Ok, let's do this CPS style. Recent and related:
Addressing the community about changes to our API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36261369 - June 2023 (320 comments)
Archive your Reddit data before it's too late - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36259930 - June 2023 (341 comments)
Shreddit is a Python program to remove all your Reddit comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257981 - June 2023 (221 comments)
Ask HN: Anyone else disinterested in Reddit API drama? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256545 - June 2023 (26 comments)
Apollo Back end just made public - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256167 - June 2023 (229 comments)
Ask HN: You are given 100M to launch a new Reddit competitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36255767 - June 2023 (23 comments)
ArchiveTeam has saved over 11.2B Reddit links - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254172 - June 2023 (150 comments)
Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254086 - June 2023 (352 comments)
Using unmodified third-party Reddit apps with a custom server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36252061 - June 2023 (20 comments)
Power Delete Suite for Reddit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36250785 - June 2023 (31 comments)
Apollo will close down on June 30th - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435 - June 2023 (1568 comments)
Continuation:
Reddit cannot go public. Its product is volunteer work by moderators and users to produce value. There’s no way to take that work and guarantee its delivery on a quarterly cycle.
This is all a ridiculous self-delusion that Reddit management has engaged in that the platform is really the “value add”. It’s not. Reddit has become the shorthand for cut through ML spam and that’s based on users constantly posting up to the minute accurate data. There’s almost no historical value to that data.
> ...calling out the developer, Christian Selig’s, “behavior and communications” as being “all over the place” and saying he couldn’t see Reddit working with the developer further.
Yes, there's only one problem spez, aside from your track record, we also have basically every other major API user voicing the exact same concerns. Maybe the somewhat erratic communications have something to do with breaking over a decade of trust and giving only a few weeks notice.
On another note, I definitely can't see myself working with or using Reddit in any way in the future.
Reddit is another notch. They got to where they were by building goodwill. It was open source, the APIs were openly accessible, they fought against censorship and they were relatively measured in their moderation. Now? It's just another fucking ad company. There's nothing left.
>We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive.
It appears he has confused the reddit AMA for an IPO prep call.
What a tone deaf farce...
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/comment/jnk...
I know this is repeated over and over but in the case of Reddit I think it’s pretty true. They should never have taken VC money. I don’t think technically they are doing anything that is very tricky. They have surely innovated on their tech stack but even the things they have tried to do seem pretty miserable. Their media player is horrendous and while they do have scale problems, I don’t see much happening on the product side. They have not done much to make admin’s life easier. Beyond the new UI they got years back, I am not sure what they have done to improve the product.
Maybe I have not paid close enough attention but Reddit feels mostly the same since forever.
At this point, I think he should back up his claim that Selig has acted disingenuously by saying one thing in public and another in private. I'm not sure it's legally defamatory, but it's definitely a bad look for a nominal leader. The only example I'm aware of him providing (the 'threat') was pretty soundly debunked by the audio recording. Ignoring the merits of their individual cases, Selig has been transparent, and so is capturing the public sympathy, while Huffman looks like a sweaty Joseph McCarthy, claiming to have a briefcase full of evidence he won't show anybody.
Funny was that he seems to have gotten his responses from a shared document with answers that his team prepared for him. At one point he copied "A: ...", which users noticed so he removed the "A:" afterwards.
Reddit's valuation has been tanking even before this drama.
https://www.businessinsider.com/fidelity-marks-down-stripe-r...
They're so eager to screw over their users, they couldn't even wait until after the IPO payday to torpedo their own business
What we're seeing here is exactly the sort of executive immaturity/arrogance that gets SO MANY startups in trouble.
Young men/aspiring founders: for the love of god understand that your investors are NOT the whole picture when it comes to leadership. You need to find yourself a graybeard/executive coach and pay them out the ass to tell you about things like:
- Rapport-building
- Professional development
- Values
- Adaptability
- Brand reputation/equity
- Tone > message
- Prioritization
- Candor
- Empathy
- Ethics
- Humility
- Accepting feedback
- Understanding second- and third-order effects
Felt so disappointed when I read that in the AMA thread. I guess it's not unexpected, someone stupid enough to make such an obvious lie would of course be stupid enough to also double down, but it really does dispel any remaining droplets of hope that their priorities could still be in some tiny way in the right place. Here's to hoping their valuation drops like a rock.
>The response was surprising. Unlike most companies, which try to soften their blows behind corporate PR speak, Huffman answered rather plainly.
