It’s still disapointing to see media misrepresent the reason for the protests. Nobody went up in arms when Reddit announced they’ll charge for API access, which was announced in April. The protests started because they’re charging a bazillion dollars, aka “the fuck you price” effectively banning 3rd party apps without actually banning 3rd party apps

And the “strike” got extended due to the extremely poor handling of the protests from Reddit, like slandering the Apollo dev

I want all of the scabs and the naysayers to see this. Without the protest, without the exodus, without the blackout, we don’t have Reuters, one of the world’s most respected journalistic institutions, publishing disparaging info on Reddit’s IPO. The longer this goes on, the worst it gets for u/spez and any other rube who feels entitled to make tens of millions off of the backs of the community they neglected.

The primary excuse for the API change, to charge AI companies for Reddit’s data, doesn’t hold water. After the change goes into effect, AI companies can just switch from the API to web scrapers for continued free access. It’ll require marginally more processing power, which AI companies already have in spades.

The ongoing strike, spurred by Huffman’s plan to charge fees to third-party apps that serve up Reddit content, was supposed to last for 48 hours.

Not just charge fees… Exorbitant fees. Outrageous fees.

If Huffman wanted to target these much higher costs to LLMs, they could have instituted an approval process for 3PAs which got charged sane API fees while they charge much more for LLMs. I’m no dev but I think they could tell the difference between the two by just analyzing the API traffic.

But they aren’t doing that. Maybe LLMs were the primary target but they sure aren’t even trying to keep 3PAs around.

Hahaha. Marvelous.

I hope the site never sees an IPO until it fades into obscurity.