As Reddit CEO Defends Their Controversial API Decision, It Dominates Reddit's Own 'Recaps' (fastcompany.com) 52
"Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says that he stands by the company's decision to charge for API access," writes the blog 9to5Mac, "despite the fact that it was massively unpopular, and led to the demise of the leading Reddit app, Apollo."
In an interview with FastCo, Huffman is unrepentant about the API decision, but says it could have been better communicated... "[H]e defended the company's decision to limit free access to its API as a necessary measure to foil AI-training freeloaders. 'Reddit is an open platform, and we love that,' he told me. 'At the same time, we have been taken advantage of by some of the largest companies in the world.'"
The incident ended up reappearing in Reddit's own "recap" pages showing highlights from its popular subreddits. For its Technology subreddit, the official recap shows that two most popular posts were "Apollo for Reddit is shutting down" and "Reddit sparks outrage after a popular app developer said it wants him to pay $20 million a year for data access."
And Reddit's official recap also shows that discussion leading to the second-most popular comment of the entire year for the subreddit. "Users supply all the content, and reddit turns around with this huge fuck you to its users, without whom it's just another crappy link aggregator. No, reddit, fuck you and your money grab."
The first most-popular comment appeared in a related discussion, headlined "Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators From Subreddits Continuing Apollo-Related Blackouts." The comment?
Reddit: You're fired!
Moderator: I don't even work here.
The topic also dominated the official recap for the Programming subreddit, where it was the subject of all three of the top comments — and all three of the year's top posts:
Ironically, FastCo headlined its interview "As the AI era begins, Reddit is leaning into its humanity." ("Rebellious moderators. Large language models' peril and promise. Maybe a long-awaited IPO. Amid it all, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says the web megacommunity is on a roll.") Other work has addressed concerns that bubbled to the surface during the moderator dust-up, such as accessibility issues: "I told the team, 'Just show up and ship,'" Huffman says. The official Reddit apps are finally compatible with screen readers used by users with vision impairments, with full compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium's accessibility guidelines planned by the end of 2024.
As for AI's potential to transform the Reddit experience, Huffman is less prone to exuberant overpromising than the average tech company CEO. But the same attributes that led third-party assemblers of large language models to crave access to the company's corpus of information could help it leverage the technology to its own benefit... Rather than involving the most obvious AI functionality, like a Reddit chatbot, the examples he provides relate to moderation of problem content. For instance, the latitude that individual moderators have to govern their communities means that they can set rules that Huffman describes as "sometimes strict and sometimes esoteric." Newbies may run afoul of them by accident and have their posts yanked just as they're trying to join the conversation. In response, Reddit is currently prototyping an AI-powered feature called "post guidance." It'll flag rule-violating material before it's ever published: "The new user gets feedback, and the mod doesn't have to deal with it," says Huffman. He adds that Reddit will also use AI to crack down on willful bad behavior, such as bullying and hate speech, and that he expects progress on that front in 2024...
Members already engage in acts of commerce such as tipping Photoshop wizards to remove ex-boyfriends from images; he says the company plans to facilitate these transactions with a payment system "that will basically involve users sending money to users, whether it's rewarding them for content or paying for digital services or digital goods or [physical] services." "People are trying to start businesses on Reddit, but it wasn't really built for that," he adds. "So just trying to flesh out that ecosystem, I think that'll be very powerful."
The incident ended up reappearing in Reddit's own "recap" pages showing highlights from its popular subreddits. For its Technology subreddit, the official recap shows that two most popular posts were "Apollo for Reddit is shutting down" and "Reddit sparks outrage after a popular app developer said it wants him to pay $20 million a year for data access."
And Reddit's official recap also shows that discussion leading to the second-most popular comment of the entire year for the subreddit. "Users supply all the content, and reddit turns around with this huge fuck you to its users, without whom it's just another crappy link aggregator. No, reddit, fuck you and your money grab."
The first most-popular comment appeared in a related discussion, headlined "Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators From Subreddits Continuing Apollo-Related Blackouts." The comment?
Reddit: You're fired!
Moderator: I don't even work here.
