The CEO of Reddit Steve Huffman held an AMA today in order to defend the controversial API changes the company recently announced. It didn’t go well.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has finally broken his silence following outrage over its unpopular API change policy. Just like Twitter, Reddit appears to be in no mood to let others – aka developers, moderators, and bot creators – have a free hand with valuable user data that is accessible via its APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). In his promised «ask me anything» session, Huffman showed no signs of backing down from the controversial move but reasoned why Reddit is shifting gears in the first place.
He began with the standard argument that Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to that end, the company can «no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.» The API pricing shift was announced in April, and in the weeks that followed, thousands of popular Reddit communities have joined hands in protest, while some popular third-party clients like Apollo have decided to shut down over the inability to pay millions of dollars in API fees.
