After seeing one of his other press interviews, I've now changed my mind from thinking he might have a point in a cynical way to thinking they're doomed.
> In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted “a handful of times” with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform.
> Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which Musk purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
I guess if all the other VCs jump off a cliff your board will also want to jump off a cliff.
I haven’t liked Reddit’s actions so far, but I figured that they were just taking a heavy handed approach toward achieving profitability or a state where they could take the business public. But to hear that they’re looking at social media management that’s resulted in the destruction of tens of billions of dollars of equity value as the path forward … wow.
I’m way too cynical to think Reddit is doomed but even as a for-profit venture this is just seemingly increasingly ill-conceived.
Also lmfao at the letter to RIF. You tear up your contract with them and THEN you tell them they’re required to respond within 48 hours? LOL get bent.
I'm starting to reach the view that VC have decided that Reddit must either see a large liquidity event or die trying. Given the present investment environment, it's time to close off taps.
That's not the risk perspective I face, and I'd prefer to see Reddit accede to community demands (though I've long since abandoned much hope they'd do so, my own personal subreddit's been all but dormant for about five years on just that basis, though I've continued to mine it for links on topics I'd posted previously).
I'm not certain what Reddit's end game is should the IPO fail, or fizzle, but it would seem that preparing for an alternative online presence might well be a good idea.
Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. My guess would be that as a public company, Reddit looks a lot like Lyft - not a terribly differentiated product, cost structure out of control, poorly performing stock, but still a multi-billion dollar company.
I think I read somewhere that Reddit had taken like $1.7 billion in VC money. Even if its current valuation is way down from what it appears to have peaked at ($15 billion), there’s still plenty of cushion for the VCs to get their money out and give the employees some liquidity.
They’ll probably torch the franchise in the process, but at least for a brief moment, they have created some real value for the shareholders.
That's one take. The other is much simpler: it has been communicated that investors will no longer bankroll Reddit and so now they will have to make ends meet, one way or another.
That would be a part of my assessment. What your response omits is the consideration of an IPO, what potential valuations might be achieved, and the fact that VC manage a portfolio of assets. The net risk of an (increasingly unlikely) large liquidity event, vs. a wash, still sees its upside in the big-pop IPO.
Which is to say: it really is rational for investors to pursue a course with a high probability of killing the goose, as the alternative is still little or no return.
The post-IPO Reddit would still be on its own, though it might be able to capitalise somewhat on the IPO itself for a time. That it will eventually have to make it on its own as a business does seem clear. And frankly, increasingly unlikely.
An IPO presumes that there will be buyers. I wouldn't touch Reddit stock with a 10 foot pole until 3 years post IPO if I would ever even consider it.
But investors don't have to work for someone else's book, just for their own and if they see an IPO as a way out that's an excellent reason not to want in.
The relevant question is what market sentiment is on the IPO valuation, and how much that's shifted over the past month.
History shows that financial bubbles can and do occur. The market is not inherently rational. Who puts what value on the issue and why is a question that's hard to answer. History has also shown that those assisting in IPOs (e.g., investment banks) may commit to making purchases at specific price points in an attempt to bid up prices. Which is to say that the market is neither transparent nor entirely free or fair.
Again: the broader point is that VC manage a portfolio of investments, Reddit is one asset in that portfolio, and that calculus may well consider a 2x return as little different from a 1x or even a loss, relative to the possibility of a 10x+ exit.
Or to use the sportsball metaphor: this appears to be a Hail Mary pass.
As a mod, I'm well aware, and it's why I'd moved my own activities and focus elsewhere years ago.
Reddit has remained a useful space to launch the occasional new forum (e.g., /r/Plexodus) on a transitory basis, and still occasionally proves useful for technical issues, but that's really the limit of my present interaction.
I hate this timeline where all these tech CEOs now aspire to follow in Musk's footsteps and be assholes with zero empathy.
Yes, many tech companies are bloated. You (CEOs and other execs) did that yourself. You can at least be empathetic and have some tact when your actions drastically alter your employees lives.
