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Comment by trollied | Hacker News Reader

There's a Reddit CEO AMA later today: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce...

Can't see it being anything other than a PR disaster for them, unless they change their stance.

It's more than likely that they'll inject their own softball questions and focus on those instead of addressing everyone's concerns in any meaningful way.

good test for the new AI bot accounts

When they removed the upvote/downvote count, it was clear reddit was fine with manipulation.

Anything I read on the website has been met with extreme skepticism since it very well could be an astroturfer.

It's money. Reddit wants astroturfers, it grows their platform and helps sell ads.

> Anything I read on the website has been met with extreme skepticism since it very well could be an astroturfer.

Good advice for any site. It's not like HN is immune to astroturfing.

You have more courage than me to say that here.

> When they removed the upvote/downvote count, it was clear reddit was fine with manipulation

I wasn't a big issue to me tbh. Vote fuzzing had always made those counts meaningless.

May not even need to be an astroturfer, it could be u/spez directly. Don’t forget that he went rogue and modified a user’s comment in the Reddit database!

Or that the Reddit founders used fake users to make the young site look busy:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

> it was clear reddit was fine with manipulation

talking about manipulation, reddit's current ceo edited users comments back when the bad guys were on business side of it.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...

Let's talk about Rampart!

Love that game!

For this being such an important moment for the site, it’s absurd that the link they announced didn’t even have a set time. And they haven’t added one.

I think I read it’s going to go live at 10-10:30am PT

I don't think there's anything Reddit could do at this point to not let it be a PR disaster. That includes changing their stance. What they're doing is so egregious, naming and shaming and lying about people who brought immense value to the community for years. All out of misguided greed.

I was talking with a friend about this the other day and he brought up a good point. If you were about to IPO as a company, this is not a bad decision from a business standpoint (cut costs, bring as many users as possible under your control). Obviously the way they executed the decision could be harmful to them, but based on the pressures they're under, I can't see how you could blame them too much. Which is why the only enduring platform has to be something federated like mastodon or lemmy, since they won't have the same economic/capitalist pressures to make the product worse.

Rich and influential entities should be subject to more accountability, not leniency. I agree that for-profit entities with motives are good reason to be wary of them, but it's no reason to let them evade responsibility for their actions.

Also, no company's success should ever depend on alienating its users and slandering longtime contributors.

> If you were about to IPO as a company, this is not a bad decision from a business standpoint (cut costs, bring as many users as possible under your control).

the parallel for traditional companies is choosing to bust unions, and a month before you IPO is an absolutely terrible time to choose to bust your union unless you're absolutely 100% sure you're immune to a "strike".

in this case it's not just picking a fight with powerful stakeholders (like mods) but also turning off features that a ton of users interact with the platform via, and trying to force everyone off third-party clients onto the new experience and native app. In this model the users are a stakeholder that you're picking a fight with at the same time.

the best time to do it is 20 years ago, the second best time is today, unless today is a month before you IPO.

The AMA is confusing - I don't understand what questions they expect to recieve, and how they'll answer them to anyone's satisfaction.

I think the original intention was to get ahead of the story but I think the apollo dev's announcement that he's shutting down the app is going to make that difficult at this point.

For some companies, for example Ticketmaster, PR disasters are fine. They don't affect the profitability of the company, nor the user base.

However if a company's CEO holds a reddit AMA that company probably does care what the public thinks.

Or that company cares what the Reddit community thinks and is convinced that they have an ace in the hole. An ace like, say, having full control over the platform and being able to make the AMA look like it goes however they want it to.

Reddit community is far to suspicious of Reddit corporate to fall for that.

Depends on which part of the community you're talking about. Many of the top-voted comments on some of the "sub blacking out" threads were to the effect of "TIL that there are third party apps." [0]

That part of the community is the part that Reddit probably wants to preserve, and that part could very easily see an AMA that appears to clear everything up and then get mad when their sub moderators go ahead with the blackout anyway.

[0] For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/142p1ax/comment/jn6...

Yeah but reddit is trying to have an IPO this very year

The risk though for PR disasters for companies like Ticketmaster is when they get the attention of regulators. Then it becomes an issue for them.

The clowns at Reddit couldn't even specify a time.

This will be a spectacular shitshow to watch.

For some reason, they gave Verge a time but not on their own post. It's at 1:30 pm EST

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754780/reddit-api-update...

Excellent thank you, I don't use the verge as a source of information, and am surprised how common they have become.

Surprising that Reddits communication on their own platform is so bad, or maybe it's not...

Thank you for the update!

> Can't see it being anything other than a PR disaster for them, unless they change their stance.

You were correct

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