Selig says that he did nothing of the kind, and that recordings of phone calls with Reddit executives (which he has linked to online) prove it. Selig said recently that Reddit refused to negotiate a cheaper deal on API fees, and that Huffman then started accusing him of blackmailing the company by threatening to shut down his app unless he got the deal he wanted. Yesterday, Casey Newton wrote, in his Platformer newsletter, that Reddit’s approach to the changes has been a “communications disaster.” In what The Verge referred to as a disastrous Reddit Q&A session -known on the site as an “Ask Me Anything,” or AMA-earlier this month, Huffman met with what Wes Davis, a writer at The Verge, described as “seemingly universal anger.” “There were a lot of f-bombs from commenters a lot of people called him a coward,” Davis wrote if users made any positive comments about Huffman or the changes, Davis “didn’t find them.” The moderators of one forum said that they had initially planned to go dark for forty-eight hours, but Huffman’s responses persuaded them to do so indefinitely. What began as a simple dispute over API terms seems to have become an existential debate over the future of Reddit itself-a situation that many Reddit fans have blamed, at least in part, on Huffman’s responses to the initial protest. Some observers argue that Reddit now going dark not only affects regular users of the site, but could also mean lower-quality results for some Google searches, which draw on user-generated content from such communities. But according to one estimate, the site has more than five hundred million visitors per month, which would make it the sixth most popular website in the US, behind Google and Facebook but ahead of Amazon and Yahoo. Some still see Reddit as little more than an overgrown discussion forum or a politer version of extremism-riddled communities like 4chan. Huffman left Reddit for a time to start a travel company called Hipmunk, but he returned as CEO in 2015. In 2006, it was acquired by the magazine publisher Condé Nast, which is owned by the Newhouse family, through their holding company Advance Publications (the site was spun off as an independent unit in 2011, but Advance is still the majority shareholder). Reddit was founded in 2005 by Huffman and his college roommate Alexis Ohanian. ![]() Some critics have also speculated that the API changes-which reportedly involve fees that are hundreds of times higher than those charged by other social media services-have been driven by a desire not to improve the site, but to boost revenue so that Reddit can go ahead with an initial public offering, a step it has been eyeing since 2021. But some of the volunteers who moderate the site’s most popular forums seemed to see things differently: they have argued that they rely on third-party apps like Apollo to do the work of moderating posts, because such apps are faster and have more features than the official one. In interviews with The Verge and CNBC, Steve Huffman, the cofounder and CEO of Reddit, suggested that the company decided to implement the API changes because it didn’t want to continue subsidizing third-party apps like Apollo, which essentially compete with Reddit’s official app. ![]() He had no choice, he said, but to shut down his app. On June 8, Christian Selig, the creator of Apollo, a popular app used for browsing Reddit, said that the new rates would cost him at least twenty million dollars a year. Reddit had announced plans to start charging for access to its API, which used to be free. Last week, however, even those who don’t follow news about the platform may have seen a blizzard of articles about a “moderator revolt” that caused thousands of its most popular forums, or “subreddits,” to go offline by changing their status to private, a process the moderators referred to as “going dark.” The unlikely-sounding catalyst for this uprising was a change to the company’s application programming interface, or API, a set of software instructions that allow third-party apps to access Reddit’s data. ![]() If you use the internet, you may think of Reddit -if you think of it at all-as a largely harmless repository of discussion forums about nerdy topics like Star Wars.
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