[mustacheemperor]

So if the impact of the change is so small, why does the CEO of this company with thousands of employees feel remotely compelled to concoct a fantasy story where the Apollo developer is an evil villain that is so unbelievable and verifiably unbelievable it doesn't last six hours before blowing up in his face?

Even if you completely accept these policy changes as a long-term positive for reddit's growth, how can you have confidence in that leadership? How can you trust anything they tell you as an investor?

Steve has some kind of problem. It's been apparent before with editing comments in the live db, and it's apparent now. This problem is a risk for reddit. "Don't lie on or about phone calls" is pretty basic risk management and he can't handle it.

[raydev]

That's the thing, because of Huffman's instability and childish behavior in previous years, his words have no meaning here.

Reddit is still a decent-sized company with a whole team of people who've likely been running the numbers. Third party apps like Apollo are a nerd concern anyway, and nerds are outnumbered on Reddit these days; I'm sure most users are happily poking away at the first party apps.

[theturtletalks]

It doesn’t matter if the “nerds” are outnumbered. Lurkers outnumber actual content creators by insane multiples, yet everyone knows that the content creators are the ones that keep people coming back.

What about mods? Looks like many of them use 3rd party apps to help moderate their subs. They are outnumbered too, but are they worth less than millions of lurkers? I think not.

Reddit is betting that the loud minority are not the ones bringing value to their site. If they are wrong, it may be too late.

[linuxftw]

Content creators want their content to be viewed. They're not going to just go away, they want the internet points.

[idiotsecant]

Content creators on digg wanted their content to be viewed too. Every social media org should have a framed copy of ozymandius on the wall.

[heisenbit]

Comments are content too and often more insightful. Moderators for all the bashing some deservedly get are key to keep content creators happy. Each forum is a small organization. The sum of the heads of these orgs. and the identities of users is what makes Reddit valuable. We are however entering an age where identity becomes more portable so mess with all the leads of your teams at your own peril.

[roblabla]

The problem is, a very very very large portion of the mods are using third party apps. If the mods go away (because their tools don't work anymore), reddit will have a very big problem on their hands.

[donnythecroc]

Yes people are missing the point here. I'm in Australia and I know when I check reddit groups moderated in other countries they are full of hate - like 4chan when the mods are asleep. I've seen an unmoderated reddit even just for a few hours, the site will be destroyed if people give up their unpaid voluntary work. They need the tools because it's not their fulltime job.

[dbg31415]

Exactly. Reddit without auto mod tools (that require API access) gets over run with hate speech and incels.

Reddit won’t work without API access… it just turns into a 4Chan-like cesspool over night without auto moderation.

[ronsor]

I honestly hope so. A 4chan-tier cesspool would completely ruin their IPO.

[ShadowBanThis01]

Based on many of the mods' behavior, that might actually be a big win for users. Their persecution and abuse of users makes Reddit the cesspool that it is.

After all, Reddit is so shitty that HN will ban you for pointing out behavior here as "Reddit-like."

[dang]

We don't ban accounts for that sort of reason, so I'd like to know which account(s) you're talking about.

[tptacek]

I read it as a hyperbolic restatement of the Semi Noob Illusion Clause.

Oh --- wow --- another SNI clause!

[ShadowBanThis01]

I don't remember now, but thanks for asking.

[dang]

You're welcome, and it's ok - I get how hard it is to remember these things and also how easily it can seem like we've banned an account for a bad or unfair reason. If you (or anyone) have that impression again in the future, you're welcome to ask. In a few cases there are details we can't disclose, but in most cases we're working with information that's public (like comment histories) and can tell you why we banned an account. You might not disagree with the reason and that's fine, but I'd rather that people disagree with the actual reason and not an incorrect one.

[JohnFen]

> Their persecution and abuse of users makes Reddit the cesspool that it is.

That's not what made Reddit seem like a cesspool to me. It was the commenters.

[ShadowBanThis01]

I'm sure there are plenty of bad ones. But I haven't participated in groups where those have been a problem.

I was banned from all field-recording-related subs because I asked a question about microphones, and the lack of a particular kind in the market. More people piled in, and eventually we contacted the CEO of a mic company who engaged with us and said he'd make a modified version of a product if enough people expressed interest.

Everyone involved with the thread was banned and it was deleted, with no excuse. I never raised the topic again, but was immediately banned from another recording-related sub when I answered a question about a recorder... as if my account had been flagged by some inbred cabal to auto-ban if I ever showed up.

This behavior utterly defeated the purpose of the forums and stole from users. Yes, stole. It's time that people took stock of the fact that the time we spend to compose questions and answers on forums is not free, and those who deliberately steal it should be called out every time.

[Alupis]

Just wait until you've been banned on sub's you've never visited before - because you made a comment somewhere else on reddit.

Mods can be great, and many of them are. But... there's plenty of bad ones out there that make participating in some communities stifling at best.

[ShadowBanThis01]

That is one of the exact things I'm talking about. Mass banning from subs you don't even participate in, or that could not have been related to whatever you're being persecuted for.

