[Nathan2055]

It’s also a 180 from last week’s position, because Reddit has continually stated throughout this whole thing that they’re happy to continue supporting third-party apps as long as they pay, and that if they wanted third-party apps gone, they would have just killed the API outright.

But now Steve Huffman is saying here that the API was never supposed to support third-party apps, and they only allowed them out of the kindness of their heart. Which is also wrong, since the API was literally created in part to allow third-parties to make apps, because Reddit didn’t ship a first-party app until 2016 (as I mentioned in my top-level comment on this post).

I honestly can’t see him staying in his position much longer. As I noted in my thread, Reddit’s already starting to lose advertisers because of how they handled redirecting campaigns throughout all of this, and the continued instability is concerning the ones who remained. This isn’t an Elon Musk situation where he owns the company and can do whatever he wants, he has investors to answer to, and eventually they’re going to want answers as to why he’s pushing advertisers away, threatening developer partners, and refusing to listen to his site’s power users who both produce much of the content that drives traffic and provide them with millions of dollars a year in free moderation.