About parasitic behavior: I think if Reddit had said “in 6 months the API will no longer be free. An average user creating W posts, X comments, Y searches and Z votes will incur $1 in monthly API costs” then there would’ve been very little drama. 99% of people will be sympathetic to a company charging for a thing that costs them money to provide.
It’s the fact that Reddit is using this event to get rid of third party apps by charging ridiculous prices for the API, not honestly owning this decision and finally giving less than a month of transition before it comes into effect that has made all these people angry.
To represent the angry people as just freeloaders who demand to get stuff that costs money for free would be dishonest.
I have to say including Twitter — who wanted to kill of third party apps — to make Reddit seem more level headed is an interesting way of approaching it.
The gist is this: if I am the average user, not on Reddit Premium and using the native app with ads, the available numbers indicate Reddit earns $X on me. Their API pricing is at least $2X per user. So either they are seeing API users as cash cows, or they want to price them out.
And like I indicated, there’s a loting things Reddit could’ve done that would’ve led to less drama:
- Longer transition period
- Outright banning third party apps
- Include ads in the API
- Make API access part of Reddit Premium
To me it seems that every step of the way, Reddit made the most confusing and most rage inducing choice available to them. That’s either incompetence or malice.
Without a deeper understanding of what the nature of the API is, and how many requests are needed to service a given use case, the comparison doesn’t mean much.
The Apollo developer claimed that it would cost him on average $2.50 per user per month, to use the API.
That is pretty nuts for a free app, how many people would pay for that?
It’s the fact that Reddit is using this event to get rid of third party apps by charging ridiculous prices for the API, not honestly owning this decision and finally giving less than a month of transition before it comes into effect that has made all these people angry.
To represent the angry people as just freeloaders who demand to get stuff that costs money for free would be dishonest.