While CEO Steve Huffman may be dismissive of the thousands of subreddits going dark to protest his planned API changes,…
They took insporation from Twitter and we all know how profitable that turned out to be.
Yeah this is the really disturbing part imo. Huffman actually saying out loud that he was inspired by musk & twitter et al. What a fucking spoon.
He lives in a bubble and he’s certain that following Musk’s example will make him richer. But what he fails to understand is that, while reddit is massive and people are addicted to or reliant on it, if it stops producing high-quality content, it’s going to eventually be replaced by something else. Hopefully, by the fediverse.
Kinda feels like there’s not much he doesn’t fail to understand
I feel like the main step he’s forgetting is that he wanted to install an interim CEO to make these unpopular changes so they didn’t happen directly at his direction, so that the dust up can be laid at someone else’s feet…after which he can swoop back in, replace them with himself again, not reverse the changes, and avoid the blame.
Not that she was great, but I do kinda feel bad for the way Ellen Pao got dicked over by Huffman and hated by the community.
Twitter and Reddit have really thrown the idea that the “elite” are somehow smarter or more competent into disrepute. They are literally just ideologues.
The effect has been fairly small, but the effect itself is not even the thing that’s going to get Huffman’s nuts in a vice when the IPO comes. The thing that’s going to ruin him is the awareness now that poorly received changes can cause chaos to the functioning of the site. That’s not the case with social media sites like Facebook, or even Twitter for that matter. Those don’t rely intrinsically on the agreeable participation of unpaid labor (Reddit mods), so Zuckerberg and (to a lesser degree) Musk can run around naked with their balls out all they want and it won’t move the needle that much. But when Huffman does it, there’s thousands of angry people ready with clamps and gelding equipment.
Honest I’m happy all this has happened. It helped me out of my reddit addiction. Helped me realise there are alternatives out there that are way less toxic (in my opinion) and much more closely resemble the old school forums that are what I originally became addicted to via reddit etc.
somewhere along the way reddit changed and I can’t exactly pinpoint when
I feel like a frog who suddenly realized the pot was boiling and I managed to make it out just in time
Yep, some point in last few years I went from looking forward to orange envelope to show someone had engaged with my comment to “now what have I said wrong” to outright ignore my.inbox and just shout into the wind like a crazy old man
