Yeah OpenAI just demonstrated how effective this is.

Spotify demonstrates it too because you need premium to use things like mopidy.

Its not about the revenue, its about forcing everyone to get the same official experience.

Says who? They are only pushing the "official experience" to make up for lost ad revenue. If I pay Reddit $50/yr why would they care what app I use? YouTube does the same thing with Premium, and it is working out great.

It's about ads and tracking sure, but they're also trying to build a TikTok-style algorithm-powered black hole that keeps you sucked in by way of constantly shoving more things in front of you, including posts from subreddits you're not subscribed to. They also want to be able to force whatever new half-baked features they add to work with prominent positioning in their apps.

But to what end? You have a bunch of users who you know are willing to pay real dollars for a different experience. You couldn't ask for better segmentation getting people with wildly different desires and expectations to both be hooked on your platform.

I think it's probably because users paying to be able to use third party clients can't be sold as growth potential — it's a relatively static number, and they're paying for an entirely static experience. They don't want whatever gimmick Reddit is pushing at the moment (like NFT avatars), they want their simple chronological feed and that's it. The limit of worth for those users is the subscription they're paying, whereas if they're using the official app they're theoretically monetizable in N different ways.

> If I pay Reddit $50/yr why would they care what app I use?

Then why is that not an option? The narrative that they want more tracking and control makes sense with the facts we have.

That is an option, considering Reddit is charging third party developers the equivalent of ~$2.5/mo per user for API access, so the tracking argument already goes out of the window. They are already giving up control, for a very low price too, but just implementing it in the most brain dead way possible.

That is what the 3rd party dev has to implement, Reddit already has a premium feature, but there is no api-unlock, there is just dev payments. That’s a big part of the issue. If people paying Reddit would unlock api access, most issues would disappear.

Every reddit account gets API access with OAth. No payment needed.

Uh, no, that’s the upcoming change.

Sorry friend, you are incorrect.

* https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update...

"If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id

If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per minute"

Wait, what? This is news to me. Why is this not mentioned anywhere? How does this not solve this for almost everyone? I already authenticate through oAuth anyway, wouldn’t this then just require inputting my own API key?

edit: Ah, it also requires applying for an API key on their support website which may or may not be granted to you by Reddit and might take some amount of time. That is not comparable to having proper API access.

And even worse, it’s not clear you are even allowed to use your own API access with a third party API, the ToS might forbid that as it’s not your (the person requesting the API key) app you are using it for, but someone else. That would make the whole thing completely useless.

Which 3rd party YouTube app are you using?

That’s a monumentally stupid reason to alienate your most dedicated users.

They don't care. It's ball about the money and all about the tracking.

Do you think this desire is out of the goodness of their hearts and they genuinely think that it is the best? I cannot believe anyone would think that.

Possibly (but it's just a guess) it's about ads and/or data harvesting. If you access it via another app, they cannot get everything they're getting now.

Plus: a subscription would drive many users away.

I never said that, its obviously to track your everyone and to force users into that endless algorithm.

What for profit company is doing anything and not thinking about revenue?

Why would they force users to do something they're not too pleased about if it wasn't entirely for generating revenue of some description?

The same official experience? So they're going to take away user choice in which subreddits to read too?

Probably not. It's about money, not enforcing a uniform experience.

At least on Android, the official app is terrible. Scrolling is very janky and feels unnatural, and the design is cluttered and soulless. Just need to look at Reddit is Fun to see how good it could be.

They say a product reflects the organization that produced it, and it's clear from the app that this is a company with unchecked Promo-Driven-Development and Resume-Driven-Development. There is no impressive metric that measures app jankiness or design clarity in isolation, and the effort to fix it is disproportionately larger than the line that it adds to your resume or promo package. So even though it's glaringly obvious that the app is broken within 3 seconds of opening it, not a single person anywhere in the org is incentivized to fix it.

Yes! Speaking as a heavy Reddit, but non-sub user, this is exactly what would have gotten me to pay them $50 a year. Not NFTs, stickers and avatars.

I think the problem is that the API concerns are more around LLMs having easy access points to their data than anything else. Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers. It's not like there are that many of them. Just seems odd how dark they've been towards this user class. It's very similar to the Twitter changes.

The nuke approach they've done will send so many of their important, core users off the site.

Can someone explain what value new Reddit data has for LLMs?

Presumably the entire 2005-2023 (up to March) dataset which is (was) freely available on Pushshift / torrents is enough?

Also, not that Sam Altman is unbiased, but he did say that social media (Reddit, Twitter) were not super important for developing LLMs (But of course, that's exactly what he would say if they were useful!)

Depends what you're training it on, I suppose. If you're just wanting to train something to generically talk then sure, a slightly outdated data set is fine. If you're wanting it to be able to talk about recent things then it'll, naturally, not be fine. It's not so much a problem right now, only being a couple of months out of date, but once that turns into years it'd become more apparent.

