I was actually somewhat ok with going back to certain Reddit communities (although NOT just mindless scrolling) after the blackout. There’s a lot of communities where (I thought) there’s literally no alternatives.
Then came his latest wave of interviews attacking people that did their jobs for them (mods, Devs making a usable mobile app) and making insane hypocritical statements about “democracy” (everyone would gladly kick you out given the chance) and “landed gentry” (dude, if the mods are the out of touch landed gentry, that would make you the out of touch king, right?)
Why is he still giving interviews? Not like I even care about the company but seriously what good can he possibly do at this point, every day thousands more people leave for good.
Anyway, I seriously don’t think I can use Reddit with a clear conscience, at all, anymore, at least for now. Every time I interact with the site (even with adblock) I can’t help but think the entire time I am helping this millionaire megalomaniac’s company keep continuing on.
I guess there’s always the chance the board is letting him self destruct to offer him as the sacrificial lamb.
I honestly don’t know if this will last in terms of me not using reddit at all, but every day this idiot opens his mouth is another day I’m not using reddit and another day I’m searching for and interacting with alternatives.
There is a lot of doublespeak going on, if you pay attention. He keeps referring to 3rd party apps as “competitors” where they really are alternate paths to interact with the platform and provide the content he relies on to sell ads over. He keeps referring to the protesting mods as “not wanting to moderate” when really they are trying to make known how much they rely on third-party tools and how difficult he is making their volunteer job.
It’s like he’s forgotten why they started the site in the first place. I wonder what Aaron would have thought of all this?
Even if he hasn’t forgotten why they started reddit initially, the priority now is clearly to find out how much money they can squeeze out of our freely provided content, while guilting the volunteer moderators into keeping the site usable.
That’s why Spez doesn’t get to profit from me anymore.
Nice! But you missed a few.
15+ years, the script kept crashing. I got as far as wiping the last several years’ worth of comments, and removing all my submissions. It’s unlikely that anyone today will be browsing some thread I was in back in 2017.
Unless some of my comments have been reverted … ? Doesn’t look like it. Point me to what I have missed, and I will address it. I saw one from r/facepalm, I will re-edit comments to that sub now.
Spez started the site to make money. This was always true - a completely typical reason to start a company. When there was no community in the early days - he made fake accounts, and fake conversations to generate traffic to attract attention. So Spez is someone that’s always used dishonesty to get what he wants.
Aaron joined the site because he saw it’s potential as a tool for civic engagement and political awareness. He left when he saw what Reddit was becoming… or really - what it always had been: a tool to extract wealth from its unknowing volunteers.
Aaron and Spez weren’t friends. They were business partners for a very short period of time. To the best of my knowledge, that’s all there is to it.
I speculate that Aaron would feel unfazed by what Reddit looks like today… because it’s expected. The founders are people that make the Forbes 30 Under 30, marry world famous pro athletes, and are worth tens of millions of dollars. They’re divorced from reality.
I would hope that open and decentralized online spaces like Lemmy reflect the sort of values & ideas Aaron spent his life advocating for.
Additional important details: spez built Reddit and sold it off to Condé Nast because he thought it was a stupid little project that would soon be eclipsed and he wanted his payout.
He spent a few years traveling and then expressed regret at having sold it because it was becoming much bigger than he imagined.
He was rehired after Ellen Pao’s very similar attacks on the user base.
Every morning he wakes up, looks in the mirror and thinks “if I’d just stuck with Reddit instead of selling it I’d be Jack Dorsey (of Twitter) right now. A real billionaire instead of a mere multi-millionaire. I invented the front page of the internet! It’s a top twenty website! Why can’t I buy an island? Like, a good one.”
That’s where he’s coming from. And he currently thinks if he acts like Elon Musk he can be as rich as him.
Unironically, Ellen Pao was the best CEO Reddit’s ever had.
She made a lot of difficult and fair choices for the future health of the company.
Reddit needed to be cleaned if they wanted to attract a larger audience and increase ad revenue. Heck, that was her job - and I believe banning hate subreddits was appropriate. There was expected blowback, but I suspect that’d be smoothed over in time.The mistake was dismissing Victoria. That completely destroyed the beloved AMA format. It also coincided with the infamous Rampart disaster. 10-15 answered softball questions, and Harrelson treated it like another press junket. I mean, why wouldn’t he?
There was no Reddit ambassador to explain how the format works, what makes it successful and why it’s important for the success of what they’re promoting.More importantly, it validated Reddit’s belief that Pao was not fit to lead Reddit, because she didn’t understand it. Much of the community thought she was only brought aboard to placate accusations of sexism in the organization. It didn’t help.
And still, Pao was big enough to admit when she’s wrong: We screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years. We haven’t communicated well, and we have surprised moderators and the community with big changes. We have apologized and made promises to you, the moderators and the community, over many years, but time and again, we haven’t delivered on them. When you’ve had feedback or requests, we haven’t always been responsive. The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit.
What do you think the odds of a narcissist like u/Spez ever holding himself the least bit accountable? If he’s not fired, he won’t.
But ya know what? Fine. Let him follow in Elon’s footsteps and see what happens.
