Online platforms ‘can’t just sit on their hands’ – Reddit’s Steve Huffman

https://mastersofscale.com/online-platforms-cant-just-sit-on-their-hands/

by iamirosha • 2 years ago

28 25 2 years ago

dangus3• 2 years ago

The question I’d like to see asked of Steve is why solo developers were able to make more reliable, faster, less buggy Reddit mobile apps than Reddit itself?

To this day I have strange bugs on the Reddit app. The logo disappears sometimes, and it’s critical for navigation. The interface sometimes stops responding to presses of certain on-screen elements.

And yet this company pushed out third party app developers in an incredibly shitty way rather than hiring them.

I’ll never forgive Steve for the loss of Apollo on iOS and the way Reddit handled the situation.

I actually understand the API restrictions and even believe that they may lead to better privacy for Reddit users. Free API access meant lots of archiving and cloning services out there when ideally the users should be able to delete their comments and posts to be forgotten if they choose. However, I think that better developer communication could have meant that we still have Apollo around, even if it meant a shift to a paid subscription.

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

Not "forgiving" them is academic if you remain on a platform despite its hostility to its users. I deleted a history of over 10,000 comments and moved on rather than stay and use their crappy official app. (And generally worsening user experience.)

If everyone did that, we'd no longer have platforms that mandate using first party apps. A platform would have to answer the question you asked, whereas now they're free to ignore it.

dangus3• 2 years ago

I don’t think that’s 100% true. In an alternate universe I might be paying Reddit $5-10 a month to use a third party app like Apollo and would have been a happy camper.

In another alternate universe, the Reddit app is made so well that third party apps can’t compete. Consumer sentiment is high and everyone in the community strongly recommends their premium subscription with their amazing app through word of mouth, and I happily convert to a paid customer.

But in the status quo I am certainly a low-value or potentially negative-value user. I don’t comment, post content, or click on ads. I don’t pay them for premium features. I mostly leech off their content delivery network, and Reddit can’t monetize people like me in the way that Meta can. The proof is in their financial statements.

I’m mostly there for certain subreddits that just aren’t replicated elsewhere and my screen time on the app is dramatically lower than it was with Apollo. My foot is already 3/4 out the door.

goatlover• 2 years ago

Majority of redditors didn't care and saw it as a moderator fight against admins, where moderators are lot more unpopular.

codetrotter• 2 years ago

I deleted a history of over 10,000 comments and moved on rather than stay and use their crappy official app.

When did you delete your comments, and have you checked to see if they are still deleted?

In June last year, Reddit was “undeleting” a bunch of comments that users had deleted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36399883

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36396404

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36359213

darklion• 2 years ago

I still use Reddit, but I gave up on productively contributing to it.

The only account I use now is purely for NSFW reddits, which Reddit will not display advertising for, and I don’t post questions or write comments. They serve me media they host, incurring the costs of storage and data transfer, and get nothing from me in return.

dialup_sounds• 2 years ago

spez when killing 3rd party apps, banning moderators, and alienating users: "We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive."

spez when licensing user content to OpenAI and Google for millions of dollars: "A lot of how I think about Reddit, it comes not from the numbers, but from the feel of using the app."

cedws• 2 years ago

The website (post redesign) is absolutely awful too, I have no idea how they ever thought it was good to roll out. Feels like a hacked together college project.

Scaevolus• 2 years ago

The same team that poorly assembled the redesign was then tasked with fixing its horrible performance, to results as bad as you'd expect.

randomdata• 2 years ago

The question I’d like to see asked of Steve is why solo developers were able to make more reliable, faster, less buggy Reddit mobile apps than Reddit itself?

Seems the answer is already in the title: Reddit is so busy trying to chase the future that it can't see what's in front of them.

throwaway48476• 2 years ago

App devs sell quality apps. Reddit sells eyeballs. Incentives aren't aligned. Also a lot of incompetence.

BizarroLand• 2 years ago

Well, if they had offered to buy Apollo and rebrand that as the official app, the world would be a different place to the tens of thousands of people their actions offended enough for them to permanently quit reddit and delete their accounts.

hellohello2• 2 years ago

How profitable is selling user comments as AI training data? At first glance the practice seems less misaligned than advertising

bigfatkitten• 2 years ago

Reddit somehow employs in the order of 2000 people, and yet everything that they build, from their mobile apps to their new web UI is unusable.

Until Reddit showed it to be possible, I could never have imagined that a business could employ so many people, and incinerate so much cash but yet have so little to show for it in terms of either profit or a usable product.

crowcroft• 2 years ago

You see this all the time in Digital Marketing.

Someone implements an attribution model to track which marketing channels have better ROI than others, and then that attribution model informs all investment and strategic decisions.

The issue is that every attribution model has some inherent flaw or limitation (usually quite significant ones too), so by bending your investment to align with the results you see from a model you're forcing the flaws and limitations of the model onto your strategy.

As companies grow and become more risk averse pleasing the attribution model becomes more and more important for teams and the company loses sight of what the attribution model was even trying to model in the first place.

cyral• 2 years ago

Isn't this the guy who edited user comments?

immibis• 2 years ago

Yes, also the guy who destroyed every single one of Reddit's values who is now saying he kept Reddit true to its values.

maeil2• 2 years ago

Along with undeleting hundreds of thousands comments to preserve the dataset for his friends at OpenAI, in obvious breach of GDPR and similar laws.

oglop• 2 years ago

HN doesn’t comply with GDPR either so that’s not saying much though.

Not defending the guy or Reddit which I think are both inherently unethical things. Just that this site also violates GDPR so maybe don’t mention that one.

If you don’t believe me, try to delete your HN account. It’s kinda funny how it works and the response they send about why they can’t delete it.

Online platforms ‘can’t just sit on their hands’ – Reddit’s Steve Huffman

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