Reddit CEO Steve Huffman on blackout: It's expensive to run a company.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman on blackout: It's expensive to run a company.
"It's time we grow up," says former moderator of jailbait subreddit.
It's probably even more expensive to piss off any investors right before an IPO.
As CEO, I always like to go online and tell the whole world “we’re not profitable” right before my IPO. Big brain stuff, ya know.
I think this is exactly why. It’s to make sure that Reddit is “shored up” from any profits leaking out, and making sure that NSFW content is locked down so that investors actually invest.
It sucks because it’s our posts, our comments, our information that makes Reddit what it is. This is simply preparation for advertising and other for-profit opportunities. Greedy.
We can only hope.
I just commented on another similar article! His reasoning for this move contradicts itself! How can he claim that the overwhelming majority of users (97%) use the official Reddit app, but the use of 3rd party apps is destroying their bottom line? That means that that the lost profit from 3% of users are the reason for the API price change?
And… if there are only 4-5 big 3rd party apps (like Apollo, RIF), why force them out of the market? If only 3% of users use them, are they really that big of a deal? Why are the prices so astronomically high?
This is Reddit consolidating their empire. I hope that folks are prepared for future roll-outs of new subscriptions and reasons that Reddit users need to pay.
I'm honestly shocked the redditors are so blind to this. Do they actually think it'll just be plain sailing from here on out?
Maybe in just to old skool and remember a time when Reddit would have really stood up.
It absolutely will not be plain sailing - I think that the protest is an early warning sign. People that stick to Reddit are going to be bombarded with ads, Premium features, and new programs after Reddit goes public.
I am an Apollo user until the end - I think that after having such a good experience under Christian, I forgot how scummy a big corporation can be. Times are changing - we just saw some similar things with Musk taking over twitter.
Reddit felt like it was going downhill for a long time. I think I just started scrolling it out of habit, only participating in a few subs for hobbies and games. This shitshow was the kick in the ass I needed to shreddit and delete my account.
Also. I think more users need to do that. Make sure you shreddit your comments and posts so reddit can't keep your content.
It makes so little sense to me. They could have charged a reasonable amount and made some money off of the apps, but instead, they chose to kill them and lose their users. Some might migrate to the official app, but this uproar may have caused even more to leave the platform entirely.
😂 fuck u/spez
I like the Fediverse and I think I’ll stay.
I'm actually somewhat happy all this happened now. I'm sad for the 3rd party app devs and everyone who suffers from these decisions. And for the wonderful communities and knowledge bases that were shattered.
But I think it caused me, and many others, to realize that great community and discussions could still be had on the internet, and that we hadn't been having those for quite a while over on reddit.
There's a lot of value in smaller scale too. Not everything needs to be mega-platform level for the mass market. We can have great communities in smaller spaces online too — sometimes even better as a result.
Some of my favorite places on the internet are smaller communities that still run webforums.
It's great. There's people I've been talking to and friends with for fifteen years on there.
It’s been boosting discovery of fediverse and causing an explosion of both traffic and hopefully donations.
How have you going about this? I'm interested in the same. I see real potential for this type of accessible decentralized platform.
"It's expensive to run a company into the ground" - u/spez
"But I think the greater Reddit community just want to participate with their fellow community members."
One way to find out right.
Yes, it is expensive to hire engineers to build an NFT Marketplace, Steve.
"We're 18 years old," Huffman said. "I think it's time we grow up and behave like an adult company."
Who the hell is this even directed to?
The 16 year olds defending their actions?
-
Fine, let the people who apparently have no concept of foresight turn Reddit into a cesspool.
-
This is clearly about cashing in on machine learning at the expense of your users. Maybe you should self reflect a bit before your entire website is produced and consumed entirely by machine learning.
-
I enjoy how he's still talking about this as if it's purely about having 3rd party apps pay a fee, not about his incredibly piss-poor handling of it.
I really hope July 1st destroys reddit as we know it.
The more he speaks, the easier it is for me to break my Reddit addiction.
I was on the fence about what I would do when the API changes go live on July 1st. Seeing his comments over the last few days has made that decision a whole lot easier.
Yes, it is. So charge a reasonable API price so that this whole argument is over. But that won't be done. This is just about squeezing money out of Reddit ASAP before Spez resigns ASAP with a nice big bonus for pushing through those beautiful API changes oh so smoothly.
