That’s a straw man. The 3P client devs were willing to pay. 2-3x the ARPU but Reddit is demanding 20x. At one point a dev could even do a 10x multiplier with paid subscription but the admins are only interesting in killing them off.

I agree that they probably are not that interested in the survival of the apps and are happy to see them die off but my question is why anyone is surprised by that.

If they wanted to work with third-party apps they could have charged reasonable rates for API access and could have offered a reasonable transition time. They gave them one month to transition their whole business onto a new model to make the costs work. This was entirely bad-faith bargaining on Reddit’s part, and NPR should be ashamed for publishing Reddit’s press release for them.

> should be ashamed for publishing Reddit’s press release for them.

I have a sinking feeling I'm going to be seeing this phrase posted thousands of times.

Yep. They could also have kept the api free but insisted that 3rd party apps show ads. The developer of Apollo also agrees that would have been reasonable. But no.

They could have but this would have still represented giving up a lot of control over how ads are shown.

Not necessarily. They could have added an extra requirement for accessing the api that Reddit must approve how ads are displayed.

Right, but if they control the app they can make changes on the fly whenever. If they have 10 partner apps then everything will be glacially slow.

Its not like the way ads are presented changes a lot. But I acknowledge the point.

I think I wouldn't mind so much if their official app was anywhere near as good as Apollo.

I don't ack their point. They'd get one warning and then they'd be kicked out and it would be justified.

Wasn’t reddit profitable a few years ago, until they took on a massive amount of extra VC money and hired more people to make their horrible new website?

Seems like reddit could easily have been run indefinitely as it was at a modest profit and brought happiness to its users, employees and shareholders. But no, they got greedy and have tried to “shoot for the moon”. And now they need to squeeze more money out of their service to please their investors. In doing so, they’re making their product worse. (No, I don’t want to install their shitty official mobile app.)

Ugh. Someone please make a simple, clean reddit replacement that my communities can move to. Reddits actions here have been slimy and I don’t want to support them.

I don’t think that would have brought happiness to the shareholders but otherwise I guess they could have pursued a low-growth strategy. That does kind of open the door to being leapfrogged, though.

leapfrogged by what though? one of the problems right now is that there is no real alternative, and the federated platforms are mostly memes / hangouts for power-users.

Who knows? Myspace seemed unbeatable for a while.

Apollo has repeatedly said they will pay, but the amount being asked way too high. Also, no where near enough time has been given to make a change to a pay model.

Try to think about this like you couldn’t care less about any of the actors for a minute. Is supporting Apollo likely the most profitable venture they could pursue with whatever resources it costs them?

Yes.

After a 15 year status quo and 3 months since Reddit stated there would be no major changes to the API in 2023, the costs for Apollo suddenly went from $0 to tens of millions of dollars a year with 1 month notice. Reddit could have done this years earlier, or not lied about their plans, or given a reasonable notice period, not set ridiculous prices, anything. I don't see how any of this is the fault of third party devs.

You assume they have plans in the first place.

I've definitely gotten the sense that this is a potential significant factor in this "clown car crash". Kind of feels like Reddit has been able to raise insane amounts of money for years, but, with the sudden appearance of (and gold rush-style interest in) ChatGPT combined with Fed moves on interest rates, the taps have 'suddenly' been closed. And, apparently, there was no ... real plan (even though they hired a CFO back in 2021 and have been signaling plans to IPO since around that time).

Of course, this underscores the stupidity of the whole thing. Given that THE 'google-hack du jour' is adding reddit to search terms (with articles in MSM showing up since at least Jan 2022) AND the value of Reddit's 'corpus' (as Huffman himself put it back in April) to companies like GOOGLE (trying to not only build ChatGPT-style ML, but relevant up-to-date search capabilities based around ChatGPT-style 'agents'), you'd think they'd be able to convert these stories into reasonable financial health and successful IPO w/o wading into brand-destroying PR debacles...

... but, apparently not.

Having a business that exists entirely at the pleasure of one larger business that doesn’t consider you particularly important is a position I would seek to avoid.

