I really hadn’t expected that. Corporate doublespeak is one thing, and management decisions aren’t necessarily always in the interest of their users - but such an egregious act is really beyond the pale.
From the IPO mindset, what questions does this raise about the risk to the business from the leadership’s lack of integrity? And not just the propensity to lie, but to get caught so blatantly. Why would even a ruthless money-over-everything Wall Street investor want to gamble on that?
And kudos to Christian for doing what he did. Bullies need to learn that the truth will come out eventually, and if the revelation they can’t gaslight with impunity is a shock to them - good.
Edit: not to mention Christian's full-time job has just been ended by this policy change. How especially and thoughtlessly cruel to now also make him out to be an extortionist liar, and for nothing really.
Spez was the person who got caught editing a users comment in the backend to make them seem like an asshole or otherwise change the public perception of a question and response
This is 100% in line with something I would expect from Spez (the CEO)
He also spearheaded entirely killing off reasonably sized and loud portions of the community - love them or hate them, r/The_Donald was a massive, advertisable bloc of users.
Bit soon to whitewash history.
What are they buying? What would be advertised to them, and by whom?
I would like to be astounded. But Reddit has taken $1.4 billion in venture capital, meaning they are expected to make VCs well more than that. And one way that can happen is aggressively juicing the short-term numbers and IPOing, so that VCs can dump their holdings before everybody realizes that they were sold a bill of goods. I suspect that they were thinking nobody would catch them like this. Or that even if they did, people would have forgotten by the IPO pop.
I think there's a fundamental conflict of interest in the business models of web communities. I saw somebody sum up Web 2.0 as "you do all the work, we make all the money", which totally applies to Reddit. Those communities can work well on a pay-the-bills basis. But investors generally don't give a shit about communities; they just want money. So from the perspective of the economic rational actor, the right thing to do is to strip-mine the years of goodwill built up, maximizing short-term revenue. That will set the business up for long-term failure, but by that point it will have been sold off.
That's an important part of the private equity playbook and has been for a while. A good example is Simmons Mattress: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/...
And Cory Doctorow has been talking about this as enshittification: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Yeah true. Still seems like a legally asinine thing to do. It was really as simple as "I did not see eye to eye with Apollo" and you can power trip all you want after that.
I don't know if there is a slander case here, but a C level executive shouldn't even risk it to begin with.
likely not, given how strong libel/slander laws in the U.S. are. Funnily enough, correcting the story so quickly before damages were done may have weakened a case.
I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website.
If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web (or web mobile or the official Reddit app), the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority.
Of course I think the behavior is shitty but I don't think most people really care and reddit will not see any real impact of it either.
Even if you completely accept these policy changes as a long-term positive for reddit's growth, how can you have confidence in that leadership? How can you trust anything they tell you as an investor?
Steve has some kind of problem. It's been apparent before with editing comments in the live db, and it's apparent now. This problem is a risk for reddit. "Don't lie on or about phone calls" is pretty basic risk management and he can't handle it.
Reddit is still a decent-sized company with a whole team of people who've likely been running the numbers. Third party apps like Apollo are a nerd concern anyway, and nerds are outnumbered on Reddit these days; I'm sure most users are happily poking away at the first party apps.
We see this all the time on social media, where companies respond to the very vocal minority, because even though they may be a minority, their voice is amplified by social media. Not saying this is the case here, but it's why companies often respond even when the real impact may be small.
A thousand times this. Plus their repeated insistence that they "aren't like Twitter" (which is true, I think. They're worse.) They are obviously running scared of something, and that something can really only be that the impact of this is potentially enormous.
It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO I don’t even know how you think people will “lose trust in leadership”. They are stoked they’re about to make ridiculous stacks of cash, and the few that aren’t don’t matter.
But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App Traffic it's probably more that people in reddit care just not their ceo
Of course it's not. According to this site, around 3/4 of their traffic is from mobile.
https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/
HackerNews, I love you, but some of the comments in here are detached from reality. You'd be hard pressed to find any social media company that gets more traffic from desktop than mobile in the year 2023. This site is the exception, not the rule.
I know reddit is pushing it's all but even that is not 3th party apps.
The loud minority argument assumes homogenous cohorts, and that the loudness happens to cluster around inconsequential things. These criteria are almost never satisfied in practice.
Any online community today has extreme differences: usually a tiny minority contribute almost all content to the site (posts, comments). In Reddit’s case, moderation is also done by human volunteers assured by 3p bots (as opposed to automated ML policing + human intervention when someone famous gets sour). The vast majority of users are passively consuming, occasionally upvoting/downvoting.
