took a deep dive into how CEO Steve Huffman went from being Reddit’s co-founder to its much-needed savior at a difficult moment—and how he then became the villain at the center of Reddit’s still-raging protests: https://slate.com/technology/2023/06/reddit-protests-steve-huffman-api-chaos.html
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I honestly think the article should have given a little more focus to the fact the API pricing isn’t something disagreed upon, but the main backlash is due to the pricing out of 3rd party apps by making it outrageously expensive. Give at least an extra paragraph describing what happened between Selig and Reddit.
As well as an unrealistic time table for change (30 days). Selig even offered to discuss giving more time to adapt the apps to what Reddit was wanting, and that’s when the lies from Huffman started.
Reddit is gonna burn and we all will witness it. A. Reddit Hangs up its boots and goes Dark. B. u/spez resigns and all third party apps come back. It’s already to late. Long live the #fediverse , Kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon
Yeah, honestly I just realized today that I haven’t been on Reddit at all for anything all week. I’ve been on Lemmy (on a few different instances ever since this all started, but I’m finally feeling comfortable and not tempted to check Reddit at all.
Me too. I am finding the fediverse meets all my dopamine needs.
I haven’t been on there since the 12th. I’ve been on mastodon and am enjoying it, but was missing the Reddit feel. So I’m trying out kbin.
I still check Reddit for updates on how the protests and the mods over there are doing, but other than that I’m quite comfortable with Kbin, Lemmy and Discord for discussions.
its much-needed savior at a difficult moment
The manufactured crisis that allowed him to return as “The Good Guy”?
Yeah, that one.
Been the villain this whole time
Huffman’s public reactions to Redditors’ outrage haven’t helped. While he once appeared even-keeled yet decisive while dealing with online mobs, he appears to have alienated a far wider swath of users by coming off as hard-nosed, condescending, and stubborn.
This is the big thing that is different this time around, to me. His behavior, towards the community and towards developers, has become more aggressive amd openly hostile. I don’t know if his earlier “saving Reddit” moments emboldened him to the point of arrogance, or what.
Hasn’t he almost always been like that? It just helped that it wasn’t aimed at users before, but either controversial people, or something that could at least be excused.
His database-editing negative comments talking about him wasn’t anything less controversial, or indicative of a thick skin.
It might be less his “saving Reddit”, and more Elon Musk and Twitter that might be doing it. He basically proved that as a billionaire CEO, you can waltz in and do whatever you like. Even if it’s unpopular, a big platform (like Twitter) isn’t going to implode immediately, so he can just squeeze out what money he can, and make out reasonably wealthy (or at least, that’s the idea), in spite of user unpopularity. “Saving Reddit” seems more like a flimsy justification.
Probably the best article to date about what is truly going on – very comprehensive and well documented.
This seems weirdly positive about Spez. I didn’t really get into Reddit until 2018, but he’s had a bad reputation for as long as I was on.