Thousands of subreddits are still dark.
So they designed an API that they didn’t intend thirdparties to use at all? And documented it publicly without the intention of any devs reading the docs? Right.
What annoys me the most is that they would rather force users to see their ads and interract with their new and useless engagement features than just take payment directly from us, the users, for accessing the API. I’ll gladly pay for a premium++ ultra gold plus reddit subscription to continue using Sync. I don’t get why they would rather charge the 3rd party devs that literally gives them more users.
And the api didn’t expose ads. It’s not like the apps chose not to display them. It wasn’t even an option.
What should bother you is not the particularities of the pricing. It’s the overtly dirty dealing. Even the Apollo dev said he might have been able to make the pricing work, but certainly not in just 30 days. Admins said there would be time – months of it – and only gave 30 days. They said pricing would be based on reality, but no sensible analysis indicates that it is. Admins told the users they were worthless and literally defamed devs that were trying to work with them.
There were tons of ways they could’ve gotten ads in front of people. This wasn’t about ads. This wasn’t about some particular price point. This is about getting users onto their official app or website, presumably to mine data and control conversations.
The infinite free VC ran out when interest rates went up. Suddenly, real financial pressures they had plenty of time to address and never bothered worrying about were at the door. So they revved up the enshitification engine and got to the hard work of destroying the only source of value the site had.
If they came out tomorrow and declared they would keep the API free and that Spez was fired, it oughtn’t change how you feel. It’s time to be off that site.
It seems all reddit pricing is made to keep you away from anything that would give you control over what you see. The price of Reddit premium is about as realistic as the price they set for the API. Reddit seems to make at most 1$/year in advertising per user, so to block ads it’s 40$/year O_o… And they’ll still track & manipulate you in all kinds of other ways…
Despite what advertising executives believe, the majority of us would gladly pay if it meant not having to deal with ads. I hate ads so much.
CEOs are all manipulative sociopaths.
So after saying for weeks, if not months, that the new pricing wasn’t designed to kill third-party apps, he’s now saying the exact opposite? And thus admitting that Reddit lied to its community for the whole?
Please, can someone give to this dude any PR training? Even the bare minimum would be an improvement at this point.
He’s so bad at this that I can’t help but believe he’s actually trying to kill Reddit.
I worked for Microsoft for many years and the fact is many companies’ marketing and PR departments think their customers are morons. Or perhaps it’s that they think their customers don’t mind being treated like morons.
The shit they would send flowing down the pipeline that we were supposed to say to our customers just blew me away. “You know our customers aren’t STUPID right? I can’t talk to them like they’re stupid or they’ll escort me off premises.”
I think he just doesn’t care about any backlash at this point.
At this point, he needs “stfu training”.
By the looks of it, it was never designed to support first party apps either.
Oof
new.reddit is horrendous.
Lack of CSS support, performance issues, and ugly mess of a gigantic proportion by the Snoo Platform, Inc.
It was never designed to support third-party apps.
My brother in Christ… you bought a third party app that used the API
Wait… they bought a third party app and rechristened it the official Reddit app?
Isn’t the entire purpose of an API to provide access to other developers in the first place? It seems like he’s happy others did creative work for him and now he wants to take it and kick the ladder away.
It is literally the only reason to make an API public
Doesn’t he realise the reddit app was a 3rd party app originally that they have made into a shit show?
I asked him if he felt that Apollo, rif for Reddit, and Sync, which all plan to shut down as a result of the pricing changes, don’t add value to Reddit. “Not as much as they take,” he says. “No way. They need to pay for this."
I don’t think anyone has ever said they want the API to remain free, they just want a fairer price model and/or more time to allow existing year-long contracts to be valid. Why the sudden urgency to push out this stupidly high pricing model? The only time-critical event I can think of is Spez’s precious IPO, and he’s doing a great job at showing potential investors that everything’s under control
/s ( <– are we allowed to use that here?)
The sarcasm tag has been a thing for a long time, used in various forums before reddit was a thing.
Then what does it have a publicly accessible API for?
Says the company who bought alien blue.
3rd party apps came before the official app - in fact didn’t the official app start out as a 3rd-party app before it was acquired by Reddit?
Yup, Alien Blue was acquired by the Snoo Platform, Inc. and swiftly killed.
But, hey they shifted the hue of the AB logo from blue to orange and yet the official app is a dogshit compared to the AB.
Style and substance only, not proper function.
Yup, they bought it just to scrap it and write whatever the hell the current app is.
If it wasn’t for old Reddit and RES I’d be off there today or if platforms like this one get a good user base of quality people. This Fediverse thing is really neat but I think most people will not want to invest the time to learn how to use it. Today is my first day here and I still have a lot of questions for example I know that Mastadon is part of the Fediverse. Does that mean I can use that service due to having a Kbin account or do I have to sign up with one of their servers?
I have the same question. I have seen toots on Mastodon that make it sound like you can integrate them, but I have not found a way how. I’m banking on apps that are being developed to address this and make it clear and obvious.
"While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that; more than 80 percent of the top 5,000 communities by daily active users are now open, according to a fact sheet shared by the company on Thursday. In the fact sheet, Reddit writes that there are more than 100,000 “active communities,” that the company sees 57 million “daily active uniques,” and that there are more than 50,000 daily active moderators. "
This is why we need it to be indefinite.
Spez is a one-trick-pony. He can only power through protests by ignoring them and brushing them off. Until now it kinda worked, until it doesn’t.
The official API access rules, still online, use an android reddit app as an example for how to select a user agent: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/wiki/API#rules
It’s hard to argue this wasn’t an intended use-case…
If Reddit can handle being data mined by OpenAI, I’m sure it can handle a few dozen apps.
The more I read from him, the firmer one thought is planted in my brain….
Fuck spez.
Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
So he’ll be a leader, not a slave and as a leader, not a slave, will probably have slaves…
