After weeks of burning through users’ goodwill, Reddit is facing a moderator strike and an exodus of its most important users. It’s the latest example of a social media site making a critical mistake: users aren’t there for the services, they’re there for the community. Building barriers to access…
I don’t see why there couldn’t be compromise: A free/low cost API, but 3rd party apps (3PA) have to show reddit’s ads in addition to the 3PA’s own ads, and are limited to data flow rates for “normal human users”. A higher cost higher flow API for 3PAs with ad filters and AI bot data vacuums.
Supposedly API is priced at gouging rates so they can extract millions from OpenAI, Google, etc for scraping for AI.
…Supposedly. I mean, it actually makes some sense except how those companies weren’t using the API and stuff.
I think it would be symbiotic to have both. A free api that serves ads and a paid api that doesn’t.
Then for the free tier, let the 3pa make a cut of that ad revenue.
You could then have an app like Apollo that gets paid if ads are shown or pays for no ads. The 3pa can pass that choice off to the user.
Non-user facing things like bots and data mining would need to use the paid app tier.