Reddit CEO Spez AMA Overview | Hacker News Reader

Reddit CEO Spez AMA Overview

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52 pointsthunderbong25 comments

Well, that went about as well as expected. A handful of non answers, over 99.8% of all questions ignored, and the admin participants vanished without a trace less than 30 minutes after it started, not even updating it to say it was over.

Not sure why they did this, it's always like this.

Man, the tone in some of these replies is so hostile. Why did anyone at Reddit think this AMA was a good idea?

And why did they bother to do AMA if they knew they're only going to answer the few very specific things they wanted to answer? I'm actually not asking retoricaly here - it looks like spez wanted to do a PR release... Why not do that instead? I don't think they're so disconnected they didn't expect this result.

It's nuts that the Reddit CEO doesn't get how Reddit works.

"how Reddit works"

Sounds like you're accusing him of something you're guilty of? Is there "one" way that reddit works, and you get it, but he doesn't? hubris level intensifies.

What are you talking about?

Most people who have been around a few AMAs know that there are some obvious pitfalls and anything but transparancy is going to very quickly degrade into a mess of an AMA.

You would expect the CEO of reddit to have some understanding of that, yet his answers were textbook examples on how to torpedo yourself quickly.

Maybe we need to be thinking about how to do reddit digests as reddit as it is now, is gone.

Reddit is, of course, allowed to do whatever they want, it's their ball after all. There will likely be some 'adjustments' made based on the user reaction, but from this shitshow, regardless of what happens to the current cast of malcontents, it will be changing, and not for the better.

If it really costs them tens of millions to support third-party apps, aside from the timing and handling of it all, what is the issue? Google maps went down this road as well.

With Apollo for example, aside from emotional knee-jerk reaction, was it impossible to basically make their app paid and subscription based? They'll lose most users but might still survive as a profitable business due to their superior UI.

Reddit is a publicly traded company. And IMO, distributed social nets are the way foward, that also make it difficult for LLMs to steal user generated content. I am really looking forward to joining a class-action against openai for my nanoscopic part in my public posts they monetized without permission.

It doesn't cost tens of millions, that's the problem

The API pricing looked really reasonable to me, Apollo's own dev's math had it at ~$3/a user/a month.

I'm really disturbed by the backlash. He's doing math tricks and acting shady. He expresses the total cost, hiding the ball on his user #, and the fairly reasonable $3/month. He's no altruist either, and the whole "why don't you buy me out" thing was weird, nonsensical, and in his own words only "mostly" a joke. Not the kind of person I really want to hear from anymore.

Apollo’s dev would likely have never talked about the “buy me out thing” unless Reddits CEO had publicly implied he was trying to extort Reddit for money.

Also, I would love to see an in-depth explanation of exactly what “math tricks” he used. Not being sarcastic—I read his whole post and it seemed like he was very clear that his calculations were back of a napkin type.

Did you know it’s $3/month/user? It was odd to me he didn’t share that bit, he stays focused on the gross sum, which distorts the argument IMHO: that fee is very reasonable

The Apollo dev did say it was going to be $x per user, in the original post they did where they also mentioned the $20MM figure. I'll try to dig it up and edit with the link

EDIT:

- https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca... original post by the Apollo dev

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 hn discussion on the same

My point was less so about whether or not the price was fair, but that it illustrates issues with Reddit's leadership. Whether or not the prices quoted during negotiations between Reddit and Apollo are fair is somewhat orthogonal to the issue of weaponizing those negotiations to score PR points.

Like many apps, Apollo had (a small number of) paid users and (a large number of ) free users. And because they were competing with the Reddit app (which is free) their pricing model was only $10/year.

Reddit's changes would mean that they would have to cut off all of their free users entirely, and 10x the cost of the paid users. Also, they would have to lose money on all of their existing yearly paid paid users until renewal time.

To be clear, I understand. I’m not sure why that’s unreasonable. It’s not their job to prop up his business model and promises

I don't think that's the criticism, though. People are saying that the way Reddit is handling things is in bad faith.

Given everything that's happened, the most likely scenario is that Reddit needs to push more advertising, and the 3rd-party apps interfere with that. Rather than just cut them off, they've chosen to "offer" an unaffordable alternative with an unrealistic timeline, probably to appear more reasonable than Twitter did when it cut off other apps.

Correct. Your comment boils down to “they don’t want to lose money.” That’s fine for them. No idea why it’s spun into hysterics because some other guy complains he doesn’t want to lose money, with the rationale that he pretends he’s on the hook for a year of API calls for free. If that was true he wouldn’t be shutting down.

As far as I can tell, the timeline is

1) Reddit announces publically that they will not be doing a twitter-style shutting down of 3p apps, that they are very pro 3p app unlike evil Twitter (was at least how I read the subtext)

2) Apollo dev feels secure, doubles down on growing his app. accepts invites to speak at apple developer conference just a few weeks ago, for instance.

