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Comment by interestica | Hacker News Reader

The curious thing is that Reddit is as valuable as it is because of what it gets from its users (free moderation, free user-submitted content.) There's always been a sort of implicit agreement that it's a symbiotic relationship -- reddit provides the house/utilities, users provide the stuff, and mods do the clean up. Third-party devs were an extension of that -- making it easier to connect the parties.

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Yeah but that symbiosis community stuff is for when you're still growing. Once you're big, it's time to pull up that ladder, put on the corporate mask, and start cranking that ad revenue at all costs. You've got a million rubes doomscrolling past your homogenous r/funny - i mean, r/all - slurry who don't know the difference between an ad and a real post. People who care about things like UX and quality posts are a minority who you are free to exploit for as long as you're useful, and then crush once you're done with them.

I seriously think this is just reddit finally thinking "yup - we've won - time to start acting with impunity for anything that cuts costs (like not maintaining a public API) or increases even the smallest bit of revenue (like managing to convert 1% of apollo users to first-party-app users while alienating (no pun intended) the rest).

I don't understand why they don't either mandate ad display on third-party apps, or waive API fees for third-party apps that show ads in an approved manner. I'm sure there's a reason, but I'd rather be able to use Apollo even if it shows ads as well than to use the official app.

Control of the narrative is worth more than just money. So instead of just removing it, they just set the price to be laughable high so few, if any actually pay.

Reddit is also betting that the 'sticky' users who contribute won't leave. And I think they grossly underestimated just how fast content creators can abandon your platform for a more friendly one.

I also surmise that the API charging is to claw money back from aggregators and those YT shorts and Tiktoks that badly read a post and some comments along with an unrelated video. And also killing 3rd party API clients also helps adblocking efforts and control of the 'narrative'.

Reddit doesn't really have content creators, just content reposters.

That’s not really true. I am on a number of subs (boardgames, woodworking, baking, etc.) that have people posting their own content all the time. The following are the very first posts at the top of the front page of each of these subs right now:

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/13xydtw/the_leg...

https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/13y7iit/made_a...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Baking/comments/13ybcbk/first_time_...

It also depends on how you define content. While the initial thread may be a “repost”, the ensuing discussion is original and leads to different inputs.

ironically, these aggregators are just going to switch to using scraping instead ...

And it all comes full-circle.

Old Reddit may be 1% of the user base, but it's 99% of the worthwhile users and janitors.

Because that is a lot of work to define, manage, and review.

Far more sensible is to charge the apps, and have them monetize with their own ads.

Or just charge a reasonable price for API access that offsets the lost ad revenue. I think Reddit's ad revenue is something like $0.12/mo for an average user. If their API pricing averaged out to $0.15/month/user they would still be coming out ahead.

This would still hurt free third party apps, but I'm sure power users wouldn't mind paying $1/month to keep their favorite third party app going.

Instead, Reddit went for insane API pricing that app developers can't realistically afford at the subscription rates people are willing to pay.

I've always kind of wondered why reddit (and other social media sites like twitter) don't send ads in api calls.

Indeed; as Cory Doctorow calls it, the Enshittification stage. The point at which the platform begins to extract all the value it can from its users and its advertisers.

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