Faced with 30 days' notice for a $1.6 million monthly bill, Apollo calls it quits.
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Reddit’s new API pricing will kill off Apollo on June 30
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
Given the popularity of the Apollo post, reddit has declined to make a statement today through official channels. However, The Verge reports that Huffman will be hosting an AMA tomorrow on the changes.
I fully expect that post to either be a bloodbath for reddit or the admins will only allow positive comments and will censor any other comments.
I fully expect that post to either be a bloodbath for reddit or the admins will only allow positive comments and will censor any other comments.
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Reddit doing a Twitter - killing off 3rd party apps so they can turn it into a proper walled garden
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To all the "what would you have Reddit here?" there are some good concrete suggestions here and elsewhere (subscriptions that allow you to use whatever client you want, having the 3rd party apps like Apollo be required to include ads served with the API calls, a host of others -- but that's almost beside the point.
The question should be "how would you have Reddit act here?" and the answer is "in good faith" which they are not doing.
Imagine that at some point, Reddit itself realizes "3rd party apps bring a lot of features and our most engaged users to the platform, but maintaining the APIs costs us so much money" and reaches out to those 3rd party developers and says "here's where we're at, we value what you do and want you to thrive, and to do that, we need to find a new model for pricing"
...and that's the start of a dialogue on timelines, options, API improvements that would help efficiency, whether subscription options would be offered, by who, how, and what the timelines would look like.
Or, alternately, Reddit makes the corporate decision that they don't want 3rd party clients any more, and they reach out with "hey, it's been great, but we need to focus on our clients and not external APIs, and that means you're out. Here's a reasonable timeline to wind down operations."
That'd be awful for them, but it's one blow, and it's faced openly and honestly.
Instead, they've started out on the "here to help, we'll need to charge but we'll work with you" into increasing unwillingness to cooperate, reneging on promises and stated intent, and from this last post, they're lying to make the 3rd party devs seem like villains.
That there are reasonable-seeming solutions at the ready doesn't matter if they're not going to act in good faith, and if they were acting in good faith and collaborating, there would be a host of even better solutions that could have been arrived at.
That's the problem. I'm so disappointed that this is where Reddit's at, though maybe I should never have expected more.
The question should be "how would you have Reddit act here?" and the answer is "in good faith" which they are not doing.
Imagine that at some point, Reddit itself realizes "3rd party apps bring a lot of features and our most engaged users to the platform, but maintaining the APIs costs us so much money" and reaches out to those 3rd party developers and says "here's where we're at, we value what you do and want you to thrive, and to do that, we need to find a new model for pricing"
...and that's the start of a dialogue on timelines, options, API improvements that would help efficiency, whether subscription options would be offered, by who, how, and what the timelines would look like.
Or, alternately, Reddit makes the corporate decision that they don't want 3rd party clients any more, and they reach out with "hey, it's been great, but we need to focus on our clients and not external APIs, and that means you're out. Here's a reasonable timeline to wind down operations."
That'd be awful for them, but it's one blow, and it's faced openly and honestly.
Instead, they've started out on the "here to help, we'll need to charge but we'll work with you" into increasing unwillingness to cooperate, reneging on promises and stated intent, and from this last post, they're lying to make the 3rd party devs seem like villains.
That there are reasonable-seeming solutions at the ready doesn't matter if they're not going to act in good faith, and if they were acting in good faith and collaborating, there would be a host of even better solutions that could have been arrived at.
That's the problem. I'm so disappointed that this is where Reddit's at, though maybe I should never have expected more.
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The Apollo dev spells this out.
1) More time to transition. 30 days is an impossible deadline.
2) Pricing based on costs rather than some delusional opportunity value. i.e. We need $20M/yr from you because we would like $20M from you.
3) Reddit to have an actual desire to negotiate a workable agreement
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Reminder that Huffman has a history of editing people's comments directly in the database: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reddit-ceo-edits-user-comments_n_5839cf32e4b000af95ee5b68
Personally I'm looking forward to reddit site admins forcibly opening subreddits that are protesting, per this summary of a call with some devs (no third-party app devs of course):
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I quit facebook about a decade ago, twitter (not that I used it often) when Elon went insane, and now I’ve cancelled my Reddit premium and deleted the application off of my devices. It won’t be easy, I’ve been addicted to it for some time, but I hope to see an improvement in my mental health as well.