Say what you will but Musk wanted to take it in a different direction, one that didn't need to pay activists to meddle with the algorithm and censorship, and didn't need to pay rent in it's buildings
Seriously. Elon Musk might be able to pull something off but that doesn't mean you can, because you're not Elon Musk. Spez saw Musk do a thing and tried to copy him, only to find out that he isn't Elon Musk.
Refusing to pay your vendors is actually a surprisingly common (small) business strategy. Notice nobody else has shut them off yet, even GCP or their main office landlord.
I think some of Musk's actions do make sense. Their staff and infrastructure costs were way out of control. They could have been reliably profitable every year just by cutting those costs. That's kind of insane.
The rest of his changes - stopping moderation and the API price changes are stupid.
Has Reddit cut staff? Seems like they're just copying Musk's mistakes.
You think firing 70% of a company is sane? How about alienating your advertisers? On an advertising funded platform.
Railing against work from home and then stopping paying you office lease? The first eviction was ordered today. How long till the flagship office doors are chained shut?
No part of the twitter debacle is sane. Modeling any part of one’s strategy on it would be laughable.
Not OP, but he did caveat it with saying some decisions, which I assume he meant that cutting costs on an overstaffed org is a good idea, but maybe cutting 70% before you have a good idea what they do might have been a bad way to do it.
You can make the sane/rational decisions, yet implement those decisions in the most insane way possible.
You didn't see that video of the girl who worked at Twitter but didn't seem to do anything other then drink coffee and go to yoga class? I think if the company is not making a reliable profit then maybe there's some costs that could be cut.
They were making a profit... It's also not possible to deduce anything from a video of someone supposedly only drinking coffee and doing yoga. She's still be an order of magnitude more productive than the CEO splitting his time between five full time CEO positions.
Obviously there was an insane amount of bloat. Many popular apps with similar scale run with 20-100 engineers ....... they had like 4500 or something?
Insane waste. Remember that lady going on about "how dare you critique infra! we use graphql!" Nonsense, they were obviously not that valuable: twitter is running great with them all gone..
I just posted a comment elsewhere to this effect, but as a extremely light Twitter user (have an account, don’t post, click on a handful of links to Twitter posts a week), really basic functionality has become mostly unusable for me since the buyout. Like, a good portion of the time, the site doesn’t even load for me. Video rarely works. The one time since then I tried to log into my account, it took probably 20 minutes between demented captchas and getting kicked back to the start of the process. And I’m not even talking about any higher level functionality or whatever the subjective experience as a poster is like, just simple passive viewing.
Obviously a lot of people were unduly pessimistic about Twitter’s technical resilience, but from what I can see, it does not seem to be a well oiled machine.
I have had the exact opposite experience. Do you remember how used to take a second for replies to load under a tweet? Now it’s instantaneous. My suggested feed is a lot better too.
To add another data point from someone who used to use the site regularly but still occasionally checks in once and a while, I have noticed a significant degradation in quality for the main feed and random outages/errors seem to crop up a lot more frequently. But aside from our respective pieces of anecdotal evidence, we’ve seen how pathetically they’ve been recently handling scaling and technical issues with high traffic events like the Desantis campaign announcement.
My suggested feed is absolutely useless, I'm not interested in what Musk has to say and I'm especially not interested in the unfiltered mouth diarrhea from MAGA morons like MTG. I don't even live in the US, why would I be interested in seeing it?
It's working perfectly afaict. "What is a woman?" for example was streamed a gajillion times just fine. The 700k stream of DeSantis or whatever took twitter down though, I doubt it will next time..
Honestly, no, I don’t remember, but my mental model of replying/threading on that site has been broken for a very long time. I’ve never been very sure how it works, or if it’s working properly, so I’m probably not the right person to ask about that aspect!
For me the suggestion algorithm used to insistently make me learn about music/celebs and random topics I don't care about, but now it just shows you friends of friends and random Blue users, who are largely crypto rightist propaganda like "black people getting in fights" accounts.
There does some to be an effort to make it look like the reddit default page since there's some viral meme pages mixed in.
Though for the last week it really desperately wanted to show me posts about some Spider-Man movie, so the old stuff still activates sometimes.
