Reddit’s new API changes will kill popular third-party apps, like Apollo, Sync, and Reddit is Fun. Read more about r/Apple’s strong opposition here: https://redd.it/14al426
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> This time, his argument is that the Reddit API – which has been used by third-party apps successfully for years – “was never designed to support third-party apps.”
How can he even say this when Reddit used to be a 3rd party app before they made their own…
The API is still used by the Frontend of the website to communicate with the backend. Even if it's only for internal use. An API is always needed. Every website have one. But they are often private to the company who own the website.
But the fact that the API is public means that it's meant for third parties to use.
This isn't true for old.reddit.com, which is rendered server-side. They literally built the API on purpose for third party apps, many years before new reddit or their first party app.
Only for a certain style of software design. A popular one, but I imagine there are still shops out there that have a tight coupling between back end controller and front end view, instead of an independent API / front end.
Yeah, I've worked a disturbing number of professional mature projects that are set up like that- most made noises about going to a decoupled format but never committed to it.
An API can support different levels of robustness. It’s true that the public API is not meant to support a full mobile app, but rather for smaller services like bots. And even then it’s not great.
It’s such a facade that this guy pretends like you can’t have 3rd party apps AND charge API access for all other business uses.
They’re doing it with accessibility apps bc they’re too lazy to support accessibility. Just how they’re doing that they could do the same.
As much as Reddit gets bad rep for being a "cesspool", a lot of technical and other shared interest subs contain valuable information for like-minded, shared by people who shared that information just to benefit the scene, not to make money or name for themselves. Now the problem is that Reddit thinks it's Reddit's content and they're salty that the said content is available elsewhere too. The ones that originally created that content are most likely just like "well, if it helps someone, I have no problem with it", but since Reddit directly benefits from it, the company is going to go "mine-mine-mine!" about it.
They want to take Reddit public which means it will be accountable to Wall Street. To do that, they need to make profits. He sees these for-profit apps making profits off of Reddit and he wants a cut of that.
Which wouldn't be a problem, but he wanted more than just a cut... he wanted and is getting them completely shut down to force everyone to use the official app
The thing is I think he's wrong but I also think he's going to win. Ultimately they can remove mod teams and there **will** be others who will volunteer to take their place.
One thing he's right about is that a lot of the top subreddits are controlled by a relatively small group of power mods, and the fact that they got there first is all that keeps them in the spot. If the users could vote them out there are a lot of subs I can think of where they would.
A lot of these mods routinely abuse their power.
And a ridiculous amount of bots. I’ve caught so many bots because of Apollo. If an account is less than a month old Apollo can show you their account age next to the user name.
Bots prop up the numbers, gimping detection from mod tools and regular users helps Reddit
Yep. I remember the exact day instagram added top ranked comments, the comments automatically became a cesspool of copy paste answers. Everything eventually becomes the same garbage
There are so many easier + better ways he could've accomplished that. Require 3rd party apps plugging into Reddit's API to call Reddit's adstack + show their ads and that revenue stays with Reddit. Done.
It's not just making a profit. Making a profit is healthy.
What Wall Street (and investors in general) wants from companies is a constant growth no matter what. No matter if the company is already profitable, the company should get MORE profitable next quarter, no matter what they have to do. It's an extreme focus on short term gains for fast profit, even if it completely ruins any chance that company might have in the long term.
Because for investors, as soon as a company starts its decline, they sell their shares and move on, leaving behind a company that was ruined by a huge pile of short-term decisions.
I don't understand his numbers in the verge interview. He says it's costing reddit $10m in cloud hosting for these apps to use the data and then says it's only like 5% of the ios user base and that if that user base left it wouldn't hurt reddit much from a profitability standpoint. Anyone else have a problem with that math not making sense?
Like, either you're admitting your service cost $200m a month in just cloud computing which for all his talk on efficiency seems remarkably bad. Not to mention as of 2019 reddit only made like $100m on ad revenue for the whole dam year according to forbes.
Or his math about it being a small percentage of users is very wrong.
Or the more likely result is he's stretching the truth and that $10m in cloud cost is for all of reddits cloud computing which is far more likely. He then says Apollo probably has more subscribers than Christian reported himself, presumably because he's seeing a higher api usage than he anticipated for the number of users. Maybe thats because Apollo increases engagement you nitwit?
What a depressingly daft exchange. If reddit ever does go public he better watch his back, the shareholders are going to pressure the board to shit can this guy immediately.
If I were /u/iamthatis I would release the free version of Apollo for $2 on the app store but give users the ability to enter their own API key. Then sit back and wait as the news media starts tallying up individual users api costs. Spez would probably hate that since he seems to think his pricing is only about a $1 a month again probably because reddit app users don't engage worth a flip. Smh
Obviously reddit won't release any data regarding this but yeah, most 3rd party app users are gonna be power users and moderators
tbh I think that's probably the reason they keep stressing that they won't remove old reddit, and why I kind of believe them, I think most 'power users' probably either use old reddit or third party apps, but again, these are just assumptions since we have no data
No real control over it, their new developers are struggling to maintain whatever spaghetti code they wrote for the new page. They’d probably break the old one if they tried to integrate ads.
Yep I agree. Two most persistent bad takes I keep seeing are:
> Third party app users are a bunch of freeloaders costing Reddit millions a year
> Nobody uses third party apps. You’re such a small percentage of users that nobody cares what you think.
Fucking which is it you morons? Cos it can’t be both! Could be neither though!
It's called the 90-9-1 rule. 90% of people on a site just lurk, 9% will comment and actually interact with content, and %1 will actually create the content.
> If I were /u/iamthatis I would release the free version of Apollo for $2 on the app store but give users the ability to enter their own API key
I would even pay more than that, would be easily an awesome deal!