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I didn’t say it was necessary.
The second part doesn’t seem to have any teeth, alternatives are out there and people don’t seem to move much. That empowers the site owners.
I don’t like it, but it is what it is.
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I've had more fake accounts follow me in the past couple of months than in the previous 13 years combined. The timing of it just seems so coincidental.
Perhaps it's just my cynicism, but how many times have we've seen executives make decisions that just happen to make the numbers for the current quarter/year look good but end up hurting the company in the longer run? Long after they've collected their bonus, taken their golden parachute, and ran off. Or look at almost anything related to private equity -- they extract any and all value from a company, saddle it with debt, then pawn off the husk.
I don't know what processes reddit uses to weed out fake accounts, but it seems entirely plausible that under some guise of say improving costs, they decide to cut back on expenditures related flagging bot/spam accounts. If it just happened to juice the user figures a bit (and just happened to lead to a larger bonus for the executives) could be chalked up to an unintended consequence.
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Sheesh, “we’ll consider doing this thing that helps cover for own shortcomings for slightly longer as a favour for you not ceasing to provide us with free content to monetise”
Basically, “I’ll delay shooting myself in the foot if you agree to give me a ransom”
Did Reddit not engage like, a single person with PR knowledge before blundering into this? Everything about their response is just insanely backwards. If they were trying to make it worse I don’t think they could do so more effectively.
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OMG they actually don't know what their site is or how it works on volunteer labor, do they?
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When Cory Doctorow wrote about enshittification, he proved to be almost as prophetic as The Onion. (Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over')
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I used the official reddit app for years, and when this fiasco happened I remembered years ago I paid and used an app called Relay. So I reinstalled it on my phone and instantly fell in love with it. I don't know why I had stopped using it, maybe when switching phones I just didn't reinstall it. Now with the future of it in limbo (I haven't heard anything from the developer but I am sure he can't afford to pay the API charges) time for me to stop my reddit addiction and time to move back to Slashdot.
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I still read slashdot from time to time, but the comments sections are quite past their prime. Most of the people left are either trolls or right-wing nutjobs. Avoid like the plague. And I say this as a very long-time slashdot user. My UID is, IIRC, 5066, or something like that.
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Didn't spez turn off people pinging him forever ago? But for him only?
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Is Huffman the one that turned into one of those QAnon types or was it the other guy? I forget.
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You know I have conversations with a reddit developer and I told him I was going to give the app a fair shake when the API goes. I was fucking lying. I'm gone when Boost stops working.
old.reddit is probably on the list to go away as well.
I really don't think reddit is prepared for how much the shenanigans of their change will impact engagement. They have BA estimates, and they're going to be dead wrong.
old.reddit is probably on the list to go away as well.
I really don't think reddit is prepared for how much the shenanigans of their change will impact engagement. They have BA estimates, and they're going to be dead wrong.
I expect this to be the outcome of what happens on the 12th. Its going to be a complete shitshow but at that point there will be no question on what reddit stands for.
It looks more and more like it. He undeleted a controversial subreddit, /r/KotakuInAction, after its original creator thought the sub had gone horribly wrong.
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I wonder if Apple will allow Selig to do what Tweetbot wnd Twitterific did and release an update that allows users to waive their prorated refund…
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I gave up on most online social thingies (twitter being the last one, same reason as you) and I found I had a real problem with wanting to throw my opinion to the universe. I'm doing it right now, but it has gotten a lot better.
I also found it just gave me mental capacity to do other things though. I've taken up learning some programming again and find my shower thoughts are no longer being angry about the world but designing concepts in my head or thinking about cooking.
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I read "we're basically going back to the early 00's" and saw phpbb flash before my eyes. It was frightening
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macosandlinux
Ars Praefectus
Jason Snell/sixcolors is rather blunt:
This turned into a shit-show really fast. They really following Twitter's model of destruction!
