[phpisthebest]

This would assume that spez is not doing exactly what the Board of directors want.

I think is he, I think they think this will be better for the long term, users will be upset for a little while, but will not actually leave.

He has already said 3rd party apps make up a small amount of "traffic" and "90% fall in to the free plan" anyway.

So they are betting this is a tempest in a tea pot...

Sadly they are probably right because people are sheep and creatures of habit, for me I am going to archive my data before the 30th and purge all of my accounts. I personally am done with reddit, but I am likely the minority

[protastus]

The board wants the CEO to instigate drama and inflame their most passionate users against the company?

There's tremendous lack of tact about how this is being managed. Completely unnecessary and generally not good for business.

[phpisthebest]

> inflame their most passionate users against the company

this is think is the disconnect, they do not believe that is what they are doing, and given my tech bubble I am not sure they are wrong.

they have the data, i dont. I am sure their "most passionate users" are the ones using the official apps, and new interfaces, posting, upvoting, and commenting on cat photos, and cute animal memes, which is where their ads are targeted.....

[quantumsequoia]

I think he's referring to poor judgement by the CEO in immature PR handling. Even if raising the API prices is the right business decision according to the data, publicly slandering the Apollo developer seems like an unambiguously childish move

[sirspacey]

The Reddit community has a reputation for bullying leadership. He’s a founder & willing to stand up to them.

If all this negative press ends up driving attention in the broader stock market, it will probably work out come IPO.

So far, so good for preferred stockholders.

[phpisthebest]

isn't this about like saying the peasants have a reputation for bullying the king, then applauding the king for standing up to the unwashed masses..

[intended]

Yes, discussions between content creators and platforms are very ungentle these days.

[shostack]

They have a timeline to IPO. Reddit took $50m almost 10 years ago. They believe this will blow over quickly so they'd rather rip off the band-aid.

[genmud]

I highly doubt this is what their board had in mind when they said, "we need you to be on track to being profitable by q4 of 2023 so an IPO can take place".

I also don't trust what they are saying with regards to 90% will fall into the free plan. Is that 90% by volume of requests, by api key, by user id? It seems like the data isn't being shared in a transparent way.

You can have 90% of Reddit oauth clients never hit the free tier limit, but that doesn't mean shit if 90% of those oauth clients aren't actually being used. The fact that Steve keeps getting called out with receipts doesn't give me confidence in their assertions, given the lack of data.