It&#x27;s probably the point, they want the official app to be the only choice, so they can control everything and show you more unblockable ads.

any dollar amount more than 0 is too much for an open source app like infinity or redreader who do not charge any money from users

It doesn&#x27;t matter. It is their service and the API terms are subject to change at any time. So either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase access for a high price.Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, Clubhouse and TikTok have decided to ban third-party apps. Twitter and Reddit decided to charge for it.In this case with the developer of the third party Reddit client, unless he is making enough to cover the API costs, then it make no sense to build on someone else&#x27;s API with little to no revenue. That is the risk.It is no different to TapBots (creators of TweetBot) doing the same mistake.

What&#x27;s funny is that Reddit&#x27;s pricing is indeed more reasonable than Twitter&#x27;s, but it&#x27;s still too high to be make cheap third party clients feasible.

Why would they want to imitate a failing business model?

It is not at all accidental.  Elon Musk has given cover for other social media sites to imitate many of his moves,  such as Facebook introducing a subscription tier.

I&#x27;m shocked that Reddit has done this mere weeks after Twitter destroyed their thriving ecosystem of bots and apps by introducing horrific pricing.

It&#x27;s all about keeping reddit safe for dark patterns.There is some good content on reddit still, if you look hard to find it, but one thing that makes it hard is that reddit blends ads into the content and I think also blends in non-sequitur content that further confuses the reader into looking at and clicking on the ads.They just can&#x27;t let reddit clients provide a good, never mind better, experience.

You could enforce per-usdr API limits rather than per-app limits as well.

If it was about restricting access for AI training data, I&#x27;d expect them to give developers of actual, well-known client apps a break.

&gt; No redditor wanted them to selfhost photos and videosHonestly, this was probably one of the more reasonable features they&#x27;ve added. Having to upload images on an external site added a lot of friction for users, and put Imgur in an awkward spot as well when problematic content was removed from Reddit, but not from Imgur.Their video player still sucks, though. I&#x27;m not sure how they managed to make it so bad.

can&#x27;t they differentiate between api calls made by third party clients and AI training?this looks more malicious than ignorance or inefficiency. they want to mimic twitter by building off of community then claiming &quot;costs&quot;.fuck reddit. No redditor wanted them to selfhost photos and videos, yet they replaced imgur with their own. Why?

I think it has all to do with AI accessing sites for &quot;training&quot;, you can&#x27;t blame reddit for wanting a piece of the action.  Is the price high ?  To me it is, but for a large company doing AI, probably not.

Reddit didn&#x27;t create data. I did, you did, random users did. Why did it happen on Reddit? Because Reddit, at least for a while, seemed like it was a relatively open place where data wouldn&#x27;t be stuck and made inaccessible without an account.Reddit exists _despite_ Reddit&#x27;s incompetent management and tech teams, not thanks to them.

Um, the users create the data, and consume it. Reddit provides a &quot;marketplace&quot; for that, and sells your data in exchange. Now, they want to rent-seek from the very people making it possible to create and consume that content easily.And it IMO, is anti-competitive - they are intentionally killing all existing competitors, vs. improving their own offering.

The idea that it&#x27;s anti-competitive to do with your platform what you want is in my mind silly. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from building a reddit clone to compete against reddit besides your ability to attract their users.It comes off as extremely entitled to think that reddit should supply you with the data created by their platform to do what you want with it.

none of the 3rd party apps are real companies with resourcesthey&#x27;re passion hobby projects that&#x27;ll disappear rather than turn into a job

&gt; If Apollo&#x27;s numbers are to be believed, Reddit is willing to sell its traffic at ~$2.50&#x2F;user&#x2F;month.That&#x27;s only one side of it though. According to the same post, Reddit&#x27;s ad revenue is closer to $0.12&#x2F;user&#x2F;month. So, they are apparently willing to sell traffic to advertisers for a much much lower price than API users.

On the other hand, I think the price is damn steal. If Apollo&#x27;s numbers are to be believed, Reddit is willing to sell its traffic at ~$2.50&#x2F;user&#x2F;month. That&#x27;s half the value of a pre-Musk Twitter user and a third of the value of a Facebook or video streaming user.So, if you already have a sophisticated ad tech and sales team, you&#x27;d be able to pull 50%+ profit margin without having to worry about running the infrastructure for content.That being said, there&#x27;s maybe only a handful of companies with a more competent ad tech&#x2F;sales team than Reddit, and Reddit&#x27;s is pretty damn bad. So while the numbers make sense, the strategy does not given the competencies available in the market they&#x27;re trying to sell in.

&gt; At the end of the day, they are still your users and you might learn things from the other apps.but those users don&#x27;t see ads on 3rd party apps. they already know what all they can implement to improve user experience. they just wont, willingly

&gt; Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term profits over user happiness and long-term growth.That&#x27;s pretty much the definition of enshittification.

Except there’s a first party client for Reddit, so they’re both a client and server. Their client competes with other clients, and they use their control over the server to give their client an advantage.Now, whether this constitutes “anti competitive” in the legal sense is probably not going to fly in court: it’s unlikely Reddit can be compelled to offer an API at any particular price. It’s their service, they can do what they want with it. Rather, it’s a lesson that third parties should not be developing clients for other company’s services, as it is building a foundation on quicksand.

&gt; Purely anti-competitive behavior hereAn app that uses reddit is not a competitor to reddit, it&#x27;s a client of reddit. No definition of &quot;anti-competitive&quot; applies here.

Wow, that price is insane. To me, that&#x27;s pretty clearly a shot at any competitor apps for Reddit. Purely anti-competitive behavior here, which to me is silly. Let other apps pop up to better serve your users. At the end of the day, they are still your users and you might learn things from the other apps.Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term profits over user happiness and long-term growth.

You&#x27;ll still be able to access the website, for now. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if they tried killing that, too. If I were a profit-above-all bastard that was trying to squeeze my users for telemetry, I&#x27;d force them to use the mobile app exclusively to access my service.

I deleted the Twitter app a while ago, and if my only way to access Reddit is with their official app... I guess I&#x27;ll be a little more productive this year.

A lot of subreddits blanket ban you if you&#x27;ve posted in other subreddits that the mods don&#x27;t like.

Far from it. They have great recent user growth and everybody is appending “Reddit” to the end of their google searches in the quest for non-gamed search results

&gt; Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.I reported someone in the news sub. Paraphrasing but apparently reporting someone for saying &quot;they should all burn to death&quot; (talking about govt officials) 1: isn&#x27;t ban worthy, and 2: is &quot;abuse of the report button&quot; and led to me getting a 3 day ban.I&#x27;m out.

