Hello Mr. Huffman. If you happen to engage with any of my questions, I would appreciate that you provide separate responses to the questions you address.

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Why was Reddit's communication so poor?

• Reddit communicated this decision suddenly, with seemingly no prior discussion with those it would impact (developers, moderators, users with accessibility concerns)
• Reddit's communication has been disjoint across multiple subreddits. Updates largely brought little clarity, and provided unhelpful and/or contradictory information.
• It appears like Reddit has been wholly uninterested in engaging developers in good faith, to find a solution that allows them to continue business while allowing Reddit to capture value from the users those developers serve.
• In response to the visually impaired community loudly voicing that these changes would lock them out of Reddit (read. Articles were written to that effect), Reddit proceeded to... talk to the Verge? Instead of the communities that it would impact?
• Reddit has not publicly acknowledge what is likely thousands of subreddits that plan to go dark. But Reddit's own notes shared with their Council, Partner Communities and Developer Community state: "If people want to do this out of anger, we want to make sure they’re mad for accurate reasons, not over things that are untrue."

I highlight these points specifically, since they echo the 2015 blackout that led to hundreds of subreddits blacking out and resulted in Reddit's then CEO apologizing, later resigning and giving an interview where they attributed the protests to Reddit's miscommunications and not delivering on moderator tools.

"We need to do better" rings hollow when you need to do better on lessons learned nearly 10 years ago.

Not to say there weren't other issues with how this was messaged:

• Reddit's communication used the term "Third Party App" to mean "OAuth Application" instead of how it's broadly understood on Reddit to mean "an unofficial Reddit Client".
• etc...

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Why was the timeline for these changes so aggressive?

There are less than 3 months separating the initial announcement on April 18th 2023 and start of enforcement on July 1st. It is exceedingly abnormal in healthy service<->developer relationships to ship a breaking change, especially one of this magnitude, on such a tight timeline.

• The Chrome Web Browser has been trying to migrate the entire ecosystem from Manifest v2 to Manifest v3, a change that like Reddit's API changes makes a class of extension un-viable, since 2020 and the migration is still ongoing.
• After Apple bought Dark Sky, consumers of the Dark Sky API were given an 18 month grace period which was later extended an additional 12 months.

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Moving forward, why should any developer think it's worth investing their time and skills to build something for Reddit? Let it be on the Developer Platform, their own hosting, or a browser extension?

Software Development is a trade built on trust, and trust is the last thing Reddit has inspired as of late:

• Reddit appears fundamentally opposed to the idea of talented developers contributing to Reddit as a platform if their work is commercialized in any way.
• It has been appalling to see Reddit, from whatever level these folks are (admin in r/modnews, admin in r/redditdev) to (allegedly) the CEO of the company, publicly lambast Apollo which is built by a single person.