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Comment by quitit | Hacker News Reader

Steve Huffman, aka Spez, falsely claimed that Apollo creator (Christian Selig) had threatened and blackmailed Reddit for $10M.

The facts are that no threat nor blackmail attempt was made and Spez had entirely invented and spread the false claims as an attempt to discredit Selig.

In response to the false claims, Christian Selig released a recording of the phone call that disproved the claim and cleared his name. As Selig is in Canada, he was legally entitled to record and release the phone call. Huffman took umbrage at this action because it revealed Huffman's deceptive conduct.

Later in a Reddit "AMA", Huffman continued stating falsehoods about interactions with Selig, in spite of the evidence.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/09/reddit-ceo-doubles-down-on...

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>Spez had entirely invented and spread the false claims

That is not exactly true. It sounds like there was a genuine misunderstanding during their call, and that Huffman might have believed - for a portion of the call - that a blackmail attempt was happening. If you listen to the audio, it really does sound like a blackmail attempt. At least that's how I heard it.

It also seemed clear that Huffman no longer believed that he had been blackmailed by the end of the call. But it wasn't "entirely invented," and I actually think that Huffman might not have fully believed Selig's explanation of his 'pay me $10 million to make this go away' statement (or whatever Selig's exact language was).

Separately, from what I recall, Huffman did not accuse Selig of illegally recording their phone call. Huffman took umbrage over the release of what, IIRC, he referred to as a private conversation, stating that he did not see how he could possibly do business with Selig after that. In fairness, Huffman's statement makes sense in isolation - regardless of whether the call was legally recorded. Which it seems to have been.

I think that Huffman looks really bad in all this. But that's a reason to be particularly careful about accuracy in our statements about what happened.

In fact, it's common for an extortion attempt to be floated in that way leaving some plausible deniability for the one attempting extortion in case they are rebuffed. It's also common for the other party to seemingly accept the reframing of it to move on even though they internally believe that extortion was floated.

I know. I'm just trying to stick to the facts.

(And, interestingly, being downvoted for it. Despite no one presenting evidence that my account of what happened is wrong.)

> Huffman took umbrage over the release of what, IIRC, he referred to as a private conversation

He “took umbrage” after he publicly called out Selig for threatening Reddit, a thing that did not happen, and is immediately made obvious by the Reddit rep apologizing for the misunderstanding repeatedly.

Framing this as “Huffman was mad about Selig releasing a private discussion” is extremely misleading, and ignores the fact that Selig was basically forced to do so by Huffman’s public misrepresentation of that private conversation.

If Huffman doesn’t want a private conversation released, a good start would be avoiding misleading public statements about that private conversation.

> In fairness, Huffman's statement makes sense in isolation

You can make just about anything make sense in isolation, but this doesn’t mean that it makes sense in the real world.

Removing context is as good as lying in many situations, and this is one of those situations.

Link to Recording: https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...

People can make up their own mind if they think the Dev was trying to blackmail Reddit or not.

>That is not exactly true. It sounds like there was a genuine misunderstanding during their call.

This is false.(1) What I've written there is accurate. Why? Because while there was a misunderstanding, it was immediately corrected including Huffman apologising for his misunderstanding. Despite this Huffman later made the extortion/blackmail claim.

No part of the conversation supports extortion or blackmail, hypothetically even if Selig was serious about being bought out, that still wouldn't be extortion or blackmail.

(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

Transcript of the call here: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...

Also that the RIF developer didn't want to work with them, which emails showed was false.

There were 4-5 other things that are escaping me at the moment.

> Also that the RIF developer didn't want to work with them, which emails showed was false.

Hadn't heard that one, so thanks for mentioning it. Link for others[0].

Interestingly enough something else is mentioned in the article which is even more damning for Spez.

> RIF was paying a “sizable revenue share” to Reddit beginning in 2012, which was during Yishan Wong’s tenure as CEO. (...) Reddit terminated the agreement in 2016 — which was the year after Huffman took over as CEO.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763661/reddit-rif-is-fu...

You can record conversation in lots of US states as well as long as one party on the call knows it's happening. Just thought I'd toss that out there.

The recording did not disprove the claim.

It's not a matter of opinion, the recording did not include a threat or blackmail. Asking to be bought, even if done so coyly, is neither extortion nor blackmail.

Blackmail is a threat of revealing damaging information. That didn't happen.

Extortion is a threat of consequences. However it's clear that Selig can't enact consequences on Reddit. It's Reddit who can disable Apollo's API key. Selig can't render any kind of damage onto Reddit. This is further supported by the fact that Selig has no choice but to discontinue the app and will take a loss on the refunding of subscriptions.

Additionally the provided context of the conversation matches the discussions that Reddit has been having with other developers: i.e. API access and the future costs of that.

If one wishes to set a low bar for extortion: Then it would be Reddit attempting to extort 3rd party app developers by levying unrealistic API access costs, effectively ending their businesses. A concept that could actually hold water as Reddit develops a competitor app.

I think parent means there might be another conversation which was not released.

"We have no evidence he's guilty of murder BUT what if there might evidence. That's all I need to make an accusation"

Claim: "you called me an ass on the phone", Proof: "here's a call recording in which I say no such thing". Don't you think the analogy holds?

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