this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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My assumption here is that Huffman may win the battle, but he might lose the war. Even if he manages to get the rampaging mods under control, how much damage will he do in the process?
r/pics will probably end up going NSFW, which gets another major sub to lose ad revenue. Can Reddit manage to get all these subs back on topic without pulling some fascist takeover of the mod teams? These malicious compliance subs aren't explicitly breaking any rules, and taking action against them will just fan community outrage more.
They can obviously ban NSFW material, but that'll force a migration far faster than any blackout ever could. Not to mention 3rd party apps going dark on July 1st, which might see a not insignificant drop off of mobile users.
Reddit has likely begun its slow descent, and u/spez's best long term strategy would be to reverse course and keep the public API. Of course, he'll never do that since that just communicates to any investors that you have no control over your community. Not sure how he digs his way out of this one.
It is perfectly reasonable to charge for API access. That's not the problem.
The problem is that Huffman seems to think he can do whatever he wants without consequences. It wasn't "Hey, we're going to start charging for API, here's a reasonable price, and a reasonable time frame, and we want to make sure everyone has a reasonable opportunity to continue providing applications that lots of users and mods use to access and shepherd the site."
It was, "We're going to start charging an exorbitant amount for API access, in an unviably short timeframe. If you have any complaints or disagreements, we're going to provably lie about our interactions with you to make you look bad, oh and we're also going to completely forget that there are people with accessibility needs and basically ignore them except as an afterthought. We're also going to threaten existing mods who don't play along, and replace them with people who do if we feel like it."
That's the problem.
Because the point was never to monetize the APIs. The point was to get rid of the third party apps. A minority of users are still using the not monetized versions of reddit. old.reddit.com, and the third party apps. The people using new reddit, and the reddit app, have a totally different, heavily monetized, modern social media experience full of ads and suggested posts. They want everyone to either have that experience, or leave.
But they can't come out and say that, because it's a huge fuck you. A fuck you to their original members, a fuck you to the apps they used to fuel their growth for a decade. Now they want a controlled ecosystem like Facebook, but they can't say it directly. So instead it's surprise API costs, refusing to talk to app developers, lying about conversations with Apollo devs.
But just like everything else they do, reddit can't plan for shit. So they didn't at all consider the fallout for accessibility tools, mod tools, etc. Which is why all their messaging since then has essentially been "No, we weren't trying to kill accessibility and mod tools, just the third party apps for normal users!" But they can't say the second part directly.
There is another point you are missing. Reddit uses browser fingerprinting to doxx and identify it's user base so that they can bin your data properly when they sell it. Third party apps thwart this effort as they can't tie your account to somebody who logs into the web site or uses their app.