Reddit CEO lashes out on protests, moderators and third-party apps
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna89700 (sorry for the AMP link…)
> In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted “a handful of times” with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform.
> Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which Musk purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
I guess if all the other VCs jump off a cliff your board will also want to jump off a cliff.
I’m way too cynical to think Reddit is doomed but even as a for-profit venture this is just seemingly increasingly ill-conceived.
Also lmfao at the letter to RIF. You tear up your contract with them and THEN you tell them they’re required to respond within 48 hours? LOL get bent.
That's not the risk perspective I face, and I'd prefer to see Reddit accede to community demands (though I've long since abandoned much hope they'd do so, my own personal subreddit's been all but dormant for about five years on just that basis, though I've continued to mine it for links on topics I'd posted previously).
I'm not certain what Reddit's end game is should the IPO fail, or fizzle, but it would seem that preparing for an alternative online presence might well be a good idea.
I think I read somewhere that Reddit had taken like $1.7 billion in VC money. Even if its current valuation is way down from what it appears to have peaked at ($15 billion), there’s still plenty of cushion for the VCs to get their money out and give the employees some liquidity.
They’ll probably torch the franchise in the process, but at least for a brief moment, they have created some real value for the shareholders.
Not yet.
And management is scrambling to show they can still have a profitable exit.
Which is to say: it really is rational for investors to pursue a course with a high probability of killing the goose, as the alternative is still little or no return.
The post-IPO Reddit would still be on its own, though it might be able to capitalise somewhat on the IPO itself for a time. That it will eventually have to make it on its own as a business does seem clear. And frankly, increasingly unlikely.
But investors don't have to work for someone else's book, just for their own and if they see an IPO as a way out that's an excellent reason not to want in.
The relevant question is what market sentiment is on the IPO valuation, and how much that's shifted over the past month.
History shows that financial bubbles can and do occur. The market is not inherently rational. Who puts what value on the issue and why is a question that's hard to answer. History has also shown that those assisting in IPOs (e.g., investment banks) may commit to making purchases at specific price points in an attempt to bid up prices. Which is to say that the market is neither transparent nor entirely free or fair.
Again: the broader point is that VC manage a portfolio of investments, Reddit is one asset in that portfolio, and that calculus may well consider a 2x return as little different from a 1x or even a loss, relative to the possibility of a 10x+ exit.
Or to use the sportsball metaphor: this appears to be a Hail Mary pass.
And quarterback is about to get sacked.
That we agree on, and it's one reason I'm not sure if the mods that revolted realize how thin the ice under Reddit is.
Reddit has remained a useful space to launch the occasional new forum (e.g., /r/Plexodus) on a transitory basis, and still occasionally proves useful for technical issues, but that's really the limit of my present interaction.
The rest of his changes - stopping moderation and the API price changes are stupid.
Has Reddit cut staff? Seems like they're just copying Musk's mistakes.
Railing against work from home and then stopping paying you office lease? The first eviction was ordered today. How long till the flagship office doors are chained shut?
No part of the twitter debacle is sane. Modeling any part of one’s strategy on it would be laughable.
You can make the sane/rational decisions, yet implement those decisions in the most insane way possible.
Insane waste. Remember that lady going on about "how dare you critique infra! we use graphql!" Nonsense, they were obviously not that valuable: twitter is running great with them all gone..
Obviously a lot of people were unduly pessimistic about Twitter’s technical resilience, but from what I can see, it does not seem to be a well oiled machine.
Glad you’re liking the feed.
There does some to be an effort to make it look like the reddit default page since there's some viral meme pages mixed in.
Though for the last week it really desperately wanted to show me posts about some Spider-Man movie, so the old stuff still activates sometimes.
https://fortune.com/2023/06/06/reddit-layoffs-job-cuts-stall...
(Especially because the way it fails involves a "(null)" string being returned instead of the translation.)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-prote...
Yes, many tech companies are bloated. You (CEOs and other execs) did that yourself. You can at least be empathetic and have some tact when your actions drastically alter your employees lives.
- Spez and Reddit created that so-called "landed gentry" through their own rules and policies, and were more than happy with it until about two weeks ago. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36352719> Irony of actual power-elite labeling volunteering serfs as a power elite also noted.
