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I see three perspectives on the whole thing: First, Reddit's monetization is broken by design. It never made any sense to me why they would charge for reddit gold for an ad-free experience on their website and own mobile app but not on the API. Why would they let third party apps serve their own ads and let them charge to remove them? This would be simple to fix, both technically and in the API's ToS, just serve the same ads regardless of the client. People would be upset, but ultimately I feel it would be entirely fair. But no, it doesn't seem to be a solution considered. Second, the LLM dataset issue is also attributed to the price hike. Again, I think it's fair if unpopular to charge premium for bulk data. Again, there are technical and ToS solutions for this. They could introduce exponential tiers for bulk data, restrictions on allowed usage, other things that make user-facing usage reasonable but bulk processing expensive, but then again, starting measuring api usage per client id and not per user goes against this point, just making the API extremely expensive for everyone anywhere to the point of being unusable. Third, all points seem to lead to the fact that what they really want is to kill third party apps and hope a large part of those users move to their app, for what? More tracking, tighter grip, better engagement metrics? Not sure. Even the changes to the extremely hostile mobile site now forcing some users to download the app. Really, I'd figure they'd understand their userbase better than that and how a small fraction on content producers and a even smaller fraction of power users and moderators carry the site, and pissing them off is a really bad idea. But what do I know. |