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There are two possibilities that I can see: 1) Spez is right, this is a tempest in a teapot that hasn't (yet) had a big impact on traffic, and won't once they

There are two possibilities that I can see: 1) Spez is right, this is a tempest in a teapot that hasn't (yet) had a big impact on traffic, and won't once they seize control of the rebelling subreddits. A vocal minority cares of the public about the impact on the community, but stakeholders realize the business will be fine. 2) Spez is wrong, and is comfortable misrepresenting the situation to the public at minimum. Maybe he misrepresents it to internal stakeholders too. The situation will appear under control right up until the moment the wheels fly off. Could be a little of column A, a little of column B.

x86x87 3y ago
We saw that he's a fucking liar when dealing with Apollo. Credibility is now zero. Zero.
- mock-possum 3y ago
  Yeah whether he’s ‘right’ is kind of immaterial - he’s shown himself to be untrustworthy, and that’s enough for me. I don’t deal with liars, they’re not worth my time.
  - saltminer 3y ago
    Having modded a phpBB forum with <1k active users in the late 00s/early 10s, I used to have some sympathy for bearing the burden of being the world's biggest forum admin, but that all vanished when he started defaming the Apollo dev by spreading blackmail rumors. That's some Alex Jones-tier hyperbole, completely unbecoming of anyone in a position of leadership (and should be concerning to any reddit shareholders from a liability perspective).
    - x86x87 3y ago
      reddit shareholders and reddit employees
    - the_only_law 3y ago
      > That's some Alex Jones-tier hyperbole, completely unbecoming of anyone in a position of leadership What sort of naive idealism is this? People in power will exercise that power however they see fit as long as they believe they can get away with it. With Reddit of course it’s even easier as there’s no real stake/serious consequences (or at least the owners seem to believe there’s not). People don’t get leadership positions because of their superior ethics and morals.
bawolff 3y ago
I think it comes down to if there is a viable alternative. People don't stop what they like to do but they will move with sufficient pressure.
- malka 3y ago
  What people crave is not a site with up/down vote, or even a site with specific information about topics. What they crave is community. I am betting that the big winner of all this will be Discord.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - officeplant 3y ago
    I feel like discord has long since won this battle. It was over as soon as nearly every subreddit started to create community discords. Which is still a bad thing as now all that hoarded reddit data that comes up when I look for problem solutions is going to move to tech support discord channels for that community and vanish from the public web.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    The social media site cycle iterates again. I hope Discord takes a while to go to fall apart, it is nice for small group chats (just a couple old friends); it will be a pain to replace that platform.
    - NikkiA 3y ago
      Discord already started it's enshitification with the 'pay to get your preferred username' goldrush.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    I think the 10% active participants will be happy with discord. I'm less sure the other 90% lurkers will.
paulddraper 3y ago
I think HN underestimates the truth behind #1. (Don't shoot the messenger! Just adding some objective data amid the flames.) Roughly half of the biggest subreddits went dark. And almost all of them are back (r/funny, r/gaming, r/aww, r/todayilearned, /r/pics, etc) AFAIK the only huge holdouts are r/videos and r/music. Mods and some users have been very vocal...but there's a quieter, larger group that is fine with the official app and just wants a place to post. --- EDIT: My bad. r/aww, r/gaming, and r/pics have disabled new posts. Plenty of others...r/funny, r/askscience, r/earthporn, r/explainlikeimfive, r/food, r/gadgets, r/nottheonion, r/space, r/sports went dark and are now back. Total affected subscriber count has fallen ~60% [1] since the peak. FWIW, I think #2 is true as well. This is by no means a inconsequential disruption. But it's also far from "the death of Reddit." [1] https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
- sdfghswe 3y ago
  And this is why I always say that "but but but the mods aren't getting paid" argument makes no sense. Clearly the mods are getting _something_ out of modding, and that's their reward.
  - Majromax 3y ago
    > And this is why I always say that "but but but the mods aren't getting paid" argument makes no sense. Clearly the mods are getting _something_ out of modding, and that's their reward. That cuts both ways, however. If moderators get compensated with a sense of satisfaction rather than money, then site changes that affect their "quality of life" carry extra weight. In plain English: if you do this for fun, then you stop doing it once it's no longer fun. The API changes are the proximate cause of the protest, but the widespread participation suggests that many moderators were already near the breaking point. (ed: was capitulation)
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
  I posit that this means there is (c) Mods are out, making a tempest in a teapot, but consumers are fine -for now. Medium/longerm, no one really knows if mods will permanently quit, and whether anyone replacing them (or not) will have an effect in traffic. It appears like a bet. Not sure if its one i'd take though if i were the CEO.
TechBro8615 3y ago
What Spez is wrong about is the "opportunity cost" of third party apps that he keeps citing as reason for his "business decision." He has no basis to assume that the same people who use third party apps will use the official reddit app, or ever spend any money on reddit.
bbatsell 3y ago
If #1 were true, literally _anyone_ in spez's position would shut up and get on with things. The fact is that he initially did that — and then as the week has gone on, he has begun giving more and more unhinged interviews with the press. He's not saying "it blew over", he's blaming anyone and everyone he can think of, making objectively false statements about history and his own actions, and making overt threats to his perceived enemies. It is very plainly having a much bigger impact than spez anticipated.
- fluidcruft 3y ago
