I was actually somewhat ok with going back to certain Reddit communities (although NOT just mindless scrolling) after the blackout. There’s a lot of communities where (I thought) there’s literally no alternatives.
Then came his latest wave of interviews attacking people that did their jobs for them (mods, Devs making a usable mobile app) and making insane hypocritical statements about “democracy” (everyone would gladly kick you out given the chance) and “landed gentry” (dude, if the mods are the out of touch landed gentry, that would make you the out of touch king, right?)
Why is he still giving interviews? Not like I even care about the company but seriously what good can he possibly do at this point, every day thousands more people leave for good.
Anyway, I seriously don’t think I can use Reddit with a clear conscience, at all, anymore, at least for now. Every time I interact with the site (even with adblock) I can’t help but think the entire time I am helping this millionaire megalomaniac’s company keep continuing on.
I guess there’s always the chance the board is letting him self destruct to offer him as the sacrificial lamb.
I honestly don’t know if this will last in terms of me not using reddit at all, but every day this idiot opens his mouth is another day I’m not using reddit and another day I’m searching for and interacting with alternatives.
There is a lot of doublespeak going on, if you pay attention. He keeps referring to 3rd party apps as “competitors” where they really are alternate paths to interact with the platform and provide the content he relies on to sell ads over. He keeps referring to the protesting mods as “not wanting to moderate” when really they are trying to make known how much they rely on third-party tools and how difficult he is making their volunteer job.
It’s like he’s forgotten why they started the site in the first place. I wonder what Aaron would have thought of all this?
Spez started the site to make money. This was always true - a completely typical reason to start a company. When there was no community in the early days - he made fake accounts, and fake conversations to generate traffic to attract attention. So Spez is someone that’s always used dishonesty to get what he wants.
Aaron joined the site because he saw it’s potential as a tool for civic engagement and political awareness. He left when he saw what Reddit was becoming… or really - what it always had been: a tool to extract wealth from its unknowing volunteers.
Aaron and Spez weren’t friends. They were business partners for a very short period of time. To the best of my knowledge, that’s all there is to it.
I speculate that Aaron would feel unfazed by what Reddit looks like today… because it’s expected. The founders are people that make the Forbes 30 Under 30, marry world famous pro athletes, and are worth tens of millions of dollars. They’re divorced from reality.
I would hope that open and decentralized online spaces like Lemmy reflect the sort of values & ideas Aaron spent his life advocating for.
Even if he hasn’t forgotten why they started reddit initially, the priority now is clearly to find out how much money they can squeeze out of our freely provided content, while guilting the volunteer moderators into keeping the site usable.
No matter how noble the cause realistically his position and actions were predicable.
That said if they really are in undeleting comments from those who have closed their accounts it’s a huge privacy breach and a few years down the line all those inevitable fines from around the world will sink the platform, IPO or not and spez will be welcoming people at Walmart.
Can’t wait.
If they are really undeleting, I think that may be the biggest thing to have come out of this whole thing so far. I’m unsure of EU laws regarding this, but reddit claiming ownership of our interactions crosses a line imo, and could be a huge step for privacy, for the better.
And I agree. Their behavior has been nothing but on brand.
Investors will price in pissing off EU regulators into the IPO lol. There’s no way they’ll let this one fly under the radar
As someone who’s been on reddit for almost 12 years, who’s also a developer. It really has saddened me to hear so many I’ll things he’s said to other dev teams.
This is the main reason why I’m trying to go all in with Lemmy, subscribing to different communities, etc.
At this point, if Reddit doesn’t make him step down and all these popular third party apps go under because of the API pricing, i will rarely be visiting reddit in the future.
I dropped in today and there was a huge banner at the top of the page claiming to tell me about how much third-party apps were stealing from Reddit.
I saw the same. I was just about tempted to slide back and browse quickly on my lunch break, then I saw that and just noped out of there. This place is building up quickly and strongly enough that I probably won’t bother going back to reddit if he’s going to keep up with this nonsense; I don’t really need that sort of BS negativity.
Which is most outrageous because Reddit made the API that allows that and supported it with third party developers. It’s like inviting a bunch of people to a party and then complaining after they’ve been there for a couple hours, “What are you people doing here?” And it was a potluck party, the guests brought a lot of the food.
same, I would have probably kept using reddit before his insane press releases this week. Done with it now.
Same. Now that the CEO revealed the mindset that drives reddit behind the curtains, the problem shifted from a matter of convenience (access from APIs) to a matter of principles:
- the corporation has an authoritarian style of problem-solving;
- it has no respect for the userbase or the developers, thus it is not transparent,using underhanded tactics to push a narrative and hide their real goals;
- it wants to control every aspect of our interactions to make the userbase receptive to aggressive marketing;
- it has no qualms to limit access to content that is 100% created by users, not to use unpaid labor (the mods) to maximize its profits;
- it sees the userbase and the mods as expendable when they voice an objection on a policy, despite being those they exploit to make their model profitable (reddit is nothing without the moderation and the user-made content)
This type of aggressive capitalism is becoming a poison for the web.
It is going too far, destroying what has made the internet a special place to share information: no limits to exploration, to sharing, to expression. Now they want to create isolated bubbles behind login walls where they can be owners of the info and controllers of the space to sell data, product