Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout “will pass”
Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout “will pass”
“We absolutely must ship what we said we would.”
Dude this article gives me work PTSD. I hate working for CEOs and stupid fucking managers. Open source forever.
r/programmerhumour announced they would go privately indefinitely cause of this. Here's hoping a lot more subreddits join in, and hoping u/spez regrets every dumb decision he's made in the pasts few months.
I never understood why they decided to come back Wednesday to begin with. Protests don’t work when you schedule an end date.
It's a lower barrier to entry. It's much easier to get people/subreddit to join the protest if they know it's limited in time.
Then once they started the protest it's easier to extend it indefinitely.
Exactly. It’s like saying you’re going to go on strike for two days and then come back. Like, the employer will just feel more validated in their actions if you do that.
Fuck that bad luck Brian looking ass bitch.
That said, the more stupid shit he does, the more people find out about lemmy. Lessssgooooooo
Digging in their heels like this just convinces me that I made the right decision as soon as Christian Selig went public with his post. This goes way deeper than just them not listening to moderators and app developers. The CEO of Reddit is willing to kill the platform if we don't get in line—fuck spez. I hope reddit dies a thousand deaths a day as people migrate to the fediverse that fits them best.
Not wholly sure that spez self-reflects on anything enough to have regrets. Seems a bit to egotistical for that kinda thing frankly.
Did he just try to make it sound like Reddit employees are victims of hate crimes?? LMAO
I have to imagine he thinks people hate Reddit for some irrational unfathomable reasons, rather than just him and the other executives for their actual behavior.
Like he and corrupt CEOs always do make themselves the victim. Lol
“There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well,” the memo reads. “We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.”
In other words, the blackout is not being taken that seriously. The culling of 3rd party apps is still happening. I hope more subreddits decide to go dark indefinitely, and that Redditors keep migrating to Lemmy.
Dude called it noise, lol. Feudalist vibes.
The culling of 3rd party apps was the goal from the beginning of this saga.
We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.
There’s your answer on how it’s affecting reddit. May be it’s spez just blushing, but I hope this is a wake up call for the two day blackout subs and they do it indefinitely.
Idk how this is possible either, almost every sub I subscribe to is black, why would that not impact rev?
Two days isn't significant enough to register as a real change. Especially since I assume most advertisers have ongoing contracts based on longer periods.
If you want to see an actual revenue impact, the blackout has to go long enough that advertisers have time to start scaling back or even withdrawing from the platform.
If everyone who's not using reddit was already using a 3P ad free app, it's possible they're saving money on bandwidth while still serving the same number of ads
This is a good thermometer reading. I'm pretty sure many communities are prepared to extend this indefinitely if current plans aren't reverted. I do believe him when he says
We absolutely must ship what we said we would.
I don't know who the angry VCs are who get to pull his strings but if this gets their attention - it may or it may not - reddit might budge on things a bit.
At the end of the day the company is hopeless to make a profit with him at the helm. This memo sounds slightly nervous and lacks confidence. He has no clue what he's doing.
It needs to affect revenue. To do that it needs to last.
Yeah last time an executive told me that it didn’t happen and he got fired within 2 years
Same. Angry VC money is a demon that's not worth summoning.
My desire to open Reddit compulsively "will pass" too.
Just replace a drug by another one. Just like e-cigarette is used to replace the old product. Maybe you just need to inhale more Lemmy to change your addiction (and good news Lemmy is healthier) XD
I deleted the app and removed it from my browser home screen. I noticed I was still habitually clicking on the icon when I opened Firefox.
While he's probably right, the blackout is giving Reddit users the chance to return to old sources of news and entertainment, or encouraging them to try new communities like Lemmy. Ideally the blackouts continue, but I think the biggest threat to Reddit is a long-game when other alternatives become viable.
I’ve been using beehaw, but more important Feedly (RSS) because:
I can subscribe to YouTube channels, Reddit/Lemmy communities, and independent websites. That’s all my stuff in one place!
It’s algorithmically ranked, but I control the algorithm.
I can get to “inbox zero” and don’t re-see stuff I already read. No more doom scrolling.
I've love rss. I'm using feeder. I've ditched a lot of the things I use to go on like Twitter and Reddit. I'm mostly on discord, but that's dwindling.
