"His “joke” is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him."
People are quickly replying with screenshots and archive.org snapshots. He certainly can, but it would be plainly obvious and all eyes are on those comments.
In general I would agree, but the only reason the recordings were made public was because Reddit was straight up lying about the Apollo dev. So the recordings were released to prove that the Apollo dev was right.
this part is up to debate. I would also consider "joke" with $10m sticker to go away quiet as a threat, which looks like didn't go through and apollo dev backed up.
The recording contains the Apollo dev explaining that it wasn't a threat, and spez acknowledging it as such. To other people spez still says he was threatened. How is that anything but a lie?
Okay. So spez acknowledged in the call that it wasn't a threat, but he felt threatened, so it's okay for him to tell everyone the Apollo dev threatened him?
> So spez acknowledged in the call that it wasn't a threat
its regular bs sugar coating, like you know someone is cheating, and he knows he is cheating but doesn't admit, but you don't have proof and you say "oh it was miscommunication" for the sake of continuing cooperation.
Why do you think this is the case? The audio by the Apollo dev doesn't support this, and spez has not published anything that would prove there was a threat. The audio doesn't sound like what you're describing, it sounds like what the Apollo dev is describing.
> Apollo dev: How did you take that, sorry? Could you elaborate?
> spez: Oh, like, cause you were like "hey, if you want this, if you want this to go away, like [unintelligeble]..."
> Apollo dev: Oh, I said if you want Apollo to go quiet, like I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API use..."
> spez: Oh, okay, got it. Got it, sorry. That's a complete misinterpretation on my part. I apologize immediately [...]
Would you expect spez to still consider it a threat given both the literal content of what he says, and the tone it was said in? I see no way your interpretation makes sense.
So the part that spez was talking about misunderstanding, which he apologized for? The context you think I didn't include is the thing that spez is explicitly saying he didn't understand correctly?
I quoted spez apologizing for misunderstanding something. You're saying I left that something out as context. Considering spez acknowledged his misunderstanding and apologized, it seems a bit ridiculous to expect the something he apologized for to "override" his apology, doesn't it?
If he was joking then why would he still be asking for reddit to buy Apollo?
Yesterday he wrote,
> Why doesn't Reddit just buy Apollo and other third-party apps?
> This was a very common comment across the topics: "If Apollo has an apparent opportunity cost of $20 million per year, why not just buy them and other third-party apps, as they did with Alien Blue?"
> I believe it's a fair question. If these apps apparently cost so much, an easy solution that would likely make everyone happy would be to simply buy these apps out. So I brought that up to them during a call on May 31st where I was suggesting a variety of potential solutions
I don't care whether he is joking, I care whether he is making a threat or not. He did not make a threat. spez understood him as saying "if you want this discussion and situation to go away quietly, pay me this". The Apollo dev was asking "if you're having these costs, why not just pay me half that and have the app quiet down?". One is a threat (pay me or XYZ will happen), the other is a legitimate question.
No, he clearly was. I don't know how someone could think otherwise. He said "I could make it really easy on you", "we can both skip off into the sunset", "Bob's your uncle", "And have Apollo quiet down". He just backed up at the end I think because they're somewhat scared nerds and they don't like that level of confrontation. But nobody would go into a business meeting and just say that accidentally. You wouldn't even do that at a weekly meeting with your own team members, much less talking to the CEO of a decent sized company and asking to be acquired. And he actually carried out the threat, he helped make one of reddit's biggest messes (although mostly they did to themselves.)
All of the things you quoted are obviously referring to Reddits claim that Apollo is incurring very high costs through its API usage. I don't know how you can get anything else from it. What do you think "And have Apollo quiet down" could mean EXCEPT for this?
spez is free to release counter-evidence, the Apollo dev has given his approval for anything to be released. Him not doing it means we just have the Apollo devs recording to go off - and that is very, very clearly referring to what he is claiming it's referring to.
He had previously made 2 other posts about it before on Apr 18-19, so that's what he meant by "quiet down". Reddit refused to pay him $10 million and so he went the opposite of "quiet", he made a post telling his story and it blew up.
For the next week when mods were taking their subs private, the Apollo dev didn't disclose to any of them that he'd asked for 10 million to "have Apollo quiet down." If some reddit employee hadn't asked him about it Mastodon, he would never have told anyone about that.
I'm not sure what timeline you're exactly trying to prove or disprove. It makes sense to me that he'd make a post describing a call with Reddit, after he had a call with Reddit. He doesn't have to describe exactly everything he describes, but fact is: Reddit is claiming he is costing them 20 million dollars per year, he suggested a buy-out for half that. You have to actually prove he tried to threaten them, because the non-threat explanation makes perfect sense - because of course the developer of an app would make posts about the status of communications regarding these changes!
If I'm missing something you're alluding to in the beginning I'd appreciate an explicit explanation :)
The way the US business environment is, if the little guy in every business deal ISN'T recording everything they can legally get away with, they WILL be taken advantage of.
Why should they stop? Asshole immature CEOs still bring in millions a year. If the consuming public refuses to punish you, and the government is busy playing sportsball with women's reproductive health, why would you ever change?
CEOs will only stop being giant twats when being a giant twat inevitably leads you to personal ruin.
Does anyone know what the "joke" thats being referenced is? I'm not super in the weeds here, but none of the posted material looks like a joke or "joke" one way or another.
The Apollo dev “joked” that Reddit should buy Apollo for $10 million dollars because, according to Reddit’s pricing of their API, the opportunity cost of Apollo existing to Reddit was $20 million.
spez accused the author of Apollo (Christian) of trying to blackmail reddit. Christian responds[0] and has a recording [1]. There was a misunderstanding, Christian clarified, spez apologized.
Additional context that Christian was referencing the _app_ being "noisy", as in the _noisy neighbor_ effect, when a client is misconfigured to cause more activity and bring more a burden than it should [0]. Reddit interpreted this as "noisy" = "we will complain and raise hell", but this was literally immediately worked out as a miscommunication in the transcript [1].
Weeks later, after Christian announced to his community the most likely impact on the app of the upcoming API changes and a summary of his conversations with Reddit.
Reading this comment makes me wonder if Steve genuinely believes the ongoing outrage from Reddit's community is somehow to any extent Christian's fault. "Look, it was a threat after all. He's doing what we thought he would and what he said he wouldn't do."
The poster (CEO of Reddit) has replied to a few comments so far but they've been downvoted to oblivion so they aren't visible in the main comments; you can see all his replies on his user profile page here:
So all the top responses to the top comments in the thread are going to be “seriously, this” and nobody is going to see how spez actually responds. Classic.
You would think Reddit would have made an AMA sorting mode that surfaces OP's answers even when they're heavily downvoted by now, since it's been a thing for years, but it doesn't seem like a priority for them.
Yes, but it doesn't seem to work very well. It still doesn't show spez's answers, and you could argue that the co-founder and long time CEO should use that sorting order in his own AMA where he knows full well he'll be heavily downvoted, but it seems to use the default "best".
The Q&A sort mode still shows the most popular questions at the top. The CEO only answered questions with an order of magnitude fewer votes than the top questions. The Q&A sort works fine, it’s just that no questions were answered.
Based on other comments, it appears that there is a lot of vote manipulation happening on the CEO’s comments. Still in the negative, but they are being capped after some time.
1. They're not backing down at all, and even explicitly mention that Apollo/RIF/Sync will be going down because of this.
2. It looks like they are backtracking a bit on the moderation tools that use the API. This makes sense as otherwise Reddit would have been a cesspool, but a lot of moderators do use tools like Apollo, so it will be interesting to see what happens to the quality bar over time.
3. Removing NSFW content from the API is interesting - I wonder if the main app will still have access to this?
They have said the main app will still have access to NSFW content. He just claimed in a comment that it's being removed from the API due to regulatory concerns. Which seems like total BS to me.
It would be nice if whenever someone blamed their actions on vague "regulatory concerns" they actually listed the specific law/code that they were concerned with. For example, in this case, what specific law makes API access to this content risky but not regular web-based access to the content.
> Maybe. Probably are a partial truth. Regulatory pressures to crack down on NSFW content of any kind are very real.
Regulatory pressure to perform age verification is real.
But Reddit already requires users to be logged in and their account to have gone to the website and clicked on an explicit toggle in order to access NSFW content.
When (and sadly inevitably if) Reddit requires age verification to access adult content, then it will be on a per account basis - and hence the toggle would not be enabled without it. So at that point the status quo still fulfils the regulatory requirement the account has checked age. It is not clear at all to anyone who thinks about it for a second why third party clients would change anything here.
1. I think they don't want to get caught eating their own words when they're about to go public with an IPO. Backtracking because of third-party apps isn't going to go over well with potential investors.
2. I think it'll go down regardless. Mod tools is one thing, but I would really like to know the percentage of mods who use third-party Reddit apps like Apollo, RIF, etc. I wonder how many will leave the platform. If so we can expect more power-hungry mods, or Reddit having to pay for their own moderation.
3. Reddit says NSFW content is staying within the main app, but I can see it going away soon. A popular Reddit image hoster banned and deleted all NSFW content which already broke a lot of the posts in NSFW subreddits. And with Reddit now having investors and needing to attract more expensive advertisers, I can see them scrubbing NSFW content in full to become a more attractive ad platform. Especially since that's really going to be the way they make the bulk of their money.
The absolute traffic numbers immediately might not drop that big but the power function of participation - number of users is brutal for Reddit. There's a tiny, tiny fraction of users who were to leave the entire structure would fracture. The house doesn't collapse immediately but it's unsound so people begin to leave. First those in the know, then those who follow those in the know, and so on larger and larger waves until only a few people roam the ruins. It might just go on and on -- digg.com is still up. Even Slashdot is still there. Heck, I use lycos.com to force the login screen when logging in on public Internet.
