Users have been protesting the changes for days.
  •  Lvxferre   ( @lvxferre@lemmy.ml ) English
    5•1 year ago

    As typical, looking for what is not said is useful. What is not being said?

    Who are the “commercial entities that require large-scale data use” that spez (Steve Huffman) is talking about? They are not the third party front end apps, even if he implies to be. They are big businesses using Reddit to train data models with.

    Reddit knows it fully. Even so, it still wants to demand from those businesses the same as it demands from Christian Selig (the Apollo developer) and the others. That shows that, when spez says that “We are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.”, he is simply lying. Reddit is actively avoiding to work with folks who want to work with them.

    This should not come as a surprise for anyone here. Spez is like this; he is disingenuous.

    A few other comments:

    Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.

    Was Reddit not “a self-sustaining business”? A: we cannot know it because Reddit Inc. does not publish this sort of information to the public. It’s the old “chrust me, you gullible fucker” discourse.

    Were the third party apps being “subsided” with free API access? Arguable; they do not contribute with the immediate profit of the site or the business - but they contribute with its value.

    Huffman also responded to a Redditor asking about Christian Selig’s claim that Huffman told Reddit moderators the Apollo developer “threatened us” in an attempt to get Reddit to give him $10 million without entirely denying or confirming it.

    Emphasis mine. As typical, Spez is unable to back up his own words.

    “His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.”

    Emphasis mine. Interesting pronoun change here, hinting that Spez is the one behind this decision concerning API access prices. Even if this decision was taken by a hypothetical product management, it is fully backed by a CEO with ability to enforce or vet it.

    Specifically on “recording and leaking a private phone call”: business relies on trust. If the Apollo developer recorded and leaked such private call, it is clear that he distrusts Reddit Inc., the Reddit administration, and Steve Huffman.

    And, as shown in this thread, plus by previous incidents, the Apollo dev is completely right to mistrust them. Spez is expecting people to be gullible morons.

    Selig, in a reply, asked Huffman to “give examples where I said something differently in public versus what I said to you.”

    Let me guess: Spez simply pretended to not see it.

    But the API changes have otherwise remained in place for the vast majority of developers, with Selig and others, including the makers of rif is fun for Reddit and ReddPlanet for Reddit, announcing they would be shutting down their apps on June 30th.

    “For the other apps, we will continue talking. We acknowledge that the timeline we gave was tight; we are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.”

    That is an important detail: it is not just Apollo, it’s the whole ecosystem of Reddit third party front end apps. Even if Selig was unreasonable (I don’t think that he is), Reddit is failing to dialogue with the developers of all those platforms.

    Perhaps Spez should libel them too?

    Based on what I’ve heard, that last sentence doesn’t ring entirely true

    i.e. the author of the article is smelling the bullshit from afar.

    “It’s a constant fight to keep this content at all,” Huffman wrote. “We are going to keep it. But the regulatory environment has gotten much stricter about adult content, and as a result we have to be strict / conservative about where it shows up.”

    Note how spez avoided to address the question. The asker did not ask if Reddit was going to keep the NSFW content or not; the question was why Reddit will no longer let explicit / NSFW content appear in third-party apps.

    It should be clear for anyone here that restricting the sort of content that you’re allowed to see through a third party app should further discourage its usage. Another nail on the coffin, while the one hammering it is saying “noooo, we are not trying to kill you! NOW GET INSIDE THE COFFIN.”

    Reddit has given some small concessions: the r/Blind subreddit protested the changes because they could mean that accessibility-focused apps necessary to browse the site would have to shut down

    Throw you a bone, but keep the meat.

    The developer of RedReader, one of the apps granted an exemption, said in a post that “I think it’s very reasonable to be concerned about Reddit’s current trajectory, and nobody can know for sure how long the exemption will last.”

    I.e. even people who would directly benefit from their decision - given that RedReader would have less competitors to deal with - are still speaking poorly of the decision.

    The maker of Dystopia, another app given an exemption, claims that Reddit clarified on a call that the impact of the changes on accessibility apps was unintended. “While you’ll just have to take my word for it, I really did get the impression that this was sincere.”

    The “intentions” here are irrelevant.

    Reddit Inc. showed that it doesn’t care about visually disabled people, while still doing lip service to a discourse of tolerance and inclusiveness. It only reacted to the protest that the other users, empathetic with the blind ones, raised.

    This is amazing. Way easier to browse through than that messy AMA. Thank you for sharing!