Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA

https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/5emsq3/reddit_reacts...

When the parts of their community with outsize influence start talking about abandoning the site to somewhere else it threatens both their hundreds of millions in free labour per year, and also the future of their site.

Reddit exists as it does today because Digg made a series of bad decisions that led to mass movement away from Digg. The same thing can happen to Reddit.

This is a digression, but this saying has always frustrated me. It makes sense for a second, but then I wonder if whoever came up with it had any idea how much malice exists in the world. Many cases of "malice is at least as adequate an explanation as incompetence, given the facts or lack of them".

They've been doing that since the reddit redesign thing, trying to go more mainstream yet.

I think that's why they feel they can burn bridges

They can’t easily do that in the current financial environment. I suspect that they’re also seeing a plateau in year over year user growth. Bundle that up with everybody seeing advertising revenue decline and there’s no good story to sell to investors.

I think that they’re probably under tremendous pressure right now by their investors to at least get close to profitable so that they can IPO.

Why not both? This is the platform that literally built itself off of registering fake accounts and posting spam to make themselves look more active than they were, after all[0]. Reddit administration is a unique blend of malicious incompetence. I call it malicincompetence.

For example, spez in particular notably was caught editing the posts of /r/the_donald posters he was in a shouting match with. This is malicious, because the admins demonstrated that they're willing to fuck with historical records to defame their enemies. But it's also incompetent, because it turned a bunch of fascists[1] into martyrs. If he had just banned /r/TD then and there, or even just that poster, it would have been less malicious and less incompetent at the same time.

Going deeper, a lot of malicious behavior is itself inherently stupid. That's the idea behind the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: betrayal is advantageous only when you don't think more than a step ahead. Once you do, then tit-for-tat[2] becomes better, possibly with some kind of forgiveness term if random or accidental betrayal is possible. None of Reddit's CxO suite[3] thinks this way. They think their users are resources to be taken for granted, except they're also really bad at doing that. And Reddit users have just gotten used to shouting down these kinds of stupid changes until the admins fold, which they usually do, because Reddit doesn't have the kind of user lock-in to make people just stick with it.

[0] Nobody noticed until the admins just outright admitted it a few years later. Although if /r/SRD and /r/de is to be believed, they're doing the same shit again in German: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red...

[1] Ok, I don't have citations for the victim of Spez's tomfoolery being a fascist, but /r/TD was notorious back then for banning anyone who wasn't enthusiastically riding the Trump train that hard.

[2] Do what the opponent did last round.

[3] Except maybe Ellen Pao, only because she wasn't around long enough for Reddit to rub off on her.

Given that incompetence is more harmful than malice, you stay pessimistic, and still blame incompetence. Simply because, if you're pessimistic, the worst that can happen tells you that you were right.

A malicious but competent person will cause damage to a few, when it's desirable for him. While an incompetent but non-malicious person will cause damage to everyone, including himself, at random intervals, regardless of his own desires.

________________

On-topic. I think that Reddit is trying to capitalise on business customers, using its platform to train its AI models with. If that's correct, then even if the users reacting negatively leave, and this puts a dent on Reddit's profit, Reddit will still profit more from those business customers.

Unsurprisingly this is not sustainable, investors are paying for the site and ultimately they want to see a return. Money talks, bs walks.

Not only is this provably untrue but your math is nonsensical.

EDIT: Provably untrue proof -- top 100 subreddit moderator list:

* https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be...

The trouble is people showed up for what Reddit was. Let us call that the Aaron Reddit. That Reddit was sustainable and could be expressed as by users for users.

That vision picked up a ton of users who love threaded, frank, unfettered discussion. It was never going to make millions, but it would have endured for a very long time.

All that changed upon each sale. And this last one is brutal, leaving current owners holding the bag.

These changes to crank out big returns are toxic to a very high percentage of users. And they are where the content comes from too.

Someone else is going to reproduce the original Reddit vision and when they do, this one will dry up just like Digg did.

Really? "Rightfully"?? I guess someone owes me money, because I did a few investments where the ROI was $0, some of them intentionally bad (family > money).

Sell out to whom? The offer of API access is a lie -- everyone who has asked to setup a billing situation has been ignored.

It could even connect to the fediverse, but with its own moderation hierarchy etc. so it has its own culture and doesn't _rely_ on the fediverse.

The high quality modding of askhistory, anthropology and other science sub reddits are provided by actual domain experts working for free. You can find someone to replace them, but the quality will plummet and the users will leave.

We talked to an admin who reviewed our logs and they were surprised by the fact that our community was modded as a team because most of the communities that they had seen and worked with were apparently modded almost exclusively by a single person.

I thought at first that this was a joke because our head mod does most of the work and because we get new mods every year and they always leave.

