Reddit API Changes
Apollo Apollo (well known iOS client) developer talking about the specifics. Sounds like the API will now be paid based on usage.
It's a bit easier to have an opinion after the Apollo developer revealed the specifics Reddit gave him. Other than the NSFW part, which seems odd considering the API will be one of the revenue streams that isn't advertiser supported, it seems reasonable, of course waiting on the final price per usage.
It was never going to be sustainable for Reddit's API to be fully free. It was just silly - you could use the whole site, which certainly costs money in both AWS fees and developers doing KTLO, and not see any advertisements via the API.
App developers will pass the costs along to the user, many will likely fold because it won't be commercially viable with the additional cost, but, well, that's the way of things.
I'd like to know reddit's plan to return value to its users through charging for API access. I'm sure I'll be waiting for awhile because they're just going to pocket the value.
Not that I'm too inclined to give spez too much in the way of benefit of the doubt but I don't think that money is the sort of value he means here. If someone creates an app which uses Reddit's API to let people browse reddit in a less shitty way than the official reddit app (and frankly, looking at raw JSON is only marginally less usable than the official app), that app is valuable to the users. It's also valuable to the app developers via ads on their app or paid installs, and valuable to reddit HQ because it keeps people on their platform. Everyone wins in that situation. Value is returned from API hits to all parties.
If someone is trawling reddit to train their LLM that doesn't benefit the users of reddit at all, or reddit corporate either. The owners of the LLM benefit but nobody else does. Meanwhile their trawling costs reddit - and therefore it's users - money.
However, this is a thread where a client app developer is confirming they're being impacted - not someone crawling it for AI training sets.
Wouldn't those people using the API to crawl and train their LLM just be able to switch to another method like scraping? I feel like this mainly hurts app developers and users.
I think it’s going to be unevenly/indirectly returned. E.g., if Reddit improves mod tools, then users indirectly get value from improved moderation. That’s the argument I’ve seen, anyway. Until we see specifics, skepticism seems to be warranted.
That's a big if. The only mod "tool" that reddit has managed to provide that is of even miniscule use is improved traffic stats and even that is useless for actual moderation and just interesting to check from time to time.
What this new limit will do is kill all the mod tools and bots we use that reddit can't be bothered to actually integrate.
I thought the limits don’t apply to mod tools and bots? While it’s nice that Reddit is communicating ahead of these changes being implemented, I don’t think the communication has been clear enough with the public. (My guess is that it’s not totally clear internally, so we are seeing that reflected in their external announcements.)
What they say and what they do are two very different things. Their announcements always require reading between the lines...
This translates to "should not impact the stuff we want you to use". They have and will continue to ban/block/remove access for many a tool that they don't think mods should be using. They're pushing the tools onto a different API with different terms and restricted data. They also specify mod bots, not the plethora of other bots and tools that aren't officially created for moderation, but provide context, anti-spam and other pieces of information that are valuable.
It’s Reddit’s platform, ultimately. It sure would be useful if I could programmatically access all of Reddit’s data for free, but it seems an unreasonable expectation that I would be allowed to. Just because something provides value doesn’t mean Reddit is obligated to subsidize it. This was inevitable, even if not pleasant.
Not saying it's not their platform or their decision on who and how to let people use their API if at all. I'm just stating that what reddit says they'll do and what they actually do have proven time and again to be two very different things.
The official app sucks, it sucks even more for moderating, it'll be interesting to see how they expect mobile moderators to continue to take care of NSFW communities while using their utterly incompetent app. Next they're taking away bots/tools that makes moderating easier on desktop. At some point there will be a mass exodus of the unpaid labor that keeps their site running.
And than site users will follow soon after. The real value is being created by the userbase and the volunteer mod teams. People go their for the content, which is user generated. W/o them the site would collapse in short order.
Maybe I am misunderstanding things but it's not like there's a non-zero amount of value in the content users are creating while using these apps
What the quote is from is the nytimes article, and the context is that he’s talking about the AI language models partially trained from public Reddit data.
Okay well the article has a big paywall and also I have no idea what an AI language model is. Maybe these threads are not for me sorry
AI language models is stuff like ChatGPT. Skybrian has a series of megathreads about them, if you're curious; the most recent one is here.
Prescient sadly.
The frog continues to boil and the reasons for me to continue using the site continue to shrink. There is valuable information on reddit, I just wish it could be liberated from reddit and let reddit sink into the sea.
Well put, I agree completely. I am trying to extricate myself from reddit completely but having trouble because there is still valuable information and discussions to be had...they're just buried under a lot of dreck.
Yeah for me it comes in handy for a few main areas:
And it's unfortunate that that information is all trapped in a platform that is becoming just another big corpo "lousy product with mass adoption"
“Apollo will almost certainly have to move to an Ultra-only (AKA subscription) model”
The Apollo dev, based on how hard he’s been pushing Ultra-subscription even to Pro paid users, is definitely happy having this external excuse to point to now.
I've seen this perpetuated a lot over at /r/apolloapp but I have yet to experience it myself and I use Apollo everyday. It seems like this "pushing" is blown way out of proportion to me.
It never made sense to me how these apps were gonna keep up with constant updates when I paid $3 for them like 7 years ago. Presumably they would pay their bills with whatever growth they get, but still.
I haven't used a reddit app in years, but from what I recall about the half dozen I did try out and conversations with their developers, most users just get the free ad-supported version. So that's the continual income stream.
This news is how I wound up here! Hello! I'm expecting baconreader to disappear in the coming months so I suppose that'll be it for me using Reddit on my phone.
