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If they want organizations not to scrape their content, tough toenails; stopping them is impossible.

It's especially impossible to stop Google and Microsoft from doing it, because they already have a search index full of said content.

Spez is alienating his loyal user base for nothing.

Why does reddit deserve to make profit from content made by others? They are service provider - they are not entitled to the work of people who used their service.

It was never truly about them not making money though was it?

The whole thing would not have escalated, if they'd actually reacted to the problems raised, e.g. the astronomical API fees and the situation of mod tools and accessability tools.

Only when shit was already hitting the fan they responded to 3rd party devs, who tried to reach out to them for a month already.

Even if they'd postpone the changes and start listening to the raised problems now, they scorched a lot of earth and very well knew that would happen.

They’re bloated. Thousands of employees. Tons of developers. Marketing people. And in the end? The real product is like you said, it’s the users and volunteer mods.

Those developers? Produced an absolutely terrible mobile app and mobile website.

The marketing people? They’re more focused on NYC time square ads than fixing sponsored posts on Reddit.

It’s an absolute shitshow but that’s what happens with these extremely bloated companies…

Can't forget about https://nft.reddit.com/, the real moneymaker. Nothing says value-adding like nfts, the dumbfucks.

It's possible that this is not about collecting money for third party app use, but instead about forcing people to use Reddit's apps (both mobile and web), which are designed for data extraction and tracking.

My best guess is they want to fight against adblockers next and can't have people easily switch to a 3PA and avoid ads this way.

When something is free, you are the product. Reddit has been a human farm for ages, using effectively “slave” (free) labor to maintain the herd. That massive data trove is now being sold for profit. That’s why it’s so important that Huffman preserve Reddit and is kicking recalcitrant mods (something I predicted would happen).

I admit, I unsubscribed to Reddit and logged off the day of the AMA, after giving Huffman a piece of my mind about his “double dipping.” I was fine paying him for no ads. I would have been fine paying Apollo a small subscription. There was no way I was going to pay Reddit AND Apollo for the use of Reddit, when Apollo was basically going to be forced to collect the money I was already paying Reddit (using the APIs as a blinder).

I am fine leaving behind a ghost account. And while I get the idea of taking your data with you, frankly, I am not a thought leader in any space, and most of my comment history are stray tidbits across multiple subreddits. Certainly nothing of any value. The only value I have is being someone who could have eyes on to ads, or interact with an ad, and that can’t happen if I’m not there. And I fully believe that there is more harm to cause by being inactive than in not being there at all. Huffman may have 400 million accounts, but how many of those are actively engaged? What if the number of inactive accounts keep growing?

Let u/spez be CEO of a graveyard of rapidly aging data and ghosted accounts. For those who have contributed, I think the best solution at this time is to get your knowledge archived in a searchable format and then just pick up elsewhere. Yeah, there will be work to re-grow the community, but I have found that folks do migrate to where the activity is. As subreddits go quiet, folks will look for where the action is. It’s what happened with MySpace and Livejournal, LiveJournal and Facebook and Facebook and Twitter. Reddit is no different. Nor is Twitter. People just forget and get complacent. Personally, I like to shake things up anyway. It’s time for change.

Imagine if phone companies started selling our conversations without giving us a cent for the content.

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 saw somewhere that the analogy was supposed to be "whoever got there first owned the land." The idea I guess is that the landed gentry settled down on the land (subreddits) first, and now the subreddit is a dictatorship because the users could never vote on who their "landlords" are.

Yes, that analogy is also terrible, and it also goes to show that spez has no idea why people hate landlords.

Edit: everyone that's replied to me has provided more reasons why it's a stupid analogy, and that makes me happy :)

Joke's on us, that's exactly what he thinks.

I deleted ~2300 comments and submissions.. Steve's not going to train AI off of my work while behaving the way he has. That entire company can go pound sand.

Just another CEO who is out of touch with his product and his customers

I mean genuinely if your charging for access to the content I have created then I am I entitled to a portion of your revenue. Same as Adsense on YT not that I want to turn it into a race to the bottom for engagement like those scenarios are conducive to. But if we want to make it about money we can make it about money /u/spez.

If I were an executive and If I was even 2% clued into the effect this is having on shifting the conversation to fediverse type projects I would be shitting myself. Not because this will have an immediately noticeable effect on my bottom line, but that it will continue to grow organically. We already crossed the threshold of momentum needed to self sustain, its all up from here especially as the tools and systems mature.

Just look at the tech literate around us start to question “yeah why the fuck are we leaving social media in the hands of corporations???”

Real Nestlé moment from Spez.