Elon Musk's Twitter moves were 'reaffirming' says Reddit boss amid API changes
- Reference: 1687195814
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/06/19/reddit_ceo_musk_twitter/
- Source link:
Talking to [1]NBC News late last week, he appeared to admit that Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter should be an example for Reddit to follow.
"Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale," he said.
[2]
"Now, they've taken the dramatic road, and I guess I can't sit here and say that we're not either, but I think there's a lot of opportunity here."
[3]
[4]
He also said that he often wondered why Twitter couldn't turn a profit under previous management despite 2021 revenue of $5.1 billion. "As a company smaller than theirs, sub-$1 billion in revenue, I used to look at Twitter and say, 'Well, why can't they break even at 4 or 5 billion in revenue? What about their business do we not understand?' Because I think we should be able to do that quite handsomely."
He added: "And then I think one of the non-obvious things that Elon showed is what I was hoping would be true, which is: You can run a company with that many users in the ads business and break even with a lot fewer people," observing that Twitter "had to do some pretty violent changes and violent surgery to get there."
[5]
When we asked Reddit about the interview, a spokesperson said: "Saying he took inspiration seems to be a bit of a stretch, as I don't recall him saying that."
It's something of an about-turn from the company's position on the API charge increases, at least according to the developer of Apollo, an iOS client for interacting with Reddit.
In a post on the website announcing that the project would shut down at the end of June because the charges would cost more than $20 million a year, Christian Selig [6]claimed Reddit told him:
I think one thing that we have tried to be very, very, very intentional about is we are not Elon, we're not trying to be that, we're not trying to go down that same path. [...] We are trying to do is just use usage-based pricing, that will hopefully be very transparent to you, and very clear to you. Or we're not trying to go down the same path that you may have seen some of our other peers go down.
Reddit, which announced [7]layoffs earlier this month, has set the price for API calls by third-party apps at $0.24 per 1,000, and while that may look small, it really stacks up at scale. Reddit claims it made the change to profit off AI outfits training large language models on the content it hosts, which is generated by users and partly moderated by volunteers.
Reddit has set its sights on an IPO, but finance Firm fidelity, which led the company's August 2021 funding round, has revised the value of its $28.2 million stake down to $16.6 million, meaning the self-proclaimed "front page of the internet" is feeling the need to actually start making money.
[8]
Moderators, who rely on these third-party apps to police their various walled-off communities on the website, this past week led a rebellion on the website by shutting off access to their subreddits or putting them in read-only mode. Huffman struck back in the same interview, comparing them to "landed gentry."
He said: "If you're a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders. And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: the people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic."
[9]Thousands of subreddits go dark in mega-protest over Reddit's app-killing API prices
[10]Reddit cuts five percent of workers while API pricing shift sours developers
[11]Reddit blackout planned over app-killing API prices
[12]Reddit: If you want to slurp our API to train that LLM, you better pay for it, pal
Popular subreddits with tens of millions of members each say their blackout will be "indefinite" until Reddit considers their demands, but the CEO said Reddit wouldn't budge. Leaning on the "democracy" angle, he said the company would have to make sure "protests, now or in the future, are actually representative of their communities. And I think that may have been the case for many at the beginning of this week, but that's less and less the case as time goes on."
Answering a question on the subreddit [13]r/ModSupport , a Reddit administrator said that company had a duty to keep popular communities running because of their large audiences, and that they wouldn't hesitate to bring in a changing of the guard if necessary.
"If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod who wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team."
Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move [14]READ MORE
Musk's haphazard approach to cutting costs and increasing revenue at Twitter, which also [15]jacked up API access prices , raised eyebrows in Silicon Valley and left thousands of jobs – ones many believed to be critical to the operation of the social network – on the cutting room floor.
Not to mention the [16]vastly inflated price Musk paid, Twitter became a poster child of how not to take over an internet juggernaut with observers unsure of whether the website could stay online.
Twitter, in case you haven't noticed, is very much online and there is nothing to say that Reddit won't simply end the protests on its platform under its own steam.
But with 3,625 multimillion-user subreddits [17]still dark as of Monday, the Musk playbook could have caused irreparable damage to the website's reputation among its most ardent community members.
