“It’s time we grow up,” says former moderator of jailbait subreddit.
😂 fuck u/spez
I like the Fediverse and I think I’ll stay.
Haha! Love the description of him after the quote!
Wasn’t that illegal? Shouldn’t be be prosecuted?
All the numbers don’t add up. He says only 3 % of users use apps but then also there is a significant cost to not serve that 3 % ads? They also only make pennies per user. They must count any hit from Google as a user or something wild to boost their numbers.
I enjoy how he’s still talking about this as if it’s purely about having 3rd party apps pay a fee, not about his incredibly piss-poor handling of it.
The irony is that at the fee they are charging, there is very little useful application for the API. So I doubt they will make much, if any, money from it. So they are just enraging and driving away their user base for a plan which won’t work anyway. Unless the API was just costing them so much server time that they are getting massive cost reductions by closing it.
I know right? I have no problem with a fee existing. It’s the ridiculously high fee, and the complete BS he tried to feed everyone that really drive me away. It’s only going to get worse. I hope lemmy gets big enough
It’s probably even more expensive to piss off any investors right before an IPO.
We can only hope.
I think this is exactly why. It’s to make sure that Reddit is “shored up” from any profits leaking out, and making sure that NSFW content is locked down so that investors actually invest.
It sucks because it’s our posts, our comments, our information that makes Reddit what it is. This is simply preparation for advertising and other for-profit opportunities. Greedy.
As CEO, I always like to go online and tell the whole world “we’re not profitable” right before my IPO. Big brain stuff, ya know.
I’m actually somewhat happy all this happened now. I’m sad for the 3rd party app devs and everyone who suffers from these decisions. And for the wonderful communities and knowledge bases that were shattered.
But I think it caused me, and many others, to realize that great community and discussions could still be had on the internet, and that we hadn’t been having those for quite a while over on reddit.
There’s a lot of value in smaller scale too. Not everything needs to be mega-platform level for the mass market. We can have great communities in smaller spaces online too — sometimes even better as a result.
Some of my favorite places on the internet are smaller communities that still run webforums.
It’s great. There’s people I’ve been talking to and friends with for fifteen years on there.
I have been thinking about this a lot in light of recent events. Growing up in the era of smaller communities, forums, etc. I can’t say large, monolithic, corporate entities have ultimately been a change for the better.
It’s not better. It was only better since I didn’t have to create several accounts for the different forums I would use. This small inconvience was enough to stop contributions from people that don’t even care about that topic.
The downvoting is the worst part. I’ve seen correct comments downvoted, not opinions but tech questions dealing with standards. Downvoting creates an anonymous mob mentality. This gets bad when the mob knows nothing about the topic and is open to all.
Reddit has destroyed so many communities because of how easy they made everything. No one really talks about that.
It’s been boosting discovery of fediverse and causing an explosion of both traffic and hopefully donations.
How have you going about this? I’m interested in the same. I see real potential for this type of accessible decentralized platform.
Gonna be even more expensive to run a company that no one uses!
It’s one of the most visited websites and I don’t see that changing when 2% is leaving the platform
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And they watch ads
Yes, it is. So charge a reasonable API price and this whole argument is over.
But that won’t happen. This is about monetizing Reddit’s content ASAP before Spez resigns ASAP with a nice big, bonus for pushing through those beautiful API changes oh so smoothly.
The more Spez speaks, the less sad I am about Reddit dying. Platforms come and go. There’s loads of Internet corners to discuss my hobbies. I don’t want to stay on a sinking ship with a hole shot out by the captain because he has ship insurance, actively throwing people off board as him and his crew climb up the still buoyant part whilst insisting THIS WILL BLOW OVER. I’m not going down with the Titanic of community boards as it sinks. It’ll die in infamy and I don’t feel like drowning alongside it.
However, I will now thoroughly enjoy watching Spez naively, single-handedly dismantle Reddit’s legacy for short term gain whilst thinking he’s being a super duper smart businessman we couldn’t possibly understand. Or possibly being a forced fallguy for share holder decisions which he has a choice in avoiding by quitting.
I’ve never in all my years of Internet browsing seen someone running an Internet-based company so blatantly indifferent to the customers they serve. There’s no Reddit revenue without Redditors.
I wish him luck on his inevitably piss-poor IPO when Reddit offers little content of value and more people get more angry at him as more ridiculous reasoning flies out of his mouth. Reddit’s gonna look like MSN News by the end of this mess.
