Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: 'It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company'
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: 'It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company'
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.
Yeah, only naughty people would associate it with porn. /s
Is that why almost every subreddit shut down for 24 hours? Lol
who are not in touch with the greater Reddit community.
Reddit Inc?
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
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
NBC Is in on it as well. https://apple.news/ABf0fBhOISSS9Fe9vF1fLPw
Front page of huffpost https://www.huffpost.com/
Go to featured article DOWNVOTED: REDDIT CEO DIGS IN HEELS AS OUTRAGE ENGULFS WEBSITE
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.
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"
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.
I'm not sure seven is enough, honestly.
You know what's better than seven new assholes? Eight new assholes.
"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!
"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
An "adult company" wouldn't have their CEO go on an extemporaneous personal attack against a third party developer in the middle of a Q&A.
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.
Wow, 57MM daily visits? I wonder how many are legit and not bots, kind of like how Twitter was when Elon bought. Shows that the few hundred thousand that might have came to fediverse is not even a dent in the numbers. We'll see what happens after June 30th.
I wonder how much that will drop next month. I'm using RIF briefly every few days but once RIF (and all the others like it) are gone, I won't be looking at reddit at all. I'm guessing that there are quite a few others doing the same and using their favourite app to access then leaving once the app and all the other wonderful things being slain by this terrible decision is no longer available.
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.
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.
If nothing else it would spin-up their servers something awful, they'd probably need to implement something like cloudflare to stop the API calls by whatever bot service was used to delete everything--which would just advance their plan. They could just close the API early, and blame it on "bot abuse by angry mods".
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.
@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.
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.
Yeah I've been saying this all week, Reddit won't die here. But the product is different to what it used to be, and we all needed a push to go looking for that special thing that it used to be. Let the normies have their memes and clickbait who the fuck cares
Yeah, well, digg.com is technically still up, and I've visited it at least three times this decade, so I'm sure it's doing fine.
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.
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.
"It's time to enshitify."
The one admirable thing about reddit leadership is how transparent they have been about the enshittification of their product. Usually companies will do some perfunctory song and dance about how great the changes are and how much users will love them. Reddit has been pretty clear that the changes will negatively effect users and that they are doing it for the money.
Speaking of which, it's time he grows up and behaves like an adult, period. Huffman has the diplomatic skills of a toddler.
Time for a grown-up/adult CEO then...
FUCK HIM.
Adults don’t lie to developers (the API will never go away! Our pricing will be reasonable! You’ll have years to make changes!), accuse indie developers of blackmail (holy shit!), and ignore millions of users and mods asking for answers (14 questions on my AMA and then I’m out!).
The gaslighting was my line in the sand. That's not how you do business.
And he had the gall to call it "leaking a private conversation" after that. Lol
what's an adult company
PornHub?
Most "grown up" companies don't alienate a vast amount of their consumers. Greedy little dickholes have no problem fucking their userbase for a quick monetary boost. Spez is just a bitch who can see a payday, he is a shit founder who only pretends to be a CEO, fuck him and Reddit as a whole.
I mean, the very notion of "grown up" companies is a lie. Reading the article on the Instant Brands bankruptcy...
"Instant Brands was purchased by private equity firm Cornell Capital in 2017. While some of its products, such as Pyrex and CorningWare are long established brands — Pyrex is 108 years old, and CorningWare is 65 — Instant Pot was only launched in 2010. The company said that at least one of its products can be found in 90% of US homes"
Yet, they're filing for bankruptcy because some brainiac "disruptor" CEO is an idiot but other rich idiots gave him millions of dollars to turn it into a garbage fire.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/13/business/instant-brands-bankruptcy/index.html
We weren't their consumers. We were their product.
App creators weren't their consumers, either.
Advertisers are their consumers.