Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA

It’s really amazing to see the incompetence of Huffman. As the CEO, it’s his responsibility continue to drive his company while being committed to its values. They’ve lost touch with what made reddit special in favor for the lowest common denominator user base.

Reddit has three real function, first as a cultivated collection of subreddits, second as a warehouse of incredibly niche and specific information, and lastly as a place to scroll.

They’ve catered to this third audience which I see as the most shallow of user. This part of their function can be easily replaced by plenty of other services. With such tone-deaf and dishonest actions of spez, it’s obvious there was no foresight on trying to set up a smooth transition.

There absolutely could have been a solution here to generate income for Reddit without coming to this painful nuclear ending. It’s been writing on the wall for a while with the stretch toward IPO that their motives and value had become entirely based on money.

See that’s not how companies work though. They may need to be profitable to exist but they exist to provide a service or product. By sacrificing and disenfranchising a loyal core of your user base out of lack of foresight and problem solving, this is just another nail in the coffin of their inevitable demise.

Huffman is a loser and a sell out. Get fucked Spez.

Steve has never been committed to any values that the company has ever tried to say they adhere to. He’s a kid who doesn’t have a clue how to handle people. And never has.
- Now now, he did brag about how he thinks reddit could "definitely influence elections" and then immediately tried to smother it when people started to comment on r/The_Donald's role in the 2016 election. It takes truly bold leadership skills to brazenly lie about your own conduct, especially when it's on public record.

That AMA was honestly hilarious... I don't know what i actually expected, but this was better. Not only did the CEO go after Christian in the comments, but he also admitted that reddit isn't profitable, lol. This may not seal the deal for reddit, but i wouldn;t be surprised if spez was out of there just based on this PR disaster.

I don’t think it was a secret that reddit wasn’t profitable yet, but the way that was posted twisted as a nasty way to take a jab at 3rd party apps was awful.
I mean, have a proper answer ready. Most people would absolutely understand that as a company they need to be “profit driven” to become sustainable as long as they had really open & honest communication with as much notice as possible about changes.
There seems to be this counterproductive instinct by (some) CEOs to just keep silent.. it’s not the screw ups that sink you.. it’s the lack of communication on it that does. This AMA somehow actually managed to make it even worse by pretending to be ready to talk and then responding with this kind of crap.
The fact that he was so upset about being recorded was hilarious.
- My favorite was the claim that Christian “leaked” the recordings - like it was surreptitious and he wasn’t supposed to do that. Lololol uh, no, he released the recordings, which were his, legal, and he had every right to do. Reddit got caught with their pants around their ankles, again!
One can only hope! I bet if they can him they still won't even consider changing the course though.
- Yeah, agreed... This decision is above the CEO and even if they budge a little on the API, they definitely don't revert course.
I don’t understand what it was he hoped to accomplish with it. Nothing new was stated and all it did was make things worse. It was worse than half assed too.

Thing is, I'm kind of settled with the idea that Reddit will still win out monetarily with this. 99% of users are going to take the path of least resistance, which is kinda expected.

So my goal is more around just having a good conversational community, and I kinda like the change in pace now that I'm using alternatives. I don't really focus on "Reddit losing". I just like having a good place to chat. It might be funny to see if they end up reversing course, but I'm not losing sleep on that turnout.

