Hackers Threaten to Release Reddit Data Unless API Changes Are Rolled Back

[Orange Bat]

The reality is, while reddit gave API access for free, they paid for that, while the dude who created Apollo made millions, thanks to reddit. He's not some small mom and pop shop that got squeezed out by some big bad corporation. He was lucky he took advantage while he did. And quite frankly, he tried to extort reddit also.

Exactly this.

First, Reddit is a business. It has employees, it maintains servers, it has costs and bills. Why should others be able to profit off of Reddit’s work without some kind of compensation going to Reddit? This stuff can be pretty expensive to maintain.

Second, it’s never great to rely on another company for the soul survival of your own business. A day will come when YouTube will dramatically change their policies and a lot of full-time YouTubers will suddenly find themselves out of a job. The problem is they never think the current deal will go away, so they have no back-up plan. The same is true for any developers living off another company’s API.

 

[sw1tcher]

This country is a rule of law country. Blackmail has no standing.

Agreed!...

And yet you're the one who would like to see the hackers release the data. You'd even pay/incentivize them to do it.

 

[robbietop]

Maybe that’s what it’s going to take for Reddit to stay alive. The CEO is not bulging in and compromising. He doesn't care about the users. Reddit is Toast.

Oh, I think the CEO is bulging alright. On a power trip.

 

[sjsharksfan12]

What a weird few weeks here on Macrumors. We start so excited about WWDC but it's felt like MacRumors has turned into RedditRumors the last few weeks and WWDC is a bit of an afterthought. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, hacking into a site and stealing data is illegal and it hurts the users. On the other hand, the CEO's ego should be brought down some. Still, what this is is illegal and I can't get behind it. It is unfortunate that it has come down to this.

As for this country being a rule of law country, I don't think we are.

 

[Corefile]

These folk who steal data and blackmail in this way are terrorists.

 

[sw1tcher]

If a water company had a good standing with a local community and provided a pipeline of free, clean water for over a decade and then suddenly changed it's mind and started charging ungodly amounts of money for that same water overnight, without negotiating with the community or discussing the situation...I'd expect to see pitchforks too. And since there were no rules put in place BEFORE that pipeline was provided, why should the users expect anything but a right to that water, especially when it's been used to grow the community even more?

(playing devils advocate)

Comparing a vital life resource (water) to Reddit. People cannot survive without clean water. People can survive without Reddit.

Plus, people can still access Reddit with their planned API changes. It just won't be possible without 3rd party apps like Apollo.

 

[Crowbot]

A “phishing attack” was all it took to get 80 gigs of data? Lol even my grandmother knows how to avoid those scams.

Yeah but your grandma is probably on the lookout for phishing scams. The Masters of the Universe think they are immune to social engineering.

 

[Zest28]

I'm sorry, am I really reading people supporting a band of criminals because they think these black hats might reduce the revenue a free entertainment site makes?

What a bunch of entitled children throwing a tantrum...

Imagine some strange dude called Apollo walking into a massage salon and starts giving massages while keeping all the money he makes for himself. Apollo is essentially competing against the massage salon while making use of the facilities of the massage salon for free.

And if that massage salon starts charging this strange dude Apollo based on his usage of the massage salon, the internet wants to burn down this massage salon.

 

[Attirex]

I hope Reddit doesn't go away! Where else can I read thousands of depressing Millennial posts about having to work side hustles, not being able to afford a mortgage/house, never retiring, wish I wasn't born, etc?

 

[aespana]

It is really sad how it went to this point for Reddit. But well, money is money.

Really gonna miss the few sub-reddit that i'm registered. Good post with good information, opinions, etc to read. Also, searching for something in specific is always better to find it on reddit that somewhere else

 

[The Clark]

I'm sorry, am I really reading people supporting a band of criminals because they think these black hats might reduce the revenue a free entertainment site makes?

What a bunch of entitled children throwing a tantrum...

Nailed it.

 

[_Spinn_]

I’m really enjoying this. Reddit is going down in flames and becoming the next Digg 🥤🍿

 

[Thunderstrike76]

If you haven’t done it. Here’s your chance.
Make sure to save your Reddit posts.

View attachment 2220400

Are you able to show proof you have deleted your accounts?

 

[ersan191]

Roll back API changes and a paltry sum of 4.5 million dollars.

Reddit will tell them to get stuffed. I don't think the API changes are really what they care about.

 

[justin216]

Imagine some strange dude called Apollo walking into a massage salon and starts giving massages while keeping all the money he makes for himself. Apollo is essentially competing against the massage salon while making use of the facilities of the massage salon for free.

And if that massage salon starts charging this strange dude Apollo based on his usage of the massage salon, the internet wants to burn down this massage salon.

Not really equivilent. Reddit (massage salon) still gets the data and engagement, which is remarkably valuable to them in their IPO objectives.

This would be like this Apollo dude sitting outside the salon, and selling really nice slippers or lotion that the salon doesn't sell. It can enhance the experience you're having at the salon. The rub is, the salon might want to control the experience more end-to-end, and promise to make good slippers and lotion, and not want Mr Apollo outside the door hocking his wares and leveraging the traffic/platform to make his own revenue.

The CEO of Reddit essentially said that he doesn't feel that the third-party apps should be profitable if they're (Reddit) not profitable. But their cost basis and value proposition is very different. Apollo is useless without Reddit. Reddit is more pleasant to use with third-party tools like Apollo. They should have a symbiotic relationship, and instead, it's combative.