None of those social media are rudderless, just that, money’s circulating in hyperspace and the lower dimension slice of those just has to be mostly consistent on time axis. We are looking at a cross section at ballast deck of a ship.

Reddit has seemed rudderless for a long time.Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It&#x27;s a wonder they have any revenue at all.Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.

It&#x27;s not &quot;their&quot; data in the same way that last mile network access isn&#x27;t &quot;their&quot; (telco&#x27;s) pipes.If value in a platform comes from third parties choosing to use the service, and those third parties are free to use alternatives, then platforms should be very careful about how greedy they get in exploiting their users.Most of the platform value actually comes from future, continued use.

But I wonder if they really fulfil this goal. How do they solve the unsolved problem of allowing scraping &#x2F; SEO (Google, Bing etc.) but not teaching their LLMs?It&#x27;s obvious or an open secret that Alphabet&#x2F;Google and Microsoft will use their web copy for teaching their AI.

If that&#x27;s the real issue, then offer two licenses. One that allows you to use the data to train an AI. Another that doesn&#x27;t and says that if you do they will permaban your API access and sue your pants off.Third-party client apps can keep doing what they do, knowing that attempting to use the data to train an AI would destroy their business forever. Companies that want to train an AI can use the other license and pay big stacks of money.

They don&#x27;t want people training LLMs with their data without paying for it. Blame the AI bros for stealing all their data.

What I don’t get is they acquired Alien Blue, which was an amazing app, yet the official Reddit app is nowhere near the quality that AB had years ago.

You cannot just &quot;change the APIs&quot; to inject ads—ads require a lot of external verifiable measurement and have specific requirements over display and placement that third-party apps can&#x27;t provide. Injecting ads into existing third-party apps would mean putting specific requirements for measurement SDKs (binary third-party code from trusted adstech vendors) and developing a lot of new APIs for reporting that that third-party developers would have to implement

Exactly.Same reason why Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. don&#x27;t have alternative clients.Nothing unusual.Reddit is proceeding along the well-trodden path to monetization optimization.

It does seem fair to charge third parties approximately the same in ad revenue that you would have gotten from the same users on a first party app.Then the third party app can choose between adding their own ads, or charging a subscription.

There&#x27;s an obvious solution here, which is to stop participating on platforms that are ad-funded. Charging user subscriptions and fees to businesses should be sufficient to cover costs. If it&#x27;s not, maybe it shouldn&#x27;t exist.

you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad viewsExcept that&#x27;s not what Reddit is doing here. They&#x27;re charging 3rd party clients ~21X what they lose in ad views, pricing them completely out of the market.

&gt; Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them.And they do. Over time they have become less and less distinguishable from post of humans.I wonder what&#x27;s going to happen with Apollo.And what about my script to randomize my posts after a while? Yea, it doesn&#x27;t do a lot, but still...

&gt; It really isn&#x27;t worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.I really want to be the fly in the room looking at their grafana for monthly active users and see what happens to it in the coming months.I’m someone with ADHD and obsessive behavior is kinda one of the main symptoms of it. I think with this change, it’s not going to be hard for someone like me to drop it.I suspect that because of these changes, Reddit is also going to make it harder for search engines to index them - which is going to further reduce how useful Reddit is for information discovery.This is going to hurt reddit, and I personally don’t think the growth is going to be as strong as it has been once they take these actions. Social media sites depend on their users, and arguably only a small portion of their users create content. And a smaller portion that than create useful content. Once you’ve pissed off and pushed away that small %, you’re not recovering.I’m guessing this is some decisions made by MBAs who have learned some theoretical stuff, but don’t realize their courses haven’t really covered businesses like Reddit, Twitter, StackOverflow etc. They’re in for a rude awakening.Remember that Tumblr effectively died once they made some decisions.

&gt; If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them.If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it&#x27;s harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features.Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party clients, but to appease advertisers Reddit has to make guarantees around visibility. It&#x27;s not enough to check if third parties are calling the correct API, they will actually need to regularly audit all third party clients.It really isn&#x27;t worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.

Think like someone who wants to run a business to make money and has no interest in the site as a community for a moment.  Why would you ever elect to have no control over the site&#x27;s presentation?

&gt; Facebook&#x27;s average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10&#x2F;quarter[0], and 6x that in the US.Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn&#x27;t that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that?My first though was that maybe 1% of users buy something in a given year, but that&#x27;s $24k to acquire a customer and is so far from reality that my perspective must be way off.

My thoughts exactly. People ask for paid options in lieu of ads and tracking, but when sites like YouTube and Reddit offer paid plans at reasonable prices ($3-$10&#x2F;mo) there is an equal amount of outrage. You will never be able to please users who simply want to pay nothing.

I had the same thoughts, that Reddit&#x27;s reasons must stem from opportunity cost.The Apollo developer does however address this in his post and he claims that Reddit&#x27;s ARPU is only $0.36&#x2F;quarter. Reddit has likely been doubling down their efforts on Ad Targeting, etc and perhaps forecasts much higher.Christian&#x27;s reddit post only addresses ads though, but Reddit has been trying to diversify and create multiple products and revenue streams. They have gold for purchase and if I recall they were trying to launch some Clubhouse-esque product. Point is, it&#x27;s hard to push any of these things if so many users are on 3rd party clients that don&#x27;t support such features.

Cool, that assumes those users will continue to use Reddit after the third party apps have been killed.For me, I don’t think that will be the case. I almost exclusively use Reddit on mobile though Apollo and Reddit’s own app is absolutely garbage (unpleasant to use and heating up my phone burning through the battery).I used to pay for Reddit premium, but I stopped after realising that Reddit wasn’t providing me a better experience for it.

Facebook&#x27;s average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10&#x2F;quarter[0], and 6x that in the US. Which is honestly kind of stunning. Reddit is presumably much less than that, but they might be reasonably gunning for a number better than Pinterest, with an ARPU of ~$1.50[1].To put the pricing post into the same context, we&#x27;re talking $7.50 per Apollo user&#x2F;quarter, which is closer to what Facebook makes per user than Pinterest.That said, presumably 3rd party client users are especially active and would skew higher ARPU than the average Redditor, and it wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if they were more likely to live in developed countries.I dunno. I started running the numbers expecting to be outraged, but the cost doesn&#x27;t seem crazy far from what Reddit could conceivably hope to earn off these users. I doubt Reddit is monetizing anywhere near that well right now, but if they&#x27;re pricing the API in a forward-looking way, rather than planning to ratchet it up every quarter inline with monetization efforts, it could make sense.0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;251328&#x2F;facebooks-average-revenue-per-user-by-region&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;251328&#x2F;facebooks-average...</a>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;995251&#x2F;pinterest-quarterly-revenue-per-user-arpu-region&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;995251&#x2F;pinterest-quarter...</a>

Reddit wants to make money on the backs of their unpaid mods. I really don’t like them, but: Reddit has a ton of infrastructure costs they need to cover due to the centralization of these communities.I do not like telegram or discord communities due to history issues. Same with Facebook. Reddit posts popping up on Google searches is really great.I really wish we could go back to forums. The thing Reddit gave us was a central place to find communities as well as a unified login and feed. I feel like an aggregator of forums could help with finding communities. Forums that support oauth and rss would help bridge the gap of unified login and a central feed. The nice thing about forums is that their infra costs only need to scale with their community.

