WhipTheLlama

Huffman claims it’s about things like LLM training that uses the API, as if it isn’t possible to validate apps that want to use the API and only issue keys for approved apps. This could save third party apps while preventing bad actors from gaining access to the data without scraping the site.

No, if bad actors were the problem then the solution would be much different.

A better comparison is formerly popular social news/link aggregators such as Digg and StumbleUpon. Digg dominated just like Reddit for a while, and then it died when users flocked to Reddit after an unpopular change. The similarities are uncanny.

It’s laughable that Huffman thinks people don’t realize how much smaller Reddit is than Google or Facebook.

Most of what Huffman said here is about cost-cutting. If Reddit had 1800 employees before the layoffs, then yes, it’s probably bloated and laying off another 800 employees probably wouldn’t affect the end-user experience.

The problem remains that Huffman sees how users want to use Reddit as bad for the company. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why Reddit couldn’t have monetized their API through ads, making third party apps similarly profitable as their own app. And if their own app isn’t profitable through ads, then what’s their plan? Moving all those users to their first party app doesn’t fix anything.