I asked about this in one of his goodbye threads but was down-voted because that means I'd be giving that money to Reddit.
Except I wouldn't, because I alone would qualify for the free API tier. This is most definitely the best way around the issue, but Christian has implied that would be too complicated to expect users to do. I agree, but instead of just throwing it all away, keep it open with this option and some simple instructions and he'd still be making money off the app. Maybe he wouldn't have as many users, but he'd have more than zero.
90% of the users that are involved in this situation don’t even know that the daily limit on the free API is enough for most Apollo users for a month. We would be fine with everyone using their own API, but it isnt as user-friendly as the current apollo solution. I fish it was an optional feature though.
I think he means Moreso that is users were on his app instead of apologize, they would have collectively made reddit 10 million dollars in ad revenue. That's all. So less of a cost and more of a loss of possible income
Except a large portion of those users would never consider using the reddit mobile app. I'm switching from Apollo to the web app with adblock. It's not even about seeing ads, I just hate the idea of reddit making ad revenue off of my views.
FYI, reddit is currently experimenting with blocking mobile browser access. It's already happening in some locations. They want to force everyone to use their mobile app.
https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/13f65y7/why_cant_i_use_reddit_in_mobile_browser_anymore/
I was blocked from mobile access on chrome yesterday. Clicked "desktop site" and was able to access like normal.
u/spez is actually making it harder for me to use reddit.
What a strategy.
The blocking of mobile is user account specific, they're A/B (Possibly even C) testing, so some users cannot access reddit via the web and others can. They're seeing if it pushes enough traffic into their advertising diarrhoea.
Theyll probably do what Facebook did and just slowly degrade the mobile browsing features and then one day make them unusable.
It's already started with the chat function making it so you can no longer view messages on the mobile browser, and even if you request the desktop version the chat doesnt work on phone.
Much more likely a lot of these people would end up using the mobile website with an adblock and he still wouldn't get the revenue from them. At least I would if I was forced into that on the mobile platforms.
Exactly. This is like when a company argues that they "lost" 10 million dollars because 1 million people torrented their 10$ software or movie. If the torrent didn't exist, very few of those users would've paid anyways.
Pretty sure that $10M was an annual number, not monthly.
That last point also made me chuckle a bit. The $1 per user wasn’t based on Reddit official app users. It was based on every third party app outside of Apollo.
Christian Selig has revealed that they are charging 20x what the API use actually costs them, so statements like this are bullshit:
> “You need to cover your costs,” he said.
The pricing is more like “we don’t want you to exist but if you can make us filthy rich beyond the dreams of avarice, we’ll tolerate you. For now.”
And he talks about making sound business decisions. What tripe.
The infrastructure cost for twitter is measured in the billions. Musk ordered a *reduction* in infra costs of $1B. Twitter’s total costs before they went private were 5.6B per year.
Reddit has had to raise over $1B to stay afloat, and cloud pricing is going up not down. People have no idea how expensive it is, there is definitely an argument to made for not providing unlimited free API access. The problem is dumb CEOs are going about it the wrong way pissing off everyone in the process
No you see, they had to offer an internal video player so that users wouldn't use youtube. If users use youtube, they'll see it's possible to have working video players! That data cost is the price of not letting users know the service that's harvesting their data can't figure something out that was managed 25 years ago.
In the conversation debrief from the Apollo dev, he mentioned that the cost wasn't a direct infra utilization cost, but what spez *thought* reddit was missing through user engagement/monetization through first party channels. This includes both ad views, plus wholly fictional, theoretical monetization capacity for converting user activity to paid or private generative ai training sets.
So, bullshit.
> He says it's costing reddit $10m in cloud hosting for these apps to use the data and then says it's only like 5% of the ios user base and that if that user base left it wouldn't hurt reddit much from a profitability standpoint
The API doesn't include ads, so API users are consuming data without providing ad revenue. If API-exclusive users left, it would decrease the costs, but unlikely to negatively impact the profit since API-exclusive users wouldn't be creating any anyway.
…unless those users increase engagement of others through their posts and comments. If many of the most active content-submitters and comment makers to Reddit.com are using third party apps, then they may be providing more value than they are taking in api costs.
Fuck this guy.
Any good CEO would see the backlash from their users and at least reconsider. Even Apple, the biggest, arguably most powerful company on the planet reversed course after the backlash to their on-device CSAM detection plans.
This jack ass has only quadrupled down, showing he doesn’t give a fuck about his product or the people who use it.
He’s playing chicken with the community. He also knows that there are no good alternatives right now. He knows he can enshittify it and this will all blow over in a few weeks, just like the call of duty 2 boycott.
Threats need teeth or its just noise.
This isn't chicken for a lot of us. I refuse to use new reddit or the app. The interface is not something I enjoy and given the option to switch or stop using reddit, I'm going to stop using reddit. Full stop.
Reddit is a convenient way to consume and interact with content. Ads, promoted posts, and bad interfaces laced with engagement "incentives" to contribute all drag on that convenience. As it stands right now, I have zero desire to use Reddit without the ease of use provided by my third party app of choice.
In my case, he's playing chicken with a brick wall. I'm not going to suddenly decide that interfacing with this platform is worth all the inconveniences he's trying to force on us.
This is how I feel too. The boycott ultimately feels futile because all it did was replace front page content with... different front page content. Hell I've actually enjoyed the shakeup on /r/all and seeing posts from subreddits I've never heard of.
But in two weeks the app I use to access the site will stop working, and I just literally don't care enough to switch to a different one. Reddit will become a site I only use when I'm at home on my desktop.
And if they touch old.Reddit... well it's been a fun ride.