Now, Reddit gained a massive amount of users in the last few years (something like 2x-4x) so bean counters start drooling over ad revenue from them. They may think that the old timers, power users and mods are a minority that can be gradually replaced by the new user pool without major incident. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m pretty sure that the bean counters don’t know either, simply because the graphs they’re looking at don’t have the predictive power they think. They’re risking the company’s main asset to find out.
I've already seen many of these subs having moderator led discussions about relocation options for the communities.
As for liability, the Ninth Circuit in Mavrix v LiveJournal held that if an agent of a user-content-hosting ISP (social media) has the means and opportunity to moderate, they also have the means and opportunity to interdict reasonably known copyright violations, and failure to act on those would jeopardise their DMCA Safe Harbour.
And there’s a lot of registered copyright holders that will 100% line up to be a creditor on statutory damages.
If the majority of people posting, commenting, etc are coming from the other interface it does not matter if the bulk of the "traffic" which is largely going to be non-power users that just read reddit comes from the web and the new interface.
There seems to be this idea that reddit will need to see massive traffic loss to die, no they need to see massive loss of quality link submissions and comments to die, that is a very different metric
But. I'm not a mod. I don't know what mods use. And the only reason reddit is good is because communities have tools to moderate themselves.
What I use is kind of irrelevant if the people who keep the communities I visit consistent and relatively clean are pissed and walk out. A casual user won't drop the site when Apolo closes, it would be slightly later when reddit becomes 4chan in absence of moderation.
As contractors, we have the same option to us by responding to a request with an outrageous fee that you think nobody will pay so you can avoid having to actually say no.
But he will be the person to increase revenue anyway.
Because he can now say that whatever app survived this is now paying for it instead.
In terms of user counts that's undoubtedly true. In terms of user influence I think that's yet to be determined. I think June 12-13 will be fascinating as a view of just how much of reddit and reddit content is managed by people affected by and unhappy about these changes.
Mods and highly influential users aren't evenly distributed across the user base by account age. Older accounts are more likely to be in both of those categories, and they're also more likely to have shifted to third party apps at some point particularly when those apps addressed problems they were having. There are communities that will never come back from this, and there are users who've earned reputation who will react by removing all their content and their accounts.
In a lot of ways HN is like a single highly-active subreddit - what would the impact be if the chronically underappreciated dang got fed up, removed everything he'd ever posted, and quit? How about if in his position as moderator he decided that it was time for the sub to go away and applied automoderation in such a way as to remove all posts?
For me I will continue to use reddit as I have before.
Do I think it’s going to kill Reddit? No. But I think this is going to have a large effect on their IPO and they will be treated as a hostile entity going forward than a neutral one, and that will add up over time. There’s no plausible deniability.
So, while it may be a small percentage of users, I suspect that losing them (or even just impairing their ability to moderate) will have an outsized negative impact on reddit.
Same. I have never used anything other than old.reddit on a proper computer, with the exception being when I need to edit the new.reddit sidebars for subs I moderate, which I still do on a proper computer.
they might not lose many users, but they'll lose their most important users.
I think this neglects the power struggle that would occur if its many unpaid moderators who do use apps far more than any other group, either shutdown subreddits or straight up quit.
I won't be using Reddit on mobile going forward, and I'll stop using it on desktop when old.reddit inevitably goes away.
That sounds like a pretty big impact for me...
is this a rule of the internet about the most vocal part of the community tends to be a tiny percentage? the "people on the internet" are screaming about something again today. in a previous job, i was introduced to this first hand. that's when i learned people will just double down on an incorrect theory/comment when shown incontrovertible evidence. yet, when you look at the numbers of the people shouting online is just a tiny percentage, but causes so much work for people to defend against. they come across as petulant children throwing tantrums because they didn't get exactly what they wanted.
Hmmm ...
For example, I paid for Apollo Pro as a one time thing so I’m not a subscriber. Only people paying for Apollo Ultra every month are counted. That 50k is just the most invested and dedicated of Apollo users.
I think you are missing an even larger point here. What is Reddit without its communities and users? At the end of the day, if people are no longer love using Reddit, there's nothing left to their business. How anybody thinks that the API decision was a good one in light of that (alienating your own power users) is beyond twitteresque.
I listened to the audio. It was very clear from the get-go the minute he said pay me $10m they were taking it very seriously, they said repeatedly "I just want to be very clear about what you're saying" and then said "that's sounds like a threat". The wording doesn't really make sense for a native English speaker when talking about a buyout. And they end that part with "I'm just going to hope that's not what you meant." which is generally how someone acts when they think you've threatened them but are going to be civil about it. So I don't think it's fair to say it's a blatant lie. And wouldn't you know it, what they thought was being threatened is what is happened?
