Regardless of how simple the business case for this change is or is not, Steve's choice to egregiously lie about his conversation with Christian is a completely unnecessary and frankly daft risk to take. It's bullying, and he was almost immediately caught out as a liar.

I cannot understand how anyone in his team with a sturdy ethical compass could look him in the eye after seeing that post, especially if they were party to the original conversation. I can't remember the last time I saw a corporate leader get caught in such a high profile absolute falsehood, especially directed at a single individual.

If this reflects the company's culture I have no idea how it can succeed as a public firm. How will Steve deal with criticism from public investors? What is he not willing to lie about?

This gets repeated a lot, with the assumption that they're refusing to pay at all, but in the very original post they highlight how they do pay for API usage elsewhere (Imgur) already and therefore have no problem adding Reddit to that at a reasonable cost.

I get the want to simplify things, but it's already simple enough:

1. Reddit brings out absurdly priced API

2. Developers don't want to pay that much

3. Reddit then behind the scenes berates developers, claiming they are trying to blackmail millions of dollars, to the apps serving harmful ads, to posting about how the apps aren't "good citizens" and instead are scraping wildly

4. Developers push back and announce app closures

If it was about "showing ads", they would have budged on price a long time ago, added in guidelines to use the API and serve ads, etc. This is about controlling user data, tracking every bit they can, leveraging their content, and then monetizing the fuck out of it in the age of AI.

You make them sound like freeloaders, when in reality they provide value to the community by committing significant time contributing to Reddit through posts, comments, original content, and volunteer moderation.

Reddit is worthless without community contributions, and Reddit is very clearly telling the community (both users and developers) that they aren't valuable and should go find somewhere else to spend their time.

Yeah - obviously (imo).

Similarly to twitter third party api access with no ads doesn't make any sense for a business that's an ad business, it's stupid they've allowed this at all for as long as they have (and it was stupid for twitter to do the same).

If you want to build a non ad-based subscription business go ahead! I strongly prefer models that do that (e.g. substack), but if you're not going to do that then don't operate some weird half measure that's clearly counter to the company incentives. Apollo is just upset the free party is over.

I'm a little surprised reddit would not just shut it all down like twitter did since that makes more sense for this model, but having the price set crazy high is effectively the same thing anyway. It makes sense they don't want to negotiate, they'd rather have no third party API access at all.

This argument doesn't mean I'm a fan of data access and control (I'm not - I work on urbit to give people a way to escape it), but I recognize the business as it is. If you're running an ad business and allow third parties to build apps on your business that prevent you from controlling users at the client level (and prevent you from showing ads) you're making stupid decisions.

Like most things it's a problem of incentives. You can't fix the behavior without fixing the incentives. You can't escape the megacorp ad world we're trapped in by just wishing the existing incentives didn't exist.

Why fuck around with 20x pricing then? If the ARPU is on the order of $0.12 a month, why attempt to charge $2.50 a month?

... then require apps to show ads to users that don't pay reddit for ad-free access?

Except the way Reddit works increasing the volume of users, even if they aren't seeing ads, provides the entirety of the value of the site that the users who are seeing ads come to see.

This 100% reeks of business people who don't even care to understand what Reddit is coming in and seeing the raw metrics of "% of users who aren't seeing ads" and the "lost" revenue.

Can’t Reddit just have a tiered API: one pricing for ad-free API and another for ad-supported? Surely a system could be put in place to ensure compliance.

I have to think there was a path here for Reddit to get its ad money without alienating so many users and mods.

in TFA paying a price isn't a problem. The insanely high price isn't necessarily even a dealbreaker (Apollo is a paid app already, though it'll be a steep as hell increase). The issue is he (and everyone else) had 30 days notice between the new pricing and the pricing going into force, which is not enough to actually adapt to the changes without going deeply into the read in the meantime (for example, much of Apollo's users are on a yearly plan).

Reddit could just return the ads via the api & mandate how they are displayed in apps.

> but I do think Apollo (and, by proxy, its users) will eventually have to pay Reddit something.

Apollo will never pay, because it's shutting down. It was always an option to monetize 3PA but Reddit decided not to.

Christian agrees, as he describes in the linked post. But the pricing and timeline are untenable.

Why would it be limited to social media companies? Have companies like Airbnb done anything to show YC companies are more or less just as bad (once they are big of course)

A second mistake is thinking these types aren't in lots of other businesses and even government! Just happening on smaller scale to smaller groups.

It would be impossible for me to disagree more. Editing someone's comments to put your own words in their mouth is despicable. Basically, he impersonated those users and put them on record as saying something they'd never said. It's like the text version of a deep fake recording.

I think that while the trolling wasn't egregious, the issue was that words were being put in their mouths, which undermines trust. It's a whole other level of manipulation compared to even just impersonating someone.

>as we saw with their attacks on the_donald

what attacks are you specifically referring to here, other than kicking them off the site?

How can you hate those groups but not hate the_donald where mods were also a disaster?! They absolutely love to gaslight you in general. Shouldn't a good faith response to a post in the_donald not be immediately removed and OP banned? The mods would never let any non-hyperventilated group think through. It's the same with r/conspiracy back then where I happily took my ban for calling out the worst mod I've ever encountered who would again ban good faith discussion for arbitrary reasons. r/politics mods are also horrible, to add some balance. I'm banned there too.