Wow. That is a truly horrendous interview. This saga just keeps getting better. That interview is somehow the absolute worst thing he’s done so far, and he’s pulled a lot of shit.
The only thing more gross than Elon Musk is an Elon Musk imitator. He’s just. so. angry.
For me he’s also stupid, I mean, you’re managing one of the biggest websites in the world and you don’t know accessibility is an international standard?? You need “guidelines” before you know what you should implement in your own official app? (he said this during the AMA) Come on …
A lot of these tech goons are losers in their personal lives and get huge ego strokes being able to control these platforms. Any questioning of their actions is perceived as a direct challenge to them as a person.
If that just became the worst he’s ever done, I can’t wait another week before he stoops another 10 feet lower.
The way he setup Pao so he could look like a savior is still the worst thing he has done. Or maybe dealing with CP as a mod of jailbait.
The Verge interview is Here
The tl;dr is it’s the AMA part 2: electric douchealoo
These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free.
I just can’t believe that a CEO of a company who doesn’t pay their moderators would actually say something so tone deaf.
And blatantly false.
Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up
LMFAO that ship has fucking sailed. They already used Reddit data through 2021 and got everything they needed for free. Huffman is locking the barn after the horses are already out, and setting it on fire. What a fucking dumbass.
Also no sane company would pay that ridiculous price for training a LLM on memes
Why paying exorbitant api prices when you can scrape for free? Like all those image models clearly trained on scraped watermarked stock images
LMFAO that ship has fucking sailed. They already used Reddit data through 2021 and got everything they needed for free. Huffman is locking the barn after the horses are already out, and setting it on fire. What a fucking dumbass.
Plus they can just scrape the data without using the API. It’s a red herring, just a lie to cover up his desire to kill third party apps.
The 9to5mac article has just the right amount of spiteful contempt. Nice.
It’s funny how he’s playing this out to be about third party apps like Apollo. Like yeah, that’s what the community cares about, but the reason they’re making the changes is because he’s fucking anal about OpenAI and other companies finding such success with products they have built using data scraped via the Reddit API.
He wants some of that money, not the comparatively tiny amount that Christian got from Apollo.
He also doesn’t seem to get that people root for an underdog. Had he been more serious about how they are upset that companies use their API to build massive tools that they can sublicense to other companies, like Microsoft, and make lots of money, people might agree with that.
What he’s framing it as though, is a big company like Reddit vs small indie app developers, like Christian Selig. Guess who the underdog is in that scenario, Hm?
Dude could literally invent a developer program to help support “sanctioned” third party devs that pay some sort of a yearly fee to access the API and raise cost like he is now to fend off LLMs. But nah, I’d expect that out of somebody that is actually wanting to solve the problem. Lol
That sounds unnecessarily complex. Just force an authentication of the client (ergo, make it so you can’t access the API without logging in) and add api rate limits per user, maybe with higher limits on users that have the paid Reddit membership tier.
But I don’t think that was the point anyway. It’s less work to just start charging for the API. That way they can charge companies like OpenAI, and drive others to use their main app, letting them sell targeted adverts to them too.
Folks have made millions.
It sucks to be you, Reddit.
It’s hilarious how people have literally paid app developers for a better way to experience reddit and he’s mad about that. Like sorry you’re a talentless hack. The only reason reddit is as popular as it is was down to the stars aligning back in the digg days. That’s about it, first mover advantage with your only other competitor shooting themselves in the foot.
I used most 3rd-party apps for Android and the official one is simply the worst.
Lemmy clients are already better than Reddit’s official apps.
You’re right about the first mover advantage: there was a small time window in which Reddit was the town square of the Internet, but it turned to shit when the brass decided to milk users like data money cows.
R.I.P. Reddit.
How to nuke you valuation speedrun
My god… he is such… a fucking… idiot. Holy shit… I’m just surprised he’s lasted this long as “CEO”. I work in tech and I’ve seen interns and entry level engineers exercise better decision making. I guess being strongman is more important to him than saving his company and/or protecting his image as a sensible leader.
My first comment in the entire fediverse will be:
FUCK U/SPEZ
I’d hate to be that guy
Balls in his mouth
what a prick
He is so out of touch.
But yeah keep going back to their site and watch their ads, that’ll show them for sure.
