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by Defenestresque 1100 days ago
He does not care about users like you.

>>I know I’m focusing a lot on that, but that’s where a lot of the protests in the community are focused. People appear to really love these apps. And, apparently, they think Reddit itself is not offering the experience they’re looking for. People talk about leaving the platform because they can’t use these apps. So if Reddit is going to shut down these apps, you’re going to lose people who loved Reddit, and that still doesn’t quite make sense. So I guess I’m wondering why hasn’t there been...

>90-plus percent of Reddit users are on our platform, contributing, and are monetized either through ads or Reddit Premium. Why would we subsidize this small group? Why would we effectively pay them to use Reddit but not everybody else who also contributes to Reddit? Does that make sense?

>These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free. And that free comes at the expense of our other users and our business. That’s what this is about. It can’t be free.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...

The entire article is just so bizarre and needlessly hostile that I'm amazed they're allowing him to do interviews.

1 comments

I read the article and Huffman seems quite reasonable. Basically that they are asking profit making apps like Apollo to cover server costs, which seems not ridiculous if Reddit is loss making and Apollo profit making. I get the impression that some people who say they don't like corporate doublespeak are upset because Huffman just says pay or move on instead of doing the doublespeak. My biases - I did his python course and thought he seemed ok, also I use old reddit on the laptop and it works fine.
Third party apps aren’t upset that their free API access is getting charged; it’s the ridiculously high price, along with very short notices that make it painfully obvious of Reddit’s intention to permanently encapsulate all traffic in-house.
My dude, server costs are a tiny fraction of what they are charging for API access.

One API call probably costs on the order of a millionth of a cent if not less. The infrastructure costs of running a server are extremely cheap.