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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company

64 points by Terretta 3y ago

h2odragon 3y ago
I bet the Substack folks are partying hard lately. Watching your competition immolate itself has got to be a heady feeling.
- ftxbro 3y ago
  then when substack becomes the adult in the room they will become like quora or medium
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - type0 3y ago
    Quora became rotten before it riped, Medium was blogger 2.0 and was doomed from the start
- type0 3y ago
  But there is no similarity between Reddit and Substack, how are they competing exactly?
  - throw9away6 3y ago
    Only in that they are the last line of defense for non commercial content
  - h2odragon 3y ago
    Substack now has a comment system and has had user given content as their thing for a while. all they lack is a front page to vote their headlines and discussions onto.
menus 3y ago
> "But I think the greater Reddit community just want to participate with their fellow community members." > "The protest, what it really affects is the everyday users, most of whom aren't involved in this, or the changes that spurred this," Its amazing how we butchered the protest into the regular 'us vs them' situation seen in everything: politicize everything, pitch people against people, while the person on the top reaps the money and enjoyment from the drama. > Huffman said negotiations have broken down with two of the most popular apps, Apollo and Reddit is Fun, but he said Reddit is willing to negotiate with most third-party developers. Wow. You accuse him of blackmailing you for 10 million, get caught red handed (1) then say that negotiations "broke down"? I want to hear what happened with rif from the developer. I hope he recorded his calls too. (1) https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
- flandish 3y ago
  It’s a corporation. It is never about community. Only ever profit. The manufactured fracture of us vs them is a tactic of distraction.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Careful now, you're posting on HN. Venture capitalist incubator... which funded Reddit. It was only ever about profit, why would you think otherwise?
    - flandish 3y ago
      I don’t think people “think” otherwise, but they do apply human “ideals” or “emotion” to corporate action and while corps are run by humans they are not themselves human, obviously. So it’s a slippery distractive slope.
- croutonwagon 3y ago
  Let us not forget many other app develops revealing they got the ghost up until at least the ama and he was all “woops” I find it ironic he says they should grow up. You know who makes up narratives in their head and when challenged on it still tries dig in and blame me. My 5 and 7 year old… There’s your sign.
emodendroket 3y ago
> Giving away a service for free, Huffman said, is not something Reddit would be able to do forever. > "We've been subsidizing other business for free for a long time. We're stopping that. That is not a negotiable point," Huffman said. "We simply were in a unsustainable position." We’ve all seen this playbook a million times. Apollo is an excellent product and I’m sorry to see anyone put in a precarious position, but what could you really expect? They’re not going to grow at a loss till the end of time.
- garbagecoder 3y ago
  There's a bigger issue. Reddit basically runs on free user content and free moderation. All this is saying is that they are going to only take and not give. A lot of these "what did you expect" takes never seem to mention the other side of the equation. So... what did Reddit expect? Apparently no one to complain about massive changes. How many times have we seen THAT playbook? What did they expect?
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    Well, if Reddit’s contribution is negligible then all those users can simply set up a replacement, since it’s so easy.
    - garbagecoder 3y ago
      I don't get this kind of flip response. I'm clearly suggesting there are TWO sides to the equation (if there is an "other" side of the equation, you could safely deduce I'm saying there is more than one). To be crystal clear, I never said it was "easy," either. But realistically, reddit is not an innovative system. Someone else could easily create a new one if they could round up the users——that's the hard part, so I don't know why reddit thinks it's a good move to chase them off, in, again, an entirely predictable way. What should be apparent from my comment is that both sides need each other. spez seems to think that's not true and the people fleeing to places that won't have the users (really the third component) are making almost as much of a mistake as reddit is. It's a symbiosis and anyone ignoring that is bound to lose. FWIW, it does appear that at least some subs are indeed leaving, simply enough, for example /r/startrek. I would personally prefer a return to forums, but whatever. Not sure what's going on in your workplace, but don't take it out on Redditors.
KennyBlanken 3y ago
I love how this article is just a PR puff piece that doesn't even attempt to seek out the third party app developers, talk to any users, etc. Also glosses over the "breakdown" in negotiation with Apollo and others. Dude got caught lying through his fucking teeth because the Apollo dev was recording their phone calls (and a damn good thing he did, too.) 2-party laws only protect the wealthy and powerful, who don't like how recordings level the playing field.
- cardy31 3y ago
  I expected so much better from NPR. This was absurdly lazy journalism.
- dbg31415 3y ago