- A "small number of users" discounts the activity, value, role, and influence of those people, and ignores the pervasive power-law relationships in virtually all of media, online or off. Compare against HN where a small fraction of profiles contribute the overwhelming majority of both comments and front-page stories. More deets: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36348493>.
Whatever else his CEO skills, crisis communications and adroit use of metaphor are not spez's strong suit.
As for the effectiveness of the strike and protests: Reddit has now been front-page news in national and international media, leading up to a planned IPO, and Not In A Good Way, even if the coverage of interviews is ham-fisted and one-sided. Which reads as a win for those protesting to me.
(Late edit: noting of irony.)
Absolutely nothing of reddit has come as a surprise. Not their past dramas and not this current protest. People observing the situation have accurately predicted each stage. The only thing that hasn't been surprising is how willing Spez has been to put his foot in his mouth.
So I'll throw in a few more predictions:
1. Reddit will IPO, despite legitimate concerns about their inability to turn a profit and the very real likelihood that new AI-driven services will render its model redundant. Spez will get the payday that he's so steadfast upon.
2. The IPO will first buoy, then go into a long decline as it becomes clear that the site has no direction, nothing to leverage into new markets and will struggle to maintain dominance and relevance in a world were information is increasingly tailored via AI-driven tools.
On changing moderation criteria and conditions: I'd pointed out issues with moderation (in part at Reddit) previously. My personal subreddit's presently closed, but thank you Internet Archive:
"Content rating, moderation, and ranking systems: some non-brief thoughts" (2014)
<https://web.archive.org/web/20200629055317/https://www.reddi...>
"Reddit and Community -- what works, what raises flags" (2014)
<https://web.archive.org/web/20150709003845/https://www.reddi...>
Going to war with your community never ends well for a forum. Specifically going to war with power users ends very poorly.
Treating your forum community poorly is like treating your developer community poorly:
You won’t see the impact at first, because it occurs on a side of the platform not immediately monetized.
Short term ad revenue comes from lurkers.
But the content that drives them to your site? That is generated, managed, and made possible by power users.
Most of the monetizable users are passive readers of content written by power users. Lose the power users and the readers will follow. Maybe not immediately, but they will follow
Based on what?
However: this whole episode has left me with the impression that Reddit is a company hostile to its own users - that they don't care about putting users and user experience first. That makes me consciously want to cut down my usage and explore alternatives, because I trust the brand less than I did before.
In advertising terms, subreddits are analogous to special interest magazines. Despite this, Reddit's initial approach was to spam subreddits with low quality ads that had nothing to do with the subreddit's purpose. Going to /r/golf I saw an ad for a Samsung phone and then:
> r/movies tell us who you’re most excited to see in ASTEROID CITY. In cinemas June 23
They've also made the ads barely distinguishable from regular posts.
> I've never understood how it was supposed to be profitable
Not hiring 2,000 people would've been a strong start. Improving long-standing issues with the platform rather than churning through poorly implemented and largely irrelevant features would be another.
They could easily have monetised the 3rd party apps with a much less negative reaction by requiring users to purchase Reddit subscriptions for access. Users that didn't want to pay would migrate to the official app and the subscription earns more than the API fees would.
Thinking of this clip https://youtu.be/CTbEH8etZU0
It’s… a strategy. But ultimately humans want high trust communities deep in our monkey brains.
Something tells me this trend will itself be addressed by the technology that enabled it.
I don’t understand why they felt the need to engage so much with app providers and be so childish about the whole thing. They just had to assume they were yielding the power they have over the platform and that’s how things were going to be from on now, no long explanation needed. They could still be communicating this way actually and it would sound much more honest and serious that what they are doing currently.
As of now the whole thing is a master class in how not to communicate.
To me, this reason doesn't add up.
The whole incident is a result of comical levels of arrogance and incompetence.
I was part of a forum based community in ~2010 that constantly debated moving to reddit. It boiled down to "no one joins forums anymore vs we lose control". These events were not unpredictable.
Reddit wants users to use their app so they can accidently click on ads. Like most of the economy they've switched from prioritising growth to prioritising value.
Reddit will be fine. They will add moderation tools to their app. The mods who leave will be replaced.