In that case, wouldn&#x27;t they whitelist 3rd party client apps then? At least on a case by case basis, and at least the biggest ones Apollo and co

They are probably pricing this for people who want to use Reddit data to train their AI.

&gt; and why the Digg exodus happenedThey may suspect they&#x27;re larger than Digg ever was, and can simply weather that storm.They may be right, to be honest.

I don’t know if they’re trying to eliminate access but rather make more money&#x2F;push people towards their own client

Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit&#x27;s official app and webpage is garbage, and instead of working with amazing developers like Christian to add whatever functionality they need to increase their revenue, they&#x27;re doubling down on bad decisions and alienating their users. Pure hubris... they&#x27;ve forgotten their own history and why the Digg exodus happened.Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to third-party clients? If they want usage data, they already have all the API calls. If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.

Apollo&#x27;s developer also commented on that: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditdev&#x2F;comments&#x2F;13wsiks&#x2F;comment&#x2F;jmd9e7v&#x2F;?utm_source=reddit&amp;utm_medium=web2x&amp;context=3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditdev&#x2F;comments&#x2F;13wsiks&#x2F;comment&#x2F;...</a>

I can only assume Reddit wants to kill NSFW altogether. They require you to authenticate now if you want to see any of it (though of course they promise that somehow this will still be &quot;anonymous&quot;). Once they turn off old.reddit.com, I think that&#x27;ll be the end of NSFW content on Reddit altogether.I assume they hope to attract more advertising money this way.

Is that only for not-logged-in users? I don&#x27;t see how limiting access to the official app does anything special from a regulatory standpoint. If an account is approved&#x2F;authorized for nsfw content who cares which app the account is using?

&gt; Finally, to ensure that all regulatory requirements are met in the handling of mature content, we will be limiting access to sexually explicit content for third-party apps starting on July 5, 2023, except for moderation needs.Reddit really buried &quot;no nsfw outside official reddit apps&quot; (from the end of your first link). Didn&#x27;t Tumblr do something similar and lose a significant fraction of its userbase and revenues?

The client id is per-app, not per enduser.

No. That&#x27;s the limit of how many queries can be made per minute on the free tier, but it doesn&#x27;t state what the free tier entails or what it can be used for. My guess, based on Christian&#x27;s post, is that third-party clients would not be eligible for the free tier and that the free tier is for uses like bots.

&gt; As of July 1, 2023, we will enforce two different rate limits for the free access tier:&gt; If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id&gt; If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per minuteSo... doesn&#x27;t this mean that each logged in Apollo&#x2F;3rd party client user can make 100 requests per minute for free?The Apollo developer says his average user makes less than 400 requests per day and it&#x27;s somehow going to average $2.50 per user per month. I must be missing something.

Someone at Reddit has since restored the linked post[0]. I think the content is unchanged, but it may have been subtly edited while it was &quot;[removed]&quot;.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditdev&#x2F;comments&#x2F;13wsiks&#x2F;api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditdev&#x2F;comments&#x2F;13wsiks&#x2F;api_upda...</a>

Did they really remove their own post describing the changes? I haven&#x27;t seen that before.

Reddit has posted their own announcements now<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditdev&#x2F;comments&#x2F;13wsiks&#x2F;api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redditdev&#x2F;comments&#x2F;13wsiks&#x2F;api_upda...</a> and<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;modnews&#x2F;comments&#x2F;13wshdp&#x2F;api_update_continued_access_to_our_api_for&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;modnews&#x2F;comments&#x2F;13wshdp&#x2F;api_update...</a>

old.reddit.com will be phased within 1 year. i.reddit.com went out this year and old.reddit.com will go out too, guaranteed.

I&#x27;m more surprised that reddit has maintained features like old.reddit.com and their API for this long. To me, this is textbook enshittification. Either die unprofitable or live long enough to see yourself rip features from TikTok.

People who want to manage legal and interdiction risks?

Then don&#x27;t sign in? See the LinkedIn legal precident, ToS only applies to scrapers if the scraper had to &#x27;click&#x27; the agree button in order to sign up.

In Reddit&#x27;s case data scraping is soon to be against the Terms of Service (which is already the case for Twitter), which will earn you a Cease and Desist if you try to make a business off the data.

The data is all fully public and easily scraped from APIs (both reddit and twitter). Who is the audience for these paid plans? Is this for oauth enabled access on behalf of users?

I like reddit, I really do. So it&#x27;s sad to see them taking a page out of the twitter playbook and are taking active measures to destroy their thriving ecosystem.The official reddit app is an absolute nightmare and essentially unusable. Their &quot;new&quot; website also completely sucks and is even worse on mobile than it is on desktop. If this actually gets implemented as is, I&#x27;ll definitely have a very productive rest of my year. I have no data to back this up, but I feel like with reddit, even more users only rely on third party clients than it was on twitter.

What&#x27;s the granularity of a Reddit API call? Is e.g. loading a submission with all the comments, or loading the top 20 submissions to a subreddit a single request? Or do you actually end up doing tens of requests for what&#x27;s effectively a single page load (one for the submission and a few comments, one for the each image, one for each additional batch of comments)?$0.24 for 1000 full page loads wouldn&#x27;t actually sound insane (if you compare to typical CPMs of sites with ads), but it seems hard to believe that the average user is doing that 350 times &#x2F; day.

Come for the pricing info (50 million requests costs $12,000). Stay for the argument in the comments about whether or not HN users are deranged.

&gt; Reddit seems to want NSFW content gone altogether.Between this and trying to crowd out third party clients, one has to wonder if they&#x27;re trying to position themselves to become the next Digg.

I agree, but I find it funny that it seems to be backfiring. I&#x27;ve noticed a pretty large increase in the number of posts that are people getting maimed or killed on subs that show up on the front page. Subs like publicfeakout that used to be stuff like people yelling at each other in mall now regularly have gore voted to the top.

