Barnes TechIt’s been rough for 3rd party social media apps made by small developers lately. First Twitter effectively killed 3rd party apps, and now Reddit is effectively doing the same. At the time, the way Twitter handled the situation seemed like it couldn’t have been handled any more poorly, and while that is probably still the case, Reddit decided to sure give them a run for their money.
To some degree, I think everyone knew Twitter would do this with the new ownership in place, though it’s hard to think anyone would have predicted how poorly it was communicated and executed, I hardly think anything outside the timing and actual execution was surprising. Reddit, on the other hand, had always been pretty open to working with developers. Well, that certainly didn’t last.
A few months ago, Reddit started reaching out to developers about some API changes they were going to be making, primarily around starting to charge for previously free APIs. This seems to me to be in response to the recent explosion of LLM chat apps that have been trained on public internet data, including most social media sites, though I’m not sure Reddit ever explicitly said that this was why. While kind of a bummer, I think it’s reasonable to charge for API usage. The developer of my favorite Reddit app, Apollo, seemed to feel the same way. In several posts on Reddit and Mastodon, he was open to the idea of reasonably priced API calls, even though he may need to restrict his app a bit and possibly only allow it for higher tier plans to account for the cost. He was even assured multiple times by people at Reddit that they intended to work together on pricing that was reasonable. Unfortunately once the pricing was announced it was absurdly high. For Apollo specifically, the cost at the new rate would be somewhere around $20 Million per year -
A developer says Reddit could charge him $20 million a year to keep his app working
This is insane. To me it’s clear that they are just trying to kill off 3rd party apps, and possibly try to cash in on AI companies training their data. There’s no way those companies will pay that, so I think it’s clear they are just trying to block them from doing so. But if they just wanted to stop AI companies from training their data, or even somehow if they think they would actually pay that price, they could have just changed their developer guidelines specifically for training data, and either deny it or specifically have a different pricing structure for that.
Additionally, if their goal was to kill 3rd party Reddit apps, why not just say that? Instead their CEO essentially went on a smear campaign against Apollo and the developer making it in a bizarre series of posts on Reddit. Christian, the developer of Apollo, luckily chronicled all of the conversations he has been having with Reddit and it’s quite the ride.
Reddit’s CEO for some reason decided to do an AMA which… I’m not even sure what to say about it. It was a train wreck. I’m not sure why he would think it was a good idea to do in the first place, but then he acted like an angry child in many of his responses. At best, he would dodge the questions, and at worst he would double down on smearing Apollo for some reason, even though Christian produced specific evidence to the contrary.
Many people on social media pulled out some of the best / worst responses during the AMA. For example -
Regardless, it’s frustrating to me that two of my absolute all time favorite apps are being killed off by the social media companies that they connect to. Tweetbot for Twitter and Apollo for Reddit were both fantastic apps that made the toxic services they connect to actually tolerable to use. I stopped using Twitter and I will stop using Reddit now as well. I know it won’t make a difference but I don’t want to support companies that do shit like that.
To be clear, I am all in support of paying for services like this. A fair API price is not a problem, and I would have paid more for either app to support those changes. Hell, if Twitter had just required Twitter blue to use the API or if Reddit did the same with whatever the hell their paid version is, I may have done that. But this back handed bullshit is not ok. If you want to kill off 3rd party apps, just say it. Don’t pull this chicken shit jerking people around.