I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest internet forums in my language.<p>About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market.<p>Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and stealing ad revenue.<p>Then a couple years later, in 2017, the 3rd party client's devs launched its own forum reusing the client's name. It exploded in popularity and quickly took over as the most popular message board among the youth.<p>The old forum now has a sort of boomer or mentally ill stigma to it.<p>I hope to see Apollo go down this route.<p>Oh, and I think both forums in the story did not monetize as hard as reddit going to paid awards and memberships.<p>One more thought: Keep the Apollo UI or whatever thing the users are most familiar with. Most of them do not care if it is fediverse or open source or backed by web-scale k8s, they only want it to just work (tm) good enough to post things on it. Eat the lunch you prepared yourself.
I think it'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't think these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase.<p>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'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.<p>Or, perhaps, it'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.<p>Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it's unclear who's winning, I think it's pretty obvious that most of us are losing.
Everyone saying their pricing is absurd had better get ready for the new wave of API pricing.<p>Like every other industry, there's a growth period where things are new and prices are reasonable, and then there's the "squeeze" where bean counters come in, make charts that are likely bs, and explain how much easier it'd be if we charged 4x as much for half the customer base.<p>Twitter was one of the first to give access to cheap mass data, and now they're one of the first to charge through the nose for that. The move is going to be that if you're not enterprise level you're not getting this data anymore, and I doubt it stops with reddit.
The reality is that Apollo doesn't serve intrusive ads, and thus, every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue. Unfortunately, reddit is in that late stage monetization step where they need to prove they are capable of big revenue to justify a high IPO share price.<p>One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg. So far, reddit has been very careful raising the temperature so as to not scare the frog before it's dead.
I definitely see Reddit going the way of Yahoo!<p>A slow spiral into irrelevance because of lots of small bad decisions. At one point, Reddit felt like a lone champion of free speech and conversation in a sea of buzzfeeds.<p>I think they've moderated the website into ruin. They've put a lot of energy into silencing certain kinds of voices/opinions while promoting others. What's left is a very liberal echo chamber. All of the seemingly worst ideas from the left are stated as fact and voicing a dissenting opinion can quite literally get you banned.<p>r/antiwork and r/latestagecapitalism are the most egregious examples of this that I can think of. But the attitudes held there have leaked into 99% of the other subreddits to some degree.<p>For the record, I lean left. But it really sucks to no longer have a town hall where both sides of the aisle can discuss things as adults.<p>If there's one takeaway, I think it's some flavor of:
Don't overmoderate/show favoritism. You can't have yin without yang, or salt without pepper.<p>What made Reddit awesome was the discourse. Maybe they never realized that this was the secret sauce. That is, the clashing of ideas. And so they didn't cultivate that. Today, outside of a handful of niche/hobby subreddits, it no longer has anything close to educated discussions.
The web went in the wrong direction when we abandoned the initial concepts of user agents, which was that the browser has the ultimate choice of what to render and how. That concept, transferred to today's world of apps would simply mean that any client like Apollo is essentially a browser locked on Reddit's website, parsing HTML (which has the role of an API) and rendering the content in a native interface. As long as the user can access the HTML for free, they should be able to use any application (a browser or a special app) and render the content however they wish.<p>Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly, but with the recent resurgence of server-side rendering we may soon be able to get rendered HTML with one HTTP request. And then the only hurdles will be legal.
This feels like it's all priced for AI companies, TBH. This per-request pricing makes a LOT more sense if you assume that one particular piece of content will only be requested once in your company's history, saved on a server somewhere and used for training forever. You're not paying for a request being processed, you're not even paying to offset any advertising cost, you're essentially paying for the ability to use the requested piece of content forever. Maybe that's what Apollo should do, set up a huge cache layer and proxy all requests for the public data through there? I feel like the power law would apply here, so 80% of the requests would be for 20% of the content. Considering how popular the most popular subreddits are, I wouldn't be surprised if the balance was something like 99-to-1. Cache misses would still need to be fetched from the API itself, but that should drive costs down massively.<p>If the ToS allow this, the cache layer could even be shared across apps from different developers (developers supporting both iOS and Android might have an advantage here), making the costs even lower.
He should seriously consider starting his own Reddit alternative. He has a sea of enthusiastic supporters that potentially have enough critical mass to get it started. Unlike attempts to create Reddit alternatives in the past, this group isn't full of racists and others who were kicked off the site for engaging in reprehensible topics.
Reddit has posted their own announcements now<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...</a> and<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update_continued_access_to_our_api_for/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update...</a>
Disappointing. Sad to see such a wonderful app likely
meet its end. This is to be expected when you pin your existence on the good graces of a for-profit company.<p>Reddit wants IPO. Badly. They want to show potential investors that they're solvent. To this end, as Google did nearly two decades ago, they will monetize every inch of their user base and application -- that includes access to their data.<p>But Reddit is on thin ice -- as MySpace, Digg, del.icio.us all found out and as Twitter is finding out.<p>Why? Reddit doesn't have any asset of intrinsic value. Reddit don't have sought after intellectual property. Reddit doesn't produce any goods. Reddit's value is the community and the data they bring. When they antagonize the community, they are antagonizing what is keeping the lights on for them.
