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Slate article: "How CEO Steve Huffman went from being Reddit's co-founder to its much-needed savior at a difficult moment—and how he then became the villain..." (indieweb.social)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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took a deep dive into how CEO Steve Huffman went from being Reddit's co-founder to its much-needed savior at a difficult moment—and how he then became the villain at the center of Reddit's still-raging protests: https://slate.com/technology/2023/06/reddit-protests-steve-huffman-api-chaos.html

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago (8 children)

All of this PR probably could have been fixed very easily if they gave a 6 months notice and were going to charge a reasonable fee. I would have paid 3rd party a small fee to use their app to not see ads, but spez had other IPO plans.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (4 children)

All they needed to do was change how they handled the API for third party apps. Charging for it isn't the issue, it's the prohibitive cost they decided to attach to essentially ALL API access regardless of use, as a response to Large Language Models scrapping the site.

They could have introduced separate pricing for confirmed 3rd party app usage for individuals. Or they could have introduced individual API tokens for 3rd party app use, and locked it behind something like a reddit gold subscription. Even that would be better than effectively killing all of it off.

It's clear they did absolutely no brainstorming about other options before deciding to nuke it all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

as a response to Large Language Models scrapping the site.

This might be Reddit's argument, but it doesn't hold much weight. You don't need API access to read a website, a scrapper does that. The 3rd party apps were always the target, since 1) they attack their ad revenue and 2) show the lacks of the official app, which is a liability before the IPO. Also, don't forget that spez went to the media with the "threats" of Selig before he made any public comment.

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