Standup response, I hope Christian finds a promising career ahead of him.
If I'm being honest, I wouldn't be nearly so kind to Reddit following his ordeal. Even if Reddit renegs on the API pricing completely and go back to making it free, the trust has already been sufficiently broken that I wouldn't return. They won't stop monetizing the site just because they lost some users and pissed off their developer partners. They'll just be subtler, quieter the next time they try to screw you over.
Second chances are important, but there are limits to trust. Reddit slapped their users across the face today; despite any promise or apology they make in the meantime, there is no indication that they won't do it again tomorrow to get what they want.
I agree, I don't think they would just keep the API free forever, they've already said that Reddit is not profitable, and so they will continue to add more "features" to be more like tiktok.
Third party devs have said they don’t mind a reasonable API rate, but both the cost (~$20 million/year just for Apollo) and the timing (30 days to make the pricing changes, update the app, work out bugs, get Apple to approve it, etc) were just stupid.
It was done this way to kill the third party apps, period.
If Reddit didn’t insist on hosting all pics & videos themselves, they would probably already be profitable.
If the API pricing was reasonable, users & third party devs would happily pay it.
If Reddit had given more time (3-6 months) for third party devs to implement changes, then they could and would do so (assuming reasonable API price).
![From @[email protected] on the #RedditBlackout:](https://media.kbin.social/media/56/0d/560d2eadd688e780cd5638a9ce63c74480b022330df913939daef0622a5f1c25.png){kind=link}