I used to only use the official app until they rolled out their terrible TikTok-style video player and other changes that made it difficult to navigate on mobile. I left the site and only went back when someone recommended the Apollo app.
I can’t fault Reddit’s core argument that it costs them money to let third party apps access their data and they now want to be paid for it. I dislike the official app so much that I am willing to pay $5/month or whatever to keep a third party app.
I’ve stayed off Reddit this week except to briefly check the status of the protest and had resigned myself to only using old.reddit. But Steve Huffman’s reaction and responses, particularly over the last several days, really have me questioning if I want to return at all. He’s just coming across as an incredible asshole and frankly incompetent.
Because they weren’t. Not really. Apps have development costs. They have to raise money to be able to afford making the app at all. All apps tend do this with either ads, a paid tier, or a combination. People were paying to fund app development. It’s not paying for Reddit itself, as people could get that for free. It’s paying for the additional features. that made Reddit better on mobile. (Including, for example, the ability to moderate from a phone, freeing up the time of the unpaid volunteers who actually run Reddit.)
Sure, these apps used the API Reddit provided. But they did so under the existing limits. They weren’t in any way exploiting Reddit. And Reddit used to acknowledge that. Remember, the initial argument for increasing API pricing was that there was a sudden uptick in API usage, well over the original limits, and that this was costing Reddit too much money. The pricing was to limit that, to help them make money off of that use. Reddit said they would work with third party apps, the well-behaved ones.
And note that all of the third party apps were all willing to pay for API access. They even likely had some saved back profits to cushion the blow. The problem was that Reddit made the price so high so quickly that there was no way that the developers could handle this without going into huge debt (over $10 million for Apollo). And they can’t handle that.
Huffman’s use of language here is to try and paint these third party developers as exploiting Reddit and mad because their gravy train was removed. But that’s not what happened. If that were the case, the mods wouldn’t have cared. No, the issue was that these apps provide features that make the Reddit experience better, especially for mods. The third party developers listened to users needs and wants, while Reddit kept ignoring them.
If Steve Huffman’s descriptions were accurate, there wouldn’t have ever been a blackout. There wouldn’t be mods leaving, saying the change made it where they can’t be effective at their unpaid job anymore.
No, if anyone was profiting off of anyone’s backs, it’s Reddit making money off of the backs of unpaid labor. “But Reddit isn’t profitable.” Yeah, but Huffman still makes money off of it.
Trying to paint him and Reddit as the “victims” doesn’t work. It’s all scapegoating.
Who cares? Trying to classify the various parties as victims or not is useless.
Reddit needs to make money to survive. The third-party apps are capturing their most lucrative users. And the LLM companies (many of which have lots of money) currently aren’t paying for the content they use.
Right and wrong don’t even enter into it. These are obvious sources of revenue that Reddit wants to capture so that they can survive as a business.
Reddit probably could have handled this better, but I doubt the response would have been any different even if they’d handled it perfectly. You’d still have a bunch of people complaining that they have to see ads or that they have to pay a monthly fee. People always complain when their experience gets worse. But that has nothing to do with what Reddit needs to do to have a sustainable business model.
I’m almost entirely the same. The main sympathetic point I have is with the argument that this’ll make moderating harder, which hurts everyone.
So far, only one sub I really regret going has gone (r/hobbydrama), and even that one, interestingly enough is “only’ restricted, not completely dark. Yeah, there’s their Discord, but it’s not the same. It’s like a newsgroup and IRC, two totally different ways to communicate.
This is absurd. Those are the very people who are leaving the platform because of this decision. You can’t win them over by fucking up the stuff they find useful. If you want to keep people, you work with them, not alienate them. Obviously Reddit sees these users as acceptable losses. Hence the refusal to work out anything with them.
The rest of your argument isn’t much better. Of course people care about the moral dimension. Even if one is entirely amoral themselves, it obviously harms their PR if they are perceived as the bad guy.
It’s literally the entire reason for this protest—this thing that is clearly a big headache to Huffman. It began when Reddit promised to work with third party developers, then was seen as having lied. Then it got worse when they started making up lies about one of the developers in order to discredit him. Then they have their AMA where he pisses people off so much that the protest/strike started early.
What’s more, the whole reason this was enough to get the mods mad was how they’ve been mistreated before. You know, a moral thing. They’ve been promised so many things that were never delivered. They are volunteer unpaid labor. Obviously you don’t want to anger them and be seen as cheating them.
Even Huffman clearly gets that the moral dimension is important, even though he fucked it up. That’s why he’s painting the third party developers as the bad guys and himself and Reddit as the victim. He knows he needs to counter their moral narrative to minimize the damage to his brand.
To ignore the moral dimension in this situation–like with most strikes and protests–is to completely miss the point. Someone who ignores that cannot begin to piece together why this is even happening.
And I wonder if that’s why you don’t see that this would not have gone completely differently with better actions. Work with the third party apps, and no one gets upset. No mods need to shut anything down. No users feel like Reddit is not worth it anymore. No big PR disaster that he has to try and put out. And yet they still make the same amount of money at the end. Heck, maybe even more.
