Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is continuing his damage control tour, this time via a new interview with The Verge. Despite a large number of subreddits still offline in protest over Reddit’s changes to third-party apps, Huffman is once again doubling down on that decision.
This time, his argument is that the Reddit API – which has been used by third-party apps successfully for years – “was never designed to support third-party apps.”
I’ll save my full opinion on this for the “9to5Mac’s Take” section below… but I’ll give you the gist of it here: “bullshit.”
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Steve Huffman digs in
According to Huffman, the “vast majority of the uses of the API” are for “tools, bots, and enhancements to Reddit.” Huffman seemingly believes that third-party apps like Apollo don’t offer any enhancements to the Reddit experience (he’s wrong).
The Reddit CEO also places part of the blame on this situation on himself for apparently being the “guy arguing” in favor of third-party apps for years:
“So the vast majority of the uses of the API — not [third-party apps like Apollo for Reddit] — the other 98 percent of them, make tools, bots, enhancements to Reddit. That’s what the API is for,” Huffman says. “It was never designed to support third-party apps.” According to Huffman, he “let it exist,” and “I should take the blame for that because I was the guy arguing for that for a long time.”
Huffman was supposedly so out of the loop – despite being Reddit’s CEO and apparently arguing in favor of third-party apps – that he didn’t realize “the extent that they were profiting off our API.”
“I didn’t know — and this is my fault — the extent that they were profiting off of our API. That these were not charities,” he told The Verge.
Huffman was then asked whether apps like Apollo, which plans to shut down later this month because of the exorbitant API prices, add “value to Reddit.” In an apparent attempt to further stoke the flame, Huffman replied: “Not as much as they take. No way.”
“They need to pay for this. That is fair. What our peers have done is banned them entirely. And we said no, you know what, we believe in free markets. You need to cover your costs,” he said. “That’s our business decision, and we’re not undoing that business decision.”
Christian Selig, the developer of the beloved Apollo for Reddit client, estimated that Reddit’s new API structure would come to a total bill of $20 million per year for his app. “Apollo’s price would be approximately $2.50 per month per user, with Reddit’s indicated cost being approximately $0.12 per their own numbers,” Selig has said.
Selig has also noted that Reddit’s timeline for implementing these changes is simply unfeasible. “Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days,” he explained last week.
The charming Reddit CEO’s response? “Tough luck.”
We’re perfectly willing to work with the folks who want to work with us, including figuring out what that transition period will look like. But I think a deadline forces people, us included, to negotiate that.
It’s not reasonable to let this… it’s been going on for a very long time. Folks have made millions. These aren’t like side projects or charities, they’ve made millions.
What’s next for the subreddits that have gone dark?
But while Huffman has publicly painted a picture claiming the ongoing blackouts aren’t affecting Reddit’s business, things happening behind the scenes suggest otherwise. According to @aaronp613 on Twitter, who is one of the moderators of the r/Apple subreddit, Reddit is threatening to remove moderators of subreddits that are blacking out indefinitely.
The r/Apple subreddit is one of those subreddits planning to remain dark. In a message sent today, a Reddit admin said:
Leaving a community you deeply care for and have nurtured for years is a hard choice, but it is a choice some may need to make if they are no longer interested in moderating that community. If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users.
If there is no consensus, but at least one mod who wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
In today’s interview with The Verge, however, Huffman said that Reddit “respects the community’s right to protest” and indicated the company will not force subreddits to reopen.
9to5Mac’s Take
I highly encourage you to go read The Verge‘s excellent interview with Huffman. It’s a case study of how to further anger the users who generate the content on which your platform is built. Sure, apps like Apollo are successful and lucrative for the developers. But they are (or were) an integral part of the Reddit experience for millions of users.
Apollo is the only way millions of people use Reddit. For Huffman to say that apps like Apollo don’t add value to Reddit is moronic. It’s delusional. If this is what Huffman truly believes, he’s out of touch and needs to hand over the reins. There are plenty of people out there who could take control and better communicate these types of changes for Reddit.
It truly seems like Huffman woke up on a random Tuesday after a bad night’s sleep and decided on a whim to go nuclear and destroy the businesses of these third-party app developers. And every day since then, he’s woken up and dug his heels in, silenced user feedback, and stuck to his guns. The commitment to the bit is marvelous, I must admit.
