Wanking. Def Wanking.
[w/r/t API kerfuffle] In some ways, this makes sense: third-party apps let users skip ads, which hits Reddit’s bottom line. The pricing, however, seems steep. Why?
Well, the answer is AI. Basically, former Reddit board member Sam Altman, who departed in 2022, admitted his company, OpenAI, had trained on Reddit data. I find it difficult to believe that Huffman didn’t know OpenAI was training using Reddit’s data, particularly since Altman sat on Huffman’s board. Suddenly, Huffman is saying the API is very valuable, especially to buzzy AI companies that investors have lately had the hots for. This seems to position Reddit as being in the shovels business during the AI gold rush.
Friendly reminder that only reason 3rd party apps didn’t have reddits ads was that reddot never modofoed the api to push them, and cancelled the agreememt with the one app that was sending reddit add money…
Investing in the fediverse
Killing “the front page on the internet”.
Fuck u/spez
Shitting the bed, looks like to me.
Plot twist: Spez secretly invented Lemmy
Great question. The answer is making Reddit less good.
This is the guy that used to mod the “jailbait” sub right? Looks like a creep
Is spez wrong? The community is openly letting themselves get cucked. Look at how r/place has already given up on revolting and is instead working together to boost Reddit’s IPO value. The closed subreddit protests gave up. Nobody is caring about moderators being replaced. People are still going about the site like normal. So is spez really wrong that this was going to pass because the users clearly don’t care if they’re getting fucked, just like how people somehow still hang on to Twitter.
I mean… Twitter isn’t doing great now. This one controversy won’t sink Reddit, but it opened the door for competitors to grab a foothold. When the API issues were happening, people were scrambling for an alternative and there was nothing there. However, for the next Reddit controversy there will be a more mature Lemmy/kbin as an alternative with superior third party apps.
controversy won’t sink Reddit, but it opened the door for competitors to grab a foothold. When the API issues were happening, people were scrambling for an alternative and there was nothing there. However, for the next Reddit controversy there will be a more mature Lemmy/kbin as an alternative with superior third party apps.
Enshittification commencing…
Look where we are discussing that ex-platform. And that’s all that really matters.
There are still speciality communities there not mirrored here, but give it a few more years. My first Lemmy account is now 3+ years old. Let’s see where we are in 3 more years.
deleted by creator
He stands there, on top of a (reddit) building, screaming
“I’m Homelander. I Can Do Whatever I Want”
While um…“raining” down on those below him…
Reddit is going to become irrelevant shortly. How sad.
Quickly searched the article, no mention of Lemmy.
Hope we’ll get mentioned in a future article
They only mention discord 🙄
Which is not a Reddit replacement. It works fundamentally different.
I haven’t been able to post a comment on The Verge since the redesign. Huh.
Anyways: All of spez’s spedding can be explained easily enough: He is in IPO exit mode. He wants out of this business so he can go be a piece of shit.
He really thinks he can get the valuation on reddit. I’m here to tell him he’s delusional. The window came and went with the interest rates. An adjusted value with a new S-1 is going to be a serious write down on the real value and that’s when his days are numbered.
He basically upset 5% of the user base and even that small amount has done irreversible harm to reddit. Everyone knows he wants out. Everyone knows he’s fudging MDAUs. Everyone knows reddit has never been profitable. Was it worth it, you tumbling duckweed?
The horrifying thought of this whole ordeal is that, no matter how well or how poorly Reddit’s IPO goes, Spez still walks away from this thing as a millionaire. Golden parachutes and all.
I think it’s unlikely that the IPO will happen any time soon. Nobody wants to IPO while public sentiment is bad.
I think it’s possible Huffman will get booted before the IPO. I also think a lot of his bonuses are contingent on the IPO.
Like, he’s going to make bank no matter what… But if it’s any consolation, he’s probably going to fuck himself out of a significant amount of the potential total.
I honestly don’t think that he’s going to be forced out. To be blunt, the people who could force him out are likely the people who pushed for these changes in the first place. They wanted 3rd party apps to die so they could minimize costs caused by API usage, and force more users to the official app so they could put more eyeballs in front of ads while scraping more PII from users to sell. That mission has been fully accomplished. Literally all of the fallout–the protests, the decrease in content moderation due to less mods/worse mod tools, the decrease in content quality from power users leaving, the flood of “fuck /u/spez” on every comment thread, the stream of negative articles on the tech press, all of it–were literally not accounted for because they were considered to be externalities. Just as a chemical company doesn’t consider the effects of dumping waste into a nearby river, Reddit didn’t consider the effects of alienating the majority of the userbase that were responsible for making reddit what it was.
It’s probably not even 5%, but it was a part of the site that felt so strongly about their engagement that they preferred specific apps to use for that engagement. And we are seeing that evicting that small percentage had an huge effect on the quality of the place, providing the content that kept the rest engaged.
I know people who are casual Reddit users and don’t care at all about the API access. But they can see that Reddit has jumped the shark. Content is far less interesting to them, so they are spending less time there.
Also 5% of a userbase in the hundreds of millions is NOT a small number. And it’s not JUST them who are upset its their peers on the platform who would look at that and say “hmm that IS bullshit”
One of the weirder phenomena of the low interest rate era in tech was a tendency to see companies primarily as investments. The goal was not to have a functional business, but an exit, often via IPO or acquisition. I have begun to wonder if that explains what Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has been up to lately.
I can’t pretend to know what King Steven is thinking, but his proclamations have certainly driven me to the exit. Two months ago at this time I had no clue King Steven would banish me for preferring BaconReader over the app with his Royal Warrant.
