I’m just following Christian’s good faith interpretation.
But it’s absolutely clear it was done to kill 3P clients. It’s hilarious that certain bots would be exempt and free from the price hike. Spez called out the Haikubot by name.
Look those bots are cute. But it has to query every single sub and every single comment every few minutes to work. If Reddit truly cares about waste and inefficiency those would be the first to go. The value vs cost calculus is negative.
Those bots also shit up the S/N and generally disrupt conversations with useless replies nobody asked for. They're a big part of the reason I stopped using reddit.
Even more egregious are those stupid "RemindMe!" bots which in a very ham-fisted way create noise for everyone except the one person triggering the bot (ironically, a 3rd party app would be way better suited at implementing this specific feature)
People have wanted schedulers and the ability to subscribe fr updates posts for years. Thankfully, RES has had that for almost a decade now.
Don't think Reddit even acknowledged that feature request, compared to others they said "we're working on it" some 7 years ago. Closest they got is how the subscriber plan lets you highlight new comments in a post (something RES also had, but reddit made them remove it), but you still can't notify yourself to when new comments occur.
Just another example of not considering the user. Pretty sure filtering subreddits from r/all was the last user-centric feature they made. And that was more made out of spite of the political shitshow that was 2016/7 as opposed to thinking about the users.
I don't think this is inconsistent at all. Bots don't look at or click on ads. Bots don't engage or create community. Bots don't buy awards. Bot querying is a drop in the ocean compared to real people.
It is inconsistent because spez has repeatedly said that 3P apps, Apollo in particular, are inefficient with their API usage which is preventing reddit from becoming profitable. It is their (thinly veiled) lie to justify the pricing because they think shutting down 3P apps and being caught lying at the same time is a better PR move than just shutting down 3P apps.
>Bot querying is a drop in the ocean compared to real people.
bot querying also doesn't make them any revenue, yet it is a common source of strain on the community. I imagine it also makes spam detection that much trickier. While there are some amazing bots (and ofc, automod) there are so many bots out there just to make noise. And reddit is already pretty noisy as is.
I agree with this take - this seems pretextual rather than a good-faith attempt to charge for API access. Because history rhymes I suspect Reddit's leadership was heavily inspired by Twitter's killing of third-party clients, which actually ended up working out for Twitter.
IMO Huffman's behavior in this entire saga has been extremely wanting, to the degree where one has to wonder about his suitability to lead the company. And to be clear - I'm actually someone who is sympathetic to Reddit's position, where a lot of the platform's value generation isn't being captured by them and the company is unprofitable.
I'm a very long-time Reddit user but I'm generally pretty meh about the various tempests-in-a-teapot psychodramas that emerge from there, and I remain generally cool to the popular uprising rhetoric - but Huffman's behavior is pretty egregious.
And this is why I don't really see this resolving peaceably - Huffman at this point seems personally aggrieved by Selig and one has to wonder if he's behaving in a capacity that maximizes the interests of his company vs. descending into a petty personal feud.
I may be grossly misinterpreting him here - but based on his disastrous AMA and his haughty proclamations it's not an unreasonable perception. More importantly, as a company that is 100% reliant on mass volunteer labor to even exist, the fact that this perception has been projected, reinforced, and not usefully countered in any way suggests disqualifying leadership inability.
This is the CEO that got mad at a user in a subreddit that mentioned his username, and in a drunken rage went into the database and manually edited their comment (who's to say it was just one?).
Huffman has had many terrible lapses in judgement over the years.
It has also always rubbed me the wrong way how Huffman re-writes history by saying he founded reddit with just Alexis Ohanian. There were three founders, and the third one that he always leaves out is Aaron Swartz.
No matter how you look at it, Reddit leadership massively screwed this up. When half your site goes offline for two days and the entire front page is calling for the CEO's head, it's obvious that they have lost touch. And since they aren't reversing course on this, you can assume even more user-hostile changes are coming in the near future.
I think there are a lot of people wondering if the "even more user-hostile changes" are a loss of old.reddit. I knew of 3d party apps but none by name until this most recent incident as I am fine with old.reddit but the behavior of the CEO does make me concerned. I can't tell if he was just channeling his inner Elon and being a pompous ass or if Reddit is as desperate financially as his AMA made it seem. If the latter, I would not be surprised if old.reddit was shut down.
Yep, and it's not even so much about the merits of these changes - though I am personally skeptical of them, it's that management has demonstrated no ability to sell these the community.
It's a private, for-profit company in a capitalist society. It's gonna have to do some unpopular things sometimes. What raises questions about leadership isn't so much that they're doing these unpopular things, but that they're doing so very poorly.
