In interviews with multiple publications, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman defended business decisions made by the company.
From the article:
In response to Huffman’s comments, moderators are trying to find ways to make blackouts effective. Alternatively, some communities are also setting up servers on alternative sites like Lemmy and Kbin.
He can’t be citing real statistics. I don’t know 3% of their reported 57 million users but I do know that every person I know that uses reddit uses third party apps.
Someone on data is beautiful found that all third party apps accounted for only 10% of the official app downloads. Taking that into account, it is likely that the vast majority of Reddit users only use the official app and don’t know what the fuss is all about.
But then, that mirrors the idea that most people are lurkers on Reddit.
Everyone’s talking about enshitification, but they’re also just extremely late to the game. The rest of big tech monetized a long time ago and pissed off their users, but managed to keep a solid amount of their users and the rest went… to Reddit. I guess I understand a corporation’s need to monetize, but when you built a platform that was meant to be different than the rest you’re definitely going to experience some pain when you decide to be like them.
Reddit will most definitely survive this and maybe even be profitable in a few years, but they’ll have completely given up what they originally stood for to do so. Personally, I’m just happy this whole thing gave me a push out the door and a place to migrate to, Reddit was already turning into a place I didn’t want to be long before this.
They didn’t really give good context to the situation. They really should be talking about how these changes are going to be affecting reddit’s sources of information. That the fee’s they want to charge are ridiculously high for any developer (essentially pricing out any but the rich). How all content is user generated, maintained and controlled and yet reddit feels they are the owners of it. If they want to make these changes then they need to be taking a serious look at the solutions the community are coming up with.
I just hate that Spez continues to act like 3rd parties didn’t offer or cite reasonable examples and costs for api access. No one was saying cost was not an option but it was a ludicrous cost and an amazingly short timeline that started the whole fiasco.
I think if they just wanted to serve ads to third party apps they would have worked out a deal with them to revenue share at the very least and do this.
My guess is that they want to pitch Reddit as this huge datasource for AI in the upcoming IPO and they can’t do that if they’re giving it away for free.
What’s to stop AI companies from just scraping Reddit’s HTML? The two big AI companies—Google and Microsoft—already do that as part of their search engine indexing!
HTML scraping is standard practice for AI development in most major companies. It’s not even actually that difficult, there are tools like Selenium that make it really easy and manageable to completely automate.
"And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
I love how this is suddenly only a problem for them now but has been something they defended for years previously.
Yeah, honestly he seems to have some personal beef with third party apps, like he’s personally offended and hurt they’re profitable when the main app isn’t. I think that all of this has just served to demonstrate two things clearly: CEOs, though incredibly out of touch are still human, and you don’t need to be above average intelligence in order to be rich.
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He can’t be citing real statistics. I don’t know 3% of their reported 57 million users but I do know that every person I know that uses reddit uses third party apps.
Someone on data is beautiful found that all third party apps accounted for only 10% of the official app downloads. Taking that into account, it is likely that the vast majority of Reddit users only use the official app and don’t know what the fuss is all about.
But then, that mirrors the idea that most people are lurkers on Reddit.
I came here because of the article
Relatively recent arrival to Reddit, but this was the nudge I needed to really start diving into the Fediverse (via Lemmy). It’s been a ton of fun.
Everyone’s talking about enshitification, but they’re also just extremely late to the game. The rest of big tech monetized a long time ago and pissed off their users, but managed to keep a solid amount of their users and the rest went… to Reddit. I guess I understand a corporation’s need to monetize, but when you built a platform that was meant to be different than the rest you’re definitely going to experience some pain when you decide to be like them.
Reddit will most definitely survive this and maybe even be profitable in a few years, but they’ll have completely given up what they originally stood for to do so. Personally, I’m just happy this whole thing gave me a push out the door and a place to migrate to, Reddit was already turning into a place I didn’t want to be long before this.
They didn’t really give good context to the situation. They really should be talking about how these changes are going to be affecting reddit’s sources of information. That the fee’s they want to charge are ridiculously high for any developer (essentially pricing out any but the rich). How all content is user generated, maintained and controlled and yet reddit feels they are the owners of it. If they want to make these changes then they need to be taking a serious look at the solutions the community are coming up with.
I just hate that Spez continues to act like 3rd parties didn’t offer or cite reasonable examples and costs for api access. No one was saying cost was not an option but it was a ludicrous cost and an amazingly short timeline that started the whole fiasco.
As a user, I would have even shouldered my own cost. $2.50/mo for a no ad experience on the app I prefer? Seems reasonable.
I suspect this is the real reason spez wants third-party apps gone.
I think if they just wanted to serve ads to third party apps they would have worked out a deal with them to revenue share at the very least and do this.
My guess is that they want to pitch Reddit as this huge datasource for AI in the upcoming IPO and they can’t do that if they’re giving it away for free.
What’s to stop AI companies from just scraping Reddit’s HTML? The two big AI companies—Google and Microsoft—already do that as part of their search engine indexing!
HTML scraping is standard practice for AI development in most major companies. It’s not even actually that difficult, there are tools like Selenium that make it really easy and manageable to completely automate.
Shhh don’t tell investors when they IPO soon!
"And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
I love how this is suddenly only a problem for them now but has been something they defended for years previously.
Yeah, honestly he seems to have some personal beef with third party apps, like he’s personally offended and hurt they’re profitable when the main app isn’t. I think that all of this has just served to demonstrate two things clearly: CEOs, though incredibly out of touch are still human, and you don’t need to be above average intelligence in order to be rich.