Someone in the thread where the OP linked directly to the Reddit post[0] suggested that perhaps Apollo would just create its own Reddit-like website under the name Apollo, republish it on the app store and then all the users would flock to the new social-media app instead of Reddit. The whole thing is really Reddit's fault: instead of offering to buy-out Apollo and make it official, they are relying on their ultra-shitty interface that nobody wants to use and hoping they can make an extra buck on the few third-party apps that will remain.<p>I'm not sure what they expect...we've all seen it happen with social-media, it starts out all open and free, and then investors get involved and soon enough people have already moved on to the next open and free alternative. 4chan is the only exception to this rule. But if 4chan somehow got transformed into a for-profit service, then things have already gotten very bad.<p>[0]<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083#36144800" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083#36144800</a>
Wow, that price is insane. To me, that'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.<p>Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term profits over user happiness and long-term growth.
Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit'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're doubling down on bad decisions and alienating their users. Pure hubris... they've forgotten their own history and why the Digg exodus happened.<p>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.
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. "this is /r/technology as it looked when we last crawled 15 minutes ago").<p>If Christian added a cache layer on his own server he could easily make the finances work.<p>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.
Here's a much more informative post [1] from Apollo developer Christian on Reddit last month, along with an older post [2] with some additional info.<p>[1] <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_few_calls_with_reddit_today_about_the/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...</a>
RIF is Fun is also going away because of this.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_dev_here_reddits_api_changes_will_likely_kill/?sort=confidence" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_de...</a><p>It's the only reason I use reddit and I will definitely not use the site anymore if this app goes away.<p>Probably a good thing...
> 50 million requests costs $12,000<p>I've never worked on a web platform like Reddit, nor with any per-request priced APIs. Reddit's charge of $0.00024 per request still looks like it is _significantly_ above what their own costs are.<p>Wasn't Reddit'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't understand how per-request API pricing actually accomplishes that. (I was vaguely anticipating Reddit's API pricing to have some sort of expensive "firehose" endpoint for OpenAI/Google/Meta/etc to pull from.)<p>It looks like they're instead going to squeeze out all third-party apps instead. I don't think this bodes well for Reddit's future.
> 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'd be in the red every month.<p>I just don't understand why developers underprice their apps so much. You're talking about an app that people are constantly raving about, and that people use for multiple hours per day. Charge $5/month, that's half the price of Netflix or Disney+.
Reddit is getting destroyed by tiktok for casual news/random videos etc.<p>I was a huge reddit user over the years, but now I only go there for a handful of very specific subreddits. That's really it's only use anymore. It's great for that, but they are probably seeing massive decline in usage.<p>And the moment they basically kill 3rd party reddit apps is the day I barely touch it again.
Many people are pointing out that they're going to lose a huge number of users over this, but that seems to be the point of the "cutting" phase of bulking and cutting.<p>(By bulking and cutting I mean eating a calorie surplus to gain muscle and fat followed by a calorie deficit to reduce fat while hanging on to as much muscle as possible.)<p>Reddit, Netflix, YouTube... they bulked their user base by subsidizing products. Now they're in the cutting phase and raising prices, restricting features, and/or increasing ads. They know they're going to end up with a significantly smaller user base, but if the cutting manages to maintain a large enough number of profitable users (muscle) while shedding unprofitable users (fat) then the business will end up in better shape.<p>Alternately one can keep calories stable and slowly increase muscle without gaining fat, but that's much slower and harder than a bulk/cut cycle, and most people and public companies don't have that kind of patience.
They say that the free tier API for users will be 100 queries per minute.<p>Why can't a third party app use each user's individual API queries for that user's app usage? Like you have the user OAuth with the app, and then the app uses that user's own user API access to query the API. 100 queries a minutes seems like it should be enough for most people.
Keep in mind that Reddit has said they're going to stop serving NSFW content via API too. So if you enjoy that stuff you won't get it in Apollo even if you pay them.
$12k for 50M requests, wow. It seems Reddit has taken the twitter way out.
If they just wanted to ban third party apps, they should have the balls to do it rather than pull all this stuff.
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.
What'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'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)?<p>$0.24 for 1000 full page loads wouldn'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 / day.
There are a large portion of moderators who will quit if they cannot use RedditIsFun because the official app is complete crap for moderators.<p>I really don'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/account or let users pay for their own usage or something. They're in full batshit MBA mode.
I'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.
I'm looking forward to this outcome. Reddit and Apollo both need to get paid, on a recurring basis, for their recurring services that require recurring maintenance and updates.<p>Reddit gets paid either through ad revenue displayed to non-paying visitors to the website, or through API calls for access to their dataset. Apps that enable user access via the API will need to pass along this charge to their users.<p>Apollo must become a paid-subscriptions-only app, as Reddit now charges for usage. This is fine. Apollo needs to constantly be updated to keep up with Reddit API changes over time <i>anyways</i>, so neither 'free' nor 'one-time purchase' are acceptable ways to provide a continuous living wage for keeping up with reddit API (and mobile OS) updates.<p>There's a third (paid) option, which is that Apollo sells the app to Brave or Firefox, where it's integrated <i>into</i> a paid "Reader Mode" subscription — because a team of developers will need recurring revenue for living wages in order to maintain the website rendering overlay and overcome Reddit's attempts to block or break it, and will need a team of lawyers to defend against the eventual lawsuit Reddit will bring against them (even if they'll lose due to the LinkedIn precedent from a few months ago — but, I am not their lawyer, this is not legal advice).<p>There are no good free outcomes that are not advertising-supported, and the API is incompatible with advertising, which is why so many people use it. I'm glad to see that Reddit has realized this, and I'm glad they are still offering the free ad-supported website rather than a paywall. I hope that Apollo is willing to charge me for their app, and isn't demoralized by their users complaining about this. We'll see.
