Curious how big the gap was with the API costs.

  • Scirocco
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    1 year ago

    Another moderately interesting point is that it seems like Apollo (pretty obviously the biggest 3rd party app in terms of API usage) isn’t even in the top-ten of user/abusers of the API.

    I take this from this paragraph

    On May 31st Reddit posted a chart of large excess usage by some unlabeled API clients, and stated: "We reached out to the most impactful large scale applications in order to work out terms for access above our default rate limits via an enterprise tier

    To be clear, Apollo was never contacted, and I’ve been told from someone internally that Apollo is indeed not one of the unlabeled API clients

    The only time that Apollo was reached out to by Reddit in any capacity about usage was late last year when we received an email about a 6 minute period where Apollo’s server API usage increased by 35% before lowering again. Despite 35% for 6 minutes being a comparatively small blip (the above post references clients that are over by 500000%), we responded within 2 minutes. We offered to jump on a call with Reddit engineers if they needed an answer ASAP, identified the issue within several hours and Reddit thanked us for the fast investigation

    From this post https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits

    Here’s the chart in question. It’s pretty obvious that the top spot is an irresponsible party, but none none of these are the third party user apps that we are discussing – Apollo wasn’t one of them, so logically neither were any of the smaller apps.

    https://preview.redd.it/kfejv14ss83b1.png

    Here’s the post where the chart is linked

    https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale

      • Scirocco
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        1 year ago

        I expect those top-ten abusers of the free API, exceeding the limits by 40000% and whatnot are all LLMs sucking up text for training.

        Reddit has been letting those project hoover up very valuable (given recent valuations of LLM/AI projects) textual discourse (authored by all of us of course) for free. They may feel a bit foolish, and they are realizing their worth, in terms of the value to LLM efforts.

        SO, I think the pricing is related to what they believe the various AI projects can afford to pay.

        It’s still an easy win for them to kill the third-party apps that they wish were gone, given the NSFW and in-app ads issues.

        If reddit wanted to, they could create a seperate pricing tier for usage that passes through to individual humans, rather than to language machines. They are different use cases and absolutely have different value propositions in terms of potential revenue generation.