- Spez and Reddit created that so-called "landed gentry" through their own rules and policies, and were more than happy with it until about two weeks ago. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36352719> Irony of actual power-elite labeling volunteering serfs as a power elite also noted.
- A "small number of users" discounts the activity, value, role, and influence of those people, and ignores the pervasive power-law relationships in virtually all of media, online or off. Compare against HN where a small fraction of profiles contribute the overwhelming majority of both comments and front-page stories. More deets: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36348493>.
Whatever else his CEO skills, crisis communications and adroit use of metaphor are not spez's strong suit.
As for the effectiveness of the strike and protests: Reddit has now been front-page news in national and international media, leading up to a planned IPO, and Not In A Good Way, even if the coverage of interviews is ham-fisted and one-sided. Which reads as a win for those protesting to me.
I generally fall into the same opinion. If he's so upset about how things turned out, then why did he deliberately structure everything to turn out this way?
Absolutely nothing of reddit has come as a surprise. Not their past dramas and not this current protest. People observing the situation have accurately predicted each stage. The only thing that hasn't been surprising is how willing Spez has been to put his foot in his mouth.
So I'll throw in a few more predictions:
1. Reddit will IPO, despite legitimate concerns about their inability to turn a profit and the very real likelihood that new AI-driven services will render its model redundant. Spez will get the payday that he's so steadfast upon.
2. The IPO will first buoy, then go into a long decline as it becomes clear that the site has no direction, nothing to leverage into new markets and will struggle to maintain dominance and relevance in a world were information is increasingly tailored via AI-driven tools.
On changing moderation criteria and conditions: I'd pointed out issues with moderation (in part at Reddit) previously. My personal subreddit's presently closed, but thank you Internet Archive:
"Content rating, moderation, and ranking systems: some non-brief thoughts" (2014)
A real problem is we’ve entered a period of society where certain actors have seen certain other actors repeatedly act awful and get away with it-because society has just accepted that behavior from those repeatedly abusive actors. So the normalization is it’s “ok to be awful so long as you’re always awful.”
Cheaper. Simpler electronics. Less memory requirement (text mode only stored character codes, with the font in the ROM). Not all computers did graphics.
I'm a casual daily/weekly user of reddit but rarely post and have never been a moderator. I only access the website via my desktop or mobile browser. I don't care about API prices per se.
However: this whole episode has left me with the impression that Reddit is a company hostile to its own users - that they don't care about putting users and user experience first. That makes me consciously want to cut down my usage and explore alternatives, because I trust the brand less than I did before.
I'm a long time reddit user and post frequently but have never been a moderator. I'm quite aware that reddit users are and have always been quite hostile to the company and especially advertising based attempts to monetize the site (and it would be fair to number me among those users). I've never understood how it was supposed to be profitable or create some huge exit for those who want out.
People get pissed off because they often end up doing the opposite of what makes sense for the business and the users.
In advertising terms, subreddits are analogous to special interest magazines. Despite this, Reddit's initial approach was to spam subreddits with low quality ads that had nothing to do with the subreddit's purpose. Going to /r/golf I saw an ad for a Samsung phone and then:
> r/movies tell us who you’re most excited to see in ASTEROID CITY. In cinemas June 23
They've also made the ads barely distinguishable from regular posts.
> I've never understood how it was supposed to be profitable
Not hiring 2,000 people would've been a strong start. Improving long-standing issues with the platform rather than churning through poorly implemented and largely irrelevant features would be another.
They could easily have monetised the 3rd party apps with a much less negative reaction by requiring users to purchase Reddit subscriptions for access. Users that didn't want to pay would migrate to the official app and the subscription earns more than the API fees would.
Yep, and that's why as the parent comment mentioned the threat is from what it does to content creators and mods - the passive lurkers and consumers don't care about the API but they do care about the content they show up to reddit for and if that tanks they'll have no reason to stay
Yeah, but they care about reading the stuff written by the API users.
Most of the monetizable users are passive readers of content written by power users. Lose the power users and the readers will follow. Maybe not immediately, but they will follow
I'm really surprised by the apparently small number of 3rd party app users. It amazes me to think that cutting off apps that serve disabled users was even considered, though perhaps that was just a blind spot for the company.
