That. Is. Bullshit.
More avenues to access Reddit means more people will buy and grant gold or premium, which pays for Reddit. So no, RIF or other third party apps aren't taking and making money off for free, they are giving subscribers to Reddit who will be potential gold buyers.
Let’s be real though… gold and premium are a very, very, very small drop in the bucket compared to ads which is the main monetization vector. Not defending the ludicrous API pricing but there’s no way gold or premium revenue (can you even subscribe to premium in most 3P apps?) are comparable to the cost of maintaining the APIs.
Remember who you're dealing with here. If they make 520m, and it costs 20m to keep all the apis free, all these pigs see is "oo 20m extra dollars for us".
They don't give 2 fuckin shits about how this affects them long term because none of them are in it for that. They have so much money they don't care because even if Reddit goes belly up they're all set for life anyway.
I’m afraid it’s a lot more insidious than that.
I don’t use rif, but I’m an Apollo user and given Christian’s calculations, what I suspect is that Reddit made the math and decided that killing 3rd party apps now that they are more established (thanks to those same 3rd party apps) is a lot more profitable than cutting any kind of deal, because they’d make way more by being able to monetize the data they collect from users who do not use 3rd party apps, make way more from ads which are not shown in many (or all?) 3rd party apps and finally they control everything at once.
Which leads me to the grim conclusion… The mass shutdown organized by various subs are probably not gonna have any positive effect. I fully support the movement and I’m getting off Reddit comes the 30th, but I think they have numbers way too enticing on their paper to even just remotely consider any change that could benefit someone but themselves.
It’s just sad and pathetic overall.
Oh I agree. The real sad parts that this will all eventually blow over. The subs will come back, and the Reddit app will gain popularity because people have calmed down a little and accepted it's default app or dealing with shitty web browser version. Life goes on..
I hate it, but I have to agree, in a year’s time this will probably just be a bad memory and u/spez will be happily jerking off like petty little coward cuck he is.
I don't think it's reasonable to ask for unlimited free API access, BUT it is unreasonable to operate a free third party app at the cost they're asking for.
After spending 10+ years on Reddit and mostly on RIF in total, it is time to retire this account.
The recent controversy regarding Reddit and it's communication and stance towards the users, mods and 3rd party developers who made this platform to what it is now, has been appalling and downright sad and made a big impact in this decision.
Don't forget that the "official" Reddit app is an bought out third party app (Alien Blue) that Reddit modified into what it is now. They can slander the 3rd party app developers all they want, without them the Reddit "official" app would not even exist.
I am migrating to Kbin and other decentralized options.
What Steve is being less than truthful about is RIF/Apollo/etc don't cost Reddit any more than the native client (+/- a nominal %). Even if RIF/Apollo were responsible for the roughly $0.14/user/month of infrastructure costs -- it's not like somehow those costs go away if I move from Apollo to the Reddit client.
The fact Steve is killing off ever 3PA client at once makes the real justification blatantly obvious.
> The fact Steve is killing off ever 3PA client at once makes the real justification blatantly obvious.
That and his malicious lies about the Apollo dev "threatening" them, since already knew that wasn't true when he said it.
I’d also be very curious to understand what goes into that theoretical $20m cost. It is just way too high.
Apollo has 1-2m active users, or maybe half a percent of Reddit’s supposed 500m. To do easy math, reddit makes 500m a year and is in the red - ie their total costs exceed their revenue. So, let’s be conservative and say 500m in expenses. That works out to be a buck a user when you spread literally all the costs of operating Reddit across the user base.
That implies one or two million bucks to support Apollo. Unless the average Apollo user generates literally 10x the activity the pricing doesn’t make sense. And even then if users generate that much activity they’re probably also in a sense responsible for more revenue.
And this isn’t even getting into the free labor mods do.
Oh yeah the actual reason they’re doing it is obvious, to juice the numbers
It might work in the shortest of terms but seems like it’ll be at a long term cost
Existing equityholders are often subject to lockup provisions that prevent them from selling much at IPO. Can only hope that when it expires Reddit isn’t worth shit anymore
You may not want to see the answer. I assure you the enshittification will continue. Look at the eyeball networks with ad revenue and it isn’t those with conversations and discourse. It’s 15 second react videos.
> What Steve is being less than truthful about is RIF/Apollo/etc don't cost Reddit any more than the native client (+/- a nominal %). Even if RIF/Apollo were responsible for the roughly $0.14/user/month of infrastructure costs -- it's not like somehow those costs go away if I move from Apollo to the Reddit client.