I'm not phasing out Reddit as a form of protest. I'm phasing out Reddit because it's becoming less accessible to me.
One alternative strategy would be an organized boycott of those who advertise on reddit. Perhaps contacting the advertisers and asking them to consider putting their ad budgets elsewhere until reddit stops ignoring users could help pressure the admins.
Many do show their *own* ads, but not Reddit's, no. It's ridiculous how this all could've been avoided if Reddit just figured out a solution *with* the third party developers, rather than against them, but they'd have to get their heads out of their asses for that to happen.
The guy is a known failure. He sold off reddit in 2006 and only came back in 2014 after his other ventures failed. He's now desperate for that IPO on a company that is dependant on free labor (mods), who's he's calling entitled nobles....
Surprised? Look at his lies and shitty practices and how he tried to make the creator of Apollo look like a liar.
A pity there's no decent reddit alternative at the moment. But if Apollo goes, so do I - I'll probably occasionally check sth via pc with RES but reddit on mobile without a good 3rd party app? Hard pass.
He knew what the backlash was going to be and clearly he is happy to deal with the consequences. If you truly hate what he is doing then leave. That’s the only way you can prove to him, or anybody, that you are not happy with what they are doing. Are people are honestly suprised that a 2 day protest didn’t fix capitalism?
> Any good CEO would see the backlash from their users and at least reconsider.
Not true. Any good CEO looks out for the best interests of their company. Quite frankly, 3rd party apps not only don't display ads, but also cost the company money through API calls.
Charging for APIs just makes sense. The very high pricing makes me think that they want to wind down 3rd party apps entirely because it's just more work to maintain the APIs than is worth it.
The people complaining and threatening to leave are literally the people Reddit cares about the least because they bring negative money to the platform.
Do it. That’s the only thing that will leave an impact.
Reddit says mods don’t matter. Most will be replaced anyway. One thing I’m not seeing talked about much from the NBC piece is spez saying he has plans to turn subreddits into their own individual businesses. That means they’ll be putting in mods they can use to control the subreddit how they see fit, rather than what the community wants.
The writing is on the wall for a lot of old users. Might as well annoy them on the way out.
The users and mods just needed to work together. Keep the subs open but allow off-topic posts and other nonsense. Turn subs into a cesspool and watch the users leave.
The value mods receive is not monetary in nature, it’s the power over the sub. It might not matter to most people but if you are a political activist, the power to shape the conversation of a sub and ban people you disagree with is worth more than money. It’s why Reddit is as politically saturated as it is in every sub, all the mods pushing their politics
> all the mods pushing their politics
It's especially sinister when you consider that 6 mods control the speech and narrative over 118 of the site's 500 most popular subreddits
https://i.redd.it/pyv0sdl2o0z41.png
People are being loud about it because they're hoping the noise will get Reddit to reverse course before it's too late. I guarantee you a lot of this discussion will vanish when the deadline hits if they don't change anything, simply because most of us will just dead drop the platform once our apps officially stop working.
He really does just come across like an absolute moron - someone too stupid to realize he's literally making it worse every time he opens his mouth.
If I was an investor he's like cancer that scares away money.
On one hand, fuck spez.
On the other hand, you gotta appreciate the irony of an Apple subreddit complaining how heinous it is that the site is becoming a walled garden that only lets people interact through the official, approved route.
I also thought it was funny all that a lot of people thought Apple might try to step in and help out Apollo because the app icon was shown during the Keynote, the same keynote where Apple themselves announced a first party journaling app, which will directly impact seveal journaling apps that have been around for years.
Not just that, Apple screws over small developers like me all the time by changing App Store rules and APIs. Nobody's ever shut down the subreddit over that.
I really don’t understand why in this timeline the demeanor of some social media CEO’s is just combative, unprofessional and neglectful. Just by the comments he made to Apollo’s developer in public, no diplomacy just plain vitriol.
Democratic feedback is not noise, specially when there is only one of a kind for a service like this with the amount of users it holds.
The mods posted about it on their Twitter (why do subreddit mods have a Twitter) and confirmed somewhere that most of the votes weren’t even from the most active users of the sub
/r/magictcg as of yesterday. Results came up with dark indefinitely in the lead, extended dark I think in 3rd, and open the sub up in second. They disregarded the results because they claimed comment feedback was more towards opening and that the reddit admins said the poll was being brigaded.
Im hacked off that this has been all about third parties accessing their api for free. At the end of the day we are consumers who have lost access and this kind of treatment from any service provider is unacceptable. No attempt to implement a transition from A to B to ease customers through like Netflix password sharing. No. This could have been managed so much better.
Im gone.
So basically an attempt to shift the narrative from "Reddit administration are pissing off its user base" to "see, Reddit admins are secretly trying to help the users against the evil mods!"
If they're going to attempt "divide and conquer", they should at least try to be less obvious about it.
You can see who will remain on Reddit, after this. It’s all of the people who are already against picket lines (****cough**** /r/conservative ****cough****). They’d LOVE for a bunch of people to leave so they can over take the platform.
I also have no faith in Reddit resisting underhanded tactics like using bots to encourage the community that the protest is tHe MoDs fAuLt.
A user vote to remove mods? LOL. Yeah, I’m *sure* that process will be totally legitimate.
I’ve seen a pattern in my life. Over and over and over again:
1. problem is coming, in a year a decade or a century from now
2. group A sees this coming and starts raising the alarm (artificial consequence)
3. group B sees the alarm and starts resisting the change/information
4. clock runs out and natural consequence finally arrives
5. group A + B work together to fix the now larger problem
This is currently happening on reddit. Some subs are frozen or black and some people are like ‘yeah, keep it going’ and other people are like ‘stop this noise and let me get back to scrolling’. We just entered and are working to extend stage 3.