[brookst]

Is your comment here more Reddit-like, or more HN-like?

[stronglikedan]

> if the impact of the change is so small, why does the CEO of this company with thousands of employees feel remotely compelled to...

We see this all the time on social media, where companies respond to the very vocal minority, because even though they may be a minority, their voice is amplified by social media. Not saying this is the case here, but it's why companies often respond even when the real impact may be small.

[monksy]

> may be a minority, their voice is amplified by social media.

The same organization that is dealing with that, also accepted that when they entered a market to where their potential profibility reaches a vast higher amount of people.

The companies asked for that level of audience. They got it, they're operating on a smaller staff than traditionally you would need for that level. Now they're upset they're paying the pipper.

[JohnFen]

> So if the impact of the change is so small, why does the CEO of this company [...]

A thousand times this. Plus their repeated insistence that they "aren't like Twitter" (which is true, I think. They're worse.) They are obviously running scared of something, and that something can really only be that the impact of this is potentially enormous.

[nawgz]

This breathless take that capitalists aren’t propagandists taking advantage of every step and spreading FUD at every other is shockingly naive. The CEO of Reddit is trying to punish this guy for overstepping because capital naturally positions itself at the top and bullies all threats it perceives

It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO I don’t even know how you think people will “lose trust in leadership”. They are stoked they’re about to make ridiculous stacks of cash, and the few that aren’t don’t matter.

[kaba0]

> It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders

It’s absolutely insane to call them freeloaders. Reddit’s business model is not “we serve pages with ads and advertisers pay us”, it is “those ‘freeloaders’ create content that is the whole value of the company, it is nothing without that — and this results in every traffic that hits the site”

[doctor_eval]

> They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO

My take on this comment is that these people are considered freeloaders by Reddit. It’s not necessarily rational from an outsiders perspective, but that’s not the point.

I don’t know much about reddit, but if they sell advertising, then advertisers are the customers, users are the product, and anyone else who extracts value from the ecosystem are parasites.

It doesn’t matter if the parasites are an important part of the ecosystem. There is a remarkably deep bench of people willing to replace an any “parasites” that are removed, and if exfoliating the current layer will improve DAU and therefore IPO value then it will be done.

In this context, “freeloader” is a nice way of putting it.

To be clear - I don’t agree that any of this is OK, and I certainly don’t agree that moderators or third party apps are actually parasites - but that’s also the point I think the GP is making.

If the only measure of success is money, that’s what they will optimise for. And an IPO is the shortest of short term goals - a single event which must be optimised at all costs.

[AmericanChopper]

All of these 3rd social media clients really are “freeloaders” though, I don’t get what’s so controversial about shutting them down. If I made my own Netflix client that bypasses their revenue stream, and implemented my own revenue stream on top of it, would anybody be upset or surprised if it was shut down?

[kaba0]

Shitty analogy — does your users produce the movies as well?

[AmericanChopper]

The users don’t belong to Apollo. Reddit provides a service to Reddit users, Apollo freeloads on that service, cuts off Reddit’s revenue stream, and replaces it with its own. Why would anybody think that Reddit has some obligation to allow this, or that Apollo has some right to do it?

[fullstop]

From what I have read, a lot of moderators also use third party apps as moderation tools. They are not paid to do this job.

Heck, most of the video content on Reddit is reposted from other sources.

[seviu]

The moderation tools offered by Reddit don’t have support for accessibility. If you are in r/blind for example… How are you gonna moderate that? And for those who don’t need those tools, third party apps save them a lot of time since the official app is so bad for such things.

[fsckboy]

> They are not paid to do this job.

plenty more people want to moderate, seriously, why should they pay them? hear me out:

If you pay them "a livable wage" you'll get people in the chair who don't want the job, just the pay. If you pay them less, suddenly you'll run afoul of minimum wage laws, overhead of having employees, etc.

you could auction off the job (mods pay reddit for the privilege, given that more people want to moderate than currently can) but that would encourage the mods to monetize their sub (the more successfully, the more subs would become part of ebaum's world)

voluntary moderation actually is the happy medium, people who love the job and the sub are willing/want to do it.

Like they say "everything can't be measured in money" (ok, I never say that, but there it is)

[fullstop]

I never asked for them to be paid. I'm saying that reddit can exist due to their generosity, and that these people use third party tools and the API to do this. That's being taken away.

[nawgz]

I obviously don’t believe in capitalist philosophy but you’re joking if you think the market doesn’t consider ad-free users as a drain regardless of reality.

Which is what I’m trying to say: you’re framing the actions of Reddit’s CSuite in terms or morals and long term outlooks, which is not how the market will look at their ipo. At all.

[wpietri]

Sorry, but "the market" doesn't think anything. That's a category error.

If by that you mean something like "VC investors", sure. They are people whose job is trying to turn money into more money while filling their own pockets to bursting. They are zero-sum people by nature and practice. If they really understood and cared about communities, they'd mostly have different jobs.