  Really disappointed with NPR.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  > doesn't even attempt to seek out the third party app developers They did talk to one, apparently: > Christian Selig told NPR the new charges could cost Apollo, which has just one part-time employee, around $20 million a year.
shiftpgdn 3y ago
[flagged]
- MissTake 3y ago
  "Any subreddit that has done a poll asking if they should go back to private was overwhelmingly told no" Care to back up this claim with some actual evidence?
  - shiftpgdn 3y ago
    Go look at Reddit.com?
    - MissTake 3y ago
      Pretty pointless reply. Meanwhile there were two subreddits I was in that took a poll beforehand and both had "block indefinitely" as the winning choice by members by a large degree. Granted they were but two out of basically millions but your response have scant little else to go on. If you can't provide evidence then I'll consider it safe to place your claim in the "unproven" catagory.
- Havoc 3y ago
  That not universally true. Eg homelab published their poll stats and back to normal lost by a gigantic margin: Yes, Indefinitely (sub remains private and read-only) - 2457 votes Yes, Indefinitely (sub remains private with existing members able to post/comment) - 477 votes Yes, Partially -- "Touch-Grass-Tuesdays” where the sub becomes private/read-only on Tuesdays) - 171 votes No, full stop. - 583 votes
  - pezezin 3y ago
    I am subscribed to /r/homelab, but I didn't have any idea about this poll. I am now reading the thread, and what a joke: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/14a573y/rhomelab_will_be_joining_the_continued_blackout/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/14a573y/rhomelab_w... Most of the comments are not happy about the decision, complaining that the poll was up for only 15 hours and most users didn't even have to vote. Only 4k votes in a sub with 577k members doesn't sound very legit.
ebiester 3y ago
Wait... this is how adult companies act? Adult companies do not depend on free labor to provide value. (I'm speaking about moderation in particular, but also the creation of wikis and the community management.) Personally, I can't imagine a single moderator on Reddit continuing without being paid.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- AraceliHarker 3y ago
  Microsoft outsources Windows QA to amateurs called Windows Insiders for no compensation, right?
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    [flagged]
- maxk42 3y ago
  > Personally, I can't imagine a single moderator on Reddit continuing without being paid. Unfortunately, many of them are: Just not by reddit. Commanding the attention and eyeballs of in some cases millions of users is a big opportunity, and there are countless shady hangers-on trying to cash in on personal or financial relationships with reddit moderators. If every current reddit mod quit, the platform would only be overwhelmed by financially-motivated hucksters at an accelerated rate. And frankly, that's what reddit is encouraging by not supporting the moderators that actually give a shit about the platform and not their own pocketbooks. This will only accelerate the decline of quality of reddit.
- q1w2 3y ago
  Mods for very large subs often work as PR consultants that specifically push content on/off the front page for money - so they do get paid. The ones that continue to operate are presumably in this bucket. I also wonder if some large sub mods specifically use the API in order to carefully run their voting bot farms - but I'm not accusing anyone here.
cardy31 3y ago
This is lazy journalism at its worst. They essentially published a Reddit press release.
- dsgnr 3y ago
  Thats exactly what this is, a gaslighting press release from a child of a ceo
  - mustacheemperor 3y ago
    Which author is the child of a CEO? Not familiar with anything like that in Steve Inskeep's background, and Bobby Allyn's bio says his parents were a machinist and a church organist. Disappointed in this article as well, just curious about that remark.
    - olig15 3y ago
      I think they mean it like; the CEO that’s acting like a child, rather than literally.
      - mustacheemperor 3y ago
        Thanks, poor reading comprehension by me there.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      They're talking in twitter language. It's just words.
    - cardy31 3y ago
      He was saying that the CEO of Reddit is acting like a child, not that one of the authors is the son of a CEO.
themagician 3y ago
> "It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company" Then stop talking about this. Mods don't own their subreddits. Ban all these mods "protesting" and replace them with a handful of paid employees and then operate like an adult company. The actual users won't care who the mods are. In fact, it would probably greatly improve things. I've been on reddit for over a decade. Probably check it twice a day. I really do not care about 3rd party apps. What would be nice would be the ability to post without getting flagged by a bot or banned over some ridiculous rules made up by someone hoarding what little power they have. This reminds me a bit of the Netflix drama with password sharing. Just implement a sensible policy and be done with it. Most people won't even notice. Don't give like a dozen interviews where you talk about it. Only a small, but vocal, minority care. Don't cater to them.
- mjhagen 3y ago
  That's nice for people (like you, apparently) who don't have a problem with the direction reddit chose with their website and app, but for those who enjoyed old.reddit and Apollo it's too bad. This whole situation reminds me of a policy that happens around my city where they turn industrial areas into residential ones by renting out the old factory buildings for cheap to artists and once the neighbourhood is made popular (by these artists) rent goes up enormously (pricing out the artists) and yuppies move in. Reddit is now kicking out the people that made it.
