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Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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