Full Interview: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman Isn’t Backing Down
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An executive openly attacking community members and developers, some of whom originally wrote the app that Reddit the bought to brand as their official one, as ‘not the intended users’ of the API is just misleading. They clearly saw value in having an app and bought one, one which wouldn’t have existed without API access, and which Reddit had previously heralded as a first class feature. Now they claim apps are a misuse of their api and they intended it for bots and tools only as part of their reasoning, and it just makes their whole argument seem poorly thought out.
At the end of the day, they own their platform, and can do what they like, but this attitude will cost them some of their most active contributors who decide it’s not worth putting up with their now bloated official experiences.
Also the repeated claims that third party apps strip ads is just plain wrong. Reddit has never included ads in the API nor provided a way to show ads on reddits behalf.
So they are making changes, and it doesn't even matter if the changes are most likely very bad for the company. I don't think they are naive to think that reddit can't die and this action would not lead it to that path.
> Huffman: Okay, hold on, timeout. You go to the App Store, you type in Reddit, you get two options, right? There’s Apollo. You go to one, it’s my business, and you look at our ads, use our products. That’s 95 percent of our iOS users. The rest go to Apollo, which uses our logo, or something like it, takes our data — for free — and resells it to users making a 100 percent margin. And instead of using our app, they use that app. Is that not competitive?
The Reddit strike should go on forever just for that answer alone.
Reddit could require serving their ads as a requirement for API access. Right now there is no way for Apollo to serve reddit ads even if they wanted to.
But the point is really that there are plenty of options, and instead of attempting any of those Cs just went with api euthanasia.
Reddit could choose to include the ads they sell within the API calls and say that anyone who uses the API has to display the reddit ads as well.
Maybe they could even share the ad revenue with the third party apps when someone clicks on the ads in the third party app.
They could then charge for the API calls that don't have the ads in them - e.g. the LLM that are consuming the data.
Apollo can offer a better experience because they don't have to constantly push recommendations and test new features to boost engagement metrics. If every 10th post on Apollo was an ad it would still be an improvement over the Reddit app.
That assumes that Apollo is sufficiently profitable to host the necessary backend systems to support a reddit clone. This also means that they need to have moderators (and if they're volunteer moderates where back at the "reddit takes advantage of volunteer moderators" square). It also means that this instance would have the appropriate legal staff to be able to handle trademark disputes, DMCA claims, and assorted challenges to maintain itself in the face of trolls, unsavory content, and such.
The moat that Reddit has from such upstarts isn't that its hard to build an instance, or stand one up, or even maintaining a community there - but rather making sure that it stays up by following the assorted laws (GDPR, CDA, trademark, copyright, etc...) out while maintaining a sufficient income stream to pay the staff (and maintain advertisers if you're not going full subscription only).
Apollo could pass this on to their users as the fee for ads free Reddit experience.
This way their incentives are aligned with Apollo’s.
Both earn money and are incentivized to grow their user base.
almost every company does not allow direct competitors in their platform. I m not even sure about the apps they are "cooperating" with. Down the road, one of them may end up reselling reddit content and come into conflict again.
The fact that reddit made poor decisions in the past should not stop them from making the right decisions now. Unfortunately though they still dont seem to have a good plan
Spez: > Not as much as they take. No way.
Let’s be clear, if 1 developer can make millions through Apollo and do a way better app than the Reddit team, what does that say about Reddit as a whole and their development?
It fucking sucks!
A lot to unpack here.
Simply put, the Reddit CEO definitely wants to kill 3rd party apps. He just knows that saying it out loud would have an even bigger backlash. With the current approach, he can pretend to care about 3rd party apps, but do everything to make it financially impossible to run one.
Having Reddit need to do audits of clients (where the clients could do things like quietly reduce the number of ads you get if you've tipped $9.99 or more - or not serve ads if your ID is on this special list so that friends don't see the ads or use a developer special trial build) is impractical and would mean that its even more of a call of if the client is in compliance or not.
What's more, ads served by the API to a client that isn't controlled by Reddit are less valuable - Reddit would have less information about how much engagement they had with the ad.
That's the key: Reddit and Twitter and Facebook and the like are not selling ads, they're selling you, the user. The users are the product. They're collecting every bit of data about you, building personal profiles. 3rd party apps would never be that intrusive. Delivering eyeballs on ads is not enough.
It’s totally fair for them to say they need to address the ad issue. But to claim these apps bring no value is pretty ridiculous on his part.
Not taking sides on this.
I wouldn't say the Apollo app is better. I've used both and the search UX on Apollo is so bad.
Furthermore, Apollo does not need to worry about backend at all since Reddit does all the work and gave it to Apollo for free.
Apollo did have a backend that made up for features that the Reddit API either kept as private APIs or refused to implement. He released the code as open source last week. He paid a part-time developer for the implementation and maintenance of code as well.
Featured that other APIs offer, like webhooks, pub/sub etc., were requested by various developers over the years but never implemented or took far longer to implement (years). This led to developers designing workarounds to get feature parity with Reddit's app, i.e., notifications. A few of these drastically cut down on total number of API calls by design, which would help them reduce the infrastructure spend they are so concerned with.
