Reddit Protest & APIs

It’s a big day of protest at Reddit. Users are pissed at the prices that Reddit is to start charting for API usage, which has driven best-of-breed apps like Apollo to close doors.

I liked Apollo, myself. I found it to be a very nice iOS app. So it’s annoying it’s going away.

When I heard the news, I just deleted it from my phone. Oh well, screw it, I thought. Reddit isn’t vital for me. I have no microphone there, and it doesn’t fuel anything important related to my business. I just have my few-dozen Reddits that I think are funny or interesting and probably poke at it 20 minutes a day before bed. So I suppose I’ll be contributing to the plummeting numbers over there, sending whatever kind of message that sends.

I bet that was the case for a ton of Twitter users when all those recent API changes happened. I’m sure, for a ton of people, Twitter just isn’t that important. They have no (significant) microphone there and it’s not important to their business. So bye-bye. For me, it’s harder to toss away. These days I find Mastodon more rewarding, but it’s hard for me to totally give up Twitter. I do have a microphone there and I do find it business-related. So even though I find the ownership abhorrent, I’m a weak man and I don’t throw away power easily, even when I know I should.

Regarding major API changes, I can sympathize with that being tough. I think APIs should cost money. It’s going to cost your company money to build and maintain, so in order to make that sustainable and a good idea, it needs to be profitable. You also need to work out if you think it can be profitable and something you can maintain forever. If you can’t, don’t do it. Changing the rules on APIs can seriously backfire (obviously).

I remember, back in the day, Dribbble darn near regretting the idea of having an API. People could just build an alternative Dribbble browsing experience with no ads or anything else that actually helped the Dribbble business. It just cost them money and time for nothing, which is no way to do things. We have a better vision now at CodePen for how we would handle that, but we haven’t gotten to it yet because we have so many other things cooking. I’m pretty glad we didn’t rush into it, because API rug pulls are not something I want to be associated with.

But when you’re Reddit or Twitter, and you’ve offered what you offer for so long, and then make absolutely massive changes and make it wholly unsustainable to apps that depend on it, offering them absolutely no way forward…. well, fuck that.