This is the problem here: these people already started to delete their content and will withdraw their tools in three weeks. Time is up and the CEO doesn't even acknowledge the massive problems this change causes for moderation tools. His post should've been an about face but no.
So, no it won't be 20-30% immediately, might be so small it doesn't even register beyond normal day to day variance. But it will be 90%+ in a year.
No idea. Also, I suspect Apollo made a judgment error in looking at their usage stats through the lens of the mean, rather than their median and 99% percentile, usage.
They likely have power users greatly pulling that mean up that, in all cases, should probably be capped.
EDIT: Ooof, people dislike this thought. Has the Apollo dev spoken out about their approach? I'll be the first to admit I haven't seen reddit's entire debacle, but thought I was reasonably following the play by play.
Apollo uses an average of 324 requests per user per day, according to the developer's farewell announcement posted yesterday [0].
I hadn't heard anything about the "Free Data API" limit of 100 qpm before this either, so I assume the issues is that the free API is filtered and does not include any "mature content".
> Effective July 5, 2023, we will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed.
This change will not impact any moderator bots or extensions. In our conversations with moderators and developers, we heard two areas of feedback we plan to address.
Let's say Apollo can cut down to 100 requests per user per day. at 100 qpm, assuming equal distribution, they now can have one user for each minute in a day. Somehow I don't think having 1440 users is going to cut it.
... if they meant per user, they'd say per user. They don't, but explicitly say that it is per client id (=app).
> since he says that "over 90% of apps" make rates at requests within the free limit.
>90% of apps are people that played around with the API a bit for fun or run a small hobby-bot or something. Of course those stay below the limit (and for many of those, 100 qpm is indeed quite generous). It's also entirely irrelevant to the small number of apps that non-dev end users use.
> ... if they meant per user, they'd say per user. They don't, but explicitly say that it is per client id (=app).
You may be right, the reddit post has been edited multiple times. I assumed when it referenced OAuth that it was per end user, but it does seem that "client_id" is global to the application. I wish I could find any place else that lays out the details on the limit besides just this one reddit post...
Currently, it says the limit is "100 queries per minute per OAuth client id if you are using OAuth authentication"
And it's pretty shitty if he's including every single toy project within the "90% of apps".
> Important note: currently, our rate limit response headers indicate counts by client id/user id combination. These headers will update to reflect this new policy based on client id only on July 1.
Let's say Apollo has 1 million users (I think the actual # is significantly higher). Reddit doesn't have a push API for notifications (like if someone messages you or replies to your comment), so you have to poll. Just checking those inboxes once per week gets you to 100 queries per minute. In reality, most people want inbox notifications more frequently than that.
And in the meantime, users are also upvoting posts, commenting, scrolling, and doing other things that cut into the API quota
As far as I understand, its 100 qpm per oauth user. Each logged-in user will have 100 qpm, so they can actually query inbox once per minute and still be left with 99 queries for that minute alone. I thought the problem was that, if you exceed this limit even for some users (e.g. particularly active ones) then you are no longer eligible for the free-tier and get kicked out of the club and pay price even for the free tier.
It's 100 qpm per oauth client ID, which is tied to the developer's account in the API portal (at least that's how it worked when I used the API in the past). I suppose someone could make an app that lets users provide their own API keys, but most people aren't going to go through the hassle of setting up a dev account and generating API keys. That might also be a TOS violation?
That was my initial question too, but note it's per oauth application. It could be that per-user it could get under 100, but in aggregate the only way they'd get there is if only one person used Apollo at a time.
I wonder why didn't Apollo just have each user register a new OAuth app at https://old.reddit.com/prefs/apps, the details of which would then be used per-user. It could even be done automatically upon entering one's credentials into the Apollo app. Wouldn't this have solved the problem?
Wouldn't that require each user to go in the developer settings for their account and set up their own OAuth app integration? That's probably not feasible for end-users and I would imagine breaks the spirit of the API terms if not the letter of them.
I don't understand why the apps in question (Apollo etc) care about the Reddit API and its terms at all.
Those apps are basically browsers. Applications to browse Reddit, right?
Why not use the "html over http" API which every other browser also uses?
Yes, you would have to harden the code a bit so it gracefully deals with the structure of the html changing sometimes. And you would have to update the parser from time to time. But is that such a big problem?
Also: When using the API, how is the free API limit not enough? In TFA it says "100 queries per minute per OAuth client id". That is per user, right? Why does it take more than 100 API requests per minute to use reddit?
Something changes one day, and then your app is broken until you update it, causing you to need to rush to fix it, especially if your app has paying customers. This could be a massive, sudden change of any kind since you are effectively an adversary. Bad.
You are behind a firewall designed to cut out bots, and now need to bypass or handle anti-bot CAPTCHA. Again, bad.
You want to provide push notifications, but that requires background polling on a server. Yep, that's pretty bad, since it multiplies the effort AND erases the "basically just a browser" part in one swoop. Now you need to probably pass user credentials to your backend (bad) and scrape on the server, bypassing Cloudflare/etc in a headless manner (bad.)
Reddit shuts down old.reddit.com and cuts off access to NSFW and "edgy" or perhaps just small subreddits except when logged in on official apps. Now you need to scrape from either official iOS/Android APIs where the keys could go invalid at any time, or the JS desktop site which is all JS and XHRs everywhere. The only way to make your app truly behave like the real thing is to carefully set up an actual browser engine and hide evidence that you're using automation, which is a lot harder than you might imagine. Yep, you guessed it. Very, very bad.
For that last thing, Twitch's "integrity check" mechanism is a great illustration of just how user hostile things will quickly become. Twitch integrity check won't even pass for real browsers half the time. It hates Linux users. This is the future you get.
> Effective July 5, 2023, we will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed.
Such a silly justification, as if children are using the API to find porn, which is so difficult otherwise.
Their mobile web app public feed lets you view NSFW content without logging in, but if you want to view the comments, suddenly you need to verify your age.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I strongly suspect reddit will crack down on adult content as they approach IPO (and is already being pressured to do so)... it's happened time and time again with community platforms and is one of the major dangers of monolithic app stores and investor driven decision-making.
I don't understand the connection between these two events. Why would an IPO mean that Reddit has to crack down on adult content? We've seen this with many online platforms over the years, again and again, but I just don't understand it. Can somebody please explain?
It shines a brighter light on the platform, meaning advertisers may suddenly pull out because of their ads being shown next to "objectionable content". Reddit could preemptively crack down to avoid this.
publicly traded companies are swarmed with people watching them from every possible angle because they’re trying to profit off of seeing something thing before someone else does
But why are they blocking porn content for third party apps? How does that affect their own app store entries? How does it help them with Apples guidelines? There is no connection here.
Most of the porn limits on social media sites today are because of non consensual sharing. Porn sites today primarily have to deal with this, and they’re not doing a very good job of it. Pornhub now requires accounts to verify themselves before posting content. The sites which don’t require that are over run by no consensual images. It’s pretty disgusting. Reddit has been cracking down on it but hasn’t quite gone the whole way to eliminating it yet. Mostly they keep just making it harder for lazy, horny people to post things. Verification is the key to stopping this stuff, but it’s hard to safely verify people, especially with todays AI tools which make it almost impossible to verify without actual personal info.
No, the vast majority of social media companies trying to limit porn on their platform are certain conservative religious fundamentalism groups working their ass off to ban all porn, currently by hiding behind the claim of "mountains of child porn" which has a small nugget of truth (child porn most likely gets uploaded to pornhub and other sites every day), but that's just a facade. The same group also goes after sites selling sex toys to consenting adults and makes no attempt to help victims of sexual violence. They are merely a rhetorical tool to justify their awful goals.
Well, I disagree, certain groups and states are attacking porn itself, but most of the lock down on social media recently is due to increasing levels of non consensual sharing.
3rd party apps have occasionally been denied app store validation because of age-restricted content. Reducing exposure this way will aid developers in the review process.
Or it would if there were any 3rd party developers left.
Reddit is one of the most-used pornography sites on the internet, mostly because it's mixed in with a much larger amount of non-pornographic content so can't be filtered by the usual domain-blocking tools. Children are certainly accessing porn via both the website and apps that use the Reddit API.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the first step towards removing all the pornography off Reddit entirely, for good reason as much of it is very extreme and not something children should be looking at at all really. And even more of it is degrading to women, depicting them just as holes to fuck. It was worse in the past too, with so-called "jailbait" subreddits and pornographic images of dead women, which were only removed after a considerable amount of pressure on the admins. Really makes one wonder what their priorities are.
You cannot access NSFW content from third party apps, such as apollo, without logging into reddit.com and changing a setting.
If the goal was to remove porn, then just enforce higher moderation standards. Removing porn from the API doesn't give the impression of "we want to make the site safer to use", it's communicating "if you want your smut, use the official app so we can blast you with ads".
I have my own qualms with the "protect the children" argument that everyone hides behind for their distaste of porn and this is why; it's never about protecting children; it's about controlling other people. If you view reddit's motivation as driving people towards to the official app where they can be monetized, then these actions make the most sense. If you delude yourself into think they are doing this to protect children, then why are they acting so inefficiently? Reddit already has precedence for banning crude subreddits.
> Regulatory environment around NSFW is changing rapidly and aggressively.
> The challenge is regulators and lawmakers (those who fine and sue), who don’t care about 3rd party apps and don’t understand them. They’ll come after us, not the 3rd party apps. Lawmakers don’t look at NSFW with nuance.
> We have work to do on our platform around age-gating and related stuff to be able to keep that content – we will fight for it. Sex is universal.
Bit disappointing that we haven't seen a competitor pop up since the announcement. With the instant hardware access of AWS and the infinite money of Silicon Valley banks, it's a bit shameful that no one is rushing to fill the market need.
