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Battling beancounters and bureaucrats

All across the face of the globe there are untold battles waging between parties with wildly disperate perspectives and powers.

I'm not talking about phsyical battles such as the war between Russia and Ukraine, I'm talking about situations where those with power, authority or might, seek to oppress or force their will on another weaker, less powerful group.

This can involve minorities fighting for rights that have been wrongfully denied them or it can simply be companies that are overstepping the bounds of an implied value-exchange contract between producer and consumer.

It is fascinating to watch these battles take place and invaluable lessons can be learned from the way they utimately play out.

One great example right now is the situation over at Reddit.

Reddit has become one of the world's most popular websites. It offers an almost limitless array of forums (sub-Reddits) where people discuss whatever it is that interests or infuriates them.

Reddit is the closest thing we have today to usenet -- for those who are old enough to remember that.

From what I gather, Reddit grew rapidly and was eventually sold to its current owners and now they are seeking to provide improved returns for shareholders. As many found out (to their cost) in the "dot-com bust" at the beginning of the century, turning headcounts into revenues is great in theory but often rather difficult to achieve in practice.

Reddit can be accessed via the web, something that provides a pretty "ho hum" experience, or you can use any one of a pile of third-party interfaces. These third party apps use an API which allows developers to hook directly into the site without having to parse HTML code as would otherwise be needed.

A few weeks ago, the owners of Reddit decided that it was time to start charging for that API access so they rolled out a price-plan that basically shocked the entire community.

Some API users would be forced to pay tens of millions of dollars a year if their apps were to continue functioning. That's pretty hard to deal with when it comes out of the blue.

It seems that the Reddit owners weren't just planning to lift revenues a little, they wanted to massively boost those revenues over night.

The community, many of who rely on those third party apps and their API access, were not impressed.

A plan was hatched and a couple of days ago most of the sub-Reddits on the site effectively went dark. The administrators of those forums switched them into "private" mode which made them pretty much inaccessible.

When one of the web's most popular website suddenly starts shutting its doors, lots of people are going to be pissed off and obviously all the ad-revenues will have taken a real hit.

Unfortunately the people organising this act of rebelion were obviously young and quite inexperienced in such things because they had originally planned to make this just a two-day shutdown.

WTF? Why even bother? What would this do to shift the owners' position when they knew that all they need to do is wait two days and everything would be back to normal? In fact, Reddit's management published a statement in which they said basically "who cares, people are upset, this will all have gone away in a couple of days".

When the folly of their strategy was pointed out to the forum administrators by far wiser heads, the decision was made to extend the blackout beyond the two day period initially planned and not disclose how long they were prepared to wait out the situation.

So now we switch to a waiting game. Who will blink first? Will the owners of Reddit back down and be a little more sensible about the amount they charge for API access... or will those who used to call Reddit home simply turn away permanently and find somewhere else to spend their time whilst online?

Who really has the strongest position in this stoush?

As I said at the top of the column, it's fascinating to watch these battles play out and there is a lot to be learned -- just in case you find yourself waging a similar battle.

Any predictions from the audience? Will the beancounters at Reddit be prepared to sacrifice their position in the market for a few measly tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue? Are we about to see someone lose their toes to a bullet?

Carpe Diem folks!

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