Reddit, eyeing IPO, will charge millions in fees for third-party API access
cnbc.comI think charge-for-access, for all, will be a thing in the AI era. Twitter has ask everyone to pay for the data they get or have too. We will see it as a revenue source for all community type apps since LLMs have been trained using their data.
It's interesting that the users that create the data get nothing.
You're right this is a huge shift and unless the balance of power shifts users will get screwed over. If you think (as some people do) that one of the primary methods of consumption of information is going to be to have stuff tailored for purpose first by some sort of model, then it stands to reason that lots of the existing "attention monetization" mechanisms just won't work.
Imagine a future where you can just store a reoccuring prompt along the lines of: Hey Jarvis, search and give me a summary of the top things from the last 12 hours in all the topics and sites I'm interested in. Make its length about 5 mins of my reading speed. I'll prompt you for more details if I want to go deeper on any one thing.
That seems like the sort of thing that would be pretty compelling. So it follows logically from that that people have to figure out some sort of licensing or new revenue model to replace the fact that people are going to be reading LLM outputs like that rather than viewing ads on your current webpage.
The issue in the case of Reddit is that this affects the moderators, who are doing a significant amount of work for Reddit for nothing but kudos/fame.
Many/most of the moderators of popular subreddits are using 3rd party tools to do their moderation as the 1st party tooling for it is terrible.
My understanding is that this will cause moderators to have to begin paying for their API usage, which many moderators of popular subreddits are unsurprisingly angry about and are threatening to close/make-private their subreddit when this change occurs.
It is perhaps reasonable for Reddit to want users who are skipping their ads via 3rd party tools to have to pay to do so, but it is unreasonable to expects subreddit moderators to have to pay to donate their services to Reddit.
Moderators should be paying. They're doing the job for nothing but the fun of it, so they're getting something out of it. Makes sense that they pay to continue.
Based on the responses of many mods of huge communities it doesn't seem they agree with you.
Well of course they wouldn't say it, everything else being equal more money is better.
People do get something out of it though. Many services pay content creators to join them and you get paid if people subscribe to you (see Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Substack). The average person gets to market themselves to potentially millions of people for free. I know people with hundreds of thousands of followers that would reach a fraction of that with a blog. The fact that you can write with people across the globe about anything, is valuable by itself.
I'm not saying it's a great deal but it's just not money that brings value.