Good PR and good community management is critical to a social media business, especially when said business is 100% reliant on an absolutely gargantuan amount of volunteer labor. Reddit's leadership has demonstrated not only a lack of ability here, but practically an impressive anti-ability on this front.
Just for posterity, I glimpsed at their homepage and it seems that someone is gilding posts and comments explaining the protest. This as far as I understand entails paying Reddit. Fascinating. May be trolling.
One thing that people miss out on when they complain about guilding/awards is that being guilded or buying premium will credit your account with reddit tokens that you can use to guild other posts. So there's a chance the users are just using tokens that they have in their accounts already. I purchased premium back in the day to sync visited pages, and I have around 10+ platinum awards I can give out, a lot more if I use a cheaper award.
Thanks for clarification. I'm not really complaining, just found it amusing. Still using the awards looks a little like tacitly supporting the system, and I even wondered if they help the submissions in the algorithm (if so, gilding would make more sense in that case).
> a lot of the platform's value generation isn't being captured by them
I will add that neither is it made by them. Community creation, curation, moderation, posting, discussing, styling, accessibility, usability is all done through volunteers and community members.
That "value generation" isn't 100% theirs to consume should be fair.
Twitter is all about very short form content / isolated from context and short responses and emotional reactive retweeting. Reddit is a bit more on the longer form / contextual side which favors more web browser type navigation and interaction. Looking at Twitter‘s short term success is a horrible way to set a strategic direction for Reddit.
Even that makes little sense. Reddit has survived on volunteer moderation and their use of third party tools to manage the workload. If Reddit doesn’t want to cover the cost of that infrastructure then they’re going to incur the extra cost of hiring moderators.
I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API (and thus third party clients) and since these companies see ads as a money printing scheme they’re happy to sacrifice whatever they can for it.
> I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API
Even that doesn’t make sense. They could’ve just told app developers a) we’re going to start co-mingling ads in API responses and b) that failure to render those ads according to our guidelines will result in banning your client id. Users would still be free to purchase a premium account to avoid ads.
Everyone would find that reasonable and there would’ve been no revolt. They could’ve even imposed per-user API quotas to avoid the kind of data harvesting that was being done to train LLMs. And they could’ve even threatened Christian with a ban if he didn’t improve the caching in his app, since that’s another criticism they’ve lobbed his way.
All that is targeted at making 3P app users contributing members of a profitable platform. But they did none of that and, instead, quoted him an FU price that will force him to shut down.
I'm not sure even that Reddit has a genuine value prop beyond being a new walled garden to gather data and serve ads. But it might be too big to truly fail, now, because newer generations of internet users have only experienced the feudal internet.
Once upon a time this was all served by RSS, forums, and niche websites. Reddit converted those communities to subreddits, Facebook took another slice of those. Discord and Slack portioned away other groups as did Tumblr and each one has attempted to establish a moat not just to keep competitors away, but to keep their users inside.
They will probably go the Twitter route and decide moderation isn't all that important.
This of course means unsavory content like hate speech, blatant astroturfing, and conspiracy theories will flourish, scaring away big ad spenders. They will try to compensate for this by allowing more ads for online gambling and male enhancement pills.
IMO, it tries to shift the blame a little. Pretend the price is reasonable and the developers who shut down the apps instead of paying are who took your app away, not the company. Killing them outright would make the blame very clearly on Reddit's side.
The other benefit is if anyone does decide to pay, it's profitable.
Except that doesn't work if every single third party app shuts down, which as far as I know is the case.
That's why I roll my eyes and gag in disgust a little when I hear Reddit management and their apologists somehow try to blame Christian for not negotiating in good faith. Even if that were true (which, to be clear, I don't believe it actually is, the opposite in fact), it just means that some other developer would step up if the pricing let them continue. The fact that every other app also shut down just proves that was the entire goal of these API pricing changes in the first place.
They probably also didn't anticipate quite this extreme of a blowback.
The response to killing 3rd party apps outright would have likely been the same as this, but when they did their calculations they probably expected the response to this to be less extreme and opted for the "safer" choice.
I see this theory a lot and I'm not so sure. The Reddit API makes things easier, but with this new pricing it makes way more sense for AI companies to go back to scraping.
But at the end of the day, AI companies aren't Reddit's users. Redditors don't have any reason to care about that, we have nothing to gain from Reddit charging AI companies for API access. So Reddit structing their response to AI in a way that completely dicks over so many users is never going to go over well. And it doesn't help that their CEO is acting like a petulant manchild the entire time.
But it’s absolutely clear it was done to kill 3P clients. It’s hilarious that certain bots would be exempt and free from the price hike. Spez called out the Haikubot by name.
Look those bots are cute. But it has to query every single sub and every single comment every few minutes to work. If Reddit truly cares about waste and inefficiency those would be the first to go. The value vs cost calculus is negative.