My thoughts as well. At least during the twitter drama we had Mastodon, and while instances did struggle with the traffic Mastodon was in a decent position to handle that. I'm not sure if any alternative exists for this scenario, though.
/shrug, i use it daily and didn't before. But again, we're not talking about a Reddit or Twitter replacement. I don't even want that. I want a slice of features that can fill the gap that Reddit or Twitter did. Mastodon worked excellently for that for me. I've permanently switched from Twitter, 6mo ago or w/e.
Reddit has Lemmy, maybe, but they seem in a less mature place than Mastodon was when Twitter fumbled.
Naysay Mastodon all you want, but i think it gained a fair bit of traction from Twitter's event. Best of all, it's not trying to be Twitter. I'm looking for that with Reddit, currently.
I am leaving Reddit because I use Apollo and I don't think their mobile site or app are acceptable. I would like to try Tildes but I cannot because it's invite only and I don't have the time to figure out where to get an invite. I'll check out Lemmy. Thanks for the suggestions.
it's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. nobody is eager to jump into that sink hole and Reddit itself is happy to be free of it.
I'm old enough to remember Google+ being released. The limited beta is what prevented my friends from adopting it. Facebook had just released another garbage redesign and we were all eager to drop it like a rock.
Actually now that I think about it, I would argue that the limited beta (and weird invite program) of GMail slowed its adoption as well.
The generic Reddit alternatives like Voat, Saidit, Ruqqus, etc. haven't done too well, but there have been some successes when individual subreddits, or groups of subreddits, have migrated to their own sites and taken much of the userbase with them.
Perhaps that is the better way forward than the aggregated approach of Reddit, going back to the old-school approach of separate forums with their own websites.
Yeah, this would be great if users move and the right entities sponsor it. Again, HN is a good example, as YC seems to have the right incentives to keep this place nice.
This time has a chance to be different. Perhaps not a large chance, but still quite a bit higher than sites like Voat had.
The problem with Voat and many of the others was that they either started in response to Reddit changes that most users didn't care about and that of those that did care the majority favored the changes, or if they already existed they were small enough that the people who left Reddit for them due to those Reddit change quickly became the overwhelming majority of their users.
Voat, for example either started because or got the majority of its users because Reddit got rid of /r/coontown and similar racist subreddits and got rid of a bunch of child sex subreddits. Those quickly reformed on Voat.
People did make Voat groups for mainstream things like movies and science, and some people tried to make those decent alternatives to say /r/movies and /r/science but it did't work. Any decent discussion on /v/movies or /v/science you could also find on /r/movies or /r/science. But on /v/movies or /v/science you'd also have a bunch of the racist and antisemite discussions too which weren't on /r/movies or /r/science.
For example see this Voat discussion of season 2 of The Mandalorian from /v/movies [1]. Here's an example from /v/science [2].
This time has a chance to be different because this time it won't be the dregs of Reddit leaving. It will mostly be decent people leaving. Those who remain might actually miss them instead of being happy they are gone, and so might consider actually following.
Oh my god, cognito hazard warning on those two links.
Was there some brief moment in time where there was any quality content on voat? why else would anyone volunteer to say they tried that platform and found it compelling :|
That is insane, it is like a screenshot of the old notorious white supremacist boards from the 00s. Yeah no wonder that reddit alternative didn't have a meteoric rise to popularity.
TBH, it seems like Discord is a natural alternative for many reddit communities, many of which already have one. And it tends to be more strictly moderated in my experience.
Yeah, there were some nice corners of Voat... at first. But thats why I left, the cool art subs died holding back the nasty. It just wasn't worth the effort.
I fear Discord replacing Reddit, as its so siloed off and insular. There literally could not be an effort to "backup" Discord like this post if (and when) the decline begins.
This is a quantitative disagreement. Not emacs vs vim. Straight numbers.
Reddit says the API will cost less than a $1/month per user. [1]
Apollo says the API will cost $2.50/month per user. [2]
Moreover, Apollo claims that Reddit itself makes only $0.12/month per user, therefore the API charges are absurd. [2]
What are the correct numbers? These are numbers, not opinions.
EDIT: One issue...I suspect that Apollo users are significantly more active than the average Reddit MAU. Say, 4x more active. So the $0.12/month revenue estimate is like (for example) $0.50 per Apollo user.
> Enough to account for an order of magnitude? IDK
reddit daily users (not MAU) are about 50m, which likely also don't generate 200res/d, and this difference is already order of magnitude.
Other "issue" from apollo side: he compares reddit API cost to his imgur API cost of $166 per 50m reqs, while forgetting that official imgur API costs $3k/50m.
It’s truly incompetent management. Spotify gatekeeps all third party apps behind their premium subscription, they could charge $10 a month for Reddit Premium to give access to Apollo and they’d make out like bandits. Spez sounds like he has personal beef with Christian on the AMA, that’s Elon Musk level nonsense except replacing electric cars and space travel with a shitty web forum
THIS! Just make it so the third party apps only work for reddit gold users, or have limitations for non-gold users, and now they've converted a bunch of the apollo users into paying members. Instead they're lying and slandering people, getting caught, and doubling down.
I'm getting the impression that reddit isn't profitable not because of any fundamental issue, but because the leadership of the site have absolutely no idea what they're doing.
I have to wonder if this is just the same cross-society trend of employees seemingly checking out and doing the bare minimum, manifesting in the C-suite. One would think top management should be doing the work of coming up with several different monetization strategies, analyzing what different types of backlash they each might cause, how to market them, simulating revenue given various levels of attrition, etc. Instead it's like they (he?) have chosen a single course of action and are just going to force it through at all costs, and they're in charge so why isn't everyone just doing what they say damnit.
He now blames[1] Apollo's author for saying other things in private and in public and "leaking" the phone call recording proving Huffman's lying, which - the developer mentioned at least twice - is legal in Canada where he lives.
What is this guy's issue? Why does he keep saying and doing pointless things that are self-destructive and risky to him and the business? How has reddit let this situation run so completely out of their control?
Divorcing entirely from the subject of the strategy change, the decision to execute it in this manner seems incomprehensible unless they truly do want to completely drive away as many of the users who even know about this change as possible. Maybe we are so ignorant of Reddit's real user metrics that they consider almost everyone reading that AMA to be a money drain.
He seems to be attempting to use a technique known as DARVO ("deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender") to smear the Apollo dev. This happens sometimes when people who know they've done something wrong are held accountable.
Broadly speaking, if you don’t want the public to know you’re a liar, simply don’t lie. Otherwise, you have no one else to blame but yourself when the public is shown the person you are.
One could argue Huffman’s actions in this regard have been deeply unprofessional, as well as operating blatantly from a place of bad faith. Savvy negotiation is distinct from lying and pleading extortion.
Reddit says "typical app user" but Apollo claims that its users make more API requests than is typical for other apps, in part due to higher usage, and in part due to inefficiencies in how Apollo structures its queries.
Reddit may be making their claims based on an app that doesn't issue push notifications and thus doesn't need to poll their servers 24/7 for every user.
It all just blows my mind, because realistically none of these details even matter. It's reddit's ball, they can take it and go home any time they want. They don't have anything to prove, they don't owe anything to anybody, not even an explanation. Ultimately they need to make a profit and they think this is the way towards that.
I just can't understand why they feel the need to keep publicly stating things that are either outright untrue or at least misleading. Just make an announcement to the effect of "this is the pricing, we have determined this is the best way to meet our financial goals" and shut the hell up. It's not hard!
The BS / gaslighting about precise numbers and the misrepresentation of what they've heard from developers is completely pointless.
Not to the extent that Reddit is, at least not in the same way. Other companies can exist and even thrive regardless of what users want by being necessary or legally mandated. Oil companies' users aren't their customers. Equifax doesn't care about how users feel. ADP, Geico, SAP, utilities, banks, etc. aren't the best companies for users, and many of their users dislike them, but it's generally not a threat to their profitability.
This is a somewhat cynical view, admittedly, but overall, many successful companies don't need to please "users" in the same way Reddit does. They obviously make some amount from advertisers, but they need users for advertisers to advertise too.
Most companies provide a service or product to their users, and their users pay for that. The company creates the value for which their users/customers pay.
With Reddit the majority of the value to users is not created by Reddit but by the users themselves. The only real value that Reddit provides is a platform, and it's a platform that would be fairly easy to replicate (from a technical point of view it's just a large scale CRUD app, nothing special, it's a solved problem).
The only real reason that users stick with Reddit is the network effect, but that is the biggest risk to their platform as well. If they manage to alienate enough of the most active part of their user base into moving to another platform, the same network effect with ensure the rest of them follows, taking all of the value that Reddit provides to their visitors with them, and as a result all of the value all those visitors provide to paying advertisers.
This is not as unlikely as you'd think, because only a small percentage of visitors to Reddit actively contribute.
You are quite wrong to think they are panicking. I can assure you they planned and anticipated for a backlash of this proportion. And also came to the conclusion this will be worth it.
they are in the business of community building, a bit directly but mostly indirectly through the various subreddit teams
thus they have a reputation as platform gods, and now they put up that reputation as bargaining chip, it's the classic "trust us, we care about you", and now it seems they really don't.
so now they owe an explanation to users, teams, and in general to anyone who they directly or indirectly hurt.
The rule that you shouldn’t build your business on someone else’s API obviously applies here and in the end Reddit is of course justified in choosing to shut out third party apps. But I must say it is simply hilarious that their exorbitant new price was so absurd that when devs quoted it back to them as a buyout rate, Reddit felt like they were being blackmailed. I mean that’s literally getting offended at your own number.
> The rule that you shouldn’t build your business on someone else’s API obviously applies here
Is there an alternative? If your business is an app around someone elses API, as it is in this case, Tweetbot, etc - it seems super reasonable no?