So when our head mod leaves the subs will die. We'll become /r/worldpolitics. And there's a good chance that he'll leave during the protest.

What I'm trying to say is that we often see moderators as interchangeable, one leaves and another joins and nothing changes, but the reality is that good mods are scarce. I don't expect an inexperienced mod to join a sub with half a million users and know what to do. Most of our team doesn't know how to use the automoderator. I'm the only one who knows how to use the custom automation bot that I wrote. And then there's the issue of understanding the culture.

So whether reddit lives or dies in my opinion won't be a matter of how fast reddit can replace moderators but a matter of how many moderators will stay and put up with the bullshit because it has become part of their lives.

I think is he, I think they think this will be better for the long term, users will be upset for a little while, but will not actually leave.

He has already said 3rd party apps make up a small amount of "traffic" and "90% fall in to the free plan" anyway.

So they are betting this is a tempest in a tea pot...

Sadly they are probably right because people are sheep and creatures of habit, for me I am going to archive my data before the 30th and purge all of my accounts. I personally am done with reddit, but I am likely the minority

They represent investors who sunk 1.3 billion dollars into a company who was spending millions providing 3rd party apps a free api where users can’t be monetized. And is not currently profitable

If my previous experience means anything, the board wanted the price to be 100x higher or to shut down the api completely, and were talked down by spez

It might need a different governance structure.

Commercial and community interests can be in conflict.

What’s the leadership structure that recognizes this tension and delivers optimal outcomes in the long term?

I remember Esther Dyson: Release 2.0

She was talking about how, for example a wine forum could make money connecting wine sellers and buyers

do it

Instead of boring ads, make it possible for communities to engage with relevant businesses. Affiliate links, coupons and such. Meaningful dialogue. I am a former mod of /r/usbchardware and we were close to this a few times, with Sanho Hyper and SlimQ. Make yourself the "house brand" of the sub by engaging in good faith and you should be rewarded.

But even just affiliate links, as a former mod of /r/usbchardware, we very often recommend this and that and if we did that with affiliate links then everyone would be better off. And you can make a reputation system here which makes it much harder to just spam garbage.

This is an off-the-cuff idea which probably needs refinement but no way, no way you can't make good money from such hypertargeted communities. Just think outside of the box a little. Corporate spam gets you booted. A company offering insight, honest good advice gets you boosted. It's ... possible. There is a way making money for everyone involved which doesn't involve dirty play.

Reddit feels like /was 3 firms.

A forum, hosting firm.

A sort of platform? Ads, compliance, support

A media firm - What they had with the old AMA and an employee helping guests.

I dont see any of these hitting Platform numbers. I do see it being a titan in popular culture.

Christian hasn’t been beaten down by years of corporate ladder climbing. He knows how to protect himself, but does it in ways that others don’t often see in the business world.

Even the whole “$10m extortion” thing feels overblown. Like I can’t believe a CEO would ever take a comment like that anymore seriously than a passing joke/jesting comment in that situation. Christian’s point is true. If Reddit is having such a hard time delivering a quality app, they can buy any third party app.

The fact that Spez seems so stuck on that seems to indicate the success of Apollo is really weighing on him.

Although I wouldn't know a whole lot about it because after a decade-plus on Reddit I've still never bought any.

I thought reddit was really clever for the first ~7 years of operations. They replaced forums, fostered communities, gained a reputation as a place to get real people's takes, and attracted people willing to have interesting conversations. The upvote/downvote system that is now so common was made popular from reddit. They brought awareness to important political topics surrounding net neutrality. They were leaders in early Web2.0, where each user saw content that appealed to them, because everyone could choose which subreddits were in their homepage. It was highly social and highly engaging.

After a certain point in 201X the dark patterns began to appear. I was almost fully disengaged by the start of 2013. I can't remember the details, but I remember being increasing disappointed with reddit every time I returned for a brief visit.

A fine business model but a bizarre damage control statement

But optimizing for short-term profit over long-term revenue is just nuts. Apple didn't become a trillion dollar company by focusing on maximizing profit above all else every single quarter.

As search results became gamed and sites became SEO machines, finding a Reddit thread discussing the thing you want to know about is a breath of fresh air.

Nobody else has that. Reddit has a ton of really niche content that people want to read, spread out over a large amount of time. Why are they focused on becoming a place where people infinite scroll reposts of TikToks?

Instead, they went the route of introducing features that at best cannibalized other features (chat and the regular message system - it’s confusing) and at worst just seem like hasty add ons or complete stabs in the dark.

Even Discord has a system to directly monetarily sponsor servers you want to support, why on earth doesn’t that exist for Reddit? Good lord. It’s such a simple thing to add. Instead they charge money to customize your avatar like it’s a Fortnite skin. It’s insane.

