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 amounts of community and developer good will to privatize the internet - how did it work out for them long term?
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.
Right, the metrics they’ll look at are hosting costs went down 5% and ad revenue went up 10%.
Perhaps I misunderstood. I thought X angle 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 and such. But I agree regarding reddit, definitely wanted to drive users to their engagement ads.
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.
I’m pretty sure he wanted to harm it before the elections or at least make it more right wing. I think he succeeded in both to a degree, his candidate won and he’s getting his reward.
I do wonder if it was an accident though. He was s already well past the line of stock manipulation so maybe he listened to a lawyer for once and decided he had to follow through this time to stay out of jail. Of course, destroying twitter was all him
I wish I could make sense out of it either
Like yeah, these characters like Musk are deeply venal and ethically impaired, and that’s just average in my experience
we’re just gambling I guess
Data farming to teach AI on our personal info and accomplishments.
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 (edit: like google with its Reddit deal)
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
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.
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.
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. That’s the reason why the phone browser experience has also been killed.
Craigslist didn’t do too well when they did something like this. it basically killed the site
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
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.
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.