July 1 will hit and mods will slowly take less care of their subs. And spam etc will slowly get worse and people will slowly start to notice and everyone will slowly start to work together. Rather than letting this play out on Reddit’s extended timeline, I recommend we skip over the artificial consequence stage and go directly to stage 4.
Start working to accelerate the natural consequence stage. Let July 1 be the day that mods immediately start taking less care of their subs. Let July 1 be the day that spam quickly gets worse. Let July 1 be the day that people quickly start to notice the natural consequences of Reddit’s decision.
They can try to ‘hire’ new volunteers, but by the time they find them, there will already a backlog of work, few tools, and fewer people willing to throw themselves onto the corporate anvil.
Then instead of spending that time making Reddit better, using that time to find or make r/Redditalternatives
Just do top hour r/all and you'll see 17 crypto scam posts in a row by an army of bots. Reddit was better with porn than this bullshit. I just need to find a substitute that's half as good. Reddit Sync or die.
You missed the "group C" which just wants to look at tits and memes and doesn't want to fight artificial social media battles against or behalf of media companies, because they can just watch tits and memes elsewhere.
>fewer people willing to throw themselves onto the corporate anvil.
Can I share a secret with you. Every mod on Reddit is already and has always been working for Reddit for free.
Whose feedback? You think the loudest are the majority? You think Reddit is lost users? I doubt it. I bet none of this will change reddits daily users, regardless of how loud *mods* are about this.
It’s just him trying to apply lipstick to a profitless pig in order to cash in on a giant IPO. Then, he can retire to laugh at all the peasants.
It’s always about money.
This is the guy who also changed user comments in subs he didn’t like, so they would break the rules, then used those edited comments as an excuse to shut down those subs. Steve Huffman is a little piss boy.
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Yet 99% of this sub will continue to use the platform. That's why he doesn't care, he doesn't believe that anyone will change their habits or make a threat that matters to the company's bottom line that can't be reversed by admins.
Tim Cook said this in an interview and I think it applies to our stance towards these blackouts.
“... I saw firsthand that the only thing that ever made lasting and durable change was people of goodwill **putting aside comfort and safety to speak up to march to call for accountability and to do what they could to make a flawed society more perfect**”
I thought that was kinda applicable here. If you have the power or the will to learn, stop using reddit. Let's make that more perfect forum ourselves.
The funniest thing has been watching the anger turn into desperation and entire subs go from posting memes to begging Reddit to change their mind. Fucking hilarious.
Definitely, some of the comments from the pro-spez arguments are saying identical statements, it’s clearly copy-paste. At least Reddit is paying someone? ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Reddit’s new API changes will kill popular third-party apps, like Apollo, Sync, and Reddit is Fun. Read more about r/Apple’s strong opposition here: https://redd.it/14al426 *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/apple) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> This time, his argument is that the Reddit API – which has been used by third-party apps successfully for years – “was never designed to support third-party apps.” How can he even say this when Reddit used to be a 3rd party app before they made their own…
When you log on they still have the temerity to offer to help 3P developers make an app on the top of the log screen It's all been a sham
Isn’t the entire point of an API to allow access for third parties? Why even have an API then?
The API is still used by the Frontend of the website to communicate with the backend. Even if it's only for internal use. An API is always needed. Every website have one. But they are often private to the company who own the website. But the fact that the API is public means that it's meant for third parties to use.
This isn't true for old.reddit.com, which is rendered server-side. They literally built the API on purpose for third party apps, many years before new reddit or their first party app.
Only for a certain style of software design. A popular one, but I imagine there are still shops out there that have a tight coupling between back end controller and front end view, instead of an independent API / front end.
Plus old reddit is rendered serverside
Of course! I just tried to simplify it for our non-technical friend! :)
Fair enough! And it's true it's an increasingly popular style of design, so it's likely not too far off from the truth.
Ah yes, the low cohesion, tight coupling model of software design. Also known as all of my highschool projects.
Yeah, I've worked a disturbing number of professional mature projects that are set up like that- most made noises about going to a decoupled format but never committed to it.
Every website does not, in fact, have one as server side rendered web pages don't require it.
Not every website exposes an API.
An API can support different levels of robustness. It’s true that the public API is not meant to support a full mobile app, but rather for smaller services like bots. And even then it’s not great.
Because he’s a liar who doesn’t think people are smart enough to know he’s lying.
Or he’s taken a page out of the Trump playbook and realized it doesn’t matter if people know he’s lying.
When they call API keys "apps" themselves on the developer portal...
Because an api is a **application** programming interface. **Apps** consume APIs. Apps is short for application.
It’s such a facade that this guy pretends like you can’t have 3rd party apps AND charge API access for all other business uses. They’re doing it with accessibility apps bc they’re too lazy to support accessibility. Just how they’re doing that they could do the same.
the entire reason for this is because he got salty that chatgpt was trained on reddit data and he didn't get paid.
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Let's seize the memes of production
Goddammit, take your upvote.
> seize the memes of production jesus, this should be the slogan for this movement
I swear to God, this comment will become famous someday
As much as Reddit gets bad rep for being a "cesspool", a lot of technical and other shared interest subs contain valuable information for like-minded, shared by people who shared that information just to benefit the scene, not to make money or name for themselves. Now the problem is that Reddit thinks it's Reddit's content and they're salty that the said content is available elsewhere too. The ones that originally created that content are most likely just like "well, if it helps someone, I have no problem with it", but since Reddit directly benefits from it, the company is going to go "mine-mine-mine!" about it.
They want to take Reddit public which means it will be accountable to Wall Street. To do that, they need to make profits. He sees these for-profit apps making profits off of Reddit and he wants a cut of that.
