while this article sheds light from another angle on the investablility of reddit as a commercial property, it still misses the mark regarding the real issues that spez has caused while making the mods appear as somewhat entitled thugs rather than the exploited laborers that they are. in any case, spez is made to look incompetent nonetheless.
i think the clock is ticking for either spez to walk things back, renegotiate API terms, or simply resign. I believe the latter will be the well-earned end result.
I think the only way this ends amicably between the community and Reddit at this point is Huffman is ousted and then they can finally entertain other deals for API access. I’m sure they’re looking at the insane profits AI companies are raking in largely off of data they scraped from sites like Reddit for free and thinking “WTF”. My impression is third party apps got caught kinda in the crossfire on this and weren’t actually their main target, but Huffman has managed to turn it in to some weird kind of ego issue now he’s accusing multiple developers of antagonizing the platform, refusing to work with them, when we have proof from several of them in multiple instances of the direct opposite. Attempts to reach out that go unanswered. An impossibly timeline to implement changes. Trying to throw the Apollo dev under the bus only to double down when confronted with proof he lied to press. Utterly bizarre. He needs to go.
My problem with the AI narrative is that AI companies probably don’t even use the API, they use a web crawler to scrape directly from the website. And any who are using the API can pretty easily switch
My take on this is maybe spez is the least problematic. I mean sure. He is a dick and fuckin malicious. But I think he is also just a fall guy. I’m sure these plans were decided by the people pulling the strings in the background.
Ousting spez will not solve the problem. But it is hella satisfying to see though. I bet after this, no matter the outcome, spez will be let go anyways. And still those responsible for the fiasco will be secure in their thrones and also unnamed.
Reddit will not improve, let’s face it. Even if they rescind their decisions now. They have seen what can happen and they’re likely to implement more controls in secret and also gradually.
Maybe they tested a theory of theirs, that’s why we see their move as idiotic. They tested how strong the communty has become, and we’ve shown them all our cards. And now that they survived, they’ll slowly work their way to get the upper hand. Gradually chipping the independence of their userbase.
I’ve already moved on and accepted that the reddit I knew is gone. Even if they decide to make the api free for 3rd party tools. They have seen their weakness and will be slowly patching it off.
I think you give them too much credit. I think spez has a mandate to take the company public by the end of the year and produce a return for his investors. Reddit has been trying to go public since 2021. This was his last ditch effort to make the company profitable before that happens.
I’m okay with him being portrayed as incompetent but I agree spez is far more malicious than he is a bumbling idiot
You can be both an idiot and malicious. Seems that’s what is going on here tbh.
The terms I see in my mind are greedy and incompetent.
Incompetent in management. Planning, decision-making, communication, leadership, of understanding what Reddit has, what it is, what its’ strengths are. Every time he does something - or neglects to act - the thing that made Reddit special erodes further.
Incompetent emotionally. The hotheaded knee-jerk pattern of lying, gaslighting, redirecting blame and name-calling we’ve seen through the years.This, combined with greed and his stupid, damaged worldview and political stances, is a volatile cocktail that does stink of maliciousness.
He will resign after the changes are implemented, or after the IPO. He’s the scapegoat of the investors
I think every article is missing a key issue and no one has asked Spez yet…
If 3rd Party Apps and AI services are making millions (as he asserts) why isn’t Reddit competing in those areas?
3rd Party Apps aren’t in a war of new features, putting a 5-10 person development team together to analyse the competitor apps and match the features would kill off the unique selling point of the 3rd Party Apps. Why hasn’t Reddit done this?
LLM aren’t new, the first appeared in 2018. Why hasn’t Reddit assembled a team to exploit their own data? In my experience 1 data scientist backed by 2 software engineers can do a lot. It isn’t a huge amount of people needed.
Even if you buy his argument that they companies are profiting from Reddit, Reddit is a platform those companies are building value from. Reddit isn’t providing those services and so those companies profits aren’t “stolen” from Reddit.
It’s like company who sells art supplies. They sell them to a painter for £100, then a painter sells their artwork for £1000. The art supply company then gets upset it didn’t get £1000 for its supplies.
This article from TechCrunch had a line that really confirmed some suspicions I’d had about this:
[Spez] told the publication that he was the person inside the company who was responsible for this policy change that affect these apps.