  spez was on NPR this morning and it was hilarious. Also sad that Steve Inskeep didn't realize (alternatively: care) about the bullshit verbal games spez was playing with his answers.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - brewdad 3y ago
    That seems to be the NPR way the past few years. Allow guests of all stripes on the air to say whatever nonsense the can dream up. And then move on to the next question with no follow-up or pushback. All in the name of "neutrality". It's not journalism and it does a disservice to their listeners.
    - hanklazard 3y ago
      One of the reasons I stopped listening.
badwolf 3y ago
Regarding 1: I don't believe the company saying this at all. My $DayJob has been running Reddit Ads campaigns for the last couple months. Starting Monday we saw a ~60% drop in impressions. They have not come back up yet, they've continued to decline all week.
- revscat 3y ago
  I can guarantee you that there are reporters who would love to talk to you. You should seriously consider approaching one of those, and I hope that you do so.
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  I remember seeing a public statement from Reddit saying their revenue hasn't been impacted by the blackout.
  - bob-09 3y ago
    Maybe ad impressions are dropping while ad clicks remain steady? Assuming ads are PPC.
    - rumblerock 3y ago
      Highly unlikely, that would imply that CTRs are going up during a partial user revolt / shutdown. On the other hand, perhaps Reddit could squeeze a little extra ad revenue per click given they control the market prices. What seems more likely Spez is lying and/or saying this with the subtext that a week of disruption hasn't impacted what their projected quarterly revenue will be, because they'll have time to revise those projections and smooth it all over by the time they IPO. But re-projections never happen in real time, it'll take a few months to see if they're deviating far enough to require a downward projection.
JohnFen 3y ago
> Spez is wrong, and is comfortable misrepresenting the situation to the public at minimum. I don't know if he's right or wrong, but it's pretty clear that he's comfortable misrepresenting things to the public.
kypro 3y ago
As you suggest, it's not binary. Even if he's "right" what "Spez" has done here is pure idiocy. Even if Reddit comes out of this largely unharmed, why did they even take the risk? Why didn't they just incrementally increase API pricing or implement policies that slowly kill off 3rd party apps one at a time? What he's doing is simply bad from a strategical perspective. But further, this event has put me off ever wanting to invest in Reddit post-IPO. "Spez" seems approaching conflict like a child in an argument with their parents might. Even if you like Reddit's product I don't know how anyone in their right mind would invest in a company where a child is calling all the shots. The dude edits comments to pwn people he doesn't like, he lies, he's comes off as arrogant and entitled. It's just so unprofessional. If anyone else was in charge I'd have assumed they wanted the controversy.
- throwaway_5753 3y ago
  > Why didn't they just incrementally increase API pricing or implement policies that slowly kill off 3rd party apps one at a time? Might just be a rip-off-the-bandaid type of calculation. Maybe the response sucks now, but it'll resolve in a week or two (vs having smaller protests every time one of these incremental changes take effect). Similar to how people were really angry when companies had more than one round of layoffs. btw not an endorsement of spez's actions; just trying to game out why he might be doing it this way.
  - munk-a 3y ago
    That's an interesting idea - though it'd speak really poorly of Spez's qualities as a leader. There's a reason the gas station near has a much higher price over than two decades past while from week to week you'll never see anything more than a 20cent difference and often times see a bit of price lowering to break things up. This may be due to our hunter past or something else but humans are terrible at noticing large gradual changes - but suddenly double the price in front of us and we'll definitely notice.
- a_worried_user 3y ago
  > Why didn't they just incrementally increase API pricing or implement policies that slowly kill off 3rd party apps one at a time? I guess that the goal is not to kill all the 3rd party apps, but only those that make profit from the Reddit API (which doesn't include their advertising if I understand well). Now assuming that a progressive price increase would be put in place, I guess that these apps would simply offload the API tax to their user base with each new raise. As it has been mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, with an abrupt price raise in a very short time, the apps would not have enough treasury to be able to "buffer" the cost until the users pick the pace up - assuming users would, which is perhaps a more important (read: long term) worry. It should be observed that the goal is not to kill off all 3rd party apps, since there are special exemptions for non commercial apps. I don't know if these exemptions are actually useable in practice, or if actually this is just a part of a larger scheme to get rid of all those apps while having a plausible line of deniability. It is certainly sad for iOS users as Apollo seems to be their only option besides the web site, but I wonder why they did not see that coming miles away. Maybe they did expect a price to show up at some point, but not with such a magnitude.
canes123456 3y ago
It mostly likely a combination. This could blow over with the correct PR campaign. Spez idiocy is making this way worse than it should have been and risking everything. If Reddit just came out and said they can’t support third party apps. They are not profitable and they need to focus on their ad business. Third party undermine the business. Inside they killed third party apps, while lying about it. They keep doubling down on this passive aggressive point of view. This is making the community and mods realize that they are providing all the value and not getting any of the benefit. This is becoming much bigger than about third party apps.
mistermann 3y ago
My theory: Reddit wants total control over the UI, the current one (as bad as it is) supports dangerous levels of discussion and collective cognition, and having the masses thinking for/between themselves is rarely a good idea if one is in the business of maintaining an illusory political regime. Just think of how much of reality is manufactured and distributed among nodes on this single platform.

