Louis Rossmann Calls For Users to Quit Reddit, Calls Out CEO
Popular YouTuber Louis Rossmann is calling for users to quit Reddit, saying CEO Steve Steve Huffman is “giving a giant middle finger to the community.”
Huffman and Reddit stirred the hornet nest when the company revealed its pricing for access to its API. Despite initially saying it would not follow in Twitter’s footsteps and make access exorbitantly expensive, that’s exactly what Reddit did. Christian Selig, the maker of the popular Apollo Reddit client, revealed the API would cost him some $20 million per year.
Despite multiple attempts to reach a resolution, Reddit refused to budge, ultimately forcing Selig to announce that Apollo would shut down. Adding to the drama, Reddit accused Selig of threatening and coercing the company, despite previously acknowledging and apologizing for misunderstanding a completely innocent remark Selig had had in one of the conversations.
Because Selig lives in Canada, which only requires single-party consent to record calls, Selig had recorded his calls with Reddit and released them publicly, backing up his side of the story. Despite irrefutable proof to the contrary, Huffman continued to maintain that Selig was trying to threaten and coerce the company in a disastrous AMA.
In response to the ongoing drama and the threat of losing third-party apps, many subreddits went dark from June 12 through June 14, with some of them opting to remain dark indefinitely. More than 8,000 went dark during the primary period, including some of the platform’s biggest, ultimately crashing Reddit for a few hours.
Reddit and Huffman have held the line, saying the “noise” will pass, and it’s business as usual.
Rossmann begs to differ, succinctly explaining why third-party apps are so important to Reddit users, especially moderators. More than anything, however, Rossmann makes a compelling case for quitting Reddit altogether since Huffman clearly has little to no concern about the community that helped build his platform.