But sure, there are plenty of other data sources as well. On top of the problem of not wanting to train your data on content you know is littered with bots.

I'm now envisioning a sci-fi future where the AIs are an embodiment of xkcd #606. Far better than humans at mundane tasks but with significantly outdated cultural knowledge.

There are humans today that refer to Africa as the 'third world' even though it's a continent with countries more developed than some US states or European countries.

Significant outdated cultural knowledge seems the norm for humans too.

Are they using "third world" in its original sense of non-alignment?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

As someone in a US state with blackouts to our power grid, I'm wondering what more developed things you might be referring to and I might be missing out on.

I didn't even know it was available on torrents.

> Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers.

This approach mostly doesn't work because, for third-party client apps that don't go through the developer's own server, scrapers could snag those keys from the client. Scraping has always been a thing and I don't see a foolproof solution that allows good actors to use the product without bad actors getting to scrape content (not that scrapers won't settle for html scraping).

Wouldn't you leave the API key, in the server and proxy thru? That's what I was taught to do, and you give your own tokens to clients to track which client is making that request and block that client if needed. It seems very dangerous to pass on the reddit API key to the client.

with Oauth2, the API credentials don't give you access to other users' accounts or data or anything of that sort - so the only problem with the client id/secret being in the client is malicious people pulling it and abusing the service while using those API credentials. In general this hasn't been a problem, but once it costs (for example) Apollo $x per million API calls, it could be a money drain, and it could cause headache for the service that now has to try to do abuse prevention via IP reputation / other tracking techniques.

And proxying api calls isn't an end-all solution. This introduces a large burden for the developer to not just run a scalable proxy for the API calls, but also must introduce and manage some abuse prevention system, maybe with their user account system with reputation ratings based on number of times they've hit a rate limit or how many different subreddits they try to access every day.

It also is generally not good for users to have to deal with a proxy like this, since it means the app developer has the ability to log all of their users' usage, and could be compelled by law enforcement / courts to hand over user PII or activity logs.

How would those api keys be exposed if it’s an app?

Inspecting the app's content or the network traffic.

Decompiling apps even on iOS is not too hard, typically API keys would either be in resource files or exposed via strings in the binary itself.

There's pretty much no scenario where Reddit wants to encourage 3rd party app developers to run their own intermediate "proxy" service for Reddit's API. For one it adds another barrier between Reddit and their own users, and two it would mean that there's just one more small step for the app developer to take to just implement the backend services themselves and stop using Reddit's APIs completely. I see a lot of suggestions already that app developers should do this. This of course is completely impractical for anything more than a trivial number of users unless the developers want to start paying millions to run their own infrastructure instead of just paying for access to Reddit's backend systems.

While I have issues with mods of various forums being little hitlers, I can see why they are rebelling, evidently only the 3rd party apps provide a decent way to mod on mobile. They're already working many hours for free, why would they put up with using crappy tools to do a job they do for fun and for free?

That small time developer who discussed paying millions also said it came out to $2.5/month on average[1]. Which actually isn't that bad for the service Reddit is providing

One of the problems mentioned in the many Reddit threads discussing the issue about Apollo, is that its creator was selling ULTRA LIFETIME MEMBERSHIPS[2]. Yes, they were charging people money, taking it, then using a free API to deliver paying members their value. The developer now feels he cannot charge lifetime members an extra $2.5/month because he promised them he wouldn't

Beyond the discussion of is Reddit about to die or not, selling LIFETIME access to someone elses free API is a dumb move, which will always end badly

I think Reddit charging $2.5/month for API access is more than fair

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/31/23743993/reddit-apollo-cl...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/r3npbm/last_call...

Then Reddit can and should charge that to the user directly. Not screw over app developers like this.

Perhaps you should read Christian’s post on Reddit [1] where he described, in detail, what this truly means and how he was effectively lied to by Reddit; and an interview where he states that he actually understands Reddit charging for API access — he doesn’t understand why the burden is being put on the app developers and why they didn’t give app developers considerable more time to make the adjustment with respect to their own pricing [2].

Reddit isn’t wrong for trying to monetize their API to cover service and server costs. Reddit is absolutely wrong for lying to app developers, charging an egregious amount to the app developers, and for not giving them enough time to be able to change their pricing terms and not leave developers on the hook for millions while existing pricing tiers (such as someone who paid in advance) still have months before renewal.

[1] https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_w...

[2] https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0

Key word here is 'on average'. Most people are not going to spend $25/year for access to a third party reddit app. That leaves the hardcore users who are going to cost the dev much more than $2.50/mo, and when ads are no longer able to be served and NSFW content is also gone where is the profit then?

Putting aside the bad salesmanship and planning of selling a forever license, it is absolutely way too much money.

