>It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie

Spez was the person who got caught editing a users comment in the backend to make them seem like an asshole or otherwise change the public perception of a question and response

This is 100% in line with something I would expect from Spez (the CEO)

> It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community.

I would like to be astounded. But Reddit has taken $1.4 billion in venture capital, meaning they are expected to make VCs well more than that. And one way that can happen is aggressively juicing the short-term numbers and IPOing, so that VCs can dump their holdings before everybody realizes that they were sold a bill of goods. I suspect that they were thinking nobody would catch them like this. Or that even if they did, people would have forgotten by the IPO pop.

I think there's a fundamental conflict of interest in the business models of web communities. I saw somebody sum up Web 2.0 as "you do all the work, we make all the money", which totally applies to Reddit. Those communities can work well on a pay-the-bills basis. But investors generally don't give a shit about communities; they just want money. So from the perspective of the economic rational actor, the right thing to do is to strip-mine the years of goodwill built up, maximizing short-term revenue. That will set the business up for long-term failure, but by that point it will have been sold off.

That's an important part of the private equity playbook and has been for a while. A good example is Simmons Mattress: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/...

And Cory Doctorow has been talking about this as enshittification: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

I actually believe reddit when they say the impact is small

I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website.

If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web (or web mobile or the official Reddit app), the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority.

Of course I think the behavior is shitty but I don't think most people really care and reddit will not see any real impact of it either.

"Why would even a ruthless money-over-everything Wall Street investor want to gamble on that?"

I think you are missing an even larger point here. What is Reddit without its communities and users? At the end of the day, if people are no longer love using Reddit, there's nothing left to their business. How anybody thinks that the API decision was a good one in light of that (alienating your own power users) is beyond twitteresque.

At this point, I'm just glad Apollo's author will be able to get some indemnification (and cover his refunds) with the likely lawsuit that will come from this lie.

> It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community.

I listened to the audio. It was very clear from the get-go the minute he said pay me $10m they were taking it very seriously, they said repeatedly "I just want to be very clear about what you're saying" and then said "that's sounds like a threat". The wording doesn't really make sense for a native English speaker when talking about a buyout. And they end that part with "I'm just going to hope that's not what you meant." which is generally how someone acts when they think you've threatened them but are going to be civil about it. So I don't think it's fair to say it's a blatant lie. And wouldn't you know it, what they thought was being threatened is what is happened?

Spez has always made Ellen Pao look like a genius CEO

>Bullies need to learn that the truth will come out eventually,

At this point, this is just speculation and wishful thinking on your part. History has shown that this is not always the outcome. Things we try to teach kids like "winners don't cheat, and cheaters don't win", "crime doesn't pay", or any similar platitudes do not hold true in real life which adults live. If Reddit were to die tomorrow, it would affect me in no way. So this has all been a bunch of popcorn eating for me to watch everyone on their soapboxes make outlandish statements made on pure emotion.

Their fight with ad blocking is the same Cold War every other social media site has. If they’re serving ads off of distinctly named infrastructure, or even distinctly subnetted or IP-addressed infrastructure, an adblocking router config will kill them no matter, & there’d be people writing those and distributing them. Their only hope would be to serve ads inline with content, to defeat those. Which … they already do, I think? I dunno. It would be how they’d serve adverts to Apollo users and RiF users. I think the biggest adblocking issue they have is people on desktop chrome & Firefox. Who already aren’t using the API.

They didn’t lock old.reddit out of new features; it’s a really unwieldy codebase, and making changes to old,reddit is like shaking a wooden water tower. It holds up the water tank as long as it’s a static load, not dynamic. I’ve had to read / maintain / debug source code in my career - and I’ve read the old open sourced Reddit code, and it is … well, it’s not designed for building up and out. It’s not even designed for maintaining over time. It was designed to get a message board running with occasional weekly downtimes, and a lot of “you broke reddit” and a bunch of RSS feeds and API endpoints, and no view to end user experience. It was built with the same mindset as building windows 3.1. Coding some of the features would be like backporting their support code to windows 3.1 - but not as libraries, as device drivers.

After carefully reading the comments and going back to the post, I take back my argument. It was flawed and did not represent the whole picture. I apologize for that. I think it wasn't a threat, but rather an unsuccessful attempt to sell Apollo before time runs out. I apologize for the confusion I created with my poor argument. I need to read more carefully.

--- I initially clicked on this post fully prepared to be outraged at Reddit and its CEO, but after carefully going through the audio, I just can't share that sentiment. I've listened to the recording multiple times, making sure that I'm not missing any crucial points in the conversation. It is evident to me that this statement, "if you want Apollo to go quiet," did come across as a threat.

Yes, the developer tried to backtrack later in the call by adding "in terms of API usage," but the damage was already done. Steve's side even provided several opportunities for him to clarify his statement, claiming that he couldn't hear him properly. I understand that many members of this community are rightfully upset with Reddit and its actions in recent years (me included), but we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that it really felt and sounded like a threat. ---

Transcript of the call: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...

Audio: http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...