Reddit CEO Claims Third-Party Apps Do Not Provide Value to Platform
According to Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, the social discussion platform was not intended to provide support for third-party applications.
In protest against changes to the application programming interface (API), thousands of Reddit communities remain dark, forcing some third-party developers to shut down their apps, reports The Verge.
According to Huffman, these third-party apps don’t add much value to the platform.
“So the majority of uses for the API — not (third-party apps like Apollo for Reddit) — the other 98 percent of them are making tools, bots, and enhancements to Reddit. That’s what the API is for,” Reddit’s CEO said in a statement.
“It was never designed to support third-party apps.”
Huffman also railed against third-party apps that compete with his company.
“I didn’t know—and this is my fault—how much they were benefiting from our API. That these weren’t charities.”
When asked if he genuinely believes the power outages have not affected his decision making regarding the API pricing changes.
“That’s our business decision, and we’re not going to reverse that business decision,” Huffman replied.
According to a fact sheet shared by the company on Thursday, the platform now has over 1,00,000 “active communities”, 57 million “daily active individuals” and over 50,000 “daily active moderators”.
In an internal memo sent to employees on Monday, Reddit’s CEO had said that, like all other implosions on the platform, “this too shall pass.”
Last week, Huffman had hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session to discuss the platform’s controversial API changes and confirmed that the company is not going to revive its upcoming API pricing changes, which have prompted several developers to announce they are shutting down their apps. .
