this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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It's funny because with their over 40% valuation drop from the change they would have been better off just buying out the third party apps. Most of those apps were made with super slim teams. A couple mil and they would have sold. The API cost increase could have stood, people on 3rd party apps would have been brought into the fold and not counted towards it, and they would have then just slowly tweeked the apps towards the same user experience over time. It would have been the ultimate win for reddit and would have avoided this entire situation. Instead they decided to burn it all down.
The valuation drop by Fidelity took place over time, mostly last year, so it's unrelated to the API changes. That said, I agree the admins have chosen very poorly. With the amount of money on the table, buying out 3rd party apps would have been a steal compared to the massive hit to goodwill among their users and mods they're taking now.
They didn't need to buy them out.
They didn't even need to keep the API access free/very cheap. Hell, their specific "fuck you" price wasn't even the big issue.
The big issue was dealing with people dishonestly. Lying both before, during, and after the crisis, over and over. For example, repeatedly saying devs would get months of notice and then giving them only 30 days' notice, guaranteeing no business model could be built in time. Libeling the Apollo dev. Overtly telling the community their opinions meant nothing and only profitability mattered. Keeping secret their real current financial situation (which is presumably goddamn DIRE and which will soon be public regardless).
It's completely possible that this API change actually was necessary for the continuing health of the site. Maybe there was some real calculus used to arrive at it (though the only way that could possibly be true is if the free API was costing them hundreds of millions of dollars, which seems absolutely impossible).
But they dealt with the community dishonestly. It's very hard to come back from that. In my opinion, impossible, which is why my account is redact.dev'd
I think they are trying to convince themselves that there is some hundreds of millions of revenue they're missing out on, with the whole "it's valuable to train language models" argument.
This is definitely their attitude. When spez came back he said his biggest regret when he left previously was "leaving money on the table" and that he thinks Reddit should be in the same league as Facebook and Twitter (before Musk stomped that into mulch). They're not appreciating what they have, they're obsessing over all the things they're think they're missing out on.