this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is fighting a losing battle against the site's moderators (qz.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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The company wants to charge for API access. Its volunteer moderators have other ideas

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

My assumption here is that Huffman may win the battle, but he might lose the war. Even if he manages to get the rampaging mods under control, how much damage will he do in the process?

r/pics will probably end up going NSFW, which gets another major sub to lose ad revenue. Can Reddit manage to get all these subs back on topic without pulling some fascist takeover of the mod teams? These malicious compliance subs aren't explicitly breaking any rules, and taking action against them will just fan community outrage more.

They can obviously ban NSFW material, but that'll force a migration far faster than any blackout ever could. Not to mention 3rd party apps going dark on July 1st, which might see a not insignificant drop off of mobile users.

Reddit has likely begun its slow descent, and u/spez's best long term strategy would be to reverse course and keep the public API. Of course, he'll never do that since that just communicates to any investors that you have no control over your community. Not sure how he digs his way out of this one.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The primary thing with r/pics and its users is that they are creating/posting SFW quality content for free. They are an established platform with an audience, and the tradeoff is that the platform can be used for ads by its owner. This is all fair.

The main outrage against the blackout is now coming from people who usually scroll, upvote, and consume content. Not content creators. They cannot fathom that their source of entertainment is inaccessible and just want people to stop 'overreacting' and get back to scrolling.

What happens when the platform is no longer reliable, because the owner decided to upset the people making sure the quality remains as established? Sure, someone else will fill the gap, but with these actions I'm sure a lot content creators have flocked to other places. Which leaves the bots, and the lurkers. No content is worse than low quality content.

I'm curious for what the future brings for Reddit. It feels like it will have a different trajectory compared to Twitter, where anything is content and quality doesn't matter as much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, ask Tumblr how well banning NSFW went for them lol

Maybe his exit strategy is to give Elon an amazing handjob and hope he buys reddit for a stupid amount of money.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is perfectly reasonable to charge for API access. That's not the problem.

The problem is that Huffman seems to think he can do whatever he wants without consequences. It wasn't "Hey, we're going to start charging for API, here's a reasonable price, and a reasonable time frame, and we want to make sure everyone has a reasonable opportunity to continue providing applications that lots of users and mods use to access and shepherd the site."

It was, "We're going to start charging an exorbitant amount for API access, in an unviably short timeframe. If you have any complaints or disagreements, we're going to provably lie about our interactions with you to make you look bad, oh and we're also going to completely forget that there are people with accessibility needs and basically ignore them except as an afterthought. We're also going to threaten existing mods who don't play along, and replace them with people who do if we feel like it."

That's the problem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Because the point was never to monetize the APIs. The point was to get rid of the third party apps. A minority of users are still using the not monetized versions of reddit. old.reddit.com, and the third party apps. The people using new reddit, and the reddit app, have a totally different, heavily monetized, modern social media experience full of ads and suggested posts. They want everyone to either have that experience, or leave.

But they can't come out and say that, because it's a huge fuck you. A fuck you to their original members, a fuck you to the apps they used to fuel their growth for a decade. Now they want a controlled ecosystem like Facebook, but they can't say it directly. So instead it's surprise API costs, refusing to talk to app developers, lying about conversations with Apollo devs.

But just like everything else they do, reddit can't plan for shit. So they didn't at all consider the fallout for accessibility tools, mod tools, etc. Which is why all their messaging since then has essentially been "No, we weren't trying to kill accessibility and mod tools, just the third party apps for normal users!" But they can't say the second part directly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just went back to log in for the first time in a week and took a look at one of my most frequented subs (Austria) to see what is going on. Apparently the mods decided to allow posts only about an Austrian children‘s show character who is a bike.

However, in the comments where I looked overwhelmingly the users whined about power tripping mods and that they should be removed and are undemocratic for not letting users choose the topic and nobody cares about 3rd party apps and they should just shut up and go back to normal.

So if that were my entire impression of this it wouldn‘t be that the mods are winning. Maybe a draw since I can also see the mood on here.

I‘d think it‘s maybe "opinion forming" bots if it weren‘t some of them in Austrian and I doubt Reddit would use bots for German opinions. So it seems genuine to me, only the spez bootlickers are left. I‘m never going back, let them have it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I noticed this too. It seems some people just arent ready to let it go and are blaming this protest for decreasing the number of users on the sub. What they fail to realize is that a lot of the people who left are probably using third party apps and wont have access to reddit after they lose API access. We will really see the extent of this in July?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I just think that most of the people complaining probably don't want to mod themselve. As long as reddit has no way to replace most of the mods and as long as the mods keep up their protest reddit will only be semi-functional.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They claim to make no profit out of Reddit. Is that true?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Capitalists gonna exploit free labor, burn down good will, and jump ship when they run aground. Some day we may learn to stop giving corpos free resources in exchange for their benevolence. Because they haven't any. They're leeches. They monetized the internet, as they do everything, and they don't care about the things they create or the people that come to rely on them. Yeah he's a low-rent Elon but Steve isn't gonna be moved by any of this protesting any more than the Emerald Prince is over Twitter. It doesn't matter if it's a losing battle for him. He'll get his cut and the rest can burn.

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