Disappointed that NPR didn’t elaborate more on how Huffman truly fucked over Christian Selig.
Huffman characterized the Reddit protesters as a small but vocal cadre of angry users who are not in touch with the greater Reddit community.
Yes! Yes!! YES!!! GASLIGHT ME HARDER, DADDY!
Ah, this is what an “adult company” means.
Do you reckon it’s innacurate? I’m not really sure. No one seemed thrilled about the plan that spoke about it there, but then if I didn’t know or care what any of this hoo ha was about I’d likely not comment or read anything on the matter.
The community shut downs are huge, but that decision is controlled by smaller groups who are the ones particularly affected by the proposed changes to how Reddit goes about things from now on.
It’s in his interests to promote what he’s saying as true, but I don’t know if it actually is untrue. Would be nice, I’d like to see them fall flat on their face with this but what he’s saying doesn’t sound all that implausible.
Dude is such a snake, god damn I hope he fucking loses this battle and crawls back to the hole he came from
I don’t even care what happens to spez or reddit any more. I came to the fediverse out of spite, but I stayed for the amazing community. Spez can do what he likes, this is my home now.
Precisely
It’s a small group that’s very upset, and there’s no way around that… Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site. He said “the vast majority” of moderators also do not rely on third-party apps.
But also…
“But the opportunity cost of not having those users on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant,”
So it’s a teeny tiny group. Basically insignificant. But it’s also such a large group that we can’t possibly NOT try and monetize them 🤡.
Right? The corporate double-speak just makes Huffman look like a moron.
I think he more than looks like one—he is one.
Says pedobear u/spez
Wasn’t he a mod of /r/jailbait?
Yeah, but that was when you could make someone else mod and they didn’t have to accept. One of the mods did that to him. Once he learned about he, he left the position and they pushed out a change shortly where you had to accept the mod position. People did it to troll others, specifically like that.
No mistake, no love lost on him, but he was a mod as a joke, and he removed himself when he was aware of it
I believe this, either way there’s enough other questionable content around Spez to criticize him, like how he said they wouldn’t remove Coronavirus misinformation despite all the largest subs wanting it removed, much like the current blackout.
“Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things,” Huffman said. “We are not in the business of giving that away for free.”
He believes he owns our voice. I’m just beyond disgusted.
Thank you spez for solidifying my opinion that I never want to return to reddit.
That’s why I’m deleting my account and taking my thousands of posts with me. I will create a new account to lurk in a couple of subs I like until there’s enough traffic here or elsewhere. I’m almost tempted to go into some of the more active forums and start posting ChatGPT generated garbage that seems superficially meaningful or relevant to start fucking with their idea to train AIs on Reddit posts.
Not a bad idea. I would love to do that, but a lot of my posts are to promote myself as an artist so, my plan is to promote my fediverse presence with my art if I ever do post again
“it’s time to grow up and be an adult company” he says, logging on to the site that’s mostly memes, anime, and pictures of people’s genitals.
Sure, they’re going to be an adult company now and turn all of those memes, anime and genital pics into sweet sweet ad money, just like a real megacorp!
Human beings talk about interesting things on Reddit. ‘We are not in the business of giving that away for free’
“But we are in the business of reselling the content that those human beings provide, without compensating them at all, or even considering any of their complaints about how we manage the site they speak on.”
Fuck this guy seven new assholes.
And, of course, there are the unpaid moderators. He doesn’t seem concerned at all that they’re “giving it away for free”. The experienced power-mods are the ones in the position to put a serious hurting on spez, and I hope they take the opportunity to do so.
They won’t. They’re drunk on imagined power and will do whatever the platform asks to keep it.
That’s exactly why 8000 subs closed to protest! Wait…
Yeah, I think the power trip of moderating some subreddit with millions of members is very seductive. Sadly, it seems very seductive to exactly the people I would not want moderating, but I’m sure ousting conscientious moderators for puppet dictators will alleviate this situation in the future of Reddit.
Right? RIGHT?!
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
I’m not sure seven is enough, honestly.
You know what’s better than seven new assholes? Eight new assholes.
That line stuck out at me. It’s bizarrely out of touch. What does Reddit actually produce itself? A shit-tier website (new) and an even shittier-tier app? Everything of value on the site was made by volunteers.
I guess this is the danger of being openly helpful on the internet. At any time your generosity could be snatched and monetized without even so much as a “fuck you, thank me”
Been reading Noam Chomsky, and the theme of democratic movements being quelled, one might say mysteriously, is a common global theme. Reddit was that social democracy for a time.
No, it wasn’t.
It is, and has always been, a feudal monarchy, if you want to define it’s political structure.
You and I are the peasants, above us are the moderators acting on behalf of the local Lord Subreddit Owner, which serve at the whim of The Monarchs of the corporation, with His Majesty the CEO only being rained in sliiiiightly by the clerics of the venture capital Church.