I mean there are a lot of parallels with Elon and Twitter.
The thing that amazes me about the Reddit tanking - is how sudden it was. For anyone who was paying more attention than I was at the start - how long were there smoke signals for?
I swear it was like 2 Apollo posts within 48hrs straight into blackout shitstorm within the week.
Elon at least hummed and Harred about it for a good while before destroying Twitter week after week and that was fast.
Spez seems to be speed running it.
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really went off the rails there lol. I could tell when you mentioned Snowden/Assange.
you don’t think it’s nuts for snowden critics to mod privacy subreddits when snowden is the guy behind the main leak that showed how fucked our privacy is?
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What it is Spez? How can people who use third party apps simultaneously be only 3% of the user base (I realize you proved he’s wrong) and significant enough to ruin Reddit’s profitability? Cause if you’re going public and only three percent of your users can ruin Reddit’s profitability you’re in for a rough ride. Investors don’t like too much risk.
“We’re 18 years old,” Huffman said. “I think it’s time we grow up and behave like an adult company.”
Who the hell is this even directed to?
The 16 year olds defending their actions?
he moderated WHAT? So not only is he an idiot, he’s a pedo? What a great image.
The fact that he was a mod on jailbait is kind of a distraction. It’s funny in concept, but at the time, mods could just add anyone else as a mod instead of sending an invite to be a mod. So anyone could be assigned as a mod for an embarrassing subreddit.
There’s some problematic power tripping mods and those incidents are the most visible, but probably >99% of mod actions are essentially unnoticed and just keeping subreddits relatively organized. And people were doing that for free. If reddit isn’t profitable, then pissing off moderators that were doing work for free does not seem like a good approach.
I doubt he was targeting moderators directly, but that’s what ended up happening in part.
Using the percentage of mods that use 3rd party apps is disingenuous (if that stat is even correct). There’s probably tons of mods on low volume subreddits that don’t need to do much and thus don’t use the mod tools on 3rd party apps. But I bet the percent of mod actions that come through the API vs native is very different than counting it by mod that use the API vs native. As in, a small percentage of mods on big subreddits are probably doing a lot of moderation and they are probably using 3rd party apps at least part of the time.
I really hope July 1st destroys reddit as we know it.
It won’t immediately, but it’s clearly a sinking ship.
This is why the fediverse is so great. It really is really expensive to run a social media company. By spreading the cost over many actors and encouraging competition, this allows us to host content without being beholden to billionares.
*Chinese billionaires
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I am asking this in full earnestness: is any critique of the Chinese government assumed to be rooted in xenophobia?
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I feel that maybe you’re reading my question as ‘critique of China is inherently support for the west/US/etc’ which I absolutely do not mean. I think that it’s possible that painting all critique with a broad ‘xenophobia’ brush (while undoubtedly warranted at times) can prevent discussion in good faith.
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If this is the thinking I can expect on this instance, perhaps this is not the instance for me.
I think he’s referring to how Reddit used to operate on Tencent funding.
Tencent is partially owned by the Chinese government.Removed by mod
It’s well known and accepted that the Chinese government has significant control of Chinese companies, and Reddit is partially owned by Tencent. That’s not xenophobic.
The fact that it’s something like a 5% stake is more relevant.
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“a literal US military arm” is just as ridiculous. It’s neither.
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And you think there aren’t Russian and Chinese propagandists on Reddit?
pro-US imperialist propaganda
Right. Like all those school kids getting shot.
I fucking hate spez. Will never use reddit again
It is, but pissing off the content creators (core of the business) is NOT the way to go.
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Playing devils advocate, I suppose some companies have an extremely tight window where they rely on that last 3% after costs…I believe grocery stores operate like this…but reddit is not a food store, and I don’t know wth I’m talking about. (:
Don’t get me wrong, reddit has been the worst for about 10-12 years now and keeps getting worse every year, but as long as we’re talking about this mysterious 3%.
How much traffic does that 3% account for? That’s the real metric. I assume it’s more than the avg user.
Also, what is an avg user? Someone that just wants a crowd-sourced opinion once a month is not. Is it someone that just looks at the front page and moves on? Does the avg user post? Do they lurk? Surely they’re not mods.
I realize all these questions are moot, as reddit has been utter garbage since a little before fatpeoplehate got taken down.
It makes sense that they generate more traffic than the average user.
It’s also us that generate the content they’re selling.