If you thought Reddit’s absolute refusal to do anything in light of all the bad press was borderline sociopathic, there you go. Spez is taking all of this personally.
There was a way for everyone to win here, given some concessions. Yet no. Huffman decides to go nuclear with the API pricing to try to maximize profitability. This seems to tell me that the way Reddit was sold to investors it was way over valued.
YET, I still firmly believe that Reddit does not know what to do with its user data, or has not figured a way to conveniently, and concisely package it in any usable manner. As is, Reddit should be profitable based on the data users provide. Facebook does it with user data and remains free to use. This might explain some of the weird development choices Reddit has made over the years with new Reddit and the mobile app. They’re trying to shoehorn users into a system that allows their data to be usable, yet a large portion of the user base hasn’t followed along. They’ve utilized RES. old Reddit, and 3rd party apps instead of the official app which tries to compile user data into something that can be more easily packaged into something that can be sold to advertisers.
Now they’re on their 3rd year trying to go public, and they haven’t made measurable progress. Investors are waiting for their return, and Huffman is under the gun to produce some measured result…hence the API pricing and this nuclear option.
It’s a nearly 20 year old company that does not have a financially sustainable, robust business model. It might be profitable, despite what they claim, but they are still just shooting in the dark, randomly iterating ideas.
These leaders are fucking jokes, they wouldn’t get hired as junior analyst at any consultancy/bank.
Great article, thanks for sharing. It’s nice to see news outlets accurately capturing then situation.
They make a good point about the free labour, the disconnect is huge. They want reddit to go public so they can make millions of dollars off the backs of indentured servitude. So when do the nods cut their cut? No way is reddit going to hire moderators for the 7000+ subreddits that went dark, so the salting the earth well and truly.
I do wish they’d been clearer about the issues created for mod and accessibility tools and I wish any of the articles would note the ‘misrepresentation’ of the conversation with the Apollo developer
Not to mention that many of these reddit articles say that the reason for the blackout is that reddit was simply going to put the API behind a paywall, not mentioning the insane rates they were going to charge. Most of the conversations I saw with 3rd party app developers were that they understood the need to charge for the API, the problem was that they wanted to charge an insane amount with very little notice. Kind of makes the protestors seem unreasonable or out of touch
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As reddit is turning 18 the next few weeks, I kinda see Spez as an abusive Stepfather, who sells his children into a prostitution ring(IPO).
He doesn’t care about the site, once the IPO is over he will just take his moneybags and leave
I wish they actually did a bit of research on why people are protesting. Saying the third party apps simply “keep communities vibrant” completely misses some major points. Personally, I’m more furious how spez handled the AMA. He showed that the reddit staff has no interest in listening to anything that concerns the community. We’re all just an obstacle between them and their deserved money.
There’s a certain schadenfreude in seeing the outcome of spez’s misguided choices. I’m still very sad about Reddit. For me, RIF was Reddit.
I think one of the most valuable things about this situation is that it lays bare the relationship between users/mods and admins/employees/owners of reddit. I think most users and mods lived in willful delusion that they kind of owned their own data and communities, and admins/employees/owners just sort of maintained infrastructure and me money from ads and unspecified backend data stuff…
It’s now forced that ownership question into the open in stark terms: users and mods don’t own their data or thir communities and their sweat equity, as it were, is not valued by the admin/employee/owner group when it really comes down to it.
That’s something I miss about my old bulletin board home; I could never imagine the admin team strong arming users over shit like this. It’s antithetical to the very ethos of the place - hell, I still send them $5 / month for old times sake to keep the servers up.
Reddit sold out years ago and it’s really just now hitting the fan.
Huffman deserves credit for thinking like an investor. Some third-party apps using Reddit content make money, which an owner of the still-unprofitable Reddit would probably prefer to share. A bigger target is artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI that create value by scraping Reddit’s forums to hone their own products. Huffman’s plan would shut off that free-data spigot.
Seriously? Way to go capitalism.
It’s also just wrong. RIF had a profit sharing agreement. Huffman killed it.
Also, not negotiating with Apollo means they earn $0 from Apollo.
The CEO publicly slandered their largest potential API customer and failed to come to any sort of agreement with them, losing Reddit many millions/yr in revenue.