Sure, Reddit needs to make a profit. Sure, it’s fair to charge third-party apps for access to the API. No one is arguing otherwise. But it’s not fair to extort them and charge astronomically high fees for access to that API. It’s not fair to implement such drastic changes with a 30-day heads-up.
My read on this is that Huffman is jealous. He’s jealous that third-party apps have built successful businesses and created user experiences for which people are willing to pay. Reddit, in its 16-year history, hasn’t created a native experience for which the majority of people are willing to pay. If it had, it would be profitable.
The fact that Reddit isn’t profitable is not Christian Selig’s fault. It’s Reddit’s fault. And more specifically, it’s Steve Huffman’s fault.
Huffman says he only recently became aware of the extent to which people were “profiting” off of Reddit’s API. If true, this is a prime example of what happens when you are reactive instead of proactive. If true, Huffman is a terrible CEO and should step down immediately. In all of Reddit’s push to become profitable, he never once considered a measured approach to charging for access to its API?
Huffman’s response to almost every question asked by Jay Peters reeks of spite. Every response has a passive (or not) aggressive undertone. The responses are laced with defensiveness. It’s the behavior of a petulant child. Huffman is trying to imply that third-party apps took advantage of Reddit to build successful businesses on the back of its API, but that’s simply not true.
In one part of the interview, Peters asks Huffman to provide a “sense of scale” for how well he believes apps like Apollo are doing in terms of subscribers. The jealousy is palpable:
You’re talking to them, go ask them! Millions. He said how many subscribers he has, his price list is public.
I have a guess on how many. He’s given a lower number of subscribers, I have another guess that’s higher. But it’s real money. And it costs us real money. It costs us about $10 million in pure infrastructure costs to support these apps. But it’s not labor, that’s not R&D, that’s not safety, that’s not ML, and that doesn’t include the lost monetization of having users not on our platform. Just pure cloud spend. It’s real money.
Another beautiful Huffman response comes when asked to elaborate on his belief that Apollo is a “fully direct competitor of Reddit.” Try not to cringe while reading this one:
Okay, hold on, timeout. You go to the App Store, you type in Reddit, you get two options, right? There’s Apollo. You go to one, it’s my business, and you look at our ads, use our products. That’s 95 percent of our iOS users. The rest go to Apollo, which uses our logo, or something like it, takes our data — for free — and resells it to users making a 100 percent margin. And instead of using our app, they use that app. Is that not competitive?
If there is one tiny, minuscule bright spot in Huffman’s interview, it’s this:
The third-party apps, if I were to describe their UI in one word, in comparison to ours, they’re simpler. I appreciate that. I like that. We’re making our own app simpler as well, because I think it has gotten too cluttered.
Steve, we agree on this one. The Reddit app is terrible and cluttered. For iPhone and iPad users, the design language is jarring and unintuitive. Apollo, meanwhile, offers an interface that’s easy to navigate and less cluttered. But it also exemplifies what so many users want and expect from a top-tier app.
Reddit’s native app becoming less cluttered would be a very small step in the right direction. But I don’t see a world in which Reddit ever matches what Apollo offers in terms of navigation, gestures, media playback, versatility, customization, and so much more. And keep in mind: Apollo is developed by one person. Reddit is a multibillion-dollar (unprofitable) company.
One more thing.
Throughout the interview, Huffman repeatedly says that Reddit is “willing to work with the apps that are willing to work with us.” But that offer only seems to apply if you agree to the imminent deadline, agree to the as-proposed API pricing, and agree to not ask for any changes or further clarification.
Otherwise, Reddit’s CEO might publicly and privately accuse you of “threatening and blackmailing the company.”
At this point, if Reddit reversed its decisions or made the API pricing more reasonable, I would not blame developers like Christian Selig for throwing in the towel anyways.
What it comes down to is this: Reddit wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It doesn’t want to subsidize businesses like Apollo for free. Fine, totally fair. But it also wants to build a platform on which all content is generated for free by the user. And moderated largely by volunteers who do that work for free. Is that a platform that developers and content creators should rely on?
I won’t use Reddit without Apollo. I especially won’t use Reddit without Apollo after everything that’s unfolded over the last three weeks. Quite frankly, I don’t want to give Reddit or Steve Huffman a dime.
As of Thursday, Reddit says that “more than 80% of our top 5,000 communities (by daily active users) are open.” In other words, one out of every five subreddits you try to visit will probably be offline. Excellent work, team. Great user experience. 5 stars. 10/10 would visit your website again.
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