Reddit CEO Digs In Heels As User Outrage Engulfs Website
Reddit CEO Digs In Heels As User Outrage Engulfs Website
www.huffpost.com
Reddit CEO Digs In Heels As User Outrage Engulfs Website
Wow. Front page of huffpost.com right now. Interesting...
353 comments
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The fact that we're communicating from so many different websites blows my mind! Just a little extra thing that makes this platform even more fun for me :)
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Honestly, it might not be a great thing just yet. I feel like Lemmy is struggling under the influx, and honestly, it's just not ready usability wise. This was always going to be a mess at first, no question, but I'm worried it will get messy to the point Lemmy atarts cracking.
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I'm trying to help the Lemmy.world chat community take off. Come introduce yourself!
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When I first started using reddit over a decade ago it was pretty great. I didn't really stop to think what would happen if reddit started to act more like a corporation because I was having too much fun.
Now that time has come, and it's time to move on to a more free (as in freedom) and open system. It's immoral that all those years worth of human interaction (the howto's, cat videos, porn, niche topics etc) is "owned" by a corporation.
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“Protest and dissent is important,” Huffman said. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
Protest is important, just not against us.
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"This is a business decision, not like all those other times people protested companies."
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/c/Leopardsatemyface ?
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Someone may tell this guy that making (bad) business decisions is probably the #1 reason why businesses fail
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“Protest and dissent is important,” Huffman said. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
Honestly, my reply to this particular statement is that maybe Reddit should die!
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I'm not entirely sure that Steve Huffman understands how protests work. The whole point is you don't have control over them, friendo.
You can't just say but we made a business decision and expect people to just say welp guess we should give up, there's no overcoming business decisions.
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Bro has the personality of a turd and the charisma to match.
A good play might have been to buy it off Selig for a few million. But he's so fucking unlikable and put his foot in his mouth dozens of times at this point that the power users are unlikely to back down. Reddit will limp along and lose another 40%+ valuation over the next few months as spez plows through his community to try and squeeze as much money as he can from the corpse not realizing he's doing the opposite of what he needs to do.
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"Alright boys, you heard him. He said the magic word. Let's pack our things and get out of here."
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That's really the only thing left at this point.
If there's no negotiating, fuck it, burn it down. We built it, we can unmake it, and that bastard can build it back up himself if he's so damn set on making a profit of it.
He seems to think that the people want the shit that he and his dev team created. They don't. People want the content of the site. And all he is succeeding in doing here is shoving away a good deal of it
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Well put...
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That quote is fucking wild. spez, a man of the people, all for protesting except for this time because he's nOt NeGoTiAtInG. Lol k, same bud.
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"Your business decision is making people HATE you"
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At this point, it needs to.
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He's counter-protesting
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I’m old enough to have witnessed the early beginnings of the Internet in the 90s - and what’s happening now with the fediverse feels like coming back to its roots.
We may well find that the implosion of Twitter and Reddit - within 6 months of each other - is the beginning of the end for “big tech”. It’s unlikely that it will go away entirely but I do feel a seismic shift happening. I seriously hope that it’s not a false dawn.
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Not the end of big tech. You're likely posting from MacOS or Windows and using services like AWS, Azure, or GCP on the sites you use and abuse.
The end of centralized social media though? I hope so.
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Potentially a large stumble for “big social” I don’t think that the msft/goog/amzns of the world are going to feel this as long as they’re service oriented.. but anyone platform oriented is likely watching this closely. That said I don’t think that twitter is going to “end” anytime soon. But their one company domination over the microblogging space will certainly not be quite so absolute
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Someone will try to monetize the fediverse. They may not be successful, but they'll try.
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Oh 100%. The beauty is if they try in a way that is harmful to the fediverse at large they will get defederated in a heartbeat.
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There are probably plenty of ways to do it...but most of the ones I can think of involve catering services to users directly, which is fine with me.
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capitalism world we live in
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Not necessarily the end, but they're almost certainly going to be diminished for it, probably because the money is beginning to dry up, and the silicon Valley rush seems to be ending.
Everyone these days seems to be trying to invest in AI, rather than just blanket throwing money at new tech companies with the hope of them turning a profit later on.
Reddit and Twitter will probably still be around in some shape or form some years down the line, but they might just be relegated to the background in the same way that Digg is.
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Agreed. Big tech platforms make it easy for everyone to participate. But while we gained simplicity, we lost control and independence and creativity. Every website isn't supposed to look the same. And our expression and activity isn't supposed to just be grist for the data mill.
