Speaking of: An Open Letter to Reddit Subgroups

Dear Reddit Subgroups-

I know you're pissed off that Reddit is now trying to charge for API access, and I realize it was really stupid for CEO Steve Huffman to think pissing off Reddit users would work any better for himself than it did for Melvin Capital.

But let me make one thing clear: Reddit is not being stupid.

Let's pretend you're a really great ice cream maker. The best in the country. Nobody in a day's drive of you can make a Black Raspberry Chip as amazing as yours. You're hoping to make a bit of money off this talent, so you open up your own ice cream shop, and people go nuts for it. The shop is a massive success. But out of the goodness of your heart, you decide to make a policy: any other local ice cream shops that want to sell your ice cream can swing by and grab however many buckets they need, entirely free of charge. Unsurprisingly, every ice cream shop in town takes you up on this offer, and your shop struggles to break even for the next 18 years.

That is Reddit. That is a summary of what Reddit's business model has been since its founding. In fairness, it was also Twitter's business model since its founding, which shouldn't be surprising given how much Reddit and Twitter have in common. Both are great platforms. Both are terrible businesses. And both have come to the same conclusion and have now decided to start charging other ice cream shops for the ice cream.

I understand the concerns. I get how important having free API access to sites like Twitter is for academic researchers, and it'd be amazing if the company was able to carve out an exception in those cases. And I get that killing off third-party clients who relied on free API access to operate means every Reddit and Twitter user may temporarily be forced to use the crappier company-owned apps, which sucks. But especially as we look down the barrel of everything AI is going to change, it's clearer than ever that those who own the data own the future. Reddit and Twitter are two of the most valuable unstructured data sources in existence, and they were literally given away for free. These companies are too old to be early internet troubadours anymore. They need to be businesses.

Reddit and Twitter aren't being stupid by charging for API access. They were just being stupid by not doing this for the last decade.