45 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: API Updates & Questions
There are less than 3 months separating the initial announcement on April 18th 2023[1] and start of enforcement on July 1st.
It is *exceedingly* abnormal in healthy service<->developer relationships to ship a breaking change, especially one of this magnitude, on such a tight timeline.
For example, the Chrome Web Browser is currently trying to migrate their *entire extension ecosystem* from Manifest v2 to Manifest v3. This is a disruption similar in impact to Reddit's API changes, since many browser extensions will no longer be viable after this change is finalized. The Chrome Team publicized this effort back in 2020[2] and the migration is *still ongoing*. That's over 3 years vs this timeline at less than 3 months.
2: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/intro/
Comment by Dr_Midnight at 06/06/2023 at 03:32 UTC
29 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Would it be possible to comment on why the timeline for this has been so aggressive?
My standing suspicion is that the real motivating factor here is to cut off the API usage by LLM developers considering the sheer number of companies pertaining to it that have started up since the introduction of ChatGPT, and their scraping data from APIs to build language models.
My further suspicion is that reddit (the company) looked at this, decided that doing such was the best course of action, and then further decided that anything else affected (read: collateral damage) was an acceptable loss. However, they likely didn't realize the level of blowback that they would received -- particularly because reddit employees don't seem to understand how their own site works or how people use it - as has been echoed by moderators who participated in the "adopt an admin" program.