Same. Now that the CEO revealed the mindset that drives reddit behind the curtains, the problem shifted from a matter of convenience (access from APIs) to a matter of principles:
- the corporation has an authoritarian style of problem-solving;
- it has no respect for the userbase or the developers, thus it is not transparent,using underhanded tactics to push a narrative and hide their real goals;
- it wants to control every aspect of our interactions to make the userbase receptive to aggressive marketing;
- it has no qualms to limit access to content that is 100% created by users, not to use unpaid labor (the mods) to maximize its profits;
- it sees the userbase and the mods as expendable when they voice an objection on a policy, despite being those they exploit to make their model profitable (reddit is nothing without the moderation and the user-made content)
This type of aggressive capitalism is becoming a poison for the web.
It is going too far, destroying what has made the internet a special place to share information: no limits to exploration, to sharing, to expression. Now they want to create isolated bubbles behind login walls where they can be owners of the info and controllers of the space to sell data, product placements and ads.Perhaps these new technologies like the fediverse are the answer, the solution to put a brake on this ugly phenomenon.
I hope decentralization will be the beginning of a new “Internet Renaissance”, bringing back a bit of the spirit of the 90s.It’s typical for American web sites because it’s an American kind of leadership.
Unfortunately almost all popular web sites are American… :/
Every time spez speaks he literally contradicts himself. I genuinely can’t even comprehend the shit that he spews. He literally says multiple contradictory statements in the same sentence. It’s like watching someone know they can’t win an argument, so instead they just spew random shit hoping something lands.
He’s following in the footsteps of his idol, Elon Musk
No matter how noble the cause realistically his position and actions were predicable.
That said if they really are in undeleting comments from those who have closed their accounts it’s a huge privacy breach and a few years down the line all those inevitable fines from around the world will sink the platform, IPO or not and spez will be welcoming people at Walmart.
Can’t wait.
If they are really undeleting, I think that may be the biggest thing to have come out of this whole thing so far. I’m unsure of EU laws regarding this, but reddit claiming ownership of our interactions crosses a line imo, and could be a huge step for privacy, for the better.
And I agree. Their behavior has been nothing but on brand.
Investors will price in pissing off EU regulators into the IPO lol. There’s no way they’ll let this one fly under the radar
As someone who’s been on reddit for almost 12 years, who’s also a developer. It really has saddened me to hear so many I’ll things he’s said to other dev teams.
This is the main reason why I’m trying to go all in with Lemmy, subscribing to different communities, etc.
At this point, if Reddit doesn’t make him step down and all these popular third party apps go under because of the API pricing, i will rarely be visiting reddit in the future.
I dropped in today and there was a huge banner at the top of the page claiming to tell me about how much third-party apps were stealing from Reddit.
Which is most outrageous because Reddit made the API that allows that and supported it with third party developers. It’s like inviting a bunch of people to a party and then complaining after they’ve been there for a couple hours, “What are you people doing here?” And it was a potluck party, the guests brought a lot of the food.
I saw the same. I was just about tempted to slide back and browse quickly on my lunch break, then I saw that and just noped out of there. This place is building up quickly and strongly enough that I probably won’t bother going back to reddit if he’s going to keep up with this nonsense; I don’t really need that sort of BS negativity.
What bothers me most about this is how personal it sounds, and how emotional he’s getting. He’s not thinking rationally
I guess there’s always the chance the board is letting him self destruct to offer him as the sacrificial lamb.
I don’t believe spez is self destructing, He’s doing what benefits both himself and the board in bringing about these changes. Your right about how the board will probably use him as the sacrificial lamb though, along with giving him a healthy severance package on the way out. Pretty sure they’ve even pulled that on a smaller scale before with all that AMA staff drama. It’s all an attempt to maximize profits for their shareholders when they turn Reddit public, and then they can cash out too. They won’t be reverting any of these decisions after, even when they do push spez under the bus, because we users aren’t the priority.
we users aren’t the priority.
You know what they say. If you’re using a service for free, then you’re not the customer, you’re the product. They don’t care about what we think in the same way a farmer doesn’t care about the opinions of his cows. It’s just never really been this glaringly obvious before.
Nah man, this is 2023. We’ve reached new levels of enshitification. You can pay for a service and still be the product.
same, I would have probably kept using reddit before his insane press releases this week. Done with it now.
Spez is ruining the site. It is a shame.
I’m probably a lot less negative about Spez than a lot of people here. I mean, end of the day, he spent hundreds of millions of investors’ dollars, and he’s gotta make a return for them. They weren’t donating to him to make a cool forum. They were expecting a return.
And this business model, at a high level, is the norm for dot-coms. Operate in money-losing mode, but have an especially-attractive service to grow the userbase. When you finally get a large userbase, then you have to shift over to monetizing them and being profitable.
I mean, Reddit was inevitably going to reduce user experience to try to generate more money at some point.
But none of that means that what Reddit is doing makes it the most appealing place for me. I mean, I’m over here not because I want Spez or Reddit to burn, but because it’s just not really the place I want to be with the changes. I’m not angry, but, for me, kbin is just preferable to Reddit now.
There are fewer users and less content on the Fediverse right now, but that’s okay with me. I moved to Reddit back when it was one page with mostly people talking about things of interest to the Reddit staff. It was a lot smaller than the Fediverse is now.
Ok, but they literally told the 3rd party devs earlier THIS YEAR that they weren’t going to make any changes… And now they just plop this in everyone’s lap and they have no time to react.
And then there’s the whole thing with Christian. It’s all insanity.