I remember fondly the days of early broadband, when tons of people would run a server on an old laptop for an IRC bot or a shoutcast stream or whatever. We need that back. I hear about people doing that with Lemmy instances and Matrix homeservers and the like and it makes my heart sing.
Twitter and reddit won't implode. But hopefully they keep all the users who just want to mindlessly scroll through low effort content and the smarter ones join the fediverse.
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Between Lemmy and Blue sky we might get back to a more decentralized social media again. Reddit and Twitter going the way of digg for these two would be a good thing.
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On the path to become synonymous with AOL
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But Huffman says the “pure infrastructure costs” of supporting these apps costs Reddit about $10 million each year.
Eh, so although, according to him, the third party apps cost Reddit 10 million per year, he still decided that 20 million a year from a single third party app developer is reasonable? I think he needs to learn some basic math...
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I don't think they seriously expected any third party apps to agree to the costs. They just wanted a plausible excuse to funnel everyone into their own app for data collection and advertising revenue. That's my best guess anyway, another business decision for the IPO.
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So bad the article did not put that number into context.
They're just presenting one-dimensional claims by the CEO. The overall infrastructure cost tells you nothing about gains or cost or losses due to API users.
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Oh well, here I am, glad to join this ship. I just want a reliable place I can further geek out on mechanical keyboards, memes and news. I hope we migrate somewhere cause reddit does not look like it has a bright future.
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Welcome! I'm super stoked to be here, too. And each day this community seems to grow stronger.
I agree that reddit's future looks weak. The API change was horrible. Spez's approach to the whole thing was even worse: condescending, disingenuous, and hostile.
And the more I think about it, the less I see any hope for reddit as a place I want to spend time. This isn't just one bad episode. Once the company goes public, there's going to be more shit like this. The site will slowly gut itself for perceived short-term gains, over and over again.
No thanks.
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the problem with shareholders is that they always and forever need to see a chart that's in a growing trend. That line is getting kind of stagnant there mate how you gonna please us? What makes this problematic is that there will be a finite number of users for this infinitely growing service, sooner or later growth will have to slow and this does NOT please the shareholder. Where are the gains bro? I was promised gains.
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Agreed. I have seen time and time again companies going public and turning I to a steaming pile of crap. I have no doubt the ads are going to get worse and they are going to continue to make bad decisions. It's all about exponential profit now.
One good thing about the blackout is it brought this place to my attention. Made quitting reddit so much easier.
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Do you know if old.reddit is going to be vanquished as well?
When I talked to my Discord group, they asked for a source. Ironically, I can't access the threads with all the logistical explanations of why old.reddit would be eliminated (because... they've gone private), and while yes, an official source/confirmation would actually give them cause to be angry (I totally get it - no one wants to think they can't use old.reddit any longer), it's frustrating to see they're not accepting it.
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Ooh is there a mechanical keyboards lemmy yet??
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Ooh is there a mechanical keyboards lemmy yet??
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One on lemmy.ml and one on kbin.social. But Lemmy's moderator labeled as "deleted by user" even though community is more active compared to one over kbin
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Fellow mk enjoyer
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click clack gang
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"...we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on."
Great, then I'm not negotiating when I say you're a shite CEO and I'm done with your crappy website.
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This whole debacle will end up being a MBA case study in a few years on how not to work with your user community.
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But i have a feeling it will probably show that it doesn't matter.
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Exactly. The effects are not going to be instant though. I still use Reddit everyday. But they have lost my trust. I am now actively looking for other places and other networks. Hopefully Lemmy ends up being the answer. If it does, then my use of Reddit will drop sharply in the next month or two. Who knows, maybe then reddits board of directors will realize that Spez just killed their golden goose.
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I still use Reddit everyday. But they have lost my trust. I am now actively looking for other places and other networks.
Same here. My reddit account is now only for a select few communities that haven't made much of a foothold in federated space yet here on Lemmy. But my reddit interaction is down, and I'm honestly considering deleting my account there given the total shitshow going on.
I don't think it's a place I want to go back to, especially given how hostile the place can be overall. Arguing is engagement. Lemmy has been a breath of fresh air in terms of civil and engaging discussion. It's actually like what reddit used to be over a decade ago.
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Huffman totally doesn't get that the conflict isn't about Reddit wanting to charge for API access. That in and of itself is fine.
It's how they're going about it, starting with "We're going to start charging you in a month, and just five months ago we said we weren't going to be charging anything for the foreseeable future," followed immediately by Huffman being a human-shaped turd very loudly at every chance.
