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If the discussions have been going on for that long, why this exact moment in time, and why such a short deadline?
Why any moment in time? We did it when we did it. We could do it a year from now and we’d probably have the same conversation. We could do it five years ago, we’d be having the same conversation.
I guess what I still don’t quite understand is, if this has been thought about for a long time, is the goal just to meet this deadline and move on? Like just turn a new leaf from there?
We don’t have to meet our deadline. We told folks hey, we need to come up with a plan, or we’re going to start billing you on July 1st.
Complete mess of a CEO. I’m so glad that I’m not using Reddit anymore.
Those answers were disappointingly evasive. The questions were clear and he chose non-answers. Yuck.
Dude absolutely hates third party apps. Calls them his direct competitors and demeans them. Even says he ‘made a mistake’ allowing 3rd party apps. All the while forgetting that there was no official Reddit app for over 10 years of the company existing. Why didn’t he ban 3rd party apps then? Fucking ungrateful.
That’s unfortunate. I understand your trying to IPO and his goal is to get his golden parachute afterwards. But you’d think the board and him would want to foster some goodwill with the community the depend on.
They‘re fine if anyone with some critical thought leaves and the only ones left behind are the master bootlickers who would eat a plate of shit as long as it got served by Reddit.
Could even be seen as an improvement to them considering that includes communities like r/piracy which the mere existence of could hurt their capitalist investors feelings.
If he was gonna bullshit someone it should have been investors and advertisers, not users. Look at pre-Elon twitter, Jack Dorsey knew how to IPO on straight hedgefund money.
He’s so insufferable.
He refers to reddit as a city and keeps mentioning democracy and communities. No city/community/democracy should be owned by one corporation and have it’s main goal be profitability.
Spez wishing for some corpo dystopian society.
I mean…. Just read his comments in this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
Dude more thinks of himself as a king. He sees Reddit like a city in the sense Rome was a city, and he’s the Caesar.
He literally says he’s a great leader and “would not be a slave, but a leader” in the post-apocalypse.
He literally sees himself as Immortan Joe or some shit lmao
Well, you make sixteen posts and what do you get?
Another day older and pissed off at u/spez
I had to stop reading the interview, I never voted him as CEO. i guess I was voting Reddit but now I am voting fediversd
That scumbag energy, holy smokes. He’s executing reddit right in front of our very eyes. It’s just sad.
one day I hope to count our users among our investors, but getting to breakeven is a priority for us
Yeah well, I’m already an investor on the fediverse, by donating to my instance admins, and the instances I support already break even. It pays back handsome returns on my investment not by extracting value, but by providing a community that respects its users instead of monetizing them. That is the only investment I’m interested in.
I mean, it sure makes sense. If they’re getting the server costs and effort to maintain and moderate, happy to drop a few dollaridoos now and again. Less ads to block as well, which is always nice.
Yep. As soon as I set up my lemmy account I set up a recurring donation. I don’t want anything for free I understand things cost money, spez is the one trying to monetize other people’s unpaid labor
Wow, his answers and arguments are really bad. Doesn’t acknowledge that AI scrapers abused their system, not apps to access and interact with Reddit. Practically says they will imitate Apollo. Admits that they unreasonable timeline was a way to coerce deals.
Dude wants his golden parachute so badly he treats the interview as his rant box.
Good lord, this interview just solidified my decision to never return to Reddit. It seems Spez doesn’t want me there anyway, despite how much time and money I’ve given them.
I also wish the interviewer had brought up Spez lying and mischaracterizing Christian so blatantly. Just pathetic behavior.
probably established he would not talk about that before the interview and would walk if they did.
He thinks RIF and Apollo - both of which I have personally used - don’t add any value to Reddit? Lmao what a shithead
Also love the gaslighting of “um actually sweaty nobody likes the blackouts and everyone just thinks they’re annoying 💅”
Another tech slapfight to monopolize and monetize an entire slice of the data exploitation pie. Deleting Reddit was definitely the right choice for me. And it was the perfect excuse to dust off my two-year old Lemmy account that I’d never posted from!
Adding: can’t see past the smug arrogance either
Toward the end you can really see how defensive and agitated he is with his handlers chiming in too. He’s aware that he’s a douchebag, and just doesn’t care at all.
Classic CEO.
Spez is a spaz
Don’t use disabilities as swearwords. They are enough of a burden on a person as it is.
Spaz? Really?
This will be an unpopular opinion, but I think reddit is mostly in the right with these API pricing changes. It makes no sense from a business perspective to allow other apps to freely profit off their services. They only fucked up with the arbitrarily short timeline which Huffman has no reasoning for and the poor communication throughout the whole process. Even Apollo dev said he was fine with them charging if he had had more time to make the transition.
I think charging to use the API is fine, but it was definitely overpriced to the point that it was obvious they wanted to nuke TPAs. They need all that sweet user data to sell to others, and they can’t get to that with TPAs.
I mean user data can very much be completely inferred from API calls. It’s not about the user data itself, it’s about being able to say to advertisers “all our users will see your ads”.
I haven’t seen a developer of the third party apps complain about there being a price at all, just that the price is too high given how much a user costs reddit itself, and how tight the timeline is given at that price. And yeah he basically just said “well we were gonna do it at some point, so why not now?”
I think the issue is that he’s saying that he is “willing to talk” but Christian said many times that he feels he’s talking to a brick wall. So how can he feel comfortable having discussions when those discussions might not happen until after he starts getting charged prices that he wants to talk about?
For some reason spez doesn’t get that and it’s really annoying to see him talk about how they’re the only company in town offering free lunch, no one is asking for that.
Even if you think the pricing is fine, the time window the apps get to make changes is way too short. They kept asking when would we have to start paying, and the answer always been in the distance future. Now they have 30 days to get the funding for a huge amount of users.
Monetising API access isn’t bad, but at a reasonable rate.
The Snoo Platform hiked the rate up to the unaffordable is just insane.
I don’t think charging for the API is inherently wrong, but they want to charge a ridiculous amount. It should be 1/4th of what it is, or less. The Apollo guy calculated it is 20x more than what the average user makes them, via Reddit’s own previously posted user monetization stats.
Yeah it’s hard to say what is a reasonable price without seeing the numbers across platforms. I know the apollo dev said it was an unreasonable amount to charge, but the relay dev said he thinks he’d be able to charge a subscription fee between $2-$3 a month and still make a profit after reddit and googles cut. He said his users average ~100 calls per day versus apollo saying ~300. Maybe there’s an optimization issue there or just a lot of power users on apollo, idk. Either way, I feel like if the timeline was more like 6 months to a year transition and there would be no issue.
I would agree, if Reddit were a service provided by Reddit for customers. But it’s not. It’s a social network where most of the value of the site is generated by the users contributing content. No users, no value. They have tens of thousands of moderators donating countless hours of free work to the site, too. So if we leave the morality to the side for a moment and just put on our business hats, if Huffman pisses off the community too much, he loses critical mass and a large value proposition for the site. He is betting that no major exodus will occur and he can continue turning the screws.
It at least goes to show, once again, that when building on top of other services, those services can fuck you over at any time, for any reason.
The pricing they chose seems not reasonable at all. That‘s why I still think the whole thing is to kill third party apps.