Won’t pass for me. I’d rather quit social media entirely than be inundated with nfts, ads, and shitty UI. I’d pay a premium happily to not have to deal with that. But that’s not an option.
I’ll support whatever alternative seems best as long as it seems worthwhile. I like it here so far. Hope y’all stay and keep posting.
Oh! So, Spez is asking for more? Ok then.
Reddit black out needs to keep going. Reddit communities should move to Lemmy or kbin. All reddit communities are self moderated by the people who love their selective communities.
There is no need to scum to a company that cares more about making a buck than to the people that make reddit, reddit.
Lemmy is the new reddit.
Still hoping all the mobile developers come together and make a competitor. I like Lemmy but hard to beat how Reddit is structured and the size of the communities is an advantage. Also wouldn't mind seeing Reddit's public offering be a disaster.
https://github.com/derivator/tafkars/tree/main/tafkars-lemmy
^^this is what you're looking for!
Not sure if you typically browse on mobile and have an Android, by I'm using an app called Jerboa that has a very similar feel to some of the 3rd party Reddit apps. So far, so good 👍
Yes Christian should take apollos code and make it fediverse ASAP
He does not seem interested at the moment
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759180/reddit-protest-private-apollo-christian-selig-subreddit
NP: I think that we are in an absolute moment of change for what you might call the Web 2.0 era. Have you thought about “I’m just going to take my users and go build a Reddit for ActivityPub”?
DP: Even more specifically, one thing a lot of users have been saying is, “We’re leaving Reddit; we’re gonna go to Lemmy and Kbin!” Those are the two that I keep hearing about. Is there a move that way that you think is real, that you might want to be part of?
Apollo dev: It’s tricky because, to a certain extent, that does sound really interesting. But with Mastodon, for instance, I love it, but I’ve seen so many people — even in the tech community, who totally have the means to make that move if they want to — who have just been too intimidated or just can’t get off Twitter for some reason. In the back of my head, I’m like, if these people who are much smarter than me can’t make that change, is this just like a short-term thing?
It’s hard for me to build another thing. If it just evaporated again, it would be like a double breakup. This has been so exhausting for the last few months. The amount of work it would take to port all the API endpoints over to Lemmy or Kbin or something, that would be a gargantuan amount of work that I’m not sure I have the capacity for. And then just the complexity of making it work. Long term, it’s a big question mark for me that, at this stage, I’m not sure I’m totally interested in pursuing. But it’s also one of those things where I completely wish it the best. And if something that was decentralized kind of became the norm, I think that would definitely be a win for everybody.
Unbelievable how out of touch they are with the community.
I can't find words... what a dick.
That's exactly how I feel about it as well. It's not just that these guys are cartoonishly evil, they are also cartoonishly incompetent.
I have a feeling most of corporate is run by Wily E Coyote.
“I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public,”
People wear Reddit gear? In public?! :D
Now that is giving me work PTSD of super duper hip and fresh company gear we were given and encouraged to wear aaaaughhhhhhhh.
Goes without saying the CEO really fucked this whole situation. I never would have sought out an alternative to Reddit if he hadn't decided to start all this API nonsense. But hey, in a way I'm glad he did. I never would have found lemmy otherwise. As a fan of open source material myself, I'd rather be here anyway.
Never commented much on Reddit, but I plan to be active here as much as possible. I want to see this community grow!
unfortunately yes the blackout will eventually pass ... right now i think the only question is at what cost to reddit?
curious what the zeitgeist would be if the vc or fidelity made soez step down, which replaces him and to what net effect?
seeing his credibility is completely shot publicly, is this at all worthy of putting on the table?
Tone deaf I see
so will Reddit
Wow the goddamn arrogance
This doesn't surprise me, during the whole process they didn't even try to pretend that they were listening.
The thing that really gets me is how poorly they communicated: slandering the Apollo dev, ignoring mod's concerns, lying, not giving enough notice, and having the audacity to hold an "AMA" but answer basically none of the questions.
Like if you're going to go through with this change at the bear minimum you could be professional about it. But they way they did it was very arrogant and impatient.
Looking at the Blackout Tracker it seems a few subs have folded early - r/adviceanimals and r/travel being the largest. Also the news subs and random ones like r/movies or r/photoshopbattles never joined in - were they not on board of their own choice, or controlled from on high?