  - ftxbro 3y ago
    > "for those who enjoyed old.reddit" wait they are getting rid of that too?
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      No, everybody just keeps throwing that in to maximize the appeal of the protest. It's entirely possible, though, because they've been hanging onto old.reddit forever just like the free API. I know I'll never visit the site again without old.reddit, but I also know I'm part of an extreme minority. I get the impression that mods don't know that they're part of an extreme minority, because they thought they owned the site.
dbg31415 3y ago
This guy is so shady.
dakial1 3y ago
Somebody needs to tell Huffman that he is the one not acting like an adult. Very poor planning, very poor communication and he insists in antagonizing those "very few users" that are pretty much the most active users in the plataform and the main subreddits moderatos. He could have done this in such a smoother way, talking with the main people affected (like Apollo's dev) before to explore options and make them feel part of the decision, give them a longer deadline to adjust.... Simply amateurish leadership here...
Havoc 3y ago
> It's a small group that's very upset Problem is it’s heavily correlated with the group that matters - mods and heavy users that actually post content. Without those Reddit is a ghost town.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  That's the danger. They already turned over the mod population when they shifted from being normie 4chan to respected publicly traded forum site, and they'll have to turn it over again to get out of this. There might not be anything left after they stick to their guns on this - there was a considerable quality and influence drop for the site after the first site recycling. The problem for the Group That Matters is that plenty of them don't have anywhere else to go in order to get what they get out of Reddit, and Reddit crowded out all competitors. They might end up at 4chan themselves, but they'll more likely not go anywhere. Reddit doesn't seem scared at all. They just watched Musk laugh through it.
  - Havoc 3y ago
    Yeah that seems like a good assessment. I’m probably gonna give the fediverse (sp?) a shot. Will probably read Reddit either way but done with contributing
- q1w2 3y ago
  People that post the most - often post the lowest quality content.
satvikpendem 3y ago
> "It's a small group that's very upset, and there's no way around that. We made a business decision that upset them," Huffman told NPR in his first interview since nearly 9,000 so-called subreddits staged a 48-hour boycott. "But I think the greater Reddit community just want to participate with their fellow community members." I mean, much as some people might not like it, he's right. It is just a small group of people who care about this, as the vast majority of Reddit's userbase is on new Reddit on desktop and the official app on mobile. If the protest continues, admins will simply demod them and add new mods. You already see this on /r/RedditRequest [0] which is a way to petition the admins to take over an unmoderated or private subreddit, notice the comments saying how they hope the OP gets the sub. As long as you build on someone else's platform, expect them to not care about you as an individual. This happened in 2015 too, with Ellen Pao and Victoria, but somehow people forget about that. It's as if most users simply don't care about this kind of drama. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requesting_rscience_due_to_inactivity/ https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  > the vast majority of Reddit's userbase is on new Reddit on desktop and the official app on mobile I think this is probably true, but has Reddit published any metrics to confirm this? I'd be especially interested to see the usage patterns segmented by contributors vs. lurkers. I'm sure it's true that the majority of Reddit users use the official app and new reddit. But I'm far less certain that's true for the majority of users who post content to reddit, or who moderate large communities.
  - badwolf 3y ago
    It's pretty telling that Reddit hasn't backed their claims up in this way.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    There are subreddit stats available to mods of subreddits, and which can optionally be made public. I know that for my own very small subs, which I pretty much exclusively list elsewhere under old.reddit.com, the majority of access is in fact from "new". Probably also the mobile app, though I've not looked at that recently. Again, that's despite my pushing old & Web based access generally. And my own links are a large fraction of the overall inbound.
zamalek 3y ago
> Huffman said negotiations have broken down with two of the most popular apps, Apollo and Reddit is Fun, but he said Reddit is willing to negotiate with most third-party developers. Given the lack of contrary evidence in this "article," it's abundantly clear that absolutely no journalism was done here. The Apollo guy clearly made significantly more than a reasonable effort to come to terms with Reddit (and has receipts to show it), and it was Reddit who ghosted him. This is a Reddit puff piece.
downrightmike 3y ago
As he throws tantrums?
gnicholas 3y ago
> Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site. I wonder what percent of usage is via third-party apps. And specifically, what percent of mobile usage is via these apps.
- richbell 3y ago
  I also wonder what type of engagement that 97% figure (if accurate) reflects. It's well known that people who submit content or comment (i.e. directly engage with the site) are a small minority of the overall userbase. Large subreddits with millions of subscribers often fail to get 10,000 upvotes or 1,000 comments.
