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Someone on another thread linked in this comment about the "trust thermocline". That thread is in regard to Twitter, but it's also very relevant to what's going on with reddit.
Edit: *headdesk* forgot to provide the link.
This is a great point, and a great link. Reddit doesn't understand the extent to which "user goodwill" in general and "moderator goodwill" in particular were crucial to its business model. Without them, it's not going to make any difference what they do, profits will not, as Huffman put it, "arrive."
(Relatedly, what a revealing way to put it. Huffman obviously thought he was sitting on a heap of static assets he could tap into for quick profits instead of a dynamic system he could have cultivated for a rich harvest. Too late now for either, I expect, though he may catch the dregs if he's lucky).
The thing that bothered me about that statement was the way he phrased it, that "[reddit will] continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive" - as if the arrival of profits is inevitable and no one needs to do anything to ensure their safe journey.
So he thought he could just kinda coast along, spending massive amounts of resources on various combinations of reddit community points and reddit NFTs and personalizable snoovatars and RPAN and glitchy video players and cryptocurrency and April Fool's programs and a shitty app and suddenly deciding to have reddit natively host images and videos that massively increase both storage and transfer requirements and footing the bill for multiple very rich AI companies to suck up all of reddit's data, and no one would notice or care, because the arrival of profits is inevitable, they're just a little late ....
That's a good point. There's a big scoop of entitlement there. Douchebags all the way down.
I suspect that they do understand it, but are hoping to scam investors who do not.
That's possible, but I feel like if they did understand, they would use that understanding to suck a little less hard. It's not just the bad policies, or the bad implementation, or even the bad timing, it's that they're not even taking PR seriously as part of the process. It would not be difficult or even particularly expensive for them to hire one (1) person who is good at PR, and take their advice. They don't seem to have bothered, which really suggests they don't know it's important.
Yes, they might think investors won't understand why users are upset, and they might be right. But most people seriously considering putting money into a social media platform are at least vaguely aware of the fact that it's not going to make money if the users leave, and they will notice bad PR. The API protests have shown up repeatedly in at least three publications that serious investors follow. If anyone at Reddit was really paying attention to the interpersonal parts of the scenario, it would have occurred to them that some problems are easier to avoid than they are to hide to investors, and interpersonal conflict is one of them.
(Edited to add: "how and when to avoid pissing people off" is taught in business school, I think. Point being, it's possible Huffman thinks investors are too stupid to evaluate his decisions, but I think investors are, on average, likely to understand that Reddit needs some way to hold users other than just "we have lots of content," since people who have careers in business and finance deal with human factors a lot).