Submitted 3 days ago by CaptDust@sh.itjust.works to [deleted]
Its been some time since xitter, reddit, and other sites began paywalling their API, causing third party integrations and apps to collapse.
I’m wondering, did any of these sites end up with paying customers for the API? Are there examples of third parties paying to continue their services? These sites sacrificed massive community and developer good will to privatize the internet - how did it work out for them long term?
It was not about getting paid for API usage, though they let the door open so they could sell that service for very specific purposes but not for alternative apps.
Their point, and it was admitted during the leaked conversation with one of the independent app developers, was about opportunity cost. Their official apps offer ways to get more money out of users, more advertisement, in app payments and all that.
I think one of the major reasons they wanted to close the free APIs was to prevent data scraping for AI models without paying the big dollars. Of course that also meant users would be limited to the service’s own apps with their own ads so it’s a bit of a win-win for them.
I’d imagine the only people paying the insane API prices are the AI/ML companies
You can still scrape Reddit without the api. Main reason was to prevent people using 3rd party apps.
I can still use Stealth for Reddit
Basically, each of these sites used open standards and APIs as a way to grow their service. Eventually once they got to the user base they wanted and beat out the competition, they could tighten the screws, lock things down, since the users didn’t have any place to go, they were locked in.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
en.wikipedia.org/…/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis…
In terms of specifics, it’s unclear if they were ever profitable before locking things down, since the main goal at that phase wasn’t making money, it was growing active users and killing competitors. I would have to imagine that with the locked down APIs, they are more profitable, and they never really cared about the community and good will, only when it was beneficial to grow their user base.
Wouldn’t count that as EEE
At least with Reddit, banning 3rd party apps was just a byproduct. The overall point of paywalling their API was to prevent LLM AIs from training their models on Reddit user content without paying Reddit to do so.
Craigslist didn’t do too well when they did something like this. it basically killed the site
Friend, Google is now paying for the privilege of accessing the reddit results and so far no other search engine is able to. I’m pretty sure reddit is making bank…
Twitter on the other hand, I doubt it. Some media companies might have accepted to pay for access, but most certainly didn’t. They most certainly lost money with the user exodus.
Seems to work fine for those you listed. They wanted people to use their services directly and that’s what they get. It was never about making money off the api, it was about limiting api usage
Yes, marketing analytics software dev company I work for paid up. As far as I know so did our competition, the data is simply far too valuable, there’s no substitute there.
Honestly pretty sure not many people used 3rd party apps to begin with so I don’t think it was to do with any of that like the other strangely confident commenters seem to imply.
Honestly pretty sure not many people used 3rd party apps to begin with so I don’t think it was to do with any of that like the other strangely confident commenters seem to imply.
I don’t think it was sheer numbers of users that made 3rd party apps a big deal, but who was using them. Someone would need to actually do some research to confirm or refute it, but my experience was that they were disproportionately favored by power users, i.e. the really prolific posters and commenters that you would come to know and recognize after spending a bit of time in certain subs. If enough of those people decided they couldn’t be convinced to use the mobile site or official app, you’d probably have some small amount of previous lurkers step up their posting a bit, and bots.
From what everyone says when they mention the current state of the site, it mostly sounds like it’s bots just spamming reposts and arguing with each other with recycled comments originally posted by other users.
Been on Reddit for 15 years. Can confirm it’s pretty much a bot hellscape now.
Years ago I noticed the quality of front page posts drop in terms of their basic spelling and grammar. You never used to see typos in what hit the front page because mods actually cared about the quality of what was being posted to their subreddits.
That’s far past gone now in all the top subs. Mostly because the mods there have all been compromised as shills that get paid to gatekeep selected content from bot controlled posters. Now all they care about is volume rather than quality.
That’s why most of the default subreddits and most of what hits the front page is the same regurgitated content with dick-riding commentary that doesn’t discuss much aside from just agreeing with the upvoted group-think of the post itself.
Overall quality in all the top 100 subreddits has declined exponentially in just 5 years, as the mods now heavily favor bot accounts posting more, rather than community members posting gold less often. So the best members of most communities just left, as there was no reason to contribute content that wasn’t going to be seen against a flood of mod approved click bait.
Reddit is now a soulless faceless husk shambling around as if it’s content is from a real community of people, and not a corpo filtered humonculous.
Engagement there, the good kind. Is now rare at best, if at all. And even worse - I’ve found dozens of sites that will just let you buy upvotes and accounts, so making it to the front page just takes some clever marketing spend.
It’s sad to see such a colorful community of people from around the world get invaded and slowly taken over by a body-snatcher like corporate mimic - but that’s the best compliment I can give to what’s left of Reddit.
kungen@feddit.nu 3 days ago
I don’t know all the numbers, but the point isn’t to make money from people paying for API access, but to force people to use their official applications – which meets their goals of farming more data/advertising money/engagement/whatever.
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Right, the metrics they’ll look at are hosting costs went down 5% and ad revenue went up 10%.
CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Perhaps I misunderstood. I thought X was to get the larger corpo users to buy in such as Nintendo share function, news orgs that would aggregate tweets, universities that used it for research qnd such. But I agree with reddit, definitely wanted to drive users to their engagement ads.
unemployedclaquer@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
The whole Twitter > x thing has never made any sense. Musk misunderstood what he was signing and accidentally lost an uncountable fortune to buy a social media company and turn it from trash to the shit that skinny raccoons would turn down. Seems to be going well though.
snausagesinablanket@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Data farming to teach AI on our personal info and accomplishments.