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Wow. Front page of huffpost.com right now. Interesting...
“Protest and dissent is important,” Huffman said. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
Protest is important, just not against us.
"This is a business decision, not like all those other times people protested companies."
/c/Leopardsatemyface ?
Oh well, here I am, glad to join this ship. I just want a reliable place I can further geek out on mechanical keyboards, memes and news. I hope we migrate somewhere cause reddit does not look like it has a bright future.
Welcome! I'm super stoked to be here, too. And each day this community seems to grow stronger.
I agree that reddit's future looks weak. The API change was horrible. Spez's approach to the whole thing was even worse: condescending, disingenuous, and hostile.
And the more I think about it, the less I see any hope for reddit as a place I want to spend time. This isn't just one bad episode. Once the company goes public, there's going to be more shit like this. The site will slowly gut itself for perceived short-term gains, over and over again.
No thanks.
But Huffman says the “pure infrastructure costs” of supporting these apps costs Reddit about $10 million each year.
Eh, so although, according to him, the third party apps cost Reddit 10 million per year, he still decided that 20 million a year from a single third party app developer is reasonable? I think he needs to learn some basic math...
I don't think they seriously expected any third party apps to agree to the costs. They just wanted a plausible excuse to funnel everyone into their own app for data collection and advertising revenue. That's my best guess anyway, another business decision for the IPO.
I’m old enough to have witnessed the early beginnings of the Internet in the 90s - and what’s happening now with the fediverse feels like coming back to its roots.
We may well find that the implosion of Twitter and Reddit - within 6 months of each other - is the beginning of the end for “big tech”. It’s unlikely that it will go away entirely but I do feel a seismic shift happening. I seriously hope that it’s not a false dawn.
Can I just say thank you to all of the journalists protesting against reddit with the tools they have available? Most articles I've seen are pro reddit community or barely neutral. Dozens of news sites are involved, from left and right news sites, to finance magazines, to explainers like Reuters and NPR. Multiple articles a day are keeping this at the forefront of everyone's mind - especially spez and potential investors - as well as ensuring the whole thing stays transparent. I've seen a few articles that link directly to lemmy and kbin signups too 😊
I agree. Honestly, I think these types of (front page!) articles are the only thing that CEOs pay attention to these days. I have no skin in the game anymore, since I deleted my (long-standing) account on Reddit and completely switched to Lemmy. However, it's nice to see people take a stand against greed and, from what I'm seeing in the last day or so, hypocrisy...
What good will outrage/protest do? It's time to migrate. Reddit was built by volunteers who can build it again. Lemmy seems like a good choice, but time will tell if it can be the next front page of the internet.
"...we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on."
Great, then I'm not negotiating when I say you're a shite CEO and I'm done with your crappy website.
Now Spez is sucking off Musk in the media talking about how Twitter's "cost cutting measures" were genius, firing most of your staff is never a genius move.
Makes me wonder what morale is like for the employees at Reddit. Working for a CEO that admires Musk's takeover of Twitter would have me running for the door.
This whole debacle will end up being a MBA case study in a few years on how not to work with your user community.
Yeah. Shit is really going down on reddit right now. Spez is trying to paint this as "power hungry mods are closing down your favourite subs. Let admins control reddit more and we'll stop the power mods". Sadly, it really seems to be working for a lot of people. Classic tactic of the ruling class turning people against one another to distract while they fuck people over. Its like the iq of the average redditor dropped over night.
Its like the iq of the average redditor dropped over night.
That'll happen when the oldest part of the userbase emigrates.
“Protest and dissent is important,” Huffman said. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
Honestly, my reply to this particular statement is that maybe Reddit should die!
I'm not entirely sure that Steve Huffman understands how protests work. The whole point is you don't have control over them, friendo.
You can't just say but we made a business decision and expect people to just say welp guess we should give up, there's no overcoming business decisions.
That's really the only thing left at this point.
If there's no negotiating, fuck it, burn it down. We built it, we can unmake it, and that bastard can build it back up himself if he's so damn set on making a profit of it.
He seems to think that the people want the shit that he and his dev team created. They don't. People want the content of the site. And all he is succeeding in doing here is showing away a good deal of it
I’m definitely not going to download the official reddit app, I’m done with it for good. Lemmy’s mobile website is good enough for now, hoping that the Apollo developer decides to make a Lemmy client eventually
I also will never install the official reddit app. I'm trying to move away from reddit altogether for various reasons.
