Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Reddit Hates Their Users”.
Speaking of stifling innovation, did you see the Reddit API pricing conversation? Yes, can I help you with this? What the hell man, I do not even do this bro. Oh, I actually like the separation. Oh, it helps my brain all right. Well, I’m sorry! I broke your brain then, though, it’s fine not the first time yeah um Christian selig, the developer of the popular Apollo IOS app for Reddit, says that Reddit wants 12 000 per 50 million requests, and this is a quote here: Apollo made seven billion requests last month, Which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars a month. The average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, wow, which would cost two dollars and fifty cents a month.
That means even with only subscription users, the app would be unable to break even Imgur. Apparently, charges Apollo 166 dollars for the same number of requests. That is literally almost an order of no oh wow. Almost two orders of magnitude. Less Twitter, of course, kicked off the trend of expensive API access to social platforms, with its lowest tier, offering only 10 000 requests for a hundred dollars. Twitter has subsequently been abandoned as a data source by many academics, and the future of many long-term projects is unclear. Such as bottle, which assesses How likely an account is to be a bot and whose work was actually cited in Elon musk’s fight to not buy Twitter um yeah. This sucks people are asking who would pay that for reddit’s API, though I think that’s, I think.
That’S the point: the point is that these platforms are getting scraped by AI companies and not getting any of the money that is getting dumped into AI right now and they’re sitting there going well. If we kill a bunch of research projects and we kill a bunch of uh Community favorite third-party apps in the process – I guess that’s totally worth it, because we’ll definitely still be popular platforms. That will definitely still be valuable for these AI companies to scrape and we’re not going to throw the baby out with the bath water yeah.
I don’t I don’t know, what’s gon na happen in that regard uh, but it’s not surprising at all to me. It sucks um, there’s a there’s, a fair bit more information that I’ve been reading about this. That’S not in our notes Here, necessarily but um Christian.
The Apollo developer sort of broke down um from from reddit’s public financial statements. How much each of those calls has to cost them and basically they’re they’re so far beyond, just you know. Well, you know the Reddit app has ads that help, support us and we’re not getting that from your third party app, and we need to find a way to make this. You know sustainable like like they’re so far beyond, just we need to be sustainable. This is just a blatant cash grab yeah. According to his math someone in the Philippine chat, so the Google Maps API is less than 900 for 500.
000 calls for comparison, yeah, I I I said this with the Twitter one too. The goal here is not to make it affordable or for to make it make sense. The goal here is to crush third-party apps yeah like yeah, and given how unpopular the first party Reddit app is um. I got ta wonder what this means for Reddit like will.
No one’s safe, where’s, slash dot today, where’s dig. I do agree with that, but I feel, like we’ve been in a absolutely surprisingly long period of Internet stagnation now yeah, but it’s like that article. I sent you before the insidification of everything yeah, and I think the reason that everything is coming to a head right now is because we also went through a period of basically unrestricted money hoes flowing into technology into into web. However, many point O companies right yeah and so now that that now that that spigot is getting turned off and it’s all going into AI or it’s going into uh, you know finding new ways to make housing unaffordable for regular people, yeah good um.
I think we’re seeing these companies pivot to hey. We, we just need to like make money to please our shareholders right. We, we can’t just be in this. In this growth phase, we can’t be in a pleasing the the user phase anymore, and even if, if because I know some people are going to sniff at that and be like oh yeah, but no companies are going to pay this API fee.
That might be true. I don’t think they’re necessarily expecting to make money off of this, but I do think a significant effort is being put to hamper how much other people are able to make money off of your stuff yeah yeah, just just putting up walls like no. If, if someone is using Twitter, we want them using Twitter through our own means.
If someone is using Reddit, we want them using Reddit through our own means, Etc. Yeah yeah someone to full playing chat Ron John said my Reddit account is 15 years old, I’ll be leaving once they kill third-party apps uh. To be completely honest, that’ll probably be good for you.
Anyways, hey iOS, says the first party Reddit app, makes thousands of tracking calls to the web that my pie hole, went nuts blocking and blew the log files out to gigabytes um, so yeah. There are reasons there are reasons they want you using the first party, the first party tools and they’re, not always user-friendly reasons. Oh yeah they rarely are and just stop using like.
Is your life actually enriched by using Reddit, maybe but probably not as much? It can be read it’s a really good resource for like how do I fix this problem Reddit, I I don’t know if I’m just being cynical here, maybe I am or pessimistic or whatever, but I think most people Doom scroll instead of gather information. That way, I have found that a more effective Google search for a while has been the same, Google search that you would normally do and then you append Reddit on the end yeah that’s kind of unfortunate. It just shows Google going down the hole to be honest but um if you use it in that way, that’s kind of its own thing and if you use it in that way, you don’t really need the app either. If we’re being honest, oh I don’t use the app yeah, I I just whatever I I actually have just like a muscle memory uh like there’s no way to get rid of the notification. As far as I can tell on mobile, when I’m just on the web, because I I can’t find for what I do on Reddit, I can’t find any reason to use an App instead of just using my browser, I I can’t think of one all.
I want to do is read things from time to time and post even more occasionally um, and so it prompts me like every time I load the site, but it’s better in the app you want to use the app. No, no, not really. No, I I don’t. Even I don’t it bothered me for a long time and it definitely hasn’t gone away, but it doesn’t bother me anymore, because I just no yeah no yeah.
No, I think I’m good actually yeah someone in Philippine chat uh, my husband, absolutely Doom Scrolls. He doesn’t learn anything useful 99 of the time yeah. I think that is the standard approach to using Reddit, to be completely honest, like I think most people that use Reddit could benefit very significantly from using it way less um, but that isn’t saying that Reddit is useless. I find it very, very useful for like information, um yeah .