r/redditisfun • u/talklittle RIF Dev • May 31 '23

RIF dev here - Reddit's API changes will likely kill RIF and other apps, on July 1, 2023

I need more time to get all my thoughts together, but posting this quick post since so many users have been asking, and it's been making rounds on news sites.

Summary of what Reddit Inc has announced so far, specifically the parts that will kill many third-party apps:

  1. The Reddit API will cost money, and the pricing announced today will cost apps like Apollo $20 million per year to run. RIF may differ but it would be in the same ballpark. And no, RIF does not earn anywhere remotely near this number.

  2. As part of this they are blocking ads in third-party apps, which make up the majority of RIF's revenue. So they want to force a paid subscription model onto RIF's users. Meanwhile Reddit's official app still continues to make the vast majority of its money from ads.

  3. Removal of sexually explicit material from third-party apps while keeping said content in the official app. Some people have speculated that NSFW is going to leave Reddit entirely, but then why would Reddit Inc have recently expanded NSFW upload support on their desktop site?

Their recent moves smell a lot like they want third-party apps gone, RIF included.

I know some users will chime in saying they are willing to pay a monthly subscription to keep RIF going, but trust me that you would be in the minority. There is very little value in paying a high subscription for less content (in this case, NSFW). Honestly if I were a user of RIF and not the dev, I'd have a hard time justifying paying the high prices being forced by Reddit Inc, despite how much RIF obviously means to me.

There is a lot more I want to say, and I kind of scrambled to write this since I didn't expect news reports today. I'll probably write more follow-up posts that are better thought out. But this is the gist of what's been going on with Reddit third-party apps in 2023.

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424

u/[deleted] May 31 '23

[deleted]

133

u/venn177 May 31 '23

Unfortunately, they're perfectly fine with you leaving because reddit has been pivoting from a globalized forum into social media, and they want it to keep growing and doing what's 'acceptable' based on social media design trends.

It sucks, because I'm the same way-- RES on desktop, reddit is fun (or rif is reddit for is fun for rif or whatever the fuck they're forced to call it now) on mobile.

There's just less inherent value in us because we use 3rd party apps and (presumably) adblockers, while not 'producing content'.

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u/TheCardiganKing May 31 '23

I actually do produce content from time to time, but if I want Instagram style content I'll go to fucking Instagram.

Fundamentally changing platforms never works out. Reddit used to be a major DIY resource, so much so that Google is useless without adding "Reddit" to the end of search queries. However, Googling often yields years old results. Since the post-pandemic reopening the quality of posts has declined. Gen Z prefers other social media and Millennials are concentrating more on real life, rightfully so. I doubt the Reddit execs would be making these decisions if the Millennial user base was not beginning to dwindle.

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u/dmanww Jun 01 '23

This does feel like the FB decline of a couple years ago.

May have to start looking at individual forums again.

It's too bad, because the all-in-one nature of reddit allowed for nice discovery of new topics and small subs

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u/Wild_Marker Jun 01 '23

I welcome going back to game forums that aren't 90% memes and 10% discussion.

But unless we get them back to critical mass I don't know how we're getting out of game subreddits entirely.

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u/prone-to-drift Jun 01 '23

It's Discords all the way down. It irks me when I see things asking me to join a non-indexable non-public discord server to ask for help about a tool.

All that info that should be in the public, indexed and searchable directly.... Fuckin GenZ, tbh.

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u/_arc360_ Jun 01 '23

I was gonna see what everyone was swapping to with Reddit dying, already on a few discords and it's just not the same...

Gonna miss you rif

2

u/Hoihe Jun 01 '23

I saw a webshop fucking use discord for something.

Idk what. I didnt click.

Discord is for the real me/private life not for that shit.

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u/nupanick Jun 02 '23

don't blame the users, blame the executives... there's a huge market that just wants a god damn forum they don't have to host. Fandom Wiki saw a similar niche and moved right In. People aren't using discord because they think it's the right tool for the job, they're doing it because all the other tools suck right now.

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u/prone-to-drift Jun 02 '23

Discourse, for example, doesn't suck at all for a QnA type of forum.

Hell, a Facebook group is better at information retrieval than Discord and I hate using Facebook.

On Discord, if you come back after a few days, there's no way to catch up on all messages you missed; you just ignore them and move on, always thinking what you might have missed.

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u/nupanick Jun 02 '23

I've heard good things about Discourse. Is there a hosting service for it yet, sorta like creeperhost et al for minecraft? I think the problem is that discord is "good enough" for non-technical users, we need to get a better service that accessible.

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u/TheCardiganKing Jun 01 '23

GameFAQs is still the same and still going mighty strong. The DIY and instruction side is what I'd miss the most. Millennials were the DIY generation, though, I haven't seen too many Gen Z-ers get into building and making things. The magic just isn't there and it's palpable on Reddit as of late.

