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>The response was surprising. Unlike most companies, which try to soften their blows behind corporate PR speak, Huffman answered rather plainly. I strongly dis

>The response was surprising. Unlike most companies, which try to soften their blows behind corporate PR speak, Huffman answered rather plainly. I strongly disagree. The response is line with his past behavior and notice that nowhere in it does spez response address the fact that he was caught lying. That is exactly what corporate PR speak is. Deflecting away from lies and guilt and refusing to answer the question. He wants us to be mad the Apollo dev protected himself by recording the conversation.

jongjong 3y ago
Something similar also happened to me with my previous employer. After I quit, the founders tried to make it look like I was blackmailing them. Shortly after, they were forced to change their story (at least the one told to my ex-colleagues) because my colleagues knew why I had wanted to quit since months and they knew it didn't make any sense... Cringe. Anyway in my case, they told one story to employees and a different story to investors. Unfortunately, it's very easy for certain founders to tell 3 different stories to 3 different sets of people these days and the lies exist in parallel and never reconcile for years due to divergent incentives and class divides (and media filter bubbles).
- walterbell 3y ago
  > founders to tell 3 different stories to 3 different sets of people these days and the lies exist in parallel and never reconcile for years due to divergent incentives and class divides (and media filter bubbles) The cost of automated detection of story arbitrage is also falling, e.g. hypothetical StoryGPT analysis of testimony to a blockchain (or paper) notary.
  - vkou 3y ago
    You're assuming that anyone cares about dishonesty.
    - walterbell 3y ago
      Investors have a financial incentive to care. Hedge funds have a financial incentive to uncover deception or incongruent claims.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "Unfortunately, it's very easy for certain founders to tell 3 different stories to 3 different sets of people these days and the lies exist in parallel and never reconcile for years due to divergent incentives and class divides (and media filter bubbles)." "These days" .. but was it better before? The ruling class literally spoke a different language (aristocraties in europe french and the clerics latin). That made it even easier to seperate realities and not accidently share insights to peasants what they are not supposed to hear.
- sshine 3y ago
  I think it's more likely that investors don't mind that the CEO is a two-face liar if he can make the company profitable up to an IPO. "Community" is such an intangible KPI.
  - bionhoward 3y ago
    What makes you say that Community is intangible?
    - chmod775 3y ago
      An intangible key performance indicator is qualitative rather than quantitative and can't be easily measured. Community clearly falls under any common definition you'll find. That said, I don't think community could be considered tangible in any context?
    - sshine 3y ago
      There was a bit of sarcasm implied. Community is tangible. And there are tangible KPIs for measuring the health of a community. But Reddit's community health is clearly not proportional to Reddit's profits. It's just another way of saying: VCs and users don't agree what makes Reddit great.
      - chmod775 3y ago
        > Community is tangible. How do you define tangible vs. intangible assets so that community ends up being a tangible asset?
        sshine 3y ago
        There is too much word confusion going on. I said "Community is an intangible KPI" and someone asked "What makes you say Community is intangible?" -- but I didn't say that. Then I said "Community is tangible" and what I meant by that is: There is a well understood definition of what a community is. Now you ask "How do you define tangible vs. intangible assets?" but I'm not saying that community value is easily convertible into economic value. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset.asp An asset is a resource with economic value that an individual, corporation, or country owns or controls with the expectation that it will provide a future benefit. Assets are reported on a company's balance sheet. They're classified as current, fixed, financial, and intangible. They are bought or created to increase a firm's value or benefit the firm's operations. An asset can be thought of as something that, in the future, can generate cash flow, reduce expenses, or improve sales, regardless of whether it's manufacturing equipment or a patent. One thing you could consider is moderator interaction as increasing the value of the platform in proportion to the hours spent, like you do when accounting a salaried software developer as increasing the value of the product by getting paid. (It's a proxy, of course.) I assume that shareholders are not stupid when it comes to the cost of potentially killing communities, and they believe that more ad exposure + some AI model based on Reddit's data will deliver more economic value than the current free API. I think where the difference in conviction is: - How much will killing 3rd-party apps as we know them affect Reddit's community health? - How much will a deteriorated community health affect the future quality of Reddit data?
- psyklic 3y ago
  This happened to me too. After I left our company, my business partner told new investors there was never a CTO. However, for nearly a year we had jointly agreed I was CTO -- and he routinely put it in writing. When the new investors found out, my business partner demanded I remove CTO from my website, writing it was "technically incorrect".
djbusby 3y ago
If anything, this shows the VALUE in recording conversations - especially for weaker party. Would like to have one-party consent recording all over USA.
- dotancohen 3y ago
  > especially for weaker party. How often do you see the weaker party's interests enshrined in law?
  - jjoonathan 3y ago
    Also in devices -- both Android and iPhone have consistently made it obnoxiously hard to record calls, across many years and many security decisions.
- nico 3y ago
  IANAL, this is not legal advice You can always take notes, write down things about the conversation, you can even write down the whole conversation without consent So essentially you can have a transcription of a conversation, but not the audio recording (without consent)
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    It is better than nothing, but an actual recording would be a way more solid proof.
    - Spooky23 3y ago
      Not necessarily. With a recording you need to take the good with the bad. Recordings can become toxic as you can’t get rid of them when the shit hits the fan. There are people who record their entire working day on their phones or Apple Watches and get themselves into trouble… do you know that the guy in your conference call was in Maryland? Did you say something dumb? You’re always going to run afoul of something in doing that. With contemporaneous notes, you control the editorial aspects of it and have no legal risk in most situations. If you know you are exposed to some sort of problem, email yourself to make discovery easy. Otherwise, keep a handwritten journal.
SahAssar 3y ago
A good "PR answer" does not raise concrete questions, it makes all questions feel equally invalid. In this case /u/spez'es answer did not calm or invalidate the questions.
- Exuma 3y ago
  What would be a good PR answer to refute the audio recording, out of curiosity?
  - kemayo 3y ago
    Spitballing here, but for the interpreting-as-a-threat thing he could double-down on the misunderstanding claim -- it sounds like the CEO wasn't actually on that call, so he can throw an unnamed underling under the bus for how it was represented to him, and backpedal on the specific accusation while trying to still convey the vibe that he thinks Apollo was being unreasonable.
    - Exuma 3y ago
      Interesting, thanks. I see now what you mean about 'invalidating all statements' edit: maybe you are not OP, but I still see now.
  - SahAssar 3y ago
    "While we do understand the concerns of individual developers we are moving forward with them as a community on these changes. As for mentions of acquisitions or valuations of future partnerships we consider those talks private and unfinished until we have something to announce" or some similar corporate bullshit. It's not an answer I would have liked, but it seems like it would have been far more in character.
that_guy_iain 3y ago