- capableweb 3y ago
  Without releasing granular data to the public, expect this purposefully ambiguous language like this to continue.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
DazWilkin 3y ago
> "separate server pools solely dedicated to handling the scraping Google and Microsoft do from Reddit every day" I assume Google and Microsoft are HTML "scraping", not using the API and not paying. While it's in Reddit's self-interest to be indexed by the search engines, the article mentions these companies also use Reddit's corpus to feed their AIs, is this not monetizable? It is reasonable for Reddit to want to monetize its content particularly when it loses ad revenue to 3rd-party apps but, could its approach not lead developers to follow Google's and Microsoft's lead and try to recreate (some of their API experience) by scraping Reddit?
dredmorbius 3y ago
Spez employs an all-too-common, in all senses of that word, rhetorical trope of dismissing action by a core community of Redditors as "a small group". By that same token, Reddit's executive staff and board are also a "small group", though ones that happen to hold considerable official power. As with many domains, media behaviours follow a power law distribution: "a small group" is responsible for the majority of posts, the majority of comments, the majority of moderation actions, etc. And a small group of subreddits are where a great deal of membership, submissions, comments, and traffic occur. What spez's comment confounds is quantity with significance, most especially power and value generation. I don't presently have deep insights into the workings of Reddit and numbers associated with its activity. I do however have a sixteen-year trove of Hacker News front page activity that I've been studying for the past few weeks and drawing various insights from, discussed in several recent comments on both HN and the Fediverse (#HackerNewsAnalytics: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics>). The trove (2006-2-20 through 2023-6-13) 178,642 front-page stories as archived under the "past" link (<https://news.ycombinator.com/front https://news.ycombinator.com/front>), which I've crawled recently. This isn't all submissions to HN (the front page sees only about 3% of all submissions), though it's most of activity (just under half of all comments appear on those stories, integrating with a 2022 analysis from Whaly.io[1]). Whaly also gives a denominator of active HN accounts, 767,496 (2005--2021), which I'll presume is still roughly accurate. Keep in mind that this is certainly smaller than the total registered accounts, of which I've no data, though I suspect is in the millions. The front page dataset includes submissions from 43,598 distinct accounts. So straight off the top, only five percent of active profiles have contributed to the front page. And majority of that 5% appears only once: 24,433, or 56%. The top ten profiles account for 4% of FP posts. The top 50: 11%. 253 profiles submitted 25% of front-page articles. 2,092 profiles submitted fully half of all front-page articles. That's just over a quarter percent of all, again, active HN profiles, let alone total registered accounts. A "small group" by any measure, but one that's had a profound influence on Hacker News. Keep in mind that this is front page submissions and not comments or other activity measures. I'm reporting on what I have insights on, and that's the front page, topic titles, dates, vote & comment counts, and submitters. The Whaly analysis does look at comments, along with other activity, and offers a breakdown of types of significant HN members: - "Seeders (16%): People that post but that never comment on other user posts" - "Casual Users (79%): People that reasonably comment & post (between 1 and 100 comments per year) on the social network." - "Hardcore Users (5%): People that interact a lot with the social network (more than 100 comments on the year)" My point is that spez's characterisation is dishonest, misleading, dismissive, and irrelevant. I'm disappointed NPR, also in the media business and presumably highly cognizant of such dynamics, didn't push back harder on those talking points, or balance the article in other ways. Small groups can and do matter, most especially in media. And spez is at war with his power users who've contributed tremendously to the enterprise he's now attempting to cash out on, which seems ... unwise. ________________________________ Notes: 1. 2021 retrospective: <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective> and top 10k commenters in 2021: <https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-2021 https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...>, latter discussed here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778994>
foul 3y ago
I feel very sorry on behalf of the poor Aaron Swartz.
frankreyes 3y ago
Let's behave like adults. Then: you don't like it? I'm forcing my answer upon all you.
dreamcompiler 3y ago
"Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things," Huffman said. "We are not in the business of giving that away for free." Hey Steve, you got that data for free in the first place. That sound you hear is users telling you that if you start charging ridiculous fees for serving that free data, your source of free data is going to dry up. I know it's tempting as Reddit's CEO to think the two issues (acquisition price vs selling price) are orthogonal, but they aren't. One possible solution is to offer your contributors something like a penny per word written. If you're going to charge for the words we write, we want our cut.