Or, you could do what I do - use [https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit) with an ad blocker. That hurts them on two levels -
- They have to pay for you to use the site and,
- Their ads are blocked.
Could also keep using 3rd party apps, apparently all those API calls are costing them millions.
Only the accessibility focused apps will be allowed by Reddit to continue free of cost. The other 3rd party apps will shutdown at the end of this month since their API costs will be too much for them to bear.
Only the accessibility focused apps will be allowed by Reddit to continue as long as they aren’t monetized. Sure, if you want to allow blind people to read Reddit because we can’t figure out how to do it, go nuts. But only as long as you don’t expect anything for your time and effort.
@ChargingDoorman sorry my comment was with a heavy dose of /s. Given they valued the Apollo traffic at ~20MM my tongue in cheek was saying to keep using the 3rd party apps cos it’s “costing” them so much money.
I mean, in theory I suppose that they could set up their own subscription systems, but their users would have to be paying out on a regular basis.
looks thoughtful
Actually, I’m not even sure that app authors are allowed to do that. Apple is really strict about purchases not going through the App Store for iOS – they want their 30% cut. And I don’t know if the App Store supports subscription models. Maybe it does, I dunno, don’t use an iOS device myself.
Apple 100% supports subscriptions for apps.
Spez is already talking about monetizing users account histories. Just blocking the ads isn’t going to stop them.
Have a citation for that? Because that sounds like a great link for an inevitable edited response to all my comment history
I’ll have to find it, but multiple places he’s talked about Reddit being used by companies to train their AI systems. It’s painfully obvious that he’s looking for both moral and immoral ways to monetize Reddit immediately. I give it 3 months before this is announced.
I mean, I get that Reddit isn’t making money. And that during the growth phase of a dot-com, it’s okay to burn money in the name of growing the userbase, but that he has to transition to making money at some point. Investors gave him money, hundreds of millions, if I recall correctly, in the expectation that he can generate a return. He’s getting near the point where he has to do that. And the return they’re going to expect is going to be in the neighborhood of what other dot-coms can generate from their investment.
Like, the people yelling at him for being “greedy” in that he’s aiming to make Reddit generate a return at all aren’t realistic. That is something that always was going to have to happen, from the day that Reddit started. If you look at the issues that the moderators are taking up with him, they’re trying to come up with a way that Reddit makes money and their concerns are also met.
The problem is that some of the moves he’s making to try to make a return have really negative impacts, and a number of people want something that has less of a negative impact.
If the Fediverse can support similar functionality based purely on cash donations, or based on some other model (e.g. Usenet runs on software developed by the community, but generally one has to pay a commercial Usenet provider for service to cover the costs), or a “users donate resources” like BitTorrent and provide a better experience, then that’s great. But the Fediverse is also going to have to figure out how to handle the costs of hardware and software development and all that, if it wants to be a competitive alternative. There are some hard questions that may come up down the line for the Fediverse too. The long term for something the scale of Reddit cannot be Earnest paying all of the money out of his personal pocketbook to Cloudflare to handle ramping up kbin’s capacity or something like that from the main Lemmy instance operators.
Right now, I haven’t seen any ads on the Fediverse, and I haven’t yet donated money to Earnest (though he apparently does have a “buy me a coffee” tip jar and people have sent him small gifts). Which means that right now, I’m relying on the gift of resources from Earnest and some Lemmy instance operators to me. Maybe they can afford that for a small number of users. But end of the day, if many more users show up, they are going to have to find someone else to help bear the costs on an ongoing basis.
But he has so many better options. He could listen to his userbase and create a product they enjoy. Then explain his cost and ask for donations on the site (with a progres bar as wikipedia does). If you have goodwill in your userbase, you could even just ask people for money in a monthly fashion and give them some “Reddit Supporter” badge. Maybe a “Reddit Supporter” can then vote on the functionality that will be implemented in reddit.
If he’d communicate it well, he could even monetize the API fairly (let’s say 1-2x the ad revenue he would get with similar traffic) or monetize it on the user side (user has to pay e.g. $10 for yearly api key).
I can say for myself I’d be more than willing to donate to reddit if they asked for it and I had the feeling they were actually trying to listen to the userbase and improve the platform.