> I strongly disagree. The response is line with his past behavior and notice that nowhere in it does spez response address the fact that he was caught lying. Was he though? In the audio it's clear he took it as a threat straight away. He literally said so. And the threat he understood was that the ApolloDev would create a fuss and make a lot of noise. Which the ApolloDev went on to do. The ApolloDev's response to Spez saying this was "I didn't think you took that as a threat" while posting an audio of him taking it as a threat. Then saying it's a blatant lie. While posting audio of spez saying he's taking it as a threat and using common language for moving past threats in business calls "I'll hope that's not what you meant" which is always code for "I'm going to pretend you didn't do that." You can say he was wrong but I don't think you can say someone is lying for believing something that is wrong.
- openweb 3y ago
  Yeah I think it's pretty obvious Spez took it as a threat the whole time and just wanted to save the Apollo devs face by moving on without making a fuss of it.
sillysaurusx 3y ago
Spez's response is making me question the integrity of not merely Reddit, but YC as a whole. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/jnk45rr/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_... The whole point of YC was to imbue every founder with "do not be evil" in their DNA. Otherwise, it's a cartel. This is pretty clear-cut case of Huffman not only trying to lie publicly (for no apparent reason, no less!) but then further trying to damage his reputation. I'm unreasonably upset about this, and should probably step away from computers for a bit. I don't know if I'm getting old and just feeling like "it's the end of an era," or what. But I grew up in a 2008 that was unlike anything on display here. I thought someone would be on the phone with Huffman trying to convince him that lying publicly about a developer is a bad idea. But if they are, they're not getting the message through. EDIT: the replies further illustrate the disconnect. I grew up on pg’s essays. You wouldn’t say those things if you merely thought of YC as an investment vehicle. The fact that people are saying don’t be evil isn’t a big deal is… well, if you’ve ever read I Am Legend, the book (spoiler alert) ends with the main character realizing that he’s in a world of zombies, and that they have their own culture, unique and distinct from his. The zombies aren’t even zombies; they’re people, with their own views. But the culture is so foreign and alien to him that he realizes he’s a minority of one. Am I the only one who cares about don’t be evil? Huffman isn’t merely a YC alum. He’s the alum. There were no alums before him. And now he blatantly made up a lie, publicly, about a developer, for no apparent reason and no apparent gain. It wasn’t even theoretically going to get him any gain. There seems to be no reason for the lie at all, and it’s hard to imagine something more evil than damaging someone’s reputation like that for no reason (short of doing something to physically harm someone or take away their money/resources). Reputation is everything in hacker culture.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- junofan 3y ago
  > The whole point of YC was to imbue every founder with "do not be evil" in their DNA. That’s not really the job of the startup investor. At best you try to screen for that. But like active ethics education… no.
tacticalturtle 3y ago
People keep saying he was caught lying - to be honest, I don’t really see where where that happened. Reading the transcript of the conversation with the Apollo dev, it was a fairly awkward exchange, and the Apollo dev was using all these innuendos to imply that a monetary exchange would avoid a negative outcome. I don’t think we know who it was specifically at Reddit that acknowledged the Apollo dev was not delivering a threat. The transcript notably attributed that to a general “Reddit”, not the CEO. Do we even know that the CEO was on the call? Why didn’t the Apollo dev note who was speaking? Especially after the way he was acting on the call to try and negotiate a cash payment, I don’t entirely trust the Apollo dev’s telling of events.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  I didn't get that vibe whatsoever. I got much more a vibe of him calling BS on Reddit's numbers. Like, "Really? My app's API calls are costing Reddit $20M/year? Why has this never been an issue til now? You could have reached out to me, you could have limited my API calls, hell, you could have written me a check to say "please shut down this resource drain"!"

