API pricing protests caused Reddit to crash for 3 hours
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
It's not actually trivial for the reddit admins to just re-open popular subreddits, because they still need someone to moderate them. Sure, they can have reddit employees do that, but that's a transition from having somebody in their user community perform that service for free vs. having to pay an employee to do that job.
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I couldn’t agree more; this protest needs to go on indefinitely until such time as Reddit comes to the table with saner pricing, and most importantly a developer respectful timeframe. Chris from Apollo has stated loudly, if it was just the pricing he could pivot to still be profitable, but the 30 days from when they were given that pricing, was completely unrealistic.
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"Something went wrong. Just don’t panic"
This is actually very common on reddit. Happens every couple weeks.
This is actually very common on reddit. Happens every couple weeks.
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Having an employee do it also doesn't help the whole "we don't make money" thing.
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That's about $3.3k for 50 million calls, or 1/4th of what Reddit is asking.
The dev of apollo said that he can probably make it viable if they even lowered it to $10 mil a month for the app.
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Except that the supposed api fees far exceed the profit they make from ads. This is to kill off apps that compete with their own app. No other explanation seems logical Jim.
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Well, a couple day protest may not make a huge difference, but it did remind me to cancel Reddit Premium, wipe my post history (I'll be damned if they profit from my posts), sadly un-installed RIF, and deleted the reddit bookmark (not that the website was anything other than a horror show to me).
Hopefully more people go this direction.
Hopefully more people go this direction.
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As much as everyone is agreeing with you, I'm going to signal a point that should be considered.
People get used to change over time.
Will the current users of Reddit's API-enabled features continue to use Reddit in the future? Perhaps, perhaps not. Will Reddit revamp its service to better emulate what the more popular API-enabled featured offered (sans ad blocking)? Perhaps, perhaps not.
But Reddit didn't have API-enabled features in the beginning, and it survived. If their service loads are reduced (reducing costs) by not making the API's available, and more users see ads now than before, Reddit could conceivably survive just fine.
If a million users were costing you money, and bringing in none, because you hosted API's they used to avoid ads, while 100,000 users were making you money because they got ads delivered to them, which would be a more reasonable fiscal decision: Keep the million users, continue to lose money on them, or dump the million users and make sure that anyone NEW got to see ads, increasing ad revenue.
Without getting into the sentiment and outrage here, the whole point to being in business is making money. When you don't charge for your service, you make money from ads. If your own business model's practices are undermining your ability to make money, and instead cost you MORE money, then those business practices SHOULD change.
The thing most folks seem to NOT get about the Internet is that it ain't free. It only seems like it because ads (or subscriptions) support the vast majority of it. I won't speak to the rightness or wrongness of HOW Reddit went about doing this, but it's certainly not surprising to ME, at least, THAT they did it.
Seeing what their financials are telling them would be revealing of the truth, but you don't dump millions of users in the toilet if they're a decent benefit to the company's bottom line. If' that's what they're actually doing, then I have no idea why because that doesn't make any business sense. It DOES make business sense if those millions of users are costing them more money than they'd make without access to the API's.
Sometimes it helps to see both sides when it comes to businesses and what they do. I'd love to hear how this decision came about, but I suspect the lack of income from those millions of API-accessing, ad-blocking apps is the deciding factor in this move, because nothing else mentioned in these stories makes any sense.
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I appreciate that you are changing your opinion. But you're still pretty uninformed about some things. Because these third party apps do NOT block ads. The official Reddit API doesn't even PROVIDE them.
If you built a third party reddit app today, or at any point in the past, and said, "Hey I think reddit deserves the ad revenue. I want to show the exact same ads in the exact same placement that an official app!" you would literally have no way to do it.
The official ads are not served to developers via the api. These third party apps are not stripping out ads, they literally can't show them.
Given that you don't know this, I'm just going to throw out a few other things that maybe you don't know:
1. Most popular third party apps predate the official app, as there was no official app for years.
2. The current official app is a reskinned third party app that got purchased (Alien Blue) and taken over.
3. Reddit has intentionally sabotaged it's mobile web experience to push users towards it's app
4. Almost all third party app developers agree that an api fee is necessary and expected.
The issue is cost. Reddit is charging ~20x the amount reddit makes on their own users of the official app. So even if a third party developer said, "Ok, the official app shows ads, but I will just do ad-free with a subscription model" and pay the api fee they would have to charge an obscene amount. Or if they chose to show ads to generate income to pay reddit...they'd have to show 20x the amount of ads.