Part of me finds it hilarious that if Reddit just straight up closed its API saying they didn’t want to support it anymore Twitter-style and Spez just shut up, they would most likely be in a far better position right now.
I don’t understand why they felt the need to engage so much with app providers and be so childish about the whole thing. They just had to assume they were yielding the power they have over the platform and that’s how things were going to be from on now, no long explanation needed. They could still be communicating this way actually and it would sound much more honest and serious that what they are doing currently.
As of now the whole thing is a master class in how not to communicate.
Also--they keep talking about "we can't give our API away for ML training"... But couldn't they just say "If you're using this for ML you must pay us more" in their API contract?
The fable of the "The Scorpion and the Frog" comes to mind every time I consider the current reddit problems. It's simply the nature of the beast, we all knew this was coming at some point. A lot of reddit user seems to be under the misapprehension that reddit is a co-op.
I was part of a forum based community in ~2010 that constantly debated moving to reddit. It boiled down to "no one joins forums anymore vs we lose control". These events were not unpredictable.
Reddit wants users to use their app so they can accidently click on ads. Like most of the economy they've switched from prioritising growth to prioritising value.
Reddit will be fine. They will add moderation tools to their app. The mods who leave will be replaced.
> A lot of reddit user seems to be under the misapprehension that reddit is a co-op.
Yeah, people tend to listen to others in charge of companies too much. In this case, Huffman previously stated things like:
> GQ: One of the big turning points in Reddit’s history was Digg’s collapse. It was your biggest competitor and imploded almost overnight. Is there anything about Reddit that makes you worry something like that could happen to you?
> Huffman: I think the problem Digg had is that it was a company that was built to be a company, and you could feel it in the product. The way you could criticize Reddit is that we weren't a company – we were all heart and no head for a long time. So I think it'd be really hard for me and for the team to kill Reddit in that way.
And people ate it up, bait and everything.
> Reddit wants users to use their app so they can accidently click on ads
It's about more than just that, otherwise reddit would just force 3rd party apps to serve ads, just like the official client. Instead they seem hellbent on removing 3rd party apps fully.
This is true, a lot of people do seem to me laboring under the misapprehension that Reddit is a coop. Probably more than any other factor, that explains 95% of the current controversy (the other 5% mostly being that spez thinks he’s Elon Musk but, well, he ain’t Elon Musk).
But on the flip side, I don’t think it’s at all clear yet that Reddit is a viable profit-making company that isn’t reliant on unpaid labor to maintain usage at current levels. A couple months from now, I think we’ll have a much better idea.
My guess is that Reddit will be “fine” (in that private or public markets will continue to value it as a multi-billion dollar business) but I’m not highly confident in this prediction. It could also become a poorly moderated cesspool that still has thousands of employees and no equity value, and if it needs to be restructured, I’m not really sure that the network effects are so great that it’ll continue to fill the same role that it currently does.
For me, Twitter has become basically unusable since the buyout, and I mean that purely in a technical sense (i.e., no reflection on content, bans, unbans, blue checks, etc.) I just mean that probably half the time I click on a Twitter link, the page doesn’t load. Video works for me maybe a third of the time. If Reddit becomes similarly unreliable due to cost cutting, I don’t know it’ll be that much fun to hang out there.
Anecdotally, it seems like most of my acquaintances have stopped using Twitter as a social network. Not out of principle, but because their feeds just stopped having interesting conversations and the bad parts got worse. They still follow creators and news feeds, but their use seems passive and read-only.
I was never the biggest Twitter user, but I wouldn't be surprised at a similar kind of outcome for Reddit. I've already noticed a nose-dive in the quality of my feed - it's mostly dominated by the smaller subreddits that didn't join the blackout, overall activity seems to have dropped off in an absolute sense, and when a larger subreddit makes it in my feed the conversation is just...nastier than it was a few days ago. I had to come out of HN-retirement to find a decent conversation about tech.
