So I was browsing Reddit one day, minding my own business, when I saw a post on (I think) r/Deusex about some kind of protest on June 12 in response to something Reddit had done, and my initial reaction, based on recent experience with Twitter, was “what fresh hell is this?”

So yes, protests can indeed “raise awareness” in people who – like myself, a casual redditor who mostly uses the site for light entertainment reading and has gone months at a time without commenting – might not have known of the problem already.

The problem? Apparently Reddit saw what Twitter just did to third-party apps and said “hold my raw water.”

Reddit isn’t banning third-party apps; that would be too honest. Instead it’s changing its API price from free to more than any third-party app developer is likely to be able to pay. The figure everyone’s quoting is for the iPhone app Apollo, which would owe an estimated $20 million a year. Let’s take a look at that:

• I couldn’t immediately find a number of active users for Apollo, but I can extrapolate one from this TechCrunch article: 7 billion API calls a month, with an average of 344 per user per day, equals about 670,000 users.
• …so that $20 million works out to about $29.85 per user.
• …which is just a hair higher than Apollo’s highest paid tier of $12.99.

Yeah. No wonder Apollo is shutting down. Among others.

Reddit’s CEO has tried to portray this as a sensible way to recoup “the tens of millions of dollars it costs us annually to support the 3P apps.” Of course, the same CEO initially tried to portray it as a way to gouge ChatGPT, so instead of taking his word for anything, we’re left to wonder why Reddit is indulging in short-sighted avarice (and laying off workers) shortly before an IPO. (Reddit doesn’t disclose its finances, but investors who have seen them seem unimpressed.)

 

Just to give these API charges a little extra zing, the few app developers that can keep going…

(In response to complaints about how the disabled will be especially hard hit by this – because the official Reddit app sucks at accessibility – Reddit has whitelisted two “non-commercial” apps, one for Android and one for iOS.)

…those apps will no longer be able to show “NSFW” content, whatever that means. On reflection, I don’t think Reddit will be adding an algorithmic NSFW filter, which is good, because Facebook’s algo-filter famously sucks ass. It’s more likely that Reddit will do what it’s been doing, which is to rely on a small army of volunteers to accurately tag NSFW content –

…oh, wait, those volunteers are currently pissed because Reddit just promised to break a lot of the mod tools they use. Maybe Reddit itself will step in with some effective and trustworthy moderation…

…oh, wait, Reddit just banned r/kbinMIgration for “spam.” So we can forget about “trustworthy” moderation, and as for effectiveness… I learned about that ban from the site that named the Streisand Effect, so good job suppressing that info, you bucket of absolute corporate geniuses.

And while we’re not believing Reddit’s CEO on anything, let’s note that he said he wants exclusive rights to monetize NSFW content because of “the regulatory environment.”

 

Up until now, my Reddit app was BaconReader. It’s from the same devs as Tweetcaster (one of my go-to Twitter apps) and it gets the job done, by which I mean it gets the job done better than Reddit.

Reddit sucks at UI. It’s tolerable on desktop in very small doses, like as a search result, but its mobile UI is worse (not helped by the pop-ups nudging me toward the app). I will not be using it as entertainment, for the same reason that I won’t be pulling my eyeballs out with a spork.

Also, on top of the pop-ups, unwanted suggestions, ads, and other annoyances, Reddit has been intermittently “experimenting” with blocking mobile-web access, probably to nudge people (again) toward the app. (Via The Verge)

Oh, yeah, there’s an official Reddit app… which looks a lot like its web interface, except that on the web I can apply a dark-mode browser extension. The app probably doesn’t have that “this page looks better on the app” pop-up, but the way this whole situation is going, ir probably has a “Reddit Premium” pop-up and ads tuned for maximum irritation.

While I’m here, though, I might as well look at the permissions:

• view Wi-Fi connections
• take pictures and videos
• read the contents of your USB storage
• modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
• receive data from Internet
• run at startup
• control vibration
• full network access
• prevent device from sleeping
• control Near Field Communication
• view network connections

That’s a somewhat standard amount of data access for a multimedia app, even if I’m not happy about every damn app needing to be its own camera app as well and I don’t know what NFC is doing there –

Wait, no, those are BaconReader’s permissions. Official Reddit doesn’t want NFC access. Instead it wants the rest of the above, plus…

• approximate location (network-based)
• record audio
• update component usage statistics
• control flashlight
• read sync settings
• install shortcuts
• change your audio settings
• toggle sync on and off
• pair with Bluetooth devices

I really hope they don’t mean that Sync, because they have no business at all with users’ contacts. The location tracking is equally unwelcome; the Bluetooth access is puzzling; and the flashlight control is just taking the piss.

Guess what won’t be polluting my phone.

 

This whole situation doesn’t grind my gears as much as Twitter did, because I get less use out of Reddit. Like I said, it’s mostly entertainment for me, and I have other entertainment options.

…which is good, because there doesn’t seem to be a hot new Reddit alternative. Lemmy has been namedropped a lot, but it’s also reportedly saturated with tankies.

The other contender is kbin, but it’s reportedly not quite all there yet. I may try it out anyway, or I may not. Also, both kbin and Lemmy’s instances are currently buckling under the weight of all the would-be new users.

I could theoretically switch to RedReader (one of the “accessibility” apps I mentioned), but I don’t think so, both because I don’t trust Reddit to allow any large number of third-party-app refugees to migrate to RedReader and because I don’t trust Reddit not to do something else to annoy users, like force some of their own horrible UI into RedReader.

Meanwhile, I’m subbed to few enough subreddits that the ones that have gone private or read-only made a dent. Apparently Reddit didn’t notice – even when enough subreddits reduced traffic to somehow crash the service – but I did.

Or maybe some of them did notice, but not enough of them to overrule that bullshitting CEO, or not enough of them to stop the big machine. (“We absolutely must ship what we said we would.”)

From this user’s perspective, it makes little difference. I may well not wait for the end of the month.