I don't know how Apollo works and that's why I lifted it more as an open question.
But my HN client cache the frontpage when you go through the articles so you have to manually press a button to refresh it once you want to see something new. Does the latest scoring from this minute actually matter? Similarly, there's little need to automatically refresh the comments if you go away from a thread and click back within one minute. Maybe you can implement another method for dealing with upvotes/downvotes so they don't require API requests.
It just seems crazy that the average person uses multiple hundreds of API requests per day.
A Reddit engineer commented that Apollo uses 3x more API requests per user compared to other Reddit clients. There’s definitely room for optimization and I find Christian’s attitude off putting that his users just naturally “use more” API calls:
Yes. Apollo has 1.5M users according to Christian, so you’re looking at a nominal cost of $4/yr/user. Keep in mind that 3.5x is just the lower bound; until now, Reddit apps haven’t really needed to be cognizant about how often they hit the API.
Not everyone is going to pay, and that’s perfectly fine too. But the pricing is not as onerous as people are making it out to be.
Do you know what Reddit is or what kinda of site it is? People post content and send and receive messages. How would that be cached? I don’t think the average person uses multiple hundred per day, that is skewed by the highest power users (moderators performing thousands of actions.)
People lurk. For every sent message I'm sure you have a significant factor of more cacheable pages fetched. If they have a few people using the app as a moderation tool and managing thousands of requests, maybe deal with that separately.
Lurkers are always the silent majority, and their patterns likely create opportunities to cache. I wonder, though, whether lurkers are likely to choose an app like Apollo. That user base might largely be a self-selected dopamine-hit-chasing subset.
But my HN client cache the frontpage when you go through the articles so you have to manually press a button to refresh it once you want to see something new. Does the latest scoring from this minute actually matter? Similarly, there's little need to automatically refresh the comments if you go away from a thread and click back within one minute. Maybe you can implement another method for dealing with upvotes/downvotes so they don't require API requests.
It just seems crazy that the average person uses multiple hundreds of API requests per day.