Which is why /u/jailbaitlover I mean /u/spez is sending the message that they would gladly give total power to whatever mod crosses the picket line so they can boot the rest.
If Reddit had to replace all these mods it would be complete chaos and is not much better than the blackout. They will see the same exact problems Twitter has seen since they fired most of their content moderators.
I think what this entire debacle has revealed is how incredibly unfit Huffman is to be involved in running a major site, much less one with as much reach as reddit.
I’ve read most of his comments and it’s all centered around “reddit can’t afford to keep paying everyone’s API fees while everyone else makes bank”. Which is fair enough.
But it also reads like a CEO who simply hasn’t been paying attention to much of anything and who woke up one morning to realize that they’d already handed away the company’s most valuable assets by letting Google and ChatGPT and other LLM companies harvest everything they need to build their products while reddit happily and blithely pays the bills. And now that other companies are starting to look profitable by building off what reddit paid to give away, Hoffman is both massively jealous and panicking, desperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Only instead of going through every company that uses the API, figuring out how much they use and what they use it for and how necessary that use is for reddit’s business, it looks like he panicked and tried to charge everyone the same rate. He didn’t do any research into the issue and realize that Google harvests massive amounts of data that it uses in it’s search results and to improve and program it’s products and makes massive amounts of money, vs small apps that run basic queries that massively improve the reddit experience and that don’t make much money at all. He just wants to charge everyone the same amount and keeps demanding that small apps pay the same as Google, because he’s pissed he wasn’t paying enough attention to notice what was going on.
And he’s scared shirtless because he’s had an easy run of reddit CEO, and now people are asking questions about his lack of vision and he’s afraid that no one will ever give him such an easy and lucrative job ever again. And $10 million in the bank plus whatever stock options he has may look like a lot of money to us peons, it really isn’t among the people he wants to keep hanging around with.
The one thing he’s doing half-smart is the spin game. That’s what that AMA was about, not to engage with the community, but to put out a dozen or so pre-written quotes that reddit could point to in interviews and say “look, here, this is what’s really going on, and we’ve tried.”
In the end, I think Huffman’s massive failings can be summarized in his comment that “[reddit will] continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive” - as if the arrival of profits is inevitable and no one needs to do anything to ensure their safe journey. Which seems to summarize his period as CEO: just coast along like normal and surely some profits will arrive - and then panic when the profits start arriving for companies with CEOs who do they job and attention to their business.
That’s what I don’t understand from the start. Why not just look who uses the API and charge based on that?
Google, you pay 10x per API call. ChatGPT, you pay also 10x. Random LLM, you pay 5x. Apollo, you 2x, random app with 1k downloads from the play store, you pay 0. Bumm.
Okay, not in this obvious way, because then they can complain for discrimination, but maybe some tiered one aimed against the big single-entity players. Also: per API key/user, not just per API key.
I’ve been thinking on this, and this is pure speculation, but – I keep thinking about what Christian said, where he’s already been paid by people who still have a year to go on their subscription and he can’t raise the price on them. I’d bet that Google and ChatGPT, etc, have some sort of basic contract they set up with reddit from before the AI developments this spring, saying that they get API access for [minimal cost] and that the contracts still have at least several months left to run.
So this spring is the great AI reveals by multiple companies, and everyone is saying “oh, hey, we loaded a bunch of data from reddit”. And now TPTB at reddit are all looking at Huffman, going, “oh, hey, I bet we made bank on that, let’s go ahead with that IPO!”. And Huffman is sitting there with egg on his face because he’s just been gliding along and now he’s had to admit that he gave everything away and has no idea how to make a profit, and the contracts with Google and ChatGPT and all the big boys with their big boy lawyers still have time left to run so he can’t get money from them.
So he turns around and says, "we’ll get money from all these other people using the API, we’ll charge them extortionate amounts of money so we’ll make some money there. And if they don’t pay up, we’ll be forcing people to use our own app and we can make sure they have lots of ads and promoted material so we’ll make money that way too!”
So basically he wasn’t paying attention until it was too late and now he’s scrambling for other sources of income to point to in order to save his job.
And now I’m thinking of all those programmers that he’s undoubtedly leaning on, telling them they have only two weeks to deliver on a vague suite of “mod tools” that reddit’s been repeatedly refusing to even look at for over a decade. Because that’s what a bad boss does: refuses to look ahead, refuses to listen to people who do look ahead, panics when there’s a foreseeable issue, refuses to listen to people who valid input into the issue, makes up a random answer that he swears will address every ill current and future, and then applies extreme pressure to the people who work for him in order to reach those (completely foreseeable and now extreme emergency) goals.
I’ll mention again that this is just a theory I’m working on, but it fits with what I’ve been seeing and hearing so far. I’m not sure exactly what changes he’ll be able to force through in the meantime, but I just don’t see Huffman having a job at reddit in another six months, probably sooner. And given the way he’s “led” the company and responded to this incident, I don’t see him getting another CEO job either in or out of the tech industry.