this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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It wants to keep control of how people get access to its data. The recent massive surge of interest in A.I.s means that there's a lot of people looking for good quality datasets to train new models. Reddit is sitting on a goldmine, and it currently handing out gold nuggets for free.
It wants to charge these desperate users of its data through the nose for that access, and $12,000 per 50M API calls is the market rate it has determined (and it is clearly comfortable that existing commercial users of its data such as marketers will also pay those rates).
The fact that this will kill third party clients is just the icing on the cake. If reddit wanted to kill such clients it would just turn off voting and comments in the API.
AI datasets can be built by scrubbing web content and doesn't require API access.
This is about making sure Reddit controls the user experience and users can't, say, block their ads or hide Reddit awards. It's also a cold (and short-sighted) calculation: some people are making money from our product without sharing our costs, better kill them.