In the Verge interview, huffman said the api usage costs reddit $10 mio a year. So charging Christian alone double that seems just…greedy.
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I love that he clearly thinks Reddit is too big to fail, which isn't true of anything, no matter how popular...
Hmmm...I wish that were true. But I sincerely doubt reddit will fail entirely. It's going to pick itself up after this, no question. What matters is how valuable the site that remains will be when the dust settles.
Without the power user base and a good deal of the mods, when it's going to lose a good deal of its value. It will exist, sure. But I really don't think it's going to resemble what it was.
It's good news for spez, though. Just looking at the comments in a lot of posts recently, it definitely looks like the sycophants and boot lickers that feel the need to defend a tech company that made money for years off the back of misinformation and hate are the predominant voice. Spez may actually going back to reading comments again (I guarantee the guy hasn't actually been reading them for years).
“We can’t subsidize other people’s businesses,” Huffman said. “We didn’t ban third-party apps — we said, ‘You need to cover your costs.’”
Too bad the article author does not put this into context with counter-arguments. "Your cost" saying that's the cost is a wild claim. They supposedly set an arbitrary, high price.
“I think every business has a duty to become profitable eventually — for our employees shareholders, for our investors shareholders and, one day as a public company, hopefully our user shareholders as well,” said Huffman, who co-founded the site in 2005.
I'm not so sure every shareholder is necessarily looking primarily or only at money return. It's equally probable a shareholder may be a shareholder to support the platform - even if it operates at a loss - because it's a good or important platform.
His fat mouth got me to download a Chrome extension for the sole purpose of excluding Reddit from my search results. Even Pinterest didn't get me that far.
I feel like I should thank him. Nothing has compelled me to break my reddit addiction more than this. RIF is still installed, many of my major subs are back, I could open it at any time. I've reflexively opened the app so many times in the last week just out of pure habit.
But every single time I open it on reflex, I immediately close it. I have not felt the compulsion to check Reddit for a week now and that's the first time that's happened in...I honestly can't remember. Maybe a decade.
30% of it is because I know the type of comments that are getting posted now, the type of crowd that is making up a good part of the active user base at the moment, and I have no real interest to read all of their corporate boot licking. But the other 70% is solidly because of spez. Spite is a compelling motivator to break a habit.
The full interview published at The Verge gave a pretty good insight into Huffman’s inability to manage the situation. Comparing the way he talks about third parties and his “recollection” regarding Apollo to what the Apollo creator wrote, it’s completely worlds apart. It feels as if Huffman is in smash mode and piling on the lies.
(https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview)
“Protest and dissent is important,” Huffman said. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
"we're not giving in" said everyone ever that gave in to protest later
We will see. It can still go many ways. With how big Reddit is they can certainly push through. We will see what impact that will have in the long term.