I say this with all seriousness: This, and the API pricing fiasco (not the price change itself but the gratuitously insulting and dishonest way it was handled), and firing Victoria which still strikes me as a sad thing, and “fighting back” by removing moderators who were doing a “protest” instead of just shrugging and ignoring it all, and removing reddit coins even from the tiny fraction of people who were actually paying for them, are all totally nonsensical and self-defeating actions from a strict business perspective. Anyone who runs so much as a corner pizza shop and has to interact with the real world could see how counter to reddit’s interests they are. So, why did they do it?
I genuinely think that the motivation stems on an individual personal level from the psychology of “Well you’re disobeying me, so I’ll punish you.” The users are being disobedient on my platform? Fuck them, I’ll show them what I think of them, and unless they get in line, I’ll do it even worse. Your icon’s pixellated now. How do you like that?
I’m sure it works on a personal level, for some definition of “works.” On a corporate level though, I think the results so far pretty much speak for themselves.
Don’t forget: they also deleted all messages pre-2023 with no notice.
Spez has said that he admires Musk’s playbook with Twitter and aimed to model after it. Considering Twitter’s outlook, I would say I admired the stones on a man trying to launching the IPO like this, but if he had any real stones, he wouldn’t have pressed these viciously unpopular moves that will reduce engagement and destroy the site over time.
I think the messages thing was more a limitation of the old platform. I looked into it once to see if I could replicate Reddit chats outside of the app/website and it all went through a 3rd party who didn’t expose any api, had terrible latency and throughput issues and constantly broke.
The new system will be just as bad, just now Reddit will control it.
I say this with all seriousness: This, and the API pricing fiasco (not the price change itself but the gratuitously insulting and dishonest way it was handled), and firing Victoria which still strikes me as a sad thing, and “fighting back” by removing moderators who were doing a “protest” instead of just shrugging and ignoring it all, and removing reddit coins even from the tiny fraction of people who were actually paying for them, are all totally nonsensical and self-defeating actions from a strict business perspective. Anyone who runs so much as a corner pizza shop and has to interact with the real world could see how counter to reddit’s interests they are. So, why did they do it?
I genuinely think that the motivation stems on an individual personal level from the psychology of “Well you’re disobeying me, so I’ll punish you.” The users are being disobedient on my platform? Fuck them, I’ll show them what I think of them, and unless they get in line, I’ll do it even worse. Your icon’s pixellated now. How do you like that?
I’m sure it works on a personal level, for some definition of “works.” On a corporate level though, I think the results so far pretty much speak for themselves.
Don’t forget: they also deleted all messages pre-2023 with no notice.
Spez has said that he admires Musk’s playbook with Twitter and aimed to model after it. Considering Twitter’s outlook, I would say I admired the stones on a man trying to launching the IPO like this, but if he had any real stones, he wouldn’t have pressed these viciously unpopular moves that will reduce engagement and destroy the site over time.
I think the messages thing was more a limitation of the old platform. I looked into it once to see if I could replicate Reddit chats outside of the app/website and it all went through a 3rd party who didn’t expose any api, had terrible latency and throughput issues and constantly broke.
The new system will be just as bad, just now Reddit will control it.
There is no set of raw data that cannot be laundered into a new system.
They removed the messages because they wanted to.
This tracks from what I’ve heard from folks in the industry.