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Even if they just came out and said "we don't want third party apps like Apollo anymore, we want one Reddit experience" it would have been at least honest. There would still be an uproar but not ugly like this.
Instead everything Steve has done has been duplicitous and in bad faith. Then he drops that memo and pokes the bear, does a couple rounds of interviews going "I'm so strong, mods are spoiled, I'm like daddy Elon, make me rich".
I genuinely don't know what he thinks he's going to get out of this. He should have just sat this out quietly and let subs go dark until they got bored and alternatives formed and the system fixed itself.
Side note: I've been disgusted watching redditors lick his boots and hate on the mods. In 13 years of using Reddit I only ever got banned from /r/conservative, so I don't get all these people complaining about power tripping mods. That got me to delete all my accounts.
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The part of the memo where Steve talks about wearing Reddit swag out on town really hit. Like, we love Reddit, but hate you, not your employees. Why would users want to harm Reddit employees?
I mean, it's not unfathomable, but it wasn't imperative to mention it as it only serves to stoke fear among his employees and tries to frame this as an "us against them" thing.
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I'm still bitter about a great post I made, which had a great discussion going, being removed on r/fitness for some obscure BS, just inane illogical reason. The mods in that sub were notoriously terrible, and is why there were a bunch of spinoff subs.
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Only outright corrupt mods I ever experienced wad Amos on the conspiracy sub, and the mod of r/pitbullhate.
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@softfrog I was a mod on Reddit for a bit. As far as bans go, permabans were rare. There were a few people, however, that I or another mod banned that would play this "I was just joking" or "all I said was x and they banned me" game, but we would use a mod tag on these people so we quickly remember why we banned them. And it's like dude, you told the dev who's promoting their game to kill themselves.
There are some shitty people out there, and mods have to clean up their shit (hopefully before anyone else sees) so the users have a good experience in our community.
Yeah, there are some bad mods out there too, but it's the ones that care that are going to have to work double time without these third party tools, and the site is going to lose some of those with this change.
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Explanation for the bootlicking: -some astroturfing accounts -lot of critical ppl already left reddit, and the compliant remained
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The mods for r/guitar were (are?) pretty bad. The guys at r/guitarcirclejerk made a sport of seeing how stupid a post they could post on r/guitar without getting banned. Of course, actual noobs with stupid noob questions sometimes ended up getting banned for trolling, so they'd end up at r/guitars asking wtf.
It was kinda funny, kinda tragic. Dunno if it's still there.
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I disagree. I keep seeing people saying this, but it is giving them far too much credit. It doesn't matter if the pricing was reasonable or if they had a good long time to prepare for it.
All of this talk about the pricing is completely irrelevant. What's relevant is the impetus behind it. This is just a weapon Reddit is using to kill 3rd party apps. That's it. That is what they want to do, that is what they are doing. Don't let that get confused in a bunch of talk about pricing and deadlines, it doesn't really have anything to do with what's happening here
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I remember reading a comment that said they half expected this to be a 'Door in the Face' technique (or a different one with a different name, can't recall) wherein Reddit was being a clever sales person by starting high and then going low, because the true goal was to just introduce a pricing plan to begin with. If they had just started with a pricing plan, there'd be pushback and they might have to rescind it, but if they started with something ridiculous and then walked it back/lowered it to something reasonable (their goal the entire time), they could save face and say "hey Reddit we heard you loud and clear and you're right!" and Reddit could go "We did it Reddit!" - I thought that seemed very plausible at the time.
Then I thought maybe it was just Hanlon's Razor. They were just being stupid. Turns out it was a little of both malice and stupidity.
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I genuinely think that ending up with a lower price as an appeasement was part of the initial plan. I think at some point, maybe too many people pointed that out for it to feel like a good plan anymore, or maybe spez started taking it personally and decided to take it off the table.
I'm about 50/50 now on whether they're just sticking to be being stupid/spiteful or if they've maybe just decided to remarket reddit completely as an LLM training model. If it's just a training model, who cares if the community isn't happy, that doesn't matter so much in the short term. They can prop up abandoned communities and limp along, hell even the corporate marketing & propaganda accounts talking amongst themselves might have enough value to keep things going until they IPO. Spez just has to make a plan to cash out ASAP.
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Anchoring Effect is the term you're looking for. Now we just wish it was actually that.
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He comes across like an entitled child who has made up his mind and is too stubborn to admit when he's wrong. Add onto that the fact that he bullies people with his lies and manipulation. Very much not an adult, let alone a CEO.