64 points by Terretta 3y ago

I bet the Substack folks are partying hard lately. Watching your competition immolate itself has got to be a heady feeling.

ftxbro 3y ago
then when substack becomes the adult in the room they will become like quora or medium
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- type0 3y ago
  Quora became rotten before it riped, Medium was blogger 2.0 and was doomed from the start
type0 3y ago
But there is no similarity between Reddit and Substack, how are they competing exactly?
- throw9away6 3y ago
  Only in that they are the last line of defense for non commercial content
- h2odragon 3y ago
  Substack now has a comment system and has had user given content as their thing for a while. all they lack is a front page to vote their headlines and discussions onto.

menus 3y ago

> "But I think the greater Reddit community just want to participate with their fellow community members." > "The protest, what it really affects is the everyday users, most of whom aren't involved in this, or the changes that spurred this," Its amazing how we butchered the protest into the regular 'us vs them' situation seen in everything: politicize everything, pitch people against people, while the person on the top reaps the money and enjoyment from the drama. > Huffman said negotiations have broken down with two of the most popular apps, Apollo and Reddit is Fun, but he said Reddit is willing to negotiate with most third-party developers. Wow. You accuse him of blackmailing you for 10 million, get caught red handed (1) then say that negotiations "broke down"? I want to hear what happened with rif from the developer. I hope he recorded his calls too. (1) https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

flandish 3y ago
It’s a corporation. It is never about community. Only ever profit. The manufactured fracture of us vs them is a tactic of distraction.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  Careful now, you're posting on HN. Venture capitalist incubator... which funded Reddit. It was only ever about profit, why would you think otherwise?
  - flandish 3y ago
    I don’t think people “think” otherwise, but they do apply human “ideals” or “emotion” to corporate action and while corps are run by humans they are not themselves human, obviously. So it’s a slippery distractive slope.
croutonwagon 3y ago
Let us not forget many other app develops revealing they got the ghost up until at least the ama and he was all “woops” I find it ironic he says they should grow up. You know who makes up narratives in their head and when challenged on it still tries dig in and blame me. My 5 and 7 year old… There’s your sign.

emodendroket 3y ago

> Giving away a service for free, Huffman said, is not something Reddit would be able to do forever. > "We've been subsidizing other business for free for a long time. We're stopping that. That is not a negotiable point," Huffman said. "We simply were in a unsustainable position." We’ve all seen this playbook a million times. Apollo is an excellent product and I’m sorry to see anyone put in a precarious position, but what could you really expect? They’re not going to grow at a loss till the end of time.

garbagecoder 3y ago
There's a bigger issue. Reddit basically runs on free user content and free moderation. All this is saying is that they are going to only take and not give. A lot of these "what did you expect" takes never seem to mention the other side of the equation. So... what did Reddit expect? Apparently no one to complain about massive changes. How many times have we seen THAT playbook? What did they expect?
- emodendroket 3y ago
  Well, if Reddit’s contribution is negligible then all those users can simply set up a replacement, since it’s so easy.
  - garbagecoder 3y ago
    I don't get this kind of flip response. I'm clearly suggesting there are TWO sides to the equation (if there is an "other" side of the equation, you could safely deduce I'm saying there is more than one). To be crystal clear, I never said it was "easy," either. But realistically, reddit is not an innovative system. Someone else could easily create a new one if they could round up the users——that's the hard part, so I don't know why reddit thinks it's a good move to chase them off, in, again, an entirely predictable way. What should be apparent from my comment is that both sides need each other. spez seems to think that's not true and the people fleeing to places that won't have the users (really the third component) are making almost as much of a mistake as reddit is. It's a symbiosis and anyone ignoring that is bound to lose. FWIW, it does appear that at least some subs are indeed leaving, simply enough, for example /r/startrek. I would personally prefer a return to forums, but whatever. Not sure what's going on in your workplace, but don't take it out on Redditors.

