Thousands of Reddit communities
are still dark
in protest of the API changes that are forcing some third-party developers to shut down their apps. It’s a startling change for many members of the Reddit community, but it’s one that Reddit CEO Steve Huffman tells
The Verge
that he’s fine with making. Those third-party apps, in his eyes, aren’t adding much value to the platform.
“So the vast majority of the uses of the API — not [third-party apps like Apollo for Reddit] — the other 98 percent of them, make tools, bots, enhancements to Reddit. That’s what the API is for,” Huffman says. “It was never designed to support third-party apps.” According to Huffman, he “let it exist,” and “I should take the blame for that because I was the guy arguing for that for a long time.”
Huffman now takes issue with the third-party apps that are building a business on top of his own. “I didn’t know — and this is my fault — the extent that they were profiting off of our API. That these were not charities.”
“That’s our business decision, and we’re not undoing that business decision.”
I asked him if he felt that Apollo, rif for Reddit, and Sync, which
all
plan
to shut down as a result of the pricing changes, don’t add value to Reddit. “Not as much as they take,” he says. “No way.”
“They need to pay for this. That is fair. What our peers have done is banned them entirely. And we said no, you know what, we believe in free markets. You need to cover your costs,” he says. Apollo developer Christian Selig
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