It looks like it&#x27;s currently blocked on &quot;new Reddit&quot; only for mobile user agents. If I try opening <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;boobs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;boobs&#x2F;</a> in a desktop browser (or with a desktop agent on mobile) I get an option to just click on an &quot;I&#x27;m over 18&quot; button to see the content.

Reddit seems to want NSFW content gone altogether.  At this point you can only see it anonymously if you go to old.reddit.com, if you go to the regular UI it requires you to authenticate before you can see any kind of questionable content.

Keep in mind that Reddit has said they&#x27;re going to stop serving NSFW content via API too. So if you enjoy that stuff you won&#x27;t get it in Apollo even if you pay them.

Couldn&#x27;t they just return ads from the API? Any apps that don&#x27;t show them would have their API access revoked.

Their pricing likely includes the cost of potential ad revenue that an API call is displacing. There&#x27;s no easy way to integrate ads into an API, so they just offload the advertising&#x2F;monetization problem to whoever buys the content.

&gt; 50 million requests costs $12,000I&#x27;ve never worked on a web platform like Reddit, nor with any per-request priced APIs. Reddit&#x27;s charge of $0.00024 per request still looks like it is _significantly_ above what their own costs are.Wasn&#x27;t Reddit&#x27;s pay-for-API-access announcement originally phrased as a desire to claw back some of the value that LLMs have found in Reddit data? I don&#x27;t understand how per-request API pricing actually accomplishes that. (I was vaguely anticipating Reddit&#x27;s API pricing to have some sort of expensive &quot;firehose&quot; endpoint for OpenAI&#x2F;Google&#x2F;Meta&#x2F;etc to pull from.)It looks like they&#x27;re instead going to squeeze out all third-party apps instead. I don&#x27;t think this bodes well for Reddit&#x27;s future.

Presumably that&#x27;s why they&#x27;ve been making old reddit worse over time before they turn it off (kinda like i.reddit.com)

have you seen the latest Reddit app for iOS&#x2F;macOS and its data privacy: there is zero privacy.This is why I am sticking with the web-based Old Reddit.Any further strangulation and it&#x27;s &quot;hasta la vista, Reddit&quot;.

The reddit ones won&#x27;t be though, unless they scrape instead of use the api. I doubt that&#x27;s viable for a consumer app though, Reddit will probably break your app constantly.

well the problem with mobile apps is the alternatives are free. It&#x27;s a bad business and why I didn&#x27;t take my passion for mobile apps as a career.

I suspect that a fraction of users would convert and many others would trash the developer&#x2F;app for the switch to subscription. Users of free apps like this have a seriously warped view of software costs.It seems like Reddit is pushing these changes because that&#x27;s exactly what they want to happen. They want all users to be using the free first-party Reddit app.

LMAO can you imagine paying monthly to use Reddit? That&#x27;d be like paying monthly to browse this site or 4chan. I think I&#x27;d reevaluate my life if I considered paying monthly to access that cesspool.Reddit is already nearly entirely astroturfed advertisements, and you pay for the site by reading the shill posts that fill its pages. The fact that anyone pays Apollo or Reddit for a subscription is already just sad. Like paying for cable.

&gt; The OP makes the case that it will cost him on average $2.50 per month per user - so... charge $3 per monthApple takes at least 15% of that, or 30% depending on the developer&#x27;s revenue, leaving $2.55 or $2.10.

Honestly, reddit is the only one irritated me enough that I get a third party app. The ass behavior of popping sub I didn&#x27;t subscribe and pretend it is a notification of reply to me just drives me insane.They are just truly shitty at make a working app. It&#x27;s really not a business or what, just the official one truly don&#x27;t work.Popup ad to notification is already bad, pretend it to be user message? How the fxxk do they think it is going to encourage the engagement?

I agree. The OP makes the case that it will cost him on average $2.50 per month per user - so... charge $3 per month - no blog post needed.Same with Twitter. So many businesses were built upon basically free API access and are now shocked the company responsible for their app&#x27;s customer appeal wants some of that action.It&#x27;s not Reddit&#x27;s responsibility to float OP&#x27;s business and make it profitable. OP&#x27;s billions of monthly requests have a real cost for Reddit - and now that Reddit&#x27;s API is so coveted, they can charge whatever they want for it&#x27;s access.No Twitter - no Twitter App.No Reddit - no Reddit App.It&#x27;s really simple...

That&#x27;s fine. If you can&#x27;t or don&#x27;t want to pay, you can look at Reddit&#x27;s ads. I do not use Reddit very much, so it&#x27;s not worth $5&#x2F;month to me. But why would I expect to get a third-party ad-free client for free?

For the world? Yes it is.For the average HN user? Lol, no it’s not.I would wager the majority of HN users can point to several dumb &gt;=$5 expenses in any given month. If you don’t value Apollo enough to pay for it, fine. Just don’t pretend that $60 a year is a morally outrageous amount for software.

Again, compare to the price for streaming services. Hulu charges $8&#x2F;month an still makes you watch ads.

You also don&#x27;t understand how 95% of the world or 80% of HN lives. $5&#x2F;month is a very significant expense.

Who cares? It doesn&#x27;t matter one bit. OP built a profitable business off free API access. That is the mistake here... assuming it would always be free.

What percent of the app&#x27;s current customer base do you think would stick around at paying $5 a month to browse r&#x2F;funny on the phone?

There’s no reason for $5&#x2F;month to be what the average user pays. It’s for power users who spend way more time on the app.Netflix has introduced ad-supported tiers where you pay less. That’s the same here, those users can use the website or first-party app.

I&#x27;m guessing that you work in the tech industry in the US and makes $100k+ per year?$5 is not an insignificant amount to a lot of people all over the world, including Europe and maybe the US. Especially when every single app and service wants you to subscribe to them now, I&#x27;ve heard plenty of people saying they&#x27;re going to cancel their Netflix subscription when password sharing stops working.344 requests per day is not worth $5 per month for the average user.

Where in the hell you live where that generous mobile plan exists?

I spend 5€&#x2F;month for my mobile phone plan, 40GB data cap.
5€&#x2F;month for a service extending reddit is quite a lot

I use Apollo and like it but I don&#x27;t like it so much that using it is worth $5 a month

I doubt that people would be paying for Disney+ or Netflix if there was an free alternative that had slightly worse UX, that was officially sanctioned and available at the top of the app store if you searched for them. The appeal of those two is access to the content - Reddit has an official website and app where the content can be accessed for free.

&gt; Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I&#x27;d be in the red every month.I just don&#x27;t understand why developers underprice their apps so much. You&#x27;re talking about an app that people are constantly raving about, and that people use for multiple hours per day. Charge $5&#x2F;month, that&#x27;s half the price of Netflix or Disney+.

