Reddit is used to brawls between its 57 million daily users. Now its keyboard warriors are directing their ire at its CEO, Steve Huffman. Thousands of moderators overseeing the site’s so-called subreddits are on strike. It’s a wrinkle in Reddit’s plan to go public, and a sign that plan is premature.
I think the only way this ends amicably between the community and Reddit at this point is Huffman is ousted and then they can finally entertain other deals for API access. I’m sure they’re looking at the insane profits AI companies are raking in largely off of data they scraped from sites like Reddit for free and thinking “WTF”. My impression is third party apps got caught kinda in the crossfire on this and weren’t actually their main target, but Huffman has managed to turn it in to some weird kind of ego issue now he’s accusing multiple developers of antagonizing the platform, refusing to work with them, when we have proof from several of them in multiple instances of the direct opposite. Attempts to reach out that go unanswered. An impossibly timeline to implement changes. Trying to throw the Apollo dev under the bus only to double down when confronted with proof he lied to press. Utterly bizarre. He needs to go.
My problem with the AI narrative is that AI companies probably don’t even use the API, they use a web crawler to scrape directly from the website. And any who are using the API can pretty easily switch