I strongly disagree. The response is line with his past behavior and notice that nowhere in it does spez response address the fact that he was caught lying. That is exactly what corporate PR speak is. Deflecting away from lies and guilt and refusing to answer the question. He wants us to be mad the Apollo dev protected himself by recording the conversation.
I don't know why but I really, really hoped he'd come into the AMA with good intentions, or maybe even to announce that actually, you know what, they've reconsidered and now they're going to walk back some of the changes to the API pricing so as not to affect average users.
If only.
"API pricing"? The absurdity of thinking that it's normal to be needing to ask permission for and even paying to essentially access a site with a different user-agent is what lead to this situation in the first place. It may not have gotten to this point had people almost all realised what was really happening to the Internet when sites started offering "API access" and rejected it.
"third party app"? My browser is a "third party app".
(Note: I am not actually a Reddit user --- I use the site read-only.)
What's the point of doing an AMA if you're not going to answer the most upvoted questions.
I for the life of me can't figure out why they are charging so much money for the API. They could do other things such as:
- Mandate as part of the TOS[0] that API users must display the ads in the application unless they pay a higher fee. I get alot of people use 3rd party apps to escape ads, but this wouldn't be the end of the world, it also allows the developer some discretion on how the ads can be formatted visually which could actually be a big win for Reddit in some ways. Make all this contingent on app review and auditing of the app.
- Work with the community to establish a more reasonable API fee. I'm sure everyone can find an agreement here somehow. All but the smallest players likely would find this agreeable.
- Only allow premium (and therefore ad free users) to use 3rd party apps. If they aren't a premium Reddit user they need to use the official client. This seems like the most pragmatic option to me, since those users would by pass ad revenue anyway.
[0]: Terms Of Service
Fwiw, if you get a call from a debt collector and would prefer not to speak to them, tell them the call will be recorded and ask for their permission. It’s been some time since I’ve had this happen but I’ve been 6 for 6 on them not giving permission and the conversation ending. (Yes, even after I consented to them recording the call)
So, this spez CEO is worse than a politician.
Obfuscate, redirect, and blame.
We all know that he is caustic, and so should the future shareholders.
Well, good luck trying to commoditize a mob. Reddit are not the first one who try, but they will probably be the next to fail.
Just throwing it out there: I love Reddit, but only via Apollo, so when Apollo shuts down, I’ll probably quit Reddit. What a dumb move for Reddit to blow their best UI like this!
Aaron Swartz must be spinning in his grave.
Reddit’s current situation is an interesting case study in the difference between running a sustainable, profitable business, growing naturally, vs trying to grow unnaturally quickly and trying to extract as much “value” as possible from the business at the expense of long-term stability in a frankly sickening and vampirish manner. It’s something I see repeated again and again in this industry.
Link to the AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
The funny part is all the top questions didn't get answered... "Ask Me Anything but I won't answer it"
Such a shame, I've used reddit for over a decade and enjoyed it for the most part. There's a lot of value in the communities and discussions on reddit, but I think the writings on the wall for this one. Hopefully someone can build something that captures the reddit experience and pulls in the communities
Can anyone explain the joke to me? Why would reddit cut Apollo a $10M check? Is this just a cheeky "so you think my use of the API provides me with $20M of value" comeback at the ridiculous API pricing? It did, in part, sound like a "half serious" (as in completely serious but with plausible deniability) attempt at "give me money and I'll announce my completely unrelated retirement and stop making a stink about this", which I'd agree is a bad look.
Communication from executives is just like communication from politicians. It's designed to get the outcome they want, to manipulate, to make the strategic commitments they want, avoid those they don't, hide the things they don't want you to know yet, play to 40 different audiences etc..
On one hand I get why they do that, on the other hand it's made communicating with these people or believing them completely impossible if you just want to know what they think or what their plans are.
It seems ill conceived to discuss with Reddit at this point in time. It is a misunderstanding of motives that Reddit executives work in favor of Reddit. The end goal of this non profitable relationship of devs with Reddit is to bait and switch the allegiance of the userbase right before Reddot"s large IPO cash out.
Moving users towards the main site and app, firing a few people, claiming to do a cleanup is just somethimg that would sound good and look good in the balooned financial projection numbers.
Long term growth or even sustainability is irrelevant right before the IPO so app and devs need to understand the motives behind those actions. Devs may stop developing, users may leave, mods can stop modding, subreddits can go dark as long as the effect of those events does not have time appear in the IPO documents.