Calling mods “landed gentry” is… look can we just use the same logic on Reddit CEOs? Where’s the vote Spez out button?
He’s done so much shady stuff over the years. But his lies trying to throw shade on the Apollo creator were, in my opinion, fairly unforgivable.
Would be great if we had a vote button. He’d get fired, ideally “for cause,” and the new CEO would phase the API changes in over a year or so and give app developers a bit more time and input on the process.
I don’t want to use Reddit any other way than through Apollo. The Reddit team sucks at UX. The redesign a few years back proved that. Spez probably thinks Craigslist looks amazing.
Anyway I’m all for being able to vote mods, and CEOs, out.
I actually read this article for some random reason (it happens sometimes) and HN has a similar problem - there are third party apps that charge money. HN has always taken a friendly approach to third-party projects as long as they make it clear they aren't official and include links to the original HN comments/submissions, but the charging money part doesn't feel right to me. I'd rather that everything HN-related be free and in the spirit of just-because.
Since Google started charging us quite a bit for the Firebase API a year or two ago, we're in a similar position to what the article describes - we're paying for https://github.com/HackerNews/API and thus indirectly funding the commercial apps.
Btw this is not to take a side on any of the Reddit stuff - that would be ultra dumb of me and anyway I'm succeeding at staying ignorant of the details. But I think it's worth saying something publicly about the analogous issue on HN because we might have to do something about it at some point.
The current API isn't particularly usable (you have to request individual items to get an entire thread) and our long term plan is to replace it with a more usable one that just gives a JSON representation of any HN URL and is hosted on our server. I've been posting about that for an embarrassing number of years (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) but you all know how slow we are. Anyhow, whenever we get there, we'll probably do proper things like have API keys and terms of service and whatnot. If the commercial app thing is still a thing at that point, maybe we can find some decent way to address it.
I agree, charging money for an app built atop a free service is sketchy and doesn't feel right. But how much are they actually making? HN only has a few 10's of thousands of DAUs, and HN's population is notoriously difficult to monetize. Still, it wouldn't bother me one bit if the HN policies changed to forbid such parasitic behavior.
The real story is that this is all a sideshow and low-value distraction compared to the commercial entities scraping the fuck out of HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, and the Internet at large purely for their own gain without giving anything back to the data providers. The real parasites being the data-hungry LLM makers who drive zero external traffic and don't credit sources in any way.
I've actually taken all of my non-commercial websites offline for the first time in 22 years, because I don't wish to continue feeding this beast. I can't see any upside in continuing to donate to them.
Edit:
p.s. @dang: Your message was better with the burning bridges Reddit joke ;)
About parasitic behavior: I think if Reddit had said “in 6 months the API will no longer be free. An average user creating W posts, X comments, Y searches and Z votes will incur $1 in monthly API costs” then there would’ve been very little drama. 99% of people will be sympathetic to a company charging for a thing that costs them money to provide.
It’s the fact that Reddit is using this event to get rid of third party apps by charging ridiculous prices for the API, not honestly owning this decision and finally giving less than a month of transition before it comes into effect that has made all these people angry.
To represent the angry people as just freeloaders who demand to get stuff that costs money for free would be dishonest.
I have to say including Twitter — who wanted to kill of third party apps — to make Reddit seem more level headed is an interesting way of approaching it.
The gist is this: if I am the average user, not on Reddit Premium and using the native app with ads, the available numbers indicate Reddit earns $X on me. Their API pricing is at least $2X per user. So either they are seeing API users as cash cows, or they want to price them out.
And like I indicated, there’s a loting things Reddit could’ve done that would’ve led to less drama:
- Longer transition period
- Outright banning third party apps
- Include ads in the API
- Make API access part of Reddit Premium
To me it seems that every step of the way, Reddit made the most confusing and most rage inducing choice available to them. That’s either incompetence or malice.
Without a deeper understanding of what the nature of the API is, and how many requests are needed to service a given use case, the comparison doesn’t mean much.
The Apollo developer claimed that it would cost him on average $2.50 per user per month, to use the API.
That is pretty nuts for a free app, how many people would pay for that?
