CEO Steve Huffman says tech giants should not be able to trawl Reddit’s huge store of data for free. But that information came from users, not the company
That “corpus of data” is the content posted by millions of Reddit users over the decades. It is a fascinating and valuable record of what they were thinking and obsessing about. Not the tiniest fraction of it was created by Huffman, his fellow executives or shareholders. It can only be seen as belonging to them because of whatever skewed “consent” agreement its credulous users felt obliged to click on before they could use the service.
Ouch
update: removed the comment because I was looking at the Api docs again and it seems that despite using the bearer token, metrics and rate limiting still are based off the app client ID, which is super stupid. originally stated that rate limits would be by oauth client which would be per user, 100 requests a minute, but it is actually 100 requests per minute app wide, which is just unfeasible for large scale
Well, I don’t know how the Reddit API works, but what you described is generally bad practice, as is my understanding. The Oauth token’s allow the app to perform actions on the behalf of authenticated users, but they still need to use the reddit API, and I imagine an API key, to perform those actions. You generally aren’t supposed to use Oauth as a access authentication mechanism.
At least pricing is per Oauth key, but still, the pricing burden is still going to fall on the developers for these apps who reddit now views as their “competitors”, despite making a product that supported reddit’s business for years.