I'm shocked that Reddit has done this mere weeks after Twitter destroyed their thriving ecosystem of bots and apps by introducing horrific pricing.
RIF (android) / apollo (iphone) are the only reasons reddit is usable on mobile since the official apps and new web view are absolutely terrible lol. If reddit kills the viewing experience, i can finally get off that site.<p>The reddit api is also essential because reddit offers so little functionality. I have used my own bots before to search my own comments and delete my own content en masse.
I don'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/free to users is a non starter.<p>Reddit has failed to adequately monetize their userbase, they've run into the same "politics and porn" issue that every social media platform has, and they've raised way, way too much money.<p>The worst part? I couldn'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.
I don'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's a massive task, but if the only other option is shut the company down, it might be worth exploring. They'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).
Something like this at first feels like bad news, but may later turn out to be good. If something hooks me off Reddit and I use my time better, it is a net positive, for me. Unfortunately, Reddit has good parts to which I don't know alternatives. For example, right now I am studying for a certification and there is a subreddit for that. I recently bought an e-bike and there was a subreddit for that. It is useful.
Third party Reddit apps should just start letting users bring their own API credentials as each user gets access to a free tier of API access of 100 queries a minute which is plenty.
I blocked the reddit.com domain from all of my devices a few weeks ago, because until recently I didn't feel like I could keep my finger on the pulse of "The Internet" without Reddit.<p>That's no longer the case. Google's "For You" gets me my niche subject-specific content, Google News/Memeorandum (and its sibling sites)/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.<p>I don't think any one company came for Reddit on their own, but what they'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's all you're going to offer, you're not going to be able to justify that $10-$15bn (probably lower now) valuation to investors.
I'm surprised they didn't take the approach of "API access for paid accounts only, and with limits to restrict LLM scraping". If they'd added that to Premium, plus a lower-tier "API" pricing at $1-2/month they'd likely have cleaned up.<p>I'm curious what percentage of Reddit Premium subscribers are also users of third-party apps - seems to me that if you're a power user you're more likely to be in both camps. Also moderators - apparently lots of mods do so through the apps instead of the website, so there may be plenty of subs that have issues as well.
Has anyone <i>stopped</i> using old.reddit.com that uses it and LIKEs using new reddit? I don't know what it is but when I get popped over to new reddit it's absolutely jarring.<p>It looks ridiculous on my 49" monitor because it's middle aligned and horribly padded horizontally.<p>Also it doesn't seem to be doing it right now, or maybe it only does it on mobile but that thing where they only show you a couple of comments then have a DIFFERENT post/comment section right under it drives me crazy.<p>Maybe I'm just a luddite unwilling to learn new things.
My understanding is that LLMs use Reddit comments as training data. These LLMs are often well funded and Reddit is using this to their advantage. Suddenly, a decade or so of this kind of data has turned to gold and damned if a company soon to travel down an IPO pathway is passing this cash cow up.
My long time reddit account got permabanned because I argued with the mod of a popular subreddit (I disagreed with him about the localization of a Japanese game, really trivial stuff). It was a veteran, seasoned account with lots of awards, karma, and "reddit coins" ($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 "ban evasion". Poof.<p>I tried to appeal but when you'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 "reviewed my appeal" and "will not be lifting the permaban".<p>I'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's "platform integrity" team some credit, merely using a VPN isn't sufficient. I just wish they'd treat customers who'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're totally above providing any level of customer support. Reddit isn't alone here. I can't even get refunded by my CC company because the coins were purchased over 6 months ago.<p>At least I still have HN.
Without a doubt, this is another step in Reddit's demise. It will really go into freefall when they go public later this year, after which I'm certain you'll start seeing more intrusive monetization. The window just opened for someone to develop the replacement. It will rip itself apart over the next few years and all 52 million users will be looking for a new home.<p>Reddit's product is authenticity. Monetization is the antithesis of authenticity. The two cannot coexist, as they're about to find out.
If the primary complaint from Reddit is that they are losing revenue (no ad impressions/lack of user data and metrics gathering) why don't they just keep the API free/affordable but require developers to show ads and send usage metrics back to reddit?<p>I feel like it's incredibly short sighted for these companies to limit their APIs.
Can someone give me a couple reasons why it does not make sense to buy Apollo out, and make it the default iOS app?<p>It is currently maintained by one excellent developer, is featured by the Apple App Store for design... what's the downside?
This means the end of a lot of my reddit use. Sure, I'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've never seen one.)