Honestly, I think I was kind of waiting for this. I've been a redditor for 12 years, and I feel like it's gone significantly downhill in recent years, in the "don't read the comments" sort of manner. Just so much negativity and fighting and hatred and people with horrible, distorted views on the world and people spewing nonsense and getting voted right up to the top. A lot of the site has just turned into rage bait for me. But the comments are what make Reddit. So I'm at more of a "don't read Reddit" point.
Welcome :)
I think this was probably inevitable and things like the removal of
.compact3 weeks ago shows the writing was on the wall. Reddit is going to want people to use their new dev platform.If I were to guess, Reddit should probably look internally though if they're worried about API (ab)users. They're maintaining at least 7 different APIs by my count to access what's essentially text data in a database. I get that reddit can't just operate with "postgres and memcached" anymore, but it's a little absurd.
The fact that they make about 10 different requests to 1 API build part of the current user's profile on the front page on new reddit is quite absurd
It's frustrating that they didn't reveal details divulged privately to the Apollo developer in the announcement post. This impacts every single developer and needs to be clearly explained, not restricted to only the most prominent developers.
The good-faith interpretation is that they're genuinely going to define the specifics of the changes alongside the app developers, so as it's in a moment of flux it'd be best not to make it public until the details are hashed out. In essence, the public post is "hey, if you're a moderator concerned about automod or someone that makes bots, don't worry about it", and then this is hashing out the details with the client apps.
As I said, good-faith interpretation, could just be that they want to make the bad news quieter.
Cautiously optimistic that that's the case. The Developer Platform team has been great so far, much more responsive and open to suggestions than any other Reddit endeavor I've been involved with.
I understand why they didn't want to outright announce "paid API required for third-party apps." But it feels like they're kinda minimizing that and pushing the responsibility for informing users on the app developers. The developers are going to be the ones that get flack for eliminating their free app tiers or raising prices.
So they're going to paywall NSFW content (first stop 3rd party access, then likely hide it behind reddit premium since they don't allow advertising in NSFW subs) and kill pretty much every bot and tool used by mods to keep reddit's site clean...
Good job, reddit.
I always thought I'd leave reddit when old.reddit stopped working as I don't use apps at all, but I guess it'll occur when the mod tools I use stop working.
My reddit silver is on killing it entirely. Tumblr style purge in 2 years, over/under?
I'll take that bet. I'm guessing there's no paywall in two years.
They've explicitly said this will not impact bots/scripts/tools used to moderate the platform. This is targeting applications with heavy API usage (i.e. scraping operations and third-party apps).
What they say and what they do have been shown time and again to be two very different things.
Was waiting for this to happen after we saw it occur to Twitter.
This seems like a much more…orderly and planned transition to a paid API though.
At this point it'd be hard to be less orderly than Twitter.
Aaaaaand as expected, a full month and a half before the API changes are supposed to go into effect, reddit kills Pushshift.
$12,000 for 50M requests, which would cost Apollo $20M per year.
All the hope in this thread was for naught! lol
I get why Reddit is doing it (money and trying to force users to use their app), but I want to know who on earth thought it was a good idea.
I would’ve thought the sensible idea was to improve their new UI on both web and mobile to address complaints, but apparently that’s too bold of an idea…
Everyone that saw dollar signs and is incapable of thinking people would just stop using reddit. In their minds it's a win-win, 3rd parties start paying for API or if they don't those users start using the official app, both of which make them money.
Having been on there for nearly 17 of the 18 years they've existed, reddit doesn't improve their UI, ever.
I think that they're going to lose a bunch between Sync, Apollo, and all the other third party clients that will go paid after the API lockup.
Maybe it's a good time to give tildes a boost?
My comment isn't restricted to old.reddit users. It's a culmination of several things and other comments I made here. API kills NSFW and kills bots/tools mods use, mods find it more difficult to do their volunteer job, mods quit quietly or en masse, mods stop removing rule breaking content, spam, racism, sexism, and any number of other things and the users notice and leave as well. That's the point I was making, that there's always a breaking point, at I'm of the opinion that reddit gets closer and closer to alienating the people that actually make their site possible.
The subs I moderate show old.reddit is only around 1% of users, hell desktop in it's entirety is 8.5% of traffic. If that traffic is breakdown is similar sitewide, it almost makes sense to shut down the website entirely and just be completely app based. Here's the February pageview stats for my largest sub:
If it helps, here's February's stats for /r/GameDeals. Pretty different balance.
That does help, thanks! And really points out why desktop reddit even still exists. Any other reddit mods here want to chime in?
r/LondonUnderground (36,213 subscribers)
Well now, when they introduced .compact, that was an improvement on mobile. There were a few features they added that made the UI flow a little better. And a lot users love the little goofy emoticons and images.
But it's true they've made no improvements in at least a decade.
What is this .compact ? Was it a pleasant dream you had? ;)
I'm hoping these changes don't break self-hosted Libreddit instances. Redirecting all Reddit links to Libreddit is the only thing that keeps the site even remotely usable for me.
Libreddit issue: "Reddit's API Changes"
Since the day Teddit (which IIRC predates Libreddit) got announced, this was a worry I had. Both decided to rely on the API instead of scraping (scraping old.reddit would be pretty easy I'd assume)
Of course, with old.reddit slowly inching ever closer to the chopping block, I'm not sure what could be done next. Maybe they could extract the API keys and whatnot from the official apps? Some "libre proxies" do that IIRC and it seems to work well enough.