Reddit is fighting for its soul. Many users are in revolt over API pricing changes that will shut down some of the most popular third-party Reddit apps, and they’re furious at CEO Steve Huffman after last week’s AMA that made it clear the platform wouldn’t budge. Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up, but they’re also wiping out some beloved Reddit apps, and thousands of subreddits have gone dark for days in protest.
On Thursday, Reddit offered me an interview with Huffman (who goes by u/spez on Reddit). I’ve already published one story from my conversation about how Reddit was apparently never designed to support third-party apps. But here is a lightly edited transcript of the entire interview — which, at times, was contentious.
Steve Huffman: One of the most important points I’d like to make today is that Reddit is a platform built by its users. My favorite analogy for Reddit is that of a city. Cities are physical things, but they’re really these living organisms created by their citizens. I think Reddit is very much the same. We’re a platform and tech company on one hand, but on the other it’s a living organism, this democratic living organism, created by its users.
Those democratic values run deep at Reddit. Every once in a while in cities, there’s a protest. And I think that’s what we’re seeing exactly right now. We, even in disagreement, we appreciate that users can care enough to protest on Reddit, can protest on Reddit, and then our platform is really resilient enough to survive these things. I’ll turn it over to you to jump into the details. But big picture, that’s how we look at this moment.
Jay Peters: What I’m reading [from a fact sheet published Thursday] is that it seems Reddit is saying the blackouts didn’t have much impact on your decision making. Is that the case?
In this case? That’s true. We’ve had blackouts in previous times where there’s a little more room for movement. But the core of this one is the API pricing change. That’s our business decision. And we’re not undoing that business decision.
And we were clear about that going into this, which is was one of the reasons why I think our users probably are annoyed at this blackout, because there wasn’t anything to gain.
We were also clear that we were willing to work with the apps that are willing to work with us, and that’s not changed. Now the two biggest, they threw in the towel. That was unexpected, but we’re still talking to the others. And, you know, we’ll see where that goes.
“They threw in the towel.”
Before the blackout, we were trying to be as clear as possible that the mod tools were not affected. That’s a common thing that’s been thrown around; the mod tools are not affected. The accessibility apps have access, we’ve got deals now with three of them — RedReader, Dystopia, and Luna — and the vast majority of our API users are within our free limits. And Pushshift is coming back online for mods. So I think most of the stuff that mods wanted, and day to day users wanted, are there.
What’s not happening is us continuing to subsidize businesses built on taking our data for free. That’s not changing.
You said that two threw in the towel: that’s Apollo, and which other?
RIF. And I think Sync said they’re shutting down as well, if I’m not mistaken.
Yeah, they did. [Apollo developer] Christian Selig said that Reddit told him in January that there’ll be no API changes coming this year. When did that shift? When did Reddit decide to make these changes? And what was the impetus?
Well, we’ve been talking about this forever. I think one of the ironies is [Selig] is probably the only guy on Reddit defending these apps for a long time.
But the impetus for these changes is like, we took a close look at our data, our API usage, where it’s going, how much it costs, and it’s just not sustainable. And so we told them that back in April, that changes were coming, that they’re going to have to pay to cover their costs. Which actually, I think he and others accepted. You know, we’ve had a lot of conversations with him and others privately, one on one, and some on the site. What they didn’t like is the price, but the price is the price. It just happens to be expensive to run an app like Reddit.
Why are folks being kind of rushed to do this? My understanding is from the April announcement that the prices weren’t actually set yet, and Christian and others didn’t really have an understanding of the costs until the end of May. Why wait so long to roll out the prices to them, and why hold to this month long deadline, instead of a little bit more breathing room for some developers to adapt?
We’re…
Read More: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview