Full Interview: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman Isn’t Backing Down
Holy shit so many lies and outright bullshit, let&#x27;s unpack.<p>&gt; One of the most important points I’d like to make today is that Reddit is a platform built by its users. My favorite analogy for Reddit is that of a city. Cities are physical things, but they’re really these living organisms created by their citizens. I think Reddit is very much the same. We’re a platform and tech company on one hand, but on the other it’s a living organism, this democratic living organism, created by its users.<p>But they will take away those users control of their subs and they will undelete&#x2F;unedit comments of users to protect what they see as &quot;their&quot; content.<p>He completely ignores&#x2F;side-steps the question on why they told the Apollo dev there would be no API changes this year. Then tries to pretend that April is actually when the clock started on all of this when they &#x2F;just&#x2F; announced the pricing. Even what they said in April was unclear and they refused to clarify when asked.<p>&gt; We’re perfectly willing to work with the folks who want to work with us, including figuring out what that transition period will look like.<p>Lies, just straight lies. The Apollo dev was under this impression, reached out to Reddit and asked for some more time, and they told him no. Just pure bullshit coming from &#x2F;u&#x2F;spez but that&#x27;s what we have come to expect I guess.<p>&gt; You’re talking to them, go ask them! Millions. He said how many subscribers he has, his price list is public. [Selig did not deny the “millions” claim when reached for comment.] I have a guess on how many. He’s given a lower number of subscribers, I have another guess that’s higher. But it’s real money.<p>I&#x27;m sure he has made millions but the app has been around for many years. From the numbers he has quoted (~50K yearly subs and the current price is now like $13&#x2F;yr) we can guess at about $650,000&#x2F;year, $552,500 after Apple&#x27;s cut, and then he pays a backend dev, has server costs of his own, and pays for things like icons from designers. Very quickly the Selig&#x27;s take-home looks very similar to a mid to high-end developer in CA. It&#x27;s disingenuous to lump all the revenue over many years together and play it off as if he is raking in millions (plural) a year. How much does Huffman make a year?<p>&gt; Isn’t there a way you could at least give them longer and work a little bit more closely on negotiable terms for folks like Apollo or Sync or RIF? Some of their users are, I’m sure, power users of Reddit and want to see them succeed.<p>&gt;&gt; I said we are working with everybody who is willing to work with us, which includes many of the other third party apps. The three you mentioned said they don’t want to work with us and they’re shutting down. I didn’t tell them to do that.<p>Again, lies.<p>Then he sidesteps all the questions about giving a longer time to app developers and plays whataboutism games then says one of the most galling things (to me), he calls Apollo a direct competitor. Full stop, that&#x27;s bullshit. You might lose out on some tracking&#x2F;ad revenue (which, by the way, is tiny based on their financials and Reddit is quick to tell you the 3rd party app users are a tiny percentage of the userbase, you can&#x27;t have it both ways Reddit) but it&#x27;s not a direct competitor. Apollo users provide content and moderation for your (Reddit) platform. It&#x27;s not like they suck in all the Reddit data and then have their own side-discussions that don&#x27;t contribute back to Reddit. Just so freaking tone deaf.<p>&gt; We offer the API so the vast majority of our use of the uses of the API — so not these, the other 98 percent of them that make tools, bots, enhancements for Reddit — that’s what the API is for. It was never designed to support third-party apps.<p>And that&#x27;s the first time I&#x27;ve ever heard that, might the first time it&#x27;s been said publically (but at best it was first said within the last month). Reddit encouraged these 3rd party developers, reddit&#x27;s first app was 3rd party app they bought, this is rewriting history and, once again, lies, sense a theme here?