Thousands of subreddits are still dark.
So after saying for weeks, if not months, that the new pricing wasn’t designed to kill third-party apps, he’s now saying the exact opposite? And thus admitting that Reddit lied to its community for the whole?
Please, can someone give to this dude any PR training? Even the bare minimum would be an improvement at this point.
At this point, he needs “stfu training”.
I’m no PR expert but that would definitely be an improvement compared to where he’s at.
He’s so bad at this that I can’t help but believe he’s actually trying to kill Reddit.
Napoléon said something of the like “don’t attribute to malice when it’s incompetence instead”.
(your point is good, I going to be That Guy and mention that’s Hanlon’s Razor. And while a lot of people have made some similar quotes, Napoleon wasn’t one of them as far as we know)
There is no worse enemy than an friendly idiot
I worked for Microsoft for many years and the fact is many companies’ marketing and PR departments think their customers are morons. Or perhaps it’s that they think their customers don’t mind being treated like morons.
The shit they would send flowing down the pipeline that we were supposed to say to our customers just blew me away. “You know our customers aren’t STUPID right? I can’t talk to them like they’re stupid or they’ll escort me off premises.”
I think he just doesn’t care about any backlash at this point.
By the looks of it, it was never designed to support first party apps either.
👀
new.reddit is horrendous.
Lack of CSS support, performance issues, and ugly mess of a gigantic proportion by the Snoo Platform, Inc.
This just in CEO absolutely clueless.
If that would have been the case then why was the API not protected from public use? Why did it use API-Keys?
Omg what a dumb idiot. What is a third party app that adds functionality and usability? Certainly not a tool right?
And he didn’t know that there was this increased API usage? Did he just woke up from a coma?
Huffman isn’t clueless, he’s a liar. He selectively remembers thing, the man is a snake who has somehow managed to fail upwards into the position he is currently in. Even Pao was preferable, as she at least believed in what she was doing. Spez just does whatever gets him paid.
Ellen Pao was thrown under the bus
Specifically she was thrown under the bus by kn0thing (Alex Ohanion).
We live in a dark world where we got stuck with Ohanian and Huffman, and not Swartz
God that hurts. 😭
The guy literally built Reddit from scratch… He’s more than aware why there is an API, and how it has been used for years. The guy is just a douchebag and a liar that want to kill third party apps and acts like he is right from the beginning, never said or did anything wrong, because the bad people are devs, mods, and users. Why? Because he created Reddit so he can’t be wrong…
I asked him if he felt that Apollo, rif for Reddit, and Sync, which all plan to shut down as a result of the pricing changes, don’t add value to Reddit. “Not as much as they take,” he says. “No way. They need to pay for this."
I don’t think anyone has ever said they want the API to remain free, they just want a fairer price model and/or more time to allow existing year-long contracts to be valid. Why the sudden urgency to push out this stupidly high pricing model? The only time-critical event I can think of is Spez’s precious IPO, and he’s doing a great job at showing potential investors that everything’s under control
/s ( <– are we allowed to use that here?)
It was never designed to support third-party apps.
My brother in Christ… you bought a third party app that used the API
deleted by creator
It is literally the only reason to make an API public
The main reason for charging for the API all of the sudden is because Reddit is facing profitability pressures ahead of its planned IPO. With all the investment interest in AI, u/spez feels Reddit isn’t getting its fair share since many LLMs use Reddit for training data. The problem with charging such a high price for its API is that 3rd party developers get shafted. Honestly, the whole debacle would have been avoided if u/spez communicated the changes better and charged a fair price ($500/50M requests). The developer community is happy to pay for the Reddit API, but Reddit needs to price the API fairly to ensure 3rd party developers can sustain their businesses.
It could have also been avoided by grandfathering current apps into the original pricing (or a new, lower tier) which would have allowed them to still charge. I was hopeful that the negotiations would trend towards that way but instead they decided to double-down
Yeah, they definitely could have grandfathered current apps into a new low tier for 1-2 years and have separate tiers for AI/LLMs, 3rd party apps, and bots. Also, they could expose their ads through their API, so app developers can run their ads and potentially continue calling the API for free.
Wait… they bought a third party app and rechristened it the official Reddit app?
Alien Blue. But before they rechristened it, they also made it worse
But… 3rd-party apps are literally a free advertisement to the service which the app connects to?
These apps helped build early reddit and now reddit is pulling the ladder up after reaching the top.
Reddit also launched their own phone app YEARS after third party apps became popular. Like 5-6 years later. Presumably because they felt those apps were a good thing – or at the very least not a bad thing.
Damn, bro really just essentially said “get fucked”. He also in essence admitted in the interview that the intention was to kill off certain third party apps, saying they provide little to no value to the platform.
I really think the root problem here is that we’re building communities on private platforms owned by for profit corporations. The intention is to make money off your interactions, and to an extent how you have them. Instead of providing you with a service, you become the service. A commodity to be sold to advertisers and whatever nonsense they can get you to look at on their platforms.
This is why ActivityPub is important. You (mostly) don’t see this kind of fuck shit happening with SMTP, instead they just couple services in with your email (O365, G Suite). Communicating and connecting with other people shouldn’t be a business venture, and I hope social media continues to become increasingly unprofitable for these companies.
Reddit gave the ‘fuck you’ price for third party apps, then the guy in charge lied through his teeth about convrosations that has happened.
Deleted my reddit account. Twitter lost my patronage. Soo too will reddit. I’m not putting up with this noise.
Don’t forget they also planned on blocking NSFW and other posts as well from any 3rd parties.
Oh, that’s rich. The API was created for third party access. And if he didn’t like it, why was it tolerated for so long? Hmmm…maybe because they brought in more users and their data to fatten the pig before IPO?
Says the company who bought alien blue.
@okcool Math is not my greatest skill but “Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site.” Are they so bad that they can’t cover the cost of 3% usage? Why is he still CEO?
From this article:
While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that; more than 80 percent of the top 5,000 communities by daily active users are now open
Meanwhile from https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/15/reddit-threatens-to-remove-subreddit-moderators/
If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
He’s a liar, there is no way the would have let 3rd party apps use their API for over a decade if they “didn’t mean for 3rd party apps…”
We’re happy to have API clients, crawlers, scrapers, and browser extensions, but they have to obey some rules:
Emphasis mine. From the official, archived documentation here:
https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/wiki/API
EDIT: This language also appears in the very first revision of this page, dated Jun 16, 2011.
EDIT: The initial checkin of the open source reddit API includes functions for voting, hiding and unhiding posts, changing passwords, registering, marking other users as friends, and so on. These are actions that scraping bots are far less likely to need as compared to third party clients.
This code is dated June 18, 2008. Reddit was designed for third party clients for as long as it has had a public API.
Let it go, overwrite your content and leave reddit.
What website is it that does that?
This is the one I’ve seen most.
Maybe I’m just dumb but the mass edit feature doesn’t seem to work.
The more I read from him, the firmer one thought is planted in my brain….
Fuck spez.
Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
So he’ll be a leader, not a slave and as a leader, not a slave, will probably have slaves…
