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.

34.1k Upvotes

100% Upvoted

6.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

29

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

12

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.

20

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.

2

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.

3

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.

2

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.