As you may have seen over the past week, Reddit—the “last page of the internet”—has not been having a good time, after the company’s CEO decided to oversee some changes that affected some very popular apps that people were using to access the site. That CEO, Steve Huffman, is now doing some prominent interviews in an attempt at damage control, and he is not doing well.
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Faced with a website where many major subreddits—including most of the biggest video game ones, from r/ps5 to r/pcgaming—went dark for a few days (and in some cases have remained dark), and where many of the top posts on the site’s front page are still protest posts, you would think Huffman would approach these interviews with a humble, understanding tone, especially given the negative reaction to his first round of public comments.
Nope! On NBC he has instead taken the opportunity to attack the site’s moderators for organising the protest, likening them to “landed gentry”, essentially blaming them for the site-wide uproar like a conman/politician would label someone an “elite”, and saying because of this the protests aren’t “actually representative of their communities”:
Meanwhile, over on The Verge, Huffman is saying with an entirely straight face that not only was Reddit “never designed to support third-party apps” (maybe not initially, but they’ve been around and using the API for over a decade), but that he had no idea “the extent that they were profiting off of our API”.
Being a CEO, Huffman might have a different idea of what the word means, but those apps were not “profiting”. The payment options in place, for many of them voluntary, were sustaining development of applications that only existed because for a very long time Reddit didn’t even have an app, and then when it got one it sucked.
In defence of all this, Huffman can point to an official FAQ Reddit posted to their company blog yesterday, which exists solely to point out the number of subreddits that reopened after the pledged two-day blackout (and accidentally acknowledging that a full 20% of their top communities are remaining dark indefinitely in protest!), and to commit this sentence to public record:
Buddy. Reddit has existed for almost two decades as a weird, sometimes awful, sometimes tolerable collection of human communities. It has even recently become a lot of people’s only way of searching for useful content on the internet. For most of that time the site had no interest in messing with this stuff. So why all the fuss now over profit margins?