x86x87 3y ago

We saw that he's a fucking liar when dealing with Apollo. Credibility is now zero. Zero.

mock-possum 3y ago
Yeah whether he’s ‘right’ is kind of immaterial - he’s shown himself to be untrustworthy, and that’s enough for me. I don’t deal with liars, they’re not worth my time.
- saltminer 3y ago
  Having modded a phpBB forum with <1k active users in the late 00s/early 10s, I used to have some sympathy for bearing the burden of being the world's biggest forum admin, but that all vanished when he started defaming the Apollo dev by spreading blackmail rumors. That's some Alex Jones-tier hyperbole, completely unbecoming of anyone in a position of leadership (and should be concerning to any reddit shareholders from a liability perspective).
  - x86x87 3y ago
    reddit shareholders and reddit employees
  - the_only_law 3y ago
    > That's some Alex Jones-tier hyperbole, completely unbecoming of anyone in a position of leadership What sort of naive idealism is this? People in power will exercise that power however they see fit as long as they believe they can get away with it. With Reddit of course it’s even easier as there’s no real stake/serious consequences (or at least the owners seem to believe there’s not). People don’t get leadership positions because of their superior ethics and morals.

bawolff 3y ago

I think it comes down to if there is a viable alternative. People don't stop what they like to do but they will move with sufficient pressure.