They aren't being given a reasonable price to continue existing. They are being run out of business intentionally and overtly.
Reddit is trying to shape up for a potential IPO. Everyone knew that third party apps were costing reddit money. But with a reasonable price, they had the opportunity to turn third party apps from a loss into a revenue stream. And they functionally said, "No, get out" with their pricing choice. They actually threw away revenue by choosing this asinine price.
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I didn’t claim it was a good plan - in fact I view it as the kind of plan you make just before you start selling the chairs.
Still, at least someone is going to get a nice used Aeron for their wfh setup…
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Even at those rates they're significantly cheaper than what Reddit is proposing — by my math, Apollo would rack up $443K in Imgur charges vs $1.7M at the rates Reddit is proposing. And I suspect the average Imgur request represents a lot more bandwidth than the average Reddit API request.
ETA: Imgur also allows non-commercial use for free, which seems relevant to mod tools.
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I think "turn the screws on the users and make money" was reddit's end goal and (maybe) didn't anticipate as big of a backlash. I guess we'll see if they can weather the storm.
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Reddit users have a... certain reputation, but of all the big social media sites they likely have the most savvy userbase. Less profitable to advertise to on average, less happy to be monetized & more willing to just go somewhere else.
I think Reddit has done plenty of good in it's life, & probably done the least harm of all the big players, but we are due for the next generation of social media. Engagement is a useful metric, but when it's the only thing that matters you create something that often isn't good for individuals or populations.
I think Reddit has done plenty of good in it's life, & probably done the least harm of all the big players, but we are due for the next generation of social media. Engagement is a useful metric, but when it's the only thing that matters you create something that often isn't good for individuals or populations.
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I'm hoping I can find replacement communities and topic news feeds before I wipe and delete my account.
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Except that didn’t even happen.
During the AMA, spez claimed that Reddit was working with other apps who were willing to pay, and even name dropped two. Both of those app’s developers immediately showed up in the replies and said that they had been attempting to reach out to Reddit for months to try and get a plan set up to migrate to the paid API and had received no response, leading to a sheepish apology from spez and a promise to get a response out to them ASAP.
So they’re not even working with the devs who actually want to try and pay them. Combined with the comically short notice period (just one month to figure out how much apps needed to charge to break even given the Apple and Google taxes on IAPs, notify their users, set up a payment infrastructure, refund or transition existing paying customers of the app, and then get everything rolled out and through app review before they start accruing a bill on July 1st), there’s absolutely no way any app developer could legitimately comply with the policy change.
It seems like their main goal was to get the API on a paid plan as soon as physically possible, likely because they want to start billing OpenAI and Microsoft for training data collection, which they’ve admitted elsewhere is the main reason that they’re doing all of this. That’s why they’ve seemingly worked out a pricing plan and are just exempting as much other stuff as they reasonably can, and why they’re trying to force it through as quickly as possible.
Of course, I have no idea why Reddit thinks anyone would actually pay them for said data when there’s a complete database dump of Reddit, up to when they turned off Pushshift’s API key two months ago, freely available on the Internet Archive and only 2 TB compressed. Text is not exactly a rare commodity on the web, and I don’t get why Twitter, Reddit, and now even Stack Exchange think they can turn around and sell it for millions.
Stack Exchange is especially bizarre since they’re actually citing Reddit’s current plan as precedent: the “guardrails” term from the previously linked post is taken direct from Reddit’s announcements, and other contributors dug up an article in Wired where the current Stack Exchange management specifically praised Reddit’s moves as “the right approach.” The fact that Stack Exchange is CC-BY-SA and therefore legally free and clear for anyone to use for any purpose was brought up and mostly ignored (beyond some bizarre claim that all of this was simply to achieve proper attribution for contributors), as was the fact that Stack Exchange was ingested into GPT via data from the freely available Common Crawl project and not via the API or data dumps, thus this change would explicitly not be helpful in monetizing AI while causing major problems for long-time contributors.
Basically, all of these social media and otherwise forum-adjacent companies saw ChatGPT and saw dollar signs, and are perfectly willing to throw away their existing userbase in the misguided hope that they can get some money out of OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.
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Reddit relies on user generated content and moderation. Who’s to say if the 100,000 users who are served ads will stay once the million users generating content and moderating sub-reddits leave?
