Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: Reddit “was never designed to support third-party apps”
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: Reddit “was never designed to support third-party apps”
Thousands of subreddits are still dark.
Thousands of subreddits are still dark.
So they designed an API that they didn't intend thirdparties to use at all? And documented it publicly without the intention of any devs reading the docs? Right.
What annoys me the most is that they would rather force users to see their ads and interract with their new and useless engagement features than just take payment directly from us, the users, for accessing the API. I'll gladly pay for a premium++ ultra gold plus reddit subscription to continue using Sync. I don't get why they would rather charge the 3rd party devs that literally gives them more users.
And the api didn’t expose ads. It’s not like the apps chose not to display them. It wasn’t even an option.
What should bother you is not the particularities of the pricing. It's the overtly dirty dealing. Even the Apollo dev said he might have been able to make the pricing work, but certainly not in just 30 days. Admins said there would be time -- months of it -- and only gave 30 days. They said pricing would be based on reality, but no sensible analysis indicates that it is. Admins told the users they were worthless and literally defamed devs that were trying to work with them.
There were tons of ways they could've gotten ads in front of people. This wasn't about ads. This wasn't about some particular price point. This is about getting users onto their official app or website, presumably to mine data and control conversations.
The infinite free VC ran out when interest rates went up. Suddenly, real financial pressures they had plenty of time to address and never bothered worrying about were at the door. So they revved up the enshitification engine and got to the hard work of destroying the only source of value the site had.
If they came out tomorrow and declared they would keep the API free and that Spez was fired, it oughtn't change how you feel. It's time to be off that site.
It seems all reddit pricing is made to keep you away from anything that would give you control over what you see. The price of Reddit premium is about as realistic as the price they set for the API. Reddit seems to make at most 1$/year in advertising per user, so to block ads it's 40$/year O_o.... And they'll still track & manipulate you in all kinds of other ways...
CEOs are all manipulative sociopaths.
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.
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.
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.
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...
By the looks of it, it was never designed to support first party apps either.
👀
Oof
new.reddit is horrendous.
Lack of CSS support, performance issues, and ugly mess of a gigantic proportion by the Snoo Platform, Inc.
I don't think anyone is saying that Reddit shouldn't charge the 3rd party apps. Pretty sure they just wanted fair pricing.
If they would have just made it so that you needed Reddit Premium to use 3rd party apps I would have thought that was fair and subscribed
Devs said that was discussed and rejected by Reddit. They're stuck on that $12,000 for 50M figure. Because the goal is killing the apps.
Find it hilarious how perfectly this solution solves all of the problems reddit spoke about.
Reddit not profitable enough? Not enough premium subs? Third party app users can't view ads? Api use is too high and you're not making money off of it? Making premium a prerequisite for third party app use hits all 4 birds with one stone lol.
People might've grumbled a bit (me included) but it wouldn't have led to the massive blackouts we have now.
Not even "fair pricing", because no one can know what is truly fair unless they have access to the P&L statements. Maybe this pricing really is based on the lost opportunity cost Reddit is paying as a result of third-party apps -- we honestly don't and can't know for sure, even if it seems completely absurd.
The devs and users of the site were lied to. Repeatedly. We were told one thing while the C-suite planned something else. We were gaslit and lied to about timelines, pricing, and intentions, and more. We were told our opinions are just worthless noise and that the only goal of the site is profit, not community.
It's our job to believe they don't want us, at this point, no matter how much they do or do not backtrack in the coming days, weeks, and months.
Then they could just release the records showing how expensive it is
It's absolutely a fuck you price, reddit doesn't want the press of saying they wan't rid of 3rd party apps. But they're trying to do it anyways. IDK why though, because it's nakedly obvious to even people not involved in reddit.
Reddit don't want fair pricing, they want to get all users on their app and third parties to be dead.
And full experience, as they are also going to restrict NSFW posts for 3PA
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?)
The sarcasm tag has been a thing for a long time, used in various forums before reddit was a thing.
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.
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?
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.
saying they provide little to no value to the platform.
Time will tell. I will no longer contribute without RiF, so the question isn't whether RiF provides value to Reddit but whether I do.
My Karma says I do.
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.
Let it go, overwrite your content and leave reddit.
What website is it that does that?
This is the one I've seen most.