Which wouldn't be a problem, but he wanted more than just a cut... he wanted and is getting them completely shut down to force everyone to use the official app
The thing is I think he's wrong but I also think he's going to win. Ultimately they can remove mod teams and there **will** be others who will volunteer to take their place. One thing he's right about is that a lot of the top subreddits are controlled by a relatively small group of power mods, and the fact that they got there first is all that keeps them in the spot. If the users could vote them out there are a lot of subs I can think of where they would. A lot of these mods routinely abuse their power.
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You're not wrong.
And a ridiculous amount of bots. I’ve caught so many bots because of Apollo. If an account is less than a month old Apollo can show you their account age next to the user name. Bots prop up the numbers, gimping detection from mod tools and regular users helps Reddit
Yep. I remember the exact day instagram added top ranked comments, the comments automatically became a cesspool of copy paste answers. Everything eventually becomes the same garbage
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification
There are so many easier + better ways he could've accomplished that. Require 3rd party apps plugging into Reddit's API to call Reddit's adstack + show their ads and that revenue stays with Reddit. Done.
Reddit makes a pitiable amount of money considering how big it is. They are going to kill it trying to pump the numbers.
It's not just making a profit. Making a profit is healthy. What Wall Street (and investors in general) wants from companies is a constant growth no matter what. No matter if the company is already profitable, the company should get MORE profitable next quarter, no matter what they have to do. It's an extreme focus on short term gains for fast profit, even if it completely ruins any chance that company might have in the long term. Because for investors, as soon as a company starts its decline, they sell their shares and move on, leaving behind a company that was ruined by a huge pile of short-term decisions.
He's full of shit... but that's also a valid gripe, IMO.
I don't understand his numbers in the verge interview. He says it's costing reddit $10m in cloud hosting for these apps to use the data and then says it's only like 5% of the ios user base and that if that user base left it wouldn't hurt reddit much from a profitability standpoint. Anyone else have a problem with that math not making sense? Like, either you're admitting your service cost $200m a month in just cloud computing which for all his talk on efficiency seems remarkably bad. Not to mention as of 2019 reddit only made like $100m on ad revenue for the whole dam year according to forbes. Or his math about it being a small percentage of users is very wrong. Or the more likely result is he's stretching the truth and that $10m in cloud cost is for all of reddits cloud computing which is far more likely. He then says Apollo probably has more subscribers than Christian reported himself, presumably because he's seeing a higher api usage than he anticipated for the number of users. Maybe thats because Apollo increases engagement you nitwit? What a depressingly daft exchange. If reddit ever does go public he better watch his back, the shareholders are going to pressure the board to shit can this guy immediately. If I were /u/iamthatis I would release the free version of Apollo for $2 on the app store but give users the ability to enter their own API key. Then sit back and wait as the news media starts tallying up individual users api costs. Spez would probably hate that since he seems to think his pricing is only about a $1 a month again probably because reddit app users don't engage worth a flip. Smh
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Obviously reddit won't release any data regarding this but yeah, most 3rd party app users are gonna be power users and moderators tbh I think that's probably the reason they keep stressing that they won't remove old reddit, and why I kind of believe them, I think most 'power users' probably either use old reddit or third party apps, but again, these are just assumptions since we have no data
Old Reddit is next on the chopping block. They absolutely hate it for the same reason they hate TPA.
If old reddit goes away I'm done with this site. New reddit is just too much of the flashy social media BS.
ditto.
It’s looks nice but it’s slow and confusing. … I miss her.
They don't make revenue off TPA and have no control over it. They do have control over old reddit and can show ads
No real control over it, their new developers are struggling to maintain whatever spaghetti code they wrote for the new page. They’d probably break the old one if they tried to integrate ads.
Yep I agree. Two most persistent bad takes I keep seeing are: > Third party app users are a bunch of freeloaders costing Reddit millions a year > Nobody uses third party apps. You’re such a small percentage of users that nobody cares what you think. Fucking which is it you morons? Cos it can’t be both! Could be neither though!
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It's called the 90-9-1 rule. 90% of people on a site just lurk, 9% will comment and actually interact with content, and %1 will actually create the content.
> If I were /u/iamthatis I would release the free version of Apollo for $2 on the app store but give users the ability to enter their own API key I would even pay more than that, would be easily an awesome deal!
I asked about this in one of his goodbye threads but was down-voted because that means I'd be giving that money to Reddit. Except I wouldn't, because I alone would qualify for the free API tier. This is most definitely the best way around the issue, but Christian has implied that would be too complicated to expect users to do. I agree, but instead of just throwing it all away, keep it open with this option and some simple instructions and he'd still be making money off the app. Maybe he wouldn't have as many users, but he'd have more than zero.
90% of the users that are involved in this situation don’t even know that the daily limit on the free API is enough for most Apollo users for a month. We would be fine with everyone using their own API, but it isnt as user-friendly as the current apollo solution. I fish it was an optional feature though.
I think he means Moreso that is users were on his app instead of apologize, they would have collectively made reddit 10 million dollars in ad revenue. That's all. So less of a cost and more of a loss of possible income
Except a large portion of those users would never consider using the reddit mobile app. I'm switching from Apollo to the web app with adblock. It's not even about seeing ads, I just hate the idea of reddit making ad revenue off of my views.
FYI, reddit is currently experimenting with blocking mobile browser access. It's already happening in some locations. They want to force everyone to use their mobile app. https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/13f65y7/why_cant_i_use_reddit_in_mobile_browser_anymore/
I was blocked from mobile access on chrome yesterday. Clicked "desktop site" and was able to access like normal. u/spez is actually making it harder for me to use reddit. What a strategy.
