It's really dumb if the point is to keep all the third party applications that made your platform popular. It's much smarter if the point is to kill them all in favor of your first party app, that you are promising your VC investors will have tremendous growth leading up to an IPO, and you don't want your site to look like the bad guy by killing all the third party apps.
They just handled it poorly. If the reddit app actually had the moderation tools they've been promising for years, I doubt the moderator outcry would be anywhere near this bad.
And if you watch you'll notice, even during the blackout, reddit's messaging is all about the things you can still do besides use the third party apps. They're making the API still free for moderation bots. They're working with apps that provide accessibility tools for reddit. They're working with the services moderators use for moderation. They're appealing to the moderators. They've made no mentions of working with: Apollo, BaconReader, or RedditIsFun. The point was to kill the third party apps.
The real reddit app doesn’t even have an option to block a particular ad account so when they serve you evangelical right wing ads all day you just have to swallow it.
This is the main reason why apps exist in the first place. They remove the user agency that browsers provide.
But they ran into time limitations. They plan to IPO later this year and they want the 3rd party apps to be dead before then.
Imgur serves advertisements when you go to their page. But you don't get them through the API.
https://api.imgur.com/#commercial
> Your application is commercial if you're making any money with it (which includes in-app advertising), if you plan on making any money with it, or if it belongs to a commercial organization.
Calling an API and monetizing the front end it is fine. The money that Imgur loses from ads is made up in the API call monetization.
The Reddit APIs don't prohibit serving advertisements or any other form of monetization of the use of the APIs and mention it as something that your app would need to do.
https://www.redditinc.com/policies/data-api-terms
You will disclose in your App through a privacy policy how you collect, use, store, and disclose data collected from your App Users and other visitors, including, where applicable, that third parties (e.g., advertisers) may serve content or advertisements and collect information directly from your App Users and other visitors that may include the use of cookies. In addition, by using the Data APIs, Reddit may use submitted information in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
It was about maximizing the value of the IPO by ensuring investors would be minimally aware of the failures of the app and new Reddit, by ensuring as few 3rd party products exist as comparatives to the first party offerings.
It could be argued to be part of a conspiracy to defraud investors by ensuring they were incapable of being fully informed....
If a 1.5 person app (Apollo) is handily beating Reddit's app... what on earth is the holdup? Either the eng team is wildly incompetent, or this is by executive choice.
Reddit's inability to deliver on mod tools despite a decade's worth of promises makes me think it's 40/60 wildly incompetent and needing firing vs exec choice.
EDIT: Oops, that’s per day! Your math is right, please ignore.
Apollo is a better client. The comparison is Apollo vs the Reddit app, not Apollo vs Reddit as a whole.
We are talking about clients here.
I don't think the current app's design is an accident (i.e. it's not pure incompetence). It meets several objectives:
* Minimizes the user-generated content shown on each page (a couple of threads or a couple of comments), so it reduces the amount of traffic to the server and DB as the user browses around.
* Oh, and it leaves a ton of space for ads, which (bonus) can be served from a separate ad server, further lightening their load.
* Plus, there are Bob Ross-like "happy accidents" like pages jumping back to the top when you go a level up from a thread - going back to your spot can trigger more ads to be shown.
The 3rd-party apps subvert all this, and bypass the ads, to boot.
Another example: Over a year ago, I decided to explore programming with Python. At work, we encountered the problem of our web-based software requiring users to download PDFs to read them. As a personal project, I set out to build a Python application that would generate individual image files for each page of the PDFs, providing both a preview image and a higher resolution version. I dedicated a few evenings and two Saturdays to the project, and after approximately two weeks, it was successfully completed. Additionally, I created a simple GUI using Vue.js, enabling file uploads and displaying the resulting images. An experienced Python developer could likely achieve the same task in just one or two hours, with an additional two hours for the frontend.
