“They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” Mir says. “The content of the users is what makes the platform worth visiting. These hosts kind of run into this confusion that their hosting is the reason people are going there, but it’s really for the other users on the medium.”
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If it wasn’t hurting them they wouldn’t be doing damage control.
- Spez wouldn’t be doing (awful) interviews (going so far as to praise Elon Musk)
- They wouldn’t be publishing whitewashed versions of history
- They wouldn’t be changing the rules to silence dissent
- They wouldn’t be plotting to overthrow protesting mods to install compliant ones
- They wouldn’t be lying about trying to work with devs
- They wouldn’t be preventing people from deleting their old comments/posts
- They wouldn’t be forcing subreddits to reopen
- They wouldn’t be advertising on Facebook for new advertisers
- They wouldn’t be trying to smear Apollo’s developer
- They wouldn’t be posting propaganda notices on new reddit’s homepage
- They wouldn’t be censoring discussion about alternatives like Lemmy and kbin
It’s working, keep it up.
It’s seriously hilarious that the “damage control” has been more damaging than the blackout itself
Definitely I would have gone back if not for the complete and total disrespect spez has shown towards the community
Honestly I think every time spez says something stupid it convinces another wave of Redditors to check out Lemmy
The exit didn’t start with the API announcement, just gained steam. What’s truly baffling is that Reddit seems to want data on where users’ final straw is.
Who knew the best “celebrity” endorsement for the fediverse comes from the CEO of Reddit…
Ironically, if Reddit has been up front and said they were killing third party apps, and kept their mouths shut they would have faired better. For a stupid play like this, speaking only makes it worse. This is going to be taught in business school on how to kill a business.
That’s in the same vein as “it’s not the crime it’s the cover-up”
Haha yeah well I didn’t say they were doing a good job of it!
“Damaging, controlling” behavior.
There’s a term for that. The Streisand Effect, I think.
They wouldn’t be lying about trying to work with devs
Its fascinating watching him keep digging. He bullshits, gets caught out, so he bullshits about a different dev. Rinse. Repeat.
Thanks I’ve been trying to fill in those claims with links so this one is great :)
They wouldn’t be posting propaganda notices on new reddit’s homepage
I want to know more about this, i haven’t heard of this yet.
This appears at the top of the page until you dismiss it (at least for me): https://i.imgur.com/Uo3t2TI.jpg
Here’s what it links to: https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309
Yesterday they were linking to some much more blatant propaganda/history whitewash, here’s the link: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/apifacts
I got a bunch of that propaganda the other day even when signing in on old.reddit.
I like how it says their “updated” API rate limits but doesn’t mention when those rules went into effect or how much warning they gave developers.
Spoiler: the answers are “very recently” and “not even a month”.
I’m so glad that me deleting my account made them mad, I’m so glad it hurt them
I haven’t been to Reddit for a few days and they did these stuff already? Let’s keep this up.
funny how the article does not mention lemmy or kbin, but put in disclosure that their parent company have stakes in reddit. And the best the author can do is
If users have invested significant time in a community, it’s going to be a pain to find something amid the sea of federated upstarts that all claim to be the next best thing.
The mentioned article by Rory Mir actually mentioned lemmy and kbin, cause it’s EFF. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/what-reddit-got-wrong
Mir offers another business metaphor for the tension on Reddit: “If you have a really good music venue, but you break relations with every notable artist, you’re not going to be a very successful venue. You need to really prioritize the needs of the folks providing the value on your platform.”
Brilliant. Reddit looks out at a crowd of people at a packed show and says “ok we could lose 5%”. But those are the ones who return another night as musicians. And you cant run a music venue long term with open mic 7 nights per week.
Plus, you shut down the pipeline. No one’s going to make the jump from the other 95% if the content sucks.
Plus they dont want to pay bouncers so the number of assholes is going to keep creeping up
What really did it for me was Huffman’s quote on how “Reddit users, communities, and discussions are one of the largest data sets that cannot be given away for free” (summarized quote).
The rumored IPO made an entire corporation do a 180 so ruthlessly and clumsily in a way that I have never seen. It’s destroying itself and rightfully so.
I honestly can’t believe he’s being so egotistical about it. Insults mods as “landed gentry” and users’ concerns as “noise” - those are literally the people that have created this “valuable dataset” he’s coveting so greedily.
That’s why I nuked all my posts and edited every one of my comments to point to kbin / lemmy before deleting my account. They may revert my changes, but I at least wanted to try to prevent them from benefiting from me in any way.
Except that it already has been. They’ve already scraped it, and can refer back to either the archives, or just scrape Reddit like they do with other websites if they want to pull more information.