The topic also dominated the official recap for the Programming subreddit, where it was the subject of all three of the top comments — and all three of the year's top posts:
Ironically, FastCo headlined its interview "As the AI era begins, Reddit is leaning into its humanity." ("Rebellious moderators. Large language models' peril and promise. Maybe a long-awaited IPO. Amid it all, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says the web megacommunity is on a roll.") Other work has addressed concerns that bubbled to the surface during the moderator dust-up, such as accessibility issues: "I told the team, 'Just show up and ship,'" Huffman says. The official Reddit apps are finally compatible with screen readers used by users with vision impairments, with full compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium's accessibility guidelines planned by the end of 2024.
As for AI's potential to transform the Reddit experience, Huffman is less prone to exuberant overpromising than the average tech company CEO. But the same attributes that led third-party assemblers of large language models to crave access to the company's corpus of information could help it leverage the technology to its own benefit... Rather than involving the most obvious AI functionality, like a Reddit chatbot, the examples he provides relate to moderation of problem content. For instance, the latitude that individual moderators have to govern their communities means that they can set rules that Huffman describes as "sometimes strict and sometimes esoteric." Newbies may run afoul of them by accident and have their posts yanked just as they're trying to join the conversation. In response, Reddit is currently prototyping an AI-powered feature called "post guidance." It'll flag rule-violating material before it's ever published: "The new user gets feedback, and the mod doesn't have to deal with it," says Huffman. He adds that Reddit will also use AI to crack down on willful bad behavior, such as bullying and hate speech, and that he expects progress on that front in 2024...
Members already engage in acts of commerce such as tipping Photoshop wizards to remove ex-boyfriends from images; he says the company plans to facilitate these transactions with a payment system "that will basically involve users sending money to users, whether it's rewarding them for content or paying for digital services or digital goods or [physical] services." "People are trying to start businesses on Reddit, but it wasn't really built for that," he adds. "So just trying to flesh out that ecosystem, I think that'll be very powerful."
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While true, some weird results come with the experience that an infringing user has versus the legitimate ways.
The only people forced to sit through unskippable "FBI Warning" were people that used their moeny to properly view the content. Ditto for some discs having unskippable trailers, or other arbitrary unskippable content.
In streaming land, you get to juggle various apps and have to track which service arbitrarily has which content. The UI/UX is different between the providers in obnoxious ways. One pr
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> Guess what happens next.
Let me guess, something absurd.
> You have no more content -- pirated or otherwise.
There it is. People are going to make art, regardless. When the printing press appeared (which was a far more influential than pirating on the internet) humanity just kept churning it out.
"Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after
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And if enough people use the pirate streaming then the commercial companies can't make any money and they go out of business. Guess what happens next. You have no more content -- pirated or otherwise.
People will always manage to make money from content. They did so long before copyright was even a thing.
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Because you put it there.
Was not the case (Score:3, Informative)
From what I understood the fees were exhorbitant. I this not the case?
All of the armchair analysts seem to just totally ignore the point I made that Narwhal exists and is doing OK financially.
At the moment I am paying $3.99/month for Narwhal, and the developer has said this model is working for him.
So obviously the people claiming the API fee was absurdly high, are completely wrong and had either bad information or ill intent.
Re:API choice was a good one (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Narwhal Exists (Score:5, Informative)
Annual subscription (Score:2)
If I remember correctly, what happened with Apollo was that users had paid ahead for an annual subscription based on the previous cost of operation. The cost of making the API calls needed to serve annual subscribers would have far exceeded the cost of just refunding them the remainder of their subscription.
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If I remember correctly, what happened with Apollo was that users had paid ahead for an annual subscription based on the previous cost of operation.
Yes, so?? Utterly irrelevant.
You shut the old app down and make a new one. That's what Narwhal did (the current app is Narwhal 2).
Some of the subscribers would have been upset but MOST people liked Narwhal enough they simply would have re-subbed in a new app. We'll never know because the developer of Apollo was unwilling to even try... unlike Narwhal.
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Wait, I think I understand what's going on here. You think there were only 2 apps using Reddit's API, rather than literally hundreds. Most of them are gone now obviously, but because you didn't know of them you think this was about only two apps.
All you're doing is demonstrating your own ignorance.
They all suffered the Fate of Hate (Score:1)
Wait, I think I understand what's going on here. You think there were only 2 apps using Reddit's API, rather than literally hundreds.
