This seems like an even more egregious act, it's like attempted character assassination of a developer beloved by the community. This app got shouted out in WWDC and Spez's decision shortly after is to concoct an alternate reality where Christian is a villain and present it as fact, and then get caught almost immediately.
It seems apparent Spez is burdened by a serious lack of ethics, and I think that burden is now compromising Reddit as well much more than before. As far as I know, going to IPO with a crook at the helm usually only works if they haven't been caught multiple times first.
Edit: Really, what an especially awful thing to do to a developer whose full-time job your policy change has just shut down - tell the world they're an extortionist liar from your comfy office.
Reddit makes money off of ads, and Apollo doesn’t show ads. The same was the case for Twitter and Tweetbot. In some ways, Christian is directly capturing revenue that Reddit otherwise would.
I would agree that the proposed API pricing is not a workable starting point, but I do think Apollo (and, by proxy, its users) will eventually have to pay Reddit something.
Regardless of how simple the business case for this change is or is not, Steve's choice to egregiously lie about his conversation with Christian is a completely unnecessary and frankly daft risk to take. It's bullying, and he was almost immediately caught out as a liar.
I cannot understand how anyone in his team with a sturdy ethical compass could look him in the eye after seeing that post, especially if they were party to the original conversation. I can't remember the last time I saw a corporate leader get caught in such a high profile absolute falsehood, especially directed at a single individual.
If this reflects the company's culture I have no idea how it can succeed as a public firm. How will Steve deal with criticism from public investors? What is he not willing to lie about?
Reddit is terrible at everything but getting a massive user base in the early 2010s, which it has coasted on since. They could have had a phenomenal IPO in 2021, but with the current market conditions they don’t really have a hook (no AI involvement).
Their best case scenario is really Twitter’s case, where they go public, have middling performance, and then get bought out by a billionaire after annoying them with bad moderation decisions lmao
The thread linked at the top of this page covers the accusations made by Steve directed at Christian and includes the call recordings Steve was apparently unaware of completely contradicting those accusations.
Additionally, someone else in the comments here linked the text of a post[0] made in /r/partnercommunities with similar accusations to what's quoted in TFA.
> Why charge?
> It’s very expensive to run – it takes millions of dollars to effectively subsidize other people’s businesses / apps.
> It’s an extraordinary amount of data, and these are for-profit businesses built on our data for free.
This is rich. The entire for-profit Reddit business is based on people contributing data for free, subsidizing their for-profit business. These guys couldn’t be any more clueless.
I remember a long while back someone on HN characterized the Reddit leadership team as like a regular driver who's dropped into the seat of a formula 1 car halfway through a race, in the lead. Tons of momentum but the person at the controls can't keep from steering it into the wall.
It hasn't stopped them from becoming personally wealthy and "powerful" in whatever world they live in. If you keep being told not to touch the hot stove, but not touching the hot stove doesn't burn you, not only will you NOT learn to not touch the stove, but you will learn to not listen to people who tell you not to do other things.
We owe it to the world to make sure touching the stove DOES burn you, otherwise it's just DARE all over again.
Were Christian's conversations actually with Steve? Or were they with another employee, and then Steve mischaracterised them? It mentioned that an employee denied Christian access to Steve.
I don't use the app and I don't have any great attachment to Reddit, but I wondered if Reddit screwed themselves a bit here by not having a clearer link between the two parties. If either the Reddit employees involved or Steve entered the fray with any sort of bias/grievance, they likely misinterpreted the developer's comments.
This gets repeated a lot, with the assumption that they're refusing to pay at all, but in the very original post they highlight how they do pay for API usage elsewhere (Imgur) already and therefore have no problem adding Reddit to that at a reasonable cost.
I get the want to simplify things, but it's already simple enough:
1. Reddit brings out absurdly priced API
2. Developers don't want to pay that much
3. Reddit then behind the scenes berates developers, claiming they are trying to blackmail millions of dollars, to the apps serving harmful ads, to posting about how the apps aren't "good citizens" and instead are scraping wildly
4. Developers push back and announce app closures
If it was about "showing ads", they would have budged on price a long time ago, added in guidelines to use the API and serve ads, etc. This is about controlling user data, tracking every bit they can, leveraging their content, and then monetizing the fuck out of it in the age of AI.