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u/Wild_Marker Jun 01 '23 edited Jun 01 '23

I suppose it's the corporate internet. Z's grew in it and are more used to having the algorithms vomit stuff at them. I never got used to it myself, if I'm not looking for the content then it's not usually content I want to see.

I wasn't aware the gamefaq forums were that active. I remember making a guide there in 2007! I should check it out sometimes.

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u/TheCardiganKing Jun 01 '23

I do not like content crammed down my throat, it might as well be TV, and I find the notion of commercials disgusting. Instagram is rife with commercials disguised as content.

The main console boards are very active over at GameFAQs. Check the Switch message boards, PS4/5, etc.

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u/peteroh9 Jun 01 '23

I'm sure the /u/warlizard gaming forums are as active as ever.

6

u/Warlizard Jun 01 '23

ಠ_ಠ

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u/rxvirus Jun 01 '23

I'm going to miss these times when I randomly have a good laugh because u/Warlizard shows up

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u/Warlizard Jun 01 '23

Pretty bummed about all the api changes. I get it, but I don't like it.

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u/Wild_Marker Jun 01 '23

I haven't seen this interaction in ages. I wasn't even aware we were still doing this. Aaah brings a tear to my eyes.

Is there an old people subreddit? Like, a subreddit where you can only enter if your account is X years old? Maybe we should all gather there.

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u/NameTak3r Jun 01 '23

Wow, been a long time since I saw this one

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u/Clepto_06 Jun 01 '23

Forums were always superior because they have institutional memory and a deep backlog of useful information. Reddit has always been social media and intentionally makes searching awful to drive people to post more.

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u/JB-from-ATL Jun 01 '23

Everything is fucking unindexable on a god damn discord server now

3

u/Danorexic Jun 01 '23

Yeah I've been concerned by that. We're going to end up with huge swaths of content/information/whatever completely inaccessible or lost in a few years.

At least old web forums are sometimes still accessible, or if anything, indexed by an archive. Plenty has been lost, but at least not 100%.

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u/devils_advocaat Jun 01 '23

I actually do produce content from time to time

You are producing it now. These replies are the life blood of Reddit.

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u/bms42 Jun 01 '23

Reddit is still a huge DIY resource. I'm only going to miss that and the various RPG subs.

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u/devils_advocaat Jun 01 '23

while not 'producing content'.

I bet user here have a higher than average posting rate.

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u/venn177 Jun 01 '23

But posting is an incredibly small part. The content that matters is people who submit images and videos to the main subreddits, because that's the social 'attraction'.

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u/devils_advocaat Jun 01 '23

Posts like yours and mine now are almost zero direct revenue generation, but generate a large part of user retention.

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u/venn177 Jun 01 '23

I'm not sure about that, actually. I don't know how to get hard statistics, but anecdotally I know a lot of people who go on reddit just to look at images and videos ala tiktok and never even visit the comments section.

Certain subreddits like /r/AmItheAsshole and /r/relationship_advice require that interaction, but I imagine the venn diagram between people who post in subs like that and people who have been on reddit for 15 years is almost two separate circles.

So I guess what I'm saying is that not all comments are equal, and ones in subreddits that have an intrinsic level of interaction are much more valuable than us bitching here.

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u/devils_advocaat Jun 01 '23

First order of magnitude I agree.

I'm suggesting that the long tail of Reddit content creation (what we are doing now) isn't likely to be included in their business model calculations. When they chop of that tail they may bleed more than they expect

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u/venn177 Jun 01 '23

the long tail of Reddit content creation (what we are doing now) isn't likely to be included in their business model calculations.

100% agree

When they chop of that tail they may bleed more than they expect

Yeah, it's amount of people who leave vs amount of people who move over and start seeing ads. Which is way above my pay grade to figure out the magic number.

3

u/curiiouscat Jun 01 '23

Wait, are they ripping RES?!?!

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u/venn177 Jun 01 '23

Here's the official developer's statement.

I imagine if old.reddit goes away, so to will RES, as that's what it's developed for.

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u/curiiouscat Jun 01 '23

If they remove old reddit then I'm gone, which is shocking because I've been on reddit for well over a decade.

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u/venn177 Jun 01 '23

Yeah, I lurked for a couple of years before I made my account and I really enjoyed doing CSS work for subs and things like that for a while. With new reddit and mobile apps, though, that became kind of pointless.

I think I'd kind of be happy to quit going on reddit, it's so goddamn distracting. I just need some way for community discovery and interaction, and Discord sure ain't it.

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u/digital_end Jun 01 '23 edited Jun 17 '23

Post deleted.

RIP what Reddit was, and damn what it became.

