Disappointed that NPR didn’t elaborate more on how Huffman truly fucked over Christian Selig.
“it’s time to grow up and be an adult company” he says, logging on to the site that’s mostly memes, anime, and pictures of people’s genitals.
Huffman characterized the Reddit protesters as a small but vocal cadre of angry users who are not in touch with the greater Reddit community.
Yes! Yes!! YES!!! GASLIGHT ME HARDER, DADDY!
“It’s time to enshitify.”
The one admirable thing about reddit leadership is how transparent they have been about the enshittification of their product. Usually companies will do some perfunctory song and dance about how great the changes are and how much users will love them. Reddit has been pretty clear that the changes will negatively effect users and that they are doing it for the money.
It’s a small group that’s very upset, and there’s no way around that… Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site. He said “the vast majority” of moderators also do not rely on third-party apps.
But also…
“But the opportunity cost of not having those users on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant,”
So it’s a teeny tiny group. Basically insignificant. But it’s also such a large group that we can’t possibly NOT try and monetize them 🤡.
Dude is such a snake, god damn I hope he fucking loses this battle and crawls back to the hole he came from
Human beings talk about interesting things on Reddit. ‘We are not in the business of giving that away for free’
“But we are in the business of reselling the content that those human beings provide, without compensating them at all, or even considering any of their complaints about how we manage the site they speak on.”
Fuck this guy seven new assholes.
And, of course, there are the unpaid moderators. He doesn’t seem concerned at all that they’re “giving it away for free”. The experienced power-mods are the ones in the position to put a serious hurting on spez, and I hope they take the opportunity to do so.
Says pedobear u/spez
Wasn’t he a mod of /r/jailbait?
Yeah, but that was when you could make someone else mod and they didn’t have to accept. One of the mods did that to him. Once he learned about he, he left the position and they pushed out a change shortly where you had to accept the mod position. People did it to troll others, specifically like that.
No mistake, no love lost on him, but he was a mod as a joke, and he removed himself when he was aware of it
I believe this, either way there’s enough other questionable content around Spez to criticize him, like how he said they wouldn’t remove Coronavirus misinformation despite all the largest subs wanting it removed, much like the current blackout.
Most “grown up” companies don’t alienate a vast amount of their consumers. Greedy little dickholes have no problem fucking their userbase for a quick monetary boost. Spez is just a bitch who can see a payday, he is a shit founder who only pretends to be a CEO, fuck him and Reddit as a whole.
I mean, the very notion of “grown up” companies is a lie. Reading the article on the Instant Brands bankruptcy…
“Instant Brands was purchased by private equity firm Cornell Capital in 2017. While some of its products, such as Pyrex and CorningWare are long established brands — Pyrex is 108 years old, and CorningWare is 65 — Instant Pot was only launched in 2010. The company said that at least one of its products can be found in 90% of US homes”
Yet, they’re filing for bankruptcy because some brainiac “disruptor” CEO is an idiot but other rich idiots gave him millions of dollars to turn it into a garbage fire.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/13/business/instant-brands-bankruptcy/index.html
can someone buy back the PYREX brand to ensure they only distribute boroscilate glass?
Please! To stay relevant as a company, that’s all they had to do. It’s the definition of the “You only had one job” meme.
Kinda sucks that whenever major news outlets cover a social media company, they only interview the people who own the company and nobody else involved. Like here, maybe it would’ve made sense to interview a mod or someone. The way major news outlets frame it, social media outlets are theme parks and the only people who work to make it function are the owners. Most users see them more as pseduo-government leaders, and when you think about it like that it makes a lot of sense to interview the people on the ground like they do in non-tech related news pieces.
The Verge has been doing especially good with this. They’ve been communicating directly with third party app developers for their side of the story, especially when spez decides to blatantly lie about something, as he’s been frequently doing lately. They even have links on their articles for where reddit employees can send any internal emails and memos they want to leak, lol.
please NEVER interview mods lol unless you want some new cringe entertainment like with the antiwork mod
Huffman characterized the Reddit protesters as a small but vocal cadre of angry users who are not in touch with the greater Reddit community.
Although I guess people on here don’t want to hear this, he’s right on that one. Price to pay with the normiefication of reddit. No more community. Only consumers.
Yes, but reddit is unique in the social media companies in that Twitter (pre-Elon) and facebook at least had to pay a shit ton of money to get people to moderate.
It’s basically “no one cares as long as the trains run on time.” In the extreme, I would bet that it’s single-digits of TikTok users that actually make content. Reddit is probably not even that far from that. This move, let’s piss off our unpaid moderators and the users that make all of our content, is going to effect even the normies.
Also a lot of the normies use those 3rd party apps that are going to cease to exist on June 30 and are not going to be happy with Reddit’s “official” substitute. For a lot of people the app is Reddit.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure that’s true. Have you looked at the numbers in the app stores?
The official reddit app on the google play store has over 100 million downloads.
RIF has only 5 million downloads. Boost, Sync, and Baconreader are all sitting around 1 million downloads each.
It looks like about 90% of mobile users are on the official app and won’t notice any change.The ‘normies’ don’t go beyond searching for the word “reddit” and installing the first thing that pops up.
I suppose if it’s truly that low then his claims of third-party apps allowing “free” browsing hurting their bottom line isn’t true. Honestly, they could have worked with third-party developers and forced them to implement ads in a non-subscription tier while allowing the API to operate with minimal cost to the developer. But they went into this “negotiation” in bad faith because they never wanted to continue allowing third-party apps anyway. They wanted to kill them entirely. The problem is Reddit is scarce on offering mod tools and incorporating a lot of features people could get in other apps. Hell, the few things they have added over the years are garbage. The video player is pure trash. They implemented photo hosting because they wanted to undercut imgur which just adds to their own server and bandwidth cost. And in the end they rely entirely on users to deliver content.
Also, his claims are probably off where he says 97% do not use a third-party app to browse the site. I’d say that’s because the vast majority are browsing on a PC. Anything he says can’t be trusted anyway because he’s been caught lying. The truth is you are the product, and the real money is in selling your data to third parties.
Honestly Reddit is one of the few things where I wouldn’t have minded paying a $5-$7 monthly subscription. When looking at how much hours and how much entertainment I got there, it’s a better value proposition than half the streaming services I subscribe to.
Yep, spez is a greedy pig boy and this whole thing reeks of him being personally offended that any portion of the userbase can use apps where reddit can’t squeeze quite as much value out of them. A deal could easily be worked out to appease all parties if reddit was willing to be even slightly less greedy, but corpos gonna corpo I guess.
Agreed on the 97% thing. I think that’s reddit counting pc browsing in with mobile just to make the number using third party apps seem even smaller than it actually is. Which is ridiculous since the actual number isn’t that much different. Going by the downloads on google play they still have something like 90% of the mobile users on official.
And in the end they rely entirely on users to deliver content.
Isn’t it amazing how he’s so insistent on how unfair it is that third party apps are profiting off of someone else’s content when that’s essentially reddit’s business model?
