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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   38168 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Following up from my Reddit API post from last week, Spez (aka Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO) hosted a disastrous AMA yesterday clarifying on the updated terms of API access. Which means, starting from July the 1st, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user / month for a typical Reddit third-party app). They "promised" to talk with Pushshift to restore access to verified moderators, allow API access for bots and developers, third party apps, etc. However, apps like Appollo have announced that they aren't happy with the pricing and won't continue to operate anymore because doing so would now cost them $20 million. In reference to this, Steve replied to one of the comments, only to be exposed by Christian Selig (aka iamthatis), Appollo CEO:

Spez: His “joke” is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.

iamthatis: Please feel free to give examples where I said something differently in public versus what I said to you. I give you full permission.

It turned out to be a bigger disaster than I'd anticipated. No one's buying the profitability claims, because most of this labour is carried out by unpaid volunteers and dedicated users for free. No access to pushshift means harder time for mods and academics who rely on it, as noted by user SarahAGilbert here. Over 3000 subreddits, including the big ones like r/videos, r/music, r/gaming and r/pics, are going on blackout. Some of them, indefinitely. Probably the largest blackout reddit will ever see. Boy am I glad TheMotte moved offsite.

I still have no idea what exactly all the panic is about. Reddit is now going to charge third party apps for access? What does this mean and why is everyone losing their life over it? What is Apollo? What is Pushshift and why will sub-reddits close down if they can't use it?

There was always a charge for using Reddit's APIs above a certain rate. An individual toying around with a kiddie script was not going to hit it, but third-party apps (TPAs) like Apollo, RedditIsFun, and BaconReader have to pay for the number of API requests they're making. They're alternative ways to view Reddit and not owned by the company.

You have to understand, these apps are popular. People do not like the way the official Reddit app is built, as it promotes the infinite-scroll and hides ads as normal posts. There are also features in TPAs that are not present in the official app which make the experience better. An ad on RedditIsFun is not nearly as hidden, meaning you can avoid it. It also gives a better indication of how many "pages" you have scrolled, compared to the official experience.

In short, there are millions of users of these apps, many of whom do not like the official app for a variety of reasons.

Now, Reddit is coming down and saying that they will drastically increase the cost of using these apps to the owners. The creator of Apollo said he would be paying millions, and he can't afford that. Monetizing the app is always a risk as well, people are sufficiently turned away by even paying a penny. Apollo is notable for just how many mods use it, as it offers many features that making moderating easier.

This is just the outrage that got a lot of people upset en masse, the prior one was the Pushshift issue. Pushshift is an API that lets you search Reddit's comment and submission database. It was made for people to gather data via parameters (between dates, by a user, containing certain text, etc.) but is also very useful for mods to look up archived comments that were deleted by the user in case they need to take action. I can't stress enough just how valuable Pushshift is, it's the only way to search for comments with any reasonable power, Reddit's native search abilities don't let you do nearly as much.

Pushshift was taken down because they archived comments that were user-deleted and that was against Reddit's privacy terms. It will come back, but you have to be a mod of a subreddit now and you only get access to anything within the subreddit. No more doing broad searches as before.

This is a long-standing issue users and mods have had with Reddit - it is not responsive to their needs. They don't provide features people have been asking for for years, they remove or modify existing ones that people like, and increasingly made the end-user experience disrespectful.

The latest issue of increasing API charges is yet another thing that is entirely unnecessary, as Reddit in no way demonstrated that they were seriously being harmed by these TPAs or even by Pushshift. On the latter, it certainly didn't require taking the full thing down for everyone.

As for motive, people suspect that it's money. With the rise in demand for lots of data for training LLMs, Reddit has possibly realized that it can make a lot of money offering researchers the billions of comments people have made. In addition, there's the IPO coming up, and some speculate that this is an attempt to get more people seeing ads on the one official platform.

As much as I dislike Reddit's own apps myself, I understand their position. If Reddit has a large userbase whom they aren't making money off of because these users are using third-party apps that fuck up their monetization strategies, then I don't see how Reddit has any obligation to facilitate this kind of evasion. All they're saying is that if you want to do something that costs us money then at least reimburse us for the privilege. I understand the concerns of mods but this is a red herring for the overall argument, since most people making this argument aren't mods but merely want to use the argument to keep the status quo intact. If the mod thing was really the concern then a workaround similar to the Pushshift workaround should satisfy everybody, where mods get special access to use tool that help them moderate their subs only. But I doubt such a compromise would satisfy most people.

The problem is that the pricing is way beyond the cost of allowing TPAs. Here's the creator of Apollo explaining it:

As for the pricing, despite claims that it would be based in reality, it seems anything but. Less than 2 years ago they said they crossed $100M in quarterly revenue for the first time ever, if we assume despite the economic downturn that they've managed to do that every single quarter now, and for your best quarter, you've doubled it to $200M. Let's also be generous and go far, far above industry estimates and say you made another $50M in Reddit Premium subscriptions. That's $550M in revenue per year, let's say an even $600M. In 2019, they said they hit 430 million monthly active users, and to also be generous, let's say they haven't added a single active user since then (if we do revenue-per-user calculations, the more users, the less revenue each user would contribute). So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. These own numbers they've given are also seemingly inline with industry estimates as well.

For Apollo, the average user uses 344 requests daily, or 10.6K monthly. With the proposed API pricing, the average user in Apollo would cost $2.50, which is is 20x higher than a generous estimate of what each users brings Reddit in revenue.

In other words, Reddit has to pay $0.12 per user per month, Apollo would be charged $2.50 per user per month.

The creator was willing to negotiate pricing, he believes like you do that Reddit should not sustain a loss with TPAs. But this is far beyond that in the opposite direction. What's worse is that the CEO of Reddit accused him of making a threat in a call, only to have the recording of that call be shown to have nothing of the sort in it. There are ways Reddit could have monetized more of itself, but this was greedy.

the CEO of Reddit accused him of making a threat in a call, only to have the recording of that call be shown to have nothing of the sort in it

Wait, this was the "recording and leaking a private phone call" complaint? It wasn't "private" in the sense of "I don't want to talk about it", it was "private" in the sense of "I want to talk slander about it and not be proven wrong"?

That's my understanding, yeah. Supposedly, Huffman is in Cali (which is a 2-party consent state), but the Apollo dev is in Canada which is 1-party.

Isn’t that Reddit’s argument. Are current revenue per user is way too low precisely because people use these APIs and therefore this is why we are doing it? Thus using historic rev per customer seems off unless I am missing something.

According to the industry, Reddit's users are the least valuable of any social network. Some of that is attributable to the fact that the official Reddit app and New Reddit are designed for showing more ads and infinite scrolling. But people who use TPAs may sometimes use those because they dislike the focus on ads (the deceptiveness of hiding promoted posts is what really grinds my gears).

No one is saying that Reddit shouldn't try to stay in the black if it allows TPAs to exist. The complaint is the speed and absurd pricing of the new system.

According to the industry, Reddit's users are the least valuable of any social network.

As far as headlines go, that's a great one lol

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