Reddit Migration

I've been thinking on this, and this is pure speculation, but -- I keep thinking about what Christian said, where he's already been paid by people who still have a year to go on their subscription and he can't raise the price on them. I'd bet that Google and ChatGPT, etc, have some sort of basic contract they set up with reddit from before the AI developments this spring, saying that they get API access for [minimal cost] and that the contracts still have at least several months left to run.

So this spring is the great AI reveals by multiple companies, and everyone is saying "oh, hey, we loaded a bunch of data from reddit". And now TPTB at reddit are all looking at Huffman, going, "oh, hey, I bet we made bank on that, let's go ahead with that IPO!". And Huffman is sitting there with egg on his face because he's just been gliding along and now he's had to admit that he gave everything away and has no idea how to make a profit, and the contracts with Google and ChatGPT and all the big boys with their big boy lawyers still have time left to run so he can't get money from them.

So he turns around and says, "we'll get money from all these other people using the API, we'll charge them extortionate amounts of money so we'll make some money there. And if they don't pay up, we'll be forcing people to use our own app and we can make sure they have lots of ads and promoted material so we'll make money that way too!”

So basically he wasn't paying attention until it was too late and now he's scrambling for other sources of income to point to in order to save his job.

And now I'm thinking of all those programmers that he's undoubtedly leaning on, telling them they have only two weeks to deliver on a vague suite of "mod tools" that reddit's been repeatedly refusing to even look at for over a decade. Because that's what a bad boss does: refuses to look ahead, refuses to listen to people who do look ahead, panics when there's a foreseeable issue, refuses to listen to people who valid input into the issue, makes up a random answer that he swears will address every ill current and future, and then applies extreme pressure to the people who work for him in order to reach those (completely foreseeable and now extreme emergency) goals.

I'll mention again that this is just a theory I'm working on, but it fits with what I've been seeing and hearing so far. I'm not sure exactly what changes he'll be able to force through in the meantime, but I just don't see Huffman having a job at reddit in another six months, probably sooner. And given the way he's "led" the company and responded to this incident, I don't see him getting another CEO job either in or out of the tech industry.