3) Reddit drastically increases API prices in a way that makes free 3p apps impossible. All reddit third party apps now have 4 weeks to convert their business model from free-with-paid-extras to mandatory-subscription-for-all. Of the 8 or so 3p apps, every single one decides that this is impossible and that they must instead shut down their projects. Even the ones which are, for instance, about giving blind people access to reddit, or the ones which are basically apps for accessing specific subreddits and which have extremely passionate, extremely small user bases. Afaict, not a single developer decides to try to ride out these changes; all of them instead shut down. (if anyone can find an app that is actually trying to make the transition, let me know; i at least couldn't find one, and i looked pretty desperately)

4) Obviously this involves making a post explaining to their respective communities that they are shutting down the project. All of them explain why, including estimated price calculations and basically just explaining that maybe there would be a path forward but they just don't have time. Some emphasize how much it would cost for all of their free users API access, others emphasize how difficult it is to transition from free-with-paid-perks to a subscription-for-all model. Apollo is one of the former. It feels mostly like they are justifying themselves to their disappointed userbase, preempting comments of the "how dare you take away my only way of accessing reddit!" variety. It would frankly be very strange if they didn't do this. All the posts are professionalish, lots of strained "we want to thank reddit for making the platform we worked with for so long" style stuff

5) u/spez, the CEO of reddit, shows up in the comments in Apollo's goodbye post, and only Apollo's goodbye post, acting hostile and with an accusatory undertone. It feels very strange and out-of-place, and people say so. Spez gets defensive and starts badmouthing Apollo dev, calling him unprofessional and hard to work with. This then devolves into a back-and-forth between Apollo dev and u/spez, with 2 main plot points: a) apollo dev makes the jokey point that, if reddit's costs from apollo's api usage were really $20m, then shuttering Apollo is gaining reddit $20m, and perhaps half of that benefit should accrue to him. This is after the point where both of them had started being sarcastic at each other, and it was pretty much impossible not to read this as a mean-spirited joke expressing skepticism that these numbers weren't exaggerated. But u/spez seemed to take it absolutely seriously and treat it as a serious request for reddit to mail apollo a check for $10 million dollars. they have a really awkward thread about this where it's obvious u/spez understands the joke but, idk it's weird, it feels like he's desperate to get some debate points for apollo dev demanding money from reddit for no reason, and so pretends like he doesn't get the joke. While reading it I got deja vu of watching vinay gupta take deiseach's mean-spirited jokes absurdly seriously for the same reason in that one SSC post about buddhism. it was cringey to read and made u/spez seem like a narcissist. which segues nicely into plot point #2: b) the whole phone call thing. After spez had already attacked the Apollo dev, I get the impression he kind of realized like, "wait, why am i trying to be professional with this guy who is slinging crap at me, now that apollo is dead i'm just another shitposter" and decides to post the transcript of the phone call he had with reddit where they repeatedly told him he had nothing to worry about and they weren't going to pull a twitter and they supported their 3rd party devs and such, going through the specific lies and asking u/spez to comment on them

frankly the apollo dev's behavior seems totally justified. All of the hysterics are based on the CEO of Reddit coming into Apollo's goodbye post and commenting some extremely bizarre and hostile stuff, something he didn't do to any of the other extremely similar posts for the other apps. It really does seem like he has a grudge against Apollo and its developer, and the Apollo team didn't start swinging until they had already taken a few hits in the thread.

Whether or not the pricing itself is reasonable, the way Reddit is handling this entire thing is not. A company communicating in the way that Reddit is communicating while asking for a large sum of money is completely unacceptable. Just as a few of examples of their conduct:

1. They have claimed that Apollo's prices are so high because Apollo is inefficient and when asked to explain exactly what inefficiencies they are seeing, they made the following condescending and unhelpful reply (which has since been edited 7 days later but still contributed to people being upset) [1]:

> Having developers ask this question of themselves is the main point of having a cost associated with access in the first place. How might your app be more efficient? Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient. It’s up to us as users of these services to optimize our usage to meet our budget.

2. They have a rate limit of 60 queries per minute per user per client, they have tried to claim that the top app exceeds this rate limit by 438675% averaged over an entire month by ignoring the per user part of that rate limit [2]. They have used this flawed number to try and make third-party clients look bad.

3. They claimed that the Apollo developer attempted to blackmail Reddit during a conference call (Context: [3]):

> Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million. This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

It's not, but it's completely reasonable to be frustrated when a business partner (which they certainly were) changes their approach without adequate notice and without appearing to care to make any concessions to continue the relationship. Especially when you are being misrepresented publicly (that last part was the point where the apollo dev actually became adversarial: previously he was simply saying it didn't look like he would be able to continue with the app).

The majority of actual rage is coming from the users who are having an interface they liked taken away from them, especially because they perceive (quite reasonably) that this is for money-grabbing reasons and not for the long-term health of the site.

I think reddit would have had less blowback at this point if they had outright banner 3rd-party apps like twitter did, instead of spending the whole lead-up claiming that they would not be doing the same thing as them, only to effectively do the same but less honestly.

Reddit isn’t a publicly traded company yet. I think that’s their plan for this year.

> was it impossible to basically make their app paid and subscription based?

This was explained in details in the Apollo statement.

The biggest issue for Apollo was the lack of time to implement anything. There’s no way to know what the cost will be ahead of time, or the impact of changing to a subscription service on the user base. Those that stay to pay are likely the heaviest users, so it would skew any stats that he had and make it impossible to know how much to charge. No grace period meant he’d have a bill to pay immediately and no way to know if he could pay it. When he asked for a transition period they ghosted him and then started defaming him. I don’t blame him for just cutting the cord.

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