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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '23

[deleted]

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u/venn177 Jun 01 '23

But the amount of old hats leaving is microscopic compared to the amount that are coming in. Especially with the Twitter debacle. Onboarding and simplicity and claiming all of that is much more important than keeping a few people who have been around since /r/reddit.com.

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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '23

[deleted]

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u/venn177 Jun 01 '23

Reddit getting more popular is definitely not an assumption.

Here's the subscriber history for /r/pics since late 2012.

Aside from moderation - which I admittedly don't have stats for and am just kind of 'hunching' - I don't see what old hat redditors that use adblockers and non-official apps really bring to the site.

I guess we're pretty good at bitching about change?

1

u/reigorius Jun 01 '23

It's the unknown that we fear.

In a few years there might well be something out there developed with reddits original and unique style of globalized forum.

1

u/SlowRollingBoil Jun 01 '23

That's a default sub so any user account will be subscribed. There are SOOOOOO many bots and scam accounts.

1

u/Deon555 Jun 01 '23

Defaults haven't been used for years. Reddit uses algorithms ✨ to decide which subs to recommend to a user when they sign up

That said, those same algorithms may well suggest /r/pics

1

u/redditingatwork23 Jun 01 '23

Millions of people use third party apps. Probably a sizeable amount of their users. If we all decided to stand with these devs and quit I'd bet they notice.

2

u/venn177 Jun 01 '23

This is Android, but rif is fun, Sync, Boost, and BaconReader combine for ~10-15 million downloads. Reddit's official app is marked at 100M+.

2

u/redditingatwork23 Jun 01 '23

Apollo has a few million users as well. Also, many people downloaded the official app to try it but don't actually use it.

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u/venn177 Jun 01 '23

many people downloaded the official app to try it but don't actually use it.

I think that could be doubly said for every third-party app. Anyone 'power user' enough to look for non-official apps is probably more likely to try out a couple.

Apollo has a few million users as well.

This is iOS only, though, and I don't know the app store download numbers for the official reddit app or anything.

1

u/reigorius Jun 01 '23

That means there is a very sizeable amount of users that could give birth to something new that mimics the old reddit.

1

u/vxx Jun 01 '23

There was a time I had the official app just for gifting gold. I gifted a lot but stopped some time ago because I started to disagree with reddit's decisions and didn't want to support it anymore.

They kill it.

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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '23

[deleted]

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u/SlowRollingBoil Jun 01 '23

No. Advertisements aren't necessary to make insane amounts of money. They can make more than enough selling data and posts-as-advertisements. Banner ads haven't been necessary for a site to run for well over a decade.

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u/reigorius Jun 01 '23 edited Jun 01 '23

But the concept of a globalized forum is what made it so popular. Its unique structure, user-driven content, and the growing need for a globalized forum made Reddit so appealing. Would you reckon the users that made Reddit popular and others that came for that concept and obvious appeal of centralized indepth content, help and support will remain on Reddit when they have to wrestle through the short attention span garbage?

If no, would there be a similar exodus as we have witnessed with Digg? And to what? Where fo people with their hobbies migrate to? Please let it not be Discord.

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u/venn177 Jun 01 '23

Since the mid-2010s, when smartphones became pretty much ubiquitous, social media has stagnated.

I saw a post earlier about how Gen Z has been conditioned to just accept instant gratification short attention span easy-to-consume content, and I doubt that changes with whatever comes after them, so there's essentially a now-dwindling population that's interested in a mass forum.

If no, would there be a similar exodus as we have witnessed with Digg? And to what? Where fo people with their hobbies migrate to? Please let it not be Discord.

It's just too hard to break into it now. Everything is constructed and solidified. Twitter's implosion is the first time anything resembling a 'gap' in online interaction has existed, pretty much since Twitter got big. Like, sure things like Instagram and Tiktok created a new thing, but there really has never been a shift in the smartphone era.

Let's all just go to Tumblr.

1

u/Aiken_Drumn Jun 01 '23

while not 'producing content'.

App usage has no correlation to content production.

1

u/spacel0rd Jun 01 '23

The least I can do is stop paying for reddit premium which I have already done.

1

u/superbovine Jun 01 '23

Because the world needs another Twitter.

1

u/Cryst Jun 01 '23

Is RES going to stop working too?

1

u/[deleted] Jun 01 '23

Idk why the reddit team switched from the old reddit to the new, hideous reddit. There's a reason I use these third party apps, and it's because the stewards of the site make stupid decisions.

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u/Violent_Queef Jun 01 '23

Well, that's fine... You don't find the majority of your user base's preference valuable...no problem!! We can and will leave and find something better, that is run by people who do care.

Don't cry too much when you discover that you have the same future as MySpace!!

1

u/Dummdummgumgum Jun 03 '23

Not a single reddit mod or subreddit mod uses the official app for modding. Seriously this shit is on onlyfans banning NSFW content levels of stupid.