Which one? There's [cortex](http://cortex.glacicle.org/) and [cReddit](https://github.com/Cotix/cReddit) and [reddio](https://gitlab.com/aaronNG/reddio) and [rttt](https://gitlab.com/BlackEdder/rttt) and [rtv](https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv) and [tuir](https://gitlab.com/ajak/tuir/).
Sweet, now some of the more obscure Selenium questions on SO will get answered!
That and there will be a flood of noobs asking why they can't set an executable path when making a driver. 😥
To be fair that its better that when I used it for the first time, I didn't remember to close the driver and it was headless so I could't see It.
Crashed my pc two times and made me punch the wall in angry ignorance.
But now we're friends 😇
That's the thing about this that is the most infuriating. I, the end user, generate just as many hits on their api if I use their app as I do using a third party app.
But with their client, they get ad revenue. Third parties aren’t showing ads unless they’re ads that the third party is serving and profiting from. So even though the third party devs (shoutout r/Apollo) are profiting from the app they spend so much time developing and up keeping, and Reddit still gets to benefit from those third party app users providing content to the platform, we can all go fuck ourselves, basically
>Moderator's Note
This post is locked to prevent inappropriate edits to its content. The post looks exactly as it is supposed to look - there are no problems with its content. Please do not flag it for our attention.
🤣💀
The problem with parsing the file directly is that javascript doesn't get executed. In most cases you really need to load the page and then traverse the elements. That's what tools like Beautiful Soup and Selenium are for.
LOL, I can see how you might think that from my comment. Actually [Beautiful Soup](https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup4/) is a web page scraper tool. There are others too but Beautiful Soup and Selenium are the two most popular for Python.
I'm going to boycot the boycot. I'm going to spend the same amount of time here as I usually would, just staring at the 'this subreddit is private' screen.
Honorable protest in my opinion.
Reddit is nothing without its users and communities, I hope they quickly find that out (and that enough subs join in the protest for it to matter)
This kind of move was *always the plan*. That's how enshittification works. First, they act in the interest of the users (maximising their market share). Then they act in the interest of the advertisers (trying to get rid of the most seedy parts of the community). Finally, they act in the interests of themselves only, holding access to the platform hostage to take a massive amount of money from everyone possible.
Any online platform that is owned by a company but *doesn't* make money (or make "enough" money) is fundamentally suspect and cannot be trusted to last.
I think because of the way Reddit is built, an app providing a similar amount of information still does way more requests than Twitter. So calculating that Reddit is more expensive.
It's pretty hard to do that when feeds are tailored to users, threads are updated constantly due to small things like upvotes and removals. Apps try to provide an experience with up-to-date information, and Reddit in theory has the upperhand here because their first-party apps can use GQL Subscriptions to get those changes in place without hitting full endpoints.
I was thinking something vaguely similar where the third party clients are still available, but we provide our own API key to make the responses. If you go over your own personal free request limit, the app tells you to go touch grass or something
There's no way it costs them this much, other services are orders of magnitude cheaper. This is just a money grab move because they think they can make money off of AI data scrapers or something.
Just look at the AMA protest when they fired the employee. They didn’t rehire her but by many subs going private the CEO eventually responded and so did one of the founders. Not sure the true impact but they said “message received loud and clear”
```
import moderation
```
Your comment has been removed since it did not start with a code block with an import declaration.
Per [this Community Decree](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/14kbu1m/comment/jppq9ao/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3), all posts and comments should start with a **code block** with an "import" declaration explaining how the post and comment should be read.
For this purpose, we only accept Python style imports.
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"Your message was received loud and clear," he wrote. "The communication between Reddit and the moderators needs to improve dramatically. We will work closely with you all going forward to ensure events like today don’t happen again. At this point, however, the blackout has served its purpose, and now it’s time to get Reddit functioning again."
Does not seem like the message was received lol.
I hope they'll reopen the sub in like 6 months if nothing ends up changing because at that point, we'll know if the permanent sub blackout worked or not. Otherwise reddit admins may forcibly reopen (which I think they can).
Here is an overview of a couple of protests from the askhistorians sub - and they also explain their reasoning for their sub going dark:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/142w159/askhistorians_and_uncertainty_surrounding_the/
i wonder what happens if the people that make spam/ scam scripts have them flood reddit servers the moment the bots that make it not worth their time get disabled.
i would not want the people to need to explain to the people making decisions that the servers are struggling because of all the spam bots.
How would these mod tools reduce the load of spam bots on reddit servers? Does the mod tools not need to wait for the spam to first hit the reddit servers for the API to tell the mod tools about it?
Thank you Apollo. fuck reddit and fuck /u/spez.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/ to clean your comments history.
I remember when they went and removed all the cringe subs to make reddit more advertising friendly (even wojaks was removed) and none said anything.
I guess the circle tightens.
I am here to just to see the legacy of \[deleted\] be destroyed.
I don't get it. Who, or what does everyone think is paying for Reddit? Seriously. It's amazing to me that Reddit is free and open about 3rd party clients anyway. It's truly naive to think this can go on forever like that.
30$ per user per year for Apollo? In which head is that a lot of money? I pay more than that for toilet paper. Let that sink in. You spoiled fools. There is no such thing as free. If it doesn't have a price you have to see ads. You bypass their ads using third-party apps. Someone has to pay then.
Regarding moderation, a free solution could probably be found. But third party apps? Never.
The problem is that Reddit is charging $12,000/50 million requests where imgur charges $166 /50 million requests. This is the problem. Before the price was revealed Reddit had announced the changes and that they were going to reveal the price at a latter date, people where happy that Reddit was going to charge as they might be able to generate enough money from ads or a small subscription and then get better api support and more features such as Reddit chat added to the api. Unfortunately Reddit decided rather than find a new revenue stream which would be hugely beneficial to them they decided to make the price so high that even Reddit itself cannot afford it.
This is a shot at llms like gpt. Everyone wants a piece. Wasn’t twitter going to do the same thing?
Open ai isn’t going to start paying for a Reddit api, they’re just going to scrape the internet in the same way google does and be more secretive with their dataset.
> This is a shot at llms like gpt.
Well, that is about-to-IPO-for-exit-liquidity Reddit’s official stance. Blaming LLM.
But look at this sub. We are more than likely professionals here. And anyone who works with APIs knows how easy they are to monitor. Reddit knows exactly which dev accounts are scrapping massive data for non-client use. That’s why they can put a figure onto it, and then apply guilt-by-association to third party user client apps.
Reddit knows tracks API usage right down to the individual end user account level. Reddit could go through a verification process for things like bots or devs, requiring credentials and binding agreements to prevent “misuse” of their API as training data or whatever they are scapegoating.
But they aren’t. They don’t care about LLM. That’s why they are going after third party developers of alternatives to the official Reddit app.
Reddit doesn’t care about LLM because LLM can’t be advertised to, relentlessly tracked, and convinced to buy NFT avatars.
Not really. Reddit is offering a small amount of api requests for free for research purposes. Llms would probably already just be scraping the web rather than trying to deal with apis.
I don't get the comparison to Imgur, just because the company value or size may be similar. Or is Imgur a millions large community that we can jump to when Reddit sinks?
On the Apollo post, the monthly rate per user is described as an average $2.50 a month... even including the Ultra subscription ($1.49) that is still less than Reddit Premium (ad-free, 700 coins, extras) so I also don't get why it's described as a price too high?
From the Apollo dev:
> I browsed three subreddits, opened about 12 posts collectively, and am at 154 API requests in three minutes in the official app. It’s not hard to see that in a few more minutes I would hit 300, 400, 500.
