Reddit to kill third-party apps July 1 with new draconian API pricing and rules

[GeneticBlueprint]

If you’re on Android and not using Boost for Reddit then you’re doing life wrong. 

[Bacon]

3 minutes ago, GeneticBlueprint said:

Yeah I use RES on Desktop. So I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say you only see a few posts at a time or whatever. I see just slightly less than I see on old Reddit but it doesn’t look like ass. 

This is what the redesign looks like for me

[GeneticBlueprint]

11 minutes ago, Bacon said:

This is what the redesign looks like for me

Yeah when I’m on desktop I’ll screenshot and show you mine. I would definitely prefer old Reddit to what you’re seeing there. 

[CitizenVectron]

17 minutes ago, Bacon said:

This is what the redesign looks like for me

 

On the bar near the top where it says Hot New Top, click the little window-like button on the right. It will change the view from cards to rows (I think there is even a compact row option) and you can see dozens of posts at a time. I agree the default card view sucks.

[Bacon]

Hmm... classic is better than the default, but I don't prefer it over old reddit. I don't care for compact either as, well, it's too compact.

 

Not sure what change I could make signed in, but I GIGA hate the twitter-like feed when you enter a thread

Only the middle section there scrolls. I dislike that. Feels too much like mobile which is fine on a tall vertical screen. Again, I prefer old reddit

 

Old Reddit makes it feel more like a forum, which I greatly prefer.

[Bacon]

Oh, and I just realized what makes me dislike a fair amount. Black text/links.

 

I blame IGN

[Keyser_Soze]

2 minutes ago, Bacon said:

Oh, and I just realized what makes me dislike a fair amount. Black text/links.

 

[Bacon]

Just now, Keyser_Soze said:

 

It's OK. I wouldn't like white links either.

 

It was the best part of the old themes. #BingbackBacon_Soze

[Keyser_Soze]

I remember that icon.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Fidelity simply must be regretting these social media platform investments:

 

Fidelity cuts Reddit valuation by 41% | TechCrunch

TECHCRUNCH.COM

---

Fidelity, the lead investor in Reddit's most recent funding round, has cut the estimated value of its stake in the social platform by 41%.

 

[Nokra]

Today is my cake day on reddit.  

[Fizzzzle]

I can't stand anything with a white background. I don't know why people even do it anymore.

[Jason]

15 minutes ago, Fizzzzle said:

I can't stand anything with a white background. I don't know why people even do it anymore.

 

black text on c1c2c9 is GOAT but white on black is way way better than black on white

[Fizzzzle]

29 minutes ago, Jason said:

 

black text on c1c2c9 is GOAT but white on black is way way better than black on white

c1c2c9 is fine, but I much prefer dark theme now. It's how I have everything from google to youtube to wikipedia to here.

[Jason]

22 minutes ago, Fizzzzle said:

c1c2c9 is fine, but I much prefer dark theme now. It's how I have everything from google to youtube to wikipedia to here.

 

Only problem with c1c2c9 is it's super niche so it's usually just not an option. I have the Dark Reader extension installed on Firefox and only disable it for specific sites where the UX becomes unusable. Samsung Browser on my phone also has a great toggleable dark mode that does sort of the same thing as Dark Reader.

[CitizenVectron]

If we're talking about a simple choice between pure black text on white, or pure white text on black, then I will go with the former. But having pure black as the background in dark mode isn't really the standard, now (or shouldn't be). White on charcoal is great.

[Bacon]

I cannot stand pure white text on black backgrounds. It causes RL image retention and I can see the lines of text like I was looking at a lightbulb. Black text on a grey background is how I do it.

 

By RL image retention I mean stuff like the Jesus optical illusion

Spoiler

 

 

 

Edit: Or to actually explain it while making sense(), it causes an afterimage.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Pretty much all of the third-party apps announced today that they're shutting down.

[Nokra]

As a protest, a big blackout is planned for 6/12 to 6/14, when many subreddits will go dark. 

 

Hopefully the powers that be can be convinced out of this idiocy. 

[Air_Delivery]

/r/CombatFootage rules.

[Spork3245]

Reddit wants to IPO but they’re not profitable

[GeneticBlueprint]

11 minutes ago, Spork3245 said:

Reddit wants to IPO but they’re not profitable

So practically like any other company in their segment :P

[Spork3245]

3 hours ago, GeneticBlueprint said:

So practically like any other company in their segment :P

This is probably why they’re doing the crackdown

[Jason]

49 minutes ago, Spork3245 said:

This is probably why they’re doing the crackdown

 

Which is very genius because driving off the power users and mods means they have no value.

[Spork3245]

59 minutes ago, Jason said:

 

Which is very genius because driving off the power users and mods means they have no value.

Yea, I’m not saying it’s a good plan

[ThreePi]

I've never used any third party apps to access Reddit, so I don't really know the value of them. But I'm always a little hesitant when someone bases their business or revenue source on access to someone else's platform. Like, if you make your money on Twitch, you have to be prepared for Twitch to change their terms at any given moment. In the case of Reddit, the relationship between Reddit and third party apps needs to be mutually beneficial, and how much benefit to Reddit there is seems dubious.

[Jason]

7 minutes ago, ThreePi said:

I've never used any third party apps to access Reddit, so I don't really know the value of them. But I'm always a little hesitant when someone bases their business or revenue source on access to someone else's platform. Like, if you make your money on Twitch, you have to be prepared for Twitch to change their terms at any given moment. In the case of Reddit, the relationship between Reddit and third party apps needs to be mutually beneficial, and how much benefit to Reddit there is seems dubious.

