READING NOW This Guy Has No R: Remarks From Reddit CEO That Will Make Users Even More Angry
Reddit management had signed a regulation that put stones in front of third-party application developers, effective from June 19th. With this arrangement, accessing Reddit’s API is now paid.
With the disruption of the order that has been going on for years, popular Reddit applications such as Apollo would be condemned to pay hefty fees of $ 20 million annually, so it decided to close. While massive blackout protests have started across the platform for Reddit to back off, none of this seems to work.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says they won’t back down
Speaking to Jay Peters of The Verge, Steve Huffman continued his remarkable statements after the protests. Huffman started the interview by commenting on the protests, emphasizing that Reddit is a platform created by its users.
“One of the most important points I want to make today is that Reddit is a platform created by its users. My favorite analogy for Reddit is a city analogy. Cities are physical things, but they are actually living organisms created by their citizens. I think Reddit is pretty much the same. We are a platform and technology company on the one hand, and a living organism on the other, this democratic living organism created by its users.
These democratic values run deep on Reddit. Every once in a while there’s a protest in cities, and I think that’s exactly what we’re seeing right now. Even if we disagree, we appreciate that users care enough about protesting on Reddit, can protest on Reddit, and then our platform is resilient enough to survive this kind of thing.”
His comment on the API was “This is our business decision and we are not going back”:
“We’ve had blackouts in earlier times where there was a little more room for mobility. But the core of this blackout is the API pricing change. This is our business decision and we are not reversing that business decision.
We were clear about going into this, and I think that’s one of the reasons why our users were probably angry about this blackout, because there was nothing to be gained.”
The closure of Apollo took Reddit by surprise:
“We were also clear that we were willing to work with apps that were willing to work with us, and that hasn’t changed. Now the two biggest apps (Apollo and Sync) have thrown in the towel. This was unexpected, but we’re still talking to the others. And you know, we’ll see where that leads.”
- Reminder: Apollo developer Christian Selig told Reddit back in January that no API changes are planned for them.
It’s not the decision that upsets the developers, it’s the prices. However, there is no change in this regard:
“What they don’t like is the price, but that’s the price. Running an app like Reddit is expensive.”
Third-party apps win over Reddit, while Reddit doesn’t:
- Question: It seems that most of these developers are smaller – maybe one person – and are just forced to shut down. Are these people making millions?
“You’re talking to them, go ask them! millions. How many subscribers does he have, the price list shared publicly.
I have an estimate of how many. It gave a low subscriber count, I have a higher estimate. But it costs us real money. Pure infrastructure costs to support these applications cost us around $10 million. But this is not labor, this is not R&D, this is not security, this is not machine learning, and it does not include the loss of money caused by having users that are not on our platform. Just pure cloud spend. This is real money.”
The API was never developed to support third-party applications…
“The API was never designed to support third-party apps. We let it exist, and I must take the blame for it because I was the one who discussed it for a long time. But I didn’t know to what extent they were taking advantage of our API – and that’s my fault. I didn’t know these weren’t charities.
Do those who do really good things for our users like RedReader, Dystopia, Luna really like to add real value for their own cost? We were exempted. We will bear that cost.”
The bottom line is, Reddit got tired of supporting third-party apps for free and took action to unplug these apps with a snapshot. In any case, his job is to make this decision at the level of protest, and in fact, as the CEO said at the beginning of this interview, Reddit is “a platform created by its users”.
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