I am disappointed that this article, in its apparent attempt to appear objective and neutral, didn’t do a very good job of explaining why people are so angry. I was hoping for more signal amplification to inform more people who may not yet know.

The first part of the article makes it sound like the point of the backlash is that Reddit will charge for the API at all, not the punishingly high rates or the very small window of time devs had to respond after pricing was finally communicated. It does ultimately say how much Apollo would have to pay to operate under that pricing structure, but the article seemed to be burying the lede a bit to me. It also conflates the 3rd party apps with big AI training use cases, which I think misses the point.

The article also really downplayed how unprofessional Steve has been, especially during the AMA, and how powerful the recording Christian released was in terms of causing the monumental backlash that is now happening. It didn’t really describe the magnitude of the backlash itself very well, either. It was mostly trusting readers to go look at the embedded links to understand what was actually going on, and the summary snips in the article don’t do much to encourage anyone to do so.

This long, well-written rant talks a lot about how we end up in this situation. It really resonated for me. The more we have people trying to extract maximum shareholder value on the backs of all of us, the more inevitable the death of any centralized social media platform becomes.

Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media