These prices are being set by an industry-wide bottleneck around online human verification. The cost just shot up because of LLMs.<p>This is only a temporary reprieve for Reddit, Twitter, et.al. The LLMs are going to start simulating user agents and work around this. Well-intentioned alternative user agents like Apollo are collateral damage.<p>The root fix is a solution to online human verification. All these web products are just trying to hang a "Humans Only" sign on the door.
A party is the people experiencing it. The free red plastic cups of beer and ranch dip and chips are ancillary.<p>Redditors are now perking their ears for the next person to yell "next party at my house!"
I think the devs of Apollo, RIF and the other major 3rd party clients should spin up an alternative reddit backend. They can let their users chose whether they want to connect to reddit proper (and purchase API tokens) or to the new custom one.<p>I imagine that with the userbase these apps have they could succeed and perhaps do some less greedy/intrusive monetization.
I think it has all to do with AI accessing sites for "training", you can'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.
I like reddit, I really do. So it's sad to see them taking a page out of the twitter playbook and are taking active measures to destroy their thriving ecosystem.<p>The official reddit app is an absolute nightmare and essentially unusable. Their "new" website also completely sucks and is even worse on mobile than it is on desktop. If this actually gets implemented as is, I'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.
I don’t see the issue. Apollo should charge a subscription fee that equals (cost of “reasonable API access + desired profit)/.70 and cap the number of request per user so it remains profitable.<p>Users should understand and I would gladly pay for Apollo per month.
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 "not based in reality" was expecting it to go on as long as it did.
Consuming an API is a tough business. Between Twitter arbitrarily blocking API access, and now both Twitter and Reddit now charging obscene rates. It's a death sentence for some really useful projects and reduces the total value of the ecosystem.
Losing my free/ad-free client got me to delete a Twitter account (and habit) I'd had for 12 years, didn't really want anymore, but would likely not have ditched proactively.<p>If the same thing happens with Reddit I'll be ecstatic.
That API pricing, for what is mostly static content, is just insane. I've created pricing models for write heavy APIs that come out at a fraction of that, while still maintaining a margin. If that's a genuinely "fair" price then Reddit have some serious technical debt. It feels like this is intentionally overpriced to discourage any serious use.
$2.50 / month / user does not seem <i>that</i> insane when it'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 / user / year which I think most users would happily pay for for a third party app.
Why have no platforms launched an ad supported API?<p>I realise that it's ripe for mis-use as clients could always just not display ads, and analytics would be hard as even if the client isn't actively malicious, it may fail to display an ad that it records as visible which is effectively ad-fraud.<p>Nevertheless I feel like there are unexplored options here, including SDKs rather than web APIs, select partnerships, and maybe more. I would imagine if it could be done it would work well for Twitter, Reddit, and potentially even Facebook and Instagram.<p>I guess it probably comes down to it being a hard problem with little perceived benefit over owning the customer interface, but the backlash to these things always feels significant (in my bubble at least), and I'd be surprised if these companies didn't feel it was an unqualified positive change.
Question, is there a reddit data archive we can legally download before this API pricing goes in effect? I really wouldn't wanna lose all the data in reddit when inevitable reddit becomes obscure unknown internet history. It has <i>tons</i> of (imho) extremely important information.
> So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. ... With the proposed API pricing, the average user in Apollo would cost $2.50, which is is 20x higher than a generous estimate of what each users brings Reddit in revenue.<p>This is 20x higher than what each user <i>currently</i> brings Reddit in revenue, but I'm betting that Reddit is going to be cranking up the monetization hard in the next few months.<p>Reddit Premium is currently $5.99/mo, so the bean counters probably see $2.50/mo for API access for a competing app as long overdue rent. I'd be very surprised if we didn't also see a big push to drive up the ad revenue on free accounts (more pushes to get on the app, ad-blocker-blockers, etc.)
All part of the process of TVifying the internet. It is considered dangerous for people to be able to communicate, to speak their minds about products and politicians, and the power of commercial interests combined with government is speeding this degradation along.
I have seen a lot of "wow, Reddit is over" comments here and on reddit. There will absolutely not be any meaningful exodus from Reddit. Unfortunately, we as a society are pretty bad at organizing and of course prone to overestimating outrage.<p>In any event, this is clearly absurd pricing. Its tough to tell if this is deliberate to simply kill appollo and cater to a usecase that makes them some money at the same time, or simply a dumb idea.<p>Finally, I really don't want to sound like a shill for big companies like OpenAI/Google etc, but where do companies like Quora and Reddit get off selling their APIs at big numbers? Like screen scraping is legal and this data was contributed directly by users. In reddits case, literally the entire idea, community, subreddit and moderation are all handled by unpaid users. I get that capitalism exists, but its kind of fucking bullshit they think they can sell this. Like everything, if the price is out of whack, I hope people spin up scrapers and build their own API
Reddit Permabanned me (13 year old 450k karma account) after I went after crypto scammers, calling out the scam with details etc. I got tons of coins or whatever gifted to me and even more thanks and way to go from users. Evidently reddit considered it harassment (of the plain as day scammers) and won't budge after an appeal. So, f reddit.