But that doesn't make it true. And there's nothing wrong with framing Reddit's execs actions in terms of morals and long-term outlooks. We should generally not concede anything to the world-view of the greedy. Whether or not this will hurt Reddit's IPO is worth discussing, but we shouldn't confuse that with hurting Reddit the community, which it certainly will.

[nawgz]

> “the market” doesn’t think anything

Wow, you’re really going to argue pedantically here?

Let me be clear for the fools in the room then. The behavior exhibited here is perfectly rational and likely to be rewarded from the perspective of a pre IPO company looking to pump its financials wrt user count, engagement, and ad views, and therefore any objections about moral or long term behavior ignore the fact that this playbook has been wildly profitable for many people many times, and thusly explains what the Reddit CEO is doing

Looking forward to when people start panning this system / status quo instead of acting like following the incentives is confusing

[wpietri]

Asking you to be more precise where it matters isn't pedantry.

The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term. On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".

I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either. Which also isn't pedantry, because in analyses where we seek change to a system, we have to understand exactly who is involved and what their motivations are. So in this case it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO, but as a founder it's possible he's conflicted enough that he might depart from his short-term economic incentives to protect the think he's spent a major part of his life working on. Maybe some of the execs if they came in to prep in for an IPO.

So now we're not talking about the whole company, which is 2,000 employees, thousands of volunteers, and millions of content creators. We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people. That's a much more tractable number.

[kaba0]

If those ad-free users are over represented in content creatin then surely they are no drain. No one comes to reddit so they can browse ads.

[nawgz]

Seems like two big ifs - that they’re over represented, and that they wouldn’t switch to Reddit apps or web

[fsckboy]

I non-obviously do believe in the capitalist reality underpinning the universe (it's value-add all the way down) but you’re smoking if you think the market doesn't recognize ad-free users are relatively cost-less compared to their positive network externalities.

that doesn't mean that some free-to-choose sites won't experiment with paywalls, etc. in an attempt to enhance cost-covering revenue.

[wpietri]

Exactly. I'd argue the true freeloaders at Reddit are the Reddit execs and the venture capitalists squeezing for profits. Everybody here developer here knows they could rebuild Reddit in short order; there's no technology moat. The valuable asset is the community. Beyond recovering enough money to pay for servers and some core staff, everything else is parasitic.

[Demmme]

Don't get me wrong I'm not here to defend any actions of reddit especially not their CEO.

But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App Traffic it's probably more that people in reddit care just not their ceo

[internetter]

So

1. I feel like you didn't read the comment you replied to. It says in a compelling way that reddit wouldn't do this if they didn't feel a threat

2. > But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App

A solid takeaway from the original post is that you can't trust Reddit

3. All the bad press surrounding this is infinitely worse for their brand. The subreddit strike, for instance, could force their hand into taking authoritarian control over the platform, as they've hinted at. "Reddit abandons democracy" is a pretty damming headline, and they just can't seem to stop digging their hole deeper

[WJW]

> you can't trust Reddit

Sure, but what does that even mean? I cannot trust them to load the topics from /r/ruby or /r/haskell correctly because of nefarious purposes? Perhaps they have replaced all the posts with Python propaganda in the hope I wouldn't notice?

[Demmme]

I don't 'trust' reddit, I surf reddit and it's communities.

Reddit is not a bank account

[lkschubert8]

Aren't you trusting their published stats?

[Demmme]

Nope.

I argue bases on them but they do not matter to me.

I do not use a 3th party App. For me it makes sense. But if they lied they will hurt themselves anyway

[dylan604]

>All the bad press

You're forgetting the adage, "there is no such thing as bad press". If you're not a user of the 3rd party apps, then none of these decisions affect you, and most people are just not going to get upset about things that don't affect them directly.

[katbyte]

> If you're not a user of the 3rd party apps, then none of these decisions affect you

likely untrue. its not just 3rd party apps it affects. it changes api access for anything using the API

for instance modtools will be affected which means literally everyone can be affected desktop or not https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/12rt5f8/how_wil...

some subreddits make heavy use of bots

these are all going to be hugely affected

[threeseed]

Of course there is such thing as bad press.

Look at companies like Theranos where it was the investigative reporting that ultimately led to their downfall.

And as someone who has been on Reddit for 16 years and has never used a 3rd party app this decision does affect me. a) I think less of the company and the site which will affect my engagement and b) It affects everyone else on the site which in turns affects their engagement and the quality of their posts.

[dylan604]

Theranos was doing shady shit and ripping off investors. That's illegal. Bad press didn't shut them down. Criminal investigations shut them down and the CEO is now actually in jail.

Confusing illegal activity with activity you disagree with is not doing the conversation (or society in general) a bit of good

[JohnFen]

> You're forgetting the adage, "there is no such thing as bad press"

Yeah, but that adage has never been true. It's just something said by people who get bad press to make themselves feel better.

[e40]

I feel like in the age of cancel culture, this adage isn't really a thing anymore. News travels too far and too fast.

[johnnyanmac]

I agree but I think the more damning thing about this update is the slander. Maybe it still doesn't come down to a case, but letting it get this close to begin with is absurd, even for a CEO that got into a piss fight with his users.