Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: Reddit ‘was never designed to support third-party apps’

Thousands of Reddit communities are nonetheless darkish in protest of the API adjustments which might be forcing some third-party builders to shut down their apps. It’s a startling change for a lot of members of the Reddit group, nevertheless it’s one which Reddit CEO Steve Huffman tells The Verge that he’s nice with making. Those third-party apps, in his eyes, aren’t including a lot worth 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 subject with the third-party apps which might be constructing a enterprise on high of his personal. “I didn’t know — and this is my fault — the extent that they were profiting off of our API. That these were not charities.”

I requested him if he felt that Apollo, rif for Reddit, and Sync, which all plan to shut down because of the pricing adjustments, don’t add worth to Reddit. “Not as much as they take,” he says. “No way.”

I additionally requested if Huffman really believes that the blackouts haven’t impacted his decision-making across the API pricing adjustments in any respect. “In this case? That’s true,” says Huffman. “That’s our business decision, and we’re not undoing that business decision.”

We’ll have extra from our interview with Huffman quickly.

While the corporate does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it received’t drive communities to reopen, Reddit additionally suggests there’s no want for that; greater than 80 % of the highest 5,000 communities by day by day energetic customers at the moment are open, in accordance to a fact sheet shared by the company on Thursday. In the actual fact sheet, Reddit writes that there are greater than 100,000 “active communities,” that the corporate sees 57 million “daily active uniques,” and that there are greater than 50,000 day by day energetic moderators.

Reddit customers have been in revolt after Apollo for Reddit developer Christian Selig revealed on the finish of May that he’d be on the hook for $20 million per yr below Reddit’s new phrases. At the height of the protests final week, greater than 8,000 subreddits had gone darkish, and despite the fact that the protests have been solely supposed to final from June 12th to June 14th, many have prolonged their blackouts.

There are some circumstances centered round accessibility the place Reddit has made exceptions to permit apps to proceed working. “The ones that actually are doing good for our users — RedReader, Dystopia, Luna — like actually adding real value at their own cost? We’ve exempted,” Huffman says. “We’ll carry that cost.”