And it worked flawlessly too. Apollo was really a cut above anything I’ve seen out there. Was holding out hope that Reddit would reverse course, but I suppose not.
I don’t blame Christian. Spez, on a whim, decided to basically destroy his livelihood, with basically no notice. Then Spez kept doubling down and accused Christian of extortion, repeating the accusations after it was proven they were false.
I would sell the app even if they reversed course. I wouldn’t trust they wouldn’t do it again. I wouldn’t trust they’d ruin me some other way.
If they had said “we’re doing this in 6 months” and then listened to the community, that’s different. But Spez burnt the bridge to the ground and poured toxic waste on it.
A Virginia law was signed into effect on May 12th that required commercial entities that distributed "material harmful to minors" to verify the age of the users or be exposed to civil penalties. That law goes into effect in 3 hours.
NSFW content didn't show without an account for years. What's the difference between using the same account in the official app or on the website or third party apps?
Additionally one of the API changes which also goes is into effect is that they won't serve NSFW content on the paid API. So even if you pay you only get half of Reddit.
Hell, they could have banned all real NSFW content. Would have been a big deal, but wouldn’t have interfered with 3rd party apps or anything I use Reddit for.
Any NSFW stuff (due to laws, investments, advertisers, anything) had nothing to do with the API decision. They may have done them at the same time, but it wasn’t needed.
There's no possible way this is the cause. Like, at all. The simple sniff test is that blast radius of the passing of this law would be way way way larger than "reddit charges for API". We'd see many other sites follow suit with reddit.
IANAL but I'll put down $100 that this law has nothing to do with reddit's API changes. First person to prove me wrong gets it. I'd like a quote from spez that says, paraphrased "If Virginia didn't pass the law we wouldn't have started charging for the API".
> Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up, but they’re also wiping out some beloved Reddit apps, and thousands of subreddits have gone dark for days in protest.
…
They want to charge for what they believe the data is worth.
> They want to charge for what they believe the data is worth.
Counter argument: it’s not their data to charge for. And if they want to claim it is their data then they should be held accountable for the content therein.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t recoup costs for access to said data. You do after all pay taxes and get access to local libraries and archives. But they shouldn’t be extorting third-party developers.
They built a platform so that we could create communities and manage them how we want to.
We posted information. We created content. We exchanged ideas, had discussions, and we all helped each other.
I’m fine with them recouping their costs. I’m fine with them even making a bit off of it. However,
> I'll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.
…
> For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.
My understanding is that Christian is grandfathered into an older plan on Imgur. Having said that, the Mega plan is $10,000 per month for 150,000,000 requests. If we use this pricing, 50,000,000 api calls is $3,333.34 (vs Reddit’s $12,000)
While "yes, that was April, the law wasn't signed until May", it passed 96-0 ( https://legiscan.com/VA/votes/SB1515/2023 ) in February and the recommendations from the Governor to change it was rejected on April 12th.
The timeline of when that switchover would happen was at the end of May when 3rd party developers said that they wouldn't be able to continue past June 30th.
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I don't believe that the change was "Virginia Law -> do all these things" but rather "these things are in motion... Virginia Law -> several of these things in motion must be done by July 1."
> I don't believe that the change was "Virginia Law -> do all these things" but rather "these things are in motion... Virginia Law -> several of these things in motion must be done by July 1."
I do agree with you here - Virginia's mature content law probably had something to do with NSFW content in the API. The API pricing was just poor decision making occurring at the same time. (Apologies if my previous comment was a little unkind).
It makes it much easier to pass liability around and argue that the 3rd party app, with access to location services can verify if the person is in Virginia or not. If they aren't upholding the age verification law, you've got a credit card account tied with an individual or company that the person suing can be pointed to.
They didn’t even have to reverse course for this to work out. Just give a reasonable runway before beginning to charge for the API (to give third party clients enough time to adjust their subscription customers who may have just paid for a year), and charge a reasonable price.
Two months before starting to charge $0.24 per 1,000 requests is nothing but unreasonable.
I wish Reddit had just plainly said, “We don’t want third party clients anymore.” This whole thing would’ve been cleaner. Still bad, but I don’t think it would’ve been nearly as ugly.
Reddit never intended for anyone to pay for API access, that's why the costs were so high. The intent all along was to kill all third party apps through unreasonable pricing of API access so they could funnel users to the official app and inundate them with extremely intrusive ads.
If they had presented the ridiculously high cost of API access to users it would have been more overtly user hostile. By targeting the app developers the surface area of who they were directly screwing was smaller (though they are of course actually screwing all the users of those apps anyway).
This also explains why reddit made all sorts of illogical arguments to make the app developers seem like the bad guys, to try to deflect blame away from them and to the app developers.
They were just super incompetent at doing that effectively, so it was incredibly transparent.
The premium account holders don't see ads in reddit. All Reddit had to do was require premium accounts for users that wanted to use 3rd party apps. If you want to keep using yoru 3rd party app, then sign up and pay or shut up and go home.
It would have been a much more logical change for everyone involved.
I think it's just a play to bump up their in-app DAU for increased IPO valuation. Fuck the users, all about the short term gains. I'm curious what the percentage of people accessing the site via the official app vs all other avenues was before all this shit
> I'm curious what the percentage of people accessing the site via the official app vs all other avenues was before all this shit
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said 95% of iOS app users use the official app.
> You go to the App Store, you type in Reddit, you get two options, right? There’s Apollo. You go to one, it’s my business, and you look at our ads, use our products. That’s 95 percent of our iOS users. The rest go to Apollo[…]
I can't think of any software that the end-user pays API fees or even supplies their own API key/token. I've only ever needed to supply that when interacting with APIs directly in a developer setting. That, or open-source projects that require API access from some 3rd party.
I recall a fairly brief period a few years back where Twitter rate limited 3rd party API keys so heavily the apps basically stopped working... so some apps just put a feature in to input your own API key which you could get for free as a developer key at the time.
Passing it on to the users wouldn't have required billing by API key, just gate at authentication instead.
Rate-limit unauthenticated requests per API key and authenticated requests per account. Problem solved. Turn $0.12/month users into $5.99/month users, and don't worry that the 3rd-party apps aren't showing ads - because Premium users don't get ads anyway.
That was a nice feature, but there are other apps that do this without consent and I don't like it. For example, if you have the NY Times app installed and tap on a link in Safari that leads to a NY Times article, it automatically opens it in the NY Times app. iOS has no user controls for this behavior. The only way around it is to long-press on the link and pick "open in new tab", or uninstall the app.
Actually, it does but they are shockingly unintuitive and hidden. The best way to change your preference among supported link handlers is to copy a URL, paste it into the notes app, then long press that link and choose “open with” either safari or your preferred app. That will stick until the next time you long press a link in this way.
An iOS developer for JIRA taught me this when I submitted feedback that the JIRA app suddenly stopped intercepting links (probably because I had inadvertently long-pressed to open a link in safari, not knowing I was setting a preference by doing so)