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it would have been SO easy for them to make their API changes the way that it's typically done - with ample warning time and semi-reasonable prices. the only obvious explanation is that they really don't want third party apps and this was their way to shut them down without saying it explicitly.
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Should be edited to say Diggs in Heels
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Congratulations, you win the fediverse 🏆 🤣
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"We've made a business decision we're not negotiating on" sounds an awful lot like "we don't negotiate with terrorists".
Is that what we are Steve-o? Reddit terrorists?
Fucker has lost everyone now, Digging the hell out of watching reddit fail because of mismanagement now. You don't double-down when you rely on your users to create your company.
What an idiot.
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There's a great post over on that other site, from Christian the Apollo dev., where Spez is literally talking about Christian trying to blackmail him/reddit.
Unfortunately for that sad man is that Christian is in Canada, and they have 1 party consent recording, so he's recorded every call he's had with reddit. This includes the call with Spez where this misunderstanding took place, and Christian included not only audio of said call, but a transcript of it as well.
It's a really bad look when you try to drag someone through the mud and are shown to be a complete idiot and liar...
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As a Canadian, this makes me really appreciate our one-party consent laws even more (I've never had to use them myself).
Spez really dug his own hole with this one. He thought he was gonna get away with murder and now everyone knows him for the piece of shit he really is.
They may still manage an IPO, but it's not going to be anywhere near as successful as it would've been if this had been handled properly. If they were concerned about Ad revenue, all they had to do was say that all 3rd party clients must serve ads to anyone who isn't paying for a reddit premium account on top of potential app payments or subscriptions. Easy peasy. Nobody would've batted an eye because we've come to accept ads as the cost of a free service.
The end of reddit may take longer than the end of digg, but the writing seems to be on the wall now.
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"... not going to change anything"
Yet look what happened to the fediverse. I wouldn't be here without his boneheaded move. So it already changed things for me and thousands more like me. I don't plan on going back.
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Yeah for me it was sort of good that this happened as I've been meaning to stop using reddit for a while. Was planning on using RSS readers for following news though, will have to get into that more.
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RSS-feeds are good for fiding content to post too :)
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Yup, that's why I'm here, I am curious if federated services will become the norm in the future though, even for bigger companies...
I know meta has announced a twitter-like that will use the ActivityPub protocol, which is a little concerning to me, but it could be a good thing if it brings more users to the fediverse, and if they open source anything.
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The blackout probably won't result in Reddit failing, but he has to realize that if he keeps this up, it's only going to take some aspiring programmers/designers some time to develop more Reddit alternatives, and when one of them becomes viable, down goes Reddit.
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That's the thing. Reddit will live on for quite some time, but enough damage has been done to position alternatives as the better choice.
I personally think it will be a combination of all these fediverse sites.Imagine having your own personal site connected to Lemmy, Kbin, and everyone else's personal sites.
It's pretty incredible.-
That does sound quite exciting when you put it that way. (Also yay, this is my first post!)
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I honestly don't think people need to sell Lemmy like this.
The vast majority of users are not going to care at all about the fediverse. They just want a site that works like Reddit, and lemmy will give that to them. Personally, I think that within the next year or so, one or two instances are going to become the predominant ones and eventually close themselves off from the rest to better control the content.
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I don't think 99.9% of people care about the extra depth of Lemmy, or anything else like this. In fact the extra layer of complexity makes me think nothing like Lemmy will replace Reddit because people don't want to put in the extra effort to learn about instances and federation.
I'll be shocked if any instance hits a million people in the next few years
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It seems to me that you've done the math...
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undefined> I personally think it will be a combination of all these fediverse sites.
Good point. I think that It'll be the combination of these things that'll hurt them the most...
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This situation won't kill reddit, but it is quite capable of killing reddit's supremacy.
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Oh, reddit's still going to be around for a long time, and I don't think reddit clones were and are any real threat to reddit (See Voat, or any of the crypto based reddit clones). However, Lemmy is different in that federation is a revolutionary change to the reddit format just as nested comments on reddit is a revolutionary change to traditional internet forums.
So, a likely scenario is that high effort content creators are going away first, leaving the average user who only notice the content getting worse and worse until they leave too, and the dreg will get more and more concentrated as more regular people leave, which lead to worse content, turning it into a death spiral.
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just as nested comments on reddit is a revolutionary change to traditional internet forums.
Uh, Reddit hardly created the idea of nested comments. You can go back to usenet or Prodigy/Compuserve in the 90s and find nested conversations. Slashdot did it, Daily Kos did it, shit, even the old school VN Boards did it.
