The Why of Reddit Protests

Reddit is going dark. In a big way! The community that makes up the platform is protesting against the company’s decision to impose draconian pricing for access to its application programming interface, aka API. The pricing is so exorbitant that it will kill third-party apps that are popular with people who don’t want to use Reddit’s (mediocre) official app and equally mediocre website.  And more importantly, the protests only reinforce the reality that “the community is the platform.

In an interview with the New York Times, Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman laid out his reasons for charging for the API and the high prices:

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable. But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free. More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation. There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all. Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with.”

While the intent to go after big companies might be right, what he and his team didn’t realize was that it would kill small apps and independent developers. Or maybe they did and didn’t care! Or that’s why I would read it, for the treatment of developers such as Christian Selig, creator of Apollo. Selig laid out his decision to shut down the app in a detailed Reddit post. Huffman, in turn, responded by mudslinging at Selig. 🙄

Apollo is not alone – Pager, Sync, Reddplant, and Reddit is Fun will go out of business. As someone who uses Reddit via Apollo (which got name-checked during the WWDC 2023 keynote), I am pretty disappointed in Huffman and the entire Reddit team. 

Reddit is rumored to have plans to go public, but they need better leadership than the current team. Huffman has shown no leadership skills. He doesn’t know how to read the room. Most importantly, he lacks the social empathy to lead a social platform. Even more disappointing is the lack of comments or intervention from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, the always chatty — who seems to have advice for every other founder, except for his co-founder. 

In an attempt to monetize the content generated by the community, Huffman forgot that it is the people who make the platform. The community is the platform. It is something the owners of social media platforms forget. Back in 2006, on my (now unavailable) old blog, Robert Young, a guest contributor, pointed out that, 

There’s a certain level of what (for the lack of a better phrase) I will refer to as cognitive dissonance when you run a business based on community. And that’s that you quickly realize that the members of the community feel strongly that the service belongs to them, and the control that you, the corporation, think you have is actually, in large part, an illusion. After all, a community, by definition generates its own content, its own style and culture… it’s all by the people, for the people. As a result, if you’re an executive at such a company, you oftentimes feel more like a politician than a businessperson. To do anything that would suggest that you, as the corporation, owns and controls the service (and in effect, the community) is, well, akin to heresy. As the power shifts increasingly towards community, the corporation loses its grip on the traditional means of control. Yet, by letting go of control, the corporation creates an environment where the community willingly creates its own switching costs. 

Robert Young, GigaOm, 2005

No one seems to grok this simple reality. It happened with MySpace. It has happened with Twitter. It is now happening with Reddit. They never learn from past mistakes. They assume that because they own the platform, they own the community. Every time they forget that important thing, they erode the community’s trust. And once that trust goes, so does the unfettered loyalty. People start looking for options. 

“Social networks are a new medium for self-expression and, unlike traditional media, the content is being produced and owned by the audience itself. This is a new model that requires new rules… and for advertising, the most important rule is to launch programs that integrate users and advertisers, not segregate them. By aligning their interests, trust will be created, and social networks will be able to offer advertisers, and users, benefits that are truly unique to the new medium. So as is the case with money, trust will enable social networks to develop business models with sustainable value.”

The Reddit community should consider filing a class action suit against the company for monetizing its content by selling to the highest bidders. They should get a piece of the action after all, as Huffman himself said, “Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with.”

June 12, 2023. San Francisco