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Spez (Reddit CEO) just put out an announcement talking about how they'll verify bots vs humans. Get ready for a wave of new users into the Fediverse pretty soon! (www.reddit.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 41 points 7 months ago* (5 children)

The only way I'll ever rejoin Reddit is if they fire that piece of shit, Spez, and every other piece of shit who had a hand in the monetization of their API access which destroyed third party apps like Apollo; and if they change that monetization, either making it free or making it so you have to be a paid Reddit subscriber to have expanded API access.

They did the whole thing with their API completely backwards, on purpose, to shut out the third party apps -- when they could have still been able to make money by doing it properly and not alienating a lot of their userbase.

And now that Reddit is effectively a right-wing cesspool of lies and bullshit, just like Twitter has become, even if they fix what they broke, it may not be worth rejoining.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    or making it so you have to be a paid Reddit subscriber to have expanded API access.

    Isn't that what they're doing? I've used Relay Pro via API until recently by paying for it.

    The only reason I don't use that anymore is cause I went de-googled, so no play store subscription and thus no API access anymore, and since I can't stand the original app I came here.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

    No, they made the third party app developers pay the license fees, not the users. If they changed that since I left, then that I'm ignorant of. It made zero sense to force payment from the developers and every sense to simply create a two-tiered API where maybe only a read-only front page works (no commenting) unless you're a paid subscriber to Reddit, which could be available via an authorization scheme on the logged-in user. It's simple to do. But they decided (at the time) to screw over the third party developers directly by forcing them to pay.

    Thing is, even Christian (the guy who made Apollo) said a nominal fee makes sense and he would have been fine paying that, but he would have had to pay literal millions of dollars within like a month's notice in order to keep going, and have to pass that exorbitant cost onto his users who ALREADY paid him for yearly subscriptions/etc.

    Simply put: Reddit should only have charged users directly, via subscription to Reddit, in order to use a fully-featured API irrespective of which client they use it through.

    Spez is a greedy piece of garbage.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Hmm, it's truly not ideal, but while I certainly don't want to defend them (just playing devil's advocate a bit here lol), IMO application-based payments do make more sense than user-based. I assume way more people use more than 1 account than there are people who use more than 1 client. If that assumption is correct, the current system is very much in favor of the majority of users.
    But it's indeed a bad solution for the 3rd party app devs to act as some kind of middleman for the payments. The only better alternative I can think of would've been to let users add their alts to their subscription, but that would need a system to detect and punish shared subscriptions.

    That the fees are too high might be true, I don't have any insight on that - but Relay Pro has tiers from (in Germany) €1.09 to €5.49 (+ optional higher tiers for application support), the 5.49 tier being with unlimited API calls.
    This surely isn't cheap, at least in the category of social media apps, which is 99% free (but usually ad-supported, which Relay isn't), but not unfeasible. Generally speaking, i.e. regardless of category, ad-free usage (which is what API access is from reddits perspective) for €5.50 is actually cheap. Most apps and services charge around the same or more for that.

    That being said, I was obviously not in favor of that change either. And Reddit sucks at communicating what specifically they're gonna do. But I also gotta say, the way it turned out in the end wasn't too bad/unfair - at least not in my experience as a paying API user. Might be (and probably is) a different story for the developers, as the amount of shut-down 3rd party apps indicates. Reddit should've just worked out something together with these devs, then I'm sure the backlash and outrage wouldn't have been half as large.

    Either way, I'm happy to be here now.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Well, I suppose with my suggestion, which in my view is the correct path they should have taken, any alt account would also have to be a paid subscriber to Reddit if they wanted to access the full API with that account. I don’t really see much justification to support alt accounts on the same subscription.

    And you hit the nail on the head about Reddit trying to make the third party app developers be payment middlemen. It made zero sense to me if it wasn’t for greed or to squeeze out those app developers so they could force their user base to their own mobile application which was considerably inferior at the time, but allowed Reddit to show advertisements.

    It was apparent to me that they did this to make their impending IPO more appealing to potential investors because it shows that “line goes up” — which is the only thing investors care about and why the enshittification of good things always happens.

    If you can feel my bitterness, it’s because I deleted my 15-year Reddit account in July 2023 that had a couple of posts during the account lifetime that made it to the front page. Which, for a nobody like me, was kind-of cool. However, while I’m not over Spez being a greedy piece of crap, I am quite over being on Reddit and, like you, am very happy to be a part of the Fediverse!

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