I won&#x27;t be renewing my Reddit Premium. Clueless management doing what they do best.Edit: just to put my money with my mouth is, Reddit Premium sub cancelled.

I rely on &quot;nuke comment tree&quot; from Apollo to kill flame trees.Modding is about to get a lot harder.

There are a large portion of moderators who will quit if they cannot use RedditIsFun because the official app is complete crap for moderators.I really don&#x27;t know why it has to be API use based anyway. We all log in to our individual accounts through the API. For clients they should be able to determine requests&#x2F;account or let users pay for their own usage or something. They&#x27;re in full batshit MBA mode.

I might have too much privacy stuff enabled but Facebook could not be further from what I am interested in.I&#x27;m pretty sure FB thinks I&#x27;m a republican country hunter with a big beard who loves driving his huge truck to crossfit. Because of where I live possibly?

Personally, Facebook&#x2F;Instagram show me really good ads, while Reddit-ads are always a complete miss.

I don&#x27;t disagree with either party here. $12k for 50 million requests is not egregious, but $2.50 per user for something that is probably cheap&#x2F;free to users is a non starter.Reddit has failed to adequately monetize their userbase, they&#x27;ve run into the same &quot;politics and porn&quot; issue that every social media platform has, and they&#x27;ve raised way, way too much money.The worst part? I couldn&#x27;t tell you the last legitimate ad that I saw on reddit. Facebook shows semi-relevant ads, sometimes location based. Reddit ads are visual flotsam.

This means the end of a lot of my reddit use.  Sure, I&#x27;ll use it on my computer in a browser, but no more on my phone.  This is probably a good thing, but I have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of some communities.  And I pay for Apollo premium and just reupped.  The app is a complete joy to use.  The app developer is first rate.  For how complex the app is, it is both easy to use and surprisingly bug free.  (I know there are bugs, from the release notes for new versions, but I&#x27;ve never seen one.)

Reddits mobile app, and website are one of the worst UX experiences I&#x27;ve encountered on a UGC site. Terribly bad. I they should be working with people who can make products people want to use to consume their content, not killing them off with absurd pricing.

Nope, you don’t understand. You make apps for macOS. I understand that there is risk there. I’m not one of those people who go around telling you it’s your fault when Apple pulls the plug on you, because you understand the risk you operate in and I think it’s fine for people to do this.Now, if you paraded around telling people you trust Apple and that they would never hurt you in any way, and that you had conversations with their management and they want you to succeed, now we have a problem.

Everything in life is risky. Show me the 100% reliable path to financial prosperity and happiness. You could get laid off tomorrow by your current employer. The stock market could crash, and any investments you made could amount to nothing.

Honestly a dumb conversation from the admin if you ask me. Let&#x27;s say Christian is using 3x the requests for whatever reason. That just means he&#x27;s on the hook for a $6 million bill at the end of the year if he optimizes things. There&#x27;s not really a big difference here.

And in the replies to the thread, the admin is now publicly back-and-forthing with Christian about the number of requests made by his app and how &quot;other bots and apps&quot; are more efficient.

I feel like it&#x27;s the same thing with people who have a youtube channel.If you&#x27;re in a situation where all of your income comes from a company, but you don&#x27;t have an employer&#x2F;employee contract with that company. It seems like such a precarious position to me.

I found this attitude from Christian really off-putting.Dude, you run an interface to another company’s core business. You cannot make any guarantees about what they may or may not do.

Not to go all “I told you so” but I do recall Christian talking about how Reddit would never do anything like this and how much trust he had in their developer relations team now, oh, sometime earlier this year. Hope he took the suggestion to have a backup plan seriously…relying on the whims of a single company is a hard way to make your income. Doesn’t mean you can’t try it but it is fundamentally pretty risky.

$2.50 &#x2F; month &#x2F; user does not seem that insane when it&#x27;s put into that sort of perspective, but certainly more than I think most of the current users of the app would be happy paying. Hopefully they can compromise somewhere around $5 &#x2F; user &#x2F; year which I think most users would happily pay for for a third party app.

APIs should not be revenue generators! I don&#x27;t mind companies charging for an API, either to cover the costs of service or to encourage efficient behavior. But Twitter and now Reddit seem more like they are rent seeking with their APIs and it&#x27;s just not going to work out well. Particularly galling since they&#x27;re effectively charging to access all this content that users generated for free.The other explanation is these charges are intended to kill third party uses of the API. I&#x27;m pretty sure that&#x27;s what is mostly motivating Twitter (down to the weed joke price).

Maybe I am just too desktopbrained but it seems weird to charge the developer for requests sent by a User Agent, rather than.... the user.Are they gonna try to bill google chrome, too?

Unsurprising as that was inevitable and Reddit needs to make money. Unless you can afford the high prices, don&#x27;t build your whole business solely on someone else&#x27;s API. Twitter made that clear and now so did Reddit.Like I said before in [0]&quot;Either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase a high price for it.&quot;[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36087219" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36087219</a>

Honestly not a bad idea. Apollo has such a dedicated fanbase that if you get them to adopt a new community, then the quality of posts will start out pretty high. So much of Reddit is crap anyway so drop in quantity from lack of network effect wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Focus on Apollo’s strengths: great UX and bring it to the web.Ofc the major issue is how to avoid enshittification. Having a good monetization strategy from the start is key. Hardest part besides attracting large user count is to attack some of Reddit’s failings: terrible arbitrary moderation. That’s the tricky part.

I don&#x27;t know how many employees Apollo App has, but I wonder if a viable solution is just to build their own Reddit? I realize that&#x27;s a massive task, but if the only other option is shut the company down, it might be worth exploring. They&#x27;ve already got the interface built and if you remove a lot of the bells and whistles, Reddit is a pretty simple app other than the scale at which they operate (which is obviously a massive challenge).

This will basically kill 3rd apps. I refuse to use their official client.Where are you guys moving on next?

