Zebra 🦓 (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image # Announcement and slight rant about Reddit API changes In solidarity with developers of Reddit clients and other tools that make use of the Reddit API, Zebra is planning to follow in the spirit of [subreddits planning to go dark](https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/13yh0jf/dont_let_reddit_kill_3rd_party_apps/) on the 12th and 13th of this month. The news carousel you see at the top of Zebra’s Changes tab uses the Reddit API to query the top posts of the past 7 days. Fortunately, Zebra’s use of the API will fit within their extremely low limit of 100 requests per minute on the free tier (Zebra only makes one request every hour), but we’re still disappointed about this situation. As such, we’ve pinned /r/jailbreak’s announcement about the change to the front of the carousel, and on the 12th and 13th, the only item you’ll see in the carousel is this post. I know, it’s annoying. But there’s really not much we can do here, other than protest through the few methods we have available to us. After all, we’re up against a corporation whose founders and other current shareholders are about to become very wealthy - even despite how bad the market has been in 2023, even despite being co-founded by a current venture capitalist and briefly being run by the current CEO of OpenAI, even despite being sold to the media giant Condé Nast a year after founding, even despite the content being produced for them for free, even despite the moderation being dealt with for them for free, even despite eating the supposed exorbitant API costs for 15+ years, enough just wasn’t enough, and they have to push even further. If you’re out of the loop on what this is, the [Snazzy Labs interview with Christian Selig](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypwgu1BpaO0) of Apollo is an insightful watch. TLDW: Reddit is about to [go public](https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-aims-ipo-second-half-2023-information-2023-02-14/), they’re looking for ways they can trim costs and make the company more appealing to their new investors, it’s widely assumed AI startups are churning through Reddit for data to harvest for their models, and therefore they’ve decided turning the API into a paid product much like Twitter did recently is the way to go. Unfortunately, they’ve left developers of community Reddit projects in the dark of all that’s going on with this, in one case straight up telling those apps that [they cost them tons of money](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale/jmolrhn/?context=3), refusing to provide any actionable information to help those developers reduce the expenses Reddit is claiming they rack up. Reddit is asking developers of such projects to pay what, on the highest scale, works out to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. This is clearly out of reach for projects that have pretty low yearly subscriptions, or are even totally free. Asking for a reasonable fee per user would make sense - asking for tens of thousands really doesn’t. It’s designed to price out the community projects so they’re forced to shut down. For a good concise explanation of what kinds of apps this will affect, take a look at [this infographic](https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/140z59z/i_made_this_friendly_infographic_explaining_the/), and also the [/r/Save3rdPartyApps](https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/) subreddit as a whole.