I don't see a problem with charging for a product (I feel like this sentiment isn't exactly unique here on HN). Just like I don't see a problem in Reddit charging these 3rd party apps to play ball. But the pricing was not grounded in reality, certainly not with but a 30-day notice. All of the developers whose apps will be shutdown at the end of the month are on record saying they were more than willing to pay a fee to access the API, but that the cost and timeline is absolutely impossible.
Particularly, with Apollo, many of his customers were on annual subs, and even if he started charging more to pay API price increase, if his customers would even bear it, it will still take much longer than a month to make that transition.
There really is no defense for the timeline Reddit put forward for this sweeping change.
So, having done some recent scraping of HN (historical front-page views only, completed in a couple of days, with only incremental updates now) ...
... and looked at the API and finding myself somewhat underwhelmed ...
... the JSON option would be interesting (much easier to parse than raw HTML, particularly HN raw HTML). Given that there are performance concerns with the primary server already, I'd suggest:
- Put JSON on a secondary server. (Automatic redirects for, say, id=?<ID>&json=1 requests being an option to transparently serve via requests made to the main site.)
- Use some sort of account-based mechanism to regulate access. I'm thinking more in terms of "how much" and "how fast" than "who" and "what", though that might also come into play.
I also suspect that a JSON delivery would also make alternate app / front-end design even more viable, so you might want to consider that in design and provisioning considerations.
Oh believe me it's never going to happen until the performance problem is fixed. That's the other thing we've been waiting on for years. It's coming though.
As a former user of Relay Pro and Reddit I paid DBrady for how his app used the free API for ME.
Me. The user. If Reddit wants to change my behavior... API away but don't go after these people who are just facilitating API access. What's next Dang? HTML browsers?
Motivation + Reddit's handling of the situation has been the main driver of the negativity. Very few people took issue with the idea of Reddit charging commercial users of it's API.
Reddit's initial announcement was that 3rd party apps were costing them money, that API access would be paid for soon™, and that NSFW content would no longer be available through the API.
This raised immediate concerns from a few different groups. Moderators rely on free 3rd party tools to deal with a lack of functionality in Reddit's own, the removal of NSFW content from the API would cause issues even if the tools themselves were exempted. Visually impaired users rely on accessibility clients to deal with Reddit's poor experience with screen readers/magnification.
Reddit scrambled to respond by stating there would be exemptions for non-commercial mod and accessibility tools. This dealt with some of the issues.
3rd party app developers then began shutting down and it was revealed that, in addition to removing NSFW content and exorbitant pricing, Reddit had given developers only 30 days to respond to the price changes.
During all of this Reddit's CEO was openly, and privately, making disparaging comments about the userbase, 3rd party app developers, and moderators.
Reddit's actions throughout have proved that their intention was to kill off the 3rd party applications and that, without community outrage, moderation and accessibility tools would have been collateral damage. It doesn't take a genius to comprehend that 30 days is not enough time for the 3rd party developers to transition their paying users to Reddit's new payment model, or that users would not have been willing to pay for a version with censored content.
There's a major difference between you guys and Reddit though - this is not your main gig. Reddit is Reddit's only thing. HN is a side thing for YC. That makes a massive difference to how much cost is reasonable to eat.
The peculiar viewpoint you’re demonstrating in this comment is similar to Reddit’s. It’s not objectively wrong, but the calculus involved definitely looks weird from the outside.
How would you quantify the value of Hacker News to Y Combinator? You’re talking about it like it’s a cost centre, a charitable contribution to society; what proportion of Y Combinator’s revenue can be attributed to the brand and content marketing benefits which flow from the (almost) entirely unpaid contributions of HN users? The Firebase API now costs “quite a bit”; is that amount comparable to the income of a YC partner? How much should a third-party developer be compensated for the work of building a native client which brings HN to a wider audience or increases the engagement of its existing audience? How much should an HN user be compensated for their submissions and comments? Which people deserve to make money here and why? Who is “indirectly funding” whom?
This is the best solution, and really what Reddit should have done.
