As you may have seen over the past week, Reddit — the “last page of the internet“-has I didn’t have a good time after the company’s CEO decided to oversee some changes This affected some very popular apps that people used to access the site. That CEO, Steve Huffman, is now doing some high-profile interviews to limit the damage, and he’s not doing well.
Faced with a website where many major subreddits – including most of the biggest video game subreddits, from R/PS5 to R/PCgaming – went dark for a few days (and in some cases stayed dark)and where many of the top posts on the site’s front page are still protest posts, you’d think Huffman would approach these interviews with a humble, understanding tone. especially given the negative reaction to his first round of public comments.
nope! At NBC Instead, he took the opportunity attacking the site’s moderators for organizing the protest, comparing them to “country gentry” and basically blaming them them for the website-wide uproar, as if some scammer/politician were calling someone “elite” and saying that the protests are therefore not “properly representative of their communities”:
If you are a politician or entrepreneur, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician has to be elected and a businessman can be fired by his shareholders.
And I think on Reddit the analogy is more like the landed gentry: the people who get their first money are allowed to stay there and pass it on to their descendants, and that’s not democratic.
Meanwhile over there The edgeHuffman says in a deadly serious face that not only was Reddit “never designed to support third-party apps” (then why did you have an API?), but he also had no idea “how much they benefited from it.” our API”.
As CEO, Huffman may have a different idea of what the word means, but those apps weren’t “profitable.” The existing payment options, many of which were voluntary, helped create applications that only existed because Reddit didn’t even do it for a long time have an app, and then when it got one, then Fuck.
In defense of all of this, Huffman can cite it An official FAQ that Reddit posted on their company blog yesterday, which merely serves to point out the number of subreddits that have reopened after the promised two-day lockdown (and inadvertently acknowledging that a full 20% of their top communities remain in the dark indefinitely in protest!), and publicly posting this phrase:
Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and in order to achieve that, we can no longer subsidize commercial businesses that require extensive data usage of our API.
Dude. Reddit has existed as a weird, sometimes horrible, sometimes tolerable collection of human communities for nearly two decades. Recently, for many people, it is even the only way to search the Internet for useful content. Most of the time, the site had no interest in messing with this stuff. So why all the fuss? Now about profit margins?
Damage control is useless us. It’s for potential investors. Reddit’s management is trying to get the site public and make some money. and so diversity The story can be summed up: They had some serious problems with it. So the next time you see Reddit or Huffman, they go to the media and try to dismiss the site-wide protests involving millions of disgruntled users and promise to die on the slightest hill just so they can get a few bucks out off the books and appear more profitable – in this case by directing more users to the official app that serves ads – remember what their motivations really are.