Absurd stance to take, but that's why we're here and not there after all.
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.
If it wasn’t for old Reddit and RES I’d be off there today or if platforms like this one get a good user base of quality people. This Fediverse thing is really neat but I think most people will not want to invest the time to learn how to use it. Today is my first day here and I still have a lot of questions for example I know that Mastadon is part of the Fediverse. Does that mean I can use that service due to having a Kbin account or do I have to sign up with one of their servers?
I have the same question. I have seen toots on Mastodon that make it sound like you can integrate them, but I have not found a way how. I’m banking on apps that are being developed to address this and make it clear and obvious.
Kbin is a weird implementation. I think anything you post here is accessible by someone with a Mastodon account, but it wouldn’t show up for them the way we see it here. It would just look like random posts like in Twitter. I haven’t used kbin enough to even try, but theoretically you could subscribe to a Mastodon user and see their posts from here. Probably in the microblog tab.
From what I understand, andi might be wrong because this is just what I’ve picked up from my few days on kbin, it’s more like you can read and respond to things on other sites, but only after you tell it to look for it, first. Like, you can copy a link to a kbin community into Mastodon, then tell your Mastodon account to follow out. It will then pop into your Mastodon home feed, and you can reply like you would a post on Mastodon.
But you can’t actually make a new post that goes to Mastodon from kbin - you’d need your own account on a Mastodon server to do that. Same way, I think you wanted to post a new post to kbin or Lenny, you couldn’t do it FROM Mastodon. You’d need to do it from a kbin or lemmy account.
@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?
Oh, well, that makes it ok then. Everybody back to Reddit!
It might have been closer to okay compared to how it feels currently if he would have just said that from the start instead of “we want to work with anyone willing to work with us”.
So, Alien Blue was not a third-party app?
Great Snoo Platform... lie.
Deleted my account with the message "Your contempt for your users disgusts me". Oh well, account since 2012 permanently gone. Long live the Fediverse!
It was never designed to support third-party apps.
My brother in Christ… you bought a third party app that used the API
Wait... they bought a third party app and rechristened it the official Reddit app?
Isn’t the entire purpose of an API to provide access to other developers in the first place? It seems like he’s happy others did creative work for him and now he wants to take it and kick the ladder away.
It is literally the only reason to make an API public
Wow, the reddit ceo is a dick! Also, someone needs to tell him that one reason we use 3rd party apps is because his official reddit app is an ugly piece of crap that most people are only using because they didn't realize there were choices.
🤦♂️
Doesn’t he realise the reddit app was a 3rd party app originally that they have made into a shit show?
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:
3rd party apps came before the official app - in fact didn't the official app start out as a 3rd-party app before it was acquired by Reddit?
Yup, they bought it just to scrap it and write whatever the hell the current app is.
Yup, Alien Blue was acquired by the Snoo Platform, Inc. and swiftly killed.
But, hey they shifted the hue of the AB logo from blue to orange and yet the official app is a dogshit compared to the AB.
Style and substance only, not proper function.
Says the company who bought alien blue.
"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, according to a fact sheet shared by the company on Thursday. In the fact sheet, Reddit writes that there are more than 100,000 “active communities,” that the company sees 57 million “daily active uniques,” and that there are more than 50,000 daily active moderators. "
This is why we need it to be indefinite.
Does a CEO really understand how the products that his company makes operate at the nuts and bolts scale? To me this sounds like if the CEO of GM was discussing the merits and deficits of a limited slip differential. If they know anything about it they know what some engineers dumbed down enough for him to grasp it.
This is too much to believe. IMO spez is just the fall guy.This wholole shitshow leads to spez taking the blame for killing reddit, leaving, and then reddit monetizing the api at more reasonable rates than those already announced, while dying a slow death
Then what does it have a publicly accessible API for?
You think he posted this in r/AITA? Cause yeah you are.
If Reddit can handle being data mined by OpenAI, I'm sure it can handle a few dozen apps.
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....
It's all about the money, baby.
The official API access rules, still online, use an android reddit app as an example for how to select a user agent: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/wiki/API#rules
It's hard to argue this wasn't an intended use-case...
Spez is a one-trick-pony. He can only power through protests by ignoring them and brushing them off. Until now it kinda worked, until it doesn't.