this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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[–] lunarshot@beehaw.org 61 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It’s really amazing to see the incompetence of Huffman. As the CEO, it’s his responsibility continue to drive his company while being committed to its values. They’ve lost touch with what made reddit special in favor for the lowest common denominator user base.

Reddit has three real function, first as a cultivated collection of subreddits, second as a warehouse of incredibly niche and specific information, and lastly as a place to scroll.

They’ve catered to this third audience which I see as the most shallow of user. This part of their function can be easily replaced by plenty of other services. With such tone-deaf and dishonest actions of spez, it’s obvious there was no foresight on trying to set up a smooth transition.

There absolutely could have been a solution here to generate income for Reddit without coming to this painful nuclear ending. It’s been writing on the wall for a while with the stretch toward IPO that their motives and value had become entirely based on money.

See that’s not how companies work though. They may need to be profitable to exist but they exist to provide a service or product. By sacrificing and disenfranchising a loyal core of your user base out of lack of foresight and problem solving, this is just another nail in the coffin of their inevitable demise.

Huffman is a loser and a sell out. Get fucked Spez.

[–] GuyDudeman@lemmy.one 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Steve has never been committed to any values that the company has ever tried to say they adhere to. He’s a kid who doesn’t have a clue how to handle people. And never has.

[–] sarsaparilyptus@beehaw.org 24 points 1 year ago

Now now, he did brag about how he thinks reddit could "definitely influence elections" and then immediately tried to smother it when people started to comment on r/The_Donald's role in the 2016 election. It takes truly bold leadership skills to brazenly lie about your own conduct, especially when it's on public record.

[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 49 points 1 year ago (19 children)

Thing is, I'm kind of settled with the idea that Reddit will still win out monetarily with this. 99% of users are going to take the path of least resistance, which is kinda expected.

So my goal is more around just having a good conversational community, and I kinda like the change in pace now that I'm using alternatives. I don't really focus on "Reddit losing". I just like having a good place to chat. It might be funny to see if they end up reversing course, but I'm not losing sleep on that turnout.

[–] setsneedtofeed@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That is my feeling. I want Lemmy to be good, so I hope a lot of quality users jump ship from Reddit, but if Reddit retains the millions of passive users, then I’m happy for Reddit to keep them. One part of Reddit’s issue was the diluted quality of posts and comments, so let it continue to exist to filter people who want that experience. ___

[–] mobyduck648@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago

Yeah it sounds harsh but once a subreddit got above 100k its quality inevitably took a nose dive unless this was actively moderated against which it usually wasn’t. Lurkers are fine in general but when the whole platform is mostly lurkers looking to doomscroll TikTok style rather the lurkers wanting to read (and upvote) decent high-effort content it all goes down the pan pretty quickly.

If Reddit’s role in the Fediverse is as a great big sponge to soak up the passive users who just want quick content then long live Reddit! Spez staying on as CEO and increasingly zombifying the platform is actually great for us because it will drive active users here and keep the passive users on Reddit.

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[–] Clbull@beehaw.org 44 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Here's what I think will happen.

  1. Spez will forcibly depose and ban moderators who participate in the blackout and install his own yes-men to reopen these communities. A lot of power users will fold and jump back to Reddit's side, out of fear that they'll lose their foothold on the site.

  2. Communities like /r/RedditAlternatives will be banned by the admins, along with the communities of any alternative social media platforms that are in direct competition with Reddit. Some subreddits focused around Lemmy instances have already been purged by the admins and I see them quadrupling down on this.

  3. Reddit sheds a few million of its active users but the API changes and death of third-party apps don't completely kill the site because now it's pretty mainstream and a lot of people actually don't give a shit about Apollo, RIF, etc. I think the main difficulty of a site replacing Reddit is that Reddit clones are now a-dime-a-dozen.

  4. Porn-focused communities decide to leave the site and start their own website (perhaps a Lemmy instance or a standalone site that aims to compete with places like Fansly or OnlyFans), because they see the exclusion of NSFW material from the API is a precursor to a total porn-ban.

