The basic mistake I see us all make is assume that Spez has any emotional attachment to Reddit (let alone anything close to how attached we are to it). He doesn’t.
Once you realize that he’s 100% in it for the money and is utterly uncaring about Reddit’s users (i.e. you), you’ll realize that he couldn’t give less of a shit about actually addressing our concerns.
This will also make you immune to any PR sanitising lies him and his team spout, as all such lies hinge on your willingness to give him some benefit of the doubt. We shouldn’t.
The example I give again, and again, and again is Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. Craigslist remains private (which shields it from being gutted by Wall Street vultures, for sure) so we don’t know for sure, but Craig is believed to retain a controlling stake alongside current CEO Jim Buckmaster and eBay (which purchased a large stake from an exiting employee).
Craigslist makes about $600 million annually, and I’m sure provides a nice living for the executives and employees there, but has remained true to its core function of providing transparent and easy classifieds posting to everyone (mostly for free, even!)
Notice what happens when an organization becomes a vehicle for profit, beyond simply “self-sustaining profit.” Notice how taking on investors practically guarantees that outcome.
I thought Reddit was dead the day Conde Nast bought it. They’ve survived quite a bit longer! This day had to come. Let’s move on.
We can build something that primarily exists to create a community.
I had no idea Conde Nast bought Reddit. That is unreal. As someone who used to adore Wired magazine, fuck Conde Nast!
Yeah, no use saving Reddit. Give up your darling, let better things take over.
yeah pretty much
spez sees 3rd party users as an obstacle between himself and more money. so he will gladly trade the bad pr and loss of certain users if it means that even a small fraction end up switching to the official app and it gains him another 0.1% in wealth for the IPO
he claimed that old.reddit wasn’t going anywhere, but we all know that it will be crippled to the point of unusability
We shouldn’t give the benefit of the doubt to a man who’s shown himself on multiple occasions completely incapable of good faith any more than a hedgehog should give an owl the benefit of the doubt.
a hedgehog should give an owl the benefit of the doubt
I didn’t realize that owls and hedgehogs were mortal enemies.
To be fair it probably depends on the species of owls and hedgehogs involved, I know owls will sometimes go for hedgehogs here in the UK.
Rip reddit
I hope this mess they created destroys their site, they deserve it for being such smug asshole pricks about the whole thing.
I was expecting some humility, admission of faults and an olive branch.
Instead, the CEO just doubled down and comes to the AMA with canned, smug responses. What a joke.
As people were pointing out on Reddit, in this case I don’t actually hope that, because the people who suffer as a result are the users. Tons of useful content that users have created and contributed, other people would just never have access to again.
I’m all for users migrating here but there’s so much vitriol from these users which I don’t think benefits a platform like this. I for one would like to see people leave their hate for Reddit at the door and not use this as a haven for their rage.
I was surprised by how insane the ama got. Considering Reddit is a major social media platform, I expected them to act more professional and pretend to care about people’s input, attempting to make their users look like they are at least fine with these changes. I prefer the actual outcome more, love how spez doubled down on the allegations he made against Apollo while everyone blasts Reddit so much they can’t do much about it unless they start taking extreme measures.
He ‘doubled down’ because there was nothing else he could do. Iamthatis was meticulous in his takedown, and short of apologizing, there was nothing spez could say to make it better.
Agreed, I have no idea how he thought it was a good idea. I’m sure his PR and legal team tried to talk him out of it - or they’re all idiot yes men. Cards were already stacked against him and he just made it all worse.
Then he should have apologized?
You know that’s a big no no from his legal team.
His legal team more likely advised him to not comment on it. Doubling down is just slander / libel. If his legal team did tell him to talk more about it AND to not apologize, his legal team is big dumb
spez also just seems incredibly salty for someone that must have everything in life, yeesh
I just deleted my main account of 3 years and also my 2 alts.
Yep, 11 years and 82k karma wiped out yesterday. The only posts I left were some comments on a thread where I was helping folks navigate to Lemmy. I’m at my new home.
I deleted my 10 year old account. I was annoyed for a while, but this is just dumb. Fuck spez
Admitting that “Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.” just shows to the world, that they don’t know how to run a business. This should be warning shot for every investor.