They didn’t pay before, why would they bother paying now? Worst case is that they just exclude Reddit (like they did Twitter), and train from other sites instead. It’s no great loss.
Fidelity dropping reddit’s valuation by ~40% made me go “oh boy that’s bad news” when I saw it at the start of the month.
Imagine thinking you’re cashing out at 10 billion and now you’re only getting 6. The horror.
Imagine you’re an employee thinking you’re going to have stock worth 100k, and suddenly it’s worth 60k and falling.
Damn if that’s the amounts they’re actually talking about, I don’t know how much I would care as an employee.
My former employer introduced stock options last year in an effort to entice people into staying. This in the middle of multiple rounds of layoffs, real-wage paycuts, a 100% return-to-office mandate, and other shitty behaviours that had morale at an all-time low. That “incentive” to stick around amounted to…about $2k. Maturing after 2 years. Suffice it to say, that was not sufficient to get people to stick around, and by the time I left over 50% of the years of experience in my department had already left.
Sure, that is pretty crappy. But I liken that to employees who build their budgets and personal financing around bonuses. Nice to have, but not a guarantee and wrong thing to assume you’ll get them. Always assume equity will be zero, IPOs benefit C-levels and investors heavily.
I can’t find much on reddit’s equity offerings for employees but I imagine it’s, at best, a pittance. Their other benefits are top notch though. No wonder they “don’t turn a profit”.
I agree with you. My point was that 40% is a big hit, especially if you’re not already wealthy. It might even be enough to start disgruntling workers.
I’m thinking that’s why that memo got leaked, there’s already dissension among the ranks. I’m sure he’s absolutely livid like his idol Mr Musk.
I want it to hurt them. I want it to fail. But I fear they’re doing this now because they’ve run the numbers and are pretty sure the vocal minority that will leave permanently won’t be noticed in a month.
Look, I am happy as long as there are enough people on lemmy and kbin to have a fun website here. I can go and visit reddit now and then to see what kind of stuff they’re upvoting, that’s not a problem. But I want the potentially better alternatives to grow.
That’s the spirit. We don’t need to complete obliterate reddit to make it the better alternatives viable. We just need to get a minimal mass of people here to keep momentum growing.
I keep thinking of Taleb’s essay where he talks about how effective a intolerant minority can be on affecting change in general behavior.
Brilliant. Thank you for posting that.
I just downloaded the whole book; I’m not really interested in the markets, so I’ve been avoiding Taleb, but that essay has made me rethink that.
Exactly. Reddit itself should be a case study. Lemmy and Kbin offer an opportunity to build something great and learn from what made current Reddit (the good and the terrible) what it is and some things to avoid.
The only real problem with Reddit is Reddit Inc.
You’re right, Lemmy/etc represent a great opportunity for the users and mods to regain control over the communities they build.
Well, two things about that. In their interviews, Huffman says this decision making is based on Elon Musk at Twitter. I think this implies that Huffman is not basing this on numbers but on ideology and an example set by Musk. It’s simply “If I’m a rich tech bro and a richer tech bro does x, I can become a richer tech bro by copying them!”
Secondly, they can crunch the numbers, it doesn’t mean they are right, or that they are not subject to change in unexpected ways. Digg V4 was also a calculated decision, but they greviously miscalculated.
I doubt anyone on the Reddit payroll tells spez the unvarnished truth right now. Musk’s employees infamously curate their interactions with him. I read somewhere about one (I want to say working in info-sec for Tesla) who kept an extra monitor with a Matrix style scroll of bullshit because it matched Musk’s perception of what a busy person in that field should have up.
It also came out that Musk’s businesses have a Musk disaster mitigation team that reverses his bad decisions, and “guide” him. But Twitter didn’t have that, so that is why his reign has been so disastrous.
Yeah that’s why things are so bad at Twitter. Musk’s other companies have that team in place and a culture that can onboard new people in how to work in managing Elon. Twitter didn’t have any of that social infrastructure in place, so it wasn’t able to withstand his onslaught.
To be fair, there was a viable and easy to use alternative (Reddit). And the community was largely tech savvy.
Today there are more computer users, so the average tech literacy is higher, but the tech literacy of the average computer user is lower. People want slick, easy to use, centralised solutions.
I’m not too concerned about this though. I think realistically the fediverse could achieve a critical mass to keep it going, but won’t be too large that it becomes just a bunch of noise (like Reddit).
There are fewer computer users, when you look at it by proportion of the population, since most people who aren’t into PC gaming, programming, video editing and similar have switched to just using phones and tablets.
