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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I'm not entirely sure why Reddit was going to charge outlandish fees for the third-party APIs. Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he's not getting anything out of it. It's really a combination of pushing them out of the market and then being a smug little bitch that really nailed it in the coffin for a lot of people.
But that is exactly what his goal was. If he really was interested in working with the 3PA devs, this would have been handled completely differently. The fact that it was handled as it was, with essentially zero engagement between the company and the community, and with essentially zero flexibility on the part of the company on the implementation, is pretty clear evidence that their goal all along was to drive the 3PA's out of business.
They don’t want the developers to pay anything. They want the developers gone so that all the users are monetizeable through ads.
Every user they lose they'll replace with 10 bots.
This isn't about longterm thinking, this is a push to control how many "users" they can put on their IPO docs. Steve and the current board (VC monies) are going to cash out and what happens to Reddit after the IPO is the least of their worries.
Every fewer third-party app is one fewer datum that they are lying about the number of real, fleshy users. This has nothing to do with AI training or APIs or anything but legitimizing bot activity to pump up the numbers.
i don't think they were trying to make money off of the API changes. like others are saying, it has to do with AI and they figured they might as well take the chance and knock out 3rd party in the same swoop so that they can funnel more people onto the official app
they can data harvest much better that way
I feel like AI being the reason doesn't hold up particularly well from a technical standpoint. From my searching, web-scraping is completely legal. It'd be slower, but a massive dataset is still very collectable.
Plus building a web-scraper is so easy now. Funny enough, generative AI like chat gpt can get you like 95% of the way there in just a few minutes.
Though, none of the reasons they've stated so far seem to hold up to scrutiny.
It's slower, but to use an API requires you to customize your system to use each different sites unique API. It would be a massive development undertaking, for such a small benefit that it would never pay off. For an LLM, you only need to read each page once, you just wait til a post is a month or so old, and essentially all discussion has stopped, and you will get everything you need. So "fast" isn't really a concern at all.
You can pull much more data much quicker through the API than some sort of HTML scraper. These LLMs need a lot of data and reddit is a big site.
AI has nothing to do with it other than a convenient, topical scapegoat.
It would have been perfectly possible to charge a different rate for AI harvesting than for Reddit Apps.
of course, but they wanted to kill 3rd party apps without explicitly saying "we're killing 3rd party apps"
this way they can (or at least they thought they could have) had plausible deniability saying stuff like "we tried to work with them" and this is essentially what they tried in the first couple of days