What's the Reddit drama about?
Suddenly everyone is talking about some Reddit strike/blackout/revolt. I don't use Reddit, but am trying to understand what's going on. If I understand correctly, the company is now charging for API access, forcing some free 3rd party reader apps to shut down. The website is still fully usable to users through a browser and the official app, where Reddit gets money from ads. But those cloud servers hosting the forum are not free to maintain and operate and the free access was basically paid for with the company's investors' money. This was never sustainable. I see tons of outrage, but everyone is talking over themselves and can't get the reasoning. Can someone calm tell me what is all the fuss about?
The problem wasn’t that they started charging for API access, it was mostly about how expensive it was. From what I know there was 0 free tier, and one of the 3rd party apps was told they can expect to pay $20M/yr
Apollo for Reddit. Apollo, Narwhal and a few others have better ux than the actual app. They bring in more users to the platform but now they are getting locked out due to high expense.
There are free tiers for accessibility apps since blind people can not use official app yet and mod tools. There are certain number of API calls per minute that is free to run some experimental app if you want. Apollo needed more time to optimize those calls to bring prices way down from 20M/yr. But dev decided to shut the app up instead. Also the apps can easily cover the price with $2/ month from users but do not want to do that either. Frankly the whole situation has been handled poorly by many different parties.