GoatyGoats.com/links (she 🐯)

reddit API has been free to use up until now but with recent events namely 1) twitter is charging extortionate amounts for API usage and 2) reddit is widely known to be the source of a lot of the text that was scraped and fed into large language models, reddit announced that use of its API would be paid from now on but promised the fees would be reasonable

the maker of a popular app that uses the reddit API (Apollo) has been documenting his negotiations with reddit staff and the estimate they gave him for what it would cost to continue using the API at current levels and, big surprise, it's a wildly unreasonable amount, and he's obviously not going to pay it. they're clumsily trying to smear his reputation about it but he recorded all the phone calls lol

subreddits are going temporarily dark or shutting down entirely in protest, especially because 3rd party apps that use the API offer better moderation tools than the vanilla interface so reddit mods especially hate that this is happening

i don't wake up in the morning and set out to learn all of this but i have a lot of free time at work to read about internet drama that gives me schadenfreude