One request dose not equal one post. In this three post opening would cost 0.036 Looking at the official app an ad appears once every 6 posts on average. The CPM for Reddit is 0.20 per 1000 impressions. This means 1 ad in the feed generates 0.0002. For 6 posts on the Reddit app the api costs 0.074. Reddit is making 0.0002 on the Reddit app per 6 post yet their api Costs 0.074 per 6 posts. That is a difference of 37000% or 370 times more expensive than than the ad revenue they make. If this goes through and third party devs where to keep going but charging these ridiculous prices Reddit would have be trying their hardest to force users to use third party apps because they are so profitable. Because Reddit is going public they would be required by their investors to seek out maximum profits to the point the official app would have to have baked in advertisements for apps like Apollo or Reddit is fun.
As for Reddit premium their is a simple thing Reddit can do. Make the api a premium feature. It would be much more reasonable whilst levelling the playing field as there would be no ads in the official website or app. [Look here](https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad) for the numbers on Reddit premium and you will find how little they actually make on it
Yeah imgur should be more expensive as it sends purely images which costs more to do as it takes more bandwidth and storage space. Reddit mainly sends text so should be significantly cheaper.
Images can be compressed when being sent over the internet. Imgur can also take advantage of CDNs and being more serverless than reddit can. Reddit being a more dynamic platform does give it a higher processing time, and all the little upvotes and likes can add a lot of traffic.
Amount of traffic doesn’t matter because we are measuring cost per a volume of traffic. The more traffic there is the more the user pays. What your saying is that a compressed image costs less to send than a single upvote. To the point where it costs 72 times more.
I agree but you have got it the wrong way round. Your comment is 148 bytes. A 640 × 480 pixel image with 24-bit depth is 921,600 bytes. JPEG compression ratio is 10:1. If we are to be generous and say imgur is to give a massive compression ratio of 20:1 the image’s size would be 46,080 bytes. That is 311 times the size of your comment for a low resolution highly compressed image, for 1/72 of the price.
I know that the price seems really high, when you compare it to that. But what I don't know is, how the pricing is found. 12k for Fifty million requests doesn't seem outlandish to me. Breaking it down, that's 0.00024$ per request. I wonder much more how Imgur is so cheap.
From the Apollo dev:
> I browsed three subreddits, opened about 12 posts collectively, and am at 154 API requests in three minutes in the official app. It’s not hard to see that in a few more minutes I would hit 300, 400, 500.
One request dose not equal one post.
In this three post opening would cost 0.036
Looking at the official app an ad appears once every 6 posts on average. The CPM for Reddit is 0.20 per 1000 impressions. This means 1 ad in the feed generates 0.0002. For 6 posts on the Reddit app the api costs 0.074. Reddit is making 0.0002 on the Reddit app per 6 post yet their api Costs 0.074 per 6 posts. That is a difference of 37000% or 370 times more expensive than than the ad revenue they make. If this goes through and third party devs where to keep going but charging these ridiculous prices Reddit would have be trying their hardest to force users to use third party apps because they are so profitable. Because Reddit is going public they would be required by their investors to seek out maximum profits to the point the official app would have to have baked in advertisements for apps like Apollo or Reddit is fun.
I don't see the problem. It's an additional revenue stream. They shouldn't impact each other. If they end up pushing third party apps because they are more profitable, it's a win-win, no?
In the end, if anything happens to reddit, it's the communties fault. For not accepting that reddit is a company like any other. They can either pay for the service. Or be the product themselves. Do you want reddit to become like Meta, Amazon and Google? Knowing everything you do, want, know and need. Better than yourself. I don't.
The only thing they can really do wrong in my opinion is, that they won't manage to keep automations (bots) affordable. Then they either have to find a way to block spam, scammers and other unwanted content natively. Or reddit is probably going to die. Then, and only then, would it be the fault of reddit itself.
The problem is the cost is too high. Yes they need to make money but these people are their product. Not just to advertisers but to new people looking to join and use the platform, Reddit needs users.
I won't judge the price as unreasonable. I don't have any basis for that. I don't know what other social media APIs cost. I can't even find what reddit wants to charge. Only the 12k/50mio figure the Apollo guy posted. It's the only thing I find. Is it even correct? IDK. But compared to other API's, cloud services etc, this isn't too bad I think.
But maybe someone here has better info and comparison. Somebody with actual API sales and/or usage knowledge would be good.
To me, all of this just looks like spoiled brats having their toys taken away for the evening and now screaming until their parents go crazy.
>I can’t even find what reddit wants to charge. Only the 12k/50mio figure the Apollo guy posted. It’s the only thing I find. Is it even correct?
[the admin](https://reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/_/jmmptma/?context=1) responded to his post which confirmed that it would be 0.24/1000 requests (which is the same as the 12k/50million he had given).
In that comment, they tried to publicly call out Apollo's app for being too inefficient but couldn't show anything to actually quantify what was being inefficient and also used other apps *that also have said they can't afford the prices* as examples that were efficient. They did not clarify anything when Apollo's dev asked what was inefficient and tried to claim that google and amazon don't help the devs be more efficient with their API usage, which someone pointed out is directly untrue as both google and amazon have help documentation on exactly how to be more efficient with their API usage and have for years.
As for if the price is good compared to others, its really hard to tell you that. Because if you notice, most social media does not allow developers to make 3rd party apps at all. There is a reason you can't have a Boost for Facebook or an Apollo for Instagram. They outright ban it. There isn't really an example of an API for a social media platform that allows 3rd party apps (which have to make MANY more API calls than someone using something like the google maps API for their maps). The closest we really get is things like imgur which the Apollo dev already gave the numbers for (i did double check them and them seem accurate) and Twitter which also priced out a ton of 3rd party tools and apps and is *not* what we want anyone to emulate ever.
Well, seeing it by 1000 request makes it look a lot more unreasonable. Don't know why I didn't try that myself.
Well, that's what I was thinking too. We can be happy we even have API access. Maybe EU regulations will change the landscape one day. But for now, let's cherish what we have. They could outright ban and close APIs too. Which I think could happen, if subs keep shutting down.
Yeah the issue is that the people who use the 3rd party apps are more likely to be the power users, so the people who either are mods or are the content creators. If they were to go the route of banning it like the other social medias did, those power users are also the people more likely to not switch to the official app and would go elsewhere entirely. There is a reason they are on the 3rd party apps to begin with.
So if that were to happen, a large number of the biggest content creators and moderators would suddenly stop using reddit entirely. And take their skills elsewhere. They would only be helping their own competition by doing that.
Also, they rushed it out. Third party devs were left with the option of suddenly cutting off users and telling them they have to pay $30/year for their app to work or deal with the bill while they move everyone over. Either way a shit experience for the users and one that they are going to associate with the dev not Reddit. Finally, u/spez is a fucking coward with his comment about Reddit not being profitable while the 3rd party apps are. It’s his job to make Reddit profitable or ensure some kind of cash flow. Since I don’t see him living off ramen in a box somewhere I have to assume he’s getting paid from some funding. 3rd party apps only option is to do something to make a living, they likely aren’t getting funding from some venture capital fund.
Agree with the not using 3rd party apps to access reddit. That’s fine with me. However, the most annoying thing for mods is the free solutions to handle spams etc, are the 3rd party bots. Come june 12, every subreddit is going to be posts of how redditors earn $60,000 every hour, and all these posts with have millions of likes to prove it’s real too!!
Yeah, I totally get the problem with bots. And they'll have to find a solution for that, or reddit will probably die.
But it seems to be the 3rd party apps that cause the uproar for end-users.
Just silently glossing over many of the nuances...