Yea the API could change at any moment. So maybe don't over leverage yourself. Play it safe, knowing any day could be the apps last.. but beyond that "building your business around someone else's API" isn't bad here is it?
I'd happily do it if it was going to make some money. So i'm kinda unsure where the distinction is for that phrase. When is it not a good idea? Seems a better phrase would be one that includes knowing what type of business you have.
It just depends on what your timeline is. Tech is very ephemeral, so anything that exists today will be gone eventually. So build an app using an api, but i would not rely on it to be a viable product for more than a couple of years.
So its fine if you want beer money, but it wont be a career.
Personally, I think it's reasonable for a small 1-2 person shop, but if you are planning a larger company it's pretty irresponsible to build it around someone's API like this. If you can't feasibly replace a given API, then you're business is incredibly fragile, and I think it's unfair to employ a large number of people in a fragile business without clearly stating to them that they could all be unemployed in an instant.
If you have good reasons to build on a third party API and you do it responsibly (not over-leveraging yourself, not annoying the API provider) then it’s fine, sure. Perhaps the real value of that rule is that it makes you conscious of the risks and pushes you to mitigate them.
It makes sense from a risk mitigation perspective, but it doesn't sound like the reddit third party app devs were unaware or incorrectly weighing this. It sounded like they took on personal and financial risk to do something they wanted to do and add something to the world that they wanted to. Rather than foolish, I find it admirable to abandon profit and security for principles. Especially in the context of reddit being founded on principles. Regardless of what happens to the site and the shareholders: it is safe to say that the true reddit is already dead.
> > The rule that you shouldn’t build your business on someone else’s API obviously applies here
> Is there an alternative?
Scraping. They're joking on some subreddits about how reddit is about to see costs skyrocket when third-party tools start requesting and parsing whole pages instead of using a lightweight API.
>But I must say it is simply hilarious that their exorbitant new price was so absurd that when devs quoted it back to them as a buyout rate, Reddit felt like they were being blackmailed. I mean that’s literally getting offended at your own number.
It was even worse, from what I remember. It was half their number that outraged them.
If you’re a search company you shouldn’t build your business on the Google search API, if you’re a compute provider you shouldn’t build your business on the AWS API, if you’re a payment provider you shouldn’t build your business on the Stripe API, etc. So the pedantic version of the rule is like, don’t build your business on just repackaging another company’s API, I guess?
Game development is a bit of an exception to many “rules” of the software business, since creative and artistic expression are significant motivating factors substituting in for a portion of the usual profit motive, in a way you generally don’t see in other software (look for the phrase ‘labour of love’ for examples).
Game engines are also not quite APIs imo, they are more like (massive) libraries that you vendor (bundle with your game and install as dependency). This inures you against some issues with building on a third party API, but not all (e.g. price changes are still an issue, but at a different granularity: “licensing fees per game” rather than “usage fees per call”).
These minor caveats aside, your example is good and worth investigating. Off the top of my head, I believe big game development companies are indeed pretty diversified when it comes to game engines, reflecting the wisdom of not building on someone else’s API.
Riot Games uses their own engine for League of Legends, but uses Unreal for Valorant and Unity for Runeterra and Wild Rift.
Blizzard uses their own engine(s) for StarCraft/Warcraft/WoW/Overwatch/Diablo, but uses Unity for Hearthstone. They did license Unreal Engine at some point but I’m not sure if they have used it.
Activision uses their own engine (IW) for all of their Call of Duty games.
EA uses Unreal and Unity for a few games, but largely uses their own engine (Frostbite).
Ubisoft used to use Unreal for their Tom Clancy series (e.g. Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell) but in fact moved that series to their own engines (Ghost Recon is now on Ubi’s Anvil engine while The Division is on their Snowdrop engine), specifically citing concerns over control and licensing fees as the reason for the move. Their Assassin’s Creed series has always been on their Anvil engine. I believe Ubisoft has another handful of their own engines as well, not quite “one engine per game series” but maybe close to that - an extreme example where they aren’t even willing to build one department’s business on another department’s API!
Valve uses their own engine, Source, for their games. (They have worked with both Unity and Unreal, but I believe this was for their VR and console hardware?)
Nintendo also uses their own engines for their games. (Like Valve, they have worked with both Unreal and Unity for their Switch handheld hardware.)
Epic Games is the only big game developer I can think of that is not diversified, they use Unreal exclusively. Being as they are also the developers of Unreal engine, this isn’t a case of relying on a third party.
So overall I would say yes, even in game development it’s clear that companies go to significant expense to not rely on someone else’s gaming API, and with Ubisoft there’s at least one example of a company publicly learning this exact lesson.
I don't think that's a good argument. If someone says something sexually harassing to me at work and I politely say "Oh, I guess I misunderstood" to defuse the situation, it would be specious for them to later claim that my statement of misunderstanding means that no sexual harassment could have taken place.
The dev recorded things. You can hear it for yourself. To me it's pretty clear that he's saying 'my API is loud in terms of API calls, it would be quiet if it went away' not 'I will go away quietly if you pay me hush money'
They literally suspended the website [0] where you can apply for an app. It's been a perma-waitlist that hasn't moved a bit. Several app developers [1, 2, 3] have reached out and gotten radio silence.
The most obvious answer is that killing third-party apps is intentional.
It would have been a reasonable compromise to cut off API access to users who don't have Reddit Gold, but that's off the table, because it doesn't juice the numbers for the IPO the right way.
I won't go so far as to say that this is Reddit's death-knell since they've been through a lot of controversies before, and I'm sure their business will do just fine in the future, but its clear to me at this point the direction they want to take the site is continually diverging from what I want it to be.
To be honest, I'm a bit thankful that they are finally doing this. Shutting down Apollo is making me realize I'm the frog in boiling water as they try to turn it into TikTok. With this move, they turned up the temperature a bit too fast, and this is my queue to jump out.
I guess it's a classic move out of the IPO playbook at this point to gain content and users via third party clients and then turn around and eliminate them by killing their API access entirely and/or making it prohibitively expensive.
Seems like a weird move by someone who's been at Reddit since the beginning and presumably understands its users well to me though.
This post screams classic Friday afternoon news dump to me. But at this point, it doesn't really matter. I'm beginning to grow very tired of Reddit. When I signed up almost 9 years ago, it felt like a community where I was surrounded by others who were genuinely curious, helpful, and smarter than me. Now it feels like a slightly better Facebook, even if you exclude the constantly interjected political comments. The HN community feels to me today what Reddit felt like 9 years ago.
I genuinely don’t know where I’d head next if HN shut down or otherwise jumped the shark. FB was never a viable option for me, Twitter got Musked, and Reddit never held much appeal. Guess I’d have to learn how to Mastodon.
Mastodon isn't a replacement for forums. People mostly toot past each other; threads don't happen that much. When threads get big they are hard to follow; there is no easily discernible tree structure.
I don't pay a lot of attention to things like revenue and the amount of active users, but I think that by those metrics Huffman has been a pretty successful CEO. It looks like he regrets selling Reddit so cheap the first time, and has had growth as his main objective since returning as CEO. I guess taking in a lot of venture capital pretty much forced him to do that as well. New Reddit and the official apps has brought in a lot of new users, while changing what the site is. I don't think they value their old users particularly high, there's probably not a lot of them compared to the whole user base, and getting rid of them is a calculated move.
I think you're right on the mark. Reddit doesn't want the old users who used it like an internet forum. Reddit wants to be another Instagram, TikTok, etc. As a business it's the "right" choice and the only way to make their investors money.
It's a shame we're losing the biggest internet forum, but it's been on this trajectory for a long time anyway.
> It's a shame we're losing the biggest internet forum, but it's been on this trajectory for a long time anyway.
But that's what so great about reddit compared to the other big social media platforms: hard delineation by interest groups (subreddits).
Instagram, and any others (AFAIK) do not have anything like this feature. It's all just a jumbled mess of user-to-user connections.
I wouldn't say we're "losing the biggest internet forum" there. They can still make reddit more mainstream without old communities having to change much, right?
Not really - the official clients constantly push content in which I (for one) have no interest, in the name of “engagement”.
I won’t stand for it, and have just stopped using Reddit - mostly passively, but occasionally posting. Without a user-respective native client that follows system conventions and does not push garbage, the service is just not worth using.
> Not really - the official clients constantly push content in which I (for one) have no interest, in the name of “engagement”.
Where are you getting that on reddit? I don't think I've ever seen content that's not normal posts in my subreddits. [Maybe it's been there the whole time but ad blocked away or something so I'm just never seeing it?]
I don't use r/popular, r/news, r/all, etc much if they're doing something different there.
If you don't follow a lot of subreddits, then they regularly pester you to follow some, or a stupid live stream of something or the other, or other similar stuff designed to increase "engagement".
Isn't explicit subreddit-level engagement and information organization incredibly valuable for targeting/monetization?
imo, it like they're disorganizing the site to undermine and eventually cut out independent moderators, to avoid the business risk that is actively playing out.
>It's a shame we're losing the biggest internet forum
I'm looking forward to that. back in the day it was "normal" to have topic related forums/communities. walled-garden-groups on social media and centralized solutions like reddit killed those, because they were easier to set up and manage. but the community was no longer really owned by someone from that community.
> ... has had growth as his main objective since returning as CEO. I guess taking in a lot of venture capital pretty much forced him to do that as well.
the key wasnt the pornography, but the kinds of people who post what tubmlr CATGORIZED as pornography. everything from queer communities, sex education, and people who post a variety of things only SOME of which was nsfw. by alienating those people who were the core of the community that existed there, they drove out the community forming elements that existed on the site in the first place.
I still find it hard to believe that they only banned "female presenting" nipples. If a man posted his nipple on the site it was fine, at least after appealing the moderation decision, but if I woman did it? Banned.
