Spez's AMA is live, the shitshow begins

Spez on Christian (Apollo dev)

His “joke” is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.

Spez is a fucking joke

I loved the commentary on that exchange from hackernews.
""" fwlr 8 minutes ago | prev | next [–]
The rule that you shouldn’t build your business on someone else’s API obviously applies here and in the end Reddit is of course justified in choosing to shut out third party apps. But I must say it is simply hilarious that their exorbitant new price was so absurd that when devs quoted it back to them as a buyout rate, Reddit felt like they were being blackmailed. I mean that’s literally getting offended at your own number. """
He's right. If you think the golden goose lays $x/yr and the guy offers it at $.5x and it offends you, you've got a problem with yourself.
What an asshole. Still trying to ruin iamthatis.
For fuck's sake dude, sorry that you wanted to only quietly out that you're an asshole and he made sure we all know what a giant, gaping asshole you are.
WHEN I AM AN ASSHOLE I HAVE THE EXPECTATION THAT OTHER PEOPLE KEEP IT PRIVATE
- spez is a straight up narcissist that uses the same playbook as the rest. it's so evident with the gaslighting, blame-shifting, and smear campaign. at this point, anything he says should be understood to be a tactical play in gaining control by seeming powerful, "on your side," or requiring pity as a victim. his mind is deranged, so he has no other capacity.
Check the response from /u/iamthatis. Absolutely savage.
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/comment/jnk5inf/?context=3
- I'm really hoping this is the comment to break the downvoted record

Spez comes off as a narcissistic little pissbaby. Blaming the apps/devs that made Reddit what it is, rather than actually looking at ways to make the site better for everyone.

Blame-shifting is a tenet of narcissism. They can't be grandiose and entitled without it.
I think anyone surprised by Spez's behavior now have not actually read anything about him before
Power corrupts, this should probably be expected on every centralised service

You can pretty much feel the anger from each of his replies, he's getting shit on and can't handle it. What an absolute clown

All what, 13 of them? And still going after the Apollo developer, who seems to have laid himself bare. Weird.

He then answered a question on the Apollo dev situation and my god, he just dug the hole deeper. He has no idea the public perception of him and reddit at the moment, and then he continues to slander the Apollo dev with no facts or anything to back up that Apollo dev did anything wrong.

For NBA fans, he's got some real Steve Kerr energy there too, more concerned about the recording of the call than anything else, like when the video of Draymond punching Poole came out.

It's an AMABIWAA (Ask Me Anything, But I Won't Answer Anything)

Just like most high profile AMA's on reddit. But yeah it's pretty obvious theres a lot of money to be made here and as a mouthpiece for this company they arent going to give a lot of straight answers. Honestly I'm not sure why theyre even bothering with an AMA instead of just an announcement addressing concerns but they want to keep the reddit image I guess.
That image is dead and buried and has been since the site became one of the biggest on the web but what are you gunna do.

This is making our switch to Lemmy feel quite justified, isn't it? Although even if Reddit was still in good shape I think the potential of a decentralized platform is much better. I probably would have migrated here whether this shitstorm happened or not.

Unfortunately we may just be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. The developers (and moderators of this instance) are unapologetic authoritarians, and on their own instance they ban people for criticizing authoritarian governments. Take a look at this post from their own reddit account in regards to Tiananmen Square.
I want the fediverse to succeed. I love the idea of a less centrally-controlled approach to social media, because we've all seen the problems that can create. But I'm worried that the influence of authoritarian-leaning developers could be a serious problem.
- Why would that be a serious problem? The code is open and it can be hosted by anyone. The moderators of a single instance are nearly meaningless to a federated system. That's the whole point.
  To put it another way, what problems do you think the devs being tankies might cause?
- I disagree with the feditips account. I think he's pushing people away from lemmy rather than the specific instance. I've had no issues on lemmy.ml and the mods here have been great. I'm pretty sure he's just referring to lemmygrad. And like the other user who replied to you said, you could always make a new instance or join another. The political opinions of the devs means nothing if the platform is decentralized. Unlike Reddit, they don't have power over the entire platform, just whatever instance they host, just like if I made an instance, which I can, I have complete power over it.
- Can just make an account in another instance (like you´ve done in Beehaw) or kbin I suppose. So far I haven´t seen anything that makes me uncorfortable with lemmy.ml, but given all these smaller platforms are on a trial period for me I have no qualms moving if needed be

That guy is a menace!
LOL.
At what point will the Apollo dev /u/iamthis have enough evidence to sue Spez for Defamation?
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/personal-injury/defamation-lawsuit-guide/

You can tell that he is absolutely furious at the attention that Apollo has gotten.

Mad, mad props to Apollo's dev for being so transparent about it. Guaranteed they thought they could bully him into staying quiet about it and then closing up shop. He told them to pound sand and controlled the narrative. That man needs to do documentaries or reporting. Meticulous, knew how to talk to a crowd, and not afraid of corporations bullying him.
Dude is super bitter.
I think the real answer has to be that he gave them real numbers he expected them to pay. They all said wtf no but he promised similar numbers to his investors from the official channels.
People who are doing better then him (profit wise) at his own game bailed when asked for things he promised to deliver.

