“Protest and dissent is important,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told the AP. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything.”
“Protest and dissent is important,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told the AP. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything.”
Being simple and honest is a virtue if the things you’re saying are principled, being simple and honest when you’re a slimy businessperson with zero sense of moral agency just makes you a fucking leech
But he wasn’t being simple and honest. Simple and honest would have been.
“Regrettably we have decided to remove API access to the vast majority of third party clients, except those designed specifically to provide moderation or accessibility features that the official app currently lacks.
We know this will be very disappointing to many of our users, and a body-blow to developers who have worked hard on their apps.
The truth is that advertising revenue is crucial for our ongoing survival, as is the demographic information that we can gather through our own app.
Application developers should stop taking subscription renewals immediately. We will work with them to help reimburse subscribers for the remainder of existing subscriptions. “
Something along those lines.
Just a thought that’s gonna disappear into the aether…
The amount Huff-spez was going to charge Apollo was the opportunity cost, not the real cost. That is, they figured that each Reddit users was worth X amount each month, give or take, in revenue that could be generated from tracking and advertisement. That actual cost per user was more like 5% of X. If Huffspez was being honest and transparent about this, he could say to users, hey, if you pay X per month, we’ll turn off all advertisements, not sell any of the data associated with your usage, and stop tracking you as much as possible and still have our site work. (I know tracking can’t stop completely, but it can be reduced.) But that’s not what is being presented to end users; they’re only being given the ability to use the official reddit app.
Then again, the promise of cable television and streaming services was that we would pay for the service, and not be force to watch ads. And then companies figured out that they could be more profitable by also selling ads, and then requiring subscribers to pay even more to reduce the number of ads. So any claims from Huffspez that you could subscribe and not be tracked etc. would have been, rightly, viewed with derision.
Let’s not devalue basic virtues. Honesty is honesty.
Would you rather he flat out lie that “we’ll look into it” or him being honest “I’m not going to do anything about it”. Being honest lets us know where he stands so we can make our plans about migration easier.
Calling them virtues is charitable if you’re doing this while willfully refusing to acknowledge the fact that you stand on millions of hours of volunteer labor and you’d rather spit on them than give them their due. It’s a lie by omission.
He could try to tell the truth with more tact, though, to avoid sounding like a complete douchebag.