Had he a modicum of awareness regarding the question, he would have also addressed the community engagement part of the question - to users, the most important part of the question.

"The community built our platform and we'll never forget that or make engagement unpleasant. We need your engagement." Had he said that, and then segued to profit, he at least would not have been betrayed by his predetermined inflexibility.

like IDK what the comps are, what is another large corpus with authentic interactions and scoring? internet archive is probably the closest (although substantially more valuable), maybe the google library project is semi analogous in scale and value (although obviously very different in nature).

Nope it’s actually what the CEO said.

The cost of automated detection of story arbitrage is also falling, e.g. hypothetical StoryGPT analysis of testimony to a blockchain (or paper) notary.

"These days" .. but was it better before?

The ruling class literally spoke a different language (aristocraties in europe french and the clerics latin).

That made it even easier to seperate realities and not accidently share insights to peasants what they are not supposed to hear.

"Community" is such an intangible KPI.

When the new investors found out, my business partner demanded I remove CTO from my website, writing it was "technically incorrect".

  > especially for weaker party.

You can always take notes, write down things about the conversation, you can even write down the whole conversation without consent

So essentially you can have a transcription of a conversation, but not the audio recording (without consent)

That’s not really the job of the startup investor. At best you try to screen for that. But like active ethics education… no.

I'm sorry to say, but that's not in line with reality. Is there a specific source that has led you to believe this?

"Do not be evil" is a fairly vague tenet anyhow. The "whole point" of YC (if there ever was such a thing) at inception, was to test a thesis that pg et al had regarding startup incubation. It was actually a somewhat controversial idea at the time, so much so that YC had trouble finding investors.

Afaict, as long as you are a success, YC doesn't really care how you get there, as long as it isn't something illegal or otherwise obviously detrimental for investors. This is, of course, in part because one of the simpler proxies for "evil" is legality. Investors do often end up benefiting from legislation lagging behind tech and moral gray areas.

The US has been pumping money into their economy (AKA, some chosen entities in it) since the middle of the 90's, with more and more countries just copying their strategy with time.

There was a decrease on the rate of money pumping on 2000, and a reversion for a month or two in 2008 (followed by an increase by an order of magnitude). It was an era.

Reddit in 2008 had open groups for sharing ("legal") sexually suggestive photos of underage girls. ie. they had like swimsuits and stuff on. Reddit has never been about morality.

At this point, they haven't been very successful financially and at acquiring power. Nobody cares what reddit wants... they're nobodys on the tech / business scene.

Now they're looking at all these financially successful and powerful companies and are regretting not selling out earlier. The reddit that people love probably wasn't ever going to be forever. Maybe as a non-profit like wikipedia? What's the point of continuing if you won't even get your "bastion of free speech"?

Reddit was never going to make it much further as a company with no moderation or explicit ethos (other than free exchange of ideas), with minimal advertisement and monetization. These changes have been executed poorly, but they needed to act quickly. Basically, they're trying to put the genie back into the bottle, not be "the cool" social media company, and keep things afloat.

As upset as we may be have they really failed? Have they done anything to substantially lower their standing as a company. They haven't lost users, the growth numbers don't look bad to me, especially compared to some of the better recent years.

What they haven't done is turned that into money or status. Tons of businesses are successful with the "be a dick and hope they don't care strategy". People generally don't like big sacrifice. A monthly charge isn't practical, nor would it be welcomed either. They need to be in full control of the eyes and start monetizing.

the era of getting good value by providing good value seems foregone.

now we focus on extracting maximal value in the short-term/for self and acting that it's naive and dewy eyed to expect anything else. which casts such behaviour as the status quo instead of being shameful. which results in an overton window where "i got mine" is all that matters.

NSFW on Reddit isn't just porn, the tag is used in the literal sense of "your boss wouldn't approve" or as a content warning for violence, heavy subjects, etc.

e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/search?q=nsfw%3Ayes&restr...

This doesn't seem to make sense. If Reddit wanted to kill 3rd party apps, they would just disable public API access entirely. The reaction would be basically the same it seems.

I should've clarified

If Apollo were delivering $20m/year of incremental value to Reddit, then this would've been a sensical bargaining strategy. But the Apollo dev wasn't prepared to make this argument.

its not a legal case, its private actors disassociating with each over, over culturally acceptable and predictable reasons to do so.

we already know what they are going to do with the API, this isnt more damning than before

I was essentially looking for someone to post this:

  Q: How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become 
  increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?

   Spez: We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. 
   Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.

This is the arc of American business, though. A steady money printer isn't enough. That money has to grow, and it grows by reducing the surplus utility held by the users.