I've said it elsewhere, but there must be some point where both parties could have continued operating while reddit made money. Even if it wasn't much, they probably could have covered their costs if they had worked out a pricing plan with the developers.

Based on what I've seen, they went above the standard for API pricing in their industry. Comparatively the pricing offered to the 3rd party app developers was akin to gouging, and was not meant to be realistic.

if 97% of the userbase doesn't use third party apps and "And the opportunity cost of not having those users on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant" are true statements then those 3% were extreme power users

Seems very likely.

so the people that bring value to reddit.

And they probably use adblockers too.

The entire notion of "make it free at first so we can trap users into paying later" approach needs to die a fiery death.

If your intent is to eventually charge, do it from day 1. If you want to entice people to try your service by not charging them, let them know what the charge is, but give them introductory credit or an overt "free trial".

> what could you really expect?

Well, if Huffman says Apollo added no value to the platform, then I guess I would expect the official Reddit app to be at least as good as Apollo, rather than a dumpster fire of shoddy engineering and dark patterns.

Reddit gave something to users and now they want to take it away. What did they expect?

There was likely a path to making Apollo a paid product, letting it's popularity wain, and then killing it. Instead Reddit went for the power move and gave the mob a flashpoint to rally around.

They expect the rabble-rousers to lose interest and many users not to care much in the first place or get frustrated enough to support the subs being reopened and handed over to new moderators. Which I also expect.

Sure. Risky AF, considering how the site actually runs, unnecessary, and a major-league speed-bump towards IPO.

How do you think advertisers - some of whom have now had to reschedule ad buys / launches / pause campaigns, or at least factor a sudden major hit to 'stability' / consistency into consideration of the platform [1,2] - and potential enterprise customers for ML-model feeds &c. are taking this news?

Further, it has caused the CEO himself to repeatedly indicate lack of profitability (after > $1.2 billion in VC funding) and has created a massive 'paper-trail' of PR ineptness evidence.

[1] https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-redd...

[2] https://www.thedrum.com/news/2023/06/12/what-do-advertisers-...

(... among various additional articles)

Sure, but your second article suggests risk to leaving it too:

> This protest has the potential to demonstrate that its place in users’ hearts is conditional, and perhaps more importantly to demonstrate to advertisers that users do not consume its content in the context of the official Reddit app

There's a bigger issue. Reddit basically runs on free user content and free moderation. All this is saying is that they are going to only take and not give. A lot of these "what did you expect" takes never seem to mention the other side of the equation.

So... what did Reddit expect? Apparently no one to complain about massive changes. How many times have we seen THAT playbook? What did they expect?

Well, if Reddit’s contribution is negligible then all those users can simply set up a replacement, since it’s so easy.

I don't get this kind of flip response. I'm clearly suggesting there are TWO sides to the equation (if there is an "other" side of the equation, you could safely deduce I'm saying there is more than one). To be crystal clear, I never said it was "easy," either. But realistically, reddit is not an innovative system. Someone else could easily create a new one if they could round up the users——that's the hard part, so I don't know why reddit thinks it's a good move to chase them off, in, again, an entirely predictable way.

What should be apparent from my comment is that both sides need each other. spez seems to think that's not true and the people fleeing to places that won't have the users (really the third component) are making almost as much of a mistake as reddit is.

It's a symbiosis and anyone ignoring that is bound to lose.

FWIW, it does appear that at least some subs are indeed leaving, simply enough, for example /r/startrek. I would personally prefer a return to forums, but whatever.

Not sure what's going on in your workplace, but don't take it out on Redditors.

I think Reddit’s theory is that their user base is big and established enough that this dust-up is going to be forgotten soon enough.

Yes, this is definitely their theory. Huffman has basically said as much.

In my opinion*, all of this brings to mind the quote attributed to Napoleon about not interrupting your enemy "when he is making a mistake."

I certainly don't / didn't consider Reddit an enemy, and yet, suddenly, the site has an adversarial halo around it that simply didn't exist several weeks ago. A halo that I'm quite sure didn't need to be created (for Reddit Inc. to achieve its actual goals) and could have been avoided with a little more "EQ" and better PR efforts and planning.

