Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

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You are clearly feeling very righteous, but I think you should temper your righteousness. You might want to consider that while spez may not be the best human, he has had a commendable commitment to free speech. The Reddit platform has been protecting speaking truth to power, and in this case that power is himself. He has the power to shut down anti-spez content on reddit and for the most part has let his platform be leveraged against him.

Another executive won't matter because it's not the executives determining direction. It is the investors. It is the investors that want to destroy one of the last bastions of free speech on the internet. It is investors that don't want Reddit to be a platform for speaking truth to power because they are that power that truth would be spoken to.

When people write posts like this, they are missing the forest for the trees. It is the investors who are to blame. The investors benefit when spez gets blamed and not themselves.

I see no reason to think we would get a new CEO better than spez. I am not defending spez, I am not defending his edits of people's posts, but the fish rots from the top, and the investors are above the CEO. The investors are the party that deserves blame.

A bunch of what you said is probably bang on, but I can’t let that “for the most part” slide without mentioning he has literally been caught editing comments that were directed towards him in the past. https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...

> he has had a commendable commitment to free speech

Reddit does not have a good track record of supporting free speech outside its zeitgeist. In the past, it has banned subreddits that were politically conservative, not toeing the party line on transgenderism, or hosting pandemic skepticism / conspiracies. The bans were usually executed in the name of stopping threats or "hate speech", but to my eye, the rules and punishments were applied unevenly.

I'm not very sympathetic to crying about loss of free speech from people who do not protect free speech themselves.

Isn't it a bit hypocritical to ban people from r/conservative for not toeing the party line and then complain about that same behavior being applied to themselves?

I considered those actions to be protective of free speech rather than in violation of it.

Parent commenter is talking about (banned) conservative subs, not r/conservative specifically.

And yes there is a difference, there was a "Never Trump" movement led by conservatives which obviously wouldn't have been popular on places like r/the_donald. It's not a giant monolithic block.

> he has had a commendable commitment to free speech

and a love of r/jailbait

What 20 year old doesn't?

If you want to go back to original sin then reddit should not have gone public and installed the investors as the ultimate power. Steve Huffman was one of the founders

I'll give you that, but I also don't think it was clear at the time that "next quarters profit" culture would destroy everything good.

The culture at the time was "growth is money" and "we can figure out how to monetize later."

Today we have the knowledge that monetization requires enshittification, but I think there were dreams that monetization could succeed without enshittification, and now those dreams have died.

But next quarter's profit always destroys everything good. Why should this have been expected to turn out any differently?

I don't think that was a part of the collective consciousness 10 years ago.

People said "but how are you going to monetize" and everyone said "we'll figure that out later."

So even if it was true back then (and it was), spez was probably 20-25 when he sold his soul? You don't exactly have the benefit of worldly wisdom when you are that young.

You might be speaking specifically about Reddit and the Q4 profit question, but otherwise I want to point out that the idea that immediate returns in business ultimately destroys good products has been in the cultural consciousness for much longer than 10 years.

This was not something I thought about, understood, or really had conveyed to me until I was in my late 20s and saw it happening first hand with product after product. When I asked "why" the answer was there, but I didn't get the answer until I asked the question. I didn't ask the question until I saw the harm.

So while what you say might be true, there is still the question of what culture your from, how these ideas enter that culture, and when those ideas are introduced to the people in that culture.

There is the subjective experience of "collective consciousness" to deal with and subjectively, I think that "growth is great" was louder than "short termism is bad".

We were drunk on VC funded growth, and now we are dealing with the hangover and asking how we got ourselves into the position. Getting drunk was great. The hangover is not.

... since when is Reddit public? What?

Actually that's true, Surprised it took so long to be pointed out. I guess I should have said take VC money

Exactly, I see merit in your comment. They are making it some kind of "David vs Goliath" situation where spez is the Goliath but judging by the ease with which these mods were able to close shops and killed traffic to their subs all of a sudden, this now seems more of a "elves vs dwarves" situation where both sides have somewhat roughly balanced powers.

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