I’ve been a long time Redditor and an Apollo user for about a year. I even paid for it. The main draw for me was the lack of advertising. In the back of my head I kept thinking that it couldn’t last. Reddit is losing revenue from the lack of advertising views. It didn’t
To me, Reddit’s sky high pricing for the use of the API is intended to kill off apps like Apollo and for its users to move to the advertising filled web site or its own app, which I’ve never used.
If Huffman came out and said this was a revenue move right off would everyone be as upset as they are? Are people upset because Huffman completely mishandled the move or because they got their ad free experience turned off? If Reddit had an app the same quality as Apollo only with ads, would they be OK with it. I’ve only used Apollo so I can’t speak to the other apps.
I can’t blame Reddit for wanting to make money. It doesn’t make a profit. Investors have to keep pouring in money to keep it going. They’re going to want to see a return on their investment at some point. Usually they cash in on an IPO, but IPO’s are generally only successful if the corporation looks like it will be profitable or at least the stock price continues to go up. That’s how capitalism works.
In my case, I probably would have left regardless. I can’t stand adds in my feed. I probably wouldn’t have heard of lemmy or kbin if there hadn’t been such an uproar. So I’m glad it went the way it did.
They would have gone straight to scraping if they couldn’t reach a deal. Sam Altman is on the board of reddit. He knows which way the wind blows there.
LLMs are already relying on web scraping and always have. They are getting data from the entire Internet, do people really think OpenAI is doing individual integrations with every single website throughout the Internet?! Are Google and Bing doing that, too?
It’s complete FUD.
This is such a great point that I hadn’t even considered. These API changes will have exactly zero effect on LLM’s and similar services.
There may be some complexity with legality here though. Obviously Google and other search engines already have most of Reddit’s content indexed, but there are some legal arguments as to whether they can use the content to create derivative works.
If Reddit opens up its API and specifically allows AI companies to use the content to create LLMs and other AI tools then from a legal point of view they may find this much more preferable to facing potential legal action further down the road.
Reddit could reach the same agreement without an API, too. Legality isn’t going to change because of the technical implementation.