Steve Huffman Addresses Reddit API Modifications in QAnswer Session

After facing backlash from users over the company’s API changes, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has addressed the issue publicly. During an AMA session, Huffman acknowledged the concerns raised by third-party Reddit app developers who have threatened to shut down due to the changes. While he promised to improve Reddit’s own app, he did not appear willing to make any concessions on pricing or other contentious issues that have upset the community.

“Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining company, and to do that we can no longer support commercial entities that require large-scale data usage,” he wrote in an AMA post. “Some apps like Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided that this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will shut down before the pricing takes effect.”

In mostly 1-2 sentence responses to detailed, multi-part questions, Huffman acknowledged some missteps in the company’s API implementation, but largely declined to address more difficult questions about the company’s approach to its relationship with third-party developers. In one response, he acknowledged that the 30-day period given to developers for the new API was a “tight timeline” and said the company “continues to have conversations with many developers who still want to work with us.”

But other developers soon stressed that they had never heard of the company, despite reaching out through channels promoted by Reddit. “I’ve been trying to contact Reddit for the past 3 months and have been completely ignored,” one developer wrote. “I feel completely powerless to do anything right now and want to try to save the app I’ve been working on for the last 10 years.” Huffman apologized and said the company would respond.

When asked why the company accused Christian Selig, Apollo’s developer, of threatening the company — a claim Selig denied and immediately refuted in an audio clip of a call with a Reddit representative — Huffman doubled down on the criticism. “His ‘joke’ is the least of our problems,” he said. “His behavior and communication with us has been all over the place – telling us one thing and saying something completely different. I don’t know how we could do business with him.” (Huffman did not respond to Selig’s follow-up question asking for examples of such behavior.)

Huffman, who uses the platform spez, also promised that Reddit will develop its own app, including its moderation tools and accessibility features. Redditors often cite both areas as favoring third-party apps over the company’s native app. He also said the reason why third-party apps would no longer be able to display sexual content was due to the changing “regulatory environment” and legal concerns. “It’s a constant battle to preserve this content at all,” he said. “We have to be tight/conservative about where it shows up.”

One of his most revealing responses came in response to a question about the perception that “Reddit has become more for-profit and less focused on community engagement” than it has been. “We’ll continue to be profitable until the profits come in,” Huffman replied. “Unlike some 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable.”

In particular, there were several topics that Huffman did not address, including why the company priced its API at a price that developers believe is prohibitively expensive. Huffman also did not address the upcoming blackout due to the thousands of subreddits protesting the API changes. More than 3,000 subreddits have pledged to “go dark” for two days starting June 12th to protest the changes.

By the end of the AMA, Huffman had answered 14 questions, while a few other executives answered a handful of their own. Perhaps the most telling sign that their answers weren’t well received, every answer from the reddit team was downvoted so heavily that it was almost impossible to see them in the AMA thread itself. The moderator later linked all their responses to the top of the thread. “We know the answers are hard to come by,” they said.