[shagie]

I'm not sure how much of a whim Reddit had.

A Virginia law was signed into effect on May 12th that required commercial entities that distributed "material harmful to minors" to verify the age of the users or be exposed to civil penalties. That law goes into effect in 3 hours.

[aeyes]

NSFW content didn't show without an account for years. What's the difference between using the same account in the official app or on the website or third party apps?

Additionally one of the API changes which also goes is into effect is that they won't serve NSFW content on the paid API. So even if you pay you only get half of Reddit.

[MBCook]

Hell, they could have banned all real NSFW content. Would have been a big deal, but wouldn’t have interfered with 3rd party apps or anything I use Reddit for.

Any NSFW stuff (due to laws, investments, advertisers, anything) had nothing to do with the API decision. They may have done them at the same time, but it wasn’t needed.

[johnnyanmac]

That or old.reddit is probably the next big schism in the making. The NSFW fiasco may cause some significant change if it ever does happen.

[happytiger]

Classic correlation not being causation.

[bentcorner]

There's no possible way this is the cause. Like, at all. The simple sniff test is that blast radius of the passing of this law would be way way way larger than "reddit charges for API". We'd see many other sites follow suit with reddit.

IANAL but I'll put down $100 that this law has nothing to do with reddit's API changes. First person to prove me wrong gets it. I'd like a quote from spez that says, paraphrased "If Virginia didn't pass the law we wouldn't have started charging for the API".

[rovr138]

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...

> Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up, but they’re also wiping out some beloved Reddit apps, and thousands of subreddits have gone dark for days in protest.

…

They want to charge for what they believe the data is worth.

Not for usage, but value.

[halfbrite]

> They want to charge for what they believe the data is worth.

Counter argument: it’s not their data to charge for. And if they want to claim it is their data then they should be held accountable for the content therein.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t recoup costs for access to said data. You do after all pay taxes and get access to local libraries and archives. But they shouldn’t be extorting third-party developers.

[rovr138]

I agree.

They built a platform so that we could create communities and manage them how we want to.

We posted information. We created content. We exchanged ideas, had discussions, and we all helped each other.

I’m fine with them recouping their costs. I’m fine with them even making a bit off of it. However,

> I'll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.

…

> For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.

My understanding is that Christian is grandfathered into an older plan on Imgur. Having said that, the Mega plan is $10,000 per month for 150,000,000 requests. If we use this pricing, 50,000,000 api calls is $3,333.34 (vs Reddit’s $12,000)

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing

[shagie]

The announcements that they were going to charge for API access was in April. https://www.redditinc.com/blog/2023apiupdates . Mature content being restricted was mentioned in https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_r... and in https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe... it was stated that Imgur also banned sexually explicit uploads the same day.

While "yes, that was April, the law wasn't signed until May", it passed 96-0 ( https://legiscan.com/VA/votes/SB1515/2023 ) in February and the recommendations from the Governor to change it was rejected on April 12th.

The timeline of when that switchover would happen was at the end of May when 3rd party developers said that they wouldn't be able to continue past June 30th.

---

I don't believe that the change was "Virginia Law -> do all these things" but rather "these things are in motion... Virginia Law -> several of these things in motion must be done by July 1."

[bentcorner]

> I don't believe that the change was "Virginia Law -> do all these things" but rather "these things are in motion... Virginia Law -> several of these things in motion must be done by July 1."

I do agree with you here - Virginia's mature content law probably had something to do with NSFW content in the API. The API pricing was just poor decision making occurring at the same time. (Apologies if my previous comment was a little unkind).

[kemayo]

I don't see how that could be related to reddit charging for their API.

[CJefferson]

How is that solved by charging for the API?

[shagie]

It makes it much easier to pass liability around and argue that the 3rd party app, with access to location services can verify if the person is in Virginia or not. If they aren't upholding the age verification law, you've got a credit card account tied with an individual or company that the person suing can be pointed to.