But even from Christian’s voice.. I swear, should we start using /s in real life as well?!
No, but sarcasm is a tool and using it carries its own meaning, especially in negotiations.
> If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I'm just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too.
Again, I am not a native speaker and I havent' listened to the whole conversation just that segment, maybe there were other attempts like that at humor ?
edit: just read that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36248834
> From reading the transcript it reads to me that Reddit says Apollo is costing them $20 mil a year from lost opportunity cost, which I take to mean advertising/tracking et? The Apollo dev seems skeptical of that cost and is jokingly suggesting that if they cut him a $10 mil check, they can make it up in 6 months purely from getting that "opportunity" back with the added benefit Apollo just disappears.
> I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...
Could be but there are no laugh or tone that suggests the dev is joking or half-joking, there no audio cues that suggests "hey, it's a joke" but maybe it's the end of a 3 hours long talk and fatigue adds up and the joke really fell flat (edit: listening again, I can hear audio cues in the dev speech pattern at the end that indicates the intent to joke).
Jeez, and they made those TV shows about courts and crimes and lawyers look so easy to spot liars, jokers, innoncents, culprits :D.
For me "go quiet" doesn't even make sense in that conversation other than the way it was taken. In the terms of loud api user, it would still have been a large user of the API if Reddit owned it or not.
I can't wait until next month for it to all blow over. Because I really don't see anyone building a competitor.
Threaten him with pretty much what he did. We'll go quietly instead of making a large amount of noise and complaining and getting the generally hostile Reddit user base riled up.
Him and Spez (or whatever his name is) got together in a tense meeting on two opposing sides, there was a failure of communication (like in many such cases), things escalated for a bit after that but, in the end, I see that Spez recognised that he had understood things in an incorrect manner. That is I see no deliberate "lying" coming from the reddit CEO.
Days afterward, spez got on a conference call and falsely claimed that Christian was blackmailing him. An employee of Reddit itself affirmed that he said it in a summary of the call they posted to a (private) sub of high-level moderators, replicated here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/reddit_he...
(The summary in the main thread was written by members of the community on the call, the comment I linked is Reddit’s own summary.)
Reddit has also repeated the same claim off-the-record to multiple journalists.
At this point, this is just speculation and wishful thinking on your part. History has shown that this is not always the outcome. Things we try to teach kids like "winners don't cheat, and cheaters don't win", "crime doesn't pay", or any similar platitudes do not hold true in real life which adults live. If Reddit were to die tomorrow, it would affect me in no way. So this has all been a bunch of popcorn eating for me to watch everyone on their soapboxes make outlandish statements made on pure emotion.
The myth that Germany lost the war because of "human wave tactics" of the Soviets is exactly one of those lies from the losers.
They didn’t lock old.reddit out of new features; it’s a really unwieldy codebase, and making changes to old,reddit is like shaking a wooden water tower. It holds up the water tank as long as it’s a static load, not dynamic. I’ve had to read / maintain / debug source code in my career - and I’ve read the old open sourced Reddit code, and it is … well, it’s not designed for building up and out. It’s not even designed for maintaining over time. It was designed to get a message board running with occasional weekly downtimes, and a lot of “you broke reddit” and a bunch of RSS feeds and API endpoints, and no view to end user experience. It was built with the same mindset as building windows 3.1. Coding some of the features would be like backporting their support code to windows 3.1 - but not as libraries, as device drivers.
--- I initially clicked on this post fully prepared to be outraged at Reddit and its CEO, but after carefully going through the audio, I just can't share that sentiment. I've listened to the recording multiple times, making sure that I'm not missing any crucial points in the conversation. It is evident to me that this statement, "if you want Apollo to go quiet," did come across as a threat.
Yes, the developer tried to backtrack later in the call by adding "in terms of API usage," but the damage was already done. Steve's side even provided several opportunities for him to clarify his statement, claiming that he couldn't hear him properly. I understand that many members of this community are rightfully upset with Reddit and its actions in recent years (me included), but we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that it really felt and sounded like a threat. ---
Transcript of the call: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...
Audio: http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
In the least charitable possible interpretation for Christian, he made an implicit threat that he would continue to raise community clamor if not bought out, then backtracked it as soon as he was asked about it, both parties shared an apology for a misunderstanding neither believed was really a misunderstanding, and then Steve made public statements of the original interpreted threat only, with that editorialized paraphrase. In responding to that statement, Christian announced his app would close in 22 days, so it sounds like he can't be doing much with Reddit's community by then regardless.