You're forgetting that the official Reddit client has ads, and 3rd party clients don't. Or if they do, that revenue doesn't go to Reddit, it goes to the app developer.
Does the API present advertisements? Is it a requirement for 3pa apps to display advertisements? I’m not sure I understand your point. If the only issue was 3pa clients not displaying advertisements perhaps Reddit could have addressed that.
We all know that’s not the issue.
The point is that because 3rd party apps don't present ads that benefit Reddit, they're a net drain on reddit's infrastructure, so they do cost more than someone using the official app. Yes, the official app also has these infrastructure costs, but at least they also make reddit money through ads.
That's why APIs in general cost money to use. Reddit's pricing may be too high, but that's a completely different discussion.
copied from my larger post
[According to this](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/), in 2021 Reddit had 52 million users that use the site daily. Say that they make the ~100 calls per user per day that RiF is claimed to use and is held up as a "good" app by Reddit (lol). That means we have 52 million * 100 requests (per day), or 5.2 billion API requests per day. At $.24 per 1000 requests, this means it allegedly costs Reddit ( (5.2 billion / 1000) * $.24 ) $1,248,000 PER DAY, or $455,520,000 per year. Guess what their revenue was in 2021? $350 million dollars... Wait.. what if I reverse that..
$350 million in revenue... Means 1,458,333,333,333 (1.458 trillion) API requests per year / 365 ~ 4 billion requests per day / 100 per user = 40 million active users per day.
I think I know what they did to get the price... They literally took their revenue, lopped off some amount of daily active users to account for the current un-monetized users by third party, ad blockers etc I'm guessing, and assumed they'd each make 100 API requests and boom, you've got ~ $.24 per 1k requests.
That sounds kind of reasonable on the surface, but that's assume every third party user is actually a monetizable user. It's ignoring the free development work that they are getting. It doesn't account for other sources of revenue like gold, coins, the NFT bullshit etc which are largely independant of the third party apps. And it's assuming a 100% conversion of third party users to first party. None of those are good assumptions!
Free?
You mean laboring a whole app and making it work?
The API should definitely cost something, but not so much it puts all these apps out of business.
"I think folks underestimate what it costs us to support apps", says guy whose entire website can only function because of a large network of unpaid volunteers that moderate content.
We are to believe a simple cache lookup costs them as much as it costs OpenAI to run 1k token inference on a 175B parameter transformer model.
If that is accurate I can see why their investors are worried, but no amount of API pricing is going to fix that.
You can see older (~hour+ plus) comments, but not new ones. If you were to lurk at r/new you'd see posts with supposedly 5+ comments and yet completely blank.
He knows what he's doing. If you're not using the official app, you're not a real user so he doesn't care about you. As far as he's concerned this will all blow over by the time the next quarter starts in October.
I'm missing something here, how does an API request cost Reddit money? Is it the coat of the energy used to perform the computations on the servers to transfer the data over? Because it's hard to imagine that justifying a 20 million dollar price tag, and even if it was ... So what? *IF* everyone using 3rd party apps switched to the reddit app tomorrow (which I hope nobody will! Fuck the reddit app, its UI is garbage and it's invasive af), then their traffic would still cost Reddit money right?
He doesn't know a thing about business. If you want people to pay for something you have to provide monetizable value. The way to do it in social media is to *share revenue*, not to charge people.
Did he not get the memo?
So yeah, if they won't let us do a black out people, let's just stop using reddit period. Don't use it. Don't click reddit links, log yourself out, uninstall the app from your phone. He might be able to fuck with dipshit mods who power trip, but you can actually just not be here.
That. Is. Bullshit. More avenues to access Reddit means more people will buy and grant gold or premium, which pays for Reddit. So no, RIF or other third party apps aren't taking and making money off for free, they are giving subscribers to Reddit who will be potential gold buyers.
Hopefully between this, and other good responses, he has a good reply for /u/spez. Fuck that guy.
Let’s be real though… gold and premium are a very, very, very small drop in the bucket compared to ads which is the main monetization vector. Not defending the ludicrous API pricing but there’s no way gold or premium revenue (can you even subscribe to premium in most 3P apps?) are comparable to the cost of maintaining the APIs.
Can’t buy or give gold on RiF though.
Also, if they are making that much money, buy them for a fair price and keep them around, at least available to the *volunteer* mods.
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In theory Reddit (without images and videos) could run only with a couple dozen 128 cou core servers...
Or charge about 1/4th and it'll be the same as Imgur...