The reddit post title mirrored on HN is intentionally vague.
For those not closely following the Reddit killing off third party clients via API price gouging drama, this is one of the Reddit co-founders and its current CEO u/spez (Steve Huffman) doing a live AMA.
Huffman has been the CEO in charge of Reddit when they implemented both "New Reddit" and their mobile apps. I wonder if he's at least a little embarrassed that his team can't make something as well liked and good as some solo developers with only API access, not hundreds of millions of dollars.
Nothing I've seen from Reddit the last years have been particularly impressive, they even used some third party company for their chat functionality which I don't think many users wanted or used. At least the uptime seems to have improved.
Totally wrong. Have you used Apollo vs the official iOS app? Night and day user experiences. The official app is buggy, ugly, difficult to navigate, and affords not even half of the amount of customization that Apollo does.
I'm not that surprised, a handful or even a couple of passionate skilled developers can out-produce a 40-team of mediocre architecture astronauts with offshore contractors any day of the week.
I have no clue if that's what's going on, but I've seen it many many times
Wouldn't surprise me if the "official" Reddit app is now weighed down by a metric tonne of compliance that none of the other apps have to do. Not that it explains shipping actively user experience degrading features, but it can explain how they can get stuck with them once those poor decisions are made, because there is so much process involved to fix them that you basically give up.
I feel like it's worth comparing Reddit to another thing that went from being free to paid - Dwarf Fortress. They built up a great rapport and trust with their user base, and in return their user base happily paid for a product they'd been using for decades for free. They made millions over the span of a few days. Someone asked in the forums if people really want to pay for this and the replies are just thousands of people saying "yes".
Compare that to Reddit's adversarial history with its user base and the backlash they're getting now. It's completely possible to make money off Reddit without resorting to measures like these. I'm a better person today because of Reddit, which is something I can't say about any other social media. It deeply hurts my heart to see such a valuable and meaningful space possibly die due to just simple greed. That, to me, is a far greater loss than anything else mentioned in the threads about this impending disaster.
This is almost entirely a "management / PR debacle". A very easily avoidable debacle, I'm fairly sure, if they had simply brought in the right people or person (even) to help them through the process.
A number of Huffman's statements, seemingly tinged with bitterness / resentment and broadcasting a sense of "unfairness" (i.e., that third party apps have been profitable but Reddit itself has not), have been laughably unprofessional. And I'm not even writing about the tit-for-tat potentially libelous completely lacking in understanding of relevant LAWS crap.
This is not remotely 'C-suite' 'level' messaging / behavior. Particularly for a company that put in a target of $15 billion valuation back in 2021.
Honestly, I will say, I feel a little bad for Huffman, at this point. He's clearly out of his depth. I suspect there is some pressure that has shown up / backstory that created a sense of serious urgency starting some months ago, and the management team at Reddit figured they could handle this process &/ want(ed) to demonstrate competence. So, they have been forging ahead w/ trying to line everything up. Some have cited "ChatGPT", and, of course, there's always the rising interest rates being a potential issue ... nevertheless, they've created substantial bad sentiment among some of the most important users & devs at a particularly BAD time.
Of course, this may well not derail an IPO, the site too much, etc., in the short run. But, it's ludicrously bad management - examples more likely by the day to show up in future business courses. A SOCIAL MEDIA site bungling MESSAGING, possibly catastrophically, and pissing off some of the people MOST WILLING to contribute to financial health (almost certainly) and MOST INTERESTED in the site continuing to be viable!
They really ought to consider, if they haven't done so already, getting some small team of 'crisis PR' or 'management advisors' or something in, with expertise in the various areas they are clearly having massive issues with right now. Simply doing that, and having Huffman indicate (externally) a degree of 'stepping aside' so that things can be righted, could defuse some of the serious negative sentiment they have now generated.
Huffman's giving us all a masterclass in how to be absolutely atrocious at PR, seriously how on Earth did Reddit as a company allow this to go ahead? It's like the tech industry equivalent of a Liz Truss speech.
Because bad PR hasn't really hurt any company in decades? When is the last time "CEO did something awful but not illegal" actually significantly reduced a company's income?
Twitter basically became a Nazi rally and they're still going to clear a billion dollars in revenue this year.
I for one definitely have not been following those sort of people and I've seen a marked increase in their presence in my feed after Elon took over - many people have. Elon unbanned a ton of right-wing accounts and it seems like he's privileged their content to appear more often in people's feeds, likely anyone the demographics have tagged as "leftist" or "liberal."
And Elon himself has been retweeting and responding favorably to racist content for a while. It's obvious there is an attempt on his part to normalize this stuff on the platform. He's basically a redpilled troll at this point.
What world do you even live in? Twitter was even full of right wing nut jobs and Russian bots _before_ the takeover, which they were more than happy to intersperse into my timeline of entirely technologists.
Funny how he keeps using the phrase “developers that want to work with us”. Clearly trying to suggest that some don’t (wonder which ones he thinks do not want to work with them /s)
> I acknowledge it was a tight timeline. For what it’s worth, we are continuing to chat with many of the developers who still want to work with us.
This is his worst answer, yet. A complete lack of respect for the developers of the affected apps, as well as their users.
I’m genuinely shocked that he’s so willing to admit to the incompetence of Reddit’s decision-makers and their complete disconnect with the situation on the ground.
> Apologies for the delay. We are responding now.
>
> If others have apps they would like to be considered for the paid API tier, please reach out here and select “This is a partnership request.”
Still, in terms of the normal transparency level of an AMA, this one reads to me like he has a crisis PR person sitting right next to him filtering his replies.
It wouldn’t surprise me if someone is copying questions into a GDoc for him and then he’s dictating the replies in the GDoc, so they’re using a Q/A format.
I can't comprehend how a crisis PR person would see the comment asking about Apollo and make the suggestion Steve pointlessly double down on the same accusation.
Tbh I think that's a good answer. As someone about to delete their account after archiving their data, I'm fine with that. They need to be profitable. If they can't break even Reddit will absolutely disappear.
I disagree; nobody "Needs to be profitable". Companies especially; many break even or depending on the time the average is breaking even or barely profitable. The fact that there are huge corporations overworking employees, and have record breaking profit margins over the last few years, with hours cut to employees is what I shake my fist at. but we are all sheep so the trend will continue. Profitable is subjective and really boils down to who is getting screwed.
The problem arises when you consider the context in which "we're not profitable" comes from, and if that statement can be trusted in that context.
I don't personally think it can, and because there's zero proof available, all we have to go off of is the overall trustworthiness of the speaker, and the context to which they are speaking, ie, they're proven to be untrustworthy and they're in a situation where they need to save face.
Other highlights, in addition to that and quotes from other users already in reply, include:
- Steve continuing to drag Christian's credibility and doubling down on the claim that Christian says "one thing to us while saying something completely different externally," and offering no evidence a day after having that exact claim blow up in his face.
- An admin insisting "We have programs in place to support our largest communities" and immediately getting replies by top 1% subreddit mods (ie ELI5) who tried those programs and said the admins they "adopted" hardly participated and didn't seem to understand the basic functionality of the mod tools. No further replies from reddit there.
- Steve copy and pasting a comment verbatim from his planning document in reply to a blind user and accidentally leaving the "A:" as in "answer" on it before stealth-editing it and getting caught by the users. No further replies from Steve there.
This is absolutely wild. I hope we get a detailed post-mortem on this AMA as a masterclass in poor public relations and devrel. It's so densely catastrophic. It's like a fractal of compounding mistakes reaching back to the foundation they laid when these changes were first announced. I didn't link the individual comments since they're all conveniently indexed at the top of the thread.
And they have confirmed they are 100% bought into the plan that accessibility at Reddit at this time consists of the administration promising updates sometime in the future, and the expectation 3rd party developers will work "non commercially" to maintain alternatives in the meantime.
At this point I have to wonder if this really is an intentional strategy to ensure the sort of users reacting negatively to these changes are driven away from the site as completely as possible as part of Reddit's ongoing macro shift. The fumbling is so thorough it looks purposeful.
All of the noteworthy Reddit apps already announced they're shutting down on the 30th.
It's absurd he's even pretending that these developers are leaving because they "don't want to work with us." Selig posted so many receipts of him going above and beyond to play well with reddit, and never even had any qualms with the idea of paying for API usage. Steve Huffman pretending that we didn't see all of this is so spineless and pathetic. Everyone at reddit should be embarrassed to work for him.
I think this is a cheeky comment but I agree that it is very addicting. The karma system gets you hooked from early on and then 10 years go by and it becomes a part of your daily routine. An alternative without incentives to gain fake internet points might fare better.
I've personally quit Reddit as of this debacle because it made me realise how much I used it everyday and this was a good enough excuse to look elsewhere.
At this point the Reddit CEO's numerous defamatory lies about the Apollo dev has been thoroughly debunked. If the CEO had the tiniest amount of common sense, he would've made an apology, however insincere it may be. So imagine my astonishment when I saw him doubling down with even more defamatory statements.
Why is Spez so insistent on becoming public enemy #1? He's so obviously in the wrong here, yet is doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on what is an obvious screw-up.
Frankly I think this might be a worse PR move than what Elon did when he did this with Twitter's API.
Is it someone in panic over a potential large impact on the IPO? I dont even think it would have that much of an effect if he hadn't gone on the platform to make the problem worse.
There's some commentary on this at the "Reddit drama" forum, if anyone here would enjoy reading some rather more ascerbic takes on the Reddit CEO's excuse-making exercise:
396 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadhttps://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
"His “joke” is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him."
