[potatolicious]

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.

[jimmydorry]

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.

[tornato7]

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.

[BashiBazouk]

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.

[brokenmachine]

When the 3rd party apps go, that's the last time I use reddit on my phone.

When old.reddit.com goes, that's the last time I use reddit at all.

[proamdev123]

Agreed. And it’s actually 90% of the site offline at this point.

And many subreddits have said they’ll be private indefinitely, not just 2 days.

[OGWhales]

> it’s actually 90% of the site offline at this point.

How did you determine this?

[potatolicious]

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.

[stereolambda]

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.

[deadso]

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.

See here: https://www.reddit.com/coins/

[stereolambda]

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).

[Deestan]

> 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.

[heisenbit]

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.