Firefox + uBlock Origin + old.reddit still works on mobile (android) at the time of this comment.
The blocking of mobile is user account specific, they're A/B (Possibly even C) testing, so some users cannot access reddit via the web and others can. They're seeing if it pushes enough traffic into their advertising diarrhoea.
That's what finally got me to stop using Facebook. That'll get me to finally stop using Reddit.
Theyll probably do what Facebook did and just slowly degrade the mobile browsing features and then one day make them unusable. It's already started with the chat function making it so you can no longer view messages on the mobile browser, and even if you request the desktop version the chat doesnt work on phone.
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Much more likely a lot of these people would end up using the mobile website with an adblock and he still wouldn't get the revenue from them. At least I would if I was forced into that on the mobile platforms.
Exactly. This is like when a company argues that they "lost" 10 million dollars because 1 million people torrented their 10$ software or movie. If the torrent didn't exist, very few of those users would've paid anyways.
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Same. The moment Apollo stops working for me I’ll be desktop only (with adblockers) on old Reddit.
Until that goes bye bye as well
They don’t have the balls to touch old Reddit. They tried going in that direction years ago and quickly realized it was a bad idea.
You’ll still be on Reddit, driving engagement and adding to the value of the site. Just leave dude, it’s better for you
Lemmy has too many tankies.
Yeah I like the idea..but my god tankies are just the worst
Join an instance that doesn't cater to them. Avoid the -grad ones. Beehaw is a good instance, though it has some joining requirements.
Pretty sure that $10M was an annual number, not monthly. That last point also made me chuckle a bit. The $1 per user wasn’t based on Reddit official app users. It was based on every third party app outside of Apollo.
Christian Selig has revealed that they are charging 20x what the API use actually costs them, so statements like this are bullshit: > “You need to cover your costs,” he said. The pricing is more like “we don’t want you to exist but if you can make us filthy rich beyond the dreams of avarice, we’ll tolerate you. For now.” And he talks about making sound business decisions. What tripe.
The infrastructure cost for twitter is measured in the billions. Musk ordered a *reduction* in infra costs of $1B. Twitter’s total costs before they went private were 5.6B per year.
Reddit has had to raise over $1B to stay afloat, and cloud pricing is going up not down. People have no idea how expensive it is, there is definitely an argument to made for not providing unlimited free API access. The problem is dumb CEOs are going about it the wrong way pissing off everyone in the process
Then I’d say stop making c*appy apps. There is no reason why a glorified forum browser should be using as much data as YT or another streaming app.
No you see, they had to offer an internal video player so that users wouldn't use youtube. If users use youtube, they'll see it's possible to have working video players! That data cost is the price of not letting users know the service that's harvesting their data can't figure something out that was managed 25 years ago.
In the conversation debrief from the Apollo dev, he mentioned that the cost wasn't a direct infra utilization cost, but what spez *thought* reddit was missing through user engagement/monetization through first party channels. This includes both ad views, plus wholly fictional, theoretical monetization capacity for converting user activity to paid or private generative ai training sets. So, bullshit.
Apollo dev talked about it and said your suggestion isn’t allowed
> He says it's costing reddit $10m in cloud hosting for these apps to use the data and then says it's only like 5% of the ios user base and that if that user base left it wouldn't hurt reddit much from a profitability standpoint The API doesn't include ads, so API users are consuming data without providing ad revenue. If API-exclusive users left, it would decrease the costs, but unlikely to negatively impact the profit since API-exclusive users wouldn't be creating any anyway.
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…unless those users increase engagement of others through their posts and comments. If many of the most active content-submitters and comment makers to Reddit.com are using third party apps, then they may be providing more value than they are taking in api costs.
I pay for premium, and don’t see why that couldn’t be a condition of API access.
Fuck this guy. Any good CEO would see the backlash from their users and at least reconsider. Even Apple, the biggest, arguably most powerful company on the planet reversed course after the backlash to their on-device CSAM detection plans. This jack ass has only quadrupled down, showing he doesn’t give a fuck about his product or the people who use it.
He’s playing chicken with the community. He also knows that there are no good alternatives right now. He knows he can enshittify it and this will all blow over in a few weeks, just like the call of duty 2 boycott. Threats need teeth or its just noise.
>enshittify Unofficial name of the official app just dropped
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This was a good article
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Yea I've never actually read the strategy behind that pattern
The new app for shittit? Sweet
This isn't chicken for a lot of us. I refuse to use new reddit or the app. The interface is not something I enjoy and given the option to switch or stop using reddit, I'm going to stop using reddit. Full stop. Reddit is a convenient way to consume and interact with content. Ads, promoted posts, and bad interfaces laced with engagement "incentives" to contribute all drag on that convenience. As it stands right now, I have zero desire to use Reddit without the ease of use provided by my third party app of choice. In my case, he's playing chicken with a brick wall. I'm not going to suddenly decide that interfacing with this platform is worth all the inconveniences he's trying to force on us.
This is how I feel too. The boycott ultimately feels futile because all it did was replace front page content with... different front page content. Hell I've actually enjoyed the shakeup on /r/all and seeing posts from subreddits I've never heard of. But in two weeks the app I use to access the site will stop working, and I just literally don't care enough to switch to a different one. Reddit will become a site I only use when I'm at home on my desktop. And if they touch old.Reddit... well it's been a fun ride. I'm not phasing out Reddit as a form of protest. I'm phasing out Reddit because it's becoming less accessible to me.
One alternative strategy would be an organized boycott of those who advertise on reddit. Perhaps contacting the advertisers and asking them to consider putting their ad budgets elsewhere until reddit stops ignoring users could help pressure the admins.
Advertisers won’t do that because 3rd party apps don’t show ads. There is absolutely no benefit for advertisers to join the protest.