Meanwhile, the subreddits that have reopened have extended their protest to posting pictures of Brit American comedian John Oliver. The number 1 rule on r/pics, for example, is now: "All posts must be images of John Oliver looking sexy." ®
Get our [18]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/bootnotes&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZJDP@8TMAzfzJFi2xVDLqQAAAE8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/09/reddit_job_cuts_api_pricing_pushback/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/bootnotes&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZJDP@8TMAzfzJFi2xVDLqQAAAE8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/12/reddit_api_outage/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/09/reddit_job_cuts_api_pricing_pushback/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/05/reddit_blackout_planned_over_appkilling/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/18/reddit_charging_ai_api/
[13] https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a5lz5/comment/jo9wdol/?context=3
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/musk_twitter_rpc_spat/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/20/twitter_microsoft_api/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/20/musk_overpaying_twitter/
[17] https://reddark.untone.uk/
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
1. Steal Underpants
2. Fire all HR, fire all developers, stop paying office rent
3. Profit
He needs an icon -->
This is a joke, right? Coz no-one could look at Twitter's past year and think "Cor! I wish that was happening to my business.", could they?
Re: He needs an icon -->
Sure you can! There are tons of reasons. Especially burning [money] reasons and tax [deduction] reasons.
Re: He needs an icon -->
This is a joke, right? Coz no-one could look at Twitter's past year and think "Cor! I wish that was happening to my business.", could they?
Or maybe, just maybe, Musk knows a little bit more about running business than you and the rest of the haters that predicted twitter would fall over within a month of the takeover?
It's notable that a bunch of other tech companies such as Meta, Microsoft and Google wielded the axe and dramatically cut headcounts after Musk led the way.
Re: He needs an icon -->
It's also very noticeable that anyone defending Musk posts as an AC.
Re: He needs an icon -->
It's notable that a bunch of other tech companies such as Meta, Microsoft and Google wielded the axe and dramatically cut headcounts after Musk led the way.
You're 100% sure the global economic post pandemic / Ukraine war related slowdown has nothing to do with that?
Reddit's CEO doesn't realize
They are easily replaceable. It isn't like Facebook where getting another single site with that large a percentage of active internet users may never happen again, nor is it like Twitter which doesn't have nearly so many users but had over the years become sort of the defacto place for the modern day equivalent of "press releases".
Reddit is just like yesteryear's dialup BBSes just on a far grander scale. Other than losing history there's nothing stopping the userbase from moving elsewhere - and the barriers to entry for someone trying to replace them aren't all that high. He pisses people off long enough and he'll find this out. Though he may not care - he's probably got a golden parachute if the company crumbles, even if it is his fault.
He seems to have taken the dumbest possible lesson from Twitter by trying to charge a small fortune for third party API access. He's dreaming that everyone training an AI is going to want to pay for reddit's database to do it, but other than having the biggest concentration of discussions in one place it has no advantage over the million other forums on the internet - including this little site we call The Reg. I'm surprised he hasn't announced some sort of verified user program, maybe he could call it Reddit Blue!
Re: Reddit's CEO doesn't realize
I've seen his mindset in others. From what I understand he only made $10 million from selling out to conde nast.
What I think is happening is he wants a big payout from an IPO, he wants to be as rich as all the other silicon valley types. He doesn't care if he burns down reddit as a result, as long as he can get that IPO payout.
Like a lot of his sort (Musk, Huffman etc) think they're geniuses when all they really are, are people who got lucky, profited off the work of others or inherited wealth.
Huffman himself is well known to be a prepper and thinks in some doomsday he'd be a leader. Rather than, you know dead within the first five minutes.
This is a literal quote from Huffman (I am not kidding, it's from the new yorker):
“Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
Says it all, doesn't it?
Re: Reddit's CEO doesn't realize
The thing is, any other company that moves into Reddit's space is going to face exactly the same challenges that Reddit now does.
How exactly do they make money without someone, somewhere paying for it?
It seems to me that Reddit's problems would be (relatively) easily solved by simply buying one of the more decent apps used by their moderators, and making it an officially supported interface. But what do I know.
Re: Reddit's CEO doesn't realize
How exactly do they make money without someone, somewhere paying for it?
Ads. Facebook makes a mint with ads, so why can't reddit? If some altruistic rich guy or group of people created a non profit to operate something like that as a public good (which is basically what people have been treating reddit as for the past decade anyway) you wouldn't need all that many ads given the number of visitors a site like reddit has, though if you're a for-profit you will eventually do like Facebook and push and push until there are more ads (sorry "sponsored posts") than actual content from your friends and pages.
It is weird that instead of pursuing ads he decided to go after API users, and not in a little way with a long term "boil the frog" strategy of slowly increasing prices, but tossing the frog directly into lava on day one.
Re: Reddit's CEO doesn't realize
How exactly do they make money without someone, somewhere paying for it?
Charge a sustainable amount?
Their pricing model puts it about 1 cent for 40 API requests. If that's anything near reflective of your costs + a sensible profit margin then there's some serious underlying inefficiencies.
For example, this works out at about $0.60 for 2400 API calls.
Amazon will deliver you a million HTTPS notifications for the same $0.60 from their SNS system.
They also charge 9 cents a gigabyte of data transferred out (again for SNS), which for reddit would equate to each API returning a payload of about 100MB.
