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Reddit CEO: We're Sticking With API Changes, Despite Subreddits Going Dark (uk.pcmag.com)

submitted 1 year ago by 0485919158191@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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[-] ultimate_question@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

Others have speculated that the API pricing model is built around customers who want to use the data for AI training, not customers who want to build apps for public use. The $20M price tag is what they're hoping a mega corp will pay for data access and don't care about anyone who can't afford that much. Some money is better than no money, but for a lot of people the "chance" at BIG money is better than some money lol

[-] smithy46@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

If this is the case, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just separate into tiers, where mass data usage to feed into a language model is priced differently than people legitimately using and contributing content to the site.

[-] ultimate_question@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

they still have a lot to gain by killing the 3rd party apps and forcing the remaining users to the platform that will benefit their valuation the most. the pricing is to court the big whales to sell data to and the forcing people to use the native app is to improve the quality of the data they want to sell.

[-] 777@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Precisely. Investors like apps because users cannot change their user experience, disable telemetry, block ads easily, and so on. They receive push notifications which drive engagement and allow easier tracking across accounts.

[-] cjsolx@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I think it's simply that they want to funnel all of their users to official channels. All of this "discussion" is a poorly veiled attempt at public justification. 30 days notice at the quoted price tag was very intentional. My hope is that Reddit seriously miscalculated the amount of damage this would cause. My suspicion is that /u/spez doesn't care and is willing to nuke the site for a one-time payout at maximum valuation.