this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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What was stopping them from bringing the tools first, let mods migrate and be comfortable with them and then apply the new pricing on the API? Greed and ego are having a field day it seems.
This whole API thing seems just so short sighted… there would have been much better ways to implement this, nobody had problem with the monetisation aspect/inclusion of ads to the API…
But it is what it is… and without this fiasco I wouldn’t have switched to lemmy/kbin! :)
They never had any intentions of building new tools.
What’s stopping them? Money and the prospect of making more
This is the question I’ve been wondering. The way they’ve gone about this makes absolutely no sense so something must have been going on behind the scenes to force it like this
There have been speculations that they wanted to throttle the API asap because of the AI revolution that has started. Reddit data is absolute GOLD for training large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. OpenAI definitely used data from both Reddit and Twitter in some capacity and for free and are making a ton of money. Tons of startups are now doing the same, training or fine tuning LLMs and for that data scraping is again required. Like Elon keeps complaining about increase in scraping attempts and doing idiotic things to handle that, Huffman just followed in his shoes.
I strongly believe they are just inept. They didn’t understand what value third party apps actually brought. None of the decision makers actually mod anywhere so they probably aren’t aware that reddits official tools are lacking.