Reddit’s Much-Anticipated R/Place Is Back for Another Year as Redditor Revolt Continues
Key takeaways
- Reddit’s 2023 r/Place community art project has launched, which quickly devolved into another protest space against the company
- Reddit mods are still waging war against the CEO, Steve Huffman, for the company’s API decisions
- Investors don’t like instability, so don’t expect an IPO until the dispute is resolved
The Reddit executive board must be a glutton for punishment. The social network has unveiled the 2023 r/Place, which quickly became an open forum for Redditors to continue protesting against the company’s controversial API policies. The war is far from over, leaving the prospects of an IPO even further away. Here’s the latest.
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What is Reddit’s r/Place?
What is r/Place? It’s a collaborative art project where Reddit users can pick out their own pixels and build art. Naturally, Redditors have taken the opportunity to continue their ongoing protest against the company in the form of pixel art.
One of the most common messages scrawled on the public board has been “F*** Spez”, which is Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s username on the site. Why all of the hate? It’s down to Reddit’s decision to charge vast sums of money for access to its API, which Huffman thinks is worth valuable capital in light of AI models being trained on Reddit information.
The move has precedent — Twitter owner Elon Musk took the same move back in March — but the prohibitive cost has shut down many popular third-party Twitter apps. In response, some subreddits went dark for 48 hours — with others maintaining the shutdown indefinitely.
Is Reddit’s IPO in jeopardy?
Things aren’t looking too hot for the ‘front page of the internet’. Fidelity, which led Reddit’s 2021 investment round, has determined the $28.2 billion stake it bought is now only worth $16.6 million — over a 40% drop.
And honestly, the whole affair hasn’t reflected well on Huffman. The CEO has been openly engaging in a war of words with Reddit third-party app developers and promised to lay off 5% of the Reddit workforce. Redditors had a part to play in former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao leaving the company in 2015 — and the same could happen here.
All of that leaves an air of instability over the whole affair — which is the antithesis of a successful float.
The bottom line
Whatever Huffman might have planned for Reddit, its ardently loyal user base isn’t going down without a fight. If Reddit has any hopes of a successful IPO, investors will look for the situation to be remedied quickly — otherwise, the Reddit users might get their way again.
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