That is my feeling. I want Lemmy to be good, so I hope a lot of quality users jump ship from Reddit, but if Reddit retains the millions of passive users, then I’m happy for Reddit to keep them. One part of Reddit’s issue was the diluted quality of posts and comments, so let it continue to exist to filter people who want that experience. ___
- Yeah it sounds harsh but once a subreddit got above 100k its quality inevitably took a nose dive unless this was actively moderated against which it usually wasn’t. Lurkers are fine in general but when the whole platform is mostly lurkers looking to doomscroll TikTok style rather the lurkers wanting to read (and upvote) decent high-effort content it all goes down the pan pretty quickly.
  If Reddit’s role in the Fediverse is as a great big sponge to soak up the passive users who just want quick content then long live Reddit! Spez staying on as CEO and increasingly zombifying the platform is actually great for us because it will drive active users here and keep the passive users on Reddit.
I'm ok with the smarter people forming communities elsewhere like Lemmy. Reddit brain drain will definitely be a thing. It's going to be the new Facebook when this is all over.
Reddit won't come out on top. They'll survive, but it's going to hurt them. They seem to have pissed off most communities on the site. It's the largest protest they've ever had.
- Reddit doesn’t run a profit yet, so all they need to achieve is enough to get into the black. Like Twitter, Reddit I don’t think will crash and burn but the quality will drop dramatically. Reddit doesn’t care about quality long as there’s enough users on the site to make the paid ads have value. In the short term I think they’ll succeed in that but it’s going to turn into a cesspool.
  But if those up for actual conversation and vaguely respectful debate come over here & leave the trolls and the karma farmers with Spez then that’s a great result!
- They are taking the pig to market. The pig is not going to be okay, but a few people are going to get fat. That was the whole point all along and why didn't everyone see that.
- It's just a question of if it sticks or not. Will people complain and mods relent or admins intervene and oust mod teams for a new batch of dummies? I feel the answer is yes.
I don't know where reddit's going from this, but I agree that the main focus should be what happens here. Seems like it gave the userbase a nice boost, and that's mostly it.
- People jumping ship will no longer be commenting or posting new content, so hopefully there are a few big hitters.
  What I'm really hoping for is a lot of the mods to leave or go on strike. There's only so many people who are willing to do the work for free, especially qualified people who care about the content.
True, to hell with them. I'll do me.
out of curiosity, what alternatives are you using? im only on lemmy rn but i wanna try other stuff out
- I also signed up to kbin. Can't give opinions yet, because I just started using both of these.
Same. We have seen nothing but reddit shitting the bed. If people are still staying everything, they're not as likely to leave. If this doesn't do it, then that's that. The subs I would consider stating for are dead. Emulation has a post from yesterday, and then 5 days ago. EmulationOnAndroid is still private. Sad to see the community not there anymore, since it was a great way to keep up with everything that was going on, but if they don't pick up here I'll just watch some YouTubers and move on.
Depends on the quality of the first-party mod tools and if enough mods stick around. Reddit doesn't work without free labor. It'll be overrun by spam and trolls.

Here's what I think will happen.

Spez will forcibly depose and ban moderators who participate in the blackout and install his own yes-men to reopen these communities. A lot of power users will fold and jump back to Reddit's side, out of fear that they'll lose their foothold on the site.
Communities like /r/RedditAlternatives will be banned by the admins, along with the communities of any alternative social media platforms that are in direct competition with Reddit. Some subreddits focused around Lemmy instances have already been purged by the admins and I see them quadrupling down on this.
Reddit sheds a few million of its active users but the API changes and death of third-party apps don't completely kill the site because now it's pretty mainstream and a lot of people actually don't give a shit about Apollo, RIF, etc. I think the main difficulty of a site replacing Reddit is that Reddit clones are now a-dime-a-dozen.
Porn-focused communities decide to leave the site and start their own website (perhaps a Lemmy instance or a standalone site that aims to compete with places like Fansly or OnlyFans), because they see the exclusion of NSFW material from the API is a precursor to a total porn-ban.
Reddit announces its IPO and still raises a lot of capital.

Someone will discover an old episode of The Simpsons where somehow, all of this already happened.
Would any power user ever want to touch reddit with the longest pole if the first half of point 1 happened?
- No, but are power users necessary? Most of the front page subreddits are just "post whatever you want here" and they have more than enough 14 year old posters to keep the site saturated.
  Power users are more likely to use more server resources and less likely to see ads. They probably specifically do not want them.
There are about 13k moderators participating in the blackout IIRC - I don't think reddit will have the resources or the community goodwill to take over all of the major subs
- Isn't moderation an unpaid volunteer gig? I agree. He's gonna have a hard time finding a bunch of people who can /will jump at the opportunity
Looks like #2 is starting to get realized: https://beehaw.org/post/487504

Doubling down on throwing accusations at Christian Selig (dev of Apollo) in the AMA was really a low point. Spez has been a fan of a certain orange politician for years, and seems to be taking his tactic of spewing shit at people whether it is true or not. Sad.