> They think their data is worth $X to AI and think that AI will pay that much.
which is absurd... the entirety of reddit has already been scraped before. the marginal utility of this today onward feed of data is a lot less than they think it is.
in the moderator subreddit, the admins have stated several times that non-commercial access will remain free, and have skirted replying to direct questions, from what I can tell.
u/spez (reddit ceo) is doing a ama tomorrow.
>Hi Mods,
We’re providing a follow-up on the last API update we made to make sure our mods, developers, and users have clarity on changes we are (and aren’t) making.
API Free Access
This exists and continues to be available.
If usage is legal, non-commercial, and helps our mods, we won’t stand in your way. Moderators will continue to have access to their communities via the API - including sexually explicit content across Reddit. Moderators will be able to see sexually-explicit content even on subreddits they don't directly moderate.
We will ensure existing utilities, especially moderation tools, have free access to our API. We will support legal and non-commercial tools like Toolbox, Context Mod, Remind Me, and anti-spam detection bots. And if they break, we will work with you to fix them.
Developers can continue non-commercial usage of the API, free of charge within stated rates. Reddit is also covering hosting for apps via the Developer Platform, which uses the Data API.
Have you looked at the rate limits? They changed it from 60 calls per user per client ID to 100 calls per minute per client ID. Nothing is getting built with limits that low
You make them sound like freeloaders, when in reality they provide value to the community by committing significant time contributing to Reddit through posts, comments, original content, and volunteer moderation.
Reddit is worthless without community contributions, and Reddit is very clearly telling the community (both users and developers) that they aren't valuable and should go find somewhere else to spend their time.
Similarly to twitter third party api access with no ads doesn't make any sense for a business that's an ad business, it's stupid they've allowed this at all for as long as they have (and it was stupid for twitter to do the same).
If you want to build a non ad-based subscription business go ahead! I strongly prefer models that do that (e.g. substack), but if you're not going to do that then don't operate some weird half measure that's clearly counter to the company incentives. Apollo is just upset the free party is over.
I'm a little surprised reddit would not just shut it all down like twitter did since that makes more sense for this model, but having the price set crazy high is effectively the same thing anyway. It makes sense they don't want to negotiate, they'd rather have no third party API access at all.
This argument doesn't mean I'm a fan of data access and control (I'm not - I work on urbit to give people a way to escape it), but I recognize the business as it is. If you're running an ad business and allow third parties to build apps on your business that prevent you from controlling users at the client level (and prevent you from showing ads) you're making stupid decisions.
Like most things it's a problem of incentives. You can't fix the behavior without fixing the incentives. You can't escape the megacorp ad world we're trapped in by just wishing the existing incentives didn't exist.
You are missing the fact that these social media sites are 100% dependent on freely provided user-generated content. Third party apps were quite likely necessary for Reddit’s success so far. It’s much more complex than what you make it sound like.
As other's have pointed out, they probably think AI will pay them more than even ads. Or, since they want to IPO and cash out, they are betting, with the current hype around "AI", that public markets will value AI high enough to value "possible" data sources of AI highly.
This is likely an indication of their internal targets for ARPU over the next months as they start aggressively monetizing and push to IPO.
For reference, approximate global ARPU if converted to monthly for other social networks in 2022: Pinterest: ~$0.5, Snap: ~$1, Twitter: ~$1.6, FB: ~$3.3
This says the IPO roadshow will say Reddit has potential somewhere between Twitter and Facebook, which feels like the right sales pitch to me.
I think the $0.12 figure that was calculated on the post may have been too low.
Iirc, the entirety of Reddit’s user base was used for the calculation. My guess is that Apollo’s subset of users are much more active (and probably more lucrative in terms of ads and user data) than probably 99% of all Reddit users.
> Reddit will be worse for lurkers if Apollo users disappear
Within the realm of folks who are willing to pay for a Reddit skin, imagine that very few of them will just give up the site once their skin is gone.