IMO, investors should ensure that a CEO can pass a 100 level undergrad PR class before handing them millions of dollars.
this part is up to debate. I would also consider "joke" with $10m sticker to go away quiet as a threat, which looks like didn't go through and apollo dev backed up.
its regular bs sugar coating, like you know someone is cheating, and he knows he is cheating but doesn't admit, but you don't have proof and you say "oh it was miscommunication" for the sake of continuing cooperation.
looks like we are in disagreement about this part.
> Apollo dev: How did you take that, sorry? Could you elaborate?
> spez: Oh, like, cause you were like "hey, if you want this, if you want this to go away, like [unintelligeble]..."
> Apollo dev: Oh, I said if you want Apollo to go quiet, like I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API use..."
> spez: Oh, okay, got it. Got it, sorry. That's a complete misinterpretation on my part. I apologize immediately [...]
Would you expect spez to still consider it a threat given both the literal content of what he says, and the tone it was said in? I see no way your interpretation makes sense.
Update on your updated comment: > and the tone it was said in? I see no way your interpretation makes sense.
Looks like we are again in disagreement about this.
sorry, this doesn't make sense to me.
I answered this already, it could be sugarcoating. Sorry, this discussion is low quality to my taste and I have no interest in continuing. Good bye.
Yesterday he wrote,
> Why doesn't Reddit just buy Apollo and other third-party apps?
> This was a very common comment across the topics: "If Apollo has an apparent opportunity cost of $20 million per year, why not just buy them and other third-party apps, as they did with Alien Blue?"
> I believe it's a fair question. If these apps apparently cost so much, an easy solution that would likely make everyone happy would be to simply buy these apps out. So I brought that up to them during a call on May 31st where I was suggesting a variety of potential solutions
And he linked to a comment,
https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_w...
spez is free to release counter-evidence, the Apollo dev has given his approval for anything to be released. Him not doing it means we just have the Apollo devs recording to go off - and that is very, very clearly referring to what he is claiming it's referring to.
Apollo dev said the call was 24hrs before June 1st. So he asked reddit for 10 million dollars right before he made this post:
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
He had previously made 2 other posts about it before on Apr 18-19, so that's what he meant by "quiet down". Reddit refused to pay him $10 million and so he went the opposite of "quiet", he made a post telling his story and it blew up.
For the next week when mods were taking their subs private, the Apollo dev didn't disclose to any of them that he'd asked for 10 million to "have Apollo quiet down." If some reddit employee hadn't asked him about it Mastodon, he would never have told anyone about that.
If I'm missing something you're alluding to in the beginning I'd appreciate an explicit explanation :)
Christian only released the recording to dispute the claim from spez that he threatened Reddit with blackmail (quite a serious claim imo)
I can't imagine doing business with Reddit after their CEO outright lied to try to tarnish another developers reputation.
...What are the odds of Reddit being the next Facebook instead of the next MySpace? It has to be astronomically low.
CEOs will only stop being giant twats when being a giant twat inevitably leads you to personal ruin.
> Please feel free to give examples where I said something differently in public versus what I said to you. I give you full permission.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
[1] http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
Christian suggests that if Apollo is costing reddit $20m/year, they could just buy it for $10m as a win/win for everyone
Reddit interprets his referring to "going quiet" as some sort of extortion/blackmail
Christian clarifies, everyone apologizes for the misunderstanding and the conversation moves on
Weeks later, Reddit admins publicly accuse him of blackmail
Christian releases his statement and a snippet of a call recording
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing_issues#Perform... [1]: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...
Weeks later, after Christian announced to his community the most likely impact on the app of the upcoming API changes and a summary of his conversations with Reddit.
Reading this comment makes me wonder if Steve genuinely believes the ongoing outrage from Reddit's community is somehow to any extent Christian's fault. "Look, it was a threat after all. He's doing what we thought he would and what he said he wouldn't do."
https://old.reddit.com/user/spez
EDIT: links for replies from other reddit officials:
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
Going into a user's profile for their comments is a paradigm older than Reddit.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
https://www.reddit.com/user/spez/comments/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/145bxmi/c...
There really aren't many answers though, unfortunately. Only 12 answers from u/spez in a sea of 14k+ comments...
It wasn't much of an AMA IMO. Mostly very short answers and I don't see any new insights here.
Fourteen. He replied to fourteen comments. In the space of four hours.
It's not often that you see a platform implode in real time.
It was never going to be anything other than a disaster, but this is just chucking fuel on the fire.
1. They're not backing down at all, and even explicitly mention that Apollo/RIF/Sync will be going down because of this.
2. It looks like they are backtracking a bit on the moderation tools that use the API. This makes sense as otherwise Reddit would have been a cesspool, but a lot of moderators do use tools like Apollo, so it will be interesting to see what happens to the quality bar over time.
3. Removing NSFW content from the API is interesting - I wonder if the main app will still have access to this?
Regulatory pressure to perform age verification is real.
But Reddit already requires users to be logged in and their account to have gone to the website and clicked on an explicit toggle in order to access NSFW content.
When (and sadly inevitably if) Reddit requires age verification to access adult content, then it will be on a per account basis - and hence the toggle would not be enabled without it. So at that point the status quo still fulfils the regulatory requirement the account has checked age. It is not clear at all to anyone who thinks about it for a second why third party clients would change anything here.
2. I think it'll go down regardless. Mod tools is one thing, but I would really like to know the percentage of mods who use third-party Reddit apps like Apollo, RIF, etc. I wonder how many will leave the platform. If so we can expect more power-hungry mods, or Reddit having to pay for their own moderation.
3. Reddit says NSFW content is staying within the main app, but I can see it going away soon. A popular Reddit image hoster banned and deleted all NSFW content which already broke a lot of the posts in NSFW subreddits. And with Reddit now having investors and needing to attract more expensive advertisers, I can see them scrubbing NSFW content in full to become a more attractive ad platform. Especially since that's really going to be the way they make the bulk of their money.
This is the problem here: these people already started to delete their content and will withdraw their tools in three weeks. Time is up and the CEO doesn't even acknowledge the massive problems this change causes for moderation tools. His post should've been an about face but no.
So, no it won't be 20-30% immediately, might be so small it doesn't even register beyond normal day to day variance. But it will be 90%+ in a year.
(Okay, so apparently client ID isn't user ID, but app ID. Explains a lot.)
They likely have power users greatly pulling that mean up that, in all cases, should probably be capped.
EDIT: Ooof, people dislike this thought. Has the Apollo dev spoken out about their approach? I'll be the first to admit I haven't seen reddit's entire debacle, but thought I was reasonably following the play by play.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36261736
The reddit post is what I was referencing by looking at mean vs. median/99%
I hadn't heard anything about the "Free Data API" limit of 100 qpm before this either, so I assume the issues is that the free API is filtered and does not include any "mature content".
> Effective July 5, 2023, we will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed. This change will not impact any moderator bots or extensions. In our conversations with moderators and developers, we heard two areas of feedback we plan to address.
0: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
> since he says that "over 90% of apps" make rates at requests within the free limit.
>90% of apps are people that played around with the API a bit for fun or run a small hobby-bot or something. Of course those stay below the limit (and for many of those, 100 qpm is indeed quite generous). It's also entirely irrelevant to the small number of apps that non-dev end users use.
You may be right, the reddit post has been edited multiple times. I assumed when it referenced OAuth that it was per end user, but it does seem that "client_id" is global to the application. I wish I could find any place else that lays out the details on the limit besides just this one reddit post...
Currently, it says the limit is "100 queries per minute per OAuth client id if you are using OAuth authentication"
And it's pretty shitty if he's including every single toy project within the "90% of apps".
https://reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_e...
And in the meantime, users are also upvoting posts, commenting, scrolling, and doing other things that cut into the API quota
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256167
Those apps are basically browsers. Applications to browse Reddit, right?
Why not use the "html over http" API which every other browser also uses?
Yes, you would have to harden the code a bit so it gracefully deals with the structure of the html changing sometimes. And you would have to update the parser from time to time. But is that such a big problem?
Also: When using the API, how is the free API limit not enough? In TFA it says "100 queries per minute per OAuth client id". That is per user, right? Why does it take more than 100 API requests per minute to use reddit?
Nope, not even close.
You are behind a firewall designed to cut out bots, and now need to bypass or handle anti-bot CAPTCHA. Again, bad.
You want to provide push notifications, but that requires background polling on a server. Yep, that's pretty bad, since it multiplies the effort AND erases the "basically just a browser" part in one swoop. Now you need to probably pass user credentials to your backend (bad) and scrape on the server, bypassing Cloudflare/etc in a headless manner (bad.)
Reddit shuts down old.reddit.com and cuts off access to NSFW and "edgy" or perhaps just small subreddits except when logged in on official apps. Now you need to scrape from either official iOS/Android APIs where the keys could go invalid at any time, or the JS desktop site which is all JS and XHRs everywhere. The only way to make your app truly behave like the real thing is to carefully set up an actual browser engine and hide evidence that you're using automation, which is a lot harder than you might imagine. Yep, you guessed it. Very, very bad.
For that last thing, Twitch's "integrity check" mechanism is a great illustration of just how user hostile things will quickly become. Twitch integrity check won't even pass for real browsers half the time. It hates Linux users. This is the future you get.
No, it's per app.
Such a silly justification, as if children are using the API to find porn, which is so difficult otherwise.
Yes they are.
> which is so difficult otherwise.
No, it's not.
What evidence do you have?
Or it would if there were any 3rd party developers left.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the first step towards removing all the pornography off Reddit entirely, for good reason as much of it is very extreme and not something children should be looking at at all really. And even more of it is degrading to women, depicting them just as holes to fuck. It was worse in the past too, with so-called "jailbait" subreddits and pornographic images of dead women, which were only removed after a considerable amount of pressure on the admins. Really makes one wonder what their priorities are.
If the goal was to remove porn, then just enforce higher moderation standards. Removing porn from the API doesn't give the impression of "we want to make the site safer to use", it's communicating "if you want your smut, use the official app so we can blast you with ads".