Please elaborate on how you see this in any way as a social democracy.
Time for a grown-up/adult CEO then…
Translation: “It’s time I cashed in with an IPO!”
Speaking of which, it’s time he grows up and behaves like an adult, period. Huffman has the diplomatic skills of a toddler.
Kinda sucks that whenever major news outlets cover a social media company, they only interview the people who own the company and nobody else involved. Like here, maybe it would’ve made sense to interview a mod or someone. The way major news outlets frame it, social media outlets are theme parks and the only people who work to make it function are the owners. Most users see them more as pseduo-government leaders, and when you think about it like that it makes a lot of sense to interview the people on the ground like they do in non-tech related news pieces.
please NEVER interview mods lol unless you want some new cringe entertainment like with the antiwork mod
Has been a while but that antiwork interview had some fishiness going on with it, ie an attempt to discredit the community/movement to the general public. At least from what I can recall about the details
I wouldn’t say to interview mods, unless they were directly in the centre of organising this, but they give almost no insight into what the broader reaction is outside of the comments of the CEO. They don’t bother to peer into a few subreddits and see what discussion is like, nor mention any decrease in users, etc.; they just restate Spez’s talking points as if he’s the only thing relevant.
The Verge has been doing especially good with this. They’ve been communicating directly with third party app developers for their side of the story, especially when spez decides to blatantly lie about something, as he’s been frequently doing lately. They even have links on their articles for where reddit employees can send any internal emails and memos they want to leak, lol.
This dude is such a fucking joke. All he wants is good little sheep who click on ads and buys their NFTs. Can’t wait till this crap blows up in his face.
Huffman characterized the Reddit protesters as a small but vocal cadre of angry users who are not in touch with the greater Reddit community.
Although I guess people on here don’t want to hear this, he’s right on that one. Price to pay with the normiefication of reddit. No more community. Only consumers.
Yes, but reddit is unique in the social media companies in that Twitter (pre-Elon) and facebook at least had to pay a shit ton of money to get people to moderate.
It’s basically “no one cares as long as the trains run on time.” In the extreme, I would bet that it’s single-digits of TikTok users that actually make content. Reddit is probably not even that far from that. This move, let’s piss off our unpaid moderators and the users that make all of our content, is going to effect even the normies.
Also a lot of the normies use those 3rd party apps that are going to cease to exist on June 30 and are not going to be happy with Reddit’s “official” substitute. For a lot of people the app is Reddit.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure that’s true. Have you looked at the numbers in the app stores?
The official reddit app on the google play store has over 100 million downloads.
RIF has only 5 million downloads. Boost, Sync, and Baconreader are all sitting around 1 million downloads each.
It looks like about 90% of mobile users are on the official app and won’t notice any change.The ‘normies’ don’t go beyond searching for the word “reddit” and installing the first thing that pops up.
I suppose if it’s truly that low then his claims of third-party apps allowing “free” browsing hurting their bottom line isn’t true. Honestly, they could have worked with third-party developers and forced them to implement ads in a non-subscription tier while allowing the API to operate with minimal cost to the developer. But they went into this “negotiation” in bad faith because they never wanted to continue allowing third-party apps anyway. They wanted to kill them entirely. The problem is Reddit is scarce on offering mod tools and incorporating a lot of features people could get in other apps. Hell, the few things they have added over the years are garbage. The video player is pure trash. They implemented photo hosting because they wanted to undercut imgur which just adds to their own server and bandwidth cost. And in the end they rely entirely on users to deliver content.
Also, his claims are probably off where he says 97% do not use a third-party app to browse the site. I’d say that’s because the vast majority are browsing on a PC. Anything he says can’t be trusted anyway because he’s been caught lying. The truth is you are the product, and the real money is in selling your data to third parties.
Honestly Reddit is one of the few things where I wouldn’t have minded paying a $5-$7 monthly subscription. When looking at how much hours and how much entertainment I got there, it’s a better value proposition than half the streaming services I subscribe to.
Very sad, but also very true.
@BlueForestDev The issue that they realize but are not saying out loud, is that small but vocal group is the glue that is holding Reddit together.
I don’t think so. For some individual subs this might be true (like apolloapp lol), but reddit has gotten too big to fail like this. IF they fail it will be a slow decline and not at all like Digg.
Wouldn’t be shocked by this. Twitter is / was this way. A small percentage of the userbase was responsible for most of the high quality content that drove engagement. Even before Musk’s buyout, the leadership was concerned that this group was leaving in numbers and not coming back.
Quality matters, and Twitter was (rightly) concerned that they were losing their quality posters. I think there’s a real chance of that happening to Reddit too.
what’s an adult company
PornHub?
I’m curious if the mods of these indefinite blackout subs could purge the subreddit of all posts and comments before they get taken over. Sure, Reddit can probably undo that with time, but it costs man hours.
