So Reddit dropped some news this week that's got me low-key annoyed, and I don't think it's gotten nearly the attention it deserves, probably because everyone's still talking about the SpaceX Starship launch on Thursday. (Quick aside: "rapid unscheduled disassembly" is the funniest way I've ever heard someone describe a rocket blowing up four minutes after liftoff. Whoever came up with that euphemism deserves a raise. Anyway.)
The actual story: Reddit announced it's going to start charging for access to its API. Right now, if you build an app that reads Reddit data, you can basically do it for free within some reasonable limits. Come this summer, that changes. Reddit's leadership has been pretty open that this is about AI companies scraping their data to train language models without paying for it, which, fine, I get it, that's a real problem and Reddit's sitting on almost two decades of human conversation that's genuinely valuable training data. I'm not going to pretend I feel bad for OpenAI or whoever else has been hoovering up subreddit threads for free.
But here's my problem with it. The API isn't just used by big AI labs. It's used by Apollo, and RIF, and Sync, and Reddit is Fun, and a dozen other third-party apps that a lot of us actually prefer to Reddit's own official app. I pay five bucks a month for Apollo Ultra. Have for something like three years now. It's fast, it's got a dark mode that doesn't look like it was designed by committee, and it doesn't shove a "Popular" tab full of stuff I never asked to see in my face every time I open it. The official Reddit app is, and I say this with love for the people who built it, kind of a mess. Slow to load, ads everywhere, and it wants me to sign up for Reddit Premium every third scroll.
If Reddit prices API access in a way that makes sense for a company scraping billions of posts to train a model, that same pricing could easily be catastrophic for a two-person team running a mobile app on subscription revenue. Reddit hasn't published actual numbers yet as of today, which is exactly the problem — everyone's speculating, and speculation is a bad place to run a business from. I saw someone doing napkin math suggesting it could be tens of thousands of dollars a month depending on how usage-based pricing shakes out. That's not a rounding error for an indie dev.
I've been using third-party Reddit clients since roughly 2013, back when I had an old Nexus phone and Reddit's own app barely existed. There's something particular about the third-party app ecosystem on Reddit that reminds me of old Twitter, before Twitter killed off Tweetbot and Twitterrific and all the rest back in 2018 by cutting off their API access too. That didn't go well for Twitter's reputation among its most dedicated users, even if it barely dented the bottom line. I'd hate to watch the same movie play out on a different platform, with different logos, five years later.
Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Reddit says they still want a "reasonable" developer ecosystem to survive, and their VP of Product has said the goal isn't to kill third-party apps outright. We'll see. Companies say a lot of things about wanting to preserve ecosystems right up until the invoice goes out and the ecosystem can't afford it.
In the meantime I've just been using Apollo like normal, scrolling my usual subs before bed, not thinking too hard about it. Which is probably exactly what everyone did with Tweetbot too, right up until the day it stopped working.
One more small thing while I'm here: I noticed this week that a bunch of legacy blue checkmarks on Twitter finally started disappearing, the ones that used to mean "this account was verified as notable" before it became "this account paid $8." Half my feed is now just anonymous checkmarks next to accounts that clearly aren't celebrities or journalists. It's a small thing but it really does change how a feed reads at a glance. You stop trusting the badge as a signal almost immediately, and once that happens I'm not sure you ever get it back.
Anyway. Going to go doomscroll Apollo while I still can.