[ninth_ant]

Can someone explain why this is such a big deal to some people? I legitimately don’t understand why this matters.

Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage, I’m not sure why inexpensive access to an API is a required right for forum software.

I don’t expect this to affect my usage of Reddit at all, and wondering who and what it does affect aside from a small number of third party client users.

To be clear, I’m _not_ asserting that there is no reason. I’m just hoping someone can explain what I’m missing.

[Macha]

The first party clients are undergoing the enshittification process

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

They would rather direct users to content that Reddit wants them to see. High engagement content like quick meme pics, short videos or polarised political content that generates time on site and activity that looks good to investors. Profitable content like the awards programs. Not externally hosted content where the ad revenue might be going to YouTube or journalists rather than Reddit. Not comments discussions where a user might spend time reading rather than generating new page views.

This might be fine with you if you see Reddit as "that site for the memes", but for a lot of users, especially veteran users, it replaced forums and other sites for discussing hobbies or other content, and that content is both harder to enjoy as the official apps push you towards what Reddit would rather you see, and drowned out by the more casual content.

In addition, for many people, they would like an efficient experience where they can select what they want to dig deeper into and then get off the site, while Reddit would rather you doomscrolled for longer to improve their metrics at the expense of the user's time.

So it's been very clear for a while that Reddit's first party UX design does not gel with the aims of these groups, which, being veteran users and therefore having more time to get used to the site, are over represented amongst those creating content or in roles like moderation. And this has been mostly fine with these groups as long as they can just go to the refuges of third party apps, old.reddit and compact reddit and ignore Reddit's trend chasing. But compact is gone, third party apps are going, and it's hard not to extrapolate that to old.reddit.

[LegitShady]

the mods also use third party tools that use the api to make modding their subreddits easier. All of those tools will die, given the api costs, making the mods do more work if they want to continue.

[EdwardDiego]

Good point. I mod a small subreddit, and the Reddit app interface for this is... bad.

If I use modmail to communicate with a user, it shows up as an unread message for me from me.

I don't get it.

[jimsimmons]

Very well articulated.

[bastawhiz]

Imagine if Google started charging for POP3 and IMAP access. Either use the official Gmail clients or pay ridiculous client costs.

Sure, there's no inherent right to free third party client access. And you can obviously switch to any service you want, or start your own. The point is that Reddit is taking away features and workflows from users which have been available for longer than most users have been on the service. Moreover, the cost is specifically being put on clients rather than users: you can't pay for Reddit through your favorite client, the client itself is being forced to pay.

If you've been using Gmail with Thunderbird exclusively for the last decade, and Mozilla is suddenly faced with paying a billion dollar API bill or shut down Gmail access, imagine how shitty that situation is for the end user.

[tremarley]

This is the best analogy I've seen so far.

[patrickmay]

I'm an Apollo user and I'll be dramatically reducing my use of Reddit if and when the third party apps are killed. The official Reddit app is nearly unusable, with a remarkably poor UI and too many ads. It also doesn't offer the tools for subreddit moderators that third party apps do.

The hope is that, despite being a small percentage of total users, third party app users represent a large volume moderators and high value contributors. If that's the case, this change will hurt Reddit enough to potentially roll it back.

What will probably happen is Reddit will tell us all to pound sand and we'll find alternatives.

[sangnoir]

> I'm an Apollo user and I'll be dramatically reducing my use of Reddit if and when the third party apps are killed.

Devil's advocate: are your current usage patterns making money for Reddit? If not, then your reduced usage will be considered a win by Reddit, all things being equal.

[rekoil]

I think the people this change will hurt are in large part fine with paying a reasonable sum for API access. I have no idea what reddit would consider a reasonable number (if they actually tried), but for me it's probably in the $1-5/month range.

That's full API access of course, not the limited API they've had which doesn't allow e.g. vote interaction, nor an API without NSFW content like they are proposing now with the ridiculous $12,000/50M requests.

Of course they aren't interested in being reasonable here, they obviously just want to kill off 3rd party apps. I actually don't get why they don't just go out and say it, what they're communicating now is just death with extra steps.

[stevenwliao]

Reddit charges $7/mo for Reddit Premium. I assume it's worth at least that much to Reddit.

[rekoil]

I have no interest in 5 of the 6 perks listed as part of reddit premium, and $7 is more than I think is reasonable, but if that were the only option I think I'd pay it, assuming that the service remains about the same that it has been (which I doubt very much would be the case unfortunately).

[yukinon]

Yes. I create content, which generates traffic, which generates ad-revenue.

[sangnoir]

There's not going to be a lot of ad-revenue if a sufficient number of users are like you that use 3rd party clients. Content creation/consumption on Reddit follows power laws, therefore the vast majority of Apollo users are consumers who do not generate any ad-revenue while costing Reddit compute and bandwidth.

[Zak]

The percentage of views from third-party clients is single-digit, but it's likely a significantly above-average percentage of those are power users who generate content, moderate subreddits, or both.

This suggests to me that management is not interested in making it a long-term sustainable business after the IPO, but in a short-term cash grab.

[spurgu]

The native apps and website are horrible for a number of reasons. I definitely wouldn't touch Reddit with a ten foot pole if 3rd-party apps and old.reddit.com went away.

I'd say people using the native apps are generally unaware that there's even an alternative. This whole shebacle will - if nothing else - change that to some degree.

Curious, have you always just used the native app/website and never tried 3rd party clients?

[xigoi]

For years, third-party apps were the only apps and some of them were really great. Then Reddit introduced the official app, which is inferior in every way, and now it wants to forbid the other ones.

[RheingoldRiver]

> Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage

The question is: Who is using these clients, specifically?

1. Visually impaired people. The official reddit app has terrible screenreader support

2. The longest-term & most dedicated users to the site, who are responsible for the content that everyone else uses & who want a) ad-free browsing; and b) a better experience than the official app, which sucks

3. Moderators who require better functionality on mobile than what the official app gives

These are all communities that matter a lot, even if it's a small % of users.

[HWR_14]

A lot of power users use third party software that offers extra features (or just a UI they are familiar with). Mods of popular subreddits are power users and friends with other power users. So mods or people they associate with use third party apps far more than average users. If the numbers are small, they are concentrated among people who have a lot of reach on the platform.

It's similar to how Twitter shut down several tools only used by power-users to force a small number of people into using their first party app.

Obviously, Twitter/Reddit wants the revenue associated with supplying the app. But it's not clear if it will be worth pissing off their user base.

[liotier]

> Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage

Reddit's "new" UX is so dismal that they keep "Old Reddit" alive so that they don't lose their mature users en masse. On mobile, I would not even try to wrestle with Reddit's own - I depend entirely on the "Reddit is fun" Android third party client.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

- Moderators use the poweruser tools in the third party clients

- I'm not sure how niche third party clients really are. Reddit started as a community of tech-savvy users who would not put up with the crap the official site/app is doing. There's probably a reason why reddit kept old.reddit.com online for so long.

[zouhair]

You already got good responses. I will add something many don't bring up in here: The death of bots.

Bots are a huge part of what makes Reddit decent. This API change will kill them all.

[stefandesu]

> small number of third party client users

I feel like that number is not that small. Apollo for iOS (which is not only a fantastic Reddit client, but an exceptional example of a great iOS app in general) has about 1.5 million monthly active users. And that's only a single client.

As you can see in your replies and in many posts on Reddit, people using these third party clients (which are soooo much better than the first party clients) are likely to dramatically reduce their usage without it or even stop completely.

[Hemospectrum]

If this change makes moderation more difficult, it negatively impacts all users of the site.