More likely is that someone comes in and makes a similar app and charges more for it. Power users and professional users will pay, and most of them will gladly pay a premium.
Not gonna lie… I think op said he charged $10 a year. I raised my eyebrows… that should probably be the bottom option of a three-tier monthly price matrix.
I think someone should buy this app and just price it properly based on value add. Im not sure what the various user profiles of Apollo are, but my guess is that there are a few profiles that can be profitably monetized even with the new Reddit API charges. Imho, Reddit is being shortsighted, but they do have a unique and large community.
> I'm so annoyed with three-tier monthly price matrices. It's honestly a red flag for me at this point.
On an aesthetic level, I agree with you. For some business, it’s just not needed.
That said…
As someone who has optimized pricing matrixes many times, I will just say that it works incredibly well. Also, for the whatever number people (like you? sort of like me?) who drop out due to “red flags”, there are legions more who allow their behavior to be shaped in an incredibly profitable way.
Yeah, I'd expect a lot of power users on the 3rd party clients are generating a lot of the content and doing free moderation that produces the product they can get the masses to use via the website/ official app.
It was already a calculation with massively generous values — come on, hardware serving easily cache-able data is dirt cheap, especially when quite a lot of that is just text. And there is data from Christian about the average daily API calls an Apollo user makes, so no need to guess.
Is that a matter of fact? How do you know it isn't higher? Also consider that it's not just advertising, it is also about funneling users to new products Reddit may want to develop
You can see how that number is derived in the post. It's based on very optimistic projections from data that reddit has previously released about their revenue, and very pessimistic projections of their user growth. If reddit somehow has massively increased the value they can get from each user compared to that I think the burden of proof is on them for that.
From TFA, $0.12 is an optimistic calculation taking better-than-best revenue divided by a pessimistic user count. We can double that again if you're expecting a late-stage product like reddit to launch a new highly monetizable feature soon, and it's still quite far away.
What does this look like in practice? Reddit devs extend their ad platform into the API and then make a mandatory design guideline, which they require with whatever app has x API demand level?
I guess the Reddit premium users just have to use Reddit apps to get it ad free?
> What does this look like in practice? Reddit devs extend their ad platform into the API and then make a mandatory design guideline, which they require with whatever app has x userbase?
Pretty much. Long tail of tiny-userbase clients probably doesn't matter that much, I suspect a small number of apps that can reasonably be spot-checked if it complies is the vast majority of traffic.
> I guess the Reddit premium users just have to use Reddit apps to get it ad free?
No reason third-party apps couldn't be allowed to be ad-free for premium users too. (or if the API is explicitly pushing "show ad URL X to user in this context" the API can take care of adjusting that)
Except the way Reddit works increasing the volume of users, even if they aren't seeing ads, provides the entirety of the value of the site that the users who are seeing ads come to see.
This 100% reeks of business people who don't even care to understand what Reddit is coming in and seeing the raw metrics of "% of users who aren't seeing ads" and the "lost" revenue.
Can’t Reddit just have a tiered API: one pricing for ad-free API and another for ad-supported? Surely a system could be put in place to ensure compliance.
I have to think there was a path here for Reddit to get its ad money without alienating so many users and mods.
in TFA paying a price isn't a problem. The insanely high price isn't necessarily even a dealbreaker (Apollo is a paid app already, though it'll be a steep as hell increase). The issue is he (and everyone else) had 30 days notice between the new pricing and the pricing going into force, which is not enough to actually adapt to the changes without going deeply into the read in the meantime (for example, much of Apollo's users are on a yearly plan).
Why would it be limited to social media companies? Have companies like Airbnb done anything to show YC companies are more or less just as bad (once they are big of course)
It seems apparent Spez is burdened by a serious lack of ethics, and I think that burden is now compromising Reddit as well much more than before. As far as I know, going to IPO with a crook at the helm usually only works if they haven't been caught multiple times first.
Edit: Really, what an especially awful thing to do to a developer whose full-time job your policy change has just shut down - tell the world they're an extortionist liar from your comfy office.