[redmerchant2]

I’m just following Christian’s good faith interpretation.

But it’s absolutely clear it was done to kill 3P clients. It’s hilarious that certain bots would be exempt and free from the price hike. Spez called out the Haikubot by name.

Look those bots are cute. But it has to query every single sub and every single comment every few minutes to work. If Reddit truly cares about waste and inefficiency those would be the first to go. The value vs cost calculus is negative.

[George83728]

Those bots also shit up the S/N and generally disrupt conversations with useless replies nobody asked for. They're a big part of the reason I stopped using reddit.

Related: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748...

[petersellers]

Even more egregious are those stupid "RemindMe!" bots which in a very ham-fisted way create noise for everyone except the one person triggering the bot (ironically, a 3rd party app would be way better suited at implementing this specific feature)

[johnnyanmac]

People have wanted schedulers and the ability to subscribe fr updates posts for years. Thankfully, RES has had that for almost a decade now.

Don't think Reddit even acknowledged that feature request, compared to others they said "we're working on it" some 7 years ago. Closest they got is how the subscriber plan lets you highlight new comments in a post (something RES also had, but reddit made them remove it), but you still can't notify yourself to when new comments occur.

Just another example of not considering the user. Pretty sure filtering subreddits from r/all was the last user-centric feature they made. And that was more made out of spite of the political shitshow that was 2016/7 as opposed to thinking about the users.

[PoorlyNamed]

Apollo implemented this as a feature last year in fact.

[castlecrasher2]

Agreed. The only good bot is the one that attempts to identify comment-stealing bots farming karma.

[bagels]

Has Time Cube vibes.

[tkanarsky]

From the great "welcome to my meme page" on FB.

[bagels]

Thank you, I'd never seen this genre of... absurdity before.

[harrelchris]

It's either meant to kill 3rd party apps, or it's an impressive failure by Steve Huffman to create another revenue stream for Reddit.

[latortuga]

I don't think this is inconsistent at all. Bots don't look at or click on ads. Bots don't engage or create community. Bots don't buy awards. Bot querying is a drop in the ocean compared to real people.

[willis936]

It is inconsistent because spez has repeatedly said that 3P apps, Apollo in particular, are inefficient with their API usage which is preventing reddit from becoming profitable. It is their (thinly veiled) lie to justify the pricing because they think shutting down 3P apps and being caught lying at the same time is a better PR move than just shutting down 3P apps.

[johnnyanmac]

>Bot querying is a drop in the ocean compared to real people.

bot querying also doesn't make them any revenue, yet it is a common source of strain on the community. I imagine it also makes spam detection that much trickier. While there are some amazing bots (and ofc, automod) there are so many bots out there just to make noise. And reddit is already pretty noisy as is.

[realusername]

To my knowledge, ads and buying awards were never available from the API anyways so it's not like Reddit can use that as a valid argument