Reddit to lay off about 5% of workforce
Reddit to lay off about 5% of workforce
www.livemint.com
Reddit to lay off about 5% of workforce: Report
110 comments
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It feels weird to want history to repeat itself, but I'm really hoping Reddit has to deal with the ironic situation of users migrating from the platform en masse due to awful management decisions.
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I've said it (with a different wording) on some post on reddit, I'm saying it again here: I want history to repeat itself. Not because I have a sadistic need to see reddit fail, but because this will ultimately be better for the users.
All of these protests are a nice sentiment, but I can't help but think the take I've read from some people is right: this is all a "door in the face" technique from Reddit to get people to accept a more reasonable compromise on pricing that they were going for all along, but without taking as much of a PR hit. So people will be relatively happy, and meanwhile reddit will have squeezed redditors just a little more, as they have been doing little by little in the last years. It's a boiling frog scenario.
So this protest may well "reverse" this specific situation, but it won't reverse the general trend on governance on Reddit that has been slowly going on for a few years already, mostly around the time that Victoria got canned.
So, to that end, I really want to stop using reddit regardless of the outcome of this debacle. Lemmy seems promising, although it does have its own set of problems. But it's still on its infancy, I'm sure it'll grow and at least some of these problems will be fixed.
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I don't want to sound like an elitist, but I guess I will regardless: the most important number of people simply don't care.
I think it's safe to say that the people who will be affected by the new API pricing and other decisions, as well as the people who want to protest at least some of it at least somehow (be it boycotting for a few days or migrating to fediverse in any capacity) are simply not the demographic that the Reddit board really cares about. Not necessarily because they're evil, anti-privacy, Machiavellian moneybags (they still are), but because Reddit is a business, a big one, and big businesses care about money more than anything else.
I'm not really optimistic about the boycott and any other aftermath. I think the best we'll see is influx of users on lemmy and other instances, which is good, but that's about it, and I'm fine with it.
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What would they be migrating to? Neither Lemmy nor Tildes seems to want to take on a mass exodus. Both have said they are not Reddit replacements and they don’t want to be either. I’ve been trying to figure out where people are actually headed to. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, outside?
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Hard to say. I used "hoping" because I still have an irking feeling that this won't ultimately result in much change. I think a small amount of reddit's base will be upset and may migrate to a different platform (like lemmy, beehaw, kbin, etc.), but the vast majority of reddit's base won't actually understand or care about these changes. The group of users that does decide the leave the platform will have multiple options though and I don't suspect the number of users to truely be unmanageable for any of these places. This is just my opinion though.
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Really looking very "investor focused" 🤢
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Alexis Ohanian, founder of rival site Reddit, said in an open letter to Rose (of Digg):
this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people."
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Time really is a flat circle.
Also I only made that top comment to test Lemmy/Mastodon interaction. Hi from Mastodon! The fediverse is cool!
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VC meddling
In this case, Advance Publications is the group pulling the strings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
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Rest in peace, Digg. We dug that shit.
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Ahh here it comes. Expect more - IPO layoffs (from personal experience) are definitely a thing
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May I ask what the whole "IPO" thing is?
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Initial Public Offer. Basically, the company going public on the stock market. They tend to try and look "shiny" before going public to make them attractive to buyers who want to make money from investing into the company.
In my experience (from working a place that has done this) they will do some waves of layoffs and make some operational budget cuts, as well as sometimes freeze some capex spending so the books look juicier. This includes things that may cause long-term harm, for short ish (under a year) gain.
Script is pretty similar with most companies that do this in tech, with predictable results.
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Agreed. I think the post-IPO layoffs will be aggressive in Reddit's case.
It's not clear to me how reddit could possibly "grow". They've hit peek influence, and ad-revenues haven't really been a growth factor that has excited investors. They're not really a technology powerhouse like Facebook or Google - all they have is their central product. So, when the IPO drops, all I can see for reddit is a future of aggressive layoffs and strong enshittification of Reddit as they seek capitalistic eternal increasing growth.