I know how many there were.
I know most simply gave up - some would never be viable with a paid model, but like Apollo many were too angry to ever even try - they all thought if they went away Reddit would fold and go back to how things were.
But guess what - something that cannot go on forever, won't. And free API access to Reddit is soemthing that could never go on forever,
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No, it was still underhanded bullshit. If Reddit wanted to charge users $3.99/month they should have just done so themselves.
All the people claiming you can't keep running a company free forever seem to have forgotten that Reddit has had ads in the site for a long, long time.
This was about increasing their revenue by charging their users because they couldn't convince their advertisers to pay more, and then heavy-handedly quelling all dissent because they were hoping for a juicy company buyout. Narwhal no
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All the people claiming you can't keep running a company free forever seem to have forgotten that Reddit has had ads in the site for a long, long time.
Have YOU forgotten that ad revenue has fallen [modernretail.co] for a long time now?
What one may have covered costs mo longer does - if it ever did. Which is very unlikely.
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All the people claiming you can't keep running a company free forever seem to have forgotten that Reddit has had ads in the site for a long, long time.
Funny thing is, the whole point of this debacle is that the users don't see ads when a 3rd party API is used to read reddit, and if they did, it's to generate revenue for whomever wrote the app.
No the people talking about running a company for free are exactly on point. This is fundamentally what it was all about.
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Many people argued that Reddit could have charged end-users for API access instead (i.e. pay $x/month and you can have API access through any app you like as long as you are logged in with your account) and made the revenue they needed in a way that didn't hurt their users so much.
Why they refused to even consider this option baffles me.
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Judging from what Narwhal started charging, they were planning on asking for much more that users would be willing to pay and they knew it. This way they can simply remain silent and let the app developers take the blunt of the user ire.
How is #3.99 / month so bad???? (Score:2)
Judging from what Narwhal started charging, they were planning on asking for much more that users would be willing to pay and they knew it.
How is $3.99 / month "much more than users would be willing to pay". I pay it, and Narwhal has had a lot of other people paying it also.
This seems pretty reasonable to me, in order to pay for the development of a high quality alternative app.
I don't see why it's baffling - horrible idea (Score:2)
Why they refused to even consider this option baffles me.
The ultimate ivory tower backseat developin' programmer comment. Can you realistically see users pasting UUIDs for API keys into apps to get them to work? And what about when those individual users accidentally or deliberately sharing API keys? Reddit would have to have a whole department of people whose job it was to play whack a mole with thousands of leaked API keys, and a whole infrastructure just to detect which API keys were obviously being u
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I was not suggesting that API keys would be involved in the way you describe. I was suggesting that the user of whichever 3rd party app would provide their username and password to the app which would then make a call to Reddit to authenticate said username and password.
Should the passed in details be a valid user with a valid API subscription, Reddit would return a token or cookie that would then be used by the app to make API calls.
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I was not suggesting that API keys would be involved in the way you describe. I was suggesting that the user of whichever 3rd party app would provide their username and password to the app which would then make a call to Reddit to authenticate said username and password.
I see what you are getting at, and that is more feasible but....
again, I refer you to the fact that absolutely no services exist that work like that. And I still think the disconnect is too great for most users, where they would be paying R
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The reason why so many users prefer 3rd party apps is because they did a better job building apps than Reddit themselves. And considering Reddit has much more resources than these 3rd party developers, this tells you the quality and efficiency of their software engineering practices and direction.
The users are customers and core of what makes Reddit valuable, and their uproar and unpopularity of this move shows how unwise this decision was. There were so many other better ways of handling this, and frankly
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The reason why so many users prefer 3rd party apps is because they did a better job
Don't you mean they DO a better job - Narwhal 2 (which I linked to in my original post - did you miss that????) works, is growing in features, and is only $3.99/month.
The other apps that shut down did so because they were angry about not getting all of reddit for free until the end of time.
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Would wikipedia like a word?
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Do you work for Reddit? Did you loan them money?
Why do you care if it’s a successful long term business. As an internet user I want it to fail so it can be replaced by something else that’s good for 10 years or so. Maybe eventually monetizing forums will be seen as a dumb idea.
