Readying to sell off, Reddit shuts off third-party clients
Reddit is the last place on the web where relevant information can be reliably found on any topic: typically, you find it by Googling with the term "reddit" or "site:reddit.com" in your query. This user interface, bizarre and brittle as it obviously is, stands in condemnation of what Google has otherwise become and in praise of what Reddit still is: easily-indexed and searchable human content largely free of ads, sponsorship, Amazon referrer listicles, SEO-optimized blather and the rest of it. For the people who own Reddit, though, those are the worst things about it. The fowl must be fattened, for it is to be sold, and that means beating it into the form taken by the rest of the modern web and app ecosystem.
Reddit, the 18-year-old social media and news aggregation site, is demanding developers pay thousands of dollars to directly access the company's data and content, a move that could help pull in a more diversified source of revenue. The company, which first disclosed plans for an IPO in late 2021, is asking developers to pay $12,000 per every 50 million requests, according to a post from the creator of a popular third-party app called Apollo. The developer said the number was "deeply" disappointing. "Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year," the developer said in a Reddit post about the change.
I honestly don't know how I'm going to deal with it once Reddit (or Google, frankly) kills the third party reddit search tricks. It's about the last thing online where 1) the UX works for my end-of-the-millennium internet brain and 2) it harvests information at scale rather than boutique/bespoke webcraft.
Source: Boing Boing
