They didn’t even have to reverse course for this to work out. Just give a reasonable runway before beginning to charge for the API (to give third party clients enough time to adjust their subscription customers who may have just paid for a year), and charge a reasonable price.
Two months before starting to charge $0.24 per 1,000 requests is nothing but unreasonable.
I wish Reddit had just plainly said, “We don’t want third party clients anymore.” This whole thing would’ve been cleaner. Still bad, but I don’t think it would’ve been nearly as ugly.
Reddit never intended for anyone to pay for API access, that's why the costs were so high. The intent all along was to kill all third party apps through unreasonable pricing of API access so they could funnel users to the official app and inundate them with extremely intrusive ads.
If they had presented the ridiculously high cost of API access to users it would have been more overtly user hostile. By targeting the app developers the surface area of who they were directly screwing was smaller (though they are of course actually screwing all the users of those apps anyway).
This also explains why reddit made all sorts of illogical arguments to make the app developers seem like the bad guys, to try to deflect blame away from them and to the app developers.
They were just super incompetent at doing that effectively, so it was incredibly transparent.
The premium account holders don't see ads in reddit. All Reddit had to do was require premium accounts for users that wanted to use 3rd party apps. If you want to keep using yoru 3rd party app, then sign up and pay or shut up and go home.
It would have been a much more logical change for everyone involved.
I think it's just a play to bump up their in-app DAU for increased IPO valuation. Fuck the users, all about the short term gains. I'm curious what the percentage of people accessing the site via the official app vs all other avenues was before all this shit
> I'm curious what the percentage of people accessing the site via the official app vs all other avenues was before all this shit
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said 95% of iOS app users use the official app.
> You go to the App Store, you type in Reddit, you get two options, right? There’s Apollo. You go to one, it’s my business, and you look at our ads, use our products. That’s 95 percent of our iOS users. The rest go to Apollo[…]
I can't think of any software that the end-user pays API fees or even supplies their own API key/token. I've only ever needed to supply that when interacting with APIs directly in a developer setting. That, or open-source projects that require API access from some 3rd party.
I recall a fairly brief period a few years back where Twitter rate limited 3rd party API keys so heavily the apps basically stopped working... so some apps just put a feature in to input your own API key which you could get for free as a developer key at the time.
Passing it on to the users wouldn't have required billing by API key, just gate at authentication instead.
Rate-limit unauthenticated requests per API key and authenticated requests per account. Problem solved. Turn $0.12/month users into $5.99/month users, and don't worry that the 3rd-party apps aren't showing ads - because Premium users don't get ads anyway.
Two months before starting to charge $0.24 per 1,000 requests is nothing but unreasonable.
I wish Reddit had just plainly said, “We don’t want third party clients anymore.” This whole thing would’ve been cleaner. Still bad, but I don’t think it would’ve been nearly as ugly.