KennyBlanken 3y ago

I love how this article is just a PR puff piece that doesn't even attempt to seek out the third party app developers, talk to any users, etc. Also glosses over the "breakdown" in negotiation with Apollo and others. Dude got caught lying through his fucking teeth because the Apollo dev was recording their phone calls (and a damn good thing he did, too.) 2-party laws only protect the wealthy and powerful, who don't like how recordings level the playing field.

cardy31 3y ago
I expected so much better from NPR. This was absurdly lazy journalism.
dbg31415 3y ago
Really disappointed with NPR.
gnicholas 3y ago
> doesn't even attempt to seek out the third party app developers They did talk to one, apparently: > Christian Selig told NPR the new charges could cost Apollo, which has just one part-time employee, around $20 million a year.

shiftpgdn 3y ago

[flagged]

MissTake 3y ago
"Any subreddit that has done a poll asking if they should go back to private was overwhelmingly told no" Care to back up this claim with some actual evidence?
- shiftpgdn 3y ago
  Go look at Reddit.com?
  - MissTake 3y ago
    Pretty pointless reply. Meanwhile there were two subreddits I was in that took a poll beforehand and both had "block indefinitely" as the winning choice by members by a large degree. Granted they were but two out of basically millions but your response have scant little else to go on. If you can't provide evidence then I'll consider it safe to place your claim in the "unproven" catagory.
Havoc 3y ago
That not universally true. Eg homelab published their poll stats and back to normal lost by a gigantic margin: Yes, Indefinitely (sub remains private and read-only) - 2457 votes Yes, Indefinitely (sub remains private with existing members able to post/comment) - 477 votes Yes, Partially -- "Touch-Grass-Tuesdays” where the sub becomes private/read-only on Tuesdays) - 171 votes No, full stop. - 583 votes
- pezezin 3y ago
  I am subscribed to /r/homelab, but I didn't have any idea about this poll. I am now reading the thread, and what a joke: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/14a573y/rhomelab_will_be_joining_the_continued_blackout/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/14a573y/rhomelab_w... Most of the comments are not happy about the decision, complaining that the poll was up for only 15 hours and most users didn't even have to vote. Only 4k votes in a sub with 577k members doesn't sound very legit.

ebiester 3y ago

Wait... this is how adult companies act? Adult companies do not depend on free labor to provide value. (I'm speaking about moderation in particular, but also the creation of wikis and the community management.) Personally, I can't imagine a single moderator on Reddit continuing without being paid.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
AraceliHarker 3y ago
Microsoft outsources Windows QA to amateurs called Windows Insiders for no compensation, right?
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  [flagged]
maxk42 3y ago
> Personally, I can't imagine a single moderator on Reddit continuing without being paid. Unfortunately, many of them are: Just not by reddit. Commanding the attention and eyeballs of in some cases millions of users is a big opportunity, and there are countless shady hangers-on trying to cash in on personal or financial relationships with reddit moderators. If every current reddit mod quit, the platform would only be overwhelmed by financially-motivated hucksters at an accelerated rate. And frankly, that's what reddit is encouraging by not supporting the moderators that actually give a shit about the platform and not their own pocketbooks. This will only accelerate the decline of quality of reddit.
q1w2 3y ago
Mods for very large subs often work as PR consultants that specifically push content on/off the front page for money - so they do get paid. The ones that continue to operate are presumably in this bucket. I also wonder if some large sub mods specifically use the API in order to carefully run their voting bot farms - but I'm not accusing anyone here.

cardy31 3y ago

This is lazy journalism at its worst. They essentially published a Reddit press release.

dsgnr 3y ago
Thats exactly what this is, a gaslighting press release from a child of a ceo
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
  Which author is the child of a CEO? Not familiar with anything like that in Steve Inskeep's background, and Bobby Allyn's bio says his parents were a machinist and a church organist. Disappointed in this article as well, just curious about that remark.
  - olig15 3y ago
    I think they mean it like; the CEO that’s acting like a child, rather than literally.
    - mustacheemperor 3y ago
      Thanks, poor reading comprehension by me there.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    They're talking in twitter language. It's just words.
  - cardy31 3y ago
    He was saying that the CEO of Reddit is acting like a child, not that one of the authors is the son of a CEO.

themagician 3y ago

> "It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company" Then stop talking about this. Mods don't own their subreddits. Ban all these mods "protesting" and replace them with a handful of paid employees and then operate like an adult company. The actual users won't care who the mods are. In fact, it would probably greatly improve things. I've been on reddit for over a decade. Probably check it twice a day. I really do not care about 3rd party apps. What would be nice would be the ability to post without getting flagged by a bot or banned over some ridiculous rules made up by someone hoarding what little power they have. This reminds me a bit of the Netflix drama with password sharing. Just implement a sensible policy and be done with it. Most people won't even notice. Don't give like a dozen interviews where you talk about it. Only a small, but vocal, minority care. Don't cater to them.