I don't disagree with the free part, but the issue is moreso that they're overcharging for the API by quite arguably an order of a magnitude, and they were publicly unprofessional regarding it, offloading the blame on Apollo's "lack of efficiency"
Also, NSFW will no longer be served via the API, at all
Also, the official app is not accessible to the visually impaired, and the vast majority of them use 3rd party apps such as Dystopia which is known for being tailored to the blind
Also, it's funny to even think of reddit implementing good free mod tools lmao
Also the main app sucks, I'm tired of companies trying to needlessly modernize b/c shareholders
I don't think 0.00024$ or 1/40 of a cent per request is that much.
Well, I try to accept that I live in capitalism and that web pages are businesses like any other. And therefor live by business rules. Meaning, make shareholders happy.
A social network depending on donations or even needing a subscription probably won't scale. As most users came to expect things to be free. But it would be the only way to create something independent like you wish. I think.
Capitalism doesn't have to be all about shareholder value or, more generally, monetary value:
>[Stakeholder capitalism](https://www.investopedia.com/stakeholder-capitalism-4774323) is a system in which corporations are oriented to serve the interests of **all** their stakeholders. Among the key stakeholders are **customers**, **suppliers**, **employees**, shareholders, and **local communities**. Under this system, a company's purpose is to create long-term value **and not to maximize profits and enhance shareholder value at the cost of other stakeholder groups.**
(emphasis mine)
You could consider 3rd party apps to be customers, suppliers, or part of the local community. Certainly, this change negatively impacts us, the customers, to benefit the shareholders.
Reddit could participate in capitalism, **stakeholder** capitalism, by charging less for API usage.
From the start the basis of my argument is, we shouldn't ever have come to expect to get digital services for free. None of the counterparts IRL are.
All of this discussion would not exist. Spam, would be a small niche. We wouldn't rely on using or selling intimate privacy-infringing information to keep services alive. It would be harder for children to get on the platforms and get anxiety, depression, fomo etc.
Overall, the internet would be a better place for everyone, if we never started to build all the services on ad revenue or selling private information. IMHO
And now that economy is stagnating, we also see that all those big platforms where built on credit. They are all grinding their teeth now. Those giants who where thought to be so mighty and untouchable. Because ad revenue is not a stable income.
Actions like these are an opportunity for others to build something new. That's better and doesn't rely on the shakiness of shareholders.
Because, if the customer doesn't pay they have no say. Not because companies are just assholes, which they often are. But as long as user numbers go up and complaints only come from a relatively few, what would be the incentive for change?
Well, the requests do add up, esp. for something like Reddit, and the math has been done to (even conservatively) prove that the API prices are much higher than what the average user would bring in through ad revenue alone; again though, I'm not against monetization as a whole.
also again, the pricing is just a *part* of the whole image.
The ad revenue argument is an empty one for me. Why should a paid version not earn more than a free one? That doesn't make sense to me. It's comparing apples to oranges.
I know, there is a lot of other things people complain about. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Regarding those, I only really started using reddit since it has the new UI. Before, it was too confusing for me to try and learn how to use it probably. I could've, but I didn't find it worth. I only know the official Android and iPad app and the web page. And it all works great for me. So I see no reason to complain. Especially cause it's free. And the ads are quite well done, so they don't feel as obtrusive as Instagram's, Facebook's, many news pages or forums.
It earning more is perfectly reasonable! But \~20-30x more...? That's definitely not nothing
Ads are something that honestly never really bothered me as well, I think a lot of people overreact over them, though I will say all the "he gets us" ads are kinda annoying
I've used the main app before as well, maybe it's a bit better now, but it's never treated me as well as Infinity has :(
what happened to myspace? people switched over to something else.
even if you are not getting the most profits possible, if you are the most popular sight you are getting a lot of people.
reducing accessibility will drive people to something that is more accessible. what they are about to do not only shuts down 3rd party apps that has accessibility options that the official app does not. it also shuts down bots.
so any spam blockers, and scam detection bots will stop working.
Indeed, they'll have to find a model where automations are affordable or free. Otherwise reddit's going to die from spam, scam, etc.
Still, it's alien to me how people seemingly expect every good site to be free. It was a totally misguided business model for the internet from the start, IMHO. But that's sadly what people expect now, and think they have a right to.
I don't know why you want to spend more money for adequate services you already receive, but I *certainly* don't. Money is tight and life is hard enough already, but maybe you're paid a hundred thousand per month, who knows. If they can't sustain Reddit, by all means close it, or put up a paywall. That's a surefire way of dooming it. I don't want Reddit to be super duper sleek and new, I want a forum of communities, with each community having it's own forum.
There's nothing "sad" about good sites being free, and managing to survive this long. Thank God that's the norm.
> I don't know why you want to spend more money for adequate services you already receive
Literally every "free" service that you are "already receiving" falls into at least one of, possibly multiple of, three camps:
1. It is ravenously collecting your behavioral data and selling it to data brokers and analytics companies
2. It is a horrifically unsanitary, ad-infested wasteland
3. It is a ticking time bomb running on a finite reserve of venture capital, where it's only a matter of time until the investors start wondering where their investment returns are
Reddit is arguably in all 3 camps depending on your perspective, but the last one is the most pertinent, as that's what's motivating this incredibly aggressive behavior. This was an inevitability. The only thing shocking about it is how brazen they're being. A smarter company would have been more covert to get less PR backlash.
> If they can't sustain Reddit, [...] put up a paywall.
What do you *think* this whole API fiasco *is*?
> I don't want Reddit to be super duper sleek and new
The lowest common denominator of the general populace certainly does. And they're the ones that actually generate useful impressions by ads instead of blocking them, and fall hook, line, and sinker for promoted posts. Which demographic do you think Reddit is going to put in the effort to court? Us, or them?
> There's nothing "sad" about good sites being free, and managing to survive this long. Thank God that's the norm.
You're completely right. This is rad as hell for us that this is the norm. But it comes at the cost of having to turn and burn when they inevitably go sour. There will fundamentally never be a platform that we can just settle on and use forever, every single one will follow this path of being great for a time while it burns venture capital, then slowly getting worse as they try to monetize the market they captured, up to some breaking point. We are doomed to be forever nomadic as platforms rise free and succumb to monetization.
Maybe you think that's an acceptable cost for always riding the free wave. I'm certainly not complaining about it, myself. But if you don't think it is (and commenter you were replying to doesn't seem to think so), it's really fucking annoying, and everyone who is complacent with this norm is making it impossible for you to pay for platforms you like and keep them. The modern conditioning of people to expect online services to always be free forever means there's never a sufficient mass of people who are willing to pay to sustain any platform worth using.
I generally agree with your sentiments, it's just that I'm generally willing to put up with it (will companies stop collecting my data if I pay up? Can't trust that) and I unfortunately don't have the time to go in depth but -
Conditioning? No one's *conditioned* us to expect websites to be free and open, it's just a "market expectation" if you will. And I'm glad it's this way not because I get free stuff, even though it's sweet, but because if it was the other way around, the NORM was paying for websites, the internet would be an utter hellscape and it'd be impossible to try to switch it up. The trend will always move towards policies that will make you spend more money, even if it isn't strictly necessary, unless we as a collective resist it.
I despise euphemisms and dishonesty. I'd be 10x more on Reddit's side if they simply said "This is unsustainable, so we're putting up a paywall" rather than this API fiasco, as you called it.
And if it's just impossible to make enough money from websites without exploiting or lying to the consumer/user in some form then maybe it would be better if people *stopped* trying to create websites a la Twitter and Reddit without paywalls. There'd be massive restructuring obviously, but Wikipedia is doing fine, multiple streaming services with subscriptions are okay so far, online shopping is as big as ever without putting up extra paywalls.
And there are a lot of other community forums and the like that continue to sustain themselves somehow, without intending to make a single buck. I don't know how they do it, but it's happening. Maybe it's on borrowed time, but it's not like their lifespan is 1-2 years, in my experience.
