Wow. Front page of huffpost.com right now. Interesting...
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Huffman totally doesn't get that the conflict isn't about Reddit wanting to charge for API access. That in and of itself is fine.
It's how they're going about it, starting with "We're going to start charging you in a month, and just five months ago we said we weren't going to be charging anything for the foreseeable future," followed immediately by Huffman being a human-shaped turd very loudly at every chance.
I remember reading a comment that said they half expected this to be a 'Door in the Face' technique (or a different one with a different name, can't recall) wherein Reddit was being a clever sales person by starting high and then going low, because the true goal was to just introduce a pricing plan to begin with. If they had just started with a pricing plan, there'd be pushback and they might have to rescind it, but if they started with something ridiculous and then walked it back/lowered it to something reasonable (their goal the entire time), they could save face and say "hey Reddit we heard you loud and clear and you're right!" and Reddit could go "We did it Reddit!" - I thought that seemed very plausible at the time.
Then I thought maybe it was just Hanlon's Razor. They were just being stupid. Turns out it was a little of both malice and stupidity.
I genuinely think that ending up with a lower price as an appeasement was part of the initial plan. I think at some point, maybe too many people pointed that out for it to feel like a good plan anymore, or maybe spez started taking it personally and decided to take it off the table.
I'm about 50/50 now on whether they're just sticking to be being stupid/spiteful or if they've maybe just decided to remarket reddit completely as an LLM training model. If it's just a training model, who cares if the community isn't happy, that doesn't matter so much in the short term. They can prop up abandoned communities and limp along, hell even the corporate marketing & propaganda accounts talking amongst themselves might have enough value to keep things going until they IPO. Spez just has to make a plan to cash out ASAP.
I've said elsewhere: Huffman is a turd, was a turd, and will be a turd. The fact that he's CEO tells you what reddit as a company wants: turds.
Anchoring Effect is the term you're looking for. Now we just wish it was actually that.