The point is there's a middle ground to be had, but rather than negotiating for an outcome both sides can live with, Reddit is just choking third-party apps (many of which provide tooling for moderating at scale or enable accessibility) to death.
Again though, I'm sure there are nuances here. But this is just a business negotiation between two businesses in this specific case. I don't really care about what's feasible for Apollo as a business, what matters more is how non commercial usage is dealt with. For now, and correct me if I'm wrong, the API limits will still be generous for individual users (so mods, etc). They just have to generate their own key. Did I get that wrong?
Yes. You can't just insert your own API key into the app of your choice.
that's not saying much when Spez outright said reddit isn't profitable. Yes, a few devs working on an API scaper is cheaper than 2000 employees worldwide, for a company HQ'd in San Fransisco on top fo that (I still can't imagine what reddit needs with 2000 employees).
meanwhile I don't exactly think Spez is surviving paycheck to paycheck himself. If he's not already, he'll easily clear tends of millions of dollars of net worth when Reddit goes public. Or at least, that's what I would have said 4-5 months ago.
>you can't expect to generate profit from another business unilaterally forever and be shocked that they won't allow it.
on the flip side, I don't think Christian is suddenly broke either. Probably not "I can retire in prauge" levels of finances, but he's definitely made a lot of money.
But he's under no obligations to play ball with Reddit, especially when reddit is taking the ball home. I don't see this as him leeching off reddit when you take into account how many users his app brought to the business. Just like how you said RiF is your Reddit, I'm sure Apollo is others' reddit.
>As people have said countless times in other situations where people had issues with reddit; just use another platform.
I agree and am. But that's tangential to this article. Christian isn't exactly trying to kill reddit nor pitch his next Apollo app for the next big platform. He said his dream scenario is to wake up and see the API rates halved and he'll be happy and keep Apollo running. He clearly doesn't want reddit dead.
But as is: he seems more or less done.
And yes I know, Reddit could have rolled their own ads in the API but... Literally no one does that. Reddit ads are already extremely cheap (read, worthless to advertisers) as it is. No one would trust an ad network that has no control over how it displays and tracks said apps. I run Adblock everywhere so I'm not particularly sad about ads being worthless, but it still matters for Reddit inc.
Now obviously apollo was well within its rights to profit from their app but you can't have your cake and eat it too: you can't expect to generate profit from another business unilaterally forever and be shocked that they won't allow it.
Now before someone calls me a shill, I will literally never use Reddit after the API change since for me Reddit is just Reddit Is Fun. Without it, the whole website is unusable. And I'm extremely critical of Reddit in general. But this is just weird, this is a business deal that has turned into some sort of martyrdom. As people have said countless times in other situations where people had issues with reddit; just use another platform.
(Or at least advocate for open source apps API access. For me the ideal solution would be apps with a bring your own API key model. And I really think there are two discussions that have been getting mixed up: commercial use for the API like Apollo's and general access for third parties. One I don't care about, the other is crucial to me using Reddit.)