Unless I misunderstand your point?
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Yep, it's going to be the new Facebook soon
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I think we're talking on it right now. The nerds and early adopters are already here. The community and open source technology will grow organically until we start drawing the attention of the masses because the experience is better. It's just going to take a few more years of enshitification, just like Digg.
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He's more concerned the investors are going to fire him.
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Reddit will go on, as Digg also did, this is not a fairy tale. But it will definitely suffer, I’m doubtful if even the IPO will happen (or what kind of valuation they could get)
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I'm hoping we'll soon need our own r/LeopardsAteMyFace just for this.
edit: typo
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I hear that! I love that it made the front page of a major news organization...
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Now Spez is sucking off Musk in the media talking about how Twitter's "cost cutting measures" were genius, firing most of your staff is never a genius move.
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Makes me wonder what morale is like for the employees at Reddit. Working for a CEO that admires Musk's takeover of Twitter would have me running for the door.
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Lol. Isn't that moron getting evicted? Yeah, "genius" my ass
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Landlords HATE this one weird trick!
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Twitter is still thriving? O_o
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Back channel asking Musk to buy Reddit for $40B
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I’m definitely not going to download the official reddit app, I’m done with it for good. Lemmy’s mobile website is good enough for now, hoping that the Apollo developer decides to make a Lemmy client eventually
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I also will never install the official reddit app. I'm trying to move away from reddit altogether for various reasons.
I created this account this morning and am writing this message on Jerboa (got it off fdroid). So far so good!
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In case you missed it: if you have Lemmy open in the browser, use the share button and Add to Home Screen. Feels and looks like an app that way.
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Haha yeah it’s supposed to but in my experience it feels and looks like a buggy webpage without a refresh button. I still have the shortcut on my home screen, I figure once server issues have been worked out then I won’t need the refresh button as often.
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Shit, let's go back to digg, why not? Is it still there?
checks digg.com
Oh shit, nevermind, here is good!
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Why not jerboa? Works decently well.. EDIT: nevermind, forgot it's not on iOS and mlem isn't great yet
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This, combined with some other news stories explicitly mentioning Lemmy as an alternative, is a very positive thing for the community here.
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Exactly. Lot of ppl are complaining, but I think this is going great, much better than I expected. Lemmy is great, scratches my reddit itch perfectly.
And let’s not forget that July 1st is still 2 weeks away, usage will further explode then, when ppl are actually forced to look for alternatives (instead of just doing it out of curiosity or principle)
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What good will outrage/protest do? It's time to migrate. Reddit was built by volunteers who can build it again. Lemmy seems like a good choice, but time will tell if it can be the next front page of the internet.
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But I don't want it to be the front-page of the internet. That turned out horrible.
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Because a company has control behind it, not the people
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Yes. We need to somehow convince reddit mods to create their community here and redirect the users here.
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I don't agree that communities need to migrate entirely. New platforms need time to naturally grow. If the user experience isn't good, then moving too many people too early will be bad in the long run.
Regardless, Reddit will continue to exist in some form for the forseeable future. It's not going to collapse in a matter of days. It might not ever collapse.
If places like Newgrounds, 4chan, 9gag, funnyjunk, etc. are still going then Reddit will keep chugging along for now. People will find there way here eventually.
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Lol, fuck spez. I've used reddit since 2011 but this debacle has been the last straw for me.
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2006 here. Bye,
FeliciaSpez.-
Class of 2008 checking in. I'll miss Reddit, but I won't miss Spez. Spez can eat a bag of dicks.
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Yeah. Shit is really going down on reddit right now. Spez is trying to paint this as "power hungry mods are closing down your favourite subs. Let admins control reddit more and we'll stop the power mods". Sadly, it really seems to be working for a lot of people. Classic tactic of the ruling class turning people against one another to distract while they fuck people over. Its like the iq of the average redditor dropped over night.
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Its like the iq of the average redditor dropped over night.
That'll happen when the oldest part of the userbase emigrates.
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Tons of shills and astroturfers too in every community, basically repeating the same talking points over and over. And then they've got doomgloomers who are trying to convince people that it's pointless. And now lately you have the most insidious assholes, the ones that tell moderators to "protest" by not moderating. That last one is hilarious because if you stop moderating a community, Reddit WILL give it to someone else or ban it.
Either way, this place is nice a cozy compared to Reddit, it's like in the old days. I'm loving it.
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Sadly, it really seems to be working for a lot of people.