Ignoring the content consuming (Apollo, RiF, Sync, etc.) third-party app side of the discussion.
My biggest takeaway from the entire argument is Reddit now has 2000 employee's but 100 of the requests for improvements for the API, built-in moderator tools, etc., have been mishandled/ignored/years late. Because of that, many people took matters into their own hands and used the API to fill in the gaps in their moderation/admin/creator workflow, and initially, before they conceded on some of those tools, they were affected as well. It wasn't until a couple of days into the uproar (after the price was released, before the blackout) that they reversed course on some of those tools, including conceding the accessibility apps (being 39, and wearing hearing aids for severe loss, I sympathize with the users that are protesting because the web and first party app are lacking in this). I can understand the protest from the above, especially giving the short timeline between prices being released and go live.
I'm all for businesses being profitable; I'm all for companies having the right to adjust processes, prices and change terms, etc., but in my opinion, Reddit has severely mismanaged this situation and, in general, been a severely mismanaged business if they are as the CEO says not profitable by now.
I don't understand why he keeps doing these interviews, he's just terrible at responding to completely predictable, reasonable questions.
He’s saying that it costs them $10M/year in “pure cloud spend” to serve 3% of their users. Despite what they say, if you look at requests, it’s obvious that Apollo is more efficient than Reddit’s app. So if he’s telling the truth, that extrapolates to at least $333M of “pure cloud spend” to serve all of their users.
There are a million and five ways Reddit could reduce the cost of serving users' data. The whole situation boils down to this disingenuous falsehood spez keeps throwing about - "our data".
Frankly we need anti-trust enforcement to stop this widespread bundling of digital services together with the software that accesses them, and/or a statutory right for programmatic API access to do everything a user is authorized to do by other means.
In the meantime I'd really love to see some adversarial interoperability around this. Reddit has to serve content to their proprietary front ends some how, and there's no reason third party clients can't just use those endpoints instead of assenting to API terms and whatnot.
That’s why the blackout protests are doomed. Unless it causes enough people to stop using reddit altogether, they will have no effect.
There's already an API and an ecosystem of third party apps. I'm amazed at the failure to embrace the opportunity to monetize this in a reasonable timescale, in a world where customers are already accustomed to monthly subscriptions.
https://9to5mac.com/2023/06/15/reddit-blackout-third-party-a...
Reminds me of:
Except, here, it's not just some jacket and a couple of people. It's some perhaps dozens of $millions made by a few app devs against a $multi-billion IPO and access and usefulness of a key site on the internet (e.g., inability of many to access valuable info and communities for days, now).
Something personal like this interfering with the IPO, and activities of so many beyond that, is a monumental failure of judgment. Combined with Huffman's past history of dishonesty and ineptness in multiple areas (including making Reddit profitable after 7+ years at the helm in this current round), seems like the best solution to the problem at this point would be removing him from the CEO position.
(Obviously, this seems easy from the outside, but I have no idea how easy / practical this would be in the "full picture")
If it's unreddit why is it a feature of reddit? (A feature, that in my opinion, is heavily abused by mods and admins).
> Tim Rathschmidt, Reddit’s director of consumer and product communications: An angle no one else has been writing about is the desire and frustration with users that want their communities back. Especially being vocal about it. That’s just not something that’s really been covered.
> Steve Huffman: The blackouts are not representative of the greater Reddit community. Users may have been for this on Monday, they’re not for it now.
Same exact kind of FUD about the Real Public™ being inconvenienced and unsupportive you'd hear from the suits with respect to a regular labor strike. But here presented as some kind of special insight that the media are all conspiring to hide.
> > The ones we’ve talked about today, yes. Once they’ve thrown in the towel, they’re doing quite well.
> Can you give any sense of scale, how well they’re doing?
> > You’re talking to them, go ask them! Millions. He said how many subscribers he has, his price list is public. [Selig did not deny the “millions” claim when reached for comment.]
That really says it all, doesn't it?
> One of the most important points I’d like to make today is that Reddit is a platform built by its users. My favorite analogy for Reddit is that of a city. Cities are physical things, but they’re really these living organisms created by their citizens. I think Reddit is very much the same. We’re a platform and tech company on one hand, but on the other it’s a living organism, this democratic living organism, created by its users.
But they will take away those users control of their subs and they will undelete/unedit comments of users to protect what they see as "their" content.
He completely ignores/side-steps the question on why they told the Apollo dev there would be no API changes this year. Then tries to pretend that April is actually when the clock started on all of this when they /just/ announced the pricing. Even what they said in April was unclear and they refused to clarify when asked.
> We’re perfectly willing to work with the folks who want to work with us, including figuring out what that transition period will look like.
Lies, just straight lies. The Apollo dev was under this impression, reached out to Reddit and asked for some more time, and they told him no. Just pure bullshit coming from /u/spez but that's what we have come to expect I guess.
> You’re talking to them, go ask them! Millions. He said how many subscribers he has, his price list is public. [Selig did not deny the “millions” claim when reached for comment.] I have a guess on how many. He’s given a lower number of subscribers, I have another guess that’s higher. But it’s real money.