jongjong 3y ago

Something similar also happened to me with my previous employer. After I quit, the founders tried to make it look like I was blackmailing them. Shortly after, they were forced to change their story (at least the one told to my ex-colleagues) because my colleagues knew why I had wanted to quit since months and they knew it didn't make any sense... Cringe. Anyway in my case, they told one story to employees and a different story to investors. Unfortunately, it's very easy for certain founders to tell 3 different stories to 3 different sets of people these days and the lies exist in parallel and never reconcile for years due to divergent incentives and class divides (and media filter bubbles).

walterbell 3y ago
> founders to tell 3 different stories to 3 different sets of people these days and the lies exist in parallel and never reconcile for years due to divergent incentives and class divides (and media filter bubbles) The cost of automated detection of story arbitrage is also falling, e.g. hypothetical StoryGPT analysis of testimony to a blockchain (or paper) notary.
- vkou 3y ago
  You're assuming that anyone cares about dishonesty.
  - walterbell 3y ago
    Investors have a financial incentive to care. Hedge funds have a financial incentive to uncover deception or incongruent claims.
hutzlibu 3y ago
"Unfortunately, it's very easy for certain founders to tell 3 different stories to 3 different sets of people these days and the lies exist in parallel and never reconcile for years due to divergent incentives and class divides (and media filter bubbles)." "These days" .. but was it better before? The ruling class literally spoke a different language (aristocraties in europe french and the clerics latin). That made it even easier to seperate realities and not accidently share insights to peasants what they are not supposed to hear.
sshine 3y ago
I think it's more likely that investors don't mind that the CEO is a two-face liar if he can make the company profitable up to an IPO. "Community" is such an intangible KPI.
- bionhoward 3y ago
  What makes you say that Community is intangible?
  - chmod775 3y ago
    An intangible key performance indicator is qualitative rather than quantitative and can't be easily measured. Community clearly falls under any common definition you'll find. That said, I don't think community could be considered tangible in any context?
  - sshine 3y ago
    There was a bit of sarcasm implied. Community is tangible. And there are tangible KPIs for measuring the health of a community. But Reddit's community health is clearly not proportional to Reddit's profits. It's just another way of saying: VCs and users don't agree what makes Reddit great.
    - chmod775 3y ago
      > Community is tangible. How do you define tangible vs. intangible assets so that community ends up being a tangible asset?
      - sshine 3y ago
        There is too much word confusion going on. I said "Community is an intangible KPI" and someone asked "What makes you say Community is intangible?" -- but I didn't say that. Then I said "Community is tangible" and what I meant by that is: There is a well understood definition of what a community is. Now you ask "How do you define tangible vs. intangible assets?" but I'm not saying that community value is easily convertible into economic value. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset.asp An asset is a resource with economic value that an individual, corporation, or country owns or controls with the expectation that it will provide a future benefit. Assets are reported on a company's balance sheet. They're classified as current, fixed, financial, and intangible. They are bought or created to increase a firm's value or benefit the firm's operations. An asset can be thought of as something that, in the future, can generate cash flow, reduce expenses, or improve sales, regardless of whether it's manufacturing equipment or a patent. One thing you could consider is moderator interaction as increasing the value of the platform in proportion to the hours spent, like you do when accounting a salaried software developer as increasing the value of the product by getting paid. (It's a proxy, of course.) I assume that shareholders are not stupid when it comes to the cost of potentially killing communities, and they believe that more ad exposure + some AI model based on Reddit's data will deliver more economic value than the current free API. I think where the difference in conviction is: - How much will killing 3rd-party apps as we know them affect Reddit's community health? - How much will a deteriorated community health affect the future quality of Reddit data?
psyklic 3y ago
This happened to me too. After I left our company, my business partner told new investors there was never a CTO. However, for nearly a year we had jointly agreed I was CTO -- and he routinely put it in writing. When the new investors found out, my business partner demanded I remove CTO from my website, writing it was "technically incorrect".

djbusby 3y ago

If anything, this shows the VALUE in recording conversations - especially for weaker party. Would like to have one-party consent recording all over USA.

dotancohen 3y ago
> especially for weaker party. How often do you see the weaker party's interests enshrined in law?
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  Also in devices -- both Android and iPhone have consistently made it obnoxiously hard to record calls, across many years and many security decisions.
nico 3y ago
IANAL, this is not legal advice You can always take notes, write down things about the conversation, you can even write down the whole conversation without consent So essentially you can have a transcription of a conversation, but not the audio recording (without consent)
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  It is better than nothing, but an actual recording would be a way more solid proof.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    Not necessarily. With a recording you need to take the good with the bad. Recordings can become toxic as you can’t get rid of them when the shit hits the fan. There are people who record their entire working day on their phones or Apple Watches and get themselves into trouble… do you know that the guy in your conference call was in Maryland? Did you say something dumb? You’re always going to run afoul of something in doing that. With contemporaneous notes, you control the editorial aspects of it and have no legal risk in most situations. If you know you are exposed to some sort of problem, email yourself to make discovery easy. Otherwise, keep a handwritten journal.

SahAssar 3y ago

A good "PR answer" does not raise concrete questions, it makes all questions feel equally invalid. In this case /u/spez'es answer did not calm or invalidate the questions.