 

Power users provide the majority of the content on reddit, for free. Mods work for free too. Both groups skew heavily toward third party apps and other third party tools like mod toolbox, so reddit is getting plenty of value out of the third party apps. Another value reddit got from third party apps is that it's a relatively recent development that reddit has a first party mobile app, for years it was only third party apps, which was a big factor in reddit getting where it is. 

 

And all the third party app developers have said they're not opposed to the principle of having to pay for API access, they just object to these giant fuck you numbers that are clearly intended into just forcing them to shut down. 

[Moa]

Kind of a dick move but I'm calling nothingburger on the whole thing. If reddit had always had this policy nobody would care. I'll publicly admit I was wrong if reddit changes course or if this appreciably harms reddit in any way.

 

Reddit will die the same way every other social media site dies, banning explicit content after going publc/being bought.

[Jason]

1 minute ago, Moa said:

Kind of a dick move but I'm calling nothingburger on the whole thing. If reddit had always had this policy nobody would care. I'll publicly admit I was wrong if reddit changes course or if this appreciably harms reddit in any way.

 

Reddit will die the same way every other social media site dies, banning explicit content after going publc/being bought.

 

Trying to mod with just the first party tools is a terrible experience, especially if your SUB is anywhere remotely close to big. 

[DarkStar189]

On 6/8/2023 at 8:51 PM, Nokra said:

As a protest, a big blackout is planned for 6/12 to 6/14, when many subreddits will go dark. 

 

Hopefully the powers that be can be convinced out of this idiocy. 

I saw today r/videos announced they are doing an indefinite blackout starting the 12th.

[CitizenVectron]

Real crisis begins when Reddit overrides the mods and makes all the subs public.

[Jason]

2 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

Real crisis begins when Reddit overrides the mods and makes all the subs public.

 

I'm part of a subreddit that's always been private and something tells me reddit isn't smart enough to do anything other than just globally hit the private->public switch.

[Kal-El814]

On 6/10/2023 at 8:21 PM, Jason said:

 

I'm part of a subreddit that's always been private and something tells me reddit isn't smart enough to do anything other than just globally hit the private->public switch.

 

Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, Twitch, Twitter… all these companies inevitably shoot themselves in the dick. They’re so fucking dumb.

[TwinIon]

I agree with the idea that this isn't going to kill reddit, even though that would be nice. Twitter did the same thing (twice!) and survived. Most social platforms never even had this option, and I assume the majority of users don't use 3rd party apps at all. The downfall of Reddit will be in how it ends up trying to control content in order to better monetize it and drives users away to whatever platform comes next.

 

Still, as a heavy users of these apps (Apollo and Relay) I think it's a real shame. It feels like these changes are the result of such simplistic thinking and a real devaluing of what those developers bring to the experience. I'm mildly sympathetic to the cost argument. If the ARPU of a user on Apollo is minimal or even negative, and they're your most valuable users, that does seem like a problem. However, they approached this in the worst possible way. An ad free experience isn't even in the top 10 reasons I use 3rd party apps, and I'd be willing to bet if they forced their ads through the feed to users of 3rd party apps, it would have been fine.

 

I'm also sympathetic to the idea that Reddit data is increasingly valuable to a company that somehow doesn't make any money, but charging the same fee to Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, etc. to train their LLMs that you charge for 3rd party user apps is just lazy and stupid, assuming that's what they're doing. They've already backtracked to create special pricing for accessibility and mod apps, they could charge a different rate for customer apps vs enterprise usage.

 

It's also stupid that they've done this with so little warning and so little help. I've been reading stories of developers that wanted to explore passing the API costs on to the customers, making their apps subscription based and seeing what happens, but Reddit has apparently been either unhelpful or entirely unresponsive (or in the case of Apollo, actively hostile). With such a short timeline for the changes they've been making, if someone wanted to continue operating one of these third party apps and charge $5 or $8 or $10 a month, Reddit didn't give them enough time or help to make that happen.

 

Which really seems like a detriment to the platform. Hell, if I'm Reddit and I see that Apollo can charge $7 a month to XXX thousand customers purely for a better user experience, that's super valuable information to me! Maybe that number ends up being 1 thousand and now I know that it's really only the top 0.001% of users that care that much or maybe it ends up being a much larger number and now it's a measurable percent of revenue.

 

The other thing that they obviously were not taking advantage of, but was still of value here, was the innovation and experimentation of UIs that the 3rd party ecosystem brought to the table. The sad state of the first party app makes it clear they weren't leveraging this, but Reddit was one of a very small number of places that essentially had a massive, free A/B/X UI test going that Reddit itself didn't have to do. There's no evidence they did, but they absolutely should have been having regular meetings examining what these apps did better than their own and what they could steal from them.

 

 

I'll admit that most of my time on Reddit is worthless and I'd be better of using it elsewhere. However, there are a few communities that are valuable to me and don't have a clear alternative. I hope that a better platform for those communities arises before Reddit completely self destructs.

[GeneticBlueprint]

There are some easy and obvious solutions to this that will keep reddits user base happy and also allow Reddit to take their cut. Like charge a percentage of profit to the makers of these apps in exchange for an API access license. The free users of these apps could have a quota. Or hell maybe even don’t have a free tier. They could buy out some of these app makers and make their apps the official Reddit app. Then close down API Access. You know, things that don’t fuck over the people making their user experience a good one and not giving them any ammo to be able to rally an army against Reddit.

 

But the people running Reddit aren’t smart and never have been. They won’t be in the future, either. They built a decent website that lots of users could flock to and have spent their time ever since then coming up with one or two good ideas to make minimal amounts of money instead of building a good UX, which allowed some app maker to build a better app in his down time at work than their entire company could in years. The leadership there is absolutely incompetent.