Steve Huffman, the Reddit CEO, told NBC News in an interview that a user protest on the site this week does not have wide support and is led by a minority of moderators.
If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said.
Someone get this man a hearing aid, because he's gone completely tone deaf.
History teacher here. I find it incredibly ironic that a guy whose entire livelihood depends on unpaid workers to generate profits for him while he sits on his porch drinking sweet tea comfortable desk chair describes those workers as the "landed gentry."
Maybe if they introduced this in good faith months ago people would think it's a good idea. They reason now is just power hungry admins trying to get their way. Fuck this guy so much.
Oh, they are gonna remove admins by having their own sub vote them out "democratically". I guess thats better PR than doing it themselves? Sounds like a feature that could easily be misused too, if they do it wrong.
With bigger subs, this strategy may actually work. A lot of Redditors just want to scroll, and they want their content. They don't care how it gets there.
Yeah I'm seeing that a lot. Floods of comments about how dumb the blackout was and that they just want to browse Reddit. I know r/SquaredCircle pledged to go dark indefinitely and there was a lot of outrage about it. I'll be very interested to see if it comes back as that was a sizeable subreddit
I've read that, at times in the past, Reddit has used bots or plants in comment threads to stear the conversation. It makes me wonder if any of that is happening now. I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but at this point I have very little trust in the Reddit staff.
Huffman said in an interview that he plans to institute rules changes that would allow Reddit users to vote out moderators who have overseen the protest, comparing them to a "landed gentry."
Wait, what? Huffman himself is "landed gentry"; moderators are among those who have to do the actual work.
Huffman said, however, that he’d like some form of revenue-sharing.
“I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” he said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”
Reddit is only going to get worse. I'm glad I jumped ship when I did.
a small % of the profits
But since Reddit isn't profitable, that means profits are actually negative and they'll have to pay. If they are profitable, no way there's any sort of profit sharing. At best, a discounted reddit t-shirt that they'll be warned against wearing in public due to the additional anti-user policies they'll be putting in place.
It would be interesting to see what happens if some of the 3rd-party devs that are being screwed over by spez make some lemmy/kbin apps that are superior to the reddit app.
If they say their biggest portion of revenue comes from the ads they serve on the official platform then why block the option for devs to serve ads and give the revenue or profit share from it.
Huffman makes no sense in any way, it’s like he’s playing volleyball with himself and arguing against his own points. Devs are wanting to pay for the api but they have been given an untenable timeline and outrageous costs.
Yep. It's not that Reddit is unusable in the official app, it's that it's a sign of more shit to come. I don't use other social media for a reason, Reddit doesn't have the command over my life that they think they do.
Reddit in particular has very little besides it's massive numbers to actually keep users on their platform. I don't use Twitter or Facebook anymore, but at least with those platforms there would be specific celebrity accounts or friends and family that would provide a reason to stay.
Because reddit was so focused on anonymity, you didn't need the "celebrity" accounts to move platforms to make the alternatives feel viable. Even with just a small portion of users moving here it feels completely natural.