Months later, the company decided to embark on a similar project but with additional extended OCR (Optical Character Recognition), incorporating machine learning to extract structured data from the PDFs. Initially, the prototype aimed solely at uploading the PDFs, with the machine learning aspects simulated. Months were spent discussing, conceptualizing, refining, and revising before the implementation phase commenced. Over a year later (though I have since left the company, I remain in contact with current employees), the first prototype was completed. Users can upload PDFs, and the system generates images from individual pages. The frontend simulates a progress bar, as the microservices run in the background without a built-in monitoring system. One of the more experienced developers foresaw this issue from the start, but management hindered his efforts until he eventually resigned. To date, the machine learning component remains unimplemented.
My last example for now: I recall a situation where the best developer I know was hired by a large corporation as external support. Within a few weeks, he was assigned an easy standard task that any competent developer could handle with ease. Believing it to be a sample project for the standard onboarding process, he promptly and efficiently completed it in less than a week. When he delivered the finished result, his clients were astonished. They had planned this to be his sole project for the next six months and had expected it to take a significant amount of time.
In summary, it is not uncommon for companies to invest months of work and millions of dollars into projects that a reasonably skilled developer could accomplish in a day. Never underestimate the incompetence of some organizations.
Saying it was "smart but handled poorly" is an excuse. It was a series of dumb moves because they did not see the actions they needed to take and in what order and on what timeframe to not capsize.
It worked for Facebook. It worked for Google Chat. It's failing for Twitter, and for reddit, for the same reasons. They did it too quickly and without the finesse needed to prevent a revolt. Instead of cranking the pricing, they needed to do what Facebook and Google did -- slowly degrade the integration system until it was unusable, start restricting features, add features incompatible with third parties, etc, until the third parties all give up and the API dies a seemingly natural death. reddit just doesn't have the foresight or planning to pull off most plans, including nefarious ones.
But it didn't work for Gmail. Despite Google's best efforts, email still exists outside Google. If we want to avoid playing this Fark->Digg->Reddit game again, we need an open standard that doesn't rely on a single company, like email.
Microsoft used it like a scalpel and a hammer for decades.
They did not. They bought it and killed it. Their home-grown application is built from scratch.
If the reddit app was any good, the 3rd party ones wouldn't even exist. All their problems are because their users prefer to pay a 3rd party than to use the recommended, official app they keep pushing into them.
Instead of all this confusion, if they just made their app work on the high-latency that is common on mobile networks, they would get much better results. (No need to even make their video work.)
Reddit has made it pretty clear they aren’t interested in that, despite the things they say.
In that sense, it makes perfect sense to jack up the price to a shocking level to force everyone to stop without outright banning them.
Examples or I don't believe that happens, maybe very rarely.
The fact is rich people can afford to live wherever they like more than anyone else. There's no reason for them to leave if they don't want to. But if they do leave and they're famous sometimes they'll take the opportunity to score political points.
Thank you for your comprehensive list of links though!
Yes, because you asked for ‘an example’. As in you asked for ‘one’.
You’re determined to stick to your point of view, you’re entitled to do that of course. But why pretend you’re interested in a debate or discussion on the matter when you’re clearly not?
NO amount of this is going to be acceptable to the wealthy, but there's gonna be a threshold between resentful grumbling and panicked flight, and that threshold is not at zero. And the usefulness of a wealth tax kicks in WAY closer to zero than the panic flight threshold is.
A more recent example in the UK would be the pensions cap which had the unintended effect of sending people into early retirement because it became uneconomical to continue working. This impacted especially doctors in the NHS and contributed to a labour shortage. The government finally corrected the folly 2 months ago.
If they're truly trying to run a paid API service then they have to actually support those customers (the apps) and they really weren't prepared to do that.
It is not how a pre-IPO company behaves
Incentives.
But I call bullshit. People training new AI models are using the API right now because it's free and easy, but as soon as that changes they will go back to good old fashioned web scraping.
Then overtime increase prices as you get a better sense of value and market dynamics.
Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart. It’s now some governments go with taxation before u-turning some years later when they’ve driven away or killed whatever it is they were hoping to tax.