Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company
npr.org
npr.org
Its amazing how we butchered the protest into the regular 'us vs them' situation seen in everything: politicize everything, pitch people against people, while the person on the top reaps the money and enjoyment from the drama.
> Huffman said negotiations have broken down with two of the most popular apps, Apollo and Reddit is Fun, but he said Reddit is willing to negotiate with most third-party developers.
Wow. You accuse him of blackmailing you for 10 million, get caught red handed (1) then say that negotiations "broke down"? I want to hear what happened with rif from the developer. I hope he recorded his calls too.
(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
I find it ironic he says they should grow up. You know who makes up narratives in their head and when challenged on it still tries dig in and blame me. My 5 and 7 year old…
There’s your sign.
Reddit has not disputed the validity of the recordings either.
The apollo dev's framing of the call is so disingenuous. When you want to extort a company like he did, it goes like this:
1. you float the idea somewhat ambiguously with some plausible deniability
Then either:
2a. the company seems receptive, that didn't happen here so no need to follow that path
2b. the company rebuffs the idea
3. you switch to your plausible deniability case
4. the company accepts your new framing of your extortion attempt for one of many reasons (maybe it's too much hassle to hold you to what you really meant, or they still want to continue working with you, etc). they might even say something like "oh sorry, i misunderstood you earlier", but of course it's really just how you navigate that situation.
To then go and take their response at (4) and say "oh, even they admitted that they misunderstood me" is disingenuous.
> To then go and take their response at (4) and say "oh, even they admitted that they misunderstood me" is disingenuous
it’s not disingenuous when they literally apologized , multiple times , in that call that they misunderstood. Literally
It was only ever about profit, why would you think otherwise?
So it’s a slippery distractive slope.
Given the lack of contrary evidence in this "article," it's abundantly clear that absolutely no journalism was done here. The Apollo guy clearly made significantly more than a reasonable effort to come to terms with Reddit (and has receipts to show it), and it was Reddit who ghosted him.
This is a Reddit puff piece.
Then stop talking about this. Mods don't own their subreddits. Ban all these mods "protesting" and replace them with a handful of paid employees and then operate like an adult company. The actual users won't care who the mods are. In fact, it would probably greatly improve things. I've been on reddit for over a decade. Probably check it twice a day. I really do not care about 3rd party apps. What would be nice would be the ability to post without getting flagged by a bot or banned over some ridiculous rules made up by someone hoarding what little power they have.
This reminds me a bit of the Netflix drama with password sharing. Just implement a sensible policy and be done with it. Most people won't even notice. Don't give like a dozen interviews where you talk about it. Only a small, but vocal, minority care. Don't cater to them.
This whole situation reminds me of a policy that happens around my city where they turn industrial areas into residential ones by renting out the old factory buildings for cheap to artists and once the neighbourhood is made popular (by these artists) rent goes up enormously (pricing out the artists) and yuppies move in.
Reddit is now kicking out the people that made it.
wait they are getting rid of that too?
It's entirely possible, though, because they've been hanging onto old.reddit forever just like the free API. I know I'll never visit the site again without old.reddit, but I also know I'm part of an extreme minority. I get the impression that mods don't know that they're part of an extreme minority, because they thought they owned the site.
Then again, earlier this year they also promised the Apollo dev there would be no changes to the API this year, or even in the next few years...
If tomorrow I try it and it doesn't work and just redirects it's not a big deal. I honestly wouldn't even think twice about it, just a, "Well, guess I have to use the normal site now."
I swear companies announce this stuff just for the headlines. Just to feel relevant. You could do this stuff in the background and no one would know.
HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36287411
That much mod turnover, and the vandalism and hate media campaigns from former mods could seriously endanger the site if some competitor arises all of a sudden, but no competitor is visible so that's unlikely.
Disappointed in this article as well, just curious about that remark.
Adult companies do not depend on free labor to provide value. (I'm speaking about moderation in particular, but also the creation of wikis and the community management.)
Personally, I can't imagine a single moderator on Reddit continuing without being paid.
Unfortunately, many of them are: Just not by reddit. Commanding the attention and eyeballs of in some cases millions of users is a big opportunity, and there are countless shady hangers-on trying to cash in on personal or financial relationships with reddit moderators. If every current reddit mod quit, the platform would only be overwhelmed by financially-motivated hucksters at an accelerated rate. And frankly, that's what reddit is encouraging by not supporting the moderators that actually give a shit about the platform and not their own pocketbooks. This will only accelerate the decline of quality of reddit.
The ones that continue to operate are presumably in this bucket.
I also wonder if some large sub mods specifically use the API in order to carefully run their voting bot farms - but I'm not accusing anyone here.
I mean, much as some people might not like it, he's right. It is just a small group of people who care about this, as the vast majority of Reddit's userbase is on new Reddit on desktop and the official app on mobile. If the protest continues, admins will simply demod them and add new mods. You already see this on /r/RedditRequest [0] which is a way to petition the admins to take over an unmoderated or private subreddit, notice the comments saying how they hope the OP gets the sub.
As long as you build on someone else's platform, expect them to not care about you as an individual. This happened in 2015 too, with Ellen Pao and Victoria, but somehow people forget about that. It's as if most users simply don't care about this kind of drama.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...
I think this is probably true, but has Reddit published any metrics to confirm this?
I'd be especially interested to see the usage patterns segmented by contributors vs. lurkers. I'm sure it's true that the majority of Reddit users use the official app and new reddit. But I'm far less certain that's true for the majority of users who post content to reddit, or who moderate large communities.
I know that for my own very small subs, which I pretty much exclusively list elsewhere under old.reddit.com, the majority of access is in fact from "new". Probably also the mobile app, though I've not looked at that recently.
Again, that's despite my pushing old & Web based access generally. And my own links are a large fraction of the overall inbound.
Reddit, now seemingly desperate for money, decided they needed to jack up the API prices. This is after squandering a fortune on VC on a bloated dev team making stupid features like NFTs. If they hadn't blown so much money and created an expensive wasteful company, they wouldn't find themselves in this situation.
Now they're dumping on their most valuable users, the unpaid moderators to squeeze anything from the bottom line.
It's disgusting, and I'm done with Reddit. I deleted my 8yo account. I hope the CEO gets fired and it burns to the ground. Hopefully something better rises from the ashes.
And, you hope the CEO gets fired for...increasing revenue and decreasing costs? I'm pretty sure the investors are well aware of this move and support it wholeheartedly in time for the IPO.
I hope the CEO gets fired and Reddit becomes a place where I want to spend time again.
Then why even participate in this conversation about Reddit?
This is like me going on a Jeep forum to complain about the Jeep Wrangler I sold 9 years ago.
No, it is like complaining about a Jeep you bought 9 years ago and sold yesterday.
> "We've been subsidizing other business for free for a long time. We're stopping that. That is not a negotiable point," Huffman said. "We simply were in a unsustainable position."
We’ve all seen this playbook a million times. Apollo is an excellent product and I’m sorry to see anyone put in a precarious position, but what could you really expect? They’re not going to grow at a loss till the end of time.
So... what did Reddit expect? Apparently no one to complain about massive changes. How many times have we seen THAT playbook? What did they expect?
What should be apparent from my comment is that both sides need each other. spez seems to think that's not true and the people fleeing to places that won't have the users (really the third component) are making almost as much of a mistake as reddit is.
It's a symbiosis and anyone ignoring that is bound to lose.
FWIW, it does appear that at least some subs are indeed leaving, simply enough, for example /r/startrek. I would personally prefer a return to forums, but whatever.
Not sure what's going on in your workplace, but don't take it out on Redditors.
In my opinion*, all of this brings to mind the quote attributed to Napoleon about not interrupting your enemy "when he is making a mistake."
I certainly don't / didn't consider Reddit an enemy, and yet, suddenly, the site has an adversarial halo around it that simply didn't exist several weeks ago. A halo that I'm quite sure didn't need to be created (for Reddit Inc. to achieve its actual goals) and could have been avoided with a little more "EQ" and better PR efforts and planning.
This isn't, remotely, the first time that Huffman, in particular, has shown PR ineptness, including the egregious PR blunder of outright highly visible dishonest behavior and inability to properly acknowledge & apologize [1].
* Which is the opinion of an internet rando / 'armchair general', but, informed by knowledge of past PR disasters and borne out, so far, by events of this saga, to date
It seems more productive to look at just what it is that gives Reddit value and is of general benefit.
There are and have been Reddit contenders, among them Tildes (of which I'm a member), the former Imzy (which I joined, and watched implode spectacularly), Lemmy (which I've known of vaguely for some months) and kbin (which I've only just heard of), as well as, of course, Hacker News itself (and clones such as lobste.rs), and extant fora such as Slashdot, Digg, Fark, and the like. Not to mention Facebook with its own Groups features.
The problem facing most extant fora is their own reputation (or lack thereof). Digg, Fark, and Slashdot all burned through goodwill and interest. I was a ... very early ... participant in Slashdot, let's say, and don't think I've logged in for years, though I'll very occasionally peruse the site. The story selection may be OK (it's often comparable to HN). The discussion level is ... poor. In the extreme.
I have less experience with Digg and Fark though I suspect the general sense is similar. Both had the spark for a time, but that torch was passed. Fallen online cultures virtually never revive.
Imzy set out as its goal, "a kinder, gentler Reddit", solving problems Reddit expressed at scale, without ever first solving the problem of reaching that scale. Imzy also managed to create a few pathologies of its own, a key aspect of which was centered around its own serial pseudonymity. HN's policy of permitting pseudonymous accounts, even temporary throways for specific discussion, but banning repeatedly and frequently generating new accounts seems to me well-founded and a good balance. Reddit has effectively had a similar policy, largely through karma requirements which make brand-new low-karma profiles of limited use, though reputation can be built over a reasonable period of time.
Tildes has existed and operated reasonably well for about seven years, being launched in 2016, and I'd joined it quite near that date. It's avoided Imzy's pathologies, but has a general scaling problem, and discussion tends to be both thin and not particularly specialised. Reddit's advantage for now is that there are corners with deep technical knowledge. Tildes might get there, though I'm not sure that's its goal. For now it's ... a reasonable option.
Lobste.rs is nearly identical to Hacker News as regards Reddit, except smaller. There are no sub-discussions, there is now individual ownership of such discussions, and effectively the entire site is /r/all, much as HN is (as I recently noted: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256208>). As with Tildes, Lobste.rs has functioned usefully for some years, it's not been a runaway success, and it seems to fill a different niche than Reddit's topic-based user-moderated forums.
Site growth turns out to be a hard problem. Getting a small department to agree on a lunch spot, let alone several tens of millions of Internet strangers on where to decamp to is a large coordination problem. (I've been through this myself, several times, notably with the Google+ shutdown.) Successful migrations typically take both time and significant advanced planning.
And that's mostly looking at the scaling issue.
I've argued as well recently that Reddit provides a huge amount of behind-the-scenes moderation and filtering, and that this is likely a large part of the site's value. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36332367> The immediate effects of, say, a widespread user-based moderation strike would probably NOT be overwhelming amounts of spam and pr0n within subreddits. Most of that is already caught by automated tools.
Instead, what you'd see would be less egregious, but equally corrosive drift and devaluation. Off-topic posts, below-threholds-of-automated-detection levels of incivility, bullying, and trolling, shallow content, and the like. For some subreddits that's not especially significant, for others, such as AskScience and AskHistorians, which are extremely heavily moderated (I've in fact refused further participation in the latter based on moderating out of SciHub and related links), but which would devolve to chaos or irrelevance without such human intervention. If that's a small number of subs and Reddit finds them sufficiently valuable they might be able to substitute professional paid mods, but doing so for even a small fraction of the 100+ million "active" subreddits the site boasts ... would not scale.
Still, the automated infrastructure represents a huge amount of institutional knowledge and goodwill which upstart contenders would have to replicate.
Again: just two elements of the problem, neither of them easy. Not impossible to solve, but chance (and hence risk) plays a huge role.
I think I wouldn't mind so much if their official app was anywhere near as good as Apollo.
I have a sinking feeling I'm going to be seeing this phrase posted thousands of times.
Based on what I've seen, they went above the standard for API pricing in their industry. Comparatively the pricing offered to the 3rd party app developers was akin to gouging, and was not meant to be realistic.
There was likely a path to making Apollo a paid product, letting it's popularity wain, and then killing it. Instead Reddit went for the power move and gave the mob a flashpoint to rally around.
How do you think advertisers - some of whom have now had to reschedule ad buys / launches / pause campaigns, or at least factor a sudden major hit to 'stability' / consistency into consideration of the platform [1,2] - and potential enterprise customers for ML-model feeds &c. are taking this news?
Further, it has caused the CEO himself to repeatedly indicate lack of profitability (after > $1.2 billion in VC funding) and has created a massive 'paper-trail' of PR ineptness evidence.
[1] https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-redd...
[2] https://www.thedrum.com/news/2023/06/12/what-do-advertisers-...
(... among various additional articles)
> This protest has the potential to demonstrate that its place in users’ hearts is conditional, and perhaps more importantly to demonstrate to advertisers that users do not consume its content in the context of the official Reddit app
If your intent is to eventually charge, do it from day 1. If you want to entice people to try your service by not charging them, let them know what the charge is, but give them introductory credit or an overt "free trial".
Well, if Huffman says Apollo added no value to the platform, then I guess I would expect the official Reddit app to be at least as good as Apollo, rather than a dumpster fire of shoddy engineering and dark patterns.
Of course, this underscores the stupidity of the whole thing. Given that THE 'google-hack du jour' is adding reddit to search terms (with articles in MSM showing up since at least Jan 2022) AND the value of Reddit's 'corpus' (as Huffman himself put it back in April) to companies like GOOGLE (trying to not only build ChatGPT-style ML, but relevant up-to-date search capabilities based around ChatGPT-style 'agents'), you'd think they'd be able to convert these stories into reasonable financial health and successful IPO w/o wading into brand-destroying PR debacles...
... but, apparently not.
Seems like reddit could easily have been run indefinitely as it was at a modest profit and brought happiness to its users, employees and shareholders. But no, they got greedy and have tried to “shoot for the moon”. And now they need to squeeze more money out of their service to please their investors. In doing so, they’re making their product worse. (No, I don’t want to install their shitty official mobile app.)
Ugh. Someone please make a simple, clean reddit replacement that my communities can move to. Reddits actions here have been slimy and I don’t want to support them.
Also glosses over the "breakdown" in negotiation with Apollo and others. Dude got caught lying through his fucking teeth because the Apollo dev was recording their phone calls (and a damn good thing he did, too.)
2-party laws only protect the wealthy and powerful, who don't like how recordings level the playing field.
They did talk to one, apparently:
> Christian Selig told NPR the new charges could cost Apollo, which has just one part-time employee, around $20 million a year.
I assume Google and Microsoft are HTML "scraping", not using the API and not paying. While it's in Reddit's self-interest to be indexed by the search engines, the article mentions these companies also use Reddit's corpus to feed their AIs, is this not monetizable?
It is reasonable for Reddit to want to monetize its content particularly when it loses ad revenue to 3rd-party apps but, could its approach not lead developers to follow Google's and Microsoft's lead and try to recreate (some of their API experience) by scraping Reddit?
Hey Steve, you got that data for free in the first place. That sound you hear is users telling you that if you start charging ridiculous fees for serving that free data, your source of free data is going to dry up.
I know it's tempting as Reddit's CEO to think the two issues (acquisition price vs selling price) are orthogonal, but they aren't.
One possible solution is to offer your contributors something like a penny per word written. If you're going to charge for the words we write, we want our cut.
He could have done this in such a smoother way, talking with the main people affected (like Apollo's dev) before to explore options and make them feel part of the decision, give them a longer deadline to adjust....
Simply amateurish leadership here...
Problem is it’s heavily correlated with the group that matters - mods and heavy users that actually post content. Without those Reddit is a ghost town.
The problem for the Group That Matters is that plenty of them don't have anywhere else to go in order to get what they get out of Reddit, and Reddit crowded out all competitors. They might end up at 4chan themselves, but they'll more likely not go anywhere.
Reddit doesn't seem scared at all. They just watched Musk laugh through it.
I’m probably gonna give the fediverse (sp?) a shot. Will probably read Reddit either way but done with contributing
I wonder what percent of usage is via third-party apps. And specifically, what percent of mobile usage is via these apps.
It's well known that people who submit content or comment (i.e. directly engage with the site) are a small minority of the overall userbase. Large subreddits with millions of subscribers often fail to get 10,000 upvotes or 1,000 comments.
As with many domains, media behaviours follow a power law distribution: "a small group" is responsible for the majority of posts, the majority of comments, the majority of moderation actions, etc. And a small group of subreddits are where a great deal of membership, submissions, comments, and traffic occur. What spez's comment confounds is quantity with significance, most especially power and value generation.
I don't presently have deep insights into the workings of Reddit and numbers associated with its activity.
I do however have a sixteen-year trove of Hacker News front page activity that I've been studying for the past few weeks and drawing various insights from, discussed in several recent comments on both HN and the Fediverse (#HackerNewsAnalytics: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics>).
The trove (2006-2-20 through 2023-6-13) 178,642 front-page stories as archived under the "past" link (<https://news.ycombinator.com/front>), which I've crawled recently. This isn't all submissions to HN (the front page sees only about 3% of all submissions), though it's most of activity (just under half of all comments appear on those stories, integrating with a 2022 analysis from Whaly.io[1]).
Whaly also gives a denominator of active HN accounts, 767,496 (2005--2021), which I'll presume is still roughly accurate. Keep in mind that this is certainly smaller than the total registered accounts, of which I've no data, though I suspect is in the millions.
The front page dataset includes submissions from 43,598 distinct accounts. So straight off the top, only five percent of active profiles have contributed to the front page.
And majority of that 5% appears only once: 24,433, or 56%.
The top ten profiles account for 4% of FP posts.
The top 50: 11%.
253 profiles submitted 25% of front-page articles.
2,092 profiles submitted fully half of all front-page articles. That's just over a quarter percent of all, again, active HN profiles, let alone total registered accounts. A "small group" by any measure, but one that's had a profound influence on Hacker News.
Keep in mind that this is front page submissions and not comments or other activity measures. I'm reporting on what I have insights on, and that's the front page, topic titles, dates, vote & comment counts, and submitters. The Whaly analysis does look at comments, along with other activity, and offers a breakdown of types of significant HN members:
- "Seeders (16%): People that post but that never comment on other user posts"
- "Casual Users (79%): People that reasonably comment & post (between 1 and 100 comments per year) on the social network."
- "Hardcore Users (5%): People that interact a lot with the social network (more than 100 comments on the year)"
My point is that spez's characterisation is dishonest, misleading, dismissive, and irrelevant. I'm disappointed NPR, also in the media business and presumably highly cognizant of such dynamics, didn't push back harder on those talking points, or balance the article in other ways. Small groups can and do matter, most especially in media. And spez is at war with his power users who've contributed tremendously to the enterprise he's now attempting to cash out on, which seems ... unwise.
________________________________
Notes:
1. 2021 retrospective: <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective> and top 10k commenters in 2021: <https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...>, latter discussed here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778994>