This is about what I expected to happen.
Spez and Reddit have long made up their minds to drive out “competition” (3rd party apps) and are sticking to it .
All for profit to go public.
Here we go, the AMA with /u/spez is live
3 years ago by Crashdoom (he/him) to c/tech
If you'd like to view the responses spez is giving, here's a direct link to his profile: https://www.reddit.com/user/spez/comments/.
Needless to say, he's throwing the Apollo dev under the bus again and is avoiding basically any notion that Reddit might be at fault. Shock to no one.
Gotta say, if Reddit is really gearing up for an IPO this feels like the kind of behavior investors would be really suspicious of. Especially since Christian (Apollo dev) was well within his rights as a Canadian to record the conversation, and release it as evidence that he's being slandered and nothing spez is saying can be trusted.
Can't wait to see how potential investors in a public company would handle him as CEO. Have a gut feeling he'd get ousted before long because he's clearly incapable of talking to legal and shutting up.
About what everyone expected, tbh. I hope it bites Reddit in the ass if they end up shooting for an IPO.
And that they're indeed in violation of the ADA, as someone brought up. Hopefully someone somewhere raises hell with that.
They did walked back the stuff at least for accessibility apps. Legal must have told them to walk it back because of the ADA. But that was announced a few days before spez's AMA.
Thing is, why "non-commercial" apps? Why aren't the people making accessibility tools - in lieu of the company who should be doing that work anyways - allowed to make money? And, y'know, that exempts the pricing model (ok) but will NSFW content still be barred? We don't even 100% know how the NSFW API block works other than Reddit claims it'll be porn only, but I don't trust 'em to not pull a Tunblr and just say "if it's under the NSFW filter it's blocked from any API access."
What they did is something, but it's still not enough. What apps qualify? Are they allowed to make money so working on this app can be, like, their job (and not free volunteer work like happens often), and if so how do they define "non-commercial" so that happens? What features does it need to have to be "accessibility focused" - a lot of the 3rd party clients are customizable enough where people who are hard of vision can make the text plenty large so they can read, is that enough or are they considering the need for screenreader support too?
They're just so damn vague about all of this and whatever they answered yesterday was barely clarifying at all & just reiterated years-old promises that they've bareky made progress on. IMO, Reddit needs to walk the changes back until they can roll out the festures they're talking about & come to an agreement with app devs on a reasonable price (for the apps not deemed accessibility focused) and what they're allowed to do to monetize to afford that.
Fifteen business days now isn't enough time to get ready for these huge changes unless the plan is to shut down your app, like many app devs are going to do. Especially with how much seems to still be unknown or unclear.
Bust out your bingo card and let's find out how many spaces spez fills. Blackout, anyone?
@crashdoom ok so. There was an insightful comment somewhere in there which pointed out that the thread is probably going to be used by Reddit as evidence in a possible future investors vs Reddit lawsuit, where they'll say "we tried our best, but the users were hostile and unreasonable!"
From what I gather it was 14 copy / paste answer, most of which targeted the creator of the Apollo app.
go to feed...
go to feed...
https://archive.ph/X6EJq
See that "A:"?. He edited it out of his comment. Copying / pasting canned "answers".
save