I have my own qualms with the "protect the children" argument that everyone hides behind for their distaste of porn and this is why; it's never about protecting children; it's about controlling other people. If you view reddit's motivation as driving people towards to the official app where they can be monetized, then these actions make the most sense. If you delude yourself into think they are doing this to protect children, then why are they acting so inefficiently? Reddit already has precedence for banning crude subreddits.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/reddit_he...
> NSFW
> Regulatory environment around NSFW is changing rapidly and aggressively.
> The challenge is regulators and lawmakers (those who fine and sue), who don’t care about 3rd party apps and don’t understand them. They’ll come after us, not the 3rd party apps. Lawmakers don’t look at NSFW with nuance.
> We have work to do on our platform around age-gating and related stuff to be able to keep that content – we will fight for it. Sex is universal.
Reddit has Lemmy, maybe, but they seem in a less mature place than Mastodon was when Twitter fumbled.
Naysay Mastodon all you want, but i think it gained a fair bit of traction from Twitter's event. Best of all, it's not trying to be Twitter. I'm looking for that with Reddit, currently.
You underestimate the staying power of a network.
Actually now that I think about it, I would argue that the limited beta (and weird invite program) of GMail slowed its adoption as well.
Once you cross the trust thermocline,[0] collapse is sudden and virtually irreversible.
[0] https://every.to/p/breaching-the-trust-thermocline-is-the-bi...
Fact is, they dont have the critical mass Reddit does, and never will until it is actually dead, not "dying" like it has been for half a decade.
Perhaps that is the better way forward than the aggregated approach of Reddit, going back to the old-school approach of separate forums with their own websites.
Yeah, this would be great if users move and the right entities sponsor it. Again, HN is a good example, as YC seems to have the right incentives to keep this place nice.
The problem with Voat and many of the others was that they either started in response to Reddit changes that most users didn't care about and that of those that did care the majority favored the changes, or if they already existed they were small enough that the people who left Reddit for them due to those Reddit change quickly became the overwhelming majority of their users.
Voat, for example either started because or got the majority of its users because Reddit got rid of /r/coontown and similar racist subreddits and got rid of a bunch of child sex subreddits. Those quickly reformed on Voat.
People did make Voat groups for mainstream things like movies and science, and some people tried to make those decent alternatives to say /r/movies and /r/science but it did't work. Any decent discussion on /v/movies or /v/science you could also find on /r/movies or /r/science. But on /v/movies or /v/science you'd also have a bunch of the racist and antisemite discussions too which weren't on /r/movies or /r/science.
For example see this Voat discussion of season 2 of The Mandalorian from /v/movies [1]. Here's an example from /v/science [2].
This time has a chance to be different because this time it won't be the dregs of Reddit leaving. It will mostly be decent people leaving. Those who remain might actually miss them instead of being happy they are gone, and so might consider actually following.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201225021055/https://voat.co/v...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20201223123156/https://voat.co/v...
Was there some brief moment in time where there was any quality content on voat? why else would anyone volunteer to say they tried that platform and found it compelling :|
That is insane, it is like a screenshot of the old notorious white supremacist boards from the 00s. Yeah no wonder that reddit alternative didn't have a meteoric rise to popularity.
TBH, it seems like Discord is a natural alternative for many reddit communities, many of which already have one. And it tends to be more strictly moderated in my experience.
I fear Discord replacing Reddit, as its so siloed off and insular. There literally could not be an effort to "backup" Discord like this post if (and when) the decline begins.
Reddit says the API will cost less than a $1/month per user. [1]
Apollo says the API will cost $2.50/month per user. [2]
Moreover, Apollo claims that Reddit itself makes only $0.12/month per user, therefore the API charges are absurd. [2]
What are the correct numbers? These are numbers, not opinions.
EDIT: One issue...I suspect that Apollo users are significantly more active than the average Reddit MAU. Say, 4x more active. So the $0.12/month revenue estimate is like (for example) $0.50 per Apollo user.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
MAU are very different users compared to users making 200 reqs per day, and bring very different revenue.
Enough to account for an order of magnitude? IDK
reddit daily users (not MAU) are about 50m, which likely also don't generate 200res/d, and this difference is already order of magnitude.
Other "issue" from apollo side: he compares reddit API cost to his imgur API cost of $166 per 50m reqs, while forgetting that official imgur API costs $3k/50m.
I'm getting the impression that reddit isn't profitable not because of any fundamental issue, but because the leadership of the site have absolutely no idea what they're doing.
Sucks that I don't have popcorn at hand.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
Divorcing entirely from the subject of the strategy change, the decision to execute it in this manner seems incomprehensible unless they truly do want to completely drive away as many of the users who even know about this change as possible. Maybe we are so ignorant of Reddit's real user metrics that they consider almost everyone reading that AMA to be a money drain.
One could argue Huffman’s actions in this regard have been deeply unprofessional, as well as operating blatantly from a place of bad faith. Savvy negotiation is distinct from lying and pleading extortion.
> Say, 4x more active. So the $0.12/month revenue estimate is like (for example) $0.50 per Apollo user.
Numbers can very much be an opinion if you pull them out of thin air.
I just can't understand why they feel the need to keep publicly stating things that are either outright untrue or at least misleading. Just make an announcement to the effect of "this is the pricing, we have determined this is the best way to meet our financial goals" and shut the hell up. It's not hard!
The BS / gaslighting about precise numbers and the misrepresentation of what they've heard from developers is completely pointless.
I can only think of one reason: they’re panicking.
> It's reddit's ball, they can take it and go home any time they want.
While this is true, Reddit knows they are dependent on their users for their survival. That’s why they are panicking.
This is a somewhat cynical view, admittedly, but overall, many successful companies don't need to please "users" in the same way Reddit does. They obviously make some amount from advertisers, but they need users for advertisers to advertise too.
With Reddit the majority of the value to users is not created by Reddit but by the users themselves. The only real value that Reddit provides is a platform, and it's a platform that would be fairly easy to replicate (from a technical point of view it's just a large scale CRUD app, nothing special, it's a solved problem).
The only real reason that users stick with Reddit is the network effect, but that is the biggest risk to their platform as well. If they manage to alienate enough of the most active part of their user base into moving to another platform, the same network effect with ensure the rest of them follows, taking all of the value that Reddit provides to their visitors with them, and as a result all of the value all those visitors provide to paying advertisers.
This is not as unlikely as you'd think, because only a small percentage of visitors to Reddit actively contribute.
They have made a habit of fumbling and bumbling their way through things like this, and I don't think this is an exceptional circumstance.
thus they have a reputation as platform gods, and now they put up that reputation as bargaining chip, it's the classic "trust us, we care about you", and now it seems they really don't.
so now they owe an explanation to users, teams, and in general to anyone who they directly or indirectly hurt.
Just like if you ask a surgeon for opinion his opinion will lean towards surgery, because that’s what he knows.
In reality, the value of a MAU varies a ton by geography (and other factors).
For Meta, in 2023, US and Canada traffic is worth $48/yr, while developing world traffic is $3.35/yr. A ~15x difference.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
The typical Apollo user is probably much higher value than the average Reddit user, so the opportunity cost is higher as well.
Is there an alternative? If your business is an app around someone elses API, as it is in this case, Tweetbot, etc - it seems super reasonable no?
Yea the API could change at any moment. So maybe don't over leverage yourself. Play it safe, knowing any day could be the apps last.. but beyond that "building your business around someone else's API" isn't bad here is it?
I'd happily do it if it was going to make some money. So i'm kinda unsure where the distinction is for that phrase. When is it not a good idea? Seems a better phrase would be one that includes knowing what type of business you have.
So its fine if you want beer money, but it wont be a career.
RSS is an API first, there is no CEO, there are no investors, the peasants tried to stage a revolt against it many times.
Everyone on HN should probably watch this clip from Aaron Swartz again. (who deserves blame for the creation of RSS and Reddit)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aaron_Swartz_-_The_N...
It is odd we are to stupid to understand while he explains things so wonderfully?
It makes sense from a risk mitigation perspective, but it doesn't sound like the reddit third party app devs were unaware or incorrectly weighing this. It sounded like they took on personal and financial risk to do something they wanted to do and add something to the world that they wanted to. Rather than foolish, I find it admirable to abandon profit and security for principles. Especially in the context of reddit being founded on principles. Regardless of what happens to the site and the shareholders: it is safe to say that the true reddit is already dead.
> Is there an alternative?
Scraping. They're joking on some subreddits about how reddit is about to see costs skyrocket when third-party tools start requesting and parsing whole pages instead of using a lightweight API.
It was even worse, from what I remember. It was half their number that outraged them.
If you’re a search company you shouldn’t build your business on the Google search API, if you’re a compute provider you shouldn’t build your business on the AWS API, if you’re a payment provider you shouldn’t build your business on the Stripe API, etc. So the pedantic version of the rule is like, don’t build your business on just repackaging another company’s API, I guess?
Game development is a bit of an exception to many “rules” of the software business, since creative and artistic expression are significant motivating factors substituting in for a portion of the usual profit motive, in a way you generally don’t see in other software (look for the phrase ‘labour of love’ for examples).
Game engines are also not quite APIs imo, they are more like (massive) libraries that you vendor (bundle with your game and install as dependency). This inures you against some issues with building on a third party API, but not all (e.g. price changes are still an issue, but at a different granularity: “licensing fees per game” rather than “usage fees per call”).
These minor caveats aside, your example is good and worth investigating. Off the top of my head, I believe big game development companies are indeed pretty diversified when it comes to game engines, reflecting the wisdom of not building on someone else’s API.
Riot Games uses their own engine for League of Legends, but uses Unreal for Valorant and Unity for Runeterra and Wild Rift.
