Plenty of publicly traded companies have free APIs allowing third parties to build the same front end and sidestep their primary source of revenue (showing users ads)?
To clarify - I am not a fan of Reddit’s latest move, I see it as a product of the management hoping to soon be beholden to Wall Street. That necessarily comes with securing of revenue streams.
If they just worked with the users I'm pretty sure a lot of us would be absolutely proud of reddit for making it big and raking in the dough. All this time they'd left open old.reddit.com as a nod to us who've been here through all these years, and the new users were content with the redesign that was designed to get reddit paid.
Could you imagine how it would go down, if reddit had quietly negotiated with developers to allow for user API access and limiting the rates to that which a normal user would consume? (e.g. 400 calls a day or whatever). This would both allow for 3p apps to continue hooking us up with the oldschool forum board we like, WHILE preventing LLM models from scraping 1 Gigabyte of text every day.
Literally everyone would have been happy. Users would have the slight inconvenience of maybe having to re-log into their app, LLM and Researchers would pay for the privilege of getting to scrape 1 Gigabyte of text a day.
The only loophole here is malicious apps scraping the user's data as they browse and selling that black market. But is that really such a big hurdle as to completely discard the approach?
To clarify - I am not a fan of Reddit’s latest move, I see it as a product of the management hoping to soon be beholden to Wall Street. That necessarily comes with securing of revenue streams.