Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 - May 2023 (1265 comments)
Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36162235 - June 2023 (396 comments)
Honestly I am confused by their confusion. Are they receiving a different messaging internally, than that being sent out to end users and developers?
I don't think Reddit intends to profit off their API, not in any significant way. The pricing is too harsh and will likely kill off most 3rdparty usage of the API.
This really feels like them trying to completely kill off the 3rdparty ecosystem, but do it in such a way that when it does actually happen, they can claim that it was all the 3rdparty developers faults because they had provided an API and everything.
They seem to be fully aware of what they're doing and what they're about.
It could also be a smokescreen so they can backpedal if the results are bad enough.
The few subs that I am in now are pretty low-quality overall, with most posts being either the same questions asked over and over by people who can't be bothered to read the sidebar or use the search feature, or image meme shitposts. I won't be missing much if I can no longer access them on my own terms.
I feel like Reddit is somehow jealous of the success of Facebook and Twitter for vapid content and is taking their best run at digging themselves down to the same level. Quantity over quality always wins on the modern Internet I guess.
(Edit: The fact that they don't even want their users browsing Reddit on a smartphone web browser should have been a giveaway that they were going to lock down their assets further eventually.)
It might an interesting idea to just have an api website and people can just plug in their own front ends and use it how they wish. apps more or less just switch their hostname.
other then trying to fund the infra for an api, it seems easy. clearly paying isn't an option and with all text there's no ads to show.
lemmy at a glance looks confusing, i don't want to join a bunch of mini reddits.
When reddit got big there were still a lot of smaller forum and other internet communities. People were part of alot
