Reddit revolt puts CEO Steve Huffman in a tough position

Today and tomorrow, thousands of subreddits, the individual communities that make up the whole, are “going dark” to protest against Reddit management’s decisions and perceived failures. The moderators of some subreddits, including the wildly popular r/music, r/videos, and r/iphone communities, say they will stay dark for longer.

The biggest issue is Reddit’s decision to charge for access to its application programming interface, or API—the tool it provides so outside services can tap into its data and provide alternative front ends to Reddit. When CEO Steve Huffman announced this change in April, he indicated he wanted to stop the likes of Google and OpenAI from continuing to use Reddit data to train their A.I. models. More recently, management’s line is that charging a fee for API access will allow Reddit to keep offering its services for free, and to turn the site into a “self-sustaining business.”

Last week, the sole developer of the popular third-party Reddit client Apollo called it quits. Apollo creator Christian Selig said the client would shutter at the end of this month because he had realized through discussions with Reddit that his API fees would amount to $20 million a year. (Selig also said Huffman falsely told others he was trying to “blackmail” and “threaten” Reddit; for the details of that ugly back-and-forth, which seems to involve some serious misunderstandings, read Selig’s post, which comes with recordings.)

The protests are also targeting Huffman’s decision to limit access to Reddit’s not-safe-for-work content via the API—he claimed this is “part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed”—as well as Reddit’s ongoing failure to make its official app accessible to blind and visually impaired users, who have to use third-party apps that now face an uncertain future because of the new API fees.

Huffman tried to calm everyone down a couple days ago with an explanatory post and AMA session, but got only anger in response, with moderators complaining that the API changes would kill off the third-party tools they use to moderate their subreddits. “If Reddit doesn’t somehow replace these tools or give me other strong support quickly, AMAs on these subreddits will suffer or even die, and I’ll be left feeling like Reddit does not care or in fact was malicious, since they took away very helpful things that previously existed,” read one of the more polite comments.

Huffman’s API decision followed a similar call by Elon Musk’s Twitter earlier this year, though Musk went further by outright banning third-party Twitter clients. Twitter’s introduction of a hefty API fee also elicited outrage from researchers and some power users, but little of that bled through to the average user, and in any case, everyone knows Twitter is Musk’s plaything. The same cannot be said for Huffman and Reddit, which is run by volunteer mods who control much of the user experience. And those mods are showing their considerable power right now, with more than 6,000 subs being set to “private” and shutting out their users today. 

Huffman, one of Reddit’s cofounders and its CEO for the past eight years, is in a very difficult position now as there’s little he can do about the protest, and he himself is the primary focus of users’ anger. He’s expected to lead Reddit into an IPO later this year—there’s a reason he’s desperately trying to make the company profitable—but, at this point, it’s hard to predict if Reddit will be the same service, with the same leadership, by then.

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David Meyer

Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.

NEWSWORTHY

Ex–Samsung exec accused of giving China a copycat chip factory. After allegedly trying to set up a copycat computer chip plant in China, a former executive at Samsung Electronics has been arrested and indicted by South Korean prosecutors. The unnamed executive had an 18-year career at Samsung and held executive roles at chipmaker SK Hynix before starting chip manufacturing companies in China and Singapore. Prosecutors say he hired chip experts from his previous employers and tried to steal tech worth at least 300 billion KRW ($233 million). The Associated Press reports that six people employed by the man have been charged with “active participation” in the theft of Samsung’s 2018 and 2019 factory blueprints and clean-room designs.

U.S. chatbots go missing in Hong Kong. Without providing any reason, Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft have all limited the availability of their chatbots in Hong Kong in recent months. The Wall Street Journal reports that the tech giants have been treating Hong Kong similarly to mainland China, and the companies could be trying to avoid any risk they’d face if the chatbots generated content violating a national security law China established about three years ago that criminalizes many types of criticism against the government. A Hong Kong government spokeswoman told the paper that the companies’ strategies for launching products are respected and the chatbots can still be accessed through other means like virtual private networks.

The U.K. secures early access to A.I. models. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic have committed to providing “early or priority access” to their A.I. models to the U.K. government. It’s part of an effort to support research into evaluation and safety and comes after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak met with the CEOs of the companies in recent weeks. In his announcement, Sunak said he wants the U.K. to be the intellectual and geographical home of global A.I. safety regulation as it prepares to host a summit on the topic this fall. TechCrunch reports that the special access could mean risk of regulatory capture where big companies shape rules that work in their favor.

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

736

—The number of crashes involving Teslas in Autopilot mode in the U.S. since 2019. The Washington Post analyzed data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and found that the number of such crashes has increased over the past four years, along with the number of deaths and serious injuries associated with Autopilot.

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BEFORE YOU GO

ChatGPT can’t tell a good joke. OpenAI’s ChatGPT can score in a high percentile on the SAT and help people write a cover letter, but it can’t make very many jokes. German researchers Sophie Jentzsch and Kristian Kersting looked at GPT-3.5’s ability to spit out humor and found that 90% of 1,008 generations were the same 25 jokes.

In a paper released last week, the authors concluded that “ChatGPT is fun, but it is not funny” and that a central aspect of human communication, humor, is still a challenge for large language models. The researchers didn’t have access to the model’s inner workings during their experiment of prompting the chatbot with requests like “Do you know a good joke?” but the limited outputs were revealing. The researchers think it’s likely that the responses were learned and memorized during GPT-3.5’s training rather than being newly generated. Ars Technica reported that if ChatGPT is trying to deliver a banger, one of its favorites is “Why did the tomato turn red?/Because it saw the salad dressing.”