Third party apps are billed in aggregate each month. It’s up to them to decide how that’s split between users.

Don't move the goalposts.

> I think Reddit charging $2.5/month for API access is more than fair

That's my point though. Reddit is NOT charging $2.5/mo for API access. It is charging a set amount per app (based on overall usage), and the developer has to now be in the business of creating and charging for a whole new subscription themselves to make up for what they have to pay Reddit.

With the cost per request model, third party apps have more autonomy to dictate how much users pay per month.

Major third party developers are all unanimous in saying that they do not want this autonomy. This puts too much of a burden on them, and they have virtually zero time to make broad changes to their apps before getting hit with huge bills.

It’s reductive to say Reddit is providing the service, the app developer is also providing a service. The value originally is provided by the communities, then Reddit adds something on top, and the indie app devs add some more value.

The _average_ user costs $2.50/mo in API requests. I’m willing to bet people who pay for the “ultra” tier of an app are above average users at best, especially when you consider Apollo also has free users.

Will he have to refund those lifetime members?

Smart on him for selling those…

He won’t have to and I wouldn’t request it either. The cost was fairly minimal for the amount of hours I’ve spent in Apollo. The only app that makes Reddit usable on iOS (RIP Alien Blue)

> I think Reddit charging $2.5/month for API access is more than fair

I don't. I agree with you on the lifetime Apollo access. That was dumb. But $2.5/user/month is crazy for Reddit. Facebook incurs around $2/user/month in costs. I'm sorry, but there's just no comparison in terms of the platform features, stability, performance, and infrastructure. With 430 million monthly active users, either Reddit is valuing their cost at $12.9 billion annually (pro rata), or they're adding a very healthy profit margin to that charge. It's clearly the latter.

lifetime memberships are useless because a corporation can be dissolved in seconds and you can bet that lifetime for free was bound to the the life of the corporation.

The aim is not _just_ to make money, but to force users to use their crappy app so they can track users better. Sort of like what Twitter did. It’s also why they had like one dude working on their mobile website one hour a month for the last few years.

> but to force users to use their crappy app so they can track users better

That's the point: let the users pay you to make up for the (potential?) revenue you're not making from tracking them. Estimates put reddit at something like $0.25 per user. Pushing them to the official app might _generously_ triple that number. Versus the user paying $5/mo? It's a braindead business case to say that users in your official app are materially better than the same users directly paying for the service they actually want.

Sounds to me they want to double dip: charge you AND track you.

One problem is the type of user who opts to pay even $5 is probably worth more than triple the average. There’s the users who have money to spend at the top and a very long tail of non-spenders at the bottom dragging that average value down.

They're hypothetically worth more in a world where they started out in the official app. In our universe where Reddit is fucking those users, they're far more likely to simply stop using Reddit altogether. And many of them will. Reddit will be lucky if they break even.

And the official Reddit apps sucks big ass in my opinion. Combine this with the way Reddit nags and misleads you to install it, and that gave me enough reason to never use their fucking app.

Having tried to use Apollo several times over several years, I keep coming back to the official Reddit app. It works and I'm just used to it. I like the UI much better and it feels normal. Nothing Apollo provides was that much of an improvement over the default app IMO.

Are you a dev for the app or Reddit employee? The official app is a case study in bad UX design. The only positive reviews in the app store are easily identified as bot or part of paid for campaigns. The recent reviews though tell how more average users view the official app…and it’s not very good.

Nope, just a plain average user. And I never leave reviews for apps, positive or negative. Most people complaining are NOT average users. Which is why this is just a bunch of nonsense.

The bigger joke is their “open in app” links don’t work for me on mobile safari. At least old reddit still works on desktop.

... and make sure ads are served, presumably in the most annoying way possible.

What’s so crappy about it? I’ve seen some bad apps and it’s definitely not that bad. Can you elaborate?

The design language follows all modern social media apps: engagement. Think TikTok. This means auto-playing videos, large elements instead of small elements (low information density) designed to draw attention, prioritising popular and contentious items in the feed instead of relevant items for the user, etc. This language is user-hostile. It uses psychological techniques to keep users on the platform for longer instead of presenting the information which they actually want.

There are technical issues too. Many users report issues playing videos and gifs.

Finally, the Reddit app serves ads.

> auto-playing videos, large elements instead of small elements

You can fix both these issues in the app settings. Turning off feed thumbnails is also a big improvement.

> You can fix both these issues in the app settings. Turning off feed thumbnails is also a big improvement.

You cannot. The "classic" layout is still less information dense than Apollo, and disabling autoplay only disables autoplaying videos in the "card" layout. Videos still auto-play once a user taps a submission.