malka 3y ago
What people crave is not a site with up/down vote, or even a site with specific information about topics. What they crave is community. I am betting that the big winner of all this will be Discord.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- officeplant 3y ago
  I feel like discord has long since won this battle. It was over as soon as nearly every subreddit started to create community discords. Which is still a bad thing as now all that hoarded reddit data that comes up when I look for problem solutions is going to move to tech support discord channels for that community and vanish from the public web.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  The social media site cycle iterates again. I hope Discord takes a while to go to fall apart, it is nice for small group chats (just a couple old friends); it will be a pain to replace that platform.
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    Discord already started it's enshitification with the 'pay to get your preferred username' goldrush.
- bawolff 3y ago
  I think the 10% active participants will be happy with discord. I'm less sure the other 90% lurkers will.

paulddraper 3y ago

I think HN underestimates the truth behind #1. (Don't shoot the messenger! Just adding some objective data amid the flames.) Roughly half of the biggest subreddits went dark. And almost all of them are back (r/funny, r/gaming, r/aww, r/todayilearned, /r/pics, etc) AFAIK the only huge holdouts are r/videos and r/music. Mods and some users have been very vocal...but there's a quieter, larger group that is fine with the official app and just wants a place to post. --- EDIT: My bad. r/aww, r/gaming, and r/pics have disabled new posts. Plenty of others...r/funny, r/askscience, r/earthporn, r/explainlikeimfive, r/food, r/gadgets, r/nottheonion, r/space, r/sports went dark and are now back. Total affected subscriber count has fallen ~60% [1] since the peak. FWIW, I think #2 is true as well. This is by no means a inconsequential disruption. But it's also far from "the death of Reddit." [1] https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/

sdfghswe 3y ago
And this is why I always say that "but but but the mods aren't getting paid" argument makes no sense. Clearly the mods are getting _something_ out of modding, and that's their reward.
- Majromax 3y ago
  > And this is why I always say that "but but but the mods aren't getting paid" argument makes no sense. Clearly the mods are getting _something_ out of modding, and that's their reward. That cuts both ways, however. If moderators get compensated with a sense of satisfaction rather than money, then site changes that affect their "quality of life" carry extra weight. In plain English: if you do this for fun, then you stop doing it once it's no longer fun. The API changes are the proximate cause of the protest, but the widespread participation suggests that many moderators were already near the breaking point. (ed: was capitulation)
IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
I posit that this means there is (c) Mods are out, making a tempest in a teapot, but consumers are fine -for now. Medium/longerm, no one really knows if mods will permanently quit, and whether anyone replacing them (or not) will have an effect in traffic. It appears like a bet. Not sure if its one i'd take though if i were the CEO.

TechBro8615 3y ago

What Spez is wrong about is the "opportunity cost" of third party apps that he keeps citing as reason for his "business decision." He has no basis to assume that the same people who use third party apps will use the official reddit app, or ever spend any money on reddit.

bbatsell 3y ago

If #1 were true, literally _anyone_ in spez's position would shut up and get on with things. The fact is that he initially did that — and then as the week has gone on, he has begun giving more and more unhinged interviews with the press. He's not saying "it blew over", he's blaming anyone and everyone he can think of, making objectively false statements about history and his own actions, and making overt threats to his perceived enemies. It is very plainly having a much bigger impact than spez anticipated.

fluidcruft 3y ago
spez was on NPR this morning and it was hilarious. Also sad that Steve Inskeep didn't realize (alternatively: care) about the bullshit verbal games spez was playing with his answers.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- brewdad 3y ago
  That seems to be the NPR way the past few years. Allow guests of all stripes on the air to say whatever nonsense the can dream up. And then move on to the next question with no follow-up or pushback. All in the name of "neutrality". It's not journalism and it does a disservice to their listeners.
  - hanklazard 3y ago
    One of the reasons I stopped listening.

badwolf 3y ago

Regarding 1: I don't believe the company saying this at all. My $DayJob has been running Reddit Ads campaigns for the last couple months. Starting Monday we saw a ~60% drop in impressions. They have not come back up yet, they've continued to decline all week.

revscat 3y ago
I can guarantee you that there are reporters who would love to talk to you. You should seriously consider approaching one of those, and I hope that you do so.
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
I remember seeing a public statement from Reddit saying their revenue hasn't been impacted by the blackout.
- bob-09 3y ago
  Maybe ad impressions are dropping while ad clicks remain steady? Assuming ads are PPC.
  - rumblerock 3y ago
    Highly unlikely, that would imply that CTRs are going up during a partial user revolt / shutdown. On the other hand, perhaps Reddit could squeeze a little extra ad revenue per click given they control the market prices. What seems more likely Spez is lying and/or saying this with the subtext that a week of disruption hasn't impacted what their projected quarterly revenue will be, because they'll have time to revise those projections and smooth it all over by the time they IPO. But re-projections never happen in real time, it'll take a few months to see if they're deviating far enough to require a downward projection.

