So the title is not correct? API access is free. Crawling is not?
A major title change came from the New York Times source that is "Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems". Now that makes it much more clear what this is all about and why it is happening right now.
* Offering an API is expensive, third party app users understandably cause a lot of server traffic
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* To this end, Reddit is moving to a paid API model for apps. The goal is not to make this inherently a big profit center, but to cover both the costs of usage, as well as the opportunity costs of users not using the official app (lost ad viewing, etc.)
* They spoke to this being a more equitable API arrangement, where Reddit doesn't absorb the cost of third party app usage, and as such could have a more equitable footing with the first party app and not favoring one versus the other as as Reddit would no longer be losing money by having users use third party apps
* The API cost will be usage based, not a flat fee, and will not require Reddit Premium for users to use it, nor will it have ads in the feed. Goal is to be reasonable with pricing, not prohibitively expensive.
* Free usage of the API for apps like Apollo is not something they will offer, and thus me offering free usage of the app will likely be very difficult, Apollo will almost certainly have to move to an Apollo Ultra only (AKA subscription) model
A major title change came from the New York Times source that is "Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems". Now that makes it much more clear what this is all about and why it is happening right now.