While CEO Steve Huffman may be dismissive of the thousands of subreddits going dark to protest his planned API changes,…
They took insporation from Twitter and we all know how profitable that turned out to be.
Yeah this is the really disturbing part imo. Huffman actually saying out loud that he was inspired by musk & twitter et al. What a fucking spoon.
He lives in a bubble and he’s certain that following Musk’s example will make him richer. But what he fails to understand is that, while reddit is massive and people are addicted to or reliant on it, if it stops producing high-quality content, it’s going to eventually be replaced by something else. Hopefully, by the fediverse.
Kinda feels like there’s not much he doesn’t fail to understand
I feel like the main step he’s forgetting is that he wanted to install an interim CEO to make these unpopular changes so they didn’t happen directly at his direction, so that the dust up can be laid at someone else’s feet…after which he can swoop back in, replace them with himself again, not reverse the changes, and avoid the blame.
Not that she was great, but I do kinda feel bad for the way Ellen Pao got dicked over by Huffman and hated by the community.
He’s been quoted saying it was a mistake to only get $15 mil when they sold reddit the first time. I bet he has a ton of stock options tied up in this and just wanted to cash out as much as he could now and be done. His greed (and mouth) probably got the better of him and it’ll end up costing him. He’ll still get richer from the IPO, reddit will be around for years and is valuable to advertisers, but he had a shot at being a billionaire if he played his cards right, that’s pretty unlikely now.
Short term solutions for long term goals
Twitter and Reddit have really thrown the idea that the “elite” are somehow smarter or more competent into disrepute. They are literally just ideologues.
Ideologue, maybe. I also feel like they’re just a random person who didn’t receive good education. They paid to pass.
Who could have possibly seen this coming
Nobody could have predicted this
Are we in leopardsatemyface??
How could anyone have known this?
Anyone who had been planning on investing in the upcoming IPO is likely now thinking again.
I hope that’s true.
Bunch of bag holders is what you are going to have, what is reddits value proposition?
Make spez rich off the hard work of literally everyone else?
Thoughts and prayers
Fuck /u/spez
Amen
But as more than one arrogant CEO has discovered, when you kick your users in the teeth, the effects can be rather longer-lasting than you might have hoped. Huffman has not only done this, but done the same to moderators and third-party app developers, both of whom have played a significant role in driving Reddit’s popularity.
Aye, these journalists aren’t pulling their punches!
I love it !
I posit that it is, in part, because of Reddit’s self-selected role as “the front page of the internet”. Journalists and bloggers have a vested interest in what happens to reddit, and the drama surrounding third-party apps, as it likely drives a not-insignificant portion of their own traffic. I’ve seen articles from all sides of the political spectrum lambasting Huffman’s fuck-ups, as (on the negative side) the planned changes likely reduce the amount of click-throughs they might expect to their content, and/or (on the positive side) the drama drives click-throughs to their articles from impassioned redditors, would-be social media developers, and anyone with an interest in the history/sociology/economy of the social web.
I just can’t fathom why he thought doing any of this was in any way a good idea.
At least it’s causing a push towards alternatives, though!
The effect has been fairly small, but the effect itself is not even the thing that’s going to get Huffman’s nuts in a vice when the IPO comes. The thing that’s going to ruin him is the awareness now that poorly received changes can cause chaos to the functioning of the site. That’s not the case with social media sites like Facebook, or even Twitter for that matter. Those don’t rely intrinsically on the agreeable participation of unpaid labor (Reddit mods), so Zuckerberg and (to a lesser degree) Musk can run around naked with their balls out all they want and it won’t move the needle that much. But when Huffman does it, there’s thousands of angry people ready with clamps and gelding equipment.
This. The damage was already done when he announced they weren’t profitable and were gonna chase off a good chunk of the user base. The protest itself had been small, the responce from reddit has been great and the response to the even greater.
