He’s saying the same talking points at every interview and handling this situation like Chris Licht did before he got fired at CNN, had some ideas for change that people weren’t necessarily against but shove it down their throats with out any finesse or flexibility or fairness and everyone is unhappy and it exposed the true motive. Licht \ CNN was being forced to the right by the owner and billionaire investors, and Reddit is just plain forcing out 3rd party apps (that helped build reddit in the first place, and have been open to paying a reasonable amount for api access) to try and boost revenue. My favorite take on all this is from Arstechnica:
But Reddit’s biggest asset is its community. Charging for its API may be a necessary evil to survive an uncertain future, but Reddit’s attitude against its own community isn’t. Reddit is burning bridges on its quest for cash without showing an ounce of sympathy.
Yeah, spez is treating striking mods like spoiled toddlers, but insisting on making money himself while making their unpaid work harder. It’s eroding their good will to volunteer, for what future? Paid mods?
No way, they’d need to pay 3 millions a year or so to replace all moderator work in the platform.
They’re trying to optimise the company for the IPO, showing stuff like “you can sell this data to Google for LLM! It’s self-moderated! No third party apps eating your adbux!”. It’s just that it’s backfiring… badly.
I said it in another thread but it seems like the past year has been a lot of masks off for the owner class utterly losing it about the peasants not getting in line.
Honestly I wonder if the isolation they’ve had over the past few years has left their reality testing a bit off
I think it’s just the feds raising interest rates “forcing” all the internet companies operating at a loss to determine that now is the time to yank the carpet.
They’ve been using their free-flowing access to easy, low-interest capital to expand as rapidly as possible to insert themselves as broadly into people’s lives as possible, so that the profitability is maximized when they decide to flip into exploitation overdrive.
You can see this happening with Twitter, Reddit and Google seemingly all at once.
Totally get that’s the reason why the business choices are being made.
The thing I’m noting is the counter productive tone being taken. If spez/Elon/etc would tweak their tone they’d likely be much more effective in pushing these things through (imho)
It’s just being handled so poorly. They could have just been straight forward and said they unfortunately needed to cut off API access due to cost but that they are dedicated to improving the official app based on user feedback over the course of a year to help with moderation and fix all the quirks on mobile. It still would have been unfortunate to lose third party apps, but at least it would have shown that they cared about the user experience. But no, we get this beat around the bush, insulting attitude from the CEO. He just sounds so out of touch.
They could have slowed the roll of shitty changes and successfully boiled the frog without much uproar.
Block unauthenticated, no-API-key access outright, but allow app API keys a smaller number of requests per day, making apps more unreliable if not using a user’s personal key.
Block unauthenticated non-user API keys and force users to generate their own API keys, killing off most 3rd-party app usage and almost all anonymous usage.
Raise the price of API keys once few people are using 3rd-party apps.
He’s saying the same talking points at every interview and handling this situation like Chris Licht did before he got fired at CNN, had some ideas for change that people weren’t necessarily against but shove it down their throats with out any finesse or flexibility or fairness and everyone is unhappy and it exposed the true motive. Licht \ CNN was being forced to the right by the owner and billionaire investors, and Reddit is just plain forcing out 3rd party apps (that helped build reddit in the first place, and have been open to paying a reasonable amount for api access) to try and boost revenue. My favorite take on all this is from Arstechnica:
Yeah, spez is treating striking mods like spoiled toddlers, but insisting on making money himself while making their unpaid work harder. It’s eroding their good will to volunteer, for what future? Paid mods?
No way, they’d need to pay 3 millions a year or so to replace all moderator work in the platform.
They’re trying to optimise the company for the IPO, showing stuff like “you can sell this data to Google for LLM! It’s self-moderated! No third party apps eating your adbux!”. It’s just that it’s backfiring… badly.
I said it in another thread but it seems like the past year has been a lot of masks off for the owner class utterly losing it about the peasants not getting in line.
Honestly I wonder if the isolation they’ve had over the past few years has left their reality testing a bit off
I think it’s just the feds raising interest rates “forcing” all the internet companies operating at a loss to determine that now is the time to yank the carpet.
They’ve been using their free-flowing access to easy, low-interest capital to expand as rapidly as possible to insert themselves as broadly into people’s lives as possible, so that the profitability is maximized when they decide to flip into exploitation overdrive.
You can see this happening with Twitter, Reddit and Google seemingly all at once.
Totally get that’s the reason why the business choices are being made.
The thing I’m noting is the counter productive tone being taken. If spez/Elon/etc would tweak their tone they’d likely be much more effective in pushing these things through (imho)
It’s just being handled so poorly. They could have just been straight forward and said they unfortunately needed to cut off API access due to cost but that they are dedicated to improving the official app based on user feedback over the course of a year to help with moderation and fix all the quirks on mobile. It still would have been unfortunate to lose third party apps, but at least it would have shown that they cared about the user experience. But no, we get this beat around the bush, insulting attitude from the CEO. He just sounds so out of touch.
They could have slowed the roll of shitty changes and successfully boiled the frog without much uproar.
They aren’t even competent bastards.
They should tied third party app access to reddit premium