Blizzard uses their own engine(s) for StarCraft/Warcraft/WoW/Overwatch/Diablo, but uses Unity for Hearthstone. They did license Unreal Engine at some point but I’m not sure if they have used it.
Activision uses their own engine (IW) for all of their Call of Duty games.
EA uses Unreal and Unity for a few games, but largely uses their own engine (Frostbite).
Ubisoft used to use Unreal for their Tom Clancy series (e.g. Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell) but in fact moved that series to their own engines (Ghost Recon is now on Ubi’s Anvil engine while The Division is on their Snowdrop engine), specifically citing concerns over control and licensing fees as the reason for the move. Their Assassin’s Creed series has always been on their Anvil engine. I believe Ubisoft has another handful of their own engines as well, not quite “one engine per game series” but maybe close to that - an extreme example where they aren’t even willing to build one department’s business on another department’s API!
Valve uses their own engine, Source, for their games. (They have worked with both Unity and Unreal, but I believe this was for their VR and console hardware?)
Nintendo also uses their own engines for their games. (Like Valve, they have worked with both Unreal and Unity for their Switch handheld hardware.)
Epic Games is the only big game developer I can think of that is not diversified, they use Unreal exclusively. Being as they are also the developers of Unreal engine, this isn’t a case of relying on a third party.
So overall I would say yes, even in game development it’s clear that companies go to significant expense to not rely on someone else’s gaming API, and with Ubisoft there’s at least one example of a company publicly learning this exact lesson.
Edit: oh wait, maybe I misunderstood. Do they mean PER APP? I read it as PER USER. If it is per app that’s ridiculous.
[0]: https://developers.reddit.com/waitlist
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
It would have been a reasonable compromise to cut off API access to users who don't have Reddit Gold, but that's off the table, because it doesn't juice the numbers for the IPO the right way.
To be honest, I'm a bit thankful that they are finally doing this. Shutting down Apollo is making me realize I'm the frog in boiling water as they try to turn it into TikTok. With this move, they turned up the temperature a bit too fast, and this is my queue to jump out.
I guess it's a classic move out of the IPO playbook at this point to gain content and users via third party clients and then turn around and eliminate them by killing their API access entirely and/or making it prohibitively expensive.
Seems like a weird move by someone who's been at Reddit since the beginning and presumably understands its users well to me though.
We'll see how it works out for them...
It's a shame we're losing the biggest internet forum, but it's been on this trajectory for a long time anyway.
But that's what so great about reddit compared to the other big social media platforms: hard delineation by interest groups (subreddits).
Instagram, and any others (AFAIK) do not have anything like this feature. It's all just a jumbled mess of user-to-user connections.
I wouldn't say we're "losing the biggest internet forum" there. They can still make reddit more mainstream without old communities having to change much, right?
I won’t stand for it, and have just stopped using Reddit - mostly passively, but occasionally posting. Without a user-respective native client that follows system conventions and does not push garbage, the service is just not worth using.
Where are you getting that on reddit? I don't think I've ever seen content that's not normal posts in my subreddits. [Maybe it's been there the whole time but ad blocked away or something so I'm just never seeing it?]
I don't use r/popular, r/news, r/all, etc much if they're doing something different there.
I hate engagement.
imo, it like they're disorganizing the site to undermine and eventually cut out independent moderators, to avoid the business risk that is actively playing out.
I'm looking forward to that. back in the day it was "normal" to have topic related forums/communities. walled-garden-groups on social media and centralized solutions like reddit killed those, because they were easier to set up and manage. but the community was no longer really owned by someone from that community.
Venture capital is a hell of a drug.
For those not closely following the Reddit killing off third party clients via API price gouging drama, this is one of the Reddit co-founders and its current CEO u/spez (Steve Huffman) doing a live AMA.
Nothing I've seen from Reddit the last years have been particularly impressive, they even used some third party company for their chat functionality which I don't think many users wanted or used. At least the uptime seems to have improved.
I have no clue if that's what's going on, but I've seen it many many times
Compare that to Reddit's adversarial history with its user base and the backlash they're getting now. It's completely possible to make money off Reddit without resorting to measures like these. I'm a better person today because of Reddit, which is something I can't say about any other social media. It deeply hurts my heart to see such a valuable and meaningful space possibly die due to just simple greed. That, to me, is a far greater loss than anything else mentioned in the threads about this impending disaster.
This is almost entirely a "management / PR debacle". A very easily avoidable debacle, I'm fairly sure, if they had simply brought in the right people or person (even) to help them through the process.
A number of Huffman's statements, seemingly tinged with bitterness / resentment and broadcasting a sense of "unfairness" (i.e., that third party apps have been profitable but Reddit itself has not), have been laughably unprofessional. And I'm not even writing about the tit-for-tat potentially libelous completely lacking in understanding of relevant LAWS crap.
This is not remotely 'C-suite' 'level' messaging / behavior. Particularly for a company that put in a target of $15 billion valuation back in 2021.
Honestly, I will say, I feel a little bad for Huffman, at this point. He's clearly out of his depth. I suspect there is some pressure that has shown up / backstory that created a sense of serious urgency starting some months ago, and the management team at Reddit figured they could handle this process &/ want(ed) to demonstrate competence. So, they have been forging ahead w/ trying to line everything up. Some have cited "ChatGPT", and, of course, there's always the rising interest rates being a potential issue ... nevertheless, they've created substantial bad sentiment among some of the most important users & devs at a particularly BAD time.
Of course, this may well not derail an IPO, the site too much, etc., in the short run. But, it's ludicrously bad management - examples more likely by the day to show up in future business courses. A SOCIAL MEDIA site bungling MESSAGING, possibly catastrophically, and pissing off some of the people MOST WILLING to contribute to financial health (almost certainly) and MOST INTERESTED in the site continuing to be viable!
They really ought to consider, if they haven't done so already, getting some small team of 'crisis PR' or 'management advisors' or something in, with expertise in the various areas they are clearly having massive issues with right now. Simply doing that, and having Huffman indicate (externally) a degree of 'stepping aside' so that things can be righted, could defuse some of the serious negative sentiment they have now generated.
Twitter basically became a Nazi rally and they're still going to clear a billion dollars in revenue this year.
Libel is actually quite illegal. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What? No it didn't. If you're seeing that sort of content on Twitter it must be because you're following those sort of people.
And Elon himself has been retweeting and responding favorably to racist content for a while. It's obvious there is an attempt on his part to normalize this stuff on the platform. He's basically a redpilled troll at this point.
Confirmation that these changes are at least partially due to LLM training using Reddit data, which many have speculated to be the case.
> I acknowledge it was a tight timeline. For what it’s worth, we are continuing to chat with many of the developers who still want to work with us.
This is his worst answer, yet. A complete lack of respect for the developers of the affected apps, as well as their users.
I’m genuinely shocked that he’s so willing to admit to the incompetence of Reddit’s decision-makers and their complete disconnect with the situation on the ground.
> Apologies for the delay. We are responding now. > > If others have apps they would like to be considered for the paid API tier, please reach out here and select “This is a partnership request.”
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
These don’t read as prepared answers to me.
I mean the post has 14,000 comments and it's only been live for 2 hours...
Reddit's UI is just not good at that use case or threads with that amount of comments.
If there’s a crisis PR person there, they’ve faked it until they made it.
> We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.
The problem is that they're fucking it all up.
I don't personally think it can, and because there's zero proof available, all we have to go off of is the overall trustworthiness of the speaker, and the context to which they are speaking, ie, they're proven to be untrustworthy and they're in a situation where they need to save face.
- Steve continuing to drag Christian's credibility and doubling down on the claim that Christian says "one thing to us while saying something completely different externally," and offering no evidence a day after having that exact claim blow up in his face.
- An admin insisting "We have programs in place to support our largest communities" and immediately getting replies by top 1% subreddit mods (ie ELI5) who tried those programs and said the admins they "adopted" hardly participated and didn't seem to understand the basic functionality of the mod tools. No further replies from reddit there.
- Steve copy and pasting a comment verbatim from his planning document in reply to a blind user and accidentally leaving the "A:" as in "answer" on it before stealth-editing it and getting caught by the users. No further replies from Steve there.
This is absolutely wild. I hope we get a detailed post-mortem on this AMA as a masterclass in poor public relations and devrel. It's so densely catastrophic. It's like a fractal of compounding mistakes reaching back to the foundation they laid when these changes were first announced. I didn't link the individual comments since they're all conveniently indexed at the top of the thread.
And they have confirmed they are 100% bought into the plan that accessibility at Reddit at this time consists of the administration promising updates sometime in the future, and the expectation 3rd party developers will work "non commercially" to maintain alternatives in the meantime.
At this point I have to wonder if this really is an intentional strategy to ensure the sort of users reacting negatively to these changes are driven away from the site as completely as possible as part of Reddit's ongoing macro shift. The fumbling is so thorough it looks purposeful.
It's absurd he's even pretending that these developers are leaving because they "don't want to work with us." Selig posted so many receipts of him going above and beyond to play well with reddit, and never even had any qualms with the idea of paying for API usage. Steve Huffman pretending that we didn't see all of this is so spineless and pathetic. Everyone at reddit should be embarrassed to work for him.
I hope their IPO tanks.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
I've personally quit Reddit as of this debacle because it made me realise how much I used it everyday and this was a good enough excuse to look elsewhere.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
(Also an archive link here, just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20230609180814/https://old.reddi...)
Some people just never cease to surprise you.
Frankly I think this might be a worse PR move than what Elon did when he did this with Twitter's API.
Is it someone in panic over a potential large impact on the IPO? I dont even think it would have that much of an effect if he hadn't gone on the platform to make the problem worse.
https://rdrama.net/post/177376/spez-arrives-to-take-his-flog...