mjhagen 3y ago
That's nice for people (like you, apparently) who don't have a problem with the direction reddit chose with their website and app, but for those who enjoyed old.reddit and Apollo it's too bad. This whole situation reminds me of a policy that happens around my city where they turn industrial areas into residential ones by renting out the old factory buildings for cheap to artists and once the neighbourhood is made popular (by these artists) rent goes up enormously (pricing out the artists) and yuppies move in. Reddit is now kicking out the people that made it.
- ftxbro 3y ago
  > "for those who enjoyed old.reddit" wait they are getting rid of that too?
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    No, everybody just keeps throwing that in to maximize the appeal of the protest. It's entirely possible, though, because they've been hanging onto old.reddit forever just like the free API. I know I'll never visit the site again without old.reddit, but I also know I'm part of an extreme minority. I get the impression that mods don't know that they're part of an extreme minority, because they thought they owned the site.

dbg31415 3y ago

This guy is so shady.

dakial1 3y ago

Somebody needs to tell Huffman that he is the one not acting like an adult. Very poor planning, very poor communication and he insists in antagonizing those "very few users" that are pretty much the most active users in the plataform and the main subreddits moderatos. He could have done this in such a smoother way, talking with the main people affected (like Apollo's dev) before to explore options and make them feel part of the decision, give them a longer deadline to adjust.... Simply amateurish leadership here...

Havoc 3y ago

> It's a small group that's very upset Problem is it’s heavily correlated with the group that matters - mods and heavy users that actually post content. Without those Reddit is a ghost town.

pessimizer 3y ago
That's the danger. They already turned over the mod population when they shifted from being normie 4chan to respected publicly traded forum site, and they'll have to turn it over again to get out of this. There might not be anything left after they stick to their guns on this - there was a considerable quality and influence drop for the site after the first site recycling. The problem for the Group That Matters is that plenty of them don't have anywhere else to go in order to get what they get out of Reddit, and Reddit crowded out all competitors. They might end up at 4chan themselves, but they'll more likely not go anywhere. Reddit doesn't seem scared at all. They just watched Musk laugh through it.
- Havoc 3y ago
  Yeah that seems like a good assessment. I’m probably gonna give the fediverse (sp?) a shot. Will probably read Reddit either way but done with contributing
q1w2 3y ago
People that post the most - often post the lowest quality content.

satvikpendem 3y ago

> "It's a small group that's very upset, and there's no way around that. We made a business decision that upset them," Huffman told NPR in his first interview since nearly 9,000 so-called subreddits staged a 48-hour boycott. "But I think the greater Reddit community just want to participate with their fellow community members." I mean, much as some people might not like it, he's right. It is just a small group of people who care about this, as the vast majority of Reddit's userbase is on new Reddit on desktop and the official app on mobile. If the protest continues, admins will simply demod them and add new mods. You already see this on /r/RedditRequest [0] which is a way to petition the admins to take over an unmoderated or private subreddit, notice the comments saying how they hope the OP gets the sub. As long as you build on someone else's platform, expect them to not care about you as an individual. This happened in 2015 too, with Ellen Pao and Victoria, but somehow people forget about that. It's as if most users simply don't care about this kind of drama. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requesting_rscience_due_to_inactivity/ https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...

TechBro8615 3y ago
> the vast majority of Reddit's userbase is on new Reddit on desktop and the official app on mobile I think this is probably true, but has Reddit published any metrics to confirm this? I'd be especially interested to see the usage patterns segmented by contributors vs. lurkers. I'm sure it's true that the majority of Reddit users use the official app and new reddit. But I'm far less certain that's true for the majority of users who post content to reddit, or who moderate large communities.
- badwolf 3y ago
  It's pretty telling that Reddit hasn't backed their claims up in this way.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  There are subreddit stats available to mods of subreddits, and which can optionally be made public. I know that for my own very small subs, which I pretty much exclusively list elsewhere under old.reddit.com, the majority of access is in fact from "new". Probably also the mobile app, though I've not looked at that recently. Again, that's despite my pushing old & Web based access generally. And my own links are a large fraction of the overall inbound.

zamalek 3y ago

> Huffman said negotiations have broken down with two of the most popular apps, Apollo and Reddit is Fun, but he said Reddit is willing to negotiate with most third-party developers. Given the lack of contrary evidence in this "article," it's abundantly clear that absolutely no journalism was done here. The Apollo guy clearly made significantly more than a reasonable effort to come to terms with Reddit (and has receipts to show it), and it was Reddit who ghosted him. This is a Reddit puff piece.

downrightmike 3y ago

As he throws tantrums?

gnicholas 3y ago

> Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site. I wonder what percent of usage is via third-party apps. And specifically, what percent of mobile usage is via these apps.

richbell 3y ago
I also wonder what type of engagement that 97% figure (if accurate) reflects. It's well known that people who submit content or comment (i.e. directly engage with the site) are a small minority of the overall userbase. Large subreddits with millions of subscribers often fail to get 10,000 upvotes or 1,000 comments.
capableweb 3y ago
Without releasing granular data to the public, expect this purposefully ambiguous language like this to continue.