Christian called him out on it and asked for proof. No response.

14 replies. Can that even be called an AMA.

I mean… technically people did come and ask it anything. It just decided not to actually answer any of the questions that were asked.
Even the fourteen comments that were made didn’t actually answer any of the questions that were asked. And that’s if you consider copy/pasting pre-approved responses as actual answers in the first place.
I mean better or worse than talking about rampart?
- It was worse than Rampart.
Truly feels more like a PR stunt than anything…
- Yep, felt either like an obligation or their attempt to gain control of the narrative. All it did for me was clarify my decision to scramble-then-delete my 12 years of activity and then delete my account.

Fuck spez what a piece of garbage human.

Fuck spez
- Fuck spez.

I’m so excited to see Huffman burn his company to the ground. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted someone to fail as much as him.

I just hope there is any fallout from this. I really hope start mass migrating off reddit, and people don't begrudgingly return a couple days after all of this dies down
- Honestly, after coming to Lemmy, I haven’t looked back.
- I won't be going back (reddit user since the digg v4 fiasco)
  I actually prefer the smaller communities, so lemmy is a breath of fresh air
- I am personally leaving, friends/family also leaving. And Im blocking it on my network, and we got a "lets do it" to block it on our corporate network (1900+ employees). But everyone said "likely leaving". Kbin maybe about to get the hug of death! May launch a selfhosters one! Lets do this
- Rexxit seems to be picking up speed.
  Seeing a lot more posts about deleting comment history.
- I very much doubt there will be.
  They have crunched the numbers, they know they can weather this storm.
  At the end of the day there will still be natural growth of reddit via people hearing about it and just grabbing the official apps from stores. A lot of techy types will leave, but they haven't been the driving force behind reddit for a long time.
  Reddit will just start heading more towards influencer style content and less of the content that originally built the platform.
  My guess is that influencer style content is more profitable and less hazardous for them to host anyway.
- I created my account here because of this. Was on Reddit for over ten years. Won’t be using Reddit after June 30th. Trying to figure out what to do with the (smaller, but over 150k subs) subs I moderate now then I’m out.
  A ‘small’ portion of the Reddit community used Apollo & RIF (and other third party apps), but those were the power users and mods.
  There will for sure be some fallout.

In the comments, though, ReddPlanet’s developer (u/lupeski, aka Tony Lupeski) said “this is a blatant lie,” noting that he had tried multiple times to get in contact with Reddit regarding these changes and had been ignored. Another indie app developer said they had filled out a request for Enterprise API access three times and had received no response. They're not even giving api access to people who could pay. What lying shits.

Pro tip: if you're doing a line break, you need to add two spaces at the end of the previous line if you want the next one to actually break.
It makes it look like this.
Or you can press enter twice, which looks like this.
And yeah, if they breathe, they lie. That's the commonality between Steve and his cronies.
- Thanks for the heads up; I should have used the preview button.

I'm honestly surprised how quickly this is all falling apart. I don't understand Reddit's ass-backwards approach to all of these decisions.

The AMA was just an obligation. It was never going to change his or anyone elses mind.

He knows the reality. This change won't kill reddit. It will make it more controllable though, at the sake of some of their more techy users. The truth is that its big enough that they don't need those users anymore though. The people who do leave will be replaced by the natural growth of the site of people who simply download the official app from the various stores over the next few months.

The result will be a more TikTok/Tumblr/Twitter like experience. Less niche, more mainstream serving.

