[giobox]

This is a story practically as old as the internet at this point. Grow with open API and third party client ecosystem, but ultimately shut the hatches and revert to single in-house client stacks to maximize control of the user experience and advertising opportunities. Mainly the 2nd part.

To look to the Twitter example, even when I used a third party Twitter client before Elon came onboard, old Twitter were regularly playing silly games with issuing auth tokens to third party clients, for all of the same reasons.

At this stage I view third party clients as nice to have for major free web service APIs, with the expectation one day it will probably stop working. Reddit doesn't owe anyone a public API, as much as I will miss third party clients (big Narwhal user here).

[surgical_fire]

> Reddit doesn't owe anyone a public API.

And maybe they will soon learn that they are not owed an audience.

[giobox]

Maybe, but I'd still take the other side of this bet sadly. Is there any data on usage rates for third party Reddit clients? Anecdotally, I don't know anyone outside of tech who would even notice this change, really.

[surgical_fire]

Reddit was the only thing that resembles social media I ever used. Was a long time RiF user, as I absolutely hated the default interface. Even moderated a couple of subreddits back in the day (although I sort of dropped Reddit in the past couple of years, so I may be out of the loop).

My fellow mods and all prominent users I interacted with (the vast majority of them not from tech as it was not a tech focused community) were all well aware of 3rd party clients, and many used them.

This is very anecdotal, but amongst Reddit more "intense" user base, I would be surprised if 3rd party client usage was low.

[8organicbits]

On Google Play I see 100M+ downloads of the official Reddit app. 5M+ downloads of Reddit is Fun, 1M+ each for Boost, Bacon, Sync, and Relay. Many more in the 100K+ range. Thats maybe 10% at most.

I wonder how many power users, heavy users, or content generating users use unofficial apps. The passive lurkers are great for ad revenue, but the people who comment make the site worth browsing.

[CogitoCogito]

Wouldn't that mean there's no good business case for Reddit to do this in the first place?

[giobox]

Debatable - supporting a small number of users on the public API may be a legitimate technical debt issue, and a running cost as the API can't change without a lot of documentation, release planning to support all those third party stakeholders etc. Your future internal work has to remain compatible with legacy design choices if you don't want to shutdown/change the existing public end points - the list of issues has potential to be pretty big. Public APIs by their nature can't introduce major change too often without upsetting existing communities.

If the API is solely for your own consumption, this can be simpler, and of course third party clients are harder to monetize as the kinds of ads you can serve are going to be restricted to what you can force a third party client to receive and render.

If the number of users on third party clients is really low, all of the above can carry more weight in internal business case style discussions too.

[CogitoCogito]

Seems to me just better to entirely stop supporting the public api than to make the costs so ridiculously high. I mean then you're _still_ supporting it, yet you've basically scared almost all customers away. Charging a ridiculously high amount seems maybe like the worst approach of all.

[giobox]

I think you've probably described exactly whats happening - they do want to stop supporting the public API, but only for third party clients. There are other API access use cases they want to support. If the pricing kills third party clients but not the new use cases, that seems like a design choice to me.

They would instead rather charge far more money for data access for things like AI training etc, Twitter have also made similar changes to their own API to prioritize high bills for AI training use cases, not third party clients. That's at least how I see this change. The high pricing for these customers also removes the need to worry about the ad tech situation as is the case in the third party clients - you can just offer them an ad free feed at these prices for the training requirements.

I suspect the internal at Reddit desire to have less third party clients may well predate the AI discussion too, given almost all companies in this position eventually want to wind down those clients as history has shown again and again, for all of the reasons discussed in this thread.

[heywhatupboys]

difference: Twitter's native web clients work, do not force you to go to an app, and are feature complete.