Yeah, I'm out.<p>I'm not using Reddit on its own app nor the browser.<p>The app is huge and clunky.<p>The browser is turtle slow.<p>Neither gives me the granularity that Apollo gives me. The swipe controls are slick and so are the filters.<p>If I can't consume it with Apollo then it ain't worth it to me. And I already paid for the app. I refuse to pay more for something that is not a necessity.<p>Apollo would have to become a subscription to be sustainable and in a time where everybody wants to make a subscription out of everything I, on the other hand, am in a shut down everything that is not essential mode.<p>This is not essential. Neither is Netflix. Neither is Disney Plus. I'm looking for more to cut. And while, i can currently afford all this, that might not always be the case and I'm sick of subscriptions that just are just leeching out of our $$$ our bank accounts month to month and that eventually add up.<p>Also, I've been considering cutting back on toxic social media and maybe this is just the right push I need.<p>Oh well. Had a good run.<p>*shrugs*
Building your business on the back of somebody else's API is always gonna be a risky endeavor. Luckily, Apollo is a great client with loyal users, so hopefully Christian can spin off his own backend forum and build from there. Reddit's been making some dubious moves (crypto avatar-things, hostile dark patterns steering mobile web users to their app, more ads, etc) that I wouldn't be surprised if more and more users went looking for an alternative with a similar flavor.
I guess these clients just need to scrape the websites and make post request via website with fake user agents etc.<p>It's a lot of work but for a small fraction of 20m a year you can hire a team who only work on that.<p>Didn't Digg primarily die from a redesign? Why has the web become so forgiving these days? People don't seem to give a shit anymore. "Oh OK, I'll use the official reddit app filled with ads, OK I will watch your 30 second pre-roll. OK I will give you may data for free". /s
Someone else in this thread mentioned the "boiling frog" effect. Personally, I'll keep using Reddit until they remove support for old.reddit.com. Then this frog is out of the pot!
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?
Reddit has a long history of making truly brain-dead decisions and following them up with something slightly more reasonable. I can only hope this is another case.
Just a reminder that power delete suite exists, but will probably be killed off eventually as well: <a href="https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite">https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite</a><p>This is a tool to purge your reddit comments. It first edits them to something else, then deletes them. Reddit admins have claimed that this is a <i>true</i> delete, as opposed to setting a delete flag.
Every few years we rediscover centralization even if they start off as open-source community driven yada yada and the eventually lead to walled gardens.<p>I love reddit but recently they are starting to make it harder to use their services. Eventually its going to turn in to a cesspool just like facebook. Something new is gonna come open to all we promise its always free and then repeat.
Well, looks like this is the end of any social media use for me. Reddit was already hanging by a thread for me. Not being able to use Apollo for this will be the last nail in the coffin.
I've been very happy with Ivory:<p><a href="https://tapbots.com/ivory/" rel="nofollow">https://tapbots.com/ivory/</a><p>Every few months I kick a couple bucks to my homeserver (which is currently running a pretty large surplus or I'd do more) and that's the end of it.
Reddits mobile app, and website are one of the worst UX experiences I'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.
Im genuinely curious, how much value should reddit be extracting per user via third-party-clients for their services given they can't serve them ads and what not themselves?<p>Facebook's ARPU is $58.77 in the US/Canada so $5/month. According to them, Apollo's Pro clients would earn reddit $2.50/month. Is the right number $1? I imagine that would still kill Apollo.<p>It seems like the problem more generally is that third-party clients cannot extract the same value from users that first-party clients can.<p>Has anyone tried to solve this differently? What if Reddit gave you a libAds to add in your application where you build and control the other 90% of the interface and do a profit sharing system with them.
The reddit UI has gotten so hostile that I stopped using reddit a few years ago. Third party apps are nice and all, but I think a site that's so hostile to its users isn't worth me wasting my time on. I have several friends who are active reddit users but exclusively use third party apps, if those apps stop working I'm confident they'll just stop using reddit all together too.<p>I remember when Digg.com launched v4 and everyone hated it so much that they planned a "quit Digg day" and then collectively moved to Reddit. Maybe some day reddit users will do the same thing and move to something else.
For individual users (not voracious LLM and data mining and surveillance), is there any reason an app can't just be a "specialized Web browser", scraping subreddit memberships/posts/comments just-in-time, as a user browses interactively, with that access pattern and pacing?<p>Or a plugin of improvements for a general-purpose Web browser?<p>(It could even preserve ads.)<p>The reason for such an app would be that a lot of people like parts of Reddit community content, but much fewer people like many of the UI attempts that Reddit has made of the years (for desktop, mobile Web, and apps).
This is directly related to going public and is completely predictable what will happen next.<p>Investors want to get paid for the last 15 years of waiting… and they want as big of a paycheck as possible and nothing matters but that. All the free labor mods did? I’m sure the board and investors all agreed that moderator labor can’t legally demand anything, meaning they don’t matter.<p>So, I expect Reddit, one of the best forums on the internet, will deteriorate after all the trust gets squeezed out via increasingly intrusive ads shutting down of the (old.) subdomain, an increase in user profiling and user acquisition.<p>Sad but it was good while it lasted
We had a great "forum" solution back in the day - Usenet.<p>You picked the server you joined but the benefit of this over something like Lemmy is that you don't get the split community/discoverability issues that impact the average user as everyone was reading and posting to the same newsgroups but from their chosen NNTP server.<p>Let's have something like NNTP implemented in ActivityPub (is this possible? I'm not familiar enough...) where the news servers are decentralised and users pick whatever one they want but the newsgroups themselves are the same across all the servers.