There’s no reason they couldn’t have required Reddit Premium to access the API from third-party apps. Then the app developers don’t have to deal with the burden of payment processing, Reddit theoretically earns more than it would under the API plan (the Apollo dev estimated the monthly API cost for an average user would be $2.50 (but would be much higher for actual customers due to needing to pay the Apple tax and for development costs) while Premium is $5 per month right now and already removes ads), and nobody gets angry.
Plus then you have people’s credit card information, and thus you can avoid the regulatory issues that Reddit is claiming they’re encountering with NSFW content.
The fact that Reddit seemingly refuses to even consider this option really confirms that this is being done purely out of spite over both not being able to monetize OpenAI’s training data collection plus spite over most of the third-party apps being more financially stable than Reddit currently is.
I agree with pretty much your entire post, but do want to disagree with a part.
> The fact that Reddit seemingly refuses to even consider this option really confirms that this is being done purely out of spite over both not being able to monetize OpenAI’s training data collection plus spite over most of the third-party apps being more financially stable than Reddit currently is.
I think it's a combination of spite for the LLMs (which IMO is short sighted, they will just turn to scraping HTML), but also they assume that they can make more off the data vacuum and ads serving to those users than even Reddit Gold would pay them every month.
I don't think it's spite, I think it's rational. (Not that I approve.)
They're widely expected to IPO imminently. One of the most critical metrics in the S-1 will be mobile app DAUs/MAUs. They can't credibly include the 3P app users in those figures. They also don't want to be in a situation where most of their paying subscribers are insulated from future "features" and UX "evolutions" that investors will demand.
So, it makes sense to me that they would induce a scenario where users are forced to choose between migrating to the official app or quitting reddit.
At the very least it is reasonable to separate out high volume usage versus front end replacement and paywalling the former. Since you don't monetize, my intuition is that alternate front ends shouldn't actually be changing your cost. Though I can understand wanting some sort of revenue or cost sharing if revenue is being generated - or these front ends just being free in the spirit of hn.
It's the last bit that matters to me - the sprit of the thing. The currency of HN is curiosity, not money. Though much of the curiosity is about money.
That's economics. There's no such thing as a free lunch. If HN gives out free API access and holds the line, them I don't see a problem with it. Personally I do think you should charge some minimal amount so people don't abuse it. Development for new features could also be funded from this income.
What's the order of magnitude of requests the API serve per day? I've build a demo on top of HN data and I had a feeling that most of it is quite static and could easily be cached behind something like cloudflare
I don't know. If someone wants to tell me how to look it up in the byzantine labyrinth of google's cloud admin ui, I could give it a try, but might not make it back out.
I built a GraphQL API to cache the responses and dataload them like 2 years ago on top of HN API so it can give nicer responses and don't hit the endpoint as much through batching. It can load entire HN thread in one request.
It is still incomplete though because I remember you said I could not scrape the site beyond robot.txt limits which would be too less for the use case because I wanted to provide write functionality so I gave up.
Maybe people can host a caching relay and a layer like graphql on top as an unofficial way to lessen the burden on the firebase API (it's a pain to use anyway).
I deleted my Reddit account today. Six years old with 7k karma and some coins I've paid for. It's clear the CEO will do anything to trample over moderators and developers to get what he wants.
I don't have another place to move to. I did sign up for some Lemmy servers, but I'm afraid the fragmentation due to how servers federate with each other will lead to smaller communities.
15 years old account here. I'm using Redact to delete all comments and posts. It runs on my phone so it's easy to do so. Don't delete your account as Reddit is actively restoring your comments. Keep it and keep deleting whatever they restore.
Same. My Reddit account is 12 years and I have over 190k combined karma. I used to use the official app because “it’s official” but after using Apollo I cannot fathom going back. Haven’t been on Reddit now for close to 2 weeks and have barely noticed. I’ve just been playing a lot more Zelda trying to get through the Silo book series.
I’m sure I’ll find new communities for my actual interests but Reddit was always very “noisy” to me due to being subscribed to so many subs.
My concern is lack of content / discussion - you have to hope that there are users in that small community that are willing to generate good content, and there are users to contribute to the discussion around it.