Yes ofcourse Reddit execs could allow nswf, yes ofcourse Reddit execs know that the reddit app sucks, yes ofcourse Reddit execs knows the API is essential for moderator apps, yes ofcourse Reddit execs know they add work or outright screw free labor moderators, yes ofcourse Reddit could use the external apps to deliver reddit ads and get some profit.
But that would make them lose control of the IPO future profitability narrative, which appears to be as a "fake it to see if we make it" narrative
I don’t even know why this guy bothered to explain. Just change the api and be done with it
So the AMA had 21,294 comments/questions and it included a total of 14 comments from u/spez (some duped), and a total of 21 comments from all the staff participating. LOL, why even bother with a "Ask Me Anything"?
Watch the IPO dollars. That’s what this is all about. Whoever is hitching their wagon to this IPO should be taking a serious look at management and comments made by the CEO which were clearly demonstrating immaturity and a loss of touch with both product and community. Reddit for the base is dead. What that means for the IPO will be interesting. Devaluation is in the process.
There is no way it costs $20m to serve 2.6k requests a second. I could almost do that with a single Linode and postgres.
I do wonder what optimizations are left on the table on Apollo's side, though.
> “His ‘joke’ is the least of our issues,” the CEO wrote. “His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.”
I think that can also be true.
I mean he did leak a private conversation, for support to get a followup discussion at all. Then they used that action to disassociate further, but that doesn't make the actions invalid or unreasonable on its own.
We already know what they are going to do with the API, this isnt more damning than before
> Effective July 1, 2023, the rate limits to use the Data API free of charge are:
> 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id if you are using OAuth authentication and 10 queries per minute if you are not using OAuth authentication.
Am I missing something? That doesn't make any sense. What does the auth mechanism have to do with interaction rates?
If I upvote 11 posts/minute would that be higher than their rate limit?
This is a selfish ask, but is anyone motivated enough to read through the AMA answers and share a summary of the interesting points?
Reddit or any other business that thrives on user data will eventually, at some point, will have to use their data for profit. Especially during the period of LLM training with huge dataset, I understand the API rate changes. But I don't understand why they can't have reasonable exceptions for third party apps like what they have done for accessibility apps except the opaque 30 day exception withdrawal clause. While reading everything together - blocking NSFW data, increasing API prices hastily etc seems like Reddit wanting to disallow users third party apps and limit the users to use only their first party app.
He didn't answer many questions. I guess he gave up.
At this point it’ll be wasted momentum if a good alternative doesn’t prop up. It’ll be like WhatsApp and Twitter’s forgotten outrage.
I've been a reddit user for 15 years. I paid for a subscription to support what I thought was the front page of the internet, but I've cancelled it after this debacle. It's clear that Huffman doesn't care (does he even want to be CEO anymore?)... even if he gets replaced, the damage has been done.
I can't stomach the thought of using reddit and being spez's useful idiot. I want to migrate to a new community but I don't know which. Where is everyone going? Mastodon seems a bit pie-in-the-sky if I may be honest.
I only met Steve a couple times in passing, long ago, so I can’t say I know him at all, but he always seemed like a nice guy. I really hope he can see the folly of this API pricing before it’s too late.
Even lowtax had more dignity, what a farce.
Remember when Digg was a forum?
I guess Reddit is headed that way sooner or later.
So weird and foolish.
#quitreddit
I removed Relay and blocked reddit on my computers. Capitalism is one thing but Steve has shown himself to be void of any integrity. It's very obvious that it will only get worse as they ramp up for, and then after, the IPO.
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Why does the Apollo guy see the API as his entitlement? Reddit ain’t a charity. Neither is HN.
This whole drama is very odd to me and feels like a (very) vocal minority of users incorrectly extrapolating their preferences to those of all Reddit users.
Reddit owns its API. It has every right to price access however they see fit. It is wild to think that will spend $10s of millions to support 3rd party apps. Or to expect that they would acquire third party apps.
I predict Reddit will stick to their guns and that this entire brouhaha will have little to no effect on Reddit's user and engagement metrics over the medium term.
If you're outraged and highly engaged with this controversy, do you think its possible you're in a bubble?
Why did Reddit even have an AMA for this? Everyone knew it would turn out exactly like it did. The most difficult questions went unanswered. The answers they did give were either just bland corporate speak or actively detrimental, giving their critics more ammunition including opening Reddit up to accusations of libel. The whole ordeal seems to leave them in a worse position than if they just never did the AMA.