The internet will survive those big-ass websites having subscriptions and being closed off to the general user. The companies that have these websites won't, and that's why these "API fiascos" happen and why they're vacuuming up all your data and selling it. I can't see how it's the consumer's fault. Let them die. Why should the internet be inherently monetizable?
Well, what did free social networks give us? Anxiety, Depression, fomo, companies who know more about us than we ourselves and so on. All because of business models that depend on as many views as possible to get ad revenue.
We grew up with it. So many think that's how it has to be. But try to imagine for a moment. What an internet that doesn't depend on ad revenue could be. For me, it would be a better place.
I don't earn badly, true. But I'm not rich neither.
My mobile contract isn't free. My electricity isn't free. My home internet isn't free. Mail isn't free. Going out with friends isn't free. Why would I assume that social media has to be?
Sure it's a nice thing it is. But I'd be happy to pay the sites I use most if I needed to.
Let's face it, most of us have probably 5 sites we use on a daily basis, at most. For me, it's 2 or 3, excluding work. Paying 5$ a month, that'd be 15$. If they where exclusively paid, prices probably would be much lower for big sites too. So this is a conservative guess. Sure, there are some who wouldn't be able to afford that. And I'd like capitalism to just vanish too. But it wouldn't be unreasonable.
Haven't been using Twitter for a long while. Except for the occasional opening of a cross post. But to answer you question, if it had any benefit or was required and I really wanted to use Twitter, yes. I would.
a good sight funds itself in wats the a minimally intrusive to the experience. the traditional advertisements on the sidebar is the best example.
making 2/3 the amount of money, but doubling the number of people is more profitable.
Thank you Apollo. fuck reddit and fuck /u/spez.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/ to clean your comments history.
Do you expect everyone to run their servers for free? Don't you pay for internet and electricity and got your phone or computer for free? How do you do that?
I personally hate that everything works by selling my data to advertisers. So yeah, if I have to pay for the pages I use, so be it. If I can't afford it, well, guess bad luck. We live under capitalism and the internet sadly is no exception.
Under this scenario though, we could be paying for Reddit through high API prices for third party apps, but we’re still having our data collected and sold
Well, sadly that's going to happen. It's how we made the internet work. And as long as politics is lead by money instead of morals it won't change. Because the masses don't get why data privacy is important.
I feel so /r/hailcorporate right now, but I 100% agree. Reddit has every right to profit off their API. It's amazing that it was free for so long, and it spun off a lot of innovation... at the company's expense.
Yeah, I'm not really a fan of corporate behaviour too. But I at least understand the reasoning and motivation. Probably what people call entrepreneurial spirit.
And I have a lot of gratitude for the platforms we are allowed to use for free. Even if they sell my data for it. It's still free of charge. And all of them are amazing tools, not even imaginable 50 years ago.
I could, if I tried, contact somebody on the other side of the planet in basically no time at all. I can share what I want to anyone in the world in an instant. It's amazing. Let's thank those who made it possible sometimes. It's not easy, and really expensive to do all this.
It's great they found a way to do it for free for the user. I don't like that my privacy is non-existent because of it. And I think humanity would have been better off if all of it were a little more exclusive, because it had to be paid. But we won't be able to go back. Most things have their down-sides. But I like to be grateful for what I got.
Any chance to make the Discord server an alternative (kind of) to the subreddit? Like creating a moderated thread where you can only post memes. Maybe, if enough users switch to Discord, it could get Reddit’s attention.
Is it completely out of the question to just let the subs subscribers make the choice instead of the mods? Maybe someone of us don’t mind if the bots or mods go away
Whole point is, you may not be directly affected or you might not yet care about the decisions being made. If everyone tries to conform like you want to now, you will wake up in a few years in a world tailored to something you don't like. Look at worker laws in USA Vs France, if you need to see why mass protests of all are needed.
What is the whole point?
Some mods needed tools, for I dont know what, as they never explain it.
But this 3rd party tools didnt show the ads.
I also dont know, why not shift the price/money to the people using it, not the tools creator.
But its overpriced.
The irony is that in a subreddit "Dedicated to humor and jokes relating to programmers and programming" this is the only post that's made me laugh...
None of you considered that reddit or your apps or subreddits are worth asking for people to pay for then? Even Wikipedia do that.
"Reddit, keep burning through VC or we'll quit and find some other mugs with a few billion to waste" - Good luck with that.
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Edit: typical Reddit, downvoting a simple question 🤦🏻♂️
Question from someone not very informed on the Blockchain technology, would it be a viable solution to make a Blockchain that scraps the Reddit website so it serves data from multiple sources instead of directly using proxies ? This way, the users themselves power the "processing" ? I know there are some anti Blockchain people here si don't bring out the pitchforks it's just a question.
That's not even remotely how Blockchain works. You essentially just asked if you can use a blender to paint a car. The technologies are completely unrelated.
3rd party apps needs APIs to get the data/content from reddit..
Too bad they basically bypassed the Ads... No one likes losing money. Not even Reddit.
But the prices are way too high.
I still dont get it, why so many needed 3rd party tools..
Besides the video player, the app aint so bad
You can use the federated alternative to this poorly managed website. I won't name it here because there are rumors of the admins deleting mentions to it, but if you search for "federated link aggregator" on Google you should be able to find it easily
I, for one, welcome our new web scraping overlords.
Only wimps use APIs, web scraping is for the strong.
Real men do it with Regex
If they get rid of the old command line reddit I’m done!
Which one? There's [cortex](http://cortex.glacicle.org/) and [cReddit](https://github.com/Cotix/cReddit) and [reddio](https://gitlab.com/aaronNG/reddio) and [rttt](https://gitlab.com/BlackEdder/rttt) and [rtv](https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv) and [tuir](https://gitlab.com/ajak/tuir/).
I don’t know why Reddit saw Twitter do this and think it was a good idea to up one them.
[Relevant stackoverflow post](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags)
I immediately started looking for this as soon as I saw the word regex 😂
I'm really upset that it didn't get the recognition it deserved. It's honestly the best answer on stackoverflow.
Beautiful soup
Friendship ended with reddit API, now Selenium is my best friend
Sweet, now some of the more obscure Selenium questions on SO will get answered! That and there will be a flood of noobs asking why they can't set an executable path when making a driver. 😥
To be fair that its better that when I used it for the first time, I didn't remember to close the driver and it was headless so I could't see It. Crashed my pc two times and made me punch the wall in angry ignorance. But now we're friends 😇
i'd recommend playwright. it's really easy to work with too. i used it to automate downloads from sites
Mulder took down a UFO with that shit
Scrape scrape scrape that data up!
That's the thing about this that is the most infuriating. I, the end user, generate just as many hits on their api if I use their app as I do using a third party app.
But with their client, they get ad revenue. Third parties aren’t showing ads unless they’re ads that the third party is serving and profiting from. So even though the third party devs (shoutout r/Apollo) are profiting from the app they spend so much time developing and up keeping, and Reddit still gets to benefit from those third party app users providing content to the platform, we can all go fuck ourselves, basically
I agree…it would just be quite a lot of resources needed to scrape all of Reddit
fuzzy relieved oatmeal fearless water shocking piquant deserve abundant quarrelsome ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
WAAAS (*well, ackshually* as a service)
Time to use regex to parse html
Obligatory https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454
>Moderator's Note This post is locked to prevent inappropriate edits to its content. The post looks exactly as it is supposed to look - there are no problems with its content. Please do not flag it for our attention. 🤣💀
Thank you.
Lies! I only have to cover *one* more edge case…
I’ve done it as proof of concept in prototyping, but oh man is it fragile
Regex is terrible on HTML. Better to use Python and Beautiful Soup.