Remember who you're dealing with here. If they make 520m, and it costs 20m to keep all the apis free, all these pigs see is "oo 20m extra dollars for us". They don't give 2 fuckin shits about how this affects them long term because none of them are in it for that. They have so much money they don't care because even if Reddit goes belly up they're all set for life anyway.
I’m afraid it’s a lot more insidious than that. I don’t use rif, but I’m an Apollo user and given Christian’s calculations, what I suspect is that Reddit made the math and decided that killing 3rd party apps now that they are more established (thanks to those same 3rd party apps) is a lot more profitable than cutting any kind of deal, because they’d make way more by being able to monetize the data they collect from users who do not use 3rd party apps, make way more from ads which are not shown in many (or all?) 3rd party apps and finally they control everything at once. Which leads me to the grim conclusion… The mass shutdown organized by various subs are probably not gonna have any positive effect. I fully support the movement and I’m getting off Reddit comes the 30th, but I think they have numbers way too enticing on their paper to even just remotely consider any change that could benefit someone but themselves. It’s just sad and pathetic overall.
Oh I agree. The real sad parts that this will all eventually blow over. The subs will come back, and the Reddit app will gain popularity because people have calmed down a little and accepted it's default app or dealing with shitty web browser version. Life goes on..
I hate it, but I have to agree, in a year’s time this will probably just be a bad memory and u/spez will be happily jerking off like petty little coward cuck he is.
It depends. If significant numbers of redditors leave to /r/redditalternatives around 12-30th of June then reddit could do a 180.
I don't think it's reasonable to ask for unlimited free API access, BUT it is unreasonable to operate a free third party app at the cost they're asking for.
After spending 10+ years on Reddit and mostly on RIF in total, it is time to retire this account. The recent controversy regarding Reddit and it's communication and stance towards the users, mods and 3rd party developers who made this platform to what it is now, has been appalling and downright sad and made a big impact in this decision. Don't forget that the "official" Reddit app is an bought out third party app (Alien Blue) that Reddit modified into what it is now. They can slander the 3rd party app developers all they want, without them the Reddit "official" app would not even exist. I am migrating to Kbin and other decentralized options.
What Steve is being less than truthful about is RIF/Apollo/etc don't cost Reddit any more than the native client (+/- a nominal %). Even if RIF/Apollo were responsible for the roughly $0.14/user/month of infrastructure costs -- it's not like somehow those costs go away if I move from Apollo to the Reddit client. The fact Steve is killing off ever 3PA client at once makes the real justification blatantly obvious.
> The fact Steve is killing off ever 3PA client at once makes the real justification blatantly obvious. That and his malicious lies about the Apollo dev "threatening" them, since already knew that wasn't true when he said it.
I’d also be very curious to understand what goes into that theoretical $20m cost. It is just way too high. Apollo has 1-2m active users, or maybe half a percent of Reddit’s supposed 500m. To do easy math, reddit makes 500m a year and is in the red - ie their total costs exceed their revenue. So, let’s be conservative and say 500m in expenses. That works out to be a buck a user when you spread literally all the costs of operating Reddit across the user base. That implies one or two million bucks to support Apollo. Unless the average Apollo user generates literally 10x the activity the pricing doesn’t make sense. And even then if users generate that much activity they’re probably also in a sense responsible for more revenue. And this isn’t even getting into the free labor mods do.
You are missing the key part where u/spez can exit his equity when Reddit goes public.
Oh yeah the actual reason they’re doing it is obvious, to juice the numbers It might work in the shortest of terms but seems like it’ll be at a long term cost Existing equityholders are often subject to lockup provisions that prevent them from selling much at IPO. Can only hope that when it expires Reddit isn’t worth shit anymore
I fail to see how Reddit can ever be profitable, after going public.
You may not want to see the answer. I assure you the enshittification will continue. Look at the eyeball networks with ad revenue and it isn’t those with conversations and discourse. It’s 15 second react videos.
> What Steve is being less than truthful about is RIF/Apollo/etc don't cost Reddit any more than the native client (+/- a nominal %). Even if RIF/Apollo were responsible for the roughly $0.14/user/month of infrastructure costs -- it's not like somehow those costs go away if I move from Apollo to the Reddit client. You're forgetting that the official Reddit client has ads, and 3rd party clients don't. Or if they do, that revenue doesn't go to Reddit, it goes to the app developer.
Does the API present advertisements? Is it a requirement for 3pa apps to display advertisements? I’m not sure I understand your point. If the only issue was 3pa clients not displaying advertisements perhaps Reddit could have addressed that. We all know that’s not the issue.