That said, there are still plenty enough people to keep the fediverse going, and frankly I don’t think it needs to be nearly as unintuitive to the average user as it is. That’s a design problem.
Granted, I’ve thought the same of Linux for ages. It could be as intuitive and user friendly as windows… Except the people who create it are largely nerds who cater to themselves and fellow nerds, and who even take pride in using a relatively inaccessible system, which results in both the absence of basic features (like no color blind mode! In 2023! C’mon) and forums that are mean and condescending to anyone who asks a question (not everyone is like this, of course - there are people who genuinely try to help others get into Linux - but there are enough other people doing the opposite that it’s very unpleasant to deal with as a newbie.)
All of which is to say, whether the fediverse can become mainstream or not depends on whether it can overcome its own nerd culture and prioritize ease of use. I hope it will, but Linux hasn’t yet, even after all these years (although it is a little better, arguably, at least). We’ll see I guess.
I switched to Linux this year for three reasons: I hit my limit on sales-pitch notifications from Microsoft, I learned about Proton in Steam, and I finally accepted that I don’t really use Creative Suite anymore. At this point, it’s faster and easier to install Ubuntu than Windows assuming drivers aren’t an issue, which you learn at the beginning of the process with live media.
I agree it needs to be more intuitive, however, I would argue that Linux is far more intuitive than it used to be. Still, people didn’t switch.
Another driving force is that people don’t like change, and people use whatever others use. TikTok bought another company just to get their userbase, it’s that important.
The fediverse is fighting an uphill battle. You’d have to provide a platform that is far more intuitive and engaging than the competition, while relying on volunteer labour.
People switch behavior patterns for a reason. It doesn’t matter how good or bad either option is, most people won’t even be aware that switching to something else is an option until whatever they are currently doing fails to meet their needs in some way.
We just saw this play out with Kbin and Lemmy. It wasn’t something inherent about them that suddenly increased the userbase. It was an external event. The Fediverse just happened to exist already, but if Huffman hadn’t gone on an ego trip then they probably would have stayed very small things for the forseeable future no matter how good the experience was.
Presumably Twitter also crunched the numbers
Twitter is responding to official inquiries from authorities with poop emojis. The people running numbers have been fired.
Regular users don’t care about the mod drama. The real backlash will start on July 1st when all the apps stop working.
I hope the real thing is more just stop doing their volunteer work. I hope spam and bots run amok, NSFW gets posted everywhere, reports to unanswered and people devolve into screaming matches.
I think that is true that most people will not leave reddit. I’m in a subreddit called redditalternatives, and lately not many people are posting in it anymore. It definitely feels like a niche thing, but I think it’s okay. Reddit won’t last forever, and in the meantime, we can be seeing if fediverse is the way forward. This isn’t the first time reddit screwed up and it won’t be the last.
They’re also I think trying to become like tiktok and give lots of forever scrollable content, but I think tiktok/youtube shorts already fill that niche
I’m in a subreddit called redditalternatives, and lately not many people are posting in it anymore.
I imagine that’s because they all jumped ship already.
The Lemmy and Lemmymigration subs have like 2k users, which also didn’t really change over the last few days. If that is anything to go by I don’t expect a digg like exodus anytime soon.
When the “vocal minority” are the ones providing quality content and weeding out the crap (i.e. power users and mods), it will take its toll. That minority is critical for making the whole thing work.
I think it’s fine. If Reddits All page is anything to go by, I won’t miss it.
That’s been my attitude to this since it started to ramp up.
The top brass at Reddit know that ultimately all of this will die down, and while they might lose some value in the short term, the long term will see them bounce back enough to make some coin on the IPO. Then they’ll sail off into the sunset aboard expensive mega yachts, and never think about Reddit again.
It boggles my mind that I read this sentence near the end of the article:
“Force everyone to interact on one app, and it’s easier to fill their feeds with whatever advertising you want.”
This isn’t a quote from an expert, these are the actual words of the author of the article. “fill their needs… with advertising.”
Nobody has “advertising needs.” It shows how fucked-up the internet has become when a journalist writes something like this unironically, without even attempting to explain themselves. They just assume everyone believes they have advertising needs. Unreal.
This isn’t a quote from an expert, these are the actual words of the author of the article. “fill their needs… with advertising.”
Feeds not needs. You even wrote that when you quoted the author.
That says fill their feeds, no? Not needs?
You might wanna reread that quote
Glad it is doing something.
Lol I love this shrew, my friends and I loved this video in high school
TAKE A CLOSER LOOK AT THAT SNOUT!
UNTAMED
For Reddit, it is not even specific people. It is people interested in a topic. So easy to go elsewhere.
