#there was also a mass call between mods and admins before the AMA that went so poorly

[chocolatepot]

I dunno if anyone here is aware, but things are BREWING on Reddit right now.

The company announced that they were going to start charging for use of the API in advance of their IPO, to make the site more profitable. If you don't know what an API is, basically, it's the thing that an app connects to on a website. They did this because far an away most people who use Reddit on their phones do it through a third-party app, because the official one is so so bad. It doesn't have tools for moderating on it, and it also doesn't support screenreader use. Yes, really.

Developers of these apps announced that they weren't going to be able to keep running them. The people in charge of Reddit then tried to present it as a sensible choice on their end to keep the lights on and to deal with the fact that some of the third-party apps weren't free, and told everyone that they'd spoken with the developer of a very popular app, Apollo, and he'd tried to blackmail them for $10 million to "go away easy" when they just wanted a teeny tiny fee! The Apollo dev revealed that he had the receipts from the phone conversation (it's legal to record with one party's consent in his jurisdiction) and that he'd explained that the teeny tiny fee would cost him millions as the per-hit charge on the API was much higher than any other website's (except Twitter post-Elon, and you might recall that all the third-party apps and bots and websites that connected to Twitter via the API now don't do that because it's way too expensive) and had suggested reasonably that they just buy the app.

Realizing that they had a problem, Reddit announced an AMA with their wanky founder and CEO, Steve Huffman, /u/spez. The AMA drew immense interest, Huffman responded to a whopping total of 14 questions (while never actually answering the questions that were asked), and took the opportunity to cast aspersions on the Apollo dev as a liar and blackmailer that they just couldn't work with.

Now thousands of subreddits are planning to go private, lock to new comments and submissions, or some combination of the two as, essentially, a moderator strike.