That type of reductive thinking (you’re worthless unless directly contributing money) is how businesses like this fail. No one’s come out against reasonable charges for API access anyway.
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You know what they could have done? To at least placate some of the popular app developers? Charge the individual users instead of the app developers. IIRC the "cost" is under $10 a year per user. Which is vastly more than the ad revenue for a user.
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I have just closed my Reddit account. I can do without the distraction in my busy day.
I just had a thought. Reddit survives not because of visitors. It survives not because of posters or commenters it survives on the back of moderators giving countless hours of free labour to what will become Reddit's profit machine. So it's the moderators who should stand up and be unionised. No more Reddit. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Pay us or we will stop moderating.
I know that many moderators would not want to see their hard work destroyed by spam so if they set their subreddits to read only.
I just had a thought. Reddit survives not because of visitors. It survives not because of posters or commenters it survives on the back of moderators giving countless hours of free labour to what will become Reddit's profit machine. So it's the moderators who should stand up and be unionised. No more Reddit. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Pay us or we will stop moderating.
I know that many moderators would not want to see their hard work destroyed by spam so if they set their subreddits to read only.
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Can mods delete old content? Because that would be the way to strike a blow. Just delete everything older than a year or so. Maybe first archive it, so you can put it on FUREDDIT.com or whatever takes it's place.
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I don't use Reddit, but I would speculate it caused issues with their recommendation system as suddenly subreddits it tried to recommend were no longer accessible.
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Back in the day that would have been it’s own forum with it’s own fully fledged culture and the www was better for it.
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I think that was the purpose of Reddit Premium, but AFAIK it required using the official app.
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It doesn't work at all as far as I can tell. I created and verified an account but login attempts leave the spinner spinning endlessly no matter what browser or device, and there's no one to tell about it.
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Fancy Internet Person
Ars Praefectus
This is more like a site imploding because it can't -serve- expected traffic from thousands of the most popular feeds.
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A bunch of subs have already said they are dark for an indeterminate time, and several are explicitly dark until and unless Reddit comes to its senses.
After the AMA last week I suspect a lot of other mods are debating doing the same now.
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Reddit’s leadership has always struck me as being, well, unable to lead. The actions of the CEO gives me a sense that he treats Reddit as a playground and doesn’t really seem to have a decent long-term understanding of what the value is Reddit is to either its users, its customers, or its investors.
Generally, business talks not about profit, but about generating value for customers. You gain profit because you’ve generated some kind of value for your customers (who in Reddit’s case are its users but also advertisers).
The fact that the CEO can’t even give lip-service to “community” and “staying online” and “delivering a great service” to me shows a drastic lack of vision.
Generally, business talks not about profit, but about generating value for customers. You gain profit because you’ve generated some kind of value for your customers (who in Reddit’s case are its users but also advertisers).
The fact that the CEO can’t even give lip-service to “community” and “staying online” and “delivering a great service” to me shows a drastic lack of vision.
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This is a great site but slightly misleading at a glance — the green subs are fully dark, and the grey subs are the ones that are accessible but restricted in some way (e.g., not allowing new posts).
Subs that aren't participating at all aren't listed (e.g., r/movies or r/news).
Even so, the vast majority of the largest subreddits are participating.
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From a user perspective, similarly to reddit. A server running the lemmy software hosts multiple communities, each with their own moderators.
From a software perspective, it can also communicate over ActivityPub, so people on (say) mastodon can follow and interact with communities on lemmy servers.
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Ellen Pao was unironically a fantastic CEO of Reddit. She caught a ton of flak for her Me Too moment against Kleiner Perkins, which colored reddit's opinion of her.
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Too big to fail...
It's just a matter of time now, they're actively working against their users' interests and that never ends well. User-generated content is all the site has going for it, and when you alienate your users...
I suspect they're going to be too pig-headed to admit they screwed up though and will double-down.
I'm not going to delete my account because all of my comments will vanish too, however I will edit all of my content, posts and comments and remove any monetization value for them, as well as letting other readers know why the content is gone.
It's just a matter of time now, they're actively working against their users' interests and that never ends well. User-generated content is all the site has going for it, and when you alienate your users...
I suspect they're going to be too pig-headed to admit they screwed up though and will double-down.
I'm not going to delete my account because all of my comments will vanish too, however I will edit all of my content, posts and comments and remove any monetization value for them, as well as letting other readers know why the content is gone.
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Many of the lemmy servers are swamped due to the influx of reddit refugees.
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