Well, Spez was a mod of /r/jailbait before advertisers made them take it down....

It's not actually about the money in that sense. Don't be fooled.

No, they want to kick out third party apps because that cuts costs and the first party app is way better for pushing ads onto users. That's the real investor pitch, they just aren't saying it out loud.

If it was about being profitable, why charge such outrageous prices?

If it's about covering costs created by these apps, why suddenly drop such a huge change on them with an timeframe that can't possibly be met? Why don't they work together with app developers, communicate things well ahead of time and give them some leeway when necessary?

They just want to kill third party apps without outright saying it and the easiest way to do that is to charge costs they can't pay.

"We're not afraid to make the tough decisions and purposefully alienate our longest-standing users, the ones who know about things like adblock and try to hold us accountable to things we said a decade ago. Please give us money for this new sleeker userbase without any of those pesky olds."

I won't go back, with all the changes in the last few years. Reddit isn't moving in a direction I like.

It's because the planned IPO. Allowing third party apps, that are better designed, show no ads and don't collect the same amount of telemetry data (seriously the official app spies constantly for user data), doesn't look good in the eyes of potential investors.

Others have speculated that the API pricing model is built around customers who want to use the data for AI training, not customers who want to build apps for public use. The $20M price tag is what they're hoping a mega corp will pay for data access and don't care about anyone who can't afford that much. Some money is better than no money, but for a lot of people the "chance" at BIG money is better than some money lol

Funny thing if they had done that and the iceberg hit frontally like the engineers planned for it would probably not have sunken the ship.

What the engineers didn't foresee was an iceberg strafing the side and cutting open too many sections for the ship to stay afloat.

I think a blackout has a much higher impact than deleting accounts.

There are so many users nobody notices when a few disappear. But when a subreddit goes dark it's most certainly noticeable.

It's evident by now Reddit management doesn't care. Two days raise awareness amongst users. Maybe the two days won't be the last for many subreddits or people. And I'm sure more people became more aware, or thought more about the situation and alternatives than without a two day blackout.

The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.

Yeah okay

Kill other apps before yours is on par (will it ever happen) isn't improving the product.

Too bad higher prices doesn't necessarily mean more money.

but reddit cant be profitable without alienating a sizeable chunk of their userbase

Do those API prices make Reddit profitable? I highly doubt it.

I'd never repeat their claims as if they were true. It's just bullshit reasoning. Mismanagement.

I mean... the discussion is reddit, isn't it?

If I wanted to scroll mindlessly through the flea market of the internet, I'd open Mastodon. I often do, but, reddit is, er... was the community. The community is reddit. The memes, the jokes, the little phrases. They don't own any of that.