And that’s not even including just actually giving a shit about the quality of their app, and trying to get it up to snuff with the existing apps. Heck, if they can’t do it themselves, they could have bought out an app that could. If they’d not ignored what the mods want, what the power users want, (i.e. the people you say they find valuable), they wouldn’t have even been in a position to make this mistake in the first place.
The moral dimension is all over this. Ignoring it is, well, absurd.
Well, yeah, but when your most visible product depends so greatly on the goodwill of your users, endangering that relationship isn’t good business either, is it?
And now to post what I actually came here to post.
Huffman is really screwing this up:
Does he really think it’s a good idea to associate himself with Musk and Twitter’s failures right now? Sure, I said he even gets there’s a moral component to this, but he doesn’t get why people hate Musk now?
I mean, even if you don’t care about your reputation on Reddit (which seems to increasingly be the case for Spez), surely it matters if he acts like Twitter’s dumbest actions are actually helpful. Its cost cutting actions include firing necessary people, not paying for things, ignoring government fines, and so on. Twitter is having tons of tech issues because of this, even.
How in the world is this good for Reddit? Why would he want to associate himself with a company losing money so badly?
I’m now actually thinking that this may be a Licht situation. The guy may actually be out of touch.
Obviously everyone is the hero of their own narrative, but the guy who made the apollo app said that if the cost of API calls was cut in half and he had something like 3 months, he could have kept his app running, but with the steep costs reddit was going to impose, and the fact that they didn’t have enough time to redesign the app to make fewer API calls meant he either had to completely shut down the app or basically go over a cliff and face fees that he couldn’t afford and didn’t have time to avoid via any changes on his end.
And I keep running into articles on this situation when I’m just reading about other things.
Why would Huffman—the rich guy—be trying to paint the moderators (who are unpaid volunteers, remember) as the “gentry” other than because of the moral dimension? And is the world really better if we just ignore rich people pulling this shit?
How many people are actually leaving the platform? If it’s just a handful of noisy people, Reddit can probably afford to lose them.
Ok, but so what? If they’ve been volunteering their time for so long, and have been mistreated before, then it’s probably a good bet that they’ll come back in line in short order. And if not, they can just be replaced. With all due respect to the mods here, it isn’t some ultra-specialized skill.
What kind of stuff that actually matters would have gone differently, while still being able to properly monetize the app users?
Are they? Because I remember that 6 months ago there was huge hand-wringing about how Twitter was going to go down in a matter of weeks, days, or even hours. Instead, there have been a handful of minor outages. Less than Reddit. Heck, less than Github, which had a day-long outage a few months back, despite being mission-critical software for many businesses and is run by Microsoft. It looks like firing 75% of the workforce and retaining 99% of the reliability was a good move.
Spez probably recognized that despite the enormous amount of media attention surrounding Twitter, it’s pretty much still working as usual. And went from a company that had less than a year to live to one that might survive a bit longer.
Maybe. And to be clear, I’m not denying that Mistakes Were Made. But ultimately, none of this seems like it’s going to matter, because network effects are real, and there’s no suitable replacement for Reddit. Certainly not the federated solutions like Lemmy (Mastodon didn’t replace Twitter, either). So people will filter back in fairly short order, and if there are any mod holdouts they’ll just be replaced. The few subs I visit are back to normal already.
I’m not sure the Apollo dev fully grasped the issues, though. He claimed that Reddit revenue divided by monthly average users (MAU) was much less than a dollar per month, while his API costs would have been a few dollars per month. So he’s being bilked, right? Well, no, because an MAU is a user that visited once in the last month, while the Apollo app was making several hundred API calls per user per day. Maybe not all of those were equivalent to a page visit, but a significant fraction would be. Obviously, the average Apollo user was using the site at a vastly higher rate than the average across their MAU set. So it wasn’t exactly a valid comparison. The Apollo app may well have been capturing a few dollars per user-month of revenue.
I expect that Reddit will walk back some of the changes (as they already have in some minor cases). I also expect that this was somewhat intentional–it’s easier to push through unpleasant changes by giving them the worst version and partly walking them back, then to give them the compromise version in the first place.
Reddit owns every thread, every post, on their website, that they own, and can delete them, rename them, do whatever business they want to, because they own all of the content. They can just perma-ban all protesting moderators. Just the same as the Straight Dope owns every post on this web site. Try threatening to sue the SDMB for use of content that you have provided.
I find it quite hillarious that so many Reddit users don’t seem to understand that. There is nothing democratic about this business. It is just business. The users are not going anywhere, they will grumble a bit and adjust. And Reddit’s new business model will make money and everyone will forget about this soon, really soon.
The only thing that could really break the network effect is if not as many people are willing to be mods. Which if it’s true that it’s a lot more work to do that without the 3rd party apps, could happen regardless of all the protesting. But who knows. And I guess the fact that people who just go on for memes can go on to any site for that.
The mods at the top meme subs are by far the most easily replaceable. /r/videos is still set private, but the content of that sub isn’t exactly dependent on their primo mod team. Something like /r/AskHistorians is more so, but will they really continue indefinitely? Seems unlikely (especially as they already went from private to restricted).
