Lmao you sweet summer child. You think firing him will do shit? The company has cancer. They are trying to to public. Nothing is going to fix whats wrong with the company now. It's terminal.

Also, firing spez does nothing because this wasn’t spez’s decision.

If you look at the history of Reddit’s API, it had a fee until spez became CEO again and made it free. This was when the 3PA took off.

Being the CEO does not mean that you get to actually make major decisions for the company. Think of the CEO as the face of the board of directors. They are the ones that approve/deny major changes.

You want the board changed, not spez.

There are three main good faith issues with respect to the API changes.

1: Existing moderation tools were shut down (but later re-enabled)

2: existing third party apps with better moderation tools and better moderation experiences were cut off unless they paid a large amount of money.

3: Spez sneered at the moderators protesting.

The flipside to each of those is:

1: The API features that enabled the moderation tools also enabled stalking and abuse (like, kids viewing porn, as an example)

2: some of the third party apps were blocking Reddit’s advertisements and running their own adverts, while making Reddit bear the costs (fuskering Reddit)

3: some of the people who have been running subreddits are, uh, the kind of people who fondly remember when Reddit hosted racist groups , who are annoyed or angry that Reddit now has expectations that they not set up “roach motel” subreddits to corner unsuspecting visitors to exploit / hives of harassment & abuse, and who are no longer content to just “watch Reddit die” - the crab bucket phenomenon. They’re not sour over the changes - they were already beyond sour and they are using this as a pretext to harass others.

That is why Reddit was forced to close down the API, for the good of the community.

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I get accused of being a “Powermod” because I do a lot of grunt moderation work on a lot of large, active subreddits – and network with a lot of other moderators who are accused of being “powermods”. Most of what I do is “serious” about moderation, and I’m considered the “knurd” of the group.

The only way I can imagine that Apollo would be charged premium firehose api access is if Apollo was being a man-in-the-middle between Reddit’s servers and their user base — if Apollo was running a server, which server was authenticating as the users, and then the Apollo server was sending material back to the phone/tablet client app.

Which … should not be happening, for oh-so-many reasons.

For one, if Apollo is doing that to remove Reddit’s advertisements and/or insert their own advertisements … that would be shenanigans.

If Apollo is store-and-forwarding user data — are they complying with California user privacy & GDPR requirements?

etc etc etc

If I’m using a third party app to access Reddit, I do not expect that the API calls made by the app to go through the app publisher’s systems.

So I’m really not grokking how this state of affairs is a crisis for a third party app publisher, unless the third party app publisher architected their app in a completely upside down fashion, or is pulling some sort of MITM shenanigans, or the publisher completely misunderstands what the changes to the API will mean.

In short, “where’s the fettucine?”

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