Apollo is such a quality app that I had to delete it because it was so addicting.<p>Good riddance to Reddit. The only sad part is there is no clear successor ready to take its place for the minority of subreddits that host real communities and serve as a useful distribution point for information.<p>Personally I think the developers of the top Reddit apps should get together and develop their own backend that clones the Reddit API endpoints but hosts the content on federated instances. Just cut out Reddit corporate - what value are they providing when the bulk of content creators are using third party apps to browse and create content?
Ah yes, the site that refers to its users as "Daily Active Shitheads," and promotes vigilante armchair detectives to ignore the FBI and accuse random innocent civilians of being world class terrorists.
APIs should not be revenue generators! I don'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's just not going to work out well. Particularly galling since they're effectively charging to access all this content that users generated for free.<p>The other explanation is these charges are intended to kill third party uses of the API. I'm pretty sure that's what is mostly motivating Twitter (down to the weed joke price).
This is where Apollo builds their own reddit clone, implements reddit's API, and starts their own competing social network. Use the ~$5/month to pay for server costs, or run an ad supported variant.
I primarily use the regular web interface. That's because I barely use Reddit anymore after using it a ton before. More and more, I found that things that shouldn't be nsfw were marked so, the interesting people have mostly already left, and the site optimizes for "engagement" like everything else, meaning it's full of catchy junk.<p>I joke that if this guy (pointing at myself) is doing your thing, it's probably jumped the shark. What does it mean when this guy has already grown tired of your platform?
Probably a dumb question, but wouldn't Reddit be very easy to scrape instead of using an API at these prices? I assume the various LLMs' datasets are based on web scraping similar to Google for content that doesn't have a public API.<p>Also, it seems to me that Reddit could gain some goodwill here by supporting the flagship competing client apps with a lower rate while still charging a higher price for those trying to leverage its data for ML, similar to how Google provides much of the funding for Mozilla despite being a competing browser.
I'll be using Teddit until they decide to cut RSS feeds too and then maybe I'll be able to cut out this black hole from my life. It's eaten so many hours of my life...
Sites should publish their data with Signed Http Exchange (sxg) data. So other sites can share the raw data among themselves freely.<p>This current cruel control over all user data is amoral. It has no effect on bad people, & only hurts those trying to do right & to improve situations.<p>If sites want to make money, it should be for doing more than being the site of record for user content. SXG is a viable path forward to let the internet be authentically better connected.
Unsurprising as that was inevitable and Reddit needs to make money. Unless you can afford the high prices, don't build your whole business solely on someone else's API. Twitter made that clear and now so did Reddit.<p>Like I said before in [0]<p><i>"Either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase a high price for it."</i><p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36087219" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36087219</a>
Please Reddit, just let us use a web browser to access your web site.<p>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.
I wonder if the official smartphone app uses the same API as the one exposed and documented for third-party apps. It's my understanding that it does not because the unofficial app I use (reddit is fun) lacks some features, so just borrowing the official app's key and putting it in RiF is out, but surely it would be possible to adapt a FOSS app like Slide to quack like the Blessed Official App and let the arms race begin, no?
Can’t really say I would continue to use and post on reddit without Apollo. Their own mobile experience is absolutely garbage, even when paying for premium.
Seems to me like they priced the API to cash in on the LLM training data gold rush, and as a side-effect it makes third-party user apps infeasible. Oops.
I have no idea what the actual cost incurred by Reddit is, but they're asking for $0.24 for 1,000 API calls. (basically fetching content)<p>Does anyone have a ballpark?
Transparent attempt at shutting down clients that don’t show their ads. When Apollo stops working, I stop using Reddit. Their official app is garbage. Their website is garbage. Good riddance probably, I spend way too much time on it anyway. I even use the iOS Apollo app on my Mac because I like it so much, even if the experience isn’t perfect it’s still loads better than the official one.
I don't understand the outrage at all. So he is saying that the average user will cost him $2.50 in API fees/month. Since Apollo users are probably significantly more active than the average reddit user I can only assume that the same user is worth significantly in add revenue per month to Reddit. Apollo could easily be a $5/month app as a premium experience and make money.
Hopefully this accelerates the death of reddit ... I think once they nuke the Google SEO fu they have on questions (they'll screw it up, like Quora did), get rid of NSFW content and kill old.reddit, they're done. That should reduce traffic by a good chunk, and less eyes on their site, less ad money. Ironic, because they think these changes will increase ad money.
This is basically a long con. The free and open access to an API was a selling point for reddit and they benefited greatly from it -- especially in the early days of the smart phone revolution before they had an official mobile client. The presence of many, high quality third party reddit mobile applications helped them ward off would be mobile first competitors.
How can companies not be liable for data that they are now “selling access to”?<p>I mean I could never get my head around how they could circumvent liabilities by simply saying oh this is user generated content but still copyright it and now sell it? Seems like the greatest scam social networks have been able to pull off.<p>Also if this data is public, what stops people from scraping it?