  5. Reddit announces its IPO and still raises a lot of capital.

[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago
  1. Someone will discover an old episode of The Simpsons where somehow, all of this already happened.
[–] Kinga@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are about 13k moderators participating in the blackout IIRC - I don't think reddit will have the resources or the community goodwill to take over all of the major subs

[–] Dandylion@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago

Isn't moderation an unpaid volunteer gig? I agree. He's gonna have a hard time finding a bunch of people who can /will jump at the opportunity

[–] Skelectus@suppo.fi 13 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Would any power user ever want to touch reddit with the longest pole if the first half of point 1 happened?

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[–] borlax@lemmy.borlax.com 42 points 1 year ago (5 children)

That AMA was honestly hilarious... I don't know what i actually expected, but this was better. Not only did the CEO go after Christian in the comments, but he also admitted that reddit isn't profitable, lol. This may not seal the deal for reddit, but i wouldn;t be surprised if spez was out of there just based on this PR disaster.

[–] setsneedtofeed@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The fact that he was so upset about being recorded was hilarious.

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[–] Schedar@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don’t think it was a secret that reddit wasn’t profitable yet, but the way that was posted twisted as a nasty way to take a jab at 3rd party apps was awful.

I mean, have a proper answer ready. Most people would absolutely understand that as a company they need to be “profit driven” to become sustainable as long as they had really open & honest communication with as much notice as possible about changes.

There seems to be this counterproductive instinct by (some) CEOs to just keep silent.. it’s not the screw ups that sink you.. it’s the lack of communication on it that does. This AMA somehow actually managed to make it even worse by pretending to be ready to talk and then responding with this kind of crap.

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[–] SnowGlobal@kbin.social 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Doubling down on throwing accusations at Christian Selig (dev of Apollo) in the AMA was really a low point. Spez has been a fan of a certain orange politician for years, and seems to be taking his tactic of spewing shit at people whether it is true or not. Sad.

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[–] lee@sh.itjust.works 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fuck spez what a piece of garbage human.

[–] ShartyWaffles@beehaw.org 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] lunarshot@beehaw.org 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] ItzzMe@midwest.social 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] SammichParade@vlemmy.net 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Gru@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] withersailor@aussie.zone 28 points 1 year ago (6 children)

14 replies. Can that even be called an AMA.

[–] MerylasFalguard@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

I mean… technically people did come and ask it anything. It just decided not to actually answer any of the questions that were asked.

Even the fourteen comments that were made didn’t actually answer any of the questions that were asked. And that’s if you consider copy/pasting pre-approved responses as actual answers in the first place.

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[–] Radicalized@lemmy.one 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m so excited to see Huffman burn his company to the ground. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted someone to fail as much as him.

[–] GayBees@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I just hope there is any fallout from this. I really hope start mass migrating off reddit, and people don't begrudgingly return a couple days after all of this dies down

[–] GuyDudeman@lemmy.one 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly, after coming to Lemmy, I haven’t looked back.

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[–] Silviecat44@vlemmy.net 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Im waiting for the Internet Historian video on this

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[–] NeonPayload@infosec.pub 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In the comments, though, ReddPlanet’s developer (u/lupeski, aka Tony Lupeski) said “this is a blatant lie,” noting that he had tried multiple times to get in contact with Reddit regarding these changes and had been ignored. Another indie app developer said they had filled out a request for Enterprise API access three times and had received no response. They're not even giving api access to people who could pay. What lying shits.

[–] sarsaparilyptus@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pro tip: if you're doing a line break, you need to add two spaces at the end of the previous line if you want the next one to actually break.
It makes it look like this.

Or you can press enter twice, which looks like this.

And yeah, if they breathe, they lie. That's the commonality between Steve and his cronies.

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[–] strepto@kbin.social 23 points 1 year ago

I'm honestly surprised how quickly this is all falling apart. I don't understand Reddit's ass-backwards approach to all of these decisions.