While we're here, I forgot how hostile their navigation menu is. At the bottom of the app Reddit has "Home," "Discover," "Create," "Chat," and "Inbox." The latter doesn't even take one to their inbox. It takes them to their *activity." These are clearly not the most used actions on Reddit. They're the actions Reddit wants to encourage.

Everything, similar to how crappy the new (now old) god awful and broken design. It’s not meant for users, but for advertisers. From abominable amount of tracking, to recommended community posts, to unnecessary avatars, to taking multiple clicks to view something, and on and on and on…

The UI is absolutely awful. As just one example, if I want to view the karma count on a recent comment, in the official app I have to tap my user profile icon in the corner, tap "my profile" (didn't I just tap my profile icon?!), then tap "comments". So now to go back where I was I have to back swipe three times. If I'm in a comment thread and I tap on a user's name, a profile card slides up from the bottom of the screen. If I then want to view that users comment history, I have to tap on their username from the slide up card, and that brings me to the full user profile card, and then I have to tap on the comments tab for that user. To go back to the comment thread, I have to press the back arrow to leave their profile, then press the (x) button on the slide-up profile card - so I back swipe and then down-swipe/tap a button.

It's an absolutely insane and frustrating UX. Things slide in from different directions and there are multiple UI elements with similar (but not identical) functionality. That's on top of crap like not being able to download gifs and videos right to my device and the built in video player being broken. There are so many other major social media apps that do things so much better it just boggles my mind at how bad reddit's is. TikTok is so smooth and easy to use, even Facebook is better.

In Apollo on the other hand, I view my comments by tapping the "profile" button at the bottom of the screen. In a comment thread, to view a user's history, tap their name and their history pops up. It's smooth and intuitive and fast and simple. I always "go back" views by sliding from the left - the interactions never change depending on context so I always know exactly how to navigate intuitively.

The reason why I dislike it is that, compared to 3rd party apps, it's slow and the design is overly busy. I prefer a more minimalistic design. The excessive tracking doesn't help.

The app on iOS isn't too bad. It used to just light your data on fire though when reddit was trying to do streaming.

Does it look remotely like this site? No? Then that's not the reddit experience I want.

that's the final nail for me. The second I have to give an email address or can't access it via the web I'm out.

Source for people being happy to pay $50 per year?

I’m not saying that Reddit handled it well. Buy your option doesn’t seem to be any better.

Reddit Premium costs more per month ($7) than the expected cost per user for the API ($2). If third party apps can’t make it work with the request-based pricing model, limiting access to just premium users isn’t going to work any better.

Facebook's North America revenue is around $50 a quarter per user ("ARPU"), which is ~$15/month. You'd have to charge quite a bit to clear that, given most users won't pay. (Plus 30% to pay for App Store fees.)

Reddit probably did the math and figured the churn was worth it to get everyone seeing ads. Facebook is much more optimized for ads, but optimizing Reddit's ads is probably easier than getting more people to pay. The latter would probably require paywalling more which is just as icky.

They are planning to charge third party apps ~$2.5/mo per user (aggregate amount based on average usage), so that is already quite a bit less.

That would still get a lot of backlash as a lot of users just aren't going to be willing to pay just to use a different app. Turning this around isn't so easy as you make it appear too it's still reddit effectively shutting out 3rd party apps.

I mean, I think even still charging (a reasonable amount) for the public API, and in return bringing it up to near the standards of the Reddit-built app’s private API, and possibly allowing some ad revenue split with the large apps where by showing Reddit ads (currently impossible with the current API!) is compensated with some minute fraction off the API bill/paid to dev if no outstanding balance.

Reddit won because it was the Digg-alternative, they’ve always been on shaky ground if people just start posting less. What ever per-impression value they get now on their own apps/website will plummet if people just start using it less, regardless if they’re making ad revenue off every user or only some users.

Plus, yeah it’s an awesome LLM training resource. Make it cheap, why not? Your competitors are expensive, and your data is well indexed by topic and conversational in tone.

It may be the case that they have foreseen the backlash, and they plan to publicly compromise with this as a solution.

As an until-recently premium Redditor, exactly this. I voluntarily subscribed. I didn't derive value from subscribing. I just didn't want to be a freeloader since I enjoy the site so much.

Because of Reddit's current practices, I've cancelled my premium membership. I'll likely move on from Reddit unless they chart a path where I and others can continue to use our third party clients happily.

> I will never understand how Reddit bungled this so badly.

Are we living in different universes?

Less than 1% of Reddit users will be impacted by these changes. If all the people who are upset at this leave, it will have almost no impact to Reddit. A few niche subreddits may die, but that's it.

As per the usual they should have chosen the middle way and forced reasonable charges for subscriptions for those people who want to use 3rd party aps $3-5 a month. Instead they now have a rebellion, that might turn into a movement to ditch reddit like people ditched digg. I'm not sure where they'd go though, I don't know of any platform out there that is similar to reddit that could handle a large influx.