This isn't, remotely, the first time that Huffman, in particular, has shown PR ineptness, including the egregious PR blunder of outright highly visible dishonest behavior and inability to properly acknowledge & apologize [1].

* Which is the opinion of an internet rando / 'armchair general', but, informed by knowledge of past PR disasters and borne out, so far, by events of this saga, to date

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13074093

It's obvious generally and as a subtext of your own comment that it isn't "so easy".

It seems more productive to look at just what it is that gives Reddit value and is of general benefit.

There are and have been Reddit contenders, among them Tildes (of which I'm a member), the former Imzy (which I joined, and watched implode spectacularly), Lemmy (which I've known of vaguely for some months) and kbin (which I've only just heard of), as well as, of course, Hacker News itself (and clones such as lobste.rs), and extant fora such as Slashdot, Digg, Fark, and the like. Not to mention Facebook with its own Groups features.

The problem facing most extant fora is their own reputation (or lack thereof). Digg, Fark, and Slashdot all burned through goodwill and interest. I was a ... very early ... participant in Slashdot, let's say, and don't think I've logged in for years, though I'll very occasionally peruse the site. The story selection may be OK (it's often comparable to HN). The discussion level is ... poor. In the extreme.

I have less experience with Digg and Fark though I suspect the general sense is similar. Both had the spark for a time, but that torch was passed. Fallen online cultures virtually never revive.

Imzy set out as its goal, "a kinder, gentler Reddit", solving problems Reddit expressed at scale, without ever first solving the problem of reaching that scale. Imzy also managed to create a few pathologies of its own, a key aspect of which was centered around its own serial pseudonymity. HN's policy of permitting pseudonymous accounts, even temporary throways for specific discussion, but banning repeatedly and frequently generating new accounts seems to me well-founded and a good balance. Reddit has effectively had a similar policy, largely through karma requirements which make brand-new low-karma profiles of limited use, though reputation can be built over a reasonable period of time.

Tildes has existed and operated reasonably well for about seven years, being launched in 2016, and I'd joined it quite near that date. It's avoided Imzy's pathologies, but has a general scaling problem, and discussion tends to be both thin and not particularly specialised. Reddit's advantage for now is that there are corners with deep technical knowledge. Tildes might get there, though I'm not sure that's its goal. For now it's ... a reasonable option.

Lobste.rs is nearly identical to Hacker News as regards Reddit, except smaller. There are no sub-discussions, there is now individual ownership of such discussions, and effectively the entire site is /r/all, much as HN is (as I recently noted: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256208>). As with Tildes, Lobste.rs has functioned usefully for some years, it's not been a runaway success, and it seems to fill a different niche than Reddit's topic-based user-moderated forums.

Site growth turns out to be a hard problem. Getting a small department to agree on a lunch spot, let alone several tens of millions of Internet strangers on where to decamp to is a large coordination problem. (I've been through this myself, several times, notably with the Google+ shutdown.) Successful migrations typically take both time and significant advanced planning.

And that's mostly looking at the scaling issue.

I've argued as well recently that Reddit provides a huge amount of behind-the-scenes moderation and filtering, and that this is likely a large part of the site's value. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36332367> The immediate effects of, say, a widespread user-based moderation strike would probably NOT be overwhelming amounts of spam and pr0n within subreddits. Most of that is already caught by automated tools.

Instead, what you'd see would be less egregious, but equally corrosive drift and devaluation. Off-topic posts, below-threholds-of-automated-detection levels of incivility, bullying, and trolling, shallow content, and the like. For some subreddits that's not especially significant, for others, such as AskScience and AskHistorians, which are extremely heavily moderated (I've in fact refused further participation in the latter based on moderating out of SciHub and related links), but which would devolve to chaos or irrelevance without such human intervention. If that's a small number of subs and Reddit finds them sufficiently valuable they might be able to substitute professional paid mods, but doing so for even a small fraction of the 100+ million "active" subreddits the site boasts ... would not scale.

Still, the automated infrastructure represents a huge amount of institutional knowledge and goodwill which upstart contenders would have to replicate.

Again: just two elements of the problem, neither of them easy. Not impossible to solve, but chance (and hence risk) plays a huge role.