I think companies don't understand that APIs are not only a way to make money, but a way as well to control bot and scrapper. If Reddit APIs are too pricey, some people will run crazy expensive GET on entire pages to retrieve the content dynamically, and this will cost them more money than by letting clients use well designed APIs.
Alternatively (and I know many folks won't like this idea), Reddit can offer to buy out Apollo and the other 2-3 top iOS and Android apps with a generous Discounted Cash Flow market value; These Apps have put a lot of effort in development over the years and they have helped make Reddit better and more accessible.
Does anyone know if other Apps (like BaconReader for Android) have similar volumes and so have similar pricing issues ? There are a good number of options on Android for reddit clients - though I would assume the user base is more fragmented across multiple clients and would not have the volumes of Apollo..
Another subscription. Great. The reddit client I use is brilliant (relay for reddit pro), not sure what they're doing about this but I'm not using the official client and I only use reddit on my phone. I'm really sick of subscriptions though, I'd rather just pay up front and not have another subscription
If Reddit wants to <i>Digg</i> itself, so be it. If I can't use my favorite 3rd party app my usage will drop like a rock. Its current usefulness probably means my usage won't disappear completely like twitter but it will be severely reduced. I can't imagine I'm the only reddit user who feels this way.
Sites like reddit and discord will have trouble surviving eventually I think. The communities that rely on it may as well just host their own alternative at this point. It will allow them to have more control. However, I do admit that maybe doing such a thing is a bit much for many non technical communities.
Reddit is a sexist, racist, free speech bait & switching website owned by Newhouse family: <a href="https://www.tharawat-magazine.com/fbl/newhouse-family/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tharawat-magazine.com/fbl/newhouse-family/</a><p>The sooner it's gone, the better.
Seems like a straight attempt to kill 3rd party apps. Just like their ever more aggressive attempts to force browser users to use their app.<p>Ever since new reddit it's all be user hostile steaming garbage. But they have the user base and their content so the value and network effects are there even with shit UX.
It's high time for Reddit to be buried. With the clout it already has, Apollo could probably start its own social media platform.<p>Reddit, like Twitter, does not seem to understand what Facebook and Instagram already know: For many people, <i>the APP -IS- the platform.</i>
What prevents people (and Apollo) from simply using the same open APIs the the official reddit site/app?<p>The requests would be all made from a client, so how would they even know it's not their client? Is it illegal? Because I can make any reddit request with a curl, no?<p>Please educate me.
Off to Teddit or?<p><a href="https://teddit.net/about" rel="nofollow">https://teddit.net/about</a><p>Or self host your own.
<a href="https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit" rel="nofollow">https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit</a>
An average Apollo user is causing 344 API requests per day? That's a lot! I wonder if Apollo should prioritise reducing that number. I'd bet anything there is a lot of low hanging fruit to be had with aggressive caching and general tidying up.
Lots of 3rd party Reddit apps are going down as well. RIF is a great android app for example. It is Reddit for me and I'm not going to install the official app. I'll go away rather than be stuffed in their Clockwork Orange media chair.
I saw the original thread on Reddit and I don’t get what the problem is really.<p>Make Apollo a paid-only app. Change the price for Apollo to $10 per month. That’s still a drop in the bucket for anyone that cares enough to really want Apollo in the first place.
I am the sole developer of <a href="https://rdddeck.com;" rel="nofollow">https://rdddeck.com;</a> I have not receive any mails; where can I find more information regarding what will be rate-limited starting July 1st?
I blocked reddit for a week. I was much more productive and I'm having a hard time thinking of what I missed out on. I told myself it was full of interesting discussions but I basically forgot all of it the second I had closed the tab.
Maybe it’s just because I don’t know the Reddit API, but doesn’t caching semi-solve the problem? At Applo’s scale at least?<p>I HAVE to assume there is quite a bit of overlap in Apollo’s mentioned 7 billion Reddit api requests last month…
He should work together and join up with all the other alternative reddit apps and create their own backend api that they all pay for pro rata according to how much data they use.
It'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.
Unless Reddit rectifies, that sounds like the end of Apollo. I feel like old.reddit.com is next in the chopping board. Perhaps we need to go back to the browser and reskin the heck out of Reddit.
He will get a better deal. If he has to shut down, he can turn Apollo into a lemmy.ml client and migrate a huge part of his 500,000 power users. Reddit cannot risk that lemmy.ml becomes mainstream.
Stupid question, but: Why do client apps need to use a separate API? Is it due to some terms and conditions? Why would an Android Reddit app need any difference calls than, say, a web browser?
have you seen the latest Reddit app for iOS/macOS and its data privacy: there is zero privacy.<p>This is why I am sticking with the web-based Old Reddit.<p>Any further strangulation and it's "hasta la vista, Reddit".
Did it actually result in a bill, or is that just a click-baity title?<p>> Selig estimates it would cost $20 million a year to keep Apollo running.<p>No, not a bill.<p>Arstechnica is getting worse every year with these type of titles.
Someone should invest in Apollo, build a reddit clone and just let the app run on that. Screw the “actual” reddit.<p>The Apollo app has a huge install base anyway. Problem is only, how long will this all take?