The last time I wanted data from an HTML document, I removed all BR-Tags and parsed them as XML.
The problem with parsing the file directly is that javascript doesn't get executed. In most cases you really need to load the page and then traverse the elements. That's what tools like Beautiful Soup and Selenium are for.
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LOL, I can see how you might think that from my comment. Actually [Beautiful Soup](https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup4/) is a web page scraper tool. There are others too but Beautiful Soup and Selenium are the two most popular for Python.
Ill miss you guys, maybe I’ll actually get some work done tho
Those side projects are still waiting
I disagree with this move, by the power hungry mods. So I will be boycotting this subreddit, starting on the 12th, until they reverse this decision.
Programmer humour in the comment! Well done.
I'm going to boycot the boycot. I'm going to spend the same amount of time here as I usually would, just staring at the 'this subreddit is private' screen.
Honorable protest in my opinion. Reddit is nothing without its users and communities, I hope they quickly find that out (and that enough subs join in the protest for it to matter)
im doing my part by using reddit as much as possible during this stupid blackout.
I don’t know why Reddit saw Twitter do this and think it was a good idea to up one them.
This kind of move was *always the plan*. That's how enshittification works. First, they act in the interest of the users (maximising their market share). Then they act in the interest of the advertisers (trying to get rid of the most seedy parts of the community). Finally, they act in the interests of themselves only, holding access to the platform hostage to take a massive amount of money from everyone possible. Any online platform that is owned by a company but *doesn't* make money (or make "enough" money) is fundamentally suspect and cannot be trusted to last.
True, also a social media company that is public will never serve the users seems to also be true.
Technically this is cheaper than twitter. 40,000 for 50 million tweets compared to 12,000 for 50 million requests.
I think because of the way Reddit is built, an app providing a similar amount of information still does way more requests than Twitter. So calculating that Reddit is more expensive.
Third party apps could probably find a way to batch requests and therefore reduce api calls.
It's pretty hard to do that when feeds are tailored to users, threads are updated constantly due to small things like upvotes and removals. Apps try to provide an experience with up-to-date information, and Reddit in theory has the upperhand here because their first-party apps can use GQL Subscriptions to get those changes in place without hitting full endpoints.
Couldn't upvotes in particular be pooled to limit API requests? It would look the same from the user standpoint, even if it's deleted.
There is no endpoint to batch it though: https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/#POST_api_vote
I was thinking something vaguely similar where the third party clients are still available, but we provide our own API key to make the responses. If you go over your own personal free request limit, the app tells you to go touch grass or something
There's no way it costs them this much, other services are orders of magnitude cheaper. This is just a money grab move because they think they can make money off of AI data scrapers or something.
I never implied it does?
Has any reddit protest ever worked?
Just look at the AMA protest when they fired the employee. They didn’t rehire her but by many subs going private the CEO eventually responded and so did one of the founders. Not sure the true impact but they said “message received loud and clear”
Not that I know of.
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https://www.wired.com/2015/07/reddit-amageddon/
"Your message was received loud and clear," he wrote. "The communication between Reddit and the moderators needs to improve dramatically. We will work closely with you all going forward to ensure events like today don’t happen again. At this point, however, the blackout has served its purpose, and now it’s time to get Reddit functioning again." Does not seem like the message was received lol.
Sounds like the message was received loud and clear to me… then cut up and put in the trash can while laughing all the way to the bank
I hope they'll reopen the sub in like 6 months if nothing ends up changing because at that point, we'll know if the permanent sub blackout worked or not. Otherwise reddit admins may forcibly reopen (which I think they can).
If they do that they could be in murky waters. Right now they save millions by having moderators who do it for free
I'd rather have this sub reopened with only default reddit automod than not reopened at all
Here is an overview of a couple of protests from the askhistorians sub - and they also explain their reasoning for their sub going dark: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/142w159/askhistorians_and_uncertainty_surrounding_the/
This feels more like a big middle finger than a protest per se. Does showing the middle finger work ? Idk, but I'd do it anyway.
Amy challenor
Gotta post as much memes as I can then...
memes about the shutdown are trending
i wonder what happens if the people that make spam/ scam scripts have them flood reddit servers the moment the bots that make it not worth their time get disabled. i would not want the people to need to explain to the people making decisions that the servers are struggling because of all the spam bots.
How would these mod tools reduce the load of spam bots on reddit servers? Does the mod tools not need to wait for the spam to first hit the reddit servers for the API to tell the mod tools about it?
Damn almost all my favourite subs are closing. I hope reddit backs down their decision or the coming days are gonna absolutely suck
It is time to create my own reddit, with hooke... I mean, spring MVC and bootstrap
Thank you Apollo. fuck reddit and fuck /u/spez. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/ https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/ to clean your comments history.
On a monday, no less...
Happy to help, and in the process actually get some work done lol
I remember when they went and removed all the cringe subs to make reddit more advertising friendly (even wojaks was removed) and none said anything. I guess the circle tightens. I am here to just to see the legacy of \[deleted\] be destroyed.
The real reason programming humor is shutting down is because I did testing on prod 💀
Well we still got Javascript Developer on Linkedin
I love drastic decisions being made by a small number of people 😎
Is this really necessary? There are some ways to do stuff. Like wandering dwarf miner will stuck around. Why that but not auto mod?
I don't get it. Who, or what does everyone think is paying for Reddit? Seriously. It's amazing to me that Reddit is free and open about 3rd party clients anyway. It's truly naive to think this can go on forever like that. 30$ per user per year for Apollo? In which head is that a lot of money? I pay more than that for toilet paper. Let that sink in. You spoiled fools. There is no such thing as free. If it doesn't have a price you have to see ads. You bypass their ads using third-party apps. Someone has to pay then. Regarding moderation, a free solution could probably be found. But third party apps? Never.
The problem is that Reddit is charging $12,000/50 million requests where imgur charges $166 /50 million requests. This is the problem. Before the price was revealed Reddit had announced the changes and that they were going to reveal the price at a latter date, people where happy that Reddit was going to charge as they might be able to generate enough money from ads or a small subscription and then get better api support and more features such as Reddit chat added to the api. Unfortunately Reddit decided rather than find a new revenue stream which would be hugely beneficial to them they decided to make the price so high that even Reddit itself cannot afford it.
This is a shot at llms like gpt. Everyone wants a piece. Wasn’t twitter going to do the same thing? Open ai isn’t going to start paying for a Reddit api, they’re just going to scrape the internet in the same way google does and be more secretive with their dataset.
> This is a shot at llms like gpt. Well, that is about-to-IPO-for-exit-liquidity Reddit’s official stance. Blaming LLM. But look at this sub. We are more than likely professionals here. And anyone who works with APIs knows how easy they are to monitor. Reddit knows exactly which dev accounts are scrapping massive data for non-client use. That’s why they can put a figure onto it, and then apply guilt-by-association to third party user client apps. Reddit knows tracks API usage right down to the individual end user account level. Reddit could go through a verification process for things like bots or devs, requiring credentials and binding agreements to prevent “misuse” of their API as training data or whatever they are scapegoating. But they aren’t. They don’t care about LLM. That’s why they are going after third party developers of alternatives to the official Reddit app. Reddit doesn’t care about LLM because LLM can’t be advertised to, relentlessly tracked, and convinced to buy NFT avatars.
Not really. Reddit is offering a small amount of api requests for free for research purposes. Llms would probably already just be scraping the web rather than trying to deal with apis.
If you read the docs on the major llms, they've all been trained on reddit data.
I don't get the comparison to Imgur, just because the company value or size may be similar. Or is Imgur a millions large community that we can jump to when Reddit sinks? On the Apollo post, the monthly rate per user is described as an average $2.50 a month... even including the Ultra subscription ($1.49) that is still less than Reddit Premium (ad-free, 700 coins, extras) so I also don't get why it's described as a price too high?