I picked SNS because it happened to be the first thing I found pricing for, but it does illustrate what a fairly profitable cloud service thinks is acceptable for API/data usage.
I do actually think services like Reddit should charge for API access (and offer some kind of unpaid access to encourage app development), but the pricing should be realistic. Don't get greedy, it's likely apps of the future will end up having to pay for several different types of API access, they need to be sustainable too. Do what Amazon and others do, price it like a utility. It's the digital equivalent of water or electricity after all.
After all, most of these sites are built atop of Amazon, Azure, et al., no one suggests they shouldn't pay them, it's the same model just the next level down.
Re: Reddit's CEO doesn't realize
"Reddit Blue!"
Wrong colour. Perhaps more acurately: (he) "Blue it!"
Nobody Mentions Why the Mods Are Upset
This comment on Techdirt (https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/14/reddit-communities-decide-to-extend-boycott-after-ceo-says-its-almost-over/#comment-3046724) is insightful:
Almost all of the reporting, including here, has missed the reason why moderators are upset.
Reddit does not provide a viable way for the mods to actually moderate. The official apps are garbage which gave rise to many 3rd-party apps. These 3rd-party apps give the moderators the tools needed to provide free work for reddit. Charging everyone for API access makes the apps too costly to run.
Now, moderators will have to use the official apps slowing down their work. This will result in more spam and hate-speech, especially in the large forums.
Eleswhere (https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/16/reddit-ceo-triples-down-insults-protesters-whines-about-not-making-enough-money-from-reddit-users/#comment-3048063) the attitude of the owner is summarised as
“We don’t do things for free, so all the unpaid mods should get back to work”
Re: Nobody Mentions Why the Mods Are Upset
perfect summation.
Re: Nobody Mentions Why the Mods Are Upset
“3rd-party apps give the moderators the tools needed to provide free work for reddit. Charging everyone for API access makes the apps too costly to run.”
Well, at least it'll stop the mentally disturbed mods trawling users old posts in search of a pretext to get the account banned.
[1]Average Reddit Mod
There are a number of issues on Reddit that users are not allowed to contradict the official view:
Covid did not originate in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Covid vaccines do not cause harmful side-effects.
The Ukraine war is totally the results of Russian aggression.
Drag Queen Story time is not the sexualization of minors.
--
The underlying is a typical exchange on Reddit:
User: Paedophilia is bad.
Reddit mod: You're banned for hating on 2SLGBTQQIA+ people and besides the term is Minor Attracted Person (MAP).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/justneckbeardthings/comments/txabno/average_reddit_mod/
Twitter? Profits? Ever?
> He also said that he often wondered why Twitter couldn't turn a profit under previous management
> my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale
Implying that he believes Twitter is now making a sustainable profit under Elon.
Ok, have I missed something? Last I recall, Twitter was having problems getting the advertisers back, still owed a lot of money in unpaid bills and we were all waiting for the understaffing to really bite.
Not a great model to be talking about if you plan to IPO - *unless* perhaps he is trying to convince Elon to buy all the shares at IPO (after all, he bought one bag of flaming poo...)
Re: Twitter? Profits? Ever?
And not paying the rent, leading to eviction. A judge in Colorado recently authorized law enforcement to evict Twitter from an office building in Boulder, according to news reports.
Could Mr Huffman be intentionally messaging? -- "I'm prepared to pull the pin on this grenade and die - taking you all with me."
"reaffirmed" by Elon's actions
That's a bit like saying "Charles Manson made me really reassess my attitude to mass murder, Hey, do you want to listen to The Beatles?"
Funny that Spez took a page from Elon's book, especially when Twitter has not seen very many, if any, people signing up for $42k per month API access.
I I was a Reddit investor I would be selling my shares after this idiot praised what Musk is doing with the Blue Bird.
Like, why not praise someone who is actually you know, successful?
every time he opens his mouth
(the CEO of Reddit) he just seems to make the situation worse. It's really strange/sad.
Pretty much everything that they've said and done has been the worst way to handle things. Do they really believe that OpenAI and other type folks are going to just toss them millions if not tens of millions for their data?(same for twitter) I really doubt it. They have what they need already, horse has left the barn. The added benefit of getting newer data is going to by tiny relative to the data set already in hand. I have to believe these AI folks also keep copies of their training source data so they don't have to go download it from the source again as well.
I like(d) reddit, used it for about the past 4-5 years, 99% just browsing. I haven't since last Sunday, maybe never will again not sure. It was never a very useful place for me to learn stuff. Have been surprised to see how many networking and systems folks seem to rely on Reddit for some of the most trivial things though.
1. Steal Underpants
2. ?????
3. Profit!
Seems to be Reddit's business model.