Most of those people will realize in a few months.... the people posting content of value left, and came here.
And, reddit will become a cesspool like never seen before.
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Finally realized how to sign up for Lemmy. Federated ftw. Insurance against this kind of stupidity.
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This exactly. I've been a redditor on one account or another for over a decade. For a very long time, read it was 100% of my social media and online community time. That seemed safe because Reddit had always been run in a user-friendly manner.
But then somebody gave Spez a microphone and he managed to destroy 10+ years of community trust and good will in like 3 weeks. Every single thing he says doubles down, reiterates that he doesn't give a shit what the users want.So it's time to diversify. This right here is my very first post on Lemmy, never would have bothered with it if not for Spez. But now I am more carefully considering where I invest my time and discussion, and what networks I want to see grow.
With any luck, this decentralized stuff is going to be the answer to enshittification.
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Starting this comment a bit flamebatey: I think reddit will stay around and I'm very very grateful to u/spez for keeping his position in spite of all the opposition.
Because he single-handedly seeded lemmy and kbin with enough users to take these platforms out of a niche and make them viable.
Now in the future we wil still have reddit (with a lot worse moderation and a lot more annoying ads) but we suddenly also have an alternative.
Yes, the fediverse already was there before, but when I check out the old content I find it very hard to find something I'd have been interested in - which suddenly changed in the last few days.
It's like the musk twitter/mastodon. moment all over again. And with federation it at the same time more annoying and feels much more like the old world again, when individual people not huge companies would own the web.
(Btw this is my very first comment ever on lemmy, too - and it suddenly doesn't feel like it transfer ownership of my words to a corporate giant, anymore)
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Investers are gonna see yet another mindless man child ceo
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When you start to talk about share holders more than your users, then you know you are lost.
“I think every business has a duty to become profitable eventually — for our employees shareholders, for our investors shareholders and, one day as a public company, hopefully our user shareholders as well,” - quote from the article
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I wouldn't say "lost" per se, as they are a company in business to make money.
But when your site exists because of user input, because of user moderation (done for free), you're damn well not looking at the "big picture" when all you talk about is shareholders.
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Not every company has to exist to make money for somebody. Reddit didn't start that way. Remember when there was a little bar of "reddit gold paid this much for server hosting" - people wanted to give Reddit money.
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I feel like the reddit mods should come up with a "letter to the shareholders" and sticky it to the top of every major sub.
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It's crazy that he is probably the only one not seeing how bad he look like and how bad he is destroying reddit
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At this point I think he's immolating himself on purpose, and after the api changes are done a new saviour CEO will come, who won't reverse anything, but with a clean record.
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He doesn't see reddit as a community, he sees it as a way to make money. If he comes out of it with a profit, then that's a win even if reddit itself dies.
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Yeah, he doesn't cares about the communities. All he cares is the IPO.
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Nah, he doesn't care. Between how much he has now, and what he gets in the IPO, he has "fuck you" money now. He knows this is bad publicity, but it won't matter in the long run.
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In my opinion even if he changes his mind and tries to backtrack, the damage is done, for sure.
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Yeah. There's no backtracking now. The reputation is tainted.
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For us that are making the switch. Unfortunately too many fishes these days.
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What he didn't bank on is a lot of power users were already getting sick of wading through ads and dealing with mass idiocy. I mean, mass idiocy will move with the masses, you can't really get away from it. But add a power-hungry megalomaniac to the mix of an already irritated user base, and it's not pretty. Frankly, Reddit can keep the kind of users who are willing to stay there. Hopefully that will keep other communities cleaner.
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They've already shown their hand, so why should anyone trust them again even if they did backtrack? They've proven they don't care about us and are willing to go back on their words if it benefits them. I don't see any restoration of community faith in Reddit's administration.
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I'm not going back unless all this is undone and spez is removed, and rif comes back. But even then, but it won't be like before. I'll never participate like I did. I deleted rif on the 11th in anticipation of the shuttering.
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I love that he clearly thinks Reddit is too big to fail, which isn't true of anything, no matter how popular...
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Hmmm...I wish that were true. But I sincerely doubt reddit will fail entirely. It's going to pick itself up after this, no question. What matters is how valuable the site that remains will be when the dust settles.
Without the power user base and a good deal of the mods, when it's going to lose a good deal of its value. It will exist, sure. But I really don't think it's going to resemble what it was.