Exuma 3y ago
What would be a good PR answer to refute the audio recording, out of curiosity?
- kemayo 3y ago
  Spitballing here, but for the interpreting-as-a-threat thing he could double-down on the misunderstanding claim -- it sounds like the CEO wasn't actually on that call, so he can throw an unnamed underling under the bus for how it was represented to him, and backpedal on the specific accusation while trying to still convey the vibe that he thinks Apollo was being unreasonable.
  - Exuma 3y ago
    Interesting, thanks. I see now what you mean about 'invalidating all statements' edit: maybe you are not OP, but I still see now.
- SahAssar 3y ago
  "While we do understand the concerns of individual developers we are moving forward with them as a community on these changes. As for mentions of acquisitions or valuations of future partnerships we consider those talks private and unfinished until we have something to announce" or some similar corporate bullshit. It's not an answer I would have liked, but it seems like it would have been far more in character.

that_guy_iain 3y ago

> I strongly disagree. The response is line with his past behavior and notice that nowhere in it does spez response address the fact that he was caught lying. Was he though? In the audio it's clear he took it as a threat straight away. He literally said so. And the threat he understood was that the ApolloDev would create a fuss and make a lot of noise. Which the ApolloDev went on to do. The ApolloDev's response to Spez saying this was "I didn't think you took that as a threat" while posting an audio of him taking it as a threat. Then saying it's a blatant lie. While posting audio of spez saying he's taking it as a threat and using common language for moving past threats in business calls "I'll hope that's not what you meant" which is always code for "I'm going to pretend you didn't do that." You can say he was wrong but I don't think you can say someone is lying for believing something that is wrong.

openweb 3y ago
Yeah I think it's pretty obvious Spez took it as a threat the whole time and just wanted to save the Apollo devs face by moving on without making a fuss of it.

sillysaurusx 3y ago

Spez's response is making me question the integrity of not merely Reddit, but YC as a whole. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/jnk45rr/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_... The whole point of YC was to imbue every founder with "do not be evil" in their DNA. Otherwise, it's a cartel. This is pretty clear-cut case of Huffman not only trying to lie publicly (for no apparent reason, no less!) but then further trying to damage his reputation. I'm unreasonably upset about this, and should probably step away from computers for a bit. I don't know if I'm getting old and just feeling like "it's the end of an era," or what. But I grew up in a 2008 that was unlike anything on display here. I thought someone would be on the phone with Huffman trying to convince him that lying publicly about a developer is a bad idea. But if they are, they're not getting the message through. EDIT: the replies further illustrate the disconnect. I grew up on pg’s essays. You wouldn’t say those things if you merely thought of YC as an investment vehicle. The fact that people are saying don’t be evil isn’t a big deal is… well, if you’ve ever read I Am Legend, the book (spoiler alert) ends with the main character realizing that he’s in a world of zombies, and that they have their own culture, unique and distinct from his. The zombies aren’t even zombies; they’re people, with their own views. But the culture is so foreign and alien to him that he realizes he’s a minority of one. Am I the only one who cares about don’t be evil? Huffman isn’t merely a YC alum. He’s the alum. There were no alums before him. And now he blatantly made up a lie, publicly, about a developer, for no apparent reason and no apparent gain. It wasn’t even theoretically going to get him any gain. There seems to be no reason for the lie at all, and it’s hard to imagine something more evil than damaging someone’s reputation like that for no reason (short of doing something to physically harm someone or take away their money/resources). Reputation is everything in hacker culture.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
junofan 3y ago
> The whole point of YC was to imbue every founder with "do not be evil" in their DNA. That’s not really the job of the startup investor. At best you try to screen for that. But like active ethics education… no.

tacticalturtle 3y ago

People keep saying he was caught lying - to be honest, I don’t really see where where that happened. Reading the transcript of the conversation with the Apollo dev, it was a fairly awkward exchange, and the Apollo dev was using all these innuendos to imply that a monetary exchange would avoid a negative outcome. I don’t think we know who it was specifically at Reddit that acknowledged the Apollo dev was not delivering a threat. The transcript notably attributed that to a general “Reddit”, not the CEO. Do we even know that the CEO was on the call? Why didn’t the Apollo dev note who was speaking? Especially after the way he was acting on the call to try and negotiate a cash payment, I don’t entirely trust the Apollo dev’s telling of events.

FireBeyond 3y ago
I didn't get that vibe whatsoever. I got much more a vibe of him calling BS on Reddit's numbers. Like, "Really? My app's API calls are costing Reddit $20M/year? Why has this never been an issue til now? You could have reached out to me, you could have limited my API calls, hell, you could have written me a check to say "please shut down this resource drain"!"