I created this account this morning and am writing this message on Jerboa (got it off fdroid). So far so good!
"... not going to change anything"
Yet look what happened to the fediverse. I wouldn't be here without his boneheaded move. So it already changed things for me and thousands more like me. I don't plan on going back.
"We've made a business decision we're not negotiating on" sounds an awful lot like "we don't negotiate with terrorists".
Is that what we are Steve-o? Reddit terrorists?
Fucker has lost everyone now, Digging the hell out of watching reddit fail because of mismanagement now. You don't double-down when you rely on your users to create your company.
What an idiot.
When you start to talk about share holders more than your users, then you know you are lost.
“I think every business has a duty to become profitable eventually — for our employees shareholders, for our investors shareholders and, one day as a public company, hopefully our user shareholders as well,” - quote from the article
I'm hoping we'll soon need our own r/LeopardsAteMyFace just for this.
edit: typo
This, combined with some other news stories explicitly mentioning Lemmy as an alternative, is a very positive thing for the community here.
Lol, fuck spez. I've used reddit since 2011 but this debacle has been the last straw for me.
Huffman totally doesn't get that the conflict isn't about Reddit wanting to charge for API access. That in and of itself is fine.
It's how they're going about it, starting with "We're going to start charging you in a month, and just five months ago we said we weren't going to be charging anything for the foreseeable future," followed immediately by Huffman being a human-shaped turd very loudly at every chance.
Even if they just came out and said "we don't want third party apps like Apollo anymore, we want one Reddit experience" it would have been at least honest. There would still be an uproar but not ugly like this.
Instead everything Steve has done has been duplicitous and in bad faith. Then he drops that memo and pokes the bear, does a couple rounds of interviews going "I'm so strong, mods are spoiled, I'm like daddy Elon, make me rich".
I genuinely don't know what he thinks he's going to get out of this. He should have just sat this out quietly and let subs go dark until they got bored and alternatives formed and the system fixed itself.
Side note: I've been disgusted watching redditors lick his boots and hate on the mods. In 13 years of using Reddit I only ever got banned from /r/conservative, so I don't get all these people complaining about power tripping mods. That got me to delete all my accounts.
Oh, and Quora, and Google, and Meta, and Twitter.
Remember, do it in Firefox - not Chrome.
The blackout probably won't result in Reddit failing, but he has to realize that if he keeps this up, it's only going to take some aspiring programmers/designers some time to develop more Reddit alternatives, and when one of them becomes viable, down goes Reddit.
Finally realized how to sign up for Lemmy. Federated ftw. Insurance against this kind of stupidity.
This exactly.
I've been a redditor on one account or another for over a decade. For a very long time, read it was 100% of my social media and online community time. That seemed safe because Reddit had always been run in a user-friendly manner.
But then somebody gave Spez a microphone and he managed to destroy 10+ years of community trust and good will in like 3 weeks. Every single thing he says doubles down, reiterates that he doesn't give a shit what the users want.
So it's time to diversify. This right here is my very first post on Lemmy, never would have bothered with it if not for Spez. But now I am more carefully considering where I invest my time and discussion, and what networks I want to see grow.
With any luck, this decentralized stuff is going to be the answer to enshittification.
Missed opportunity. It should have been spelled: "Reddit CEO Diggs in heel ... "
Investers are gonna see yet another mindless man child ceo
In my opinion even if he changes his mind and tries to backtrack, the damage is done, for sure.
"Without Reddit’s volunteer moderators, the site could likely see less helpful content, and more spam, misinformation and hate.”
Enjoy the multiple requests for user data and histories regarding what I am sure will be an 80% spread of r/TheDonald. Like the various inquisitions of Twitter, so too will your lives be mired in government investigations. Have fun moderating 100k subs with no mods, and enjoy paddling up shit creek with your dumpster fire yacht.
It's crazy that he is probably the only one not seeing how bad he look like and how bad he is destroying reddit
At this point I think he's immolating himself on purpose, and after the api changes are done a new saviour CEO will come, who won't reverse anything, but with a clean record.
