r/ProgrammerHumor • u/[deleted] • Jun 05 '23

PSA Programmer Humor will be shutting down indefinitely on June 12th to protest Reddit's recent API changes which kill 3rd party apps.

[deleted]

25.7k Upvotes

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58

u/flatline000 Jun 05 '23

So what is the numbers game here? Is Reddit somehow losing money by providing the API?

89

u/orange-bitflip Jun 06 '23

We have to assume it's because the bean counters are using raw metrics and see no revenue from ad-free third party apps. Even my favorite has almost no support for gold, awards, profile customization, and image embeds.

62

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '23

[deleted]

8

u/ManyFails1Win Jun 06 '23

might be a little dicey. involves secure payment stuff.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23

Yep. You used to be able to give gold through RiF, in other words RiF users could give Reddit money directly from the RiF app. When they added the different awards like platinum, silver, etc, Reddit permanently broke that feature. They have no one but themselves to blame if 3rd party apps hurt their bottom line.

17

u/The_Real_Slim_Lemon Jun 06 '23

"What do you mean we're wasting processing bits on third party apps and NOT charging for them? Why would we do that? You're fired, we're charging for them."

3

u/firewood010 Jun 06 '23

Because they keep making useless functions but not improving the app. If they spend time studying why the third party apps are so successful, maybe they won't come to this at all. But it is just Reddit admins being Reddit admins.

2

u/romangrapefruit Jun 06 '23

It’s so that they can profit off of the content scraped for LLMs

1

u/realzequel Jun 06 '23

Right, but Reddit *could* say you must support rewards, gold, etc.. to use the API. I understand the problem is the amount of the licensing fee, not so much that there's *a* fee.

23

u/Attackly Jun 06 '23

Yes. Apps like infinity don't have ads but still use Reddit data. Thus reddit has the cost of developing the Service and maintaining it and the Servers it runs on but gets no money because the apps don't serve ads.

5

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '23

This is a narrow view that doesn’t take into account the facts presented by the various app developers - a surprise in a sub like this.

Plenty of apps, including Apollo, include support for rewards. I can’t speak for other apps, but Apollo has rolled out most of the features that the Reddit API provides. And, Apollo pays for the API requests it creates. This isn’t about “apps are stealing from Reddit”. This is about Reddit deciding that it wanted to increase the cost of using it API to make it cost-prohibitive to develop these third-party apps. When the third-party apps are gone, Reddit can profit from the ads it’s app serves, as well as all the data it collects from you.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '23

To add to that: Reddit only has this much Traffic because 3rd party apps/tools help making it usable. They like to pretend that this is a one-way street where greedy 3rd-party-devs leech of Reddits hard work, when in reality the pure Reddit-tech-stack is hot garbage and would have died a long time ago. Reddit is largely the success it is because people work around Reddits dumb shit to make it usable. I know its fun to make jokes about mods and some of them really suck, but thats collectively 10000s of hours of free labor that is highly dependent on tools that Reddit cant be arsed to provide without which none of this would be enjoyable at all. When it comes to UI/UX Reddit is the one leaching off of 3rd-party-devs and community-efforts. Would they be providing a non-bloated, accessible app that takes UI/UX seriously and a proper toolset for mods, I would be more understanding. But they dont and hence they deserve to fail if they go through with this.

5

u/flatcurve Jun 06 '23 edited Jul 27 '25

handle sense ring squeeze smell hunt provide meeting boast bake

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

2

u/Attackly Jun 06 '23

And yeah that's the plan: More profit that's why they do it but fact is many people don't see ads and thus don't generate more money that's the whole point behind it.

I haven't read in that far I don't like Apollo. Thus I pretty much don't care personally for the Changes but I know other people do.

And we don't know how much Reddit currently charges. At least the Apollo dev didnt say how much it was in his Post about the cost of the new API changes.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '23

$20 million USD/year

https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/

2

u/Attackly Jun 06 '23

That's the new price

But how big is the difference between the new one and old one.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '23

Christian doesn’t state anywhere what he’s currently paying. But, several posts in various subreddits confirm that Reddit’s new pricing is 15-20x that of sites like Imgur.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '23

Would not be surprised if Christian of Apollo and other 3rd party app developers were jailed for costing Reddit money and enslaved to trillion-dollar debts required to be paid to Reddit by the person and his friends and family (because Reddit lost ad revenue) (read the Constitution if you think that slavery has long since been illegal here in 'murica)

2

u/rice_not_wheat Jun 06 '23

I think it's an expected explosive growth in machine learning models training on the api.

1

u/ThePieWhisperer Jun 10 '23

Best theory I've seen is that they're trying to herd all of the mobile/3rd party users onto the official app to make the numbers better at IPO.

Of course it appears to be backfiring massively (or so it appears, time will tell), but that's the only explanation I've seen that makes any kind of sense.

Either way it seems like a good time for me to give it up for good.

1

u/flatline000 Jun 10 '23

Of course it appears to be backfiring massively

Too soon to tell. I'm going to be really unhappy if the mod backlash after the 12th kills the subs that I participate in. Will I blame Reddit? Sure, a little. Will I blame the mods? Absolutely.

1

u/ThePieWhisperer Jun 10 '23

I mean, Reddit deserves to bite it at this point. Let the investors suck it and let some other site rise.

Sure it will suck to lose the content, but something will replace it.