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Yeah Reddit would make an excellent private company with the right owner and likely some re-structuring, but as a public company ooh boy.
Outside some niche subs I'm not on there more than once a day just to see if my lemmy subs missed something, and it's my last form of social media outside discord/matrix, so if lemmy does take off enough I'll probably only be there for the odd technical search, which I suspect lemmy will take care of in time.
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Oh no! Anyway...
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Unfortunately the responsible for the shitshow aren't in the 5% who will have their lives upended.
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Sympathies to them, yes.
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Boy, things are going GREAT over there huh
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Yeah things are going soooo well
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The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok (not just about TikTok)
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Part of Cory Doctorow's point is that this pattern emerges with all kinds of companies, especially ones where investors are demanding an outrageous return on a hasty speculation.
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Totally a sign of an ultra-successful IPO!
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The fucked up thing is that it kind of is...layoffs of this kind almost always have a positive impact on stock prices, which is why they do them. Gotta love capitalism!
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Yeah, upon reflection you are right... this looks to be Reddit saying "notice me, potential shareholders, I'm so efficient!"
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Disgusting, this is is why this system needs to die, infinite growth is unsustainable, like a cancer, fucking over people is seen as a good thing for "business", how infuriating.
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Ah yes pre-IPO wallstreet pleasing. If I remember correctly wework also pulled this, and so did a few others.
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Some people have been saying a 2-day blackout isn't going to do much. But if they're struggling financially it will most likely really hurt them.
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They're not doing this because they are struggling. Its a common tactic for shitty corporations to do so it looks like they made a shit ton more money and can claim losses on their taxes
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Go go capitalism!
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All this has me wondering. Lemmy and other fediverse sites should be resistant to enshittification. But how could American corporations screw that up? Could they start their own servers and instances, and somehow make them dominant? Or would that not be worth it to them?
It seems to me that capitalism has pretty much been trying to take over everything, with a lot of success. So I find myself wondering if it could happen here.
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Theoretically some large company could use the "embrace, extend, extinguish" model to take over "open" standards. Microsoft was famous back then for using this strategy. It would look something like this:
- Embrace: large company creates a really stable and well moderated instance that federates with almost everything to attract users
- Extend: large company adds custom features to the instance that are incompatible with other instances
- Extinguish: people stop using other instances as incompatibilities start impacting user experience. Big instance might also stop federating with other instances, so users are forced to use their instance to see content. After this, big company starts making the platform shittier to make more money.
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They should officially add a fourth "E" to that model - Enshittification.
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Could go the same way as Gmail. A lot of people just use Gmail. Gmail has a lot of control in the email space because of that. Even though "Email" is an open standard/protocol Gmail has control through the spam filter. Its really hard to setup your own email server without getting a lot of spam so it isn't that open anymore. These are some challenges for open standards as well.
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It could absolutely happen here! But the nice part is that people can choose to engage with it. Whereas with reddit, you're forced to engage with capitalism. Don't want ads here? Switch servers and donate to a smaller one.
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Perhaps a cartel of high traffic servers that block others.
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The way things are going, they will be laying off many more soon.
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They really want that IPO money
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Rise and shine my friends.
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🍿 let it burn 🔥
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Probably because I just deleted my account over there and deleted all posts and comments I ever made
110 comments
I'm hopeful that lemmy reaches critical mass because of Reddit's absurd policies.
It's getting there... The Reddit wave should be enough to get us there if the servers hold up semidecently
Even if the servers don't. I'd rather deal with downtime (aka forced detox😅) than the ads, the negative trolls, the dumb UI that constantly pushes their app, and so on. Reddit only works because it has so much fresh content. If that breaks down than so will it.
I just came in from Reddit. Much easier than going from Twitter to Mastodon.
If I could figure out how to participate from my existing fediverse account....that would be the true magic.