<p>&gt; profiting off of our API<p>I can&#x27;t even with this clown. You (Reddit) decided to give the API away for free, you encouraged these developers to make&#x2F;improve their apps, you pretend it was a one-way street, it absolutely wasn&#x27;t. The amount these apps made compared to Reddit&#x27;s revenue is peanuts ($650M vs $552K for 1 app, let&#x27;s pretend there were 4-Apollo-sized apps, that&#x27;s ~2.2M, or .03%, and it was not pure profit for those apps, they had costs&#x2F;salaries as well).<p>&gt; I want to stop you for a second there. So you’re saying that Apollo, RIF, Sync, they don’t add value to Reddit?<p>&gt;&gt; Not as much as they take. No way.<p>I don&#x27;t believe this even for a second. Just pure bullshit. Let&#x27;s also remember that this API change comes with <i>no new features</i>, app developers have been asking for years if not over a decade for better API endpoints (streaming&#x2F;webhooks) to lessen the load of polling, they&#x27;ve asked for better endpoints to lower the load, Reddit has done nothing. They haven&#x27;t even kept the API up in feature parity to what the new web&#x2F;app can do.<p>&gt; 90-plus percent of Reddit users are on our platform, contributing, and are monetized either through ads or Reddit Premium. Why would we subsidize this small group? Why would we effectively pay them to use Reddit but not everybody else who also contributes to Reddit? Does that make sense?<p>&gt; These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free. And that free comes at the expense of our other users and our business. That’s what this is about. It can’t be free.<p>Ahh yes the good old &quot;These people just want something for free&quot;. That&#x27;s poppycock, I&#x27;m more than willing to pay but you&#x27;ve offered no good solutions. I&#x27;d even pay the absurd API costs (plus the Apple tax, plus a little extra for the developer) but your timeline is way too short for the app developers to make this work. Also you keep saying you will work with the devs and give them more time but that&#x27;s a lie. Apollo asked specifically for this and you said no.<p>&gt; Do you imagine there are going to be other third party apps after these API changes? What do you see the future of third-party apps looking like?<p>&gt;&gt; We’ll see. We’ll see. Like we try to charge so it works out to about $1 per user per month for reasonable API usage. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.<p>That number is a fantasy, the Reddit app itself wouldn&#x27;t come close to that usage. They&#x27;ve made up that number and it&#x27;s insulting they keep throwing it around when they don&#x27;t even come within the ballpark of that.<p>&gt; How widely are you seeing that sentiment? If I go on r&#x2F;all right now, at least as of about an hour ago, four of the five top posts are all about these blackouts. 
Let me see.<p>&gt;&gt; Oh, you mean these posts that have no comments? Those ones?<p>&gt; They’re highly upvoted by their communities.<p>&gt;&gt; If there were comments on there, I bet I can tell you what those comments would say. They would say “knock this off, it’s annoying.” Because if you go to the other posts where comments are enabled, that’s what people are saying.<p>Wow, Reddit should drop their main product and go all in on this mind reading ability they have &#x2F;s. Also I&#x27;ve heard this BS from every protest (online or real life) I&#x27;ve followed. Yes, some people are annoyed by the protests, that&#x27;s the freaking point.<p>&gt; I’m sure people are not as supportive of it as they might have been earlier in the week, because it has obviously been a huge inconvenience to using Reddit on a day-to-day basis. But how can we prove that, broadly, users are not in support of the Reddit protests when some of the top upvoted posts are protest posts?<p>&gt;&gt; If comments were on for those posts... there’s a reason why they’re not allowing comments. That is a very un-Reddit thing to do. We don’t do that. I do my AMA. I take my beating.<p>&gt; In that AMA...<p>&gt;&gt; People were pissed.<p>&gt; They were not happy.<p>&gt;&gt; Yeah. And we took it.<p>And you answered like 14 questions total, I&#x27;m not sure what this is supposed to prove?<p>I already disliked Huffman due to his blatant lies and mischaracterization but this is over the top. I had a small hope Reddit would see the error of their ways and reverse course at least partly but it seems they are fully prepared to ram this down everyone&#x27;s throats. It was fun while it lasted.