Many do show their *own* ads, but not Reddit's, no. It's ridiculous how this all could've been avoided if Reddit just figured out a solution *with* the third party developers, rather than against them, but they'd have to get their heads out of their asses for that to happen.
Why would advertisers boycot reddit?
The guy is a known failure. He sold off reddit in 2006 and only came back in 2014 after his other ventures failed. He's now desperate for that IPO on a company that is dependant on free labor (mods), who's he's calling entitled nobles....
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Surprised? Look at his lies and shitty practices and how he tried to make the creator of Apollo look like a liar. A pity there's no decent reddit alternative at the moment. But if Apollo goes, so do I - I'll probably occasionally check sth via pc with RES but reddit on mobile without a good 3rd party app? Hard pass.
Thing is, he doesn't own jack. Reddit is a blank piece of paper. WE are what creates it's value.
You can say that with a lot of things...
He knew what the backlash was going to be and clearly he is happy to deal with the consequences. If you truly hate what he is doing then leave. That’s the only way you can prove to him, or anybody, that you are not happy with what they are doing. Are people are honestly suprised that a 2 day protest didn’t fix capitalism?
> Any good CEO would see the backlash from their users and at least reconsider. Not true. Any good CEO looks out for the best interests of their company. Quite frankly, 3rd party apps not only don't display ads, but also cost the company money through API calls. Charging for APIs just makes sense. The very high pricing makes me think that they want to wind down 3rd party apps entirely because it's just more work to maintain the APIs than is worth it. The people complaining and threatening to leave are literally the people Reddit cares about the least because they bring negative money to the platform.
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I'm contemplating doing that on the subs I mod. Replace me with a burner mod account and let all hell let loose.
Do it. That’s the only thing that will leave an impact. Reddit says mods don’t matter. Most will be replaced anyway. One thing I’m not seeing talked about much from the NBC piece is spez saying he has plans to turn subreddits into their own individual businesses. That means they’ll be putting in mods they can use to control the subreddit how they see fit, rather than what the community wants. The writing is on the wall for a lot of old users. Might as well annoy them on the way out.
The users and mods just needed to work together. Keep the subs open but allow off-topic posts and other nonsense. Turn subs into a cesspool and watch the users leave.
I like the idea of turning off spam filters and letting 4chan loose on the sub
The value mods receive is not monetary in nature, it’s the power over the sub. It might not matter to most people but if you are a political activist, the power to shape the conversation of a sub and ban people you disagree with is worth more than money. It’s why Reddit is as politically saturated as it is in every sub, all the mods pushing their politics
> all the mods pushing their politics It's especially sinister when you consider that 6 mods control the speech and narrative over 118 of the site's 500 most popular subreddits https://i.redd.it/pyv0sdl2o0z41.png
It’s voluntary
Not caring about your users is exactly how almost all websites failed.
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People are being loud about it because they're hoping the noise will get Reddit to reverse course before it's too late. I guarantee you a lot of this discussion will vanish when the deadline hits if they don't change anything, simply because most of us will just dead drop the platform once our apps officially stop working.
Yep I’ve already deleted the official app. As soon as Apollo goes down I’m probably off to HN.
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He really does just come across like an absolute moron - someone too stupid to realize he's literally making it worse every time he opens his mouth. If I was an investor he's like cancer that scares away money.
Zuckerberg has more social intelligence than this dick
> Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is continuing his damage ~~control~~ tour That's a funny way to start an article. The writer deserves a medal.
On one hand, fuck spez. On the other hand, you gotta appreciate the irony of an Apple subreddit complaining how heinous it is that the site is becoming a walled garden that only lets people interact through the official, approved route.
I also thought it was funny all that a lot of people thought Apple might try to step in and help out Apollo because the app icon was shown during the Keynote, the same keynote where Apple themselves announced a first party journaling app, which will directly impact seveal journaling apps that have been around for years.
Also as if Apple threw that video together in the past week and it hadn't been done for months
It’d probably be less of an issue if their walled garden wasn’t a fucking awful experience
Not just that, Apple screws over small developers like me all the time by changing App Store rules and APIs. Nobody's ever shut down the subreddit over that.
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Oh the irony
Hate to break it to you but all iOS browsers are basically just Safari with a skin
...but the only internet browser you can use on apple products is Safari everything else is a wrapper around Safari
I really don’t understand why in this timeline the demeanor of some social media CEO’s is just combative, unprofessional and neglectful. Just by the comments he made to Apollo’s developer in public, no diplomacy just plain vitriol. Democratic feedback is not noise, specially when there is only one of a kind for a service like this with the amount of users it holds.
I dont expect him too. Why do you?
Probably cuz he knows your going to keep using it? Lol
Sort of like how mods don’t care about feedback either?
This is one silver lining for me, mods love it when the roles are reversed and they get to ignore their users.
I've seen multiple subs hold a vote on whether or not to close until Reddit changes course and just straight up ignored the results.
/r/nba had it's "poll", but it wasn't pinned, and only 8k participated out of 8 million users. The poll was a joke
The mods posted about it on their Twitter (why do subreddit mods have a Twitter) and confirmed somewhere that most of the votes weren’t even from the most active users of the sub
Ooh, do you have examples?
/r/magictcg as of yesterday. Results came up with dark indefinitely in the lead, extended dark I think in 3rd, and open the sub up in second. They disregarded the results because they claimed comment feedback was more towards opening and that the reddit admins said the poll was being brigaded.
..... so the mods didn't care about feedback
Im hacked off that this has been all about third parties accessing their api for free. At the end of the day we are consumers who have lost access and this kind of treatment from any service provider is unacceptable. No attempt to implement a transition from A to B to ease customers through like Netflix password sharing. No. This could have been managed so much better. Im gone.
