The protest was less about them wanting to charge a price, it’s that in a time frame of 6 months reportedly went from “the API won’t have changes anytime soon” to “we’re going to pivot to a paid API soon” to “we’re charging you advertiser rates per x million API requests, starting in a month, and you cannot supplement with your own ads”.
There was no time for these apps to adjust their pricing models. Most were on yearly subscription models or ad-driven. Having that large a pivot in the rules with no time to adapt the business model is just shitty partnership on Reddit’s part.
Also the fact that they were involving the third party app maintainers at all. There’s no technical reason that REDDIT couldn’t put the payment mechanisms in place to block USERS from making API calls through Oauth Apps. If you pay whatever subscription fee your account can make calls through whatever third party app you like.
But instead they decided that they were going to charge the APPS for some inane reason, and put figuring out a user-facing payment mechanism on those maintainers.
OK, true, but that’s why they want to charge 3rd party apps.
And I’m fine with them wanting to do that.
The protest was less about them wanting to charge a price, it’s that in a time frame of 6 months reportedly went from “the API won’t have changes anytime soon” to “we’re going to pivot to a paid API soon” to “we’re charging you advertiser rates per x million API requests, starting in a month, and you cannot supplement with your own ads”.
There was no time for these apps to adjust their pricing models. Most were on yearly subscription models or ad-driven. Having that large a pivot in the rules with no time to adapt the business model is just shitty partnership on Reddit’s part.
Also the fact that they were involving the third party app maintainers at all. There’s no technical reason that REDDIT couldn’t put the payment mechanisms in place to block USERS from making API calls through Oauth Apps. If you pay whatever subscription fee your account can make calls through whatever third party app you like.
But instead they decided that they were going to charge the APPS for some inane reason, and put figuring out a user-facing payment mechanism on those maintainers.