Yeah, people tend to listen to others in charge of companies too much. In this case, Huffman previously stated things like:
> GQ: One of the big turning points in Reddit’s history was Digg’s collapse. It was your biggest competitor and imploded almost overnight. Is there anything about Reddit that makes you worry something like that could happen to you?
> Huffman: I think the problem Digg had is that it was a company that was built to be a company, and you could feel it in the product. The way you could criticize Reddit is that we weren't a company – we were all heart and no head for a long time. So I think it'd be really hard for me and for the team to kill Reddit in that way.
And people ate it up, bait and everything.
> Reddit wants users to use their app so they can accidently click on ads
It's about more than just that, otherwise reddit would just force 3rd party apps to serve ads, just like the official client. Instead they seem hellbent on removing 3rd party apps fully.
But on the flip side, I don’t think it’s at all clear yet that Reddit is a viable profit-making company that isn’t reliant on unpaid labor to maintain usage at current levels. A couple months from now, I think we’ll have a much better idea.
My guess is that Reddit will be “fine” (in that private or public markets will continue to value it as a multi-billion dollar business) but I’m not highly confident in this prediction. It could also become a poorly moderated cesspool that still has thousands of employees and no equity value, and if it needs to be restructured, I’m not really sure that the network effects are so great that it’ll continue to fill the same role that it currently does.
For me, Twitter has become basically unusable since the buyout, and I mean that purely in a technical sense (i.e., no reflection on content, bans, unbans, blue checks, etc.) I just mean that probably half the time I click on a Twitter link, the page doesn’t load. Video works for me maybe a third of the time. If Reddit becomes similarly unreliable due to cost cutting, I don’t know it’ll be that much fun to hang out there.
I was never the biggest Twitter user, but I wouldn't be surprised at a similar kind of outcome for Reddit. I've already noticed a nose-dive in the quality of my feed - it's mostly dominated by the smaller subreddits that didn't join the blackout, overall activity seems to have dropped off in an absolute sense, and when a larger subreddit makes it in my feed the conversation is just...nastier than it was a few days ago. I had to come out of HN-retirement to find a decent conversation about tech.
Reddit has been promising this for about a decade with near zero to show for it.
> The mods who leave will be replaced.
The replacements will become annoyed for the same reasons the current mods are.
He’s done so much shady stuff over the years. But his lies trying to throw shade on the Apollo creator were, in my opinion, fairly unforgivable.
Would be great if we had a vote button. He’d get fired, ideally “for cause,” and the new CEO would phase the API changes in over a year or so and give app developers a bit more time and input on the process.
I don’t want to use Reddit any other way than through Apollo. The Reddit team sucks at UX. The redesign a few years back proved that. Spez probably thinks Craigslist looks amazing.
Anyway I’m all for being able to vote mods, and CEOs, out.
Since Google started charging us quite a bit for the Firebase API a year or two ago, we're in a similar position to what the article describes - we're paying for https://github.com/HackerNews/API and thus indirectly funding the commercial apps.
Btw this is not to take a side on any of the Reddit stuff - that would be ultra dumb of me and anyway I'm succeeding at staying ignorant of the details. But I think it's worth saying something publicly about the analogous issue on HN because we might have to do something about it at some point.
The current API isn't particularly usable (you have to request individual items to get an entire thread) and our long term plan is to replace it with a more usable one that just gives a JSON representation of any HN URL and is hosted on our server. I've been posting about that for an embarrassing number of years (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) but you all know how slow we are. Anyhow, whenever we get there, we'll probably do proper things like have API keys and terms of service and whatnot. If the commercial app thing is still a thing at that point, maybe we can find some decent way to address it.
The real story is that this is all a sideshow and low-value distraction compared to the commercial entities scraping the fuck out of HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, and the Internet at large purely for their own gain without giving anything back to the data providers. The real parasites being the data-hungry LLM makers who drive zero external traffic and don't credit sources in any way.
I've actually taken all of my non-commercial websites offline for the first time in 22 years, because I don't wish to continue feeding this beast. I can't see any upside in continuing to donate to them.
Edit:
p.s. @dang: Your message was better with the burning bridges Reddit joke ;)
As long it’s clear to the user that they could get the experience for free by visiting the website I don’t see what the problem is.