TLDR: Reddit was never a viable business. It’s been propped up all of these years by both venture capital and the content that millions of users have posted for free.
And like all of these companies that aren’t profitable and have never had a viable plan to ever be profitable, they are finally hitting that wall.
This doesn’t end well for Reddit. It doesn’t end well for Reddit users. This doesn’t end well for Uber, or Lyft, or Doordash, or AirBnB, or any other venture-capital-funded business that never actually had a path to making money.
What we are seeing from the Reddit CEO are the desperate flailing of dying industries. They need to start making money. But they are never going to make money.
I don’t know exactly how all of this exactly ends. But it will end. Over the next few years we will see the collapse of several venture-capitalized businesses that we all know and use. But before they do we will see a series of increasingly unhinged preformative displays from the company CEO’s. They know they are on sinking ships. But they want you to know that it “isn’t their fault.”
Unfortunately, you just got through claiming these people are so important that Reddit has to close down third party apps in order to get them back. That’s what I labeled as absurd.
The complete opposite is not quite as absurd. In raw numbers, it doesn’t look like it would matter if they were lost. But since these are the power users and the moderators, it obviously does matter.
Because, as I said, morality matters. I spent almost my entire post explaining why, even from an amoral perspective. It harms the company PR if the CEO is seen as capricious asshole who makes up lies about anyone who tries to do business with him. It harms the ability to sell to others when they can see the community being mismanaged in a way that could have easily been handled professionally. It harms the ability to monetize the community if said community sees you as the enemy. It harms the ability to acquire new unpaid volunteers if they know they’re going to be mistreated. This should be obvious.
Though, honestly, I find it weird that I have to spell out everything from an amoral perspective. But more on that later.
There would be no protest. There would be no PR disaster that Spez himself is running around trying to put out. All of the problems I mentioned above or in my other posts would not happen.
How do they monetize the people who use the apps? By increasing the API price. They just do so more gradually, giving the app owners time to increase prices. Then the apps don’t go away, and there is no protest.
Sure, some people would have been upset that things cost more. But the mods would still be able to do their jobs, and no one would have seen Reddit as the bad guy, because they worked with the people they said they would.
You’re wrong when you say that people would have been upset either way. You only think that because you’re dismissing the moral dimension of all of this. The only reason why people who are upset about something can get other people to also be upset is that they make a moral argument. That’s how protests work.
Yes. There are so many examples I can’t list them all, so I’ll just [u]link a Google search[/u]. Or I could just point you to the Pit thread. At this point, defending Musk is like defending Trump. They even share ideologies.
My conclusion: the only way your posts make any sense to me is if you started from the position that both sides are the same, and then came up with the arguments to back that up. That’s why pointing out the absurdity of one claim led you to make the exact opposite one. Because people had made such a good case that Huffman and Reddit are the ones in the wrong, you had to try and remove that from consideration–by removing the moral dimension.
But removing the moral dimension from a protest is like watching a speech from a sound proof room. You may see that people are upset, but you completely misunderstand why. You apparently think it’s about money, when it never was. All they had to do to not upset people was not kill third party apps.
But then you take it one step further, and need to try and argue that Twitter is somehow doing well when it’s now worth a quarter what it was, and has constant tech failures that are widely reported.
Take out the earplugs. Hear what’s actually going on. Understand why the protesters are upset. Realize that even Huffman himself clearly thinks it matters—or he wouldn’t be trying to hard to reassure everyone and paint everyone else as the bad guy.
Rich people don’t attack non-rich people unless they feel threatened by them.
I never claimed that the noisy ones are exactly the same set as the users of third-party apps. It’s entirely possible that the majority of the users will grumble and go back to the standard app.
It’s somewhere between trivial and significant. Reddit has an annual revenue of about $500M/yr. They wanted to charge Apollo $20M/yr. Maybe that was 2x too high, but there are other apps, so it wouldn’t shock me if they were hoping to regain perhaps $50M. Not quite pocket change.
And to be clear, I’m sure they didn’t expect the apps to cut them a check for that. The revenue would largely be from increased native traffic.
Is there some capricious asshole fine that Reddit has to pay on a quarterly basis? No? Then what matters is if having an asshole CEO actually drives away a significant part of their monetizable userbase. If only a small number of people are driven away, and/or they are not monetizable, then it doesn’t matter if the CEO is an asshole.
Has the protest actually cost them a significant amount?
You’ve named a bunch of stuff that has, at best, an indirect effect. Protests don’t cost anything. Asshole CEOs don’t cost anything. Mods on strike don’t cost anything.
What costs money is losing advertisers, losing users, losing other revenue streams, and so on. It’s possible that the protests have caused these things, but it’s not obvious to me.
Why they’re upset is easy to understand. They had something and now that something is being taken away.
But that’s totally independent of what Reddit needs to do to survive. Instead of some morality play, the better high-level way to look at this is by the power dynamics. What power do the protesters actually have? If they can be replaced easily, or don’t have much value in the first place, or can be turned against each other, etc., then their efforts will have very little effect.
Reddit has a great deal of power due to the lack of suitable alternatives and the network effect.