It's good news for spez, though. Just looking at the comments in a lot of posts recently, it definitely looks like the predominant voice is sycophants and corporate bootlickers that feel the need to defend a tech company that made money for years off the back of misinformation and hate. Lots of really tech illiterate people that probably couldn't tell you how to navigate a file tree expressing how they don't have a problem with the official app. Spez may actually go back to reading comments again (I guarantee the guy hasn't actually been reading them for years).
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The power user base is still there. 96+% of the site has effectively remained
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I love the fact that you've pointed this out. EVERYTHING can fail. That's humanity in a nutshell, and that's how it's supposed to be...
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Something about an "Unsinkable Ship" comes to mind.
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"Without Reddit’s volunteer moderators, the site could likely see less helpful content, and more spam, misinformation and hate.”
Enjoy the multiple requests for user data and histories regarding what I am sure will be an 80% spread of r/TheDonald. Like the various inquisitions of Twitter, so too will your lives be mired in government investigations. Have fun moderating 100k subs with no mods, and enjoy paddling up shit creek with your dumpster fire yacht.
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In the Verge interview, huffman said the api usage costs reddit $10 mio a year. So charging Christian alone double that seems just…greedy.
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10 for Reddit and 10 for himself
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“We can’t subsidize other people’s businesses,” Huffman said. “We didn’t ban third-party apps — we said, ‘You need to cover your costs.’”
Too bad the article author does not put this into context with counter-arguments. "Your cost" saying that's the cost is a wild claim. They supposedly set an arbitrary, high price.
“I think every business has a duty to become profitable eventually — for our employees shareholders, for our investors shareholders and, one day as a public company, hopefully our user shareholders as well,” said Huffman, who co-founded the site in 2005.
I'm not so sure every shareholder is necessarily looking primarily or only at money return. It's equally probable a shareholder may be a shareholder to support the platform - even if it operates at a loss - because it's a good or important platform.
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Capitalism unfortunately does not care about the investors there to support the platform. When 80% of stocks are held by the richest 10%, the market moves according to their desires. Money, money, and more money.
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Yeah, agreed, down with Chromium!
- sent from Vivaldi
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....wait
(Vivaldi user here too!)
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Wait - how come in Firefox, and not Chrome? (I say this as someone who primarily works using Chrome, as my workplace operates in the ice age and half the time Firefox acts stupid)
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he's referring to the fact that almost all browsers use chrome's rendering engine and google is abusing its position of leadership by making unnecessary api changes that make adblocking extensions all but impossible to implement.
if you want to still be able to block ads on the web in the years to come, switch to a non-chrome web browser to limit google's power and ability to abuse its position.
i think as of now, they have delayed the sabotage, but it's coming.
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Usually you can install/update Firefox (see Portable firefox)
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Chrome is proprietary software, so nobody can verify what it really does on your computer. Google also wants to kill adblockers.
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Not entirely sure what the commenter was referring to, but it might be about tracking (Firefox has great anti-tracking and privacy tech). The real money on the web comes from ads, and specifically targeted ads. Targeted ads require that advertisement companies like Facebook and Google track you and build a profile based on your activity. Companies like reddit make money by helping to build these profiles and by delivering ads.
If you can still be targeted by ads, the powers that be will continue to try and "make a buck" off the internet. If there is a market for targeted ads, it is likely that a service will be monetized for the sake of profit, which typically leads to situations like what we've seen with reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc... Privacy is essentially an ad-business killer in the modern web.
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I remember jumping from Firefox to Chrome because Firefox became so shitty for a while. It's sad because at the time I had Firefox so tuned, bookmarks perfect, theme perfect, but it was slow and ate up all resources. Chrome was "fast as fuck, boy!", but it took a while to get used to it and get it how it was perfect. I'm still trying to get Firefox to where it's perfect again, but it's slow going. I'm still about 75% Chrome and 25% Firefox.
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What's up with the headline formatting?
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Every time I see something like this, I'm reminded of the bathroom scene from fight Club. The listing more than the do not fuck with us part.
Not in the Dick swinging sense of it, but that hunting down and targeting the very people you rely on to function cannot end well.
Reddit has cops and criminals, doctors and fighters, manual labor and execs. Not everyone is going to resist, but the cross section of humanity that does is everywhere.
Spez should actually be very glad that project mayhem isn't a real thing. He could end up with his nuts sent press release style to a couple of news outlets. He's the fucking poster boy for the anti capitalist hate brigade at this point.
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It's really impressive how good he is at just annoying people for no visible gain. Even the stuff about how he's hanging out on Twitter, like, if this was a book you'd think it was too unbelievable.
