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Comment by dybber | Hacker News Reader

Would people maybe have been more okay with this, if the change was that you needed to pay for Reddit premium to be able to use API/other apps with your user? Then it was not be a bill forwarded to other apps, but a bill to each individual user using these apps?

They would probably have been able to reduce the price of Reddit premium at the same time.

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This would not only be reasonable, it's a model used by other services offering APIs. Spotify which gates API access with a premium subscription comes to mind.

That's not interesting to Reddit however, because Reddit wants full control of user experience so they (theoretically) have more opportunities to monetize both users (including premium users) and their data, which probably looks better for a prospective IPO.

I wonder if this could also actually work against reddit's interests. I'm guessing that a lot of the power users / mods have the highest API load, by doing things like taking large mod actions. You'd effectively be charging them more for the privilege of working.

I'd say it's better than shutting mods and power users out of better apps entirely. They could also do things like give mods of subreddits past a certain subscriber/activity threshold free premium to help them mod better.

Large mod actions? Like nuking a thread? I sincerely hope the API includes bulk actions so it only takes one call to delete a list of comment ids

do you think 3rd party developers would be okay with this? in this scenario, the Reddit premium subscription fee would be a price floor and developers would have to charge a separate fee to use their app.

That would have been completely fine with me. But it's obvious at this point Reddit's goal was not to effectively monetize third-party apps. The goal was to crush them.

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