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I'm quite honestly scared of Reddit becoming unusable: it is the main site that I have come to rely on in recent years as search engines declined (I use DuckDuckGo and still it's not as good as early 2000s Google was), both for their own stupid choices and because the web at large has been poisoned by SEO.
I have made life altering choices (most recently where to get ICL surgery) based on info I found on Reddit (corroborated by other means when possible of course) and on the whole the outcomes have been positive.
I have no love for Reddit the company of course, but the userbase seems to be the most aware of and opposed to corporate bullshit and marketing shenanigans I know of. Which means their opinion is a lot more believable than the one you find on other user review/opinion sharing sites.
So the question is what next? Thankfully we have open source projects like Discourse and Mastodon, so setting up equivalent services is not particularly difficult - the real issue is gathering enough of a critical mass of well informed users that the community becomes useful and discoverable.
Can we at least use this painful experience of beloved services enshittifying to irrelevance to go back to a more decentralized internet? And insist that we need interoperable standards vs big isolated silos?
I have made life altering choices (most recently where to get ICL surgery) based on info I found on Reddit (corroborated by other means when possible of course) and on the whole the outcomes have been positive.
I have no love for Reddit the company of course, but the userbase seems to be the most aware of and opposed to corporate bullshit and marketing shenanigans I know of. Which means their opinion is a lot more believable than the one you find on other user review/opinion sharing sites.
So the question is what next? Thankfully we have open source projects like Discourse and Mastodon, so setting up equivalent services is not particularly difficult - the real issue is gathering enough of a critical mass of well informed users that the community becomes useful and discoverable.
Can we at least use this painful experience of beloved services enshittifying to irrelevance to go back to a more decentralized internet? And insist that we need interoperable standards vs big isolated silos?
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I nuked my Twitter and Discord accounts years ago and that actually improved my mental health.
Reddit honesty wasn't as toxic as those two but I haven't really been active on Reddit this year so I guess I can try to find another place to go. Unfortunately Web Forums are mostly extinct.
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Twitter's implosion got me onto Mastodon. Reddit's missteps are leading me to try Lemmy. Mastodon is pretty decent, Lemmy is still in it's infancy. Thing is, as long as they are supported, open source only seems to get better with time, whereas every corporate platform seems to go through Doctorow's cycle of enshittification. Even if Reddit orders of magnitude better than Lemmy now, it's only going downhill from here. Even if Reddit backs off a bit, and somehow manages to keep 3rd party apps around for a while longer, there is only one path they will follow: increased monetization.
And forget paying for an "ad-free experience", I'd rather pay that same money to support open source or my chosen Mastodon instance.
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Swear to the great sky daddy that I initially read “taking wanks.”
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All part of the effort to severely limit online communication and non-vetted content on the Web. The internet has been hated by corporations since they figured our what it could be, because it was not able to be turned into TV. They want audiences with pre-chosen choices, limited viewpoints disseminated, and a lock on income streams. Things are only going to get worse.
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Well that would be because they don't actually own Reddit. They are a major shareholder of Reddit. This is not the same as ownership and isn't the same as majority shareholder, either. While they have a vested interest in the success of Reddit, they have zero control over its day to day functions.
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I just deleted my Reddit account. I wasn't using it much and, if the user experience is going to change, I doubt it will be for the better.
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That is extremely unlikely. A $5/mo subscription would be twenty times what they make from ad revenue.
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macosandlinux
Ars Praefectus
When respected people in the wider tech industry, like Jason Snell (sixcolors/former MacWorld), says following you know the Reddit CEO is a piece of s!
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Probably because the execs don't think we'll notice or remember.
Honestly, this article is really disappointing for a lot of different reasons, not the least of which is the total absence of ANY detail related to Steve Huffman's verifiable lies.
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A harmless pie
Ars Centurion
One of the things that has kept me coming back to Ars is the comment section, because the folks here tend to have their heads screwed on straight and provide thoughtful and thought-provoking commentary. If this comment section is anything to go by, Reddit is about to lose a ton of good people, and also me.
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