[HN Gopher] Reddit CEO lashes out on protests, moderators and th...
___________________________________________________________________
Reddit CEO lashes out on protests, moderators and third-party apps
Author : MrCarnation
Score : 105 points
Date : 2023-06-16 20:03 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| astrange wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| Why post the AMP link when you really didn't have to?
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-prote...
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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.
| more_corn wrote:
| 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.
| plastikmissile wrote:
| They have indeed cut staff.
|
| https://fortune.com/2023/06/06/reddit-layoffs-job-cuts-
| stall...
| nocoiner wrote:
| 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.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway9274 wrote:
| Pro-tip from a guy whose first computer had a monochrome display:
|
| Going to war with your community never ends well for a forum.
| Specifically going to war with power users ends very poorly.
|
| Treating your forum community poorly is like treating your
| developer community poorly:
|
| You won't see the impact at first, because it occurs on a side of
| the platform not immediately monetized.
|
| Short term ad revenue comes from lurkers.
|
| But the content that drives them to your site? That is generated,
| managed, and made possible by power users.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| I would bet that the large majority of reddit users couldn't
| care less about the API stuff.
| frollo wrote:
| 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
| themadturk wrote:
| 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.
| nugget wrote:
| 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.
| more_corn wrote:
| Lots of users use 3rd party apps. All of them care.
| vikramkr wrote:
| 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
| rileymat2 wrote:
| Of course they don't, but it is hard to measure if they like
| the community due to the power users and moderators that do
| care about the API.
| hedora wrote:
| That's true in the same way that Wile E. Coyote doesn't care
| that he's run off the end of a cliff until he looks down.
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| Spitballing here: keep unauthenticated (as in, cached) access
| free; and add a button on /user to pay something like $10 for
| write access in 3P apps.
| deeviant wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| theolivenbaum wrote:
| 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
| dang wrote:
| 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.
|
| Yes to the other bit.
| searchableguy wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://github.com/searchableguy/hackernews_graphql
|
| 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).
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| klyrs wrote:
| Rewrite in APL?
| metadat wrote:
| 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 ;)
| dang wrote:
| (responding to just the HN part here) - hopefully all so
| small as not to matter much. HN's lesser order of magnitude
| has advantages.
| sosodev wrote:
| Why is charging money for the app sketchy? If users are
| willing to pay for the app then clearly it's providing real
| value to them.
|
| As long it's clear to the user that they could get the
| experience for free by visiting the website I don't see what
| the problem is.
|
| With that said, I think it's totally fair for HN to ask the
| app/user to pay for their API access too.
| undersuit wrote:
| 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?
| mvdtnz wrote:
| 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.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| 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.
| pygar wrote:
| 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.
| capableweb wrote:
| > 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.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| This dude needs to go back to CEO school.
| theogravity wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| As I've noted previously on HN:
|
| - 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.
|
| (Late edit: noting of irony.)
| badrabbit wrote:
| 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.
| jmkni wrote:
| If nothing else, can we all agree this is fascinating to watch?
| dekhn wrote:
| No, it's more like watching a slow-motion car-wreck where all
| the participants already knew they were drunk and their brake
| lines had been cut.
| chaosjevil wrote:
| 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".
| jgrahamc wrote:
| No. Not at all. Watching this feels like a total waste of time.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| 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.
| activiation wrote:
| Provably could make a movie out of it
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-16 23:02 UTC)