If every twitter employee made $150k, that would be about $1B with 7k employees. So at most 20% of revenue could have gone to paying salaries. Some layoffs may have made sense to adjust for post-covid but elon is obviously a cruel idiot being cruel to prove a point. He could have instead kept advertisers happy and moved infra to on-prem. Even if I am wrong and Elon was right, he could have taken 2023 to slowly reduce workforce in a way that didn't piss off users and advertisers. He is a terrible businessperson even if you don't give a shit about users or reputation and all that because he didn't value his money well and didn't look after Twitter's bottomline.
Even if his goal was to turn twitter into a conservative friendly place, he is so blunt, obtuse and uncalculating that he reminds me of Dr. Evil in his silliness. Is the reddit CEO trying to be "mini-me"? Birds of a feather I guess.
I get the netflix type of pissing people off, business is business. Even with Reddit, that was my perspectice, their api, who cares if they want to ruin it. But I gotta say, there are ways to cleverly backtrack and still appear to be in control.
For example, introduce tiered pricing and a free tier for api keys that are restricted and tied to a specific user account with limits in the number of subreddits under that user's control. Basic divide and conquer, please the volunteer mods and continue to piss off the for-profit front-ends. And then add pricing to the free tier after a year. Boil the frog slowly and all.
Their lack of sophistication really amuses me, how can people like this even manage to become a CEO? Must be whatever gives them confident to be so arrogant to begin with.
It's a bit like watching snail courting rituals on Discovery: you're watching something sloppy, between practically brainless entities, and really slow. And you know that one of the sides will be eventually fucked, perhaps both.
But the inner zoologist of you says "keep watching it".
As with every big shift/crisis, there's a lot of opportunity for change (for good and bad, subjectively) so I do agree this is particularly fascinating although I'm definitely sad as a RiF user that there's no viable way to keep the site usable and it's displaying such contempt towards its users, even the mainstream ones (I've already seen how much contempt it had for everyone who didn't agree with the mainstream US political Reddit narratives but this is different. It's actually really aggressive against all those people that had a very strong relationship with and made Reddit what it is.
I do think this is all deeply blown out of proportion. I asked a few of my friends about their opinion of the debacle this week, all of whom are in the tech sphere mind you, and they all either didn't even know what was going on or didn't care.
Spez is likely right in this regard. This will pass and blow over in short time and people will simply move on. Your average Joe is already using the first party app, and even if he isn't today, he will easily switch over once Apollo et al. are shut down.
It's hard to say. What's the difference between Reddit and 4chan? Technically there's very little. There's nothing Reddit does that 4chan cannot do, technically. The difference is the community, the people dynamic. It may very well just blow over and stay the same, or Reddit may slowly rot like Digg and MySpace did.
I’ve seen a number of threads where regular people are discussing this and it seems plenty of people are just confused, didn’t know it happened, don’t know what an API is, or are rolling their eyes at the mods for unilaterally hijacking subreddits on a long bet Reddit will allow 3rd party apps again. Mods aren’t exactly popular on Reddit as it is. They are not exactly community leaders / established representatives that people are familiar with. They are just the guys locking threads and deleting your comments etc.
People also claim it was democratic since a few sub ran polls. The WoW subreddit ran one in the middle of the day and it got a few thousand votes before they closed it. The subreddit has 1+ million subscribers. So you can understand why some people were caught off guard.
The cultural difference between powerusers and the average Reddit user is probably pretty different (HN isn't representative either). Protests are fun, you get to stick it to the man, but most people just want to read some stuff while on the toilet. They aren’t that engaged.
r/nba closed it during the last game of the finals, the most popular time of year on the sub. People have already migrated in droves to other subs like r/nbadiscussion.
Honestly? The early part of this week, Reddit reminded me of what it was like 7 years ago. Around 2016. Not sure what changed. Maybe r/TheDonald or the pandemic made everyone flock there. The weight of the bigger subs seem to pollute the discourse of the smaller subs in my mind.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna89700 (sorry for the AMP link…)
> In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted “a handful of times” with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform.
> Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which Musk purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
I guess if all the other VCs jump off a cliff your board will also want to jump off a cliff.