What an entitled little brat.

Fuck em.

I agree with the overall posture of the article - that Huffman/Reddit is handling this badly and being unreasonable - but the article complains that they want to make money, saying that they get the content for free so they shouldn’t ask to. That makes no sense. Yes, they get the content itself for free, but Reddit has costs, including infrastructure and employees, and it doesn’t make sense to say they should just donate those costs. If that was the long-term prospect, they’d just shutter the site.

And the 3PA developers seemed to all agree that they should pay Reddit for the API access, so that isn’t really one of the issues. The issues are:

• The pricetag they imposed is untenable
• They gave very insufficient notice before the changes would take place, so the developers didn’t have time to accommodate
• They are not going to allow ads on 3PAs, which means many would have to go to a different business model
• They aren’t going to allow NSFW content through the API, for reasons that make no sense, and that will reduce the desirability of the apps for a lot of people, reducing the customer base
• They slandered and maligned the developers and mods to make themselves look more reasonable

All together it makes a clear picture of them simply wanting to kill the 3PAs. And their handling of the resulting protests is a shit show.

So there are lots of legitimate reasons to be pissed at them, but them wanting to make money from the investment isn’t one of them.

Huffman is using some really disingenuous arguments.

“The protest, what it really affects is the everyday users, most of whom aren’t involved in this or the changes that spurred this,” Huffman said.

This is simply always going to be true about anything because of the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule. 80% of the content is created by 20% of the users. So when a large negative change like this exists it will be that 20% that are affected the most and react the strongest.

So he’s right most users aren’t involved but users representing most of the content creation and thus, the entertaining content that drives views and revenue for Reddit, ARE affected.

Huffman is either being disingenuous or he’s ignorant of some pretty fundamental concepts that govern populations. Either way, not a person you’d want leading a public social media company .

That article reads like an angry reddit post but he isn’t wrong. No money would be enough money for spez and his investors. They don’t want just some profit they want to maximize all the profit. Sad to see how all these public companies and companies with greedy owners turn out.