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

DazWilkin 3y ago

> "separate server pools solely dedicated to handling the scraping Google and Microsoft do from Reddit every day" I assume Google and Microsoft are HTML "scraping", not using the API and not paying. While it's in Reddit's self-interest to be indexed by the search engines, the article mentions these companies also use Reddit's corpus to feed their AIs, is this not monetizable? It is reasonable for Reddit to want to monetize its content particularly when it loses ad revenue to 3rd-party apps but, could its approach not lead developers to follow Google's and Microsoft's lead and try to recreate (some of their API experience) by scraping Reddit?

dredmorbius 3y ago

Spez employs an all-too-common, in all senses of that word, rhetorical trope of dismissing action by a core community of Redditors as "a small group". By that same token, Reddit's executive staff and board are also a "small group", though ones that happen to hold considerable official power. As with many domains, media behaviours follow a power law distribution: "a small group" is responsible for the majority of posts, the majority of comments, the majority of moderation actions, etc. And a small group of subreddits are where a great deal of membership, submissions, comments, and traffic occur. What spez's comment confounds is quantity with significance, most especially power and value generation. I don't presently have deep insights into the workings of Reddit and numbers associated with its activity. I do however have a sixteen-year trove of Hacker News front page activity that I've been studying for the past few weeks and drawing various insights from, discussed in several recent comments on both HN and the Fediverse (#HackerNewsAnalytics: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics>). The trove (2006-2-20 through 2023-6-13) 178,642 front-page stories as archived under the "past" link (<https://news.ycombinator.com/front https://news.ycombinator.com/front>), which I've crawled recently. This isn't all submissions to HN (the front page sees only about 3% of all submissions), though it's most of activity (just under half of all comments appear on those stories, integrating with a 2022 analysis from Whaly.io[1]). Whaly also gives a denominator of active HN accounts, 767,496 (2005--2021), which I'll presume is still roughly accurate. Keep in mind that this is certainly smaller than the total registered accounts, of which I've no data, though I suspect is in the millions. The front page dataset includes submissions from 43,598 distinct accounts. So straight off the top, only five percent of active profiles have contributed to the front page. And majority of that 5% appears only once: 24,433, or 56%. The top ten profiles account for 4% of FP posts. The top 50: 11%. 253 profiles submitted 25% of front-page articles. 2,092 profiles submitted fully half of all front-page articles. That's just over a quarter percent of all, again, active HN profiles, let alone total registered accounts. A "small group" by any measure, but one that's had a profound influence on Hacker News. Keep in mind that this is front page submissions and not comments or other activity measures. I'm reporting on what I have insights on, and that's the front page, topic titles, dates, vote & comment counts, and submitters. The Whaly analysis does look at comments, along with other activity, and offers a breakdown of types of significant HN members: - "Seeders (16%): People that post but that never comment on other user posts" - "Casual Users (79%): People that reasonably comment & post (between 1 and 100 comments per year) on the social network." - "Hardcore Users (5%): People that interact a lot with the social network (more than 100 comments on the year)" My point is that spez's characterisation is dishonest, misleading, dismissive, and irrelevant. I'm disappointed NPR, also in the media business and presumably highly cognizant of such dynamics, didn't push back harder on those talking points, or balance the article in other ways. Small groups can and do matter, most especially in media. And spez is at war with his power users who've contributed tremendously to the enterprise he's now attempting to cash out on, which seems ... unwise. ________________________________ Notes: 1. 2021 retrospective: <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective> and top 10k commenters in 2021: <https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-2021 https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...>, latter discussed here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778994>

foul 3y ago

I feel very sorry on behalf of the poor Aaron Swartz.

frankreyes 3y ago

Let's behave like adults. Then: you don't like it? I'm forcing my answer upon all you.

dreamcompiler 3y ago

"Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things," Huffman said. "We are not in the business of giving that away for free." Hey Steve, you got that data for free in the first place. That sound you hear is users telling you that if you start charging ridiculous fees for serving that free data, your source of free data is going to dry up. I know it's tempting as Reddit's CEO to think the two issues (acquisition price vs selling price) are orthogonal, but they aren't. One possible solution is to offer your contributors something like a penny per word written. If you're going to charge for the words we write, we want our cut.