Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview

If the discussions have been going on for that long, why this exact moment in time, and why such a short deadline?

Why any moment in time? We did it when we did it. We could do it a year from now and we’d probably have the same conversation. We could do it five years ago, we’d be having the same conversation.

I guess what I still don’t quite understand is, if this has been thought about for a long time, is the goal just to meet this deadline and move on? Like just turn a new leaf from there?

We don’t have to meet our deadline. We told folks hey, we need to come up with a plan, or we’re going to start billing you on July 1st.

Complete mess of a CEO. I'm so glad that I'm not using Reddit anymore.

Those answers were disappointingly evasive. The questions were clear and he chose non-answers. Yuck.

That’s unfortunate. I understand your trying to IPO and his goal is to get his golden parachute afterwards. But you’d think the board and him would want to foster some goodwill with the community the depend on.

If he was gonna bullshit someone it should have been investors and advertisers, not users. Look at pre-Elon twitter, Jack Dorsey knew how to IPO on straight hedgefund money.

Dude absolutely hates third party apps. Calls them his direct competitors and demeans them. Even says he ‘made a mistake’ allowing 3rd party apps. All the while forgetting that there was no official Reddit app for over 10 years of the company existing. Why didn’t he ban 3rd party apps then? Fucking ungrateful.

He's so insufferable.

Another tech slapfight to monopolize and monetize an entire slice of the data exploitation pie. Deleting Reddit was definitely the right choice for me. And it was the perfect excuse to dust off my two-year old Lemmy account that I'd never posted from!

Adding: can't see past the smug arrogance either

This will be an unpopular opinion, but I think reddit is mostly in the right with these API pricing changes. It makes no sense from a business perspective to allow other apps to freely profit off their services. They only fucked up with the arbitrarily short timeline which Huffman has no reasoning for and the poor communication throughout the whole process. Even Apollo dev said he was fine with them charging if he had had more time to make the transition.

I think charging to use the API is fine, but it was definitely overpriced to the point that it was obvious they wanted to nuke TPAs. They need all that sweet user data to sell to others, and they can't get to that with TPAs.
Even if you think the pricing is fine, the time window the apps get to make changes is way too short. They kept asking when would we have to start paying, and the answer always been in the distance future. Now they have 30 days to get the funding for a huge amount of users.
I don't think charging for the API is inherently wrong, but they want to charge a ridiculous amount. It should be 1/4th of what it is, or less. The Apollo guy calculated it is 20x more than what the average user makes them, via Reddit's own previously posted user monetization stats.

That scumbag energy, holy smokes. He's executing reddit right in front of our very eyes. It's just sad.

Fuck u/spez

Dude wants his golden parachute so badly he treats the interview as his rant box.

Toward the end you can really see how defensive and agitated he is with his handlers chiming in too. He's aware that he's a douchebag, and just doesn't care at all.

Good lord, this interview just solidified my decision to never return to Reddit. It seems Spez doesn't want me there anyway, despite how much time and money I've given them.

I also wish the interviewer had brought up Spez lying and mischaracterizing Christian so blatantly. Just pathetic behavior.

Wow, his answers and arguments are really bad. Doesn’t acknowledge that AI scrapers abused their system, not apps to access and interact with Reddit. Practically says they will imitate Apollo. Admits that they unreasonable timeline was a way to coerce deals.

He refers to reddit as a city and keeps mentioning democracy and communities. No city/community/democracy should be owned by one corporation and have it's main goal be profitability.

He thinks RIF and Apollo - both of which I have personally used - don't add any value to Reddit? Lmao what a shithead

Also love the gaslighting of "um actually sweaty nobody likes the blackouts and everyone just thinks they're annoying 💅"

I wish him luck lol

I don’t, fuck that guy. I know you’re kidding but still, fuck that guy. Aaron is rolling in his grave right now.

Spez is a spaz

one day I hope to count our users among our investors, but getting to breakeven is a priority for us

Yeah well, I'm already an investor on the fediverse, by donating to my instance admins, and the instances I support already break even. It pays back handsome returns on my investment not by extracting value, but by providing a community that respects its users instead of monetizing them. That is the only investment I'm interested in.

I mean, it sure makes sense. If they're getting the server costs and effort to maintain and moderate, happy to drop a few dollaridoos now and again. Less ads to block as well, which is always nice.