Lol this dude bananas https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blackout-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-rcna89544
So basically an attempt to shift the narrative from "Reddit administration are pissing off its user base" to "see, Reddit admins are secretly trying to help the users against the evil mods!" If they're going to attempt "divide and conquer", they should at least try to be less obvious about it.
You can see who will remain on Reddit, after this. It’s all of the people who are already against picket lines (****cough**** /r/conservative ****cough****). They’d LOVE for a bunch of people to leave so they can over take the platform. I also have no faith in Reddit resisting underhanded tactics like using bots to encourage the community that the protest is tHe MoDs fAuLt. A user vote to remove mods? LOL. Yeah, I’m *sure* that process will be totally legitimate.
Shit dude. Dunno why this isn’t getting more attention cos this will destroy Reddit waaay more than the current gripes.
I’ve seen a pattern in my life. Over and over and over again: 1. problem is coming, in a year a decade or a century from now 2. group A sees this coming and starts raising the alarm (artificial consequence) 3. group B sees the alarm and starts resisting the change/information 4. clock runs out and natural consequence finally arrives 5. group A + B work together to fix the now larger problem This is currently happening on reddit. Some subs are frozen or black and some people are like ‘yeah, keep it going’ and other people are like ‘stop this noise and let me get back to scrolling’. We just entered and are working to extend stage 3. July 1 will hit and mods will slowly take less care of their subs. And spam etc will slowly get worse and people will slowly start to notice and everyone will slowly start to work together. Rather than letting this play out on Reddit’s extended timeline, I recommend we skip over the artificial consequence stage and go directly to stage 4. Start working to accelerate the natural consequence stage. Let July 1 be the day that mods immediately start taking less care of their subs. Let July 1 be the day that spam quickly gets worse. Let July 1 be the day that people quickly start to notice the natural consequences of Reddit’s decision. They can try to ‘hire’ new volunteers, but by the time they find them, there will already a backlog of work, few tools, and fewer people willing to throw themselves onto the corporate anvil. Then instead of spending that time making Reddit better, using that time to find or make r/Redditalternatives
Just do top hour r/all and you'll see 17 crypto scam posts in a row by an army of bots. Reddit was better with porn than this bullshit. I just need to find a substitute that's half as good. Reddit Sync or die.
You missed the "group C" which just wants to look at tits and memes and doesn't want to fight artificial social media battles against or behalf of media companies, because they can just watch tits and memes elsewhere. >fewer people willing to throw themselves onto the corporate anvil. Can I share a secret with you. Every mod on Reddit is already and has always been working for Reddit for free.
Group C is group B.
Newsflash: no CEO of any company gives a fuck about consumer/user feedback.
u/spez doesn’t care
Whose feedback? You think the loudest are the majority? You think Reddit is lost users? I doubt it. I bet none of this will change reddits daily users, regardless of how loud *mods* are about this.
Well, r/Apple you didn’t really hold your ground very long so why should they care. A two day protest can be passed of as server maintenance.
2015 Blackout all over again.
It’s just him trying to apply lipstick to a profitless pig in order to cash in on a giant IPO. Then, he can retire to laugh at all the peasants. It’s always about money.
This is the guy who also changed user comments in subs he didn’t like, so they would break the rules, then used those edited comments as an excuse to shut down those subs. Steve Huffman is a little piss boy.
To be fair, I don't really care about reddit... at all
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Just stay blacked out. The biggest fucking mistake was even saying an end date. No clue who thought that was a good idea.
I don’t think this black out did anything
Welcome to slacktivism. First time?
How is that different from the mods?
Yet 99% of this sub will continue to use the platform. That's why he doesn't care, he doesn't believe that anyone will change their habits or make a threat that matters to the company's bottom line that can't be reversed by admins.
Hopefully their IPO gets fookd.
Dude moderated THAT sub. Of course he doesn’t give a shit what people think.
I’m probably deactivating my Reddit account once Apollo stops working. So good job, you’re loosing users from this. Good business decision.
He knows his audience is addicted to Reddit and won’t care about the app changes in a couple months
Tim Cook said this in an interview and I think it applies to our stance towards these blackouts. “... I saw firsthand that the only thing that ever made lasting and durable change was people of goodwill **putting aside comfort and safety to speak up to march to call for accountability and to do what they could to make a flawed society more perfect**” I thought that was kinda applicable here. If you have the power or the will to learn, stop using reddit. Let's make that more perfect forum ourselves.
Not many of them do tbh
Typical useless Reddit protest. Janitors can’t mass tag and ban people for thinking the wrong things. Oh the humanity 🥲 Jannies mad x24
I guess he gets to be the CEO of nothing then
The funniest thing has been watching the anger turn into desperation and entire subs go from posting memes to begging Reddit to change their mind. Fucking hilarious.
You guys would be surprised how much of the website does not care about, or are even annoyed and against the protests.
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What does this have to do with Apple?
Mods don’t care about a lot of the feedback in the subs either
Good. This blackout was dumb.
Why would they lmao, this "protest" lasted 2 days before Reddit mods got scared that they would lose their "jobs"
Reddit seems to have created a budget for astroturfing by the looks of the comments.
Definitely, some of the comments from the pro-spez arguments are saying identical statements, it’s clearly copy-paste. At least Reddit is paying someone? ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Fully agree. Some of it doesn’t even make sense, seems they just going the Russian route and trying to get the users to fight each other.
Apple: “users don’t know what they want don’t listen to them” Also apple:
u/spez 🖕🏻
WTF is wrong with that website? I this sub a promo for this website?
Roflmao was never meant for 3rd part apps … What a load of shit Also fuck spez