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Comment by dybber | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t been in a situation like this.

I think they should call it off, and announce that they will go back to the drawing board. Then restart talks with the API users and third party app developers.

What if they reduced the price of Reddit premium to $3/month and made API and third party apps only available for Reddit premium subscribers?

- Reddit would get many more premium subscribers

- App developers would be able to avoid managing subscription fee’s themselves and continue as before

- Users of the official Reddit app would not be affected

- Users of third party apps would have to pay for Reddit Premium - but maybe at a discount

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I've gotta tell you - in 6-12 months nobody will even care anymore - and Reddit will still be used en masse like before.

Talking with regular non-techy people who use reddit regularly - nobody outside our bubble even knows about or cares about the whole API fiasco. Most people I've talked with shrug and say they'll just use the official app if that's what it all means. The others asked if they can just pay and use the same 3rd party app in the future.

Reddit has been, and is filled with drama. These public news pieces make the community appear extremely naïve, to a fault. When people hear some of these apps had tens, or hundreds of thousands of users that circumvented ad revenue for reddit - they mostly do not have sympathy for the 3rd party app developers.

Just being realistic. I like reddit as much as the next guy, and agree the leadership is terrible (reddit has a long history of terrible leadership).

-- Kevin Rose, circa Aug 2010.

What broke Digg is exactly what will break Reddit. The 90:9:1 rule applies just as heavily to Reddit as it does to everything that came before it, including Digg. If you made a Venn diagram of Reddit power users to those affected by the shuttering of popular apps, the overlap would be immense, and I'd be willing to put money on it being the case too.

If you drive the power users away, nobody is sharing content or engaging in the comments regularly enough for the 9% of casual commenters to stay engaged and they leave - then the 90% goes because there's nothing at all for them to lurk around.

Yes, the people who read the news stories are definitely going to feel a lot of sympathy for the Reddit shareholders who have been denied their rightful ad revenue. They are definitely (mmph) the victims (snort) in all of this. Won't somebody think of the dividends???

I think the issue with this is that the bigger third party apps (Apollo) actually host their own backend which talks to reddit on behalf of the apps so they can quickly deploy fixes. I tried to find the reddit thread about it I remember reading to confirm, but uhh... the blackout exists.

Apollo's backend just handles push notifications, the app talks directly to Reddit for 99.9% of its functionality.

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