Reddit is losing it’s mind

Anyone paying attention to tech news over the last couple months has probably seen Reddit decide to follow the shit show of Twitter. In short, earlier this year, Reddit told it’s API users (which had been offered for free for years), that it would begin charging for API usage. I don’t think any reasonable person who understands how all this works thinks that’s unreasonable, and many app developers who build Reddit apps agreed that was totally fine. Reddit even specifically said it would not make any drastic changes, and any changes they did make would roll out over the coming years. Well, they (seemingly primarily the CEO, Steve Huffman) changed their minds, and announced incredibly high API fees, and essentially yanked the rug out from under developers by giving them roughly a month before the changes were going to be made.

Why would Reddit do this?

Well I think there are a few parts to that question.

I’ll start with the rational reasons that make sense why they would charge for the API. First, servers and web services cost money to run. If you’re giving that away for free to developers, that is costing you money. You could argue that it is also not generating any profit for you. In literal terms that is true, but one could argue that the content generated by the users on these apps is providing value, which could definitely be an argument about the ROI on providing the API for free, but I get it. You can’t really prove that, or measure how much, etc. So you should at least cover the costs of running the API if you can, and I think that’s reasonable.

Second, Reddit has been rumored to be trying to go public for a couple of years now. So that would be a reason to make costs and income look as good as possible on paper. Ok, also somewhat reasonable I suppose.

Third, I think it’s fairly obvious that Steve is upset that OpenAI and other Large Language Model (LLM) based AI tools which have exploded in the last few months were able to train their models on Reddit essentially for free. To some degree this makes sense as well.

Steve said in an interview recently - “Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things… We are not in the business of giving that away for free.” Well… Kind of true. Literally that is what they have been doing, but I get the point. If you have that much data, other companies should not be able to just ingest huge amounts or all of it for free and essentially build a new product off of the data that is in there.

Given the overall reactions, however, it honestly seems like Steve is lashing out because he doesn’t know what he’s doing and was somehow blind sided about how these LLMs used their data.

What happened?

I will post several links that go in to more detail on all of this below, but in short they announced a huge price for the API, and essentially gave developers about a month notice about the change. This is effectively killing off 3rd party Reddit apps with extremely little notice, after essentially lying about what they were going to do, and when they were going to do it. How do we know they were lying? Well one of the most publicized apps being killed off is Apollo (My personal favorite Reddit app), made by Christian Selig, and he happened to record all of the interactions, and has recently posted about it. It’s a lot, but it’s pretty wild, and I think worth reading - https://gist.github.com/christianselig/449b0bd374167ff7335fab2b823120ef

At this point, it could have just been an awful PR execution of the changes that they were going to make, and a competent and mature executive would just swallow their pride, admit that it was handled poorly, clarify what they are trying to do, and try to minimize the PR damage. That is definitely not what Steve did. He continues to double down on just being an asshole about this.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview

Jay Peters Interviews Reddit CEO Steve Huffman for The Verge

Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’

They also seemingly started doubling down on just lying to everyone too. Moderators of several subreddits decided to protest the way things have been handled by changing popular subreddits to private, or marking them as NSFW, specifically because Reddit doesn’t put ads on NSFW subreddits. Reddit said they would not be overruling the mods on these decisions -

Reddit goes dark

Reddit communities with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

Reddit says it won’t overrule mods and force subreddits back open (but will it?)

But that didn’t last long -

Reddit is telling protesting mods their communities ‘will not’ stay private

Reddit will remove mods of private communities unless they reopen

Reddit starts removing moderators behind the latest protests

Community Value

Beyond the 3rd party apps, another absolutely tone deaf aspect of Steve’s responses is how clear it is that he doesn’t understand the actual value of Reddit. Reddit’s website is a cluttered and slow mess, and their first party app is a dumpster fire. So why is Reddit so important on the internet? It’s because of the communities. There are a lot of awful subreddits to be sure, but there are also a lot of extremely good and valuable ones. People spend a lot of time creating content on these, and the moderators of these subreddits deal with an unbelievable amount of work curating these, making the subreddits as good as they can be. The users and the moderators do all of this for free. Without this content, Reddit is nothing. Steve’s comments throughout this process make it clear he only cares about making money, not about cultivating these communities.

Reddit should have been clear

This all doesn’t make sense to me because it all just seems like an unforced error. If they had just been clear about what they were trying to do, this all would have been a much smaller deal. I’m personally upset because I love using Apollo, and the Reddit app is not something I’m going to use, but if they had just come out and said that they weren’t going to allow 3rd party clients, we’d be upset but whatever. It’s their right to do that, so if that’s what they wanted they can do that.

Alternatively, they could require 3rd party apps serve ads or pay more for ad-free. Hell, they could even require that users be part of Reddit premium in order to use 3rd party apps. There are lots of ways they could have made this work, but they were clearly not interested.

To put a nice little bow on everything, it’s clear where Steve’s inspiration is coming from…

Reddit CEO praises Elon Musk’s cost-cutting as protests rock platform

Update Jul 02, 2023 The Reddit moderators who coordinate many celebrity AMAs will no longer do so