There was a happy medium here where Reddit could have gave a longer runway to changes, let me give Reddit my credit card for my third-party API usage, and let me feed my token into Apollo. As a user, I have no issue with paying for a nice app experience (Apollo) while also paying to use the platform itself (Reddit). Just wasn't an option afforded to us, they'd rather just bill Apollo for my usage instead of me, because it puts more of the onus on Apollo and not them.

Reddit wants to control the experience end-to-end. They don't want Apollo or other third-party tools to exist, because their existence indicates a shortfall in their in-house experience and they cede some amount of control as a result.

 

[russell_314]

Pay 4.5 million... Yeah right. Unless the data implicates them in criminal activity it's not going to happen.

 

[[AUT] Thomas]

Regardless if this is leaked or not Reddit will suffer.
Once plattforms or suppliers abandon their core values and/or core community they are going to pay a high price as there is usually a snowball effect.
A good example is ebay... they messed it up when they started to put the commission to ~20%. The private sellers who made ebay the "place where you find everything" left and only the commercial sellers that probably got a discount, remained. So ebay became a marketplace like every other and lost the "flea market" benefit it had. Ultimately, they lost their USP because some genius manager thought it was a great idea to apply a 20% tax to private sales, which probably accounted for a minority of the revenue at that time.
Now ebay doesn't charge a commission anymore (since a few months ago) on private sales. Congratulations on realizing the obvious mistake. It should have been corrected years ago. The ship sailed.
(Even Apple made that mistake when they abandoned the creative industry... no proper mac pros and macbook pros with no ports beside USB-C... that was addressed only last minute...)
Reddit is repeating that exact mistake. Reddit is in fact worthless without its community as it is at the end of the day just another board/forum and that community is also there because of the ease of access. Now that access is overly monetized by Reddit. To provide what exactly? Database Hosting? Content or moderation certainly not.
Unless they revert that stupidity, the down-spiral will likely continue with a few more stupid ideas... "Premium-Reddits" or something like that, limited views, eventually a paid point system, i.e. going crazy on the awards or so, all free for the contributors so they remain unaffected longest, but the influx of new users will slowly dry out and thus starve the community. For few years this will work "well", and Reddit will make good money on it, but the core community is slowly migrating elsewhere as. Then it's too late. Youtube is doing the same with their double 20s+ advertisements for even a 2 minute video. Effectively kills the community. I don't know anyone who likes youtube anymore.

 

[no_idea]

The sense of entitlement here astounds me. Servers, load balancers, ip routers, high availability , networking I/O, resilient code….none of that grows on trees. At some point, the ppl that run this stuff need to make a profit to sustain.

 

[Martinpa]

Reddit hasn't done anything wrong. They're the ONLY social media company that hasn't been charging for API access. Just because people got used to something doesn't mean they have a right to that thing.

Most people don’t seem to have a problem with them charging for API use, it’s the amount and the way they went about it that is the issue. They’re not trying to monetize third party apps, they clearly want them gone but don’t have the balls to just say that.

Reddit as a platform is already something that users “make work”: it is not intuitive in a lot of cases, it is not accessible (from an accessibility perspective), it is not visually pleasing or, frankly, functional… people like the idea behind it, not so much the implementation. If they worked on those things, third party apps would phase out over time as need for them would lessen, but they’re taking the lazy approach.

As for the hackers, I just don’t think it’s the right way to go about it and doubt anything will come of it, but we’ll see…

 

[Mac Fly (film)]

I don't agree with the Reddit CEO and think he's quite bold and a liar and should respect his website's users more, but just because you don't like someone doesn't give anyone right to do what you like to the company they run. The same people criticising Musk are probably the same folks here who have no problem with stealing—which is what this is. Also, the brave people who closed down their Reddit communities tucked tail and folded like a deck of cards at the mere threat of losing their position as mods on Reddit. Those noble egos aren't so noble after all. Reddit is great for some things but many community members and mods there are toxic reactionary spoiled power-trippers.

 

[FHoff]

congratulations, you just discovered why people love reddit

True. It’s like a typed Springer episode.

 

[ninethirty]

Most people don’t seem to have a problem with them charging for API use, it’s the amount and the way they went about it that is the issue. They’re not trying to monetize third party apps, they clearly want them gone but don’t have the balls to just say that.

Reddit as a platform is already something that users “make work”: it is not intuitive in a lot of cases, it is not accessible (from an accessibility perspective), it is not visually pleasing or, frankly, functional… people like the idea behind it, not so much the implementation. If they worked on those things, third party apps would phase out over time as need for them would lessen, but they’re taking the lazy approach.

As for the hackers, I just don’t think it’s the right way to go about it and doubt anything will come of it, but we’ll see…

The API pricing isn't out of line with anyone else.

 

[burgman]

They should have asked for less money but the CEO getting fired and the API pricing changes restricted to a reasonable fee.

Instead they get the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Karma is a bitch

 

[Night Spring]

Pay 4.5 million... Yeah right. Unless ***the data implicates them in criminal activity*** it's not going to happen.

I suspect that is exactly why the hackers are demanding this payment.

 

[dypeterc]

Huffman ****ed around and found out. Huffman defamed Selig saying Selig tried to blackmail Reddit. But THIS is what blackmail really is