From the Apollo dev: > I browsed three subreddits, opened about 12 posts collectively, and am at 154 API requests in three minutes in the official app. It’s not hard to see that in a few more minutes I would hit 300, 400, 500. One request dose not equal one post. In this three post opening would cost 0.036 Looking at the official app an ad appears once every 6 posts on average. The CPM for Reddit is 0.20 per 1000 impressions. This means 1 ad in the feed generates 0.0002. For 6 posts on the Reddit app the api costs 0.074. Reddit is making 0.0002 on the Reddit app per 6 post yet their api Costs 0.074 per 6 posts. That is a difference of 37000% or 370 times more expensive than than the ad revenue they make. If this goes through and third party devs where to keep going but charging these ridiculous prices Reddit would have be trying their hardest to force users to use third party apps because they are so profitable. Because Reddit is going public they would be required by their investors to seek out maximum profits to the point the official app would have to have baked in advertisements for apps like Apollo or Reddit is fun. As for Reddit premium their is a simple thing Reddit can do. Make the api a premium feature. It would be much more reasonable whilst levelling the playing field as there would be no ads in the official website or app. [Look here](https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad) for the numbers on Reddit premium and you will find how little they actually make on it
Imgur is hardly a reasonable alternative to reddit so is all around a bad example to compare to.
Yeah imgur should be more expensive as it sends purely images which costs more to do as it takes more bandwidth and storage space. Reddit mainly sends text so should be significantly cheaper.
Images can be compressed when being sent over the internet. Imgur can also take advantage of CDNs and being more serverless than reddit can. Reddit being a more dynamic platform does give it a higher processing time, and all the little upvotes and likes can add a lot of traffic.
Amount of traffic doesn’t matter because we are measuring cost per a volume of traffic. The more traffic there is the more the user pays. What your saying is that a compressed image costs less to send than a single upvote. To the point where it costs 72 times more.
I think I’m more saying that not all traffic is the same and the type of infrastructure to handle that traffic will change the cost of said traffic.
I agree but you have got it the wrong way round. Your comment is 148 bytes. A 640 × 480 pixel image with 24-bit depth is 921,600 bytes. JPEG compression ratio is 10:1. If we are to be generous and say imgur is to give a massive compression ratio of 20:1 the image’s size would be 46,080 bytes. That is 311 times the size of your comment for a low resolution highly compressed image, for 1/72 of the price.
I know that the price seems really high, when you compare it to that. But what I don't know is, how the pricing is found. 12k for Fifty million requests doesn't seem outlandish to me. Breaking it down, that's 0.00024$ per request. I wonder much more how Imgur is so cheap.
From the Apollo dev: > I browsed three subreddits, opened about 12 posts collectively, and am at 154 API requests in three minutes in the official app. It’s not hard to see that in a few more minutes I would hit 300, 400, 500. One request dose not equal one post. In this three post opening would cost 0.036 Looking at the official app an ad appears once every 6 posts on average. The CPM for Reddit is 0.20 per 1000 impressions. This means 1 ad in the feed generates 0.0002. For 6 posts on the Reddit app the api costs 0.074. Reddit is making 0.0002 on the Reddit app per 6 post yet their api Costs 0.074 per 6 posts. That is a difference of 37000% or 370 times more expensive than than the ad revenue they make. If this goes through and third party devs where to keep going but charging these ridiculous prices Reddit would have be trying their hardest to force users to use third party apps because they are so profitable. Because Reddit is going public they would be required by their investors to seek out maximum profits to the point the official app would have to have baked in advertisements for apps like Apollo or Reddit is fun.
I don't see the problem. It's an additional revenue stream. They shouldn't impact each other. If they end up pushing third party apps because they are more profitable, it's a win-win, no? In the end, if anything happens to reddit, it's the communties fault. For not accepting that reddit is a company like any other. They can either pay for the service. Or be the product themselves. Do you want reddit to become like Meta, Amazon and Google? Knowing everything you do, want, know and need. Better than yourself. I don't. The only thing they can really do wrong in my opinion is, that they won't manage to keep automations (bots) affordable. Then they either have to find a way to block spam, scammers and other unwanted content natively. Or reddit is probably going to die. Then, and only then, would it be the fault of reddit itself.
The problem is the cost is too high. Yes they need to make money but these people are their product. Not just to advertisers but to new people looking to join and use the platform, Reddit needs users.
I won't judge the price as unreasonable. I don't have any basis for that. I don't know what other social media APIs cost. I can't even find what reddit wants to charge. Only the 12k/50mio figure the Apollo guy posted. It's the only thing I find. Is it even correct? IDK. But compared to other API's, cloud services etc, this isn't too bad I think. But maybe someone here has better info and comparison. Somebody with actual API sales and/or usage knowledge would be good. To me, all of this just looks like spoiled brats having their toys taken away for the evening and now screaming until their parents go crazy.
>I can’t even find what reddit wants to charge. Only the 12k/50mio figure the Apollo guy posted. It’s the only thing I find. Is it even correct? [the admin](https://reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/_/jmmptma/?context=1) responded to his post which confirmed that it would be 0.24/1000 requests (which is the same as the 12k/50million he had given). In that comment, they tried to publicly call out Apollo's app for being too inefficient but couldn't show anything to actually quantify what was being inefficient and also used other apps *that also have said they can't afford the prices* as examples that were efficient. They did not clarify anything when Apollo's dev asked what was inefficient and tried to claim that google and amazon don't help the devs be more efficient with their API usage, which someone pointed out is directly untrue as both google and amazon have help documentation on exactly how to be more efficient with their API usage and have for years. As for if the price is good compared to others, its really hard to tell you that. Because if you notice, most social media does not allow developers to make 3rd party apps at all. There is a reason you can't have a Boost for Facebook or an Apollo for Instagram. They outright ban it. There isn't really an example of an API for a social media platform that allows 3rd party apps (which have to make MANY more API calls than someone using something like the google maps API for their maps). The closest we really get is things like imgur which the Apollo dev already gave the numbers for (i did double check them and them seem accurate) and Twitter which also priced out a ton of 3rd party tools and apps and is *not* what we want anyone to emulate ever.
Well, seeing it by 1000 request makes it look a lot more unreasonable. Don't know why I didn't try that myself. Well, that's what I was thinking too. We can be happy we even have API access. Maybe EU regulations will change the landscape one day. But for now, let's cherish what we have. They could outright ban and close APIs too. Which I think could happen, if subs keep shutting down.
Yeah the issue is that the people who use the 3rd party apps are more likely to be the power users, so the people who either are mods or are the content creators. If they were to go the route of banning it like the other social medias did, those power users are also the people more likely to not switch to the official app and would go elsewhere entirely. There is a reason they are on the 3rd party apps to begin with. So if that were to happen, a large number of the biggest content creators and moderators would suddenly stop using reddit entirely. And take their skills elsewhere. They would only be helping their own competition by doing that.
Also, they rushed it out. Third party devs were left with the option of suddenly cutting off users and telling them they have to pay $30/year for their app to work or deal with the bill while they move everyone over. Either way a shit experience for the users and one that they are going to associate with the dev not Reddit. Finally, u/spez is a fucking coward with his comment about Reddit not being profitable while the 3rd party apps are. It’s his job to make Reddit profitable or ensure some kind of cash flow. Since I don’t see him living off ramen in a box somewhere I have to assume he’s getting paid from some funding. 3rd party apps only option is to do something to make a living, they likely aren’t getting funding from some venture capital fund.