If he has any lawyers or a wife or anyone who has any investment in reddit getting an IPO they should tackle him and take the keyboard away.

Good lord, he's got a steam shovel and is gonna break into the mantle from the hole he's digging.

DIGGing you say?
- Digg v5

Man, I'm gonna miss reddit, but Lemmy seems pretty awesome so far.

I mentioned lemmy and got shadowbanned

Haha pathetic. Let's see if that also works for me.

You can tell that he is absolutely furious at the attention that Apollo has gotten.

Yeah he seems incredibly bitter.

10 mins in, one answer which has -119 score...

WOW, where is it? I cent even find it
- undefined> nswered one question. I imagine that might be all he does. What a shit show - what does he even expect to do
  here: https://www.reddit.com/user/spez
- Might be easiest to find any comments on his user page: https://teddit.net/u/spez
  The thread is going to be a shitshow.

wow, there are 13000 comments and /u/spez has made 12, all very brief. He didn't even have any canned answers ready.

And to be fair the other admins linked in the top post have about 6 comments between them.

What a terrible AMA lol. I'm not surprised but it's still somehow worse than I imagined it would be.
- pretty shocking really. I feel like a bit of prep to have some answers written up by someone who knows how to spin things would have fooled at least some readers. especially those who weren't following the whole drama up til now. but it was a comprehensive loss for them.
I can't say I am surprised, it is probably in their best interests to not tell people too much
it looks like he copy/pasted an answer from his team, he even included the A: https://archive.ph/X6EJq

So glad I deleted my account yesterday.

Considering doing the same after 14 years of using reddit. End of an era I suppose. I think Lemmy has a ton of potential though.
- I'm right there with you. 9+ years of reddit.

This guy is such a weasel, holy shit. He comes off as incredibly bitter.

You just know every comment is being vetted by legal, marketing, and PR. Coward. Can't say anything without corporate double speak
- I'm shocked that any lawyer would say "yeah, go ahead, this AMA is a great idea"

"We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable."

Almost understandable but did they really think this was the way to put it?

Sounds like a skill issue, Mr. CEO
"I am bad at my job"
oooohhkkkkay
He really sounds like 'fuck it I'll just improvise and get this shit over with' from his answers.

He just answered a question about their accessibility issues with basically "oh we're working on it". Come the fuck on dude that shit needed to be in place before you did all this and to be frank reddit's got a history of lying about that stuff too.

even worse than I expected, somehow

Almost 20 minutes in, and he's written 3 responses, each about a paragraph.

I'm guessing it's not going well.

He's trying to justify acting like a lying asshole but his ego can't allow him to admit fault.
He may actually implode.
Answers must be vetted by lawyers.

popcornmeme.gif

I love it when idiots stab themselves in the face and set themselves on fire!

Anyone noticing slowdowns and timeouts? Overloaded? Or slowing access?

Probably just thousands of angry Redditors accessing the thread at once.
Im definitely getting something of the sort

I'm shocked spez gave redreader a shout out as still trying to work with them.

That's an other dev (quantumbadger) I would expect to be honest with his community. He'd been pretty vocal in earlier updates that he wasn't going to be able to pay them at any price since his app is FOSS and distributed as source.

Curious what his next update will say.

Quantumbadger already put out his update. Summary is that he's exempt from the new costs but we're losing distribution channels which need source (ie fdroid repo) so he doesn't publish his keys.
https://old.reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/145du4j/update_4_redreader_granted_noncommercial/

7.7k comments already, this is mad

51 minutes later 13143 comments
- wow.

Kinda wish the peanut gallery would stop posting a little bit. Like a little engagement is one thing but this literally already has more than 2,000 posts in 20 minutes of people piling on and going "uhuh!" "yeah!" "HE WONT DO IT!" "He hasnt answered to this complicated post yet".

Like it's so much noise that when and if he does inevitably reply to things it will be buried.

Also why are people celebrating the big questions by giving them reddit gold and awards? Doesnt that cost real money? I dont see the sense in going

"Yeah screw reddit! You tell this lying dirtbag!" and then giving reddit a few bucks so a little icon appears next to their name

I'll admit to a little shitposting in the AMA thread to be fair, but mostly to promote Fediverse alternatives where people are asking where they can go.
- Youre going god's work. That said I imagine that kind of content will be buried under the thousands of people posting "fuck spez"
I mean, you can just look at spez's profile to see what he's repsonded to. That's where I've been looking.
As for the awards thing, for some reason reddit has always done that. I'd bet 99% of the gold spez has gotten over the years was given in anger, which makes no sense to me, but it's something they always do
One thought is that awards etc for certain comments push in to the top when sorting by hot, I believe. Just a guess though.
@lemillionsocks @Two9A There's not really any substantive conversation to be had. It's very obvious that they just did this to kill all 3rd party apps. Spez just continues to dig his grave with obvious lies that users can see right through.