I think it will convince a lot of people who are not fully engaged with the issue, at least enough to decide not to leave any time soon. If you look at his actual AMA post, there is a lot to placate people on certain aspects, e.g. accessibility. Most redditors didn't even know third party apps existed until a week ago, so they won't care too much about losing those.
But agree with you that they no longer care about the "hardcore" users. Reddit is definitely in an enshittification spiral, but it'll probably take years to play out.
- Except… they’re pissing off the moderators and removing their tools. Also the top submitters.
  When the moderators and top submitters leave, what’s the content that will keep the bulk of the users doom scrolling? There will be a higher proportion of bot-submitted content, and a larger proportion of undesirable comments. Combined with the inline ads and dark patterns, only ignorance and inertia will hold the remaining audience.
  It definitely will retain some level of an ad-watching userbase, but will it retain enough for an IPO and long-term survival? Spez & co. seem to be looking at Twitter and hoping they can do at least as well.

Im waiting for the Internet Historian video on this

Me too, its gonna be good to see his retelling of all of this shit

Reddit sheds a few million of its active users but the API changes and death of third-party apps don’t completely kill the site because now it’s pretty mainstream and a lot of people actually don’t give a shit about Apollo, RIF, etc.

A few million is plenty to make lemmy a comparable community. As that continues more and more people who didn't move in previous years will move now, because there are enough people here to make it worthwhile.

I think the main difficulty of a site replacing Reddit is that Reddit clones are now a-dime-a-dozen.

Which makes a federated system like lemmy even more competitive.

I've given lemmy a try 3-4 times over the last couple years. And I think that presently it is getting fairly close to a big enough crowd that is very usable and is comparable to what reddit was like in 2008 when I switched from Digg.

To be honest. Lemmy doesn't need to out compete reddit or whoever. It just needs to be competitive. Not having the brain dead mainstream masses over here is not a loss. However, people have always moved to the platform with more liberty when most other aspects are the same. Otherwise reddit would never have been a thing. Most people were over at Digg for a reason. They only moved to reddit when Digg gave them enough reasons to leave.

The situation is now as it is, and we can no longer change it. Reddit has often made itself unpopular in the past with wrong decisions in the community. But this time I think they have gone too far and won't get away with this so easily. Maybe they are going to kill their own product very soon.

We all fully understand that this is a business that needs to make a profit, so they can't make their APIs totally free for everyone. Running such a service costs a lot of money indeed.

But doing so at the expense of the third-party apps that made Reddit the popular platform it is today for end users in the first place is not a smart move at all. Hands down, Reddit has not been able to bring its platform up to modern technical standards for years. Not to mention that they are not able to provide a decent web and mobile UI to their users. This is exactly the job that third-party apps are currently taking over.

What I would have done instead of Reddit is not to wipe out the very apps that keep my platform alive and make it an enjoyable experience for my end-users - but instead support those apps as much as I could. Why not provide those apps completely free API access and let the Reddit users bring their own API-access keys into those apps? Make a free Reddit tier plan which allows users to browse Reddit for free. As soon as a Reddit user wants to write posts or comments, let them pay a little monthly fee (lets say $2). Not only would that solve the problem for Reddit how to make more money without making small app developers pay, it would also significantly improve the quality of the content on the platform since it would lock out all the trolls and spammers from posting their shitty stuff.

I feel like making users pay a subscription would also kill Reddit.
- I'm one of those people that would have paid a subscription if Reddit Premium actually gave me any cool features.
- Why do you think that? Apollo users are already paying subscription fees to the app developer right now (me included). And as long as you are just a lurker, access could still be free. Sure not everyone is willing to pay $2, but if just 1/3 of all current Reddit users would do, that’s a ton of money - much more than they would ever get from the app developers paying for API requests.

Maybe Christian will repurpose Apollo as a great Lemmy app. The perfect fuck you too spez.
- That would be cool, but he's been pretty clear that it is going to be the end of Apollo. It's a very complex application with a Reddit-specific backend service and lots of other assumptions that would just not work here. Maybe some of the UI/UX could be reused, but it would probably be easier to recreate it from scratch than to adapt the existing app.

Ah yes, the AMA has a score of precisely zero. Nice vote manipulation there Reddit.

Also you can upload images directly? Awesome!

Posts never go into negative scores. If a post has negative karma, it shows 0 points, always been like this.
- Huh, I didn't know that. Still a pretty dumb feature.

