Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, has decided to just keep on talking. After his disastrous AMA helped inspire more subreddits to join a 48 hour blackout, and his dismissal of the protesting subred…
“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.”
Wow. Clearly Reddit now believes that they own all of the conversations that people have had on the site. That explains why they’ve also been restoring comments that people have deleted when leaving the site. That has major implications for data security, privacy, and even safety in some situations.
This episode has revealed Reddit’s true colors, and they’re not pretty.
What I find interesting is this could be avoided by granting exceptions to the existing app devs and being done with it.
I get the api costs money and theres folks like pushshift aggregating data and using it for their own profit. I’m sure plenty of companies are using data for adverts and more. And there’s an argument there Reddit deserves a cut. Especially if they are using the api to train bots or ai to have conversations for their own inventions.
But just the ass backwards way they handled devs of existing 3p apps that constitute value add to their data sets is just…mesmerizing.
And if these users ARENT a majority of the usage or costs, why bother cutting them off and not just granting exceptions to avoid the PR issues.
I think you misunderstood spez. He wanted no 3rd party app at all. RIF was paying Reddit for using their brand name and spez terminated the contract. It’s all about control.
It would be much easier to just inject ads into data returned by the API. Apps will automatically display these ads and developers will understand that if they filter these ads, their access to Reddit will be either limited or completely cut out.
Shu also tells me that RIF was paying a “sizable revenue share” to Reddit beginning in 2012, which was during Yishan Wong’s tenure as CEO. Shu says he says initiated the talks with Reddit to create the agreement, which allowed for the licensed use of Reddit’s trademarks. (At the time, the app was called “reddit is fun.”) Shu says Reddit terminated the agreement in 2016 — which was the year after Huffman took over as CEO.
Wow. Clearly Reddit now believes that they own all of the conversations that people have had on the site. That explains why they’ve also been restoring comments that people have deleted when leaving the site. That has major implications for data security, privacy, and even safety in some situations.
This episode has revealed Reddit’s true colors, and they’re not pretty.
What I find interesting is this could be avoided by granting exceptions to the existing app devs and being done with it.
I get the api costs money and theres folks like pushshift aggregating data and using it for their own profit. I’m sure plenty of companies are using data for adverts and more. And there’s an argument there Reddit deserves a cut. Especially if they are using the api to train bots or ai to have conversations for their own inventions.
But just the ass backwards way they handled devs of existing 3p apps that constitute value add to their data sets is just…mesmerizing.
And if these users ARENT a majority of the usage or costs, why bother cutting them off and not just granting exceptions to avoid the PR issues.
I think you misunderstood
spez. He wanted no 3rd party app at all. RIF was paying Reddit for using their brand name andspezterminated the contract. It’s all about control.It would be much easier to just inject ads into data returned by the API. Apps will automatically display these ads and developers will understand that if they filter these ads, their access to Reddit will be either limited or completely cut out.
Wait really? Source? I always thought it was unauthorised name use that went quietly unacknowledged for a long time, until they decided otherwise.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763661/reddit-rif-is-fun-developer-ceo-steve-huffman