With his current behavior he’s just destroying any good-will of the userbase and therefore any direct monetization potential.
Oh, I’m not at all saying that he’s handling this in an ideal way. There is a laundry list of things that I think might be better-done. I mean, the very first thing for me would be him at least having an option to let people continue using the site the way they have been with a premium subscription. Might not be worth it for some, but for others, it would, and that immediately solves his problem for a lot of users, and maybe some of the most-fervently-opposed. I’d be willing to pay something for a subscription myself, especially since they already went to the work of setting up anonymized payments during the Bitcoin fad and a scheme for premium service. I don’t know if it’d be enough to make myself worthwhile to Reddit relative to what the company is going for, but I’d at least like to see their price point. Let me use a third party client as long as I have Reddit Platinum or whatever and then tell me what that costs each month.
I’m just saying that there is a substantial contingent that is really pissed off and who really does not think that he legitimately has to do something about Reddit cashflow. Like, asserting that Reddit losing money is just a lie, or saying that they just want any social media corporation to go down, that sort of thing. And, I mean, that’s just kinda decoupled from the financial obligations that he’s gonna be facing.
Any capable ceo worth their salt had to be thinking about this BEFORE their first round of funding, not 10 yrs later when they are “about to ipo”. Part of acquiring large amounts of funding is working thru these problems and having a concrete monetization plan. This isn’t something new and every single startup on this planet contends with resourcing and money. This problem isn’t unique to reddit and is a solved problem by other social media companies.
If it’s serving ads and selling user profiles, be transparent about it. Mandate 3rd party apps to serve ads meanwhile reduce the need of a staff to try and come up with a god awful app that can’t load a video. Pour said money into infra-scaling instead.
Use differential privacy policies, obfuscate private data and inform + ensure users that the data being sold is to generate revenue so that the site can stay in the green and go public AND that their privacy is first and foremost. You can literally invent GDPR like privacy controls and STILL monetize user profile while keeping users happy.
If I can solve this in 10 mins, Huffman doesn’t get a pass for being an idiot. Sorry, don’t mean to sound ranty and aggressive but any sort of justification for reddit is really defending malice on his part and I feel like this needs to be said, particularly to an audience that are (rightfully so) perhaps giving him the benefit of the doubt when they don’t know any better.
Hope this helps paint a better picture of why I keep calling this guy an idiot. :-)
And don’t post anything - contribute nothing.
You want to swap the order of the text and the link there in Markdown. This:
[https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit)Yields this:
[https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit)
Whereas this:
[Old Reddit](https://old.reddit.com])Yields this:
it also hurts them on a spiritual level since they want to kill off old reddit.
Makes me wonder how long old.reddit.com is gonna last.
I use old.reddit on computer with ublock origin, I don’t even know Reddit has ads, been visiting for 10+ years, never saw single ad, same on mobile where I use Boost + Adaway or Kiwi browser + uBlock origin, I will see how the 3rd party situation works out
I mean, I did too. But you can see why Reddit is grouchy about that. I mean, I have written a lot of content and posted it to Reddit, and maybe that has value that they can monetize. Or maybe there’s some value that they can get from data-mining my activity on the server side. But they haven’t been making money off my eyeballs directly, or data-mining information available on the client side, and I imagine that that’s frustrating when they go crunch the numbers on their costs and revenue.
I appreciate his contribution to growing the fediverse everyday with all these gifts.
So glad I deliberately got perma banned a couple of days ago then nuked my account. I also deleted all the tracking cookies and deleted Boost (sorry boost dev you guys are great keep fighting the good fight) and blocked reddit domain using ublacklist.
Fuck u/spez
I don’t really engage much anymore because of busy life but I’ll try to be more active here.
The unwillingness to back down is mind boggling.
I think he has shown his true form, he was always a cunt and not a very intelligent one. But now that the games afoot he has shown his true colors. The only thing he cares about is $$$$
Don’t forget that he also ran the sub r/jailbird, which totally makes everything…uhhhhh…yeah…makes it…
Edit: phone autoassume changed the name of the subreddit, I’m actually fine with that.
Need to come off macho and confident for the shareholders/potential shareholders.
I genuinely believe this is the real reason.
My jaw dropped reading the verge interview. Insane.
