Daily Tech News 9 June 2023

• Apollo, the third-party Reddit mobile client for iOS, is shutting down at the end of the month following Reddit's abrupt move to paid APIs. (The Verge)
  
  Quick summary:
  
  
• Reddit's API has been free for years.
  
• Reddit said as recently as January the API would remain free through the rest of the year.
  
• Reddit is now going to start charging for their API with just 30 days notice.
  
• The Apollo app uses billions of API calls per year and would cost $20 million per year to run with the new pricing.
  
• Apollo doesn't make anything like that.
  
• The Reddit API doesn't cost anything like that to run.
  
• The new API pricing of $0.24 per thousand requests is actually in line with other APIs.
• Infura (which I use at work) costs $0.225 per thousand requests.
  
• This has been compared with the Twitter API changes under Elon Musk.
  
• Twitter is actually orders of magnitude worse.
  
• For $100 per month on Twitter's plan you can read 10,000 tweets.
• The same amount of data from Reddit could cost as little as 2.4 cents.
• What Reddit wants to charge for its API is at least ten times more than it makes from the same activity on its website.
  
  
  
• Okay, I guess that wasn't so quick.
  
  Reddit is in trouble like so many other tech companies thanks to rising interest rates and loss of investor interest. They'd rather take the risk of killing of their community than bleed out slowly, which is what will happen if they don't change course and Elon Musk doesn't buy them.
  
  And Reddit actually has a working product and cashflow. Startups that don't aren't going to survive.

• Google really insists on its workers showing up to work. (The Verge)
  
  As in, at the office. No lounging around at home in your pajamas.
  
  (Shifty eyes.)
  
  
  
• At the same time Google is dropping a million square feet of office space. (Mountain View Voice)
  
  The combination of those two does not bode well.
  
  
  
• First of many: A Georgia radio host is suing ChatGPT maker OpenAI for defamation. (The Register)
  
  This one is weird even for ChatGPT. A journalist used ChatGPT to summarise a civil rights suit against Washington state's Attorney General, and ChatGPT barfed up a completely fictitious criminal complaint against a man not even involved in the case it was asked to summarise.

  According to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, in Georgia, a private figure plaintiff bringing a defamation lawsuit must "prove that the defendant was at least negligent with respect to the truth or falsity of the allegedly defamatory statements."

  Since ChatGPT is negligent by design, that should be a reasonably easy hurdle to clear.
  
  Sam Altman-Fried's company might not survive long enough to buy off the regulators at this rate.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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