Why is this downvoted?

According to the linked article, even the bots which exceed the usage were manually whitelisted to stay free.

They are probably downvoted because the majority of developers of said moderator tools have pulled the pin and are shutting them down... seeing as the writing is already on the wall. Why spend any more effort maintaing the tools created when Reddit has said they will kill them off as soon as they have finished their own version? And anyone following what Reddit has been doing in the leadup to this stand-off, would be rightfully suspicious of whether Reddit even intends to uphold their pinky promise here and not just revoke API access as soon as this quietens down.

This is not even accounting for the fact that outside of business practices, they have completely alienated developers, by showing them they will take their words out of context, adversarially try to pit users against them and give them 30 days to comply or else. Why would anyone want to enter in a business agreement with a company that does this, before even looking at price?

Also: reddit pinky promises to implement mod tools they've been pinky promising for more than 5 years. Back when overwatch 1 came out, I became a mod for /r/overwatch_memes (now dead, the subreddit without an underscore ultimately was better) and even modding this subset of a subset of a gaming community would have been impossible without the API. Several moderation features that I ended up developing a bot for (using the API), reddit had been promising to implement for some time, and none of them are currently implemented. If you've been a mod all this time, you know that reddit promises to mods are completely empty. It's been fine until now because you could rely on other tools but modding anything with regular users without these tools is impossible without significantly restricting rules on allowed content.

Reddit destroyed any trust they had, so I'd guess it doesn't matter that much what they say in response at this point. It's too little, too late to say you'll keep API free for some people at this point.

I think there's still a remote opportunity they claw trust back, but it's getting smaller the longer they have their CEO out there telling people to get stuffed.

They made their intentions clear with the pricing change, they want third party apps dead. Why carry on making or supporting them with the shadow of the noose falling on you?

You're downvoted because people clearly don't want to actually discuss this. It's all about the pitchforks.

That doesn't matter if they previously broke the bot or the bot author took them down to protest the API price change. https://www.reddit.com/user/Blank-Cheque took all their bots down 10 days ago until the third-party apps change is reverted.

• AssistantBOT, AssistantBOT1 - This was broken by the Pushshift API cutoff. It's widely used for tracking sub usage statistics. The author is working on fixing it, but the last update was three weeks ago.

• Flair_Helper (Blank-Cheque) - This makes removing posts easier, especially on mobile. I haven't used it in anger.

• FloodgatesBot (Blank-Cheque) - This applies posting limits for users. There are a couple competitors, but I'm not sure how many are still running.

• Quality_Vote (Blank-Cheque) - This is used to allow users to remove unpopular posts. It can save a lot of moderation work in the right kind of sub.

The threshold is being increased from 60 to 100 for bots which didn't delegate auth, but not for any tools that used specific user-ids. It's misleading.

To quote from reddit's docs: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16160319875...

> Important note: Historically, our rate limit response headers indicated counts by client id/user id combination. These headers will update to reflect this new policy based on client id only on July 1, 2023.

Historically, reddit rate limited by user-id, so if for example, both of us logged in using a reddit app, each of us had a rate limit of 60/min free queries. Each app only gets one client-id, regardless of the number of users it has.

Now, the rate limit of 100 is per app, not per user-id, which obviously doesn't work for any tooling that acts on behalf of the user.

Reddit can only make those claims by ignoring "moderator tool" which used user-ids. In a very real sense, reddit apps like "reddit is fun" and "apollo" were moderator tools, and those are the biggest losers in this change.

You can see someone on reddit complaining about this too: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

I'm not saying that what they're saying is necessarily wrong, but their communication around these changes makes it hard to take them in good faith.

Thanks for the detailed reply.

Other than being able to maintain your own list of users, are there downsides to using Oauth?

Yup. I mod with RIF very frequently and will likely be done when it's gone.