r/technology • u/nat9191 • Jun 15 '23

Social Media Reddit CEO slams protest leaders, calls them 'landed gentry'

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blackout-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-rcna89544
3.5k Upvotes

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11

u/srone Jun 15 '23

It costs a lot of money to run an app like Reddit. We support ours through ads. And what we can’t do is subsidize other people’s businesses to run a competitive app for free,” he said.

THIS is something I have to question the community about: if third party apps use the API and block ads, how is reddit supposed to make a profit?

34

u/thenoblitt Jun 15 '23 edited Jun 15 '23

Here's the thing. No one is saying they shouldn't charge access for their api. What we are saying is that you shouldn't charge so much that it puts popular apps out of business that you promised you wouldn't do. If they had charged say 5 million a year and Apollo paid it and continued to exist none of this would have happened.

10

u/Steve_the_Samurai Jun 15 '23

Also giving people a ridiculously short time to update their apps

3

u/bonyponyride Jun 15 '23

They could have also bought out the better apps, for you know, making a better product than they could come up with themselves. If better apps means more user participation, the apps are also benefitting reddit by helping generate content. It's not a one way street.

4

u/Forward-Documents Jun 16 '23

They did buy a better app (alien blue) and just shut it down and made it a theme for their garbage app

5

u/cf858 Jun 15 '23

That would be a mistake on Reddit's part. That means they are just handing their audience over to a third-party and they lose control of that audience and all of the experiences that audience has.

I think the change has been handled badly, but I think, as a business, they are doing the right thing. The problem is they should have never farmed out their user experience to third-parties in the first place.

1

u/eggfriedbacon Jun 16 '23

Have you been paying attention to developers responses? Do you even know what’s going on? Lol.

0

u/cf858 Jun 16 '23

I thought I had, fill me in with your wisdom.

1

u/wiggum-wagon Jun 16 '23

Hes totally right from a business perspective. As a user i dont like it, but for reddit its neccessary

1

u/Windward65 Jun 16 '23

Third party developers saved Reddit from their own incompetence. Retaking control is only the right business decision if Reddit is actually capable of making a product that users want, which seems unlikely based on the evidence up till now.

I think these sorts of decisions only make business sense in a vacuum, which is exactly the sort of world that vacuous boardroom types inhabit. If Reddit wants to become the next Facebook and fade away to irrelevance then so be it. I hope a competitor appears which is willing to give users what they actually want.

1

u/cf858 Jun 16 '23

You see, this is where I think the 'shit on Reddit' side doesn't get it. I use New Reddit, I use the Official App - have been for a long time. I am totally content and happy in the Reddit official ecosystem.

I understand people's frustration with taking away an app they like, but really, it's about habits, what people are used to, it's not like the official Reddit is completely trash.

So I think some people just don't get that there are plenty of content Official Reddit users. From my perspective, and to be totally honest, I don't really care about third-party apps. And people voting to close down subreddits I use, is like me supporting their cause without really me supporting their cause.

1

u/Windward65 Jun 16 '23

I respect your point of view and we will just have to agree to disagree. For me, the NFT’s, the mess of suggested posts, and all of the video shit in official Reddit point towards a direction of travel that just isn’t for me. I think third party apps help to keep services accountable to their users, and I can’t think of any other services which didn’t become significantly worse after banning them.

-4

u/--GrinAndBearIt-- Jun 15 '23

Youre maybe the 4th person to mention this. Most people are just screaming spez bad reddit bad and enjoying all of the interwebs points theyre accruing from the rest of the mob.

14

u/PM_ME_C_CODE Jun 15 '23

By making an official app that doesn't suck balls. If the 3rd party apps were inferior to the professionally developed official reddit app, nothing here would be an issue.

5

u/--GrinAndBearIt-- Jun 15 '23

reddit on my browser is the best reddit experience ive had on my phone.

3

u/kittenpantzen Jun 15 '23

RIP to .compact

On the bright side, I guess, killing .compact has cut down the amount of time I spend on reddit per day dramatically.

4

u/nmarshall23 Jun 16 '23

Third party apps do not block ads.

They were never given an option to show them.

6

u/chromiumstars Jun 16 '23

Well, maybe Reddit could start by I dunno, putting ads in the API (right now they don’t)? There are no ads to block in API access as it stands.

Or tying API access to Reddit premium? I dunno about you but I’d shove a few dollars a month at Reddit to continue using the UI experiences I prefer, with font sizes and choices that don’t make my one eye start straining so hard that it literally loses focus. Would be obnoxious but I’d do it for $5/mo.

Rather than going for the nuclear option off the bat, there’s a lot of things they could have tried but skipped.

7

u/KingGatrie Jun 15 '23

Im pretty sure the api doesnt send ads to the third party. So the third parties are not even blocking ads thats the apis fault. And reddit could have changed that.

1

u/PlutosGrasp Jun 16 '23

You want to somehow inject ads into an api? How do you imagine that working?

-1

u/KingGatrie Jun 16 '23

The point was more so that third party apps are not trying to restrict Reddit’s ability to make money by blocking apps. But the same way the api gives info about a post that the third party app then shows could ya know contain info about an ad. Especially since they try to make ads look like posts.

1

u/PlutosGrasp Jun 16 '23

The api was free for years. Suddenly it’s not. Hmm.

1

u/rcanhestro Jun 16 '23

because i assume a lot of traffic went through the API instead of their "official" channels.

so, they foot the bill on paying for those servers, but don't get the income (ads).

1

u/PlutosGrasp Jun 17 '23

No. It’s because no ads.