Dear Apollo dev, if you updated your backend to support federated services like Lemmy I for one would love you forever.

It would definitely be great, but I was unaware until this thread that the premium version of Apollo is a paid subscription, which is a no-go for me. I'll pay money for an app like that once, never a subscription.
- I get that this largely an unpopular opinion, and ultimately, you have to do you, but whether or not an app is first party, third party, or a cobbled together black market party, software development for any service will have to be ongoing until the heat death of the universe or until the service stops functioning.
  There’s no getting around that. Anything that realistically touches the web/internet will need to be maintained. It’s the reality of software and security. It may not always require a $10/mo plan, but things are not free. Where seeing the death of the web as a lot of us knew it because funding is finally drying up and companies have to show value, or all of it goes away.
  To be clear - I think what Reddit is doing is catastrophically bad; there are ways they could monetize third party apps, they just don’t want to. But to a lot of people who don’t necessarily follow development, it’s difficult to understand how it quickly can consume all of your time. And you’re either paying for it, you are the product, or you’re paying for it with your time (volunteering on open source software).
- There's a one time premium payment as well. That's what I did.
- I have a lifetime licence for both Pro and Ultra features of Apollo. A lifetime that, sadly, looks to be coming to an end this month. Christian Selig was well aware that some users didn't like the idea of subscriptions and accommodated them as well.
- There were three ways to use it:
  Free - limitations (things like a single account and can only comment, not post).
  Pro - one off payment for the standard functionality.
  Ultra - annual or monthly subscription for the enhanced functionally that did cost the dev money to operate.
  Apparently you could pay a one off amount for a lifetime sub to the Ultra subscription but I didn’t see that option available to me (I’ma recent iPhone user)

This got me to check out Reddit alternatives... Landed on kbin.. so here we go?

Same. It got me to oficially jump over to Lemmy. Reddits been veering downhill and always wanted an alternative. Kind of glad all this got more people to Lemmy etc.
I landed on lemmy first, then I found out about kbin over there. I'm glad for the Fediverse because I don't have to lose the ability to continue to participate in the community and not be tied to one website. Now, if they could figure a way to import the subscribed list from my old account, that would be icing on the cake.
I’m here for the same. Let’s hope this place has what we’re looking for, eh?
- Yeah but if we don't see a community/magazine we want (that exists on reddit), do we take it upon ourselves to start it or do we wait for the mods of the reddit sub to create it?
- I’m new too but I thought I read boost is like a retweet
Same here! Just so I understand, it doesn't matter if you choose kbin or Lemmy, the content is the same? What about Mastadon? Is that also combined into this same network?
- They all implement ActivityPub which is just the protocol used to move everyone's posts and such around to any other server that's supposed to receive it. So yeah, you can use Mastodon to follow Lemmy or kbin magazines. You can also do the opposite where you follow Mastodon users from Lemmy/kbin. As long as the blog uses ActivityPub federation, you can ingest that content in to whatever other compatible service you want.
  I will say things get a little weird if you follow on a service that presents that information in a drastically different way, but it is doable.
- I'm still trying to figure that one out lol
  Also, what's boost?

Fuck spaz

I'm seriously considering using https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite to edit all my posts to say "fuck you u/spez" and then delete my account.
- Just used redact.dev and save yourself the time. it'll scramble all your comments and delete them, ruining their data haarvesting sales potential or AI scrapability.

I've been on Reddit for 9 years. I just deleted all my posts and comments and then deleted my account. Good riddance, I say!

So in the article it seems that reddit is banking on getting money from the help in training AI models, but what if everyone started using scripts to change their posts and then ultimately ruining the model for AI. Wouldn't those companies then not want to use those API for reddit and then ultimately losing everything too?

I just wish I could migrate my thousands of useful comments to Lemmy before I leave.
- I wonder if we could make an instance for that like reddit post history to be parsed so things can be found but then taken off reddit so the traffic would leave there and only come to lemmy... But then again that could also become disastrous with all the not helpful comments lol
Yup, my entire post history (such as it is) will be "Lorem Ipsum"ed before I delete the account.

