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Reddit communities with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology
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But that would be contrary to Reddit's actual goals, which is to monetize their user's data as much as possible. They can't do that if third party apps are providing a better experience, so they are trying to force everyone to use only the website and apps that are directly controlled by Reddit. So they can track our behavior and sell more ads.
I read somewhere that a lot of the API pricing has to do with people training LLM's on reddit comments for free; reddit wants to get paid for it. I guess they'll just have to scrape instead. /shrug
There's still a lot of tracking that can be done via api calls but you're right that they lose ad revenue and UI/click info.
That is the claim from Reddit, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny because LLMs are not using the API to get content from sites like Reddit. They are scraping data from the entire Internet, much like Google does.
Even if it was using the API, however, it's still a bullshit excuse because Reddit would be fully within their rights to enforce existing rate limits or other TOS violations. Nobody would have been complaining if Reddit revealed that the Apollo app or OpenAI were abusing the rules that were already in place and everyone agreed to. Actually, nobody would even be complaining if the pricing and timeline for the changes was anything close to reasonable!