Unfortunately what sealed it for me was Steve’s response during his followup AMA when someone asked him about the Apollo dev. He said that the dev often said one thing and did another. Christian (the dev) called him out on it and said “I give you permission to name a single time this has happened.” No response.
In other words, Steve doubled down yet again and tried to do the same damn thing after he was caught. Why lie like this?
A developer’s reputation is their most important asset. What Steve did (or tried to do, till the phone conversation proved otherwise) was simply awful.
Huffman has had 26+ days to correct the record. He has done nothing to that end. He made a "potentially career-ending" allegation, which hurt the reputation of the developer of Apollo, Christian Selig.
June 8th: Selig released his side of the story, along with messages which were sent to him from a Reddit employee as well as from moderators engaged in a subsequent call with Reddit:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230608172250/https://old.reddi...
June 9th (a full 24 hours later): Huffman had the facts, including the recording, which confirmed their mutual understanding. Huffman could have revised his stance there and then. Instead, Huffman doubled down, effectively reiterating the lie through his scare-quote and instead criticized Selig for acting publicly to defend his reputation against Reddit's internal and external slander:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230616033947/https://old.reddi...
Huffman is the CEO of the Reddit platform and nothing is stopping him from apologizing for making a potentially "potentially career-ending lie" against the developer of Apollo, Christian Selig. He hasn't made a peep on the platform since June 9th.
If it wasn't deliberate, then he's had nearly a month to speak up for the truth. At some point, refusing to correct the record, a lie does become deliberate.
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Here's TechCrunch's reporting on the situation, if you prefer to hear it from a journalist:
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/09/reddit-ceo-doubles-down-on...
But! There’s suddenly a ray of hope. See the comment upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36612285
Do you happen to know whether the call was with Steve himself, or some other Reddit employee? If it wasn’t Steve, then this whole thing was a giant miscommunication, which I’ve always suspected from the beginning.
Boy it’s nice to feel hopeful about this for once. I really hope it wasn’t Steve.
All this is to say that Steve Huffman might not be deliberately lying in this instance. Maybe. It's hard to give him too much credit since he's already shown himself to be a snake who edits other people's comments and that's certainly not something that could be done by accident. Nonetheless, memory is a funny thing.