With that said, I think it’s totally fair for HN to ask the app/user to pay for their API access too.
It’s the fact that Reddit is using this event to get rid of third party apps by charging ridiculous prices for the API, not honestly owning this decision and finally giving less than a month of transition before it comes into effect that has made all these people angry.
To represent the angry people as just freeloaders who demand to get stuff that costs money for free would be dishonest.
Here's the standard API prices of three websites:
(Price for 50 million API calls)
Imgur - $3,333
Reddit - $12,000
Twitter - $42,000
The Apollo developer claimed that it would cost him on average $2.50 per user per month, to use the API.
That is pretty nuts for a free app, how many people would pay for that?
The gist is this: if I am the average user, not on Reddit Premium and using the native app with ads, the available numbers indicate Reddit earns $X on me. Their API pricing is at least $2X per user. So either they are seeing API users as cash cows, or they want to price them out.
And like I indicated, there’s a loting things Reddit could’ve done that would’ve led to less drama:
- Longer transition period - Outright banning third party apps - Include ads in the API - Make API access part of Reddit Premium
To me it seems that every step of the way, Reddit made the most confusing and most rage inducing choice available to them. That’s either incompetence or malice.
Particularly, with Apollo, many of his customers were on annual subs, and even if he started charging more to pay API price increase, if his customers would even bear it, it will still take much longer than a month to make that transition.
There really is no defense for the timeline Reddit put forward for this sweeping change.
Yes to the other bit.
https://github.com/searchableguy/hackernews_graphql
It is still incomplete though because I remember you said I could not scrape the site beyond robot.txt limits which would be too less for the use case because I wanted to provide write functionality so I gave up.
Maybe people can host a caching relay and a layer like graphql on top as an unofficial way to lessen the burden on the firebase API (it's a pain to use anyway).
... and looked at the API and finding myself somewhat underwhelmed ...
... the JSON option would be interesting (much easier to parse than raw HTML, particularly HN raw HTML). Given that there are performance concerns with the primary server already, I'd suggest:
- Put JSON on a secondary server. (Automatic redirects for, say, id=?<ID>&json=1 requests being an option to transparently serve via requests made to the main site.)
- Use some sort of account-based mechanism to regulate access. I'm thinking more in terms of "how much" and "how fast" than "who" and "what", though that might also come into play.
I also suspect that a JSON delivery would also make alternate app / front-end design even more viable, so you might want to consider that in design and provisioning considerations.
COBOL on cogs
http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM
It's robust, ... performant... well robust.... Fully conformant to COBOL 85...
Me. The user. If Reddit wants to change my behavior... API away but don't go after these people who are just facilitating API access. What's next Dang? HTML browsers?
There’s no reason they couldn’t have required Reddit Premium to access the API from third-party apps. Then the app developers don’t have to deal with the burden of payment processing, Reddit theoretically earns more than it would under the API plan (the Apollo dev estimated the monthly API cost for an average user would be $2.50 (but would be much higher for actual customers due to needing to pay the Apple tax and for development costs) while Premium is $5 per month right now and already removes ads), and nobody gets angry.
Plus then you have people’s credit card information, and thus you can avoid the regulatory issues that Reddit is claiming they’re encountering with NSFW content.
The fact that Reddit seemingly refuses to even consider this option really confirms that this is being done purely out of spite over both not being able to monetize OpenAI’s training data collection plus spite over most of the third-party apps being more financially stable than Reddit currently is.
> The fact that Reddit seemingly refuses to even consider this option really confirms that this is being done purely out of spite over both not being able to monetize OpenAI’s training data collection plus spite over most of the third-party apps being more financially stable than Reddit currently is.
I think it's a combination of spite for the LLMs (which IMO is short sighted, they will just turn to scraping HTML), but also they assume that they can make more off the data vacuum and ads serving to those users than even Reddit Gold would pay them every month.
They're widely expected to IPO imminently. One of the most critical metrics in the S-1 will be mobile app DAUs/MAUs. They can't credibly include the 3P app users in those figures. They also don't want to be in a situation where most of their paying subscribers are insulated from future "features" and UX "evolutions" that investors will demand.
So, it makes sense to me that they would induce a scenario where users are forced to choose between migrating to the official app or quitting reddit.
How would you quantify the value of Hacker News to Y Combinator? You’re talking about it like it’s a cost centre, a charitable contribution to society; what proportion of Y Combinator’s revenue can be attributed to the brand and content marketing benefits which flow from the (almost) entirely unpaid contributions of HN users? The Firebase API now costs “quite a bit”; is that amount comparable to the income of a YC partner? How much should a third-party developer be compensated for the work of building a native client which brings HN to a wider audience or increases the engagement of its existing audience? How much should an HN user be compensated for their submissions and comments? Which people deserve to make money here and why? Who is “indirectly funding” whom?
That works for me - I'm not claiming to be unpeculiar and used the word "feel" in my comment above.
I have a lot of unfinished weekends of work to get done
Reddit's initial announcement was that 3rd party apps were costing them money, that API access would be paid for soon™, and that NSFW content would no longer be available through the API.
This raised immediate concerns from a few different groups. Moderators rely on free 3rd party tools to deal with a lack of functionality in Reddit's own, the removal of NSFW content from the API would cause issues even if the tools themselves were exempted. Visually impaired users rely on accessibility clients to deal with Reddit's poor experience with screen readers/magnification.
Reddit scrambled to respond by stating there would be exemptions for non-commercial mod and accessibility tools. This dealt with some of the issues.
3rd party app developers then began shutting down and it was revealed that, in addition to removing NSFW content and exorbitant pricing, Reddit had given developers only 30 days to respond to the price changes.
During all of this Reddit's CEO was openly, and privately, making disparaging comments about the userbase, 3rd party app developers, and moderators.
Reddit's actions throughout have proved that their intention was to kill off the 3rd party applications and that, without community outrage, moderation and accessibility tools would have been collateral damage. It doesn't take a genius to comprehend that 30 days is not enough time for the 3rd party developers to transition their paying users to Reddit's new payment model, or that users would not have been willing to pay for a version with censored content.
I don't have another place to move to. I did sign up for some Lemmy servers, but I'm afraid the fragmentation due to how servers federate with each other will lead to smaller communities.
I think still "generally" you only need to sign up to one instance.
I’m sure I’ll find new communities for my actual interests but Reddit was always very “noisy” to me due to being subscribed to so many subs.
There is a duplicate communities and fragmentation problem, but…..did you see Reddit’s fragmentation? It’s about the same
Even if his goal was to turn twitter into a conservative friendly place, he is so blunt, obtuse and uncalculating that he reminds me of Dr. Evil in his silliness. Is the reddit CEO trying to be "mini-me"? Birds of a feather I guess.
I get the netflix type of pissing people off, business is business. Even with Reddit, that was my perspectice, their api, who cares if they want to ruin it. But I gotta say, there are ways to cleverly backtrack and still appear to be in control.
For example, introduce tiered pricing and a free tier for api keys that are restricted and tied to a specific user account with limits in the number of subreddits under that user's control. Basic divide and conquer, please the volunteer mods and continue to piss off the for-profit front-ends. And then add pricing to the free tier after a year. Boil the frog slowly and all.
Their lack of sophistication really amuses me, how can people like this even manage to become a CEO? Must be whatever gives them confident to be so arrogant to begin with.
But the inner zoologist of you says "keep watching it".
Spez is likely right in this regard. This will pass and blow over in short time and people will simply move on. Your average Joe is already using the first party app, and even if he isn't today, he will easily switch over once Apollo et al. are shut down.
People also claim it was democratic since a few sub ran polls. The WoW subreddit ran one in the middle of the day and it got a few thousand votes before they closed it. The subreddit has 1+ million subscribers. So you can understand why some people were caught off guard.
The cultural difference between powerusers and the average Reddit user is probably pretty different (HN isn't representative either). Protests are fun, you get to stick it to the man, but most people just want to read some stuff while on the toilet. They aren’t that engaged.
r/nba closed it during the last game of the finals, the most popular time of year on the sub. People have already migrated in droves to other subs like r/nbadiscussion.
So Spez is a baronet, and Reddit moderators are the village elders protesting against his draconian tax policies?