Reddit’s CEO Faced Intense Criticism Over Killing a Popular Third-Party App, Apollo. His Response Is What No Leader Should Ever DoThe company’s new API access fees are supposed to generate revenue. Instead, they’re alienating everyone. Inc.
While the journalist isn’t wrong about Reddit’s leadership, they yet again miss the real issue: It’s not about Reddit wanting to charge for their API. Look at the absurd cost, the ridiculously short timeframe, the refusals to negotiate with anyone, and lack of parity in their own app and moderator tools.
Their plan is clearly to kill off 3rd party apps and force everyone through their preferred channels so they can monetize it better. Anything else they say is just a lie to cover up that fact.
Yeah, journalists are really dropping the ball on communicating what I think is very simple: it’s fine for Reddit to charge [something] for their API, but these prices are totally unreasonable. Charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for something which costs pennies to provide is absurd and unethical in any context.
I wholly agree that it’s unethical to charge $thousands for a product that costs pennies to make. And yet, that appears to be the business model becoming more and more common, or at least more unapologetically blatant.
Healthcare, for example; insulin and epipens as the poster children. Gouging in post-pandemic grocery and consumer staples prices. The ballooning of C-suite compensation in service industries, while wages for those doing the service regress with inflation.
Journalists may be dropping the ball, but they have to keep their “engagement” numbers up, too. They may be dropping the ball because exploring ethical lapses may feel like headlining “water is wet!”
Exactly. It’s not in good faith.
What was the plan here? How the hell did he manage to fuck up the site so bad without anyone telling him, “Hey maybe this isn’t such a great idea?”
I doubt he would listen to anyone, and it seems like there was no plan at all to conceal the fact that they just wanted to kill all the apps and push users to the official one.
This whole lie about ‘we only want to make money on people using our data for AI’ is bullshit and they know it, they could have easily locked down the API and then charged different rates for different companies depending on their intended use. But lumping it all in the same cost structure let’s them get away with killing apps entirely.
The worst part is that he could still save them. I figured out a way. All that needs to happen is for reddit to act like a car dealership and offer a 30 year loan to the app developers for the first year. Deadlines don’t even need to change, but apps like Apollo can run as they are for another year with the reddit loan (perhaps minus the free users), giving time to update the annual billing to the higher prices necessary for the apps to survive. And of course they’d have over a year to implement any changes, which hopefully would be enough. $20million over 30 years, even after accounting for interest that’s probably less than $1million. So charge users a price that nets $21million a year and the apps can all survive.
Everybody can win, even reddit would - I’m sure the massive influx of cash would help get them a massive IPO. (They can securitize and sell the loans off to get that money earlier.)
We should give up any illusion that this was about helping the apps, or about LLM.