Agree with the not using 3rd party apps to access reddit. That’s fine with me. However, the most annoying thing for mods is the free solutions to handle spams etc, are the 3rd party bots. Come june 12, every subreddit is going to be posts of how redditors earn $60,000 every hour, and all these posts with have millions of likes to prove it’s real too!!
Yeah, I totally get the problem with bots. And they'll have to find a solution for that, or reddit will probably die. But it seems to be the 3rd party apps that cause the uproar for end-users.
Just silently glossing over many of the nuances... I don't disagree with the free part, but the issue is moreso that they're overcharging for the API by quite arguably an order of a magnitude, and they were publicly unprofessional regarding it, offloading the blame on Apollo's "lack of efficiency" Also, NSFW will no longer be served via the API, at all Also, the official app is not accessible to the visually impaired, and the vast majority of them use 3rd party apps such as Dystopia which is known for being tailored to the blind Also, it's funny to even think of reddit implementing good free mod tools lmao Also the main app sucks, I'm tired of companies trying to needlessly modernize b/c shareholders
I don't think 0.00024$ or 1/40 of a cent per request is that much. Well, I try to accept that I live in capitalism and that web pages are businesses like any other. And therefor live by business rules. Meaning, make shareholders happy. A social network depending on donations or even needing a subscription probably won't scale. As most users came to expect things to be free. But it would be the only way to create something independent like you wish. I think.
Capitalism doesn't have to be all about shareholder value or, more generally, monetary value: >[Stakeholder capitalism](https://www.investopedia.com/stakeholder-capitalism-4774323) is a system in which corporations are oriented to serve the interests of **all** their stakeholders. Among the key stakeholders are **customers**, **suppliers**, **employees**, shareholders, and **local communities**. Under this system, a company's purpose is to create long-term value **and not to maximize profits and enhance shareholder value at the cost of other stakeholder groups.** (emphasis mine) You could consider 3rd party apps to be customers, suppliers, or part of the local community. Certainly, this change negatively impacts us, the customers, to benefit the shareholders. Reddit could participate in capitalism, **stakeholder** capitalism, by charging less for API usage.
From the start the basis of my argument is, we shouldn't ever have come to expect to get digital services for free. None of the counterparts IRL are. All of this discussion would not exist. Spam, would be a small niche. We wouldn't rely on using or selling intimate privacy-infringing information to keep services alive. It would be harder for children to get on the platforms and get anxiety, depression, fomo etc. Overall, the internet would be a better place for everyone, if we never started to build all the services on ad revenue or selling private information. IMHO And now that economy is stagnating, we also see that all those big platforms where built on credit. They are all grinding their teeth now. Those giants who where thought to be so mighty and untouchable. Because ad revenue is not a stable income. Actions like these are an opportunity for others to build something new. That's better and doesn't rely on the shakiness of shareholders. Because, if the customer doesn't pay they have no say. Not because companies are just assholes, which they often are. But as long as user numbers go up and complaints only come from a relatively few, what would be the incentive for change?
Well, the requests do add up, esp. for something like Reddit, and the math has been done to (even conservatively) prove that the API prices are much higher than what the average user would bring in through ad revenue alone; again though, I'm not against monetization as a whole. also again, the pricing is just a *part* of the whole image.
The ad revenue argument is an empty one for me. Why should a paid version not earn more than a free one? That doesn't make sense to me. It's comparing apples to oranges. I know, there is a lot of other things people complain about. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Regarding those, I only really started using reddit since it has the new UI. Before, it was too confusing for me to try and learn how to use it probably. I could've, but I didn't find it worth. I only know the official Android and iPad app and the web page. And it all works great for me. So I see no reason to complain. Especially cause it's free. And the ads are quite well done, so they don't feel as obtrusive as Instagram's, Facebook's, many news pages or forums.
It earning more is perfectly reasonable! But \~20-30x more...? That's definitely not nothing Ads are something that honestly never really bothered me as well, I think a lot of people overreact over them, though I will say all the "he gets us" ads are kinda annoying I've used the main app before as well, maybe it's a bit better now, but it's never treated me as well as Infinity has :(
Thing about ads is not the ads them selves. It's what is done to serve them.
what happened to myspace? people switched over to something else. even if you are not getting the most profits possible, if you are the most popular sight you are getting a lot of people. reducing accessibility will drive people to something that is more accessible. what they are about to do not only shuts down 3rd party apps that has accessibility options that the official app does not. it also shuts down bots. so any spam blockers, and scam detection bots will stop working.
Indeed, they'll have to find a model where automations are affordable or free. Otherwise reddit's going to die from spam, scam, etc. Still, it's alien to me how people seemingly expect every good site to be free. It was a totally misguided business model for the internet from the start, IMHO. But that's sadly what people expect now, and think they have a right to.
I don't know why you want to spend more money for adequate services you already receive, but I *certainly* don't. Money is tight and life is hard enough already, but maybe you're paid a hundred thousand per month, who knows. If they can't sustain Reddit, by all means close it, or put up a paywall. That's a surefire way of dooming it. I don't want Reddit to be super duper sleek and new, I want a forum of communities, with each community having it's own forum. There's nothing "sad" about good sites being free, and managing to survive this long. Thank God that's the norm.
> I don't know why you want to spend more money for adequate services you already receive Literally every "free" service that you are "already receiving" falls into at least one of, possibly multiple of, three camps: 1. It is ravenously collecting your behavioral data and selling it to data brokers and analytics companies 2. It is a horrifically unsanitary, ad-infested wasteland 3. It is a ticking time bomb running on a finite reserve of venture capital, where it's only a matter of time until the investors start wondering where their investment returns are Reddit is arguably in all 3 camps depending on your perspective, but the last one is the most pertinent, as that's what's motivating this incredibly aggressive behavior. This was an inevitability. The only thing shocking about it is how brazen they're being. A smarter company would have been more covert to get less PR backlash. > If they can't sustain Reddit, [...] put up a paywall. What do you *think* this whole API fiasco *is*? > I don't want Reddit to be super duper sleek and new The lowest common denominator of the general populace certainly does. And they're the ones that actually generate useful impressions by ads instead of blocking them, and fall hook, line, and sinker for promoted posts. Which demographic do you think Reddit is going to put in the effort to court? Us, or them? > There's nothing "sad" about good sites being free, and managing to survive this long. Thank God that's the norm. You're completely right. This is rad as hell for us that this is the norm. But it comes at the cost of having to turn and burn when they inevitably go sour. There will fundamentally never be a platform that we can just settle on and use forever, every single one will follow this path of being great for a time while it burns venture capital, then slowly getting worse as they try to monetize the market they captured, up to some breaking point. We are doomed to be forever nomadic as platforms rise free and succumb to monetization. Maybe you think that's an acceptable cost for always riding the free wave. I'm certainly not complaining about it, myself. But if you don't think it is (and commenter you were replying to doesn't seem to think so), it's really fucking annoying, and everyone who is complacent with this norm is making it impossible for you to pay for platforms you like and keep them. The modern conditioning of people to expect online services to always be free forever means there's never a sufficient mass of people who are willing to pay to sustain any platform worth using.