Am I the only one who doesn't get all the outrage? They are a private company with a CEO and investors and that's their data. There was never any promise to be a community effort. Why should they let Apollo etc make money out of their data.

And before people say "it's NOT their data! Users cre it" - yeah it's user generated data, which users then donate to Reddit in exchange for reach and publishing tools.

It would be different if it was on the fediverse, which has totally different premises. But Reddit is a private company and eventually they would have to turn a profit. That was always on the cards.

Of course Reddit is allowed to do this, but surely you understand why this move is so unpopular. It's bad for users, and the way they pushed it was dishonest and generally poor.
- Yeah, what I'm getting from the replies is that Reddit Inc. fucked up by doing what all other socials are doing, but without having a decent app to offer its user base. Without a decent app Reddit is basically dead. I didn't think of that angle because I avoid apps if I can
I don't think anyone who understands the issue is complaining about them monetising. People know it costs a ton to maintain the infrastructure. That's not the point.
people don't mind TPAs are billed, but the pricing is a thinly veiled attempt at pretending that they don't want to completely eliminate TPAs. People would have been fine if the pricing is reasonable. They don't like it when you try to pull a fast one over them.
their own application is bad. There's no way around it. From accessibility to mod tools.
they have promised to focus on the above points for years now, and there's still almost no improvement. People don't trust them anymore.
spez's recent comments against the Apollo dev are blatant lies and it only fuelled the outrage. Unfortunately for him, the Apollo dev legally recorded the conversation.
they do own the data, but it's still the users who create them. If you treat the people who create content for you like trash, expect backlash. This happens on many private companies, not only reddit.
There's more, but I'm out right now so I can't focus much. Basically, if your content is from the users, you should take care of the users and people running your site.
- I agree that them pushing out third party apps when their own is rubbish is an idiotic move - and it will hurt them badly. They rely on people being too addicted to leave (it kind of worked when Musk did it with Twitter) but if the app is unusable it's simply not going to happen. As someone who uses as few apps as possible (why do people trust the Apollo dev to be any better at privacy than spez? anyhow...) I didn't quite grasp that for many people Reddit is an app first and foremost. No viable app = no reddit
The outrage has a few different angles, but one key theme is that Reddit weren't exactly forthcoming with specifics around pricing information until very recently, leaving 3rd party Devs little time to negotiate a better price or actually develop the changes required to play along.
Yes, Reddit should be able to charge for their API, as a commercial business. But it's the approach taken, the short self imposed timelines and artificial pressures applied that have angered the Devs, taking the apps offline and upsetting the users
- It seems pretty obvious that they are trying to push out 3rd party apps, just like all the other platforms are doing. I understand why the devs are fuming, but I don't particularly care TBH. Besides the fact that we don't know what those devs are doing with our location + sensor data they are constantly collecting, they were always running on borrowed time. They made their money, now it's time to pivot to something else, like any other business.
Maybe I can elaborate.
As somebody who uses the official Reddit app (Android), it's complete dog shit and ridden with bugs. Tapping links will often direct you to a completely different thread, videos often don't play or if they do, audio is disabled, sometimes comment threads don't load at all, etc. I would 100% recommend using a third-party app for browsing Reddit and the only reason I ditched BaconReader was because I had some compatibility issues a few years ago.
If the official app wasn't a vastly inferior alternative to browsing the site and like a worse version of New Reddit, a lot of people would be less pissed off at Spez over this.
- Oh don't take me wrong, I am not saying they are handling this well. Specifically on the app, it's idiotic to force people off unofficial apps without the official app being if not better at least comparable in quality. That's why I use the web version - that and the fact I don't want apps collecting location and sensor data as I go about my day. I am not sure why people assume the Apollo devs are trustworthy and are not selling your data like everyone else does.

Oh what a crap-fest it was

Come on Apollo for kbin

Fuck Spez.

Spez is such a lying pos. Fuck spez

Liar liar, spez's pants on fire