My long time reddit account got permabanned because I argued with the mod of a popular subreddit (I disagreed with him about the localization of a Japanese game, really trivial stuff). It was a veteran, seasoned account with lots of awards, karma, and &quot;reddit coins&quot; ($hundreds of dollars worth). The permaban message said I could use my other reddit accounts as long as I followed the rules on them. As soon as I tried using my other veteran Reddit accounts, *all* my accounts were immediately banned for &quot;ban evasion&quot;. Poof.I tried to appeal but when you&#x27;re permabanned you are limited to only using a small appeal form with 250 characters maximum. I tried to bypass this by linking to a google doc. Nobody visited my google doc and yet reddit said they &quot;reviewed my appeal&quot; and &quot;will not be lifting the permaban&quot;.I&#x27;m not a troll, I never harassed anyone, used slurs, called for violence, etc. My only offense was arguing with a powercrazed mod (hated by most of his own subreddit), and my Reddit accounts are all wiped. When I try to create a new account, they get permabanned too after a day or so, so I gotta give reddit&#x27;s &quot;platform integrity&quot; team some credit, merely using a VPN isn&#x27;t sufficient. I just wish they&#x27;d treat customers who&#x27;ve given them hundreds of dollars the courtesy of a phone call or a human review. I really hate how some big tech companies feel they&#x27;re totally above providing any level of customer support. Reddit isn&#x27;t alone here. I can&#x27;t even get refunded by my CC company because the coins were purchased over 6 months ago.At least I still have HN.

Archive.org was knocked offline the other day due to some AI startup scraping it to death. It’s not a good thing.

Archive.org is a non-profit without the capacity to serve that many requests. An excellent resource for people to use carefully, but not a treasure trove for bots to scrape down to the last bit.

Can&#x27;t they pull the data from archive.org?

And open yourself to potential lawsuits. You can fork any public repo in github too, don&#x27;t need any fancy resverse-engineering or web scraping. But if you use the content illegally then what&#x27;s the point.

Managing all those LTE proxies is far from cheap

I heard researchers on public funding can’t violate ToS without invalidating their current and future employment, and therefore cannot engage in social media researches without free API…

lol you can&#x27;t get in trouble for datascraping or figuring out ways around their anti scraping measures. Good luck enforcing any user agreements the bot has to click through. If they don&#x27;t want it scraped then they have to not put it on a public facing webpage.

LLMs have nothing to do with it. Someone skilled enough and rich enough to develop and train an LLM is absolutely capable of reverse-engineering your private API or scraping your web UI and defeating whatever protections you have.

Yes it&#x27;s this. This has nothing to do with 3rd party app operation and everything to do with generally closing the gate to the data garden.The value of reddit&#x27;s content to non-reddit entities is rapidly increasing as its monetizable use shifts from a set of signals on which to build first-party ad targeting (which they never really figured out) to generally useful llm training data.

Right that&#x27;d be the case now but previously you could just make a billion small requests for free.

Eh can still just automate creating a bunch of accounts and do it manually. Use one of the many captcha completion services where you pay for people to complete captchas for you. ML models can already pretty much do them anyway.Then rotate between accounts and put a random time between requests. Restrict certain accounts to browse within certain hours&#x2F;timezones. Load pages as usual and just scrape data from the page rather than via api.However, I believe in a company&#x27;s right to charge whatever they want for their services. But I also believe in the right for people to choose not to use that service and for freer alternatives to spring up.Just like Tumblr, Reddit seem intent on killing themselves, although these days I&#x27;m not so sure. When Elon took over Twitter everyone was saying that all the users would leave and it would die. This is not the case, human nature means that people seek familiarity and will cling on, hmm.

You’re right, but I think it’s also pretty clear thatA) there is demand for functionality that depends on semi-real-time data, e.g. a prompt like “explain {recent_trending_topic} to me and describe its evolution” where the return could be useful in various contexts;B) the degradation of search experience and the explosion of chat interfaces seem to indicate “the future of search is chat” and the number of Google searches prefixed or suffixed with “Reddit” make it obvious that LLM-powered chat models with search functionality will want to query Reddit extensively, and in the example prompt above, the tree of queries generated to fulfill a single prompt could be sizeable;C) improvements to fine-tuning pipelines make it more and more feasible to use real-time data in the context of LLMs, such as a “trending summary” function that could cache many potentially related queries from Reddit, Twitter, etc and use them to fine-tune a model which would serve a response to my example prompt

If you want training data for an LLM and are actively talking to some data providers, you&#x27;d just ask for a dump, instead of making a billion small requests.(You&#x27;d make the billion small requests, if you are doing this on the sly.)

&gt;The web is in the process of rapidly filling up with AI regurgitated garbageThis is already the case. See the oceans of crap SEO optimized &quot;food recipe sites&quot;. It&#x27;s unbearable.So sad that, BBC back in 199ps and 2000s, there were so many random sites to visit with interesting things. Search engines were of actual use.Now, it&#x27;s basically facebook, reddit, pinterest, instagram, stackoverflow , and a couple of counted others, depending on what you like. And EVERYTHING is monetized.The WWW of today is terrible.Now

This is very obviously what&#x27;s going on.The web is in the process of rapidly filling up with AI regurgitated garbage, eventually there&#x27;s going to be a handful of sites with real usable content on them left, reddit being one of the biggest.

That&#x27;s unlikely. Elon jacked up the price because he wanted Twitter to make revenue, so get people to use their app and site, and basically to just get rid of anything he doesn&#x27;t control.

ah that explains why Twitter led the pack making their APIs insanely expensive. there is value in the data and the LLM companies will be willing to fork it. a whole new business model and monetization of mass data not predicated on ads or user privacy. what could go wrong?

I don&#x27;t think the LLM boom caused Twitter&#x27;s first API lockdown in 2012, nor do I really think it&#x27;s anything to do with the more recent final nail which seems much more in tune with Elon&#x27;s twitter trying to increase ARPU&#x2F;engagement while also dealing with a 90% reduction in headcount.

I think it&#x27;s very clear that the recent LLM boom is directly responsible for Twitter, Reddit, and others quickly moving to restricted APIs with exorbitant pricing structures. I don&#x27;t think these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase.Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, and undoubtedly the UGC platform operators are aware that they&#x27;re pricing out third-party applications like Apollo and Pushshift. These operators need high baseline pricing so they can discount in negotiation with LLM clients.Or, perhaps, it&#x27;s the opposite: for instance, Reddit could be developing its own first-party language model, and any other model with access to semi-realtime data is a potentially existential competitor. The best strategic route is to make it economically infeasible for some hypothetical competitor to arise, while still generating revenue from clients willing to pay these much higher rates.Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it&#x27;s unclear who&#x27;s winning, I think it&#x27;s pretty obvious that most of us are losing.

Social networks are a two-sided marketplace.In the case of Twitter, power users who posted the best content almost exclusively use third-party apps for the extra features and usability they provide, and the ban on those amplified Twitter&#x27;s quality issues.You have many people in this very submission saying they will quit Reddit if Apollo becomes defunct.

From a business perspective, it never made sense for Reddit to support free API access for third party apps for as long as they did. Now, they are effectively killing those apps. The thing &quot;not based in reality&quot; was expecting it to go on as long as it did.