When i read that i was honestly astonished how they expected anyone to invest in reddit at all
Exactly! I’m not a rich investor person, but nobody with a brain would invest in a company bleeding money, and that was such a terrible move to admit. If their PR isn’t a half-working AI after firing all those people, they should’ve been horrified between that and the Christian Selig/Apollo comments.
You also can’t count on Reddit becoming a meme stock, especially with absolutely zero regard for the users who make these meme stocks happen.
This whole thing is all about trying to monetize user-generated content by selling it at a high premium to large AI companies. If they allow a lower pricing tier for 3pa’s, other companies/individuals will find a way to use that lower tier for training models, and this is the only thing spez sees as a viable profit model for reddit.
Idk what the point of the ama even was, it’s not like he was going to hear anyone out, and everyone that commented was just asking “why are you such a bad person?”
“Why are you such a bad person?” - because money.
I -think- that it was to try and keep mods around by ensuring that they won’t (maybe) take away their tools.
Yes yes we are working on mod tools they will be there “soon” - reddit for the last 8 years.
I had no idea in what scenario imaginable that this was going to go well or improve things, even when it was announced.
“Hey Steve, you were right. We realize we were taking your mercy to keep the API for granted. We’ll not only cancel the subreddit blackouts but we’ll stop using 3rd party apps, install the official app and click on 5 ads just because of how admirable your AMA post was.”
-Redditors in Steve’s mind
That’s what I did…
No wait, I’m here now after 13 years on Reddit. My mistake.
Since u/spez seems to want to continue down this road and bar people of experiencing reddit the way they want, I decided to delete all of my post and comment history within my account there.
It’s obvious that those of us that want to continue to use 3rd party apps are considered dead weight in his eyes, so I decided that anything and everything I posted is likely of no value to Reddit.
It’s us the users who create & place value within that platform. In subjects of our interests. Reddit company is adamant with their decision with limiting our precense alone.
Make sense that people have started migrating into other places/ services such as this one.
Sadly he doesn’t care. He’s just keeping his eyes on the horizon awaiting all that ipo money so he can cash out.
If you don’t mind my asking, what did you use to delete all your activity? Thinking of doing the same
Try PowerDeleteSuite on GitHub.
He responded to a whole 14 questions. Truly, a hard day’s work for the CEO of Reddit.
Don’t worry, the answers he gave were all pre-written anyway. Probably not by him!
He had a monocle measuring to get to
I don’t really want to delete my history, so I’m editing all my top comments to include:
>Edit 2023/06/10: Leaving Reddit due to /u/spez doubling down on API changes. Will keep post history for future visitors.
I doubt Reddit didn’t make backups of their databases anyways so this will let more people know what’s going on.
I get it, but leaving your data intact still drives traffic to the site. I hate that I’ll be wiping my account, but I’m not about to let reddit continue profiting off me while they’re so clearly uncaring of what the users want and care about.
You do you, but they don’t deserve your comments, your takes, any of it.
You know you can download your data before you delete it, right?
The problem is other people can’t find that data.
If Reddit doesn’t back down, I will likelky be shutting down my subreddit. But I’ll put it in read-only mode rather than killing it entirely, because there is useful information there and I don’t want to contribute to link rot.
Doesn’t Reddit deserve link rot at this point? And contrariwise, does Reddit deserve to capitalize on your work and the work of the members of your subreddit?
I wonder what your members might say if you put it to them?
Reddit does, but my fellow netizens do not. I’ve experienced way too much frustration running into dead links and deleted posts when hunting down old obscure information to willingly put that burden on others.
Would archiving it on the wayback machine or archive.is be feasible? Or is it just too much work?
"[…] recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.”
Well, Selig did wait with leaking that phone call until he felt like all the bridges had been more than burned from Reddit’s side and he officially did not want to do business with Reddit anymore, so I don’t think that will be an issue…
@Knusper And, more than that: it shows the typical modus operandi of the Shitty and Pissy Evil Zombie. When people don’t fall for his bullshit, he tries to divert attention into something else, an intrinsically disingenuous tactic. All of that with the implicit consent of the company as a whole.
And as a self-fulfilling prophecy this justifies the recording. If you’re going to deal with a company that should not be trusted, you need to protect yourself, and that is what Selig did.
You can’t fire me! I quit!
Kinda glad this happened. This is getting so much more PR than Spez could have anticipated. Former Apollo user here, loving the app on iOS & it’s pretty straightforward. Hope this gets more active and i think this might be my new home :)
