Not only does Steve Huffman need to step down and quit this whole business, the entire team of senior management at Reddit needs to just get away as far as they can from managing anything larger than a lemon stand. Impossibly stupid way of running things.
I'm a big believer in Reddit, but NOT its current CEO, Steve Huffman, who has shown some horrible leadership. (See: how he handled third party apps.) He has to go.
Honestly - He should be fired for this. If Reddit was a real company, he would have been let go already. Being CEO requires that you keep ahold of your emotions and not abuse your power.
This totally calls into question the credibility of the whole site.
I just don’t see Reddit’s response here other than “yes, turns out we are the bad guys who have been continually lying and manipulating the situation for our benefit”. I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this. How do you trust your employer after this? I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this.
Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recording his calls with them for over a year (legally I might add). Reddit has 0 wiggle room here.
EDIT: Just spitballing here but could an employee bring a shareholder lawsuit for negatively impacting financial outlook or destroying brand value? I feel like this is going to significantly reshape Reddit as moderators of large subreddits will be furious and quit if not destroy entire subreddits. Just look at how many big (millions and tens of millions of subscribers) subreddits are signed onto the blackout letter https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplet...
EDIT 2: Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?
EDIT 3: Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder? I'm sure lawyers are looking closely at the agreements right now.
Christian would be a much better CEO than Steve Huffman, despite his clear lack of negotiation skills. Reddit is phenomenally mismanaged, it's somehow worse than both incarnations of Twitter
While I agree with services pricing their APIs in any way they like, it's worth pointing out that Reddit's current CEO Steve Huffman is the very same person responsible for editing Reddit user comments as recently as 2016, like he was just an admin on some no-name forum. [1] On the eve of an IPO, someone that irresponsible and childish should not be leading this company.
I was initally on Reddit's side in this particular matter (and I still think Selig's API pricing justifications are worthless), but I was shocked to learn Huffman is still the CEO, so his offhand comments about this situation and Reddit's general bad faith interactions with Selig in the past week are now very obvious to me.
All of the noteworthy Reddit apps already announced they're shutting down on the 30th.
It's absurd he's even pretending that these developers are leaving because they "don't want to work with us." Selig posted so many receipts of him going above and beyond to play well with reddit, and never even had any qualms with the idea of paying for API usage. Steve Huffman pretending that we didn't see all of this is so spineless and pathetic. Everyone at reddit should be embarrassed to work for him.
So if the impact of the change is so small, why does the CEO of this company with thousands of employees feel remotely compelled to concoct a fantasy story where the Apollo developer is an evil villain that is so unbelievable and verifiably unbelievable it doesn't last six hours before blowing up in his face?
Even if you completely accept these policy changes as a long-term positive for reddit's growth, how can you have confidence in that leadership? How can you trust anything they tell you as an investor?
Steve has some kind of problem. It's been apparent before with editing comments in the live db, and it's apparent now. This problem is a risk for reddit. "Don't lie on or about phone calls" is pretty basic risk management and he can't handle it.
I mean that was really stupid of him, but it seems like the kind of thing someone would do impulsively one time and then never again after getting reprimanded. Meanwhile, this API debacle has made me lose all respect for Reddit and its leadership — if everything the Apollo dev is saying is true, this is completely inexcusable. Reddit lied to the faces of the developers who trusted them and depended on them for their livelihood. I think the API thing is dramatically worse, and it isn’t close.
The CEO Steve Huffman recently admitted to editing his political opponent's posts. Maybe they can't get anything done because they're redditing all day.
I was on the fence for the past couple of weeks. But this interview (https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...) pushed me over the edge. Huffman's doublespeak, white lies (I'm certain there's a bunch of third party apps that you won't name that are still "in talks" about the new API pricing), and actual lies (trying to smear Christian's name) point to a company that simply cannot be trusted. Even if Reddit fixed all of the API issues today, I wouldn't want to go back.
And you bring up the most important issue anyway: every single Reddit community I've participated in has become noticeably worse over the past decade. They don't care because we're not the meme-and-ad-slurpee sipping target audience who will mindlessly scroll pictures and videos on the official Reddit app.
I'm quite surprised that he's still the Reddit CEO after he admittedly edited comments on production database.
Sometimes I feel the current situation is exactly what we (reddit users) deserve. Like, we chose to continue using this website even when we knew the leadership is piece of shit. What else did we expect?
Why hasn’t the board of directors that governs Reddit taken action yet? They need to hire a new CEO ASAP before the site becomes another Digg and people leave.
Edit: Jesus Christ, that guy on the other end of the phone has just completely destroyed himself in the world of business by lying about the conversation he had with the Apollo developer: https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...
reply