Currently clients talk direct to reddit&#x27;s servers. But if reddit started billing for API requests, you can bet every appmaker would run a caching server to reduce the number of API requests.Or they&#x27;d do some kind of peer-to-peer caching between clients.

Does the API work that way now? The part on your own server used to only be for authentication and clients would then interact with reddit&#x27;s servers directly. (Haven&#x27;t done anything recently but used to maintain a moderation bot).

Either Reddit is happy about the caching as you cost them less, or they&#x27;re not happy about it and they just block your app if you do that.  
Now, people could scrape the website or allow users to bring their own API keys, but then it becomes a cat and mouse game. And if you&#x27;re trying to sell your app on any of the app stores, Reddit could likely get it taken down&#x2F;take legal actions.

I think reddit is being naive by charging per API request. Do that, and application developers will try to reduce them - for example, caching popular subreddits or posts (ie. &quot;this is &#x2F;r&#x2F;technology as it looked when we last crawled 15 minutes ago&quot;).If Christian added a cache layer on his own server he could easily make the finances work.But... Thats in nobodies interest - Users end up with stale content, Reddit looses users due to stale content and loses revenue due to Christian extending caching times to save money. Also, Christian will make uncachable requests, like for example voting, hard to do, which again hurts reddit as a platform.

I&#x27;m not that great at APIs.Is client_id something you have to register with reddit?So you can&#x27;t, for example have a client_id per user?What if you as the app maker forced all your users who want to use your app to go register for their free personal client_id for their own personal API use, and then you have them give that client_id to the app along with their OAuth with they log in?I am just trying to understand why a third party app can&#x27;t just be a &quot;software shell&quot; that individual users can use to access reddit through their own personal free API limits as if they were just some individual accessing reddit through the API.

Because they&#x27;re also taking this opportunity to change rate limiting from client_id+user_id to just client_id.To stay inside the free tier, you get 1000 requests spread over 10 minutes (their current spike-smoothing behaviour) across your entire user base.

They say that the free tier API for users will be 100 queries per minute.Why can&#x27;t a third party app use each user&#x27;s individual API queries for that user&#x27;s app usage? Like you have the user OAuth with the app, and then the app uses that user&#x27;s own user API access to query the API. 100 queries a minutes seems like it should be enough for most people.

Losing my free&#x2F;ad-free client got me to delete a Twitter account (and habit) I&#x27;d had for 12 years, didn&#x27;t really want anymore, but would likely not have ditched proactively.If the same thing happens with Reddit I&#x27;ll be ecstatic.

I find myself remoting to desktop chrome+userscript more and more to get any semblance of enjoyable experience in last few years.

It&#x27;s clearly intended to weed out third party apps, same as Twitter. I have a pet theory that all the companies doing this are converging on the same long term plan - kill third party apps, have premium subscriptions (Facebook recently launched one too), and then give the users the choice - use the service for free, with forced opt-in into personalized marketing, sharing data with 3rd parties, or pay for premium.There&#x27;s legal precedent already in Europe that this is fine by GDPR rules, as long as the price of the subscription is &quot;reasonable&quot;.That way they get to preserve (or even improve) their ad targeting business, on the assumption that most users will just choose selling their data over a subscription. And if they go for a subscription, even better. In a sense, let the market decide the value of privacy.The first step in this would obviously be killing any third party alternatives that would be the first place of refuge when they make that move.In any case, a pet theory, but there&#x27;s been a strange convergence by these big companies and the way they&#x27;re changing their business models.

Oh, that sucks.  I don&#x27;t use Apollo, but I imagine that this mean&#x27;s I&#x27;ll eventually lose RIF, which is an excellent mobile client.

Consuming an API is a tough business. Between Twitter arbitrarily blocking API access, and now both Twitter and Reddit now charging obscene rates. It&#x27;s a death sentence for some really useful projects and reduces the total value of the ecosystem.

In the end users must be for the service in one way or an other. Either be it add impressions, subscriptions, selling imaginary stickers or charging a lot for using the API...Not sure why couldn&#x27;t subscription cover the API use for the user.

I&#x27;m amazed that one of the most visited website&#x2F;app in the world with highly cacheable (free user generated) content can&#x27;t be profitable (enough?).

Company that can’t make money desperately tries to gouge profit out of stuck users. There’s a playbook for this.

Another subscription. Great. The reddit client I use is brilliant (relay for reddit pro), not sure what they&#x27;re doing about this but I&#x27;m not using the official client and I only use reddit on my phone. I&#x27;m really sick of subscriptions though, I&#x27;d rather just pay up front and not have another subscription

For what it’s worth, I literally just created my first HN account after seeing the Apollo dev’s post. Hope I don’t bring down y’all’s collective IQ by being here lol.

It worked great for Twitter, I’m sure it will be an incredible success for Reddit as well. &lt;&#x2F;sarcasm&gt;Hopefully one more nudge towards decentralized services and open standards.

I think the problem is the garbage content is where the money is.

&gt; Tik tok is 99% garbage content.You&#x27;re likely not using TikTok effectively. I personally use it, and all my engagements with it are 100% relevant to my interests.

But that&#x27;s what I mean- for the few specific places to go, sure it&#x27;s great. However I only need to go to something like an &#x2F;r&#x2F;nfl or &#x2F;r&#x2F;valheim for a few minutes each day to catch up on some specific news like that I want to see.For checking out completely random things, or funny things, or just to brwose around... that&#x27;s where tiktok destroys them now.&gt;Tiktok is 99% garbage contentThat&#x27;s... a statement.

&gt;The curation on reddit just far, far better outside of the super generic frontpage subreddits.Even smaller subreddits can be pretty terrible with bad mods.A lot of smaller hobby subreddits are basically treated as facebook groups, with people treating it as a group for people with an interest and not a focused discussion about that interest,

My experience is the opposite. TikTok curation is incredibly efficient at honing in on the content niches that appeal to you. My TikTok feed feels very personal, I regularly interact in the comments and find some truly insightful discussions there. Reddit is a totally random mess of crap that I used to like. The manual curation of subreddits feels outdated and a pain compared to TikTok&#x27;s ability to &quot;organically&quot; bring me to content that I am interested in at the moment.

The main problem with Reddit is the moderation. It all hit the wall when Trump was elected and the Reddit directors decided to run around like chickens and clamp down on half the community. The website has become a far-left US-centric mass market echochamber.

I can&#x27;t really agree. The curation on reddit just far, far better outside of the super generic frontpage subreddits. Tik tok is 99% garbage content.

&gt; Reddit is getting destroyed by tiktok for casual news&#x2F;random videos etc.Yes please. Random videos should move to TikTok.

Reddit is getting destroyed by tiktok for casual news&#x2F;random videos etc.I was a huge reddit user over the years, but now I only go there for a handful of very specific subreddits. That&#x27;s really it&#x27;s only use anymore. It&#x27;s great for that, but they are probably seeing massive decline in usage.And the moment they basically kill 3rd party reddit apps is the day I barely touch it again.

check out Lemmy <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;join-lemmy.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;join-lemmy.org&#x2F;</a>

Something like that could probably be built on top of the matrix protocol, I&#x27;m not aware of anything concrete though.

Unfortunately that wired website seems to be following the enshittification protocol.

&gt; I wonder if there is a &quot;fediverse&quot; for something like forums? I can never get into mastodon because it&#x27;s not like forums and conversations between people are quite hard if you don&#x27;t follow them.Usenet. But it fell out of fashion around the turn of the millenium.

&gt;I wonder if there is a &quot;fediverse&quot; for something like forums?Closest thing I can think of is the .win communities which are very reddit-like in interface, but unfortunately mostly uh.... radical.Reddit itself was open-source until 2018. I wonder if someone could easily spin up a docker container that allows one to self-host a local instance (e.g. one subreddit)

&gt; Ever since learning the phrase &quot;enshittification&quot; [1] from Cory Doctorow it becomes more apparent when it happens around you.This is just the natural lifecycle of all things involving humans. Why people want the same stuff to remain dominant forever is baffling to me. I can imagine nothing worse. Reddit dying off to leave space for something new and fresh is a good thing.Social media sites do seem to go through the cycle even faster though--probably because they&#x27;re essentially digital nightclubs. We all know of that one hip club that everybody waited in line for in our 20s, and then suddenly the drinks get too expensive and the crowd gets older and uncool...and then suddenly there&#x27;s no line out front anymore. And there&#x27;s a new spot in town where the young people cluster.Before Reddit there was Digg. After Reddit, I&#x27;m confident there will be something else.

enshittification might be more like the ship of theseus. The original reddit was started by an interesting group of people with different ideas and ideals than who is there now.The people making up reddit might have been replaced with completely different people - with different motivations, behaviors, and expectations.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ship_of_Theseus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ship_of_Theseus</a>

Ever since learning the phrase &quot;enshittification&quot; [1] from Cory Doctorow it becomes more apparent when it happens around you.I wonder if there is a &quot;fediverse&quot; for something like forums? I can never get into mastodon because it&#x27;s not like forums and conversations between people are quite hard if you don&#x27;t follow them.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow&#x2F;</a>

They’ve got rid of the alternative mobile UI (I.reddit.com). And a lot of links from old.reddit.com redirect to the main site.

old.reddit.com and Apollo are the only things that makes reddit usable. I suspect that there are plans to do away with old.reddit.com at some point.Maybe that will be reddit&#x27;s Digg exodus moment.I read a thread on reddit about the api fees where commenters called out HN as the next site to move to. Hopefully not.

And you can append .rss &#x2F;r&#x2F;all.rss to any sub. Never have to reskim a headline and all the links open in old.reddit

If you have an account you can also just tell it to use the old &#x2F; desktop site in settings.

or you could log in and set your UI preferences to the old and then it&#x27;s always that look. Stop lurking!

Have you tried using the &#x27;old&#x27; reddit? Replacing &#x27;www.&#x27; with &#x27;old.&#x27; will move you over to the old style of reddit and will keep you there when clicking through links.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;all&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;all&#x2F;</a>

Please Reddit, just let us use a web browser to access your web site.Users shouldn’t be forced so aggressively into using an ‘app’ - whether the official one or a 3rd-party app - when mobile web browsers are so very capable.

It&#x27;s business. While I do hate reddit with the passion of a thousand burning suns I acknowledge their right to set their API prices however they wish. They are not a monopolist by any stretch of the word.

My understanding is that LLMs use Reddit comments as training data. These LLMs are often well funded and Reddit is using this to their advantage. Suddenly, a decade or so of this kind of  data has turned to gold and damned if a company soon to travel down an IPO pathway is passing this cash cow up.

You can subscribe to the &quot;top&quot; page of the last week, on average this feed will only have 3-4 new entries per day.Example RSS feed: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;technology&#x2F;top&#x2F;.rss?sort=top&amp;t=week" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;technology&#x2F;top&#x2F;.rss?sort=top&amp;t=week</a>

While I use RSS for many things, I find Reddit&#x27;s RSS feeds rather useless due to the large volume of posts, even on moderately small subreddits. If there is some way to limit it to just the top posts of the day I would consider using it, but AFAIK it&#x27;s all or nothing.

Nobody mention that their RSS feeds still work...

ugh, discord is basically IRC. There&#x27;s a reason we don&#x27;t use IRC for everything. I hate that it&#x27;s replacing everything.

&gt;Yeah, I pretty much only use reddit for a few game communities, unfortunately with this change I suspect more and more people will move to discordOh boy, I can&#x27;t wait to have to join a specific game discord for every game I want to play or else be locked out of any community information!Discords are easily killing a lot of hobbies by sequestering away information. And even when you&#x27;re told &quot;Oh that answer is on XYZ discord&quot; you have to go in and find the conversation using Discords ever-shittier search function

&gt; but what they&#x27;ve left Reddit with as a differentiator are the communities.Yeah, I pretty much only use reddit for a few game communities, unfortunately with this change I suspect more and more people will move to discord. It&#x27;s pretty annoying, but I suspect I&#x27;ll have to eventually cave and join them when they finally kill old.reddit.com.

Could be referring to the suggested news on the mobile home page and also in Google News

It&#x27;s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.google.com&#x2F;foryou" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.google.com&#x2F;foryou</a>.

What is Google&#x27;s &quot;For You&quot; ?

I blocked the reddit.com domain from all of my devices a few weeks ago, because until recently I didn&#x27;t feel like I could keep my finger on the pulse of &quot;The Internet&quot; without Reddit.That&#x27;s no longer the case. Google&#x27;s &quot;For You&quot; gets me my niche subject-specific content, Google News&#x2F;Memeorandum (and its sibling sites)&#x2F;Apple News gives me the mainstream media perspectives, HN (and maybe Bluesky occasionally) my urge to discuss and engage with others, and YouTube Shorts (I refuse to install TikTok) helps me understand Internet culture.I don&#x27;t think any one company came for Reddit on their own, but what they&#x27;ve left Reddit with as a differentiator are the communities. Unfortunately, those end up existing as little fiefdoms for the moderators who run them, and if that&#x27;s all you&#x27;re going to offer, you&#x27;re not going to be able to justify that $10-$15bn (probably lower now) valuation to investors.

Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing