> I acknowledge it was a tight timeline. For what it’s worth, we are continuing to chat with many of the developers who still want to work with us.
This is his worst answer, yet. A complete lack of respect for the developers of the affected apps, as well as their users.
I’m genuinely shocked that he’s so willing to admit to the incompetence of Reddit’s decision-makers and their complete disconnect with the situation on the ground.
- Steve continuing to drag Christian's credibility and doubling down on the claim that Christian says "one thing to us while saying something completely different externally," and offering no evidence a day after having that exact claim blow up in his face.
- An admin insisting "We have programs in place to support our largest communities" and immediately getting replies by top 1% subreddit mods (ie ELI5) who tried those programs and said the admins they "adopted" hardly participated and didn't seem to understand the basic functionality of the mod tools. No further replies from reddit there.
- Steve copy and pasting a comment verbatim from his planning document in reply to a blind user and accidentally leaving the "A:" as in "answer" on it before stealth-editing it and getting caught by the users. No further replies from Steve there.
This is absolutely wild. I hope we get a detailed post-mortem on this AMA as a masterclass in poor public relations and devrel. It's so densely catastrophic. It's like a fractal of compounding mistakes reaching back to the foundation they laid when these changes were first announced. I didn't link the individual comments since they're all conveniently indexed at the top of the thread.
And they have confirmed they are 100% bought into the plan that accessibility at Reddit at this time consists of the administration promising updates sometime in the future, and the expectation 3rd party developers will work "non commercially" to maintain alternatives in the meantime.
At this point I have to wonder if this really is an intentional strategy to ensure the sort of users reacting negatively to these changes are driven away from the site as completely as possible as part of Reddit's ongoing macro shift. The fumbling is so thorough it looks purposeful.
It's absurd he's even pretending that these developers are leaving because they "don't want to work with us." Selig posted so many receipts of him going above and beyond to play well with reddit, and never even had any qualms with the idea of paying for API usage. Steve Huffman pretending that we didn't see all of this is so spineless and pathetic. Everyone at reddit should be embarrassed to work for him.
I hope their IPO tanks.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
> We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.
The problem is that they're fucking it all up.
I don't personally think it can, and because there's zero proof available, all we have to go off of is the overall trustworthiness of the speaker, and the context to which they are speaking, ie, they're proven to be untrustworthy and they're in a situation where they need to save face.
> Apologies for the delay. We are responding now. > > If others have apps they would like to be considered for the paid API tier, please reach out here and select “This is a partnership request.”
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
These don’t read as prepared answers to me.
I mean the post has 14,000 comments and it's only been live for 2 hours...
Reddit's UI is just not good at that use case or threads with that amount of comments.
If there’s a crisis PR person there, they’ve faked it until they made it.