To be fair from what I understand he only posted the private conversation because Huffman was intentionally lying about him to a large audience and he was forced to defend himself. I'm not saying he's handled this amazingly but Reddit absolutely dug their own hole in this case.
I don't think even Alastair Campbell could teach them effective crisis management.
I think this definitely could have been handled much more tactfully on both sides. Im not sure which large audience you are referring to, but Christian references a call with some moderators that seems to have sparked all of this[1]. Prior to the horrendous AMA, spez hadn't posted on reddit for 11 months. Christian was definitely the one to bring it to the public eye. Either way, both sides should share some of the blame.
I think this was definitely a case of the little guy not knowing how to navigate such a volatile situation. Some people might even find it pretty unprofessional to joke about reddit buying him out for half-priced at $10mil during an important discussion. Which, btw, would have shutdown the app also, except with a large windfall. How much of that was actually a joke vs testing the waters?
Christian’s one dude. And he’s a dev. Most of us here are devs (or at least have technical backgrounds) yeah? Ok now imagine any of us get on a phone call to negotiate terms and defend our work on a business call with another idiot (spez). Yeah…
So you’re right neither side handled it the best. But Reddit has no excuse. They have a team of business so-called experts and have resources to handle this correctly. At this point it’s clear that they are intentionally choosing to go this route of being hostile to 3rd party apps and alienating their users.
Considering the importance of the negotiations for Apollo’s developer he could have considered hiring a middleman for the call, that would probably have prevented some misunderstandings
I don't think even Alastair Campbell could teach them effective crisis management.