[–] nude@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The AMA was just an obligation. It was never going to change his or anyone elses mind.

He knows the reality. This change won't kill reddit. It will make it more controllable though, at the sake of some of their more techy users. The truth is that its big enough that they don't need those users anymore though. The people who do leave will be replaced by the natural growth of the site of people who simply download the official app from the various stores over the next few months.

The result will be a more TikTok/Tumblr/Twitter like experience. Less niche, more mainstream serving.

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[–] ASCIIansi@infosec.pub 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit sheds a few million of its active users but the API changes and death of third-party apps don’t completely kill the site because now it’s pretty mainstream and a lot of people actually don’t give a shit about Apollo, RIF, etc.

A few million is plenty to make lemmy a comparable community. As that continues more and more people who didn't move in previous years will move now, because there are enough people here to make it worthwhile.

I think the main difficulty of a site replacing Reddit is that Reddit clones are now a-dime-a-dozen.

Which makes a federated system like lemmy even more competitive.

I've given lemmy a try 3-4 times over the last couple years. And I think that presently it is getting fairly close to a big enough crowd that is very usable and is comparable to what reddit was like in 2008 when I switched from Digg.

To be honest. Lemmy doesn't need to out compete reddit or whoever. It just needs to be competitive. Not having the brain dead mainstream masses over here is not a loss. However, people have always moved to the platform with more liberty when most other aspects are the same. Otherwise reddit would never have been a thing. Most people were over at Digg for a reason. They only moved to reddit when Digg gave them enough reasons to leave.

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[–] eight_byte@feddit.de 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The situation is now as it is, and we can no longer change it. Reddit has often made itself unpopular in the past with wrong decisions in the community. But this time I think they have gone too far and won't get away with this so easily. Maybe they are going to kill their own product very soon.

We all fully understand that this is a business that needs to make a profit, so they can't make their APIs totally free for everyone. Running such a service costs a lot of money indeed.

But doing so at the expense of the third-party apps that made Reddit the popular platform it is today for end users in the first place is not a smart move at all. Hands down, Reddit has not been able to bring its platform up to modern technical standards for years. Not to mention that they are not able to provide a decent web and mobile UI to their users. This is exactly the job that third-party apps are currently taking over.

What I would have done instead of Reddit is not to wipe out the very apps that keep my platform alive and make it an enjoyable experience for my end-users - but instead support those apps as much as I could. Why not provide those apps completely free API access and let the Reddit users bring their own API-access keys into those apps? Make a free Reddit tier plan which allows users to browse Reddit for free. As soon as a Reddit user wants to write posts or comments, let them pay a little monthly fee (lets say $2). Not only would that solve the problem for Reddit how to make more money without making small app developers pay, it would also significantly improve the quality of the content on the platform since it would lock out all the trolls and spammers from posting their shitty stuff.

[–] HowieDewitt@aussie.zone 13 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I feel like making users pay a subscription would also kill Reddit.

[–] Clbull@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago

I'm one of those people that would have paid a subscription if Reddit Premium actually gave me any cool features.

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[–] Hellebert@beehaw.org 15 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Dear Apollo dev, if you updated your backend to support federated services like Lemmy I for one would love you forever.

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[–] LostXOR@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Ah yes, the AMA has a score of precisely zero. Nice vote manipulation there Reddit.

Also you can upload images directly? Awesome!

[–] baduhai@sopuli.xyz 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Posts never go into negative scores. If a post has negative karma, it shows 0 points, always been like this.

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[–] ADrunkenSaylor@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago (18 children)

This got me to check out Reddit alternatives... Landed on kbin.. so here we go?

[–] Reeek@beehaw.org 15 points 1 year ago

Same. It got me to oficially jump over to Lemmy. Reddits been veering downhill and always wanted an alternative. Kind of glad all this got more people to Lemmy etc.

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[–] LA71@lemmy.one 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)
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