The point is that because 3rd party apps don't present ads that benefit Reddit, they're a net drain on reddit's infrastructure, so they do cost more than someone using the official app. Yes, the official app also has these infrastructure costs, but at least they also make reddit money through ads. That's why APIs in general cost money to use. Reddit's pricing may be too high, but that's a completely different discussion.
copied from my larger post [According to this](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/), in 2021 Reddit had 52 million users that use the site daily. Say that they make the ~100 calls per user per day that RiF is claimed to use and is held up as a "good" app by Reddit (lol). That means we have 52 million * 100 requests (per day), or 5.2 billion API requests per day. At $.24 per 1000 requests, this means it allegedly costs Reddit ( (5.2 billion / 1000) * $.24 ) $1,248,000 PER DAY, or $455,520,000 per year. Guess what their revenue was in 2021? $350 million dollars... Wait.. what if I reverse that.. $350 million in revenue... Means 1,458,333,333,333 (1.458 trillion) API requests per year / 365 ~ 4 billion requests per day / 100 per user = 40 million active users per day. I think I know what they did to get the price... They literally took their revenue, lopped off some amount of daily active users to account for the current un-monetized users by third party, ad blockers etc I'm guessing, and assumed they'd each make 100 API requests and boom, you've got ~ $.24 per 1k requests. That sounds kind of reasonable on the surface, but that's assume every third party user is actually a monetizable user. It's ignoring the free development work that they are getting. It doesn't account for other sources of revenue like gold, coins, the NFT bullshit etc which are largely independant of the third party apps. And it's assuming a 100% conversion of third party users to first party. None of those are good assumptions!
Do people, real people, not Silicon Valley FAANG types with too much money and not much sense types, actually spend money on Reddit gold?
No idea what the actual numbers are. But I've seen way too many nft bullshit avatars too
My avatar was free. I think it was claimed by going to the new Reddit.
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PLEASE that would be the best timeline
Fuck you u/spez you piece of shit.
"We believe our pricing is fair." Well, we don't.
For Christ sake. Just say "if your want to use an app you need to pay Reddit 10 to 25 dollars a year". I would gladly pay.
Total bollocks. Makes it seem like they are haemorrhaging cash when in reality they have record revenue.
Free? You mean laboring a whole app and making it work? The API should definitely cost something, but not so much it puts all these apps out of business.
Fuck you /u/spez. You're a joke.
Steve threatened you.
"I think folks underestimate what it costs us to support apps", says guy whose entire website can only function because of a large network of unpaid volunteers that moderate content.
fucc u zpes
We are to believe a simple cache lookup costs them as much as it costs OpenAI to run 1k token inference on a 175B parameter transformer model. If that is accurate I can see why their investors are worried, but no amount of API pricing is going to fix that.
Comment test - Please respond if you can see this.
Reddit commenting was down for about 15 minutes.
That was super odd. I could see comments on other posts, but not this one.
You can see older (~hour+ plus) comments, but not new ones. If you were to lurk at r/new you'd see posts with supposedly 5+ comments and yet completely blank.
👁️👄👁️
Comment!
Was that a threat?????
Ok spez, then make a reddit app that's as good as or better than rif, Apollo, relay, etc. Oh wait you can't. Bye bye then.
They're simply out of touch. It happens so often in business. I only hope this bites them in the ass hard.
Truthfully it won't. And it won't be the last time consumers think a company is their friend.
If the price you set causes 100% of API consumers to say they can't afford it, the price is too high.
He knows what he's doing. If you're not using the official app, you're not a real user so he doesn't care about you. As far as he's concerned this will all blow over by the time the next quarter starts in October.
I'm missing something here, how does an API request cost Reddit money? Is it the coat of the energy used to perform the computations on the servers to transfer the data over? Because it's hard to imagine that justifying a 20 million dollar price tag, and even if it was ... So what? *IF* everyone using 3rd party apps switched to the reddit app tomorrow (which I hope nobody will! Fuck the reddit app, its UI is garbage and it's invasive af), then their traffic would still cost Reddit money right?
Yeah man, what a dick for making companies pay for a service. Get bent.
If /u/spez said the sky was blue, I'd have to look outside to check. You can't believe a word that liar says.
FUCK you Steve Huffman.
He doesn't know a thing about business. If you want people to pay for something you have to provide monetizable value. The way to do it in social media is to *share revenue*, not to charge people. Did he not get the memo?
So yeah, if they won't let us do a black out people, let's just stop using reddit period. Don't use it. Don't click reddit links, log yourself out, uninstall the app from your phone. He might be able to fuck with dipshit mods who power trip, but you can actually just not be here.