Mr. Tact wrote on Jun 15, 2023, 21:40:
I'm not a big reddit user, but I'm there occasionally. As a casual user I had never even heard of Apollo or Sync. Based simply on my experience with corporations, I would guess Reddit is at best overacting, at worse being true dicks. He seems to be implying third party apps are making money off Reddit. I have no idea if that is accurate. However, if it is, that would at least give him a sliver of an edge of reasonability to cling to...

The major issue is that large language models like ChatGPT require large amounts of content to train on. Reddit is particularly useful. Long and short format, moderated, with conversational threads frequently, it's an ideal language sample. The early generative AIs are trained on Reddit and a few other things. A lot of people who are angry at Reddit actually feel like the AI thing sucks and Reddit should get compensated for that.

From that perspective Reddit absolutely deserves a piece of the pie. There's a lot of cash sloshing around and Reddit is providing essentially the raw materials for these programs. However, in doing so, they decided to go Full Elon and charge insane rates for API access. This doesn't just put 3rd party browsers at risk, but a lot of mod tools are at risk and several accessibility apps for sight impaired and the ilk are going away. Reddit has promised repeatedly to work with these apps and even said that the API changes won't cover the accessibility apps but that was just on an AMA and didn't actually offer any solutions, and since then the devs of those apps have said that Reddit just isn't responding.

I think that's what pushes things from anger into real protest- Reddit is promising to help and take care of people, and then is doing just slightly better than auto-replying to them with a poop emoji by simply ignoring them. They're also yanking 3rd party support while their own app is *woefully* inadequate for daily usage. They're pulling alternatives while they themselves admit their solution sucks.

Reddit arguably works because the API allows the mods and devs to fill in inadequacies of the program and enhance the value that contributes to the network effect, which is where the real commodity of Reddit lies. Walling off an API is a big step in the enshittification of the platform and while I'm sure Reddit will continue it will become a worse product as time goes on.