The more Spez speaks, the less sad I am about Reddit dying. Platforms come and go. I don't want to stay on a sinking ship with a hole shot out by the captain because he has ship insurance, actively throwing people off board as him and his crew climb up the still buoyant part whilst insisting THIS WILL BLOW OVER.
However, I will now thoroughly enjoy watching Spez naively, single-handedly dismantle Reddit's legacy for his own gain whilst thinking he's totally right. Or possibly being forced by the shareholders to make a poor business decision. I've never in all my years of Internet browsing seen someone running an Internet-based company so blatantly indifferent to the customers they serve. There's no Reddit revenue without Redditors.
I wish him luck on his inevitably piss-poor IPO when Reddit offers little content of value and more people get more angry at him as more ridiculous reasoning flies out of his mouth. Reddit's gonna look like MSN News by the end of this mess.
I mean there are a lot of parallels with Elon and Twitter.
The thing that amazes me about the Reddit tanking - is how sudden it was. For anyone who was paying more attention than I was at the start - how long were there smoke signals for?
I swear it was like 2 Apollo posts within 48hrs straight into blackout shitstorm within the week.
Elon at least hummed and Harred about it for a good while before destroying Twitter week after week and that was fast.
Spez seems to be speed running it.
All the numbers don't add up. He says only 3 % of users use apps but then also there is a significant cost to not serve that 3 % ads? They also only make pennies per user. They must count any hit from Google as a user or something wild to boost their numbers.
I fucking hate spez. Will never use reddit again
he moderated WHAT? So not only is he an idiot, he's a pedo? What a great image.
The fact that he was a mod on jailbait is kind of a distraction. It's funny in concept, but at the time, mods could just add anyone else as a mod instead of sending an invite to be a mod. So anyone could be assigned as a mod for an embarrassing subreddit.
There's some problematic power tripping mods and those incidents are the most visible, but probably >99% of mod actions are essentially unnoticed and just keeping subreddits relatively organized. And people were doing that for free. If reddit isn't profitable, then pissing off moderators that were doing work for free does not seem like a good approach.
I doubt he was targeting moderators directly, but that's what ended up happening in part.
Using the percentage of mods that use 3rd party apps is disingenuous (if that stat is even correct). There's probably tons of mods on low volume subreddits that don't need to do much and thus don't use the mod tools on 3rd party apps. But I bet the percent of mod actions that come through the API vs native is very different than counting it by mod that use the API vs native. As in, a small percentage of mods on big subreddits are probably doing a lot of moderation and they are probably using 3rd party apps at least part of the time.
It's almost like they've been deceptive about everything they've said. That's the reason they're so pissed at the Apollo creator. His recording of the call really showed that they were full of shit when they tried to pull a fast one on him.
“It’s time we grow up,” says former moderator of jailbait subreddit.
See this is another thing, how is Reddit management not in prison and on the sex offenders list? They willfully and knowingly distributed child pornography for YEARS. And it's not like they're rich enough or have enough high up connections to get out of it. What the fuck?
Man I'm seriously waiting for reddits downfall
At this point this seems intentional. This has definitely pushed me away from Reddit and I’m already seeing a lot more meaningful conversations on Lemmy. All I ever saw on Reddit anyways is people just trying to one up each other on the comment threads for upvotes. Took a lot of scrolling to even get to people actually talking about the topic.
Agree it's intentional. Normies don't care about any of this and will just follow the memes. Most of us here are the users that had ad blockers and probably didn't care about giving gold.
Giving and receiving gold was surprisingly, one of my least favourite things. Someone gave me gold once and i felt beholden to say thank you? I didnt ask for it, i didnt comment in hopes of getting given “gold”. I never gave anyone else gold. Why would i give a shit about getting it myself? Its a fucking forum.
It's expensive to run a company that constant wastes resources and is trying to grow beyond what it is.
No no no but you see we need to restrict API access for the third party apps! They use just way too much bandwidth!! Apollo alone can use like 300 requests a day! We need people to use our shitty slow horrible app that uses an average of 500 requests per day. If it weren't for third party apps we (10 billion dollar company) would be thriving!
They're just greedy, the only reason the official app makes marginally more money despite using more requests is thanks to tracking
I liked it better when they had one kind of Reddit Gold and displayed a progress bar on the homepage showing what percentage of daily operating costs were covered.
It's the same reason people don't show their pateron monthly incomes, they don't want people knowing how much money and potentially saying to themselves wow 3x daily cost? Seems I don't need to give money.