Reddit

I'm sure no one here needs to be convinced that /u/spez is duplicitous, but just to put some evidence behind it. For context, Christian wrote an extremely detailed post, with citations, explaining his side of things.

But the impetus for these changes is like, we took a close look at our data, our API usage, where it’s going, how much it costs, and it’s just not sustainable. And so we told them that back in April, that changes were coming, that they’re going to have to pay to cover their costs. Which actually, I think he and others accepted. You know, we’ve had a lot of conversations with him and others privately, one on one, and some on the site. What they didn’t like is the price, but the price is the price. It just happens to be expensive to run an app like Reddit.

1. In April, everyone was assured that it wouldn't be comically expensive like Twitter's. And then when it came and was almost the same as Twitter, everyone at reddit sort of just shrugged and said, as Steve did, that the price is the price.

2. Christian actually did an excellent job of drilling down into the numbers behind that "pay to cover their costs" assertion, and reddit eventually admitted that what they were talking about was "opportunity costs." Not anything it was costing reddit, but the idea that they could be making this amount of money more if these third-party apps didn't exist.

We’re perfectly willing to work with the folks who want to work with us

Christian showed evidence of reaching out several times to try to work it out and being refused.

It’s not reasonable to let this... it’s been going on for a very long time. Folks have made millions. These aren’t like side projects or charities, they’ve made millions. One is owned by an ad network. They have no contract with us. Our peers just turn them off. Reddit’s the only company that allows these sort of competitive products to exist, and we’ll allow them to continue to exist if it’s fair, if they’re on equal footing, which is paying for their data in the same way that we have to.

Emphasis is mine; I wanted to quote just the bolded part but it felt misleading to isolate it without providing the context. But that quote is clearly absurd. Having a "competing product" access your API is, for reddit as well as many other companies, a primary reason to publish an API.

And again, Christian got reddit to admit that the numbers they were asking for were not at all based on what it was costing them to provide the API, but that plus a quite large "opportunity cost" of money they felt they would be making if Apollo didn't exist.

What our peers have done is banned them entirely.

This is part of a very weird section of the interview, too long to quote, where spez asserts that reddit was kind enough to allow 3rd-party reddit apps to exist even though it was costing them money, whereas all his competitors (Facebook, Snap, etc) have banned them. That's actually not true -- what their competitors did was simply make apps that weren't ass in the first place (as well as, in general, make money). So the whole issue, of this booming market for 3rd-party apps that weren't terrible, never existed in the first place.

So he's right that it's a uniquely (or at least exceptionally) reddit problem, but wrong on why.

Like we try to charge so it works out to about $1 per user per month for reasonable API usage. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

I mean, $1 per user per month for a widely-used app is a lot. Christian explained how a lot of his users pre-pay up front for a year, and the actual costs his company was going to incur and how it would affect them, and offered to take on even the exact costs reddit was asking for if he just had a few months to figure out how to do it without killing his business, and they stopped taking his calls.

I don't know man, the whole interview just made me irritated.

Edit: I don't know why I keep coming back to this and getting irritated again. I have no real reason to care. But, Apollo is actually a prime example of how to make money in business. They made a fantastic app, to the point that it was highlighted in many places as an example of how to make a super-capable app that people would love. And so people paid them for this great product and they became profitable. It wasn't complicated. Then, spez comes along and whines in basically every interview about how the app developers are making money when they're not, when reddit had this consistent track record of limp-wristedly trying these weird gimmicks like charging money for awards, giving away coins, selling ad space using one of the weirdest and most malfunction-prone tools I have ever seen in quite a long time of buying web advertising, not upgrading or adapting to basic functionality needed in their app, basically just doing things in this very lazy and entitled fashion. If they had simply done exactly what Apollo had done -- offered a genuinely upgraded experience to users for a tiny amount of money per month -- they'd have more ground to stand on to tell everyone else what's what about how to make business decisions. Instead, they told Christian with a straight face that it would cost him $1 per user per month, when his app charges $1.49 per user per month to the customers, and he could run all other aspects of his development / operations / Apple's cut / and whatever else on the remaining $0.49. When he demonstrated that that's way more than it was costing them, they shrugged. When he asked for more time to work out how to fulfill even that crazypants request, they simply stopped taking his calls and started defaming him publicly. And now they're doing these patronizing interviews about it.

Man, fuck spez. I swear I'm gonna try to stop caring about it now because it doesn't impact me and I have other things to worry about. But the whole thing just pisses me off honestly.