Reddit CEO: We're Sticking With API Changes, Despite Subreddits Going Dark

World News@beehaw.org – 47 points – 1 years ago

Reddit CEO: We're Sticking With API Changes, Despite Subreddits Going Dark

'Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,' Steve Huffman says in defending the move to charge for high-volume API access.

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11 years on reddit and seeing its long slow decline its just sad. A return to the basics was very necessary. Removing subs from r/all, messing with the voting, "new" reddit, a clamp down on content...it just kept getting worse and worse. As long as I could use RIF and old.reddit it was fine, but the writing is on the wall at this point.

While most of their users are used to the newer layout from other social media, my goal was always to see the most number of posts I could on a single page and have a clean ad-free experience. Lemmy seems to get this

It's like Reddit forgot the Digg flood back in the day and is making the same poor choices Digg made that drew so many people to reddit a decade ago.

There was never serious competition to threaten Reddit before. Voat was the closest, but when legitimate redditfugees got there it was already full of a critical mass of Nazis (actual Nazis, not “everyone I don’t like is a Nazi”) and people who thought spamming slurs was peak free speech. Not exactly a solid foundation for popular new site.

The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc's founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.

Whoa. I missed this tidbit of information. Aaron Swartz's memory defiled by their actions just reaffirms my decision to leave.

Aaron Swartz will always be the real spiritual founder of what Reddit was at its best for me. Huffman will be the fool that didn't understand the ethos of it and drove it into the ground in his greed.

If true, that actually speaks volumes. Like what kind of guy removes a dead man, at some point revered, from the list of co-founders. What do you lose by not doing it? What did you win by doing it? I mean, the odds are you lost more than anything. Besides, he should have been your partner. Even if you did for the cash, what about all the moments you had with him? Was Aaron such a piece that you'd rather have him erased?

I seriously can't get it.

Ego. Tremendously inflated ego, perhaps stoked by watching Musk and thinking “great idea, I can do that too!”..?