this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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I agree requring third party apps to contain their ads would have been a WAY better move. It's funny to me though that Reddit claims to be unprofitable but pulls in $456 million and some change per year. Greedy fuckers
How fucking stupid do they have to be to complain about 3PA not paying their way (BS anyway - the net gain of users using Apollo etc is a win for Reddit) when REDDIT are the ones not serving them up? Then they frame it in a way that sounds like Apollo are taking advantage of them.
Why not include ads in the API responses, tagged as ads, and let the app developers implement a way of showing them. If an individual User pays for Reddit Premium - ads aren’t sent in the API responses.
My leading statement wasn’t a question. Reddit and spez aren’t stupid - they think we are. Fuck them.
Reddit even already treats ads as a post type (hence the karma and comments on ads). All they had to do was say "you must show our ads" and if they caught a major app filtering out ads, block their API keys.
I don't even think paying an API licensing key is that unreasonable. In fact it's quite common. But the price they're asking is completely absurd and doesn't scale appropriately. They also didn't give app developers time to assess and discuss the pricing before implementation started.
There were SO MANY ways to handle this better, that would have been more profitable for them, and would have left people feeling more good about that things were being handled in a reasonable way. This decision making process screams of hubris. I've said it a couple of places, but it gives the impression that Reddit fundamentally doesn't understand reddit. Reddit's greatest value is ease of community creation and curation. Many of the decisions they've made since rolling out New Reddit have stood to restrict and inhibit this core interaction.
I genuinely wonder how Spez et al view reddit. What do they think the point is? What do they think people are there for?
I was the ultimate freeloader/user. I used reddit nearly everyday for 13 years, never once bought premium or any reddit gold or any sort of rewards and blocked every ad.
They definately could have forced me to pay a subscription or something somehow without just completely shuting down how I browse the site.
It's so utterly bizarre and stupid.
It's just corporate accounting. They're profitable but they essentially cook the books to get the tax benefits of being "unprofitable". This is why amazon is still occasionally "unprofitable" even though they're growing year over year. You can't just keep taking out loans to buy and build new warehouses if you're actually unprofitable.
Huffman is just a greedy piece of shit. He, himself, made a comment when talking about Apollo that implied this developer is sitting on millions and he deserves a cut of it. API calls in terms of cost to the company cost fractions of a penny and plenty of large companies make money off their API. They could charge the base cost and add 10% for the profit. The problem is a realistic and reasonable cost for reddit's API would probably cost the apollo dev maybe a few grand a year. Like I said above, Huffman thinks there's a lot more money to wrangle out of developers there, but I'd bet the apollo dev was barely making a fraction of a percent on Huffman's net worth.