You have to assume that the leadership team is not completely inept and that there must be a valid, urgent reason for willingly taking so much heat before the IPO.
What could it possibly be?
It’s just normal humanity stupidity and greed, and these aren’t like head of the class intellects, it’s just boring people who love money and status and get no satisfaction from helping others.
The problem with Tech is that they are the primary beneficial of hyper growth with zero interest rate era and Smartphone revolution. In the space of 10+ years tech have grown from an unthinkable Trillion dollar market cap to now we have a single company with close to 3 trillion, two other company with close to 2 trillion and other rushing to trillion dollar club. And this is unlike previous bubble they have actual profits and balance sheet for their market valuation.
People working in tech, especially within BigTech are not only partly dictating the world and media's attention, they are also so out of touch they became aristocracy in the old era.
Thus begins your decline and the gamble for who gets stuck holding the bag.
A VP who oversaw a billion being set on fire will still be hired as a VP at the next company as long as that money was burned on the tech trend of the moment.
Maybe more: "he's trying to be at the top in business/value extraction/rent seeking"
By taking a huge jump to early on and shitting on volunteers/3rd party app developers, they lost what little trust they had. Doubly sad that the same playbook played out with Digg and showed reddit exactly what not to do.
So we gathered a lot of information, as much of it as possible directly from management itself. We have indeed found information that explains some managerial decisions, but so far only of the variety that have benefited individual managers themselves, and always with negative consequences for the majority of others.
However, the overwhelming majority of what we consider peculiar (up to catastrophic) decisions are due to a combination of hubris, impostor syndrome and absolute incompetence. In one case where we could least explain the decisions at first, a manager under the influence of alcohol virtually admitted that they were not only aware of their own incompetence, but that they intentionally got rid of overly competent people so that they wouldn't make them look so bad. It's a mess.
Now as they ramp up to an IPO, 3rd party clients are seen as a liability, not an asset.
They view anyone that complains as a vocal minority, the my don’t believe their MAU numbers will change in any meaningful way.
If anything, all the press around it just raises Reddits profile.
That’s my take on what’s going on, but I have no insider knowledge so I’m just guessing :-)
the problem is that the "troublemakers" are the cool kids that make the site interesting, so it's a bit like gentrification kids out the cool folks that made the place interesting in a first bit
In the PC world, the power users could graduate into developers and make apps to share with everyone. In the Reddit world, the power users are people who are interested in farming for karma, the people who stake out claims as moderators, the people who respond to tons of AITA / legaladvice / relationships posts.
When I hear someone ranting, pissed off, about the latest Windows or macOS update, or systemd, it’s often because they use computers to get work done, and having the tech stack change under your feet makes it hard to get work done. Broad sense of the word “work” here, when I say “get work done”.
Nobody’s getting work done on Reddit, it’s a time drain from other stuff we could be doing. (Like, not nobody nobody, just nobody.)
The best places on reddit are good dude to stringent moderation.
They are all going dark in response. This will remove all quality from Reddit and finally turn it fully into a meme and porn dump.
In recent years I have seen more and more people comment here that they search reddit rather than the web when they want to get decent results. I can absolutely imagine that this could end relatively soon, and whether a "meme and porn" version of reddit is really worth more than a "central platform of all niche forums for all topics" reddit remains to be seen.... The fact that there have been many "meme and porn" platforms that came and went in the past makes me question that...
The people who make Reddit interesting are, IMO, the content creators and the people who answer questions. The content creators are spending most of their time off-Reddit, working on projects. The people answering questions are browsing /new on a few subreddits, killing time, and watching a mostly unmoderated stream of posts.
The moderation rules for individual subreddits are usually annoying—things like karma minimums, minimum ages, and sometimes a bunch of weird rules about what you can post and how you can post it. Rules against self-promotion.
Risk is that if they kick out the "creators" by making the apps unattractive they might lose a lot of content for the lurkers.
But they should have statistics to see how many are using apps and how many of the most hit posts are written by app users ... if they didn't run such an analysis: their bad.
Contrast this to the official site/app, which are instead designed to keep you jumping from post to post without dwelling for too long, but are also designed to sell junk like NFT avatars.
Reddit might continue on with business as usual after the API rate change goes into effect, but I believe the average quality of content and comments (which was already trending lower) will fall through the floor. There's no incentive for invested users who put more thought and effort into their posts to stick around.
Perhaps in the US. There is another 96% of humanity left to go so a little bit of additional growth should be feasible
On the contrary, I really resonated with the top response to one of his replies:
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/comment/jnk...
Elsewhere I've seen people complaining that one of his responses started with "A:" so he was "obviously just copy-pasting rather than actually answering".
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/146h9d6/reddits...
(E to put the last part in quotes)
The really impressive thing is... if you follow a user profile link to a comment and vote, the vote doesn't count.
And it was really hard to see spez's comments without following them from his profile, because they were so downvoted.
So I don't even know how you get down to -1000 on comments.
By not going into the database and flipping the sign on that integer.
And before anyone says I'm memeing or otherwise attacking spez without cause: Remember, this is spez. He admitted to directly modifying the database to edit comments of people critical of him once upon a time. He called forth this level of distrust himself.
It'd be a massive fuck you to the community, but how would that be different to what's been going on the last few months?
I'm guessing the company will be like an abusive partner saying "we're in control, you can leave, but we know you won't."
Trying to find a bunch of new mods will probably be an issue. Right now there isn't _too much_ complaining about mods. It's a very fine balance and replacing a bunch of existing ones with new ones might cause mayhem.
So if they look at their analytics later, they will probably discover the comforting fact that only people on 3rd party clients were downvoting the CEO.
I've been a Reddit user for a while, but I never knew this. I tried doing a quick search, but it dates back to 2015 when it seems they were actually disabled all together from the profile page [0].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/2nzzhg/if_i_go_throug...
reddit got lucky - right place, right time, and locked in a strong enough network effect to stay alive despite the best efforts of their leadership. Look at their atrocious UI. The clumsy desperate attempts to drive users to an app. The boneheaded copycat features that never quite work, or are just downright baffling.
In an alternate world a smaller team would have focused on site reliability, mod tools, and a small set of features that made sense. Use third party ad tools until, or if, you get a better homegrown solution. With this route reddit would have been profitable and probably good. Instead...
So, does the heat matter?
I was thinking more of Victoria Taylor, where sure, the community did get rid of Ellen Pao, but they didn't get back AMAs and got an even less considerate and professional CEO.
That wasn’t “skepticism” - it was outright denial of high-school-level biology facts, and it all gets worse from there.
> commercially pretty easy
I doubt it’s that easy - considering Facebook’s inaction.
"After a controversial 2010 redesign and the departure of co-founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, in July 2012 Digg was sold in three parts: the Digg brand, website, and technology were sold to Betaworks for an estimated $500,000;[9] 15 staff were transferred to The Washington Post Company's "SocialCode" for a reported $12 million; and a suite of patents was sold to LinkedIn for about $4 million."
Benefit of the doubt only stretches so far.
What is the platform even worth if it is riddled with bots like Twitter? Who are companies even advertising towards? Hey backend server "207fef50-b354-4c85-8865-f56f8313cd2c" look at these new electric BBQ offers!
Perhaps he's trying to pull a Nuclear Gandhi[1] and go 'deep' enough to underflow to being extremely positive?
People keep talking about an AMA session, but there was none. Not every self post on reddit is an AMA session, and I don't think it's fair to call his post one and attack it on that basis.
“ Reddit CEO, u/spez, will be here tomorrow to host an AMA about the latest API updates, including accessibility, mod bots, and third-party mod tools. “