I don't see the point in either of these situations for Steve to have said what he did, and he must have been aware of how this call could be interpreted in transcript and did it anyway. If I was hearing about this as a disagreement between business partners retold in a bar conversation, I might give reddit's team the same benefit of the doubt as you. In this case, it doesn't seem to matter much. The question remains WTF was spez thinking even making those comments.
There's a common error where, because one believes they have been aggressed upon, they can behave as if they actually have been aggrieved without actually examining realistic positions of actual evidence. I've seen this sort of thing happen in a variety of circumstances. Whether or not the Apollo developer intended to threaten or not doesn't actually change the behavior of the person who took whatever was said as a threat, and acting in a reconciliatory manner when one feels threatened is actually a very reasonable thing to do.
And do you think if Steve had made this offer, would we have even heard a second of this recording?
I mean, come on guys. He literally said "I can make it easy on you," named a price, and then clarified that he was mostly joking.
edit: Thank you for catching that! I've now changed "Steve" with "Steve's side."
You say it was later in the call, but it was an immediate request for clarification and then reworded and clarified once that statement was made. There wasn't some long back and forth where the developer finally relented and changed his mind.
If anything, the immediate response of "No, no, sorry. I didn't mean that to-" seems to indicate that he wanted to clarify what he meant.
And "if you want Apollo to go quiet" isn't the original quote anyways, not sure why you had to paraphrase but pretend otherwise.
Christian: I said "If you want Apollo to go quiet". Like in terms of- I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API usage.
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million."
> Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
In the audio call Steve apologizes for the misinterpretation after clarifying, but then goes off and still makes claims of threats.
It is clear that Christian was asking Reddit to buy out Apollo. It was a business proposition. Pay me 6 months, and I'll shut off my app, which is what Reddit wants. They want more users on their official app so they can make revenue. The language he used was clumsy, but it is clear, and it was clarified afterwards. The natural easy response is to say no, we are unwilling to pay, end of conversation.
The problem here is that Reddit seems to be litigating free-flowing language from part of a conversation as part of its defense for its changes. That is not only ridiculous, but wildly inappropriate.
To be honest, reddit has all the justification it needs to do what they're doing. Do I think they're making the right decision? No. But they're free to raise prices however they want. It's their API. But a billion dollar company accusing an individual of threatening them and then continuing to litigate the words used even after clarifications have been made is indicative of a catastrophic leadership failure on Reddit's side.
They may not be. According to Christian's post, they told him they will not do that in 2023. Were he inclined to sue them, he might be able to hold them to that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Reliance-based_estopp...
I just listened to your audio link several times, and I totally disagree that it sounded like a threat.
Also, the call was not with Steve, as Christian explained:
> Have you talked to CEO Steve Huffman about any of this?
> I requested a call to talk to Steve about some suggestions I had, his response was "Sorry, no. You can give name-redacted a ping if you want."
I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...
The alternative is that he has no choice but to shut down the app, given that they've announced what the price will be 30 days before it's introduction. Even if he'd said nothing there would have been a shitstorm; the timing would be obvious.
Reasonable notice of the price increase would have given 3rd party developers time to monetise and meet the new costs. A more reasonable price could have been borne by 3rd party apps with very little fuss. Making API access a premium Reddit feature would have put even more money in Reddit's pocket. Buying out the 3rd party apps would have been unpopular but would give Reddit the appearance of being less incompetent, underhanded, and duplicitous.
Instead, Reddit made literally the worst possible choice in this situation: alienating their users and the moderators that do most of the work on the platform.
(for the record, I almost feel like he's in the right to do so. Still weird how this is being presented)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypwgu1BpaO0
I think that interpretation is incorrect and based on Christian's attitude towards the whole thing. More likely it's projection on the part of Reddit's CEO.
Second, listening to the actual audio, it doesn't sound like a threat at all, and it all cleared up right away.
"You are claiming that my app is costing you $20M a year in API calls. Just buy it from me for $10M. Then it's yours to shut down if you want, or modify, or whatever you want to do with it."
That's not a threat. At that point it seems like he didn't have any obligation to do anything, and was offering them a mutually beneficial deal. Reddit's cost go down by $20M a year, he gets paid, and everybody (except probably the apollo users) benefits.
It is always amazing to me how easily people will accept however an issue is framed for them on social media.
Of course this was a threat. It wasn't a language issue. And the post-hoc explanation was nonsense. It was an obvious and indisputable threat.
And it’s even more amazing when people think they are smarter “than the average” and go the exact opposite way just because, failing a proper evaluation.