JohnFen 3y ago

> Spez is wrong, and is comfortable misrepresenting the situation to the public at minimum. I don't know if he's right or wrong, but it's pretty clear that he's comfortable misrepresenting things to the public.

kypro 3y ago

As you suggest, it's not binary. Even if he's "right" what "Spez" has done here is pure idiocy. Even if Reddit comes out of this largely unharmed, why did they even take the risk? Why didn't they just incrementally increase API pricing or implement policies that slowly kill off 3rd party apps one at a time? What he's doing is simply bad from a strategical perspective. But further, this event has put me off ever wanting to invest in Reddit post-IPO. "Spez" seems approaching conflict like a child in an argument with their parents might. Even if you like Reddit's product I don't know how anyone in their right mind would invest in a company where a child is calling all the shots. The dude edits comments to pwn people he doesn't like, he lies, he's comes off as arrogant and entitled. It's just so unprofessional. If anyone else was in charge I'd have assumed they wanted the controversy.

throwaway_5753 3y ago
> Why didn't they just incrementally increase API pricing or implement policies that slowly kill off 3rd party apps one at a time? Might just be a rip-off-the-bandaid type of calculation. Maybe the response sucks now, but it'll resolve in a week or two (vs having smaller protests every time one of these incremental changes take effect). Similar to how people were really angry when companies had more than one round of layoffs. btw not an endorsement of spez's actions; just trying to game out why he might be doing it this way.
- munk-a 3y ago
  That's an interesting idea - though it'd speak really poorly of Spez's qualities as a leader. There's a reason the gas station near has a much higher price over than two decades past while from week to week you'll never see anything more than a 20cent difference and often times see a bit of price lowering to break things up. This may be due to our hunter past or something else but humans are terrible at noticing large gradual changes - but suddenly double the price in front of us and we'll definitely notice.
a_worried_user 3y ago
> Why didn't they just incrementally increase API pricing or implement policies that slowly kill off 3rd party apps one at a time? I guess that the goal is not to kill all the 3rd party apps, but only those that make profit from the Reddit API (which doesn't include their advertising if I understand well). Now assuming that a progressive price increase would be put in place, I guess that these apps would simply offload the API tax to their user base with each new raise. As it has been mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, with an abrupt price raise in a very short time, the apps would not have enough treasury to be able to "buffer" the cost until the users pick the pace up - assuming users would, which is perhaps a more important (read: long term) worry. It should be observed that the goal is not to kill off all 3rd party apps, since there are special exemptions for non commercial apps. I don't know if these exemptions are actually useable in practice, or if actually this is just a part of a larger scheme to get rid of all those apps while having a plausible line of deniability. It is certainly sad for iOS users as Apollo seems to be their only option besides the web site, but I wonder why they did not see that coming miles away. Maybe they did expect a price to show up at some point, but not with such a magnitude.

canes123456 3y ago

It mostly likely a combination. This could blow over with the correct PR campaign. Spez idiocy is making this way worse than it should have been and risking everything. If Reddit just came out and said they can’t support third party apps. They are not profitable and they need to focus on their ad business. Third party undermine the business. Inside they killed third party apps, while lying about it. They keep doubling down on this passive aggressive point of view. This is making the community and mods realize that they are providing all the value and not getting any of the benefit. This is becoming much bigger than about third party apps.

mistermann 3y ago

My theory: Reddit wants total control over the UI, the current one (as bad as it is) supports dangerous levels of discussion and collective cognition, and having the masses thinking for/between themselves is rarely a good idea if one is in the business of maintaining an illusory political regime. Just think of how much of reality is manufactured and distributed among nodes on this single platform.