This is usually when internet noobs ask the question who will pay for everything? How can we have a forum without money. But surely a guy like yourself already knows the answer to that.
Terrible excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
Being scraped by large companies is a poor excuse. Reddit is publicly accessible, and any junior engineer can write a distributed scraper that uses thousands of proxies around the world to scrape everything that goes on in reddit 24 hours a day. Having the API is obviously a bit easier but it is by no means an obstacle for anyone interested in scraping reddit data.
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No not really. Reddit frankly is not scrapable. It's too large, too diverse with too many sub communities. This isn't a newspaper generating double digit stories per day. This is a site that generates just shy of 1 million new posts per day.
API access is essential to writing any app that does anything useful with reddit.
Reddit and Twitter have done great in 2023 (Score:5, Interesting)
for Lemmy and Mastodon. Lemmy especially really needed the influx of new users: the more people discover the Fediverse, the better.
Re:Reddit and Twitter have done great in 2023 (Score:5, Insightful)
I've switched over. I have to admit that it's a trickle of content, comparatively, since there's so many fewer users, but on the other hand it's probably better for my quality of life to have less useless social media crap hitting me anyway.
Reddit? (Score:2)
You mean the site I always seem to end up at when trying to find out if public figure Y "has nudes"?
I'm sure it has a vast array of other uses. I just haven't found them. :)
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I know someone who frequents it. Beside celeb nudes, he often shares various conspiracy theories and a lot of fake stories about male superiority and female (lack of) fidelity. Apparently it is a lively and well-educated community of people with rich social lives.
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Honestly it's hard to say that Reddit is any one thing. It's more like every single phpBB forum EVER made on the internet got together and decided to have one unified login.
Wanna talk about cars? You can do that. Trains? That too. Celeb nudes? Yep. Obscure indie game from 1992? The five fans are over there. There is no one common identifier for people on Reddit other than wanting to engage with other people who have similar interests to them.
Humanity, right (Score:2)
I'll believe that when it's possible to get a reply to a ban appeal in less than three months and counting. My crime? Telling a prank caller to call his local police station. That counts as doxxing, apparently.
Why not just change the TOS (Score:2)
What I don't understand is why they couldn't change their TOS to prevent AI harvesting while still allowing the apps like Apollo to work. It would seem easy enough, and then they could just cut off what they said were the source of the problem.
It seems to me they just wanted tighter control of everything, and didn't care about their users at all.
The CEO needs to jump at opportunities... (Score:2)
IMHO, the Red Hat CEO needs to jump at opportunities and not try to squeeze the open source people:
With VMware being brought into Broadcom, a lot... nay a TON of businesses want to get off the platform. What did Red Hat used to have? A working, stable virtualization system that was well supported (oVirt)/RHEV. This worked well enough, that (IIRC) even Microsoft blessed it. However, RH tossed it for OpenShift, and even though Kubernetes is a shiny, a lot of businesses run "pet" VMs, and don't need all th
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Blah, posted this on the wrong topic. My bad.
Reddit leverages you. (Score:2)
And Reddit leverages you, the ordinary users who provide substantially all of its content. Hypocrites.
full circle (Score:2)
I found slashdot sometime around two decades ago. I loved it but soon found myself on digg because of content quantity. When digg blew itself away I fully migrated to reddit. When front page killed itself I hid in smaller subreddits and old.reddit but I'm only here on slashdot again right now because I've had it with reddit. They did a full 180 on essentially everything that encouraged me to move in in the first place. Now here I am on slashdot. Still awesome. No shark jumping (unless you count
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Yep I sometimes use reddit for reading. Through teddit, with no account.
Everything else is web 1.0 or smallweb and I am much happier. I’d say Slashdot is one of the worse forums I go to, which is fine, I don’t need to be nice here and can goof around and troll a bit. Compared to all but the most niche of subreddits it blows Reddit out of the water on quality and intelligence.
In retrospect was it the wrong decision? (Score:2)
We ran story after story here predicting Reddit's demise. Yet here we are, out of the maybe 90 subs I've registered to it appears as though precisely nothing has changed. User activity is the same, content is the same. Sure there are the odd stories of some sub descending into chaos after the mods left, but I'll say now what I said then: There's 3125000 subreddits. Having 100 odd go offline is irrelevant.