Nobody wants to be in the shoes of Steve Huffman at the moment. The Reddit CEO and co-founder is under attack from moderators after the social network decided to change rules for some third-party apps for the use of Reddit data. But he is unwilling to take a step back.
The fight is over API pricing. In April, Reddit announced that it would begin to charge some large-scale users for access to its application programming interface or API. It is a way through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s wide range of memes, gifs, videos and conversation threads. In protest, thousands of subreddits have gone dark for days in protest.
Huffman said on Thursday that he plans to bring a change in the rules, allowing Reddit users to vote out moderators, who are overseeing the protest. He went to the point of comparing them to a “landed gentry.”
He said the blackout has been led by a “small group” and hasn’t cost the company much but it has created “a fair amount of trouble”. Nearly 9,000 subreddits have staged a 48-hour boycott.
“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 has told NPR. “But I think the greater Reddit community just wants to participate with their fellow community members.” Thousands of Reddit communities remain dark in protest.
Huffman said that the platform was not designed to support third-party apps and he is the person to blame for allowing these apps to exist. “So the vast majority of the uses of the API — not [third-party apps like Apollo for Reddit] — the other 98 per cent of them, make tools, bots, enhancements to Reddit. That’s what the API is for,” Huffman has told The Verge.
The company no longer wants to give away such valuable datasets to companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft, which have been using Reddit’s data to develop artificial intelligence systems.
“Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business and to do that, we can no longer subsidise commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” Huffman said in a recent Ask Me Anything discussion on the site.
The protest has taken down thousands of message boards or subreddits and some of these communities plan to continue the action indefinitely. Participating communities that have gone “private”, have made their boards unviewable even to members.
The platform’s policy says moderators could be removed by higher-ranking moderators or by Reddit itself for inactivity or violations of rules. Or, they may remove themselves. “If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” the 39-year-old CEO has said.
He has said that 80 per cent of Reddit’s top 5,000 communities are back in business. At the moment, there is no plan to “unilaterally” reopen communities.
Earlier this year, Twitter pulled the plug on third-party developers. But the approach was different. Elon Musk made it clear that he no longer wanted them to exist. The logic is simple: Twitter doesn’t make money from anyone using a third-party app because they don’t see Twitter’s ads.