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“Protest and dissent is important,” Huffman said. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
"we're not giving in" said everyone ever that gave in to protest later
We will see. It can still go many ways. With how big Reddit is they can certainly push through. We will see what impact that will have in the long term.
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The full interview published at The Verge gave a pretty good insight into Huffman’s inability to manage the situation. Comparing the way he talks about third parties and his “recollection” regarding Apollo to what the Apollo creator wrote, it’s completely worlds apart. It feels as if Huffman is in smash mode and piling on the lies.
(https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview)
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I mean it is pride month, let him dig in those heels! Silly wording aside, where the heck are Reddit's PR team and why hasn't the board put controls on Huffman at this point? Where are the adults in the room? Man this going to fill the minds of conspiracy theorists for a decade.
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Yea, I was just glad that it made the front page of a major news organization. It certainly can't hurt...
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His fat mouth got me to download a Chrome extension for the sole purpose of excluding Reddit from my search results. Even Pinterest didn't get me that far.
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I feel like I should thank him. Nothing has compelled me to break my reddit addiction more than this. RIF is still installed, many of my major subs are back, I could open it at any time. I've reflexively opened the app so many times in the last week just out of pure habit.
But every single time I open it on reflex, I immediately close it. I have not felt the compulsion to check Reddit for a week now and that's the first time that's happened in...I honestly can't remember. Maybe a decade.
30% of it is because I know the type of comments that are getting posted now, the type of crowd that is making up a good part of the active user base at the moment, and I have no real interest to read all of their corporate boot licking. But the other 70% is solidly because of spez. Spite is a compelling motivator to break a habit.
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Same. I have been using reddit less and less over the years, but still finding myself scrolling at least 10-15 minutes a day. This was the point I havent been on for several days now.
I have found some indexed results for technical searches that went to close/scuttled links which made me giggle and go "oh yeah" and move on.
I have noticed they started restoring comments on my accounts, which i regularly often clean.
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Wow. Body count!
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I think this is not the great IPO advertisement they were looking for...
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Missed opportunity. It should have been spelled: "Reddit CEO Diggs in heel ... "
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I found reddit when Digg imploded, and have now found Lemmy when reddit imploded. (No, I don't think that reddit is going to truly implode, just using an analogy…)
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There are thousands of bots that just scrape image sites for fresh memes and post them. That's all that some people want from reddit, and I think that's what they'll get. Spez wants reddit to be the new 9gag - no content, only memes.
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Reddit can DIAF.
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Well, that’s a great way to get investers. 😂 I read this article this morning, and it makes me sad.
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Diggs in heels, har har. ill see myself out
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Yea, I remember Digg and the fallout from that "upgrade." Deja-vu like a MF...
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F u/Spez
(That was missing from here.)
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Ha...diggs
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Reddit CEO Diggs in heels as outrage engulfs website
FTFY
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353 comments
Can I just say thank you to all of the journalists protesting against reddit with the tools they have available? Most articles I've seen are pro reddit community or barely neutral. Dozens of news sites are involved, from left and right news sites, to finance magazines, to explainers like Reuters and NPR. Multiple articles a day are keeping this at the forefront of everyone's mind - especially spez and potential investors - as well as ensuring the whole thing stays transparent. I've seen a few articles that link directly to lemmy and kbin signups too 😊
I agree. Honestly, I think these types of (front page!) articles are the only thing that CEOs pay attention to these days. I have no skin in the game anymore, since I deleted my (long-standing) account on Reddit and completely switched to Lemmy. However, it's nice to see people take a stand against greed and, from what I'm seeing in the last day or so, hypocrisy...
to me lemmy has taken a big dip in activity the last couple days, particularly in the more niche communities. hopefully it grows back over time, but I'm not that optimistic.
Get on squabble as well.
Everyone knows, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum, is that spez is a moron, and is doomed as CEO.
I might be a little bit cynical but I suspect at least some of them are only writing about it because Reddit was the source of all of their stories and they don't want to have to do actual journalism again...
Where will the gaming sites get their Skyrim article material now lmao
I really appreciate The Verge's coverage on this. I guess someone there really have an axe to grind on Spez or Reddit lol.
Traditional media outlets are not exactly in the friendliest of terms with social media platforms in the realm of disputing ad revenue.
That's an institutional attack from content producers against a platform. In the limit publishers could host their own lemmy instances.
Interesting and rare thing to see...
Ehh. I don't think that this is some elaborate strategic move coordinated from on-high at media companies in the space of a day or two. It's just a big, high-profile event to write a story about.