The article says that page views dropped by 6.6% from the day before the blackout to the second day of the blackout. Those numbers seem quite small to me and sobering about the impact of the blackout. At the peak of the blackout, views were only down 7%? I would imagine that views are recovering as more and more subreddits are being forced back open. That doesn’t seem like it will have a big impact on reddit long-term!
To be clear, I’m not happy about it or saying this to defend reddit! It’s just my takeaway from the article. Maybe someone more familiar with these metrics can explain that 7% is actually a really big and significant impact?
Remember the 1% rule; that 6-7% can include a very large number of that 1%, so lots of people that remain are just lurkers. Communities don’t die in a few days, it’s a continual process.
I hadn’t heard of that rule before, that’s an interesting idea! It would be cool to find out if the generation of new posts and comments has declined at a greater rate than the number of views.
Exactly. And at the end of the month, when a non-zero number of users can’t access Reddit the way they want to, the numbers are going to show what a clusterfuck this move was.
Popcorn.gif
I agree that it is a sobering number. I don’t expect Reddit to die by losing 7%, but that number probably represents a very large absolute number, some of which is directed at alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin. If a threshold has now been passed (which I think it has) and the alternatives are/will offer a better solution, then in time Reddit may be in trouble.
For me the “win” since the start of the black out has been whether alternatives can be legitimized.
And it does seem that Lemmy/Kbin are growing by leaps and bounds even day over day. I don’t need to go back as this place is viable.
I definitely agree with you! It’s neat to have alternatives available. So far I feel that comments are higher quality here. So even if reddit goes on, I can enjoy the interaction here.
It’s the classic catch-22 of internet communities, though: as a community grows, there’s a gradual trade of quality of the average individual post in exchange for a higher population and the increased overall activity that it brings.
The former attracts the latter and the latter provides the critical mass of buzz and activity that tends to foster longevity.
Well although i would have liked a bigger hit for reddit and a lot of people leaving and joining alternatives, for me the win has been me switching to Lemmy as well as other people that are the types of people that made me enjoy reddit.
Tbh i didn’t use reddit much in the last 3-4 years because of stipid SJW and woke dumb fucks that crowded the space bringing up useless conversations in the frontpage.
But also in niche communities there was a lot of duplicated threads of the same questions/threads because nobody wanted to google first before posting.
I had time to post comments on lemmy like 3 times, and all the times I got to interact with people that seemed really engaged and friendly, that reminded me of my first introduction to Reddit 8 years ago.
I just need more time to contribute and enjoy it here, and kinda like that assholes are stuck on reddit.
I also need to find some good places for torrents around here xD
The people who stay behind are the people we don’t want here anyway
Honest I’m happy all this has happened. It helped me out of my reddit addiction. Helped me realise there are alternatives out there that are way less toxic (in my opinion) and much more closely resemble the old school forums that are what I originally became addicted to via reddit etc.
somewhere along the way reddit changed and I can’t exactly pinpoint when
I feel like a frog who suddenly realized the pot was boiling and I managed to make it out just in time
Yep, some point in last few years I went from looking forward to orange envelope to show someone had engaged with my comment to “now what have I said wrong” to outright ignore my.inbox and just shout into the wind like a crazy old man
It has weight when real shops up and move out. I knew the Twitter diaspora was real when big news agencies like NPR and PBS jumped. I canceled my twitter and I had it since the start. I had gone with reddit a long… since digg… I feel like it’s quitting cigarettes… I’m breaking thru the fog only now. I will be interested on Jun 30 when all the 3rd party apps stop. But I haven’t deleted RIF yet… hard to drop what I paid for.
I’m riding this wave till it ends. Now half my Reddit time is spent here.
My usage has plummeted. I go here almost every time instead.
Honestly don’t know, but is spez also following Twitter in letting go of many employees? A lot of the backlash to Twitter came from that. He’s been saying that they aren’t profitable and their cost per API call for third party apps implies that they are running a pretty inefficient ship…