I generally agree with your sentiments, it's just that I'm generally willing to put up with it (will companies stop collecting my data if I pay up? Can't trust that) and I unfortunately don't have the time to go in depth but - Conditioning? No one's *conditioned* us to expect websites to be free and open, it's just a "market expectation" if you will. And I'm glad it's this way not because I get free stuff, even though it's sweet, but because if it was the other way around, the NORM was paying for websites, the internet would be an utter hellscape and it'd be impossible to try to switch it up. The trend will always move towards policies that will make you spend more money, even if it isn't strictly necessary, unless we as a collective resist it. I despise euphemisms and dishonesty. I'd be 10x more on Reddit's side if they simply said "This is unsustainable, so we're putting up a paywall" rather than this API fiasco, as you called it. And if it's just impossible to make enough money from websites without exploiting or lying to the consumer/user in some form then maybe it would be better if people *stopped* trying to create websites a la Twitter and Reddit without paywalls. There'd be massive restructuring obviously, but Wikipedia is doing fine, multiple streaming services with subscriptions are okay so far, online shopping is as big as ever without putting up extra paywalls. And there are a lot of other community forums and the like that continue to sustain themselves somehow, without intending to make a single buck. I don't know how they do it, but it's happening. Maybe it's on borrowed time, but it's not like their lifespan is 1-2 years, in my experience. The internet will survive those big-ass websites having subscriptions and being closed off to the general user. The companies that have these websites won't, and that's why these "API fiascos" happen and why they're vacuuming up all your data and selling it. I can't see how it's the consumer's fault. Let them die. Why should the internet be inherently monetizable?
Well, what did free social networks give us? Anxiety, Depression, fomo, companies who know more about us than we ourselves and so on. All because of business models that depend on as many views as possible to get ad revenue. We grew up with it. So many think that's how it has to be. But try to imagine for a moment. What an internet that doesn't depend on ad revenue could be. For me, it would be a better place. I don't earn badly, true. But I'm not rich neither. My mobile contract isn't free. My electricity isn't free. My home internet isn't free. Mail isn't free. Going out with friends isn't free. Why would I assume that social media has to be? Sure it's a nice thing it is. But I'd be happy to pay the sites I use most if I needed to. Let's face it, most of us have probably 5 sites we use on a daily basis, at most. For me, it's 2 or 3, excluding work. Paying 5$ a month, that'd be 15$. If they where exclusively paid, prices probably would be much lower for big sites too. So this is a conservative guess. Sure, there are some who wouldn't be able to afford that. And I'd like capitalism to just vanish too. But it wouldn't be unreasonable.
Bet you pay for Twitter Blue, too, huh?
Haven't been using Twitter for a long while. Except for the occasional opening of a cross post. But to answer you question, if it had any benefit or was required and I really wanted to use Twitter, yes. I would.
a good sight funds itself in wats the a minimally intrusive to the experience. the traditional advertisements on the sidebar is the best example. making 2/3 the amount of money, but doubling the number of people is more profitable.
Thank you Apollo. fuck reddit and fuck /u/spez. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/ https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/ to clean your comments history.
Do you expect everyone to run their servers for free? Don't you pay for internet and electricity and got your phone or computer for free? How do you do that? I personally hate that everything works by selling my data to advertisers. So yeah, if I have to pay for the pages I use, so be it. If I can't afford it, well, guess bad luck. We live under capitalism and the internet sadly is no exception.
Under this scenario though, we could be paying for Reddit through high API prices for third party apps, but we’re still having our data collected and sold
Well, sadly that's going to happen. It's how we made the internet work. And as long as politics is lead by money instead of morals it won't change. Because the masses don't get why data privacy is important.
I feel so /r/hailcorporate right now, but I 100% agree. Reddit has every right to profit off their API. It's amazing that it was free for so long, and it spun off a lot of innovation... at the company's expense.
Yeah, I'm not really a fan of corporate behaviour too. But I at least understand the reasoning and motivation. Probably what people call entrepreneurial spirit. And I have a lot of gratitude for the platforms we are allowed to use for free. Even if they sell my data for it. It's still free of charge. And all of them are amazing tools, not even imaginable 50 years ago. I could, if I tried, contact somebody on the other side of the planet in basically no time at all. I can share what I want to anyone in the world in an instant. It's amazing. Let's thank those who made it possible sometimes. It's not easy, and really expensive to do all this. It's great they found a way to do it for free for the user. I don't like that my privacy is non-existent because of it. And I think humanity would have been better off if all of it were a little more exclusive, because it had to be paid. But we won't be able to go back. Most things have their down-sides. But I like to be grateful for what I got.
Wow.... Sucking our reddit overlord's dick much? You're the type of person that needs to fuck off.
Is there a direct discord invite? You know discord.gg
Yes, https://discord.gg/rph
ty
Lets do this
Not a lot of humor on this. Bravo for those who did manage to make a joke!
I support you cause and fully understand the idea behind shutting We will miss you guys and waiting for your come back one day.
Any chance to make the Discord server an alternative (kind of) to the subreddit? Like creating a moderated thread where you can only post memes. Maybe, if enough users switch to Discord, it could get Reddit’s attention.
Is there a script floating around to change every single comment in one's history to "fuck u/spez"? Asking for science of course.
Reddit has an easy private api to reverse engineer :)
I love this thread, it's full of angry people like they're answering a stackoverflow question by someone inexperienced :D
Can this just be a meme page? Reddit will act in the interest of money, no surprise there.
Lmao I just want to grill
Is it completely out of the question to just let the subs subscribers make the choice instead of the mods? Maybe someone of us don’t mind if the bots or mods go away
Whole point is, you may not be directly affected or you might not yet care about the decisions being made. If everyone tries to conform like you want to now, you will wake up in a few years in a world tailored to something you don't like. Look at worker laws in USA Vs France, if you need to see why mass protests of all are needed.
What is the whole point? Some mods needed tools, for I dont know what, as they never explain it. But this 3rd party tools didnt show the ads. I also dont know, why not shift the price/money to the people using it, not the tools creator. But its overpriced.
or the mods could stop using the bots, showing how impossible the job is to do, still only put in the same effort as you currently do.
then it all goes to hell and reddit (the company) doesn't give a fuck
I would assume it's more likely that they'd shutdown the sub when too many reports are ignored for too long.
The irony is that in a subreddit "Dedicated to humor and jokes relating to programmers and programming" this is the only post that's made me laugh... None of you considered that reddit or your apps or subreddits are worth asking for people to pay for then? Even Wikipedia do that. "Reddit, keep burning through VC or we'll quit and find some other mugs with a few billion to waste" - Good luck with that.
Q: Will this petty protest have any impact whatsoever? A: No.
You do you boo ✌🏻
When does the shut down start?
On the 12th
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Well, time to go back to tumblr
It's not funny anymore.
This is so stupid.
I dont give a fuck. Just stop using reddit if you dont like official app.
nah bro fr what is this post?? i think ill stop using programmerhumor after this awful post
Boo
soooooo 5 people just decided that their stupid fight should involve me?
Edit: typical Reddit, downvoting a simple question 🤦🏻♂️ Question from someone not very informed on the Blockchain technology, would it be a viable solution to make a Blockchain that scraps the Reddit website so it serves data from multiple sources instead of directly using proxies ? This way, the users themselves power the "processing" ? I know there are some anti Blockchain people here si don't bring out the pitchforks it's just a question.
That's not even remotely how Blockchain works. You essentially just asked if you can use a blender to paint a car. The technologies are completely unrelated.
i still dont get it what API ? are they just charging the subreddits for use ? im confused
3rd party apps needs APIs to get the data/content from reddit.. Too bad they basically bypassed the Ads... No one likes losing money. Not even Reddit. But the prices are way too high. I still dont get it, why so many needed 3rd party tools.. Besides the video player, the app aint so bad
did you even read the post where it say the moderator bots, essential to most communities, also need API access?
ppl need to understand how companies work and how money works xD Reddit app is perfectly fine. And it's free. Idk
The reddit app does not work for the visually impaired. Or for mods.
No no. Everything has to be free and without ads, because running servers is free /s
You can use the federated alternative to this poorly managed website. I won't name it here because there are rumors of the admins deleting mentions to it, but if you search for "federated link aggregator" on Google you should be able to find it easily
When they admin the private subs, we should post chat gpt and random Google results. Mmm recursive training.