Fuck you, Reddit. A guy develops an app way better than your dogshit for FREE and now you want to charge him for API calls? Frankly you should be paying him, and it should be a lot of money!
If Christian, the Apollo dev, started his own community I’d move to it and stop using Reddit in an instant. Even if it’s just me there talking to sock puppet accounts.
It worked great for Twitter, I’m sure it will be an incredible success for Reddit as well. </sarcasm><p>Hopefully one more nudge towards decentralized services and open standards.
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.<p>Are they gonna try to bill google chrome, too?
I deleted the Twitter app a while ago, and if my only way to access Reddit is with their official app... I guess I'll be a little more productive this year.
Over 90% of my reddit usage is through Apollo. Sounds like I’ll have to find another way to kill a few minutes while I am eating lunch or waiting on a bus.
I won't be renewing my Reddit Premium. Clueless management doing what they do best.<p>Edit: just to put my money with my mouth is, Reddit Premium sub cancelled.
It'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.<p>There's legal precedent already in Europe that this is fine by GDPR rules, as long as the price of the subscription is "reasonable".<p>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.<p>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.<p>In any case, a pet theory, but there's been a strange convergence by these big companies and the way they're changing their business models.
Late to the party and this may get buried, but wanted to add a contextual POV. I'm an Apollo user, and I am also someone who was Reddit's earliest enterprise advertisers. As in, the campaigns I've green lit are perhaps still in their advertising media decks as case studies.<p>Reddit for the past few years have been changing the UX to benefit their revenue streams. Visit any reddit thread on a mobile browser, and get a nag to download the official app. Their app is less likely to be blocked by ad blockers, has advertising SDKs, and can link advertising parameters.<p>I believe certain threads need you to login. It is also in their best interest to find opportunities for you to login to again link browse behavior. Forgot to mention, the app also allows a logged in state to persist easier than browser.<p>TL;DR All of Reddit's UX decisions have been to grow their revenue stream.<p>Do they have the right to do so? Of course. Does it suck for this audience in particular, probably. In my opinion, they will lose their early adopters and perhaps some power users. Is that a risk they are taking? Clearly.
I stopped using Reddit last week when they shadowbanned me for, I assume because you cannot know for sure, saying something related to gun violence in America and my local area in a political subreddit. I only ever commented about sim-racing at any other point in that account's life, and so perhaps it was shadowbanned for posting my own YouTube videos that were not monitized and had like a dozen views? I don't know, and I don't care, my mental health has never been better than the past week!<p>tl;dr: I quit Reddit because I didn't want to make yet another account, and my life is better for it.<p>Edit: Also, I've been trying not to come into HN political and pop-culture threads too much, but am failing at that. Maybe today is the day I start just hitting the technical threads!
on the bright side, it looks like it will be cheaper to make your own platform<p>there's plenty of areas you can improve upon functionally for a modern forum
Link to some discussion without context. Apparently this is about Apollo which is some alternative Reddit app.<p><a href="https://apolloapp.io/" rel="nofollow">https://apolloapp.io/</a>
A good reminder that Reddit is not actually usenet, or even the individual forum sites that it ultimately killed off. It's a massive surveillance capitalism corporation that ultimately only serves its owners.
I got nervous that the API changes would be the end of Apollo, and thus largely the end of my Reddit use. So, I made a way to export all of my post and comment data into a searchable SQLite archive:<p><a href="https://github.com/xavdid/reddit-user-to-sqlite/">https://github.com/xavdid/reddit-user-to-sqlite/</a><p>It can pull your recent activity from the API, but also has support for pulling data from a GDPR archive (a feature I'm very proud of).
Reading the comments in their announcement thread[0] reminds me of the "I'm leaving to Canada" from the Trump era. I'm sure they did the math and I'm sure Reddit will be just fine.<p>[0] <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...</a>
What a sad sad sad state of the internet. The Cluetrain Manifesto/Intertwingularity ideals of a connected world are being hosed by shitty bullshit greedy capitalism. Possibility is closing up shop & ending. Sad days.
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.
I found Apollo to be fairly shady. I paid for the app and they “lost” my account or something so suddenly I could no longer use the pro features. Pretty lame, no amount of support could help, so I used the app for a while as a free user because I didn’t want to pay twice. One day they pushed like 50 modals over the course of a day to “upgrade to pro” and eventually moved to a monthly subscription service, which suddenly made me realize why they “couldn’t find” my previous account.<p>Love the features, but feels shady to me still. The API pricing thing does suck, but at this point I’m not willing to throw any money at them.
Reddit is a sexist, racist, free speech bait & switching website owned by the second richest family on the planet.<p>The sooner it's gone, the better.
Is it so unreasonable to charge 12k for 50mln requests? I don't know.<p>Is it so unreasonable to charge 20m/year to a super popular iOS app? I don't know.<p>Does apollo make money from this? Do they take advertisement income?
But I imagine, if you are the most popular app, on the most popular mobile platform, of a very popular site like Reddit, there has to be a lot of money floating around no? They definitely have income, and definitely have expenses (development isn't free). Curious to actually see the balance of these.<p>But if reddit want people to use their own app, I don't see why they would support Apollo for free. I also don't know that the actual cost towards reddit would be. A reasonable price is probably somehwere between 0 and 12k.