I'm sure he has made millions but the app has been around for many years. From the numbers he has quoted (~50K yearly subs and the current price is now like $13/yr) we can guess at about $650,000/year, $552,500 after Apple's cut, and then he pays a backend dev, has server costs of his own, and pays for things like icons from designers. Very quickly the Selig's take-home looks very similar to a mid to high-end developer in CA. It's disingenuous to lump all the revenue over many years together and play it off as if he is raking in millions (plural) a year. How much does Huffman make a year?
> Isn’t there a way you could at least give them longer and work a little bit more closely on negotiable terms for folks like Apollo or Sync or RIF? Some of their users are, I’m sure, power users of Reddit and want to see them succeed.
>> I said we are working with everybody who is willing to work with us, which includes many of the other third party apps. The three you mentioned said they don’t want to work with us and they’re shutting down. I didn’t tell them to do that.
Again, lies.
Then he sidesteps all the questions about giving a longer time to app developers and plays whataboutism games then says one of the most galling things (to me), he calls Apollo a direct competitor. Full stop, that's bullshit. You might lose out on some tracking/ad revenue (which, by the way, is tiny based on their financials and Reddit is quick to tell you the 3rd party app users are a tiny percentage of the userbase, you can't have it both ways Reddit) but it's not a direct competitor. Apollo users provide content and moderation for your (Reddit) platform. It's not like they suck in all the Reddit data and then have their own side-discussions that don't contribute back to Reddit. Just so freaking tone deaf.
> We offer the API so the vast majority of our use of the uses of the API — so not these, the other 98 percent of them that make tools, bots, enhancements for Reddit — that’s what the API is for. It was never designed to support third-party apps.
And that's the first time I've ever heard that, might the first time it's been said publically (but at best it was first said within the last month). Reddit encouraged these 3rd party developers, reddit's first app was 3rd party app they bought, this is rewriting history and, once again, lies, sense a theme here?
> profiting off of our API
I can't even with this clown. You (Reddit) decided to give the API away for free, you encouraged these developers to make/improve their apps, you pretend it was a one-way street, it absolutely wasn't. The amount these apps made compared to Reddit's revenue is peanuts ($650M vs $552K for 1 app, let's pretend there were 4-Apollo-sized apps, that's ~2.2M, or .03%, and it was not pure profit for those apps, they had costs/salaries as well).
> I want to stop you for a second there. So you’re saying that Apollo, RIF, Sync, they don’t add value to Reddit?
>> Not as much as they take. No way.
I don't believe this even for a second. Just pure bullshit. Let's also remember that this API change comes with no new features, app developers have been asking for years if not over a decade for better API endpoints (streaming/webhooks) to lessen the load of polling, they've asked for better endpoints to lower the load, Reddit has done nothing. They haven't even kept the API up in feature parity to what the new web/app can do.
> 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.
Ahh yes the good old "These people just want something for free". That's poppycock, I'm more than willing to pay but you've offered no good solutions. I'd even pay the absurd API costs (plus the Apple tax, plus a little extra for the developer) but your timeline is way too short for the app developers to make this work. Also you keep saying you will work with the devs and give them more time but that's a lie. Apollo asked specifically for this and you said no.
> Do you imagine there are going to be other third party apps after these API changes? What do you see the future of third-party apps looking like?
>> We’ll see. We’ll see. Like we try to charge so it works out to about $1 per user per month for reasonable API usage. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
That number is a fantasy, the Reddit app itself wouldn't come close to that usage. They've made up that number and it's insulting they keep throwing it around when they don't even come within the ballpark of that.
> How widely are you seeing that sentiment? If I go on r/all right now, at least as of about an hour ago, four of the five top posts are all about these blackouts. Let me see.
>> Oh, you mean these posts that have no comments? Those ones?
> They’re highly upvoted by their communities.
>> If there were comments on there, I bet I can tell you what those comments would say. They would say “knock this off, it’s annoying.” Because if you go to the other posts where comments are enabled, that’s what people are saying.
Wow, Reddit should drop their main product and go all in on this mind reading ability they have /s. Also I've heard this BS from every protest (online or real life) I've followed. Yes, some people are annoyed by the protests, that's the freaking point.
> I’m sure people are not as supportive of it as they might have been earlier in the week, because it has obviously been a huge inconvenience to using Reddit on a day-to-day basis. But how can we prove that, broadly, users are not in support of the Reddit protests when some of the top upvoted posts are protest posts?
>> If comments were on for those posts... there’s a reason why they’re not allowing comments. That is a very un-Reddit thing to do. We don’t do that. I do my AMA. I take my beating.
> In that AMA...
>> People were pissed.
> They were not happy.
>> Yeah. And we took it.
And you answered like 14 questions total, I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove?
I already disliked Huffman due to his blatant lies and mischaracterization but this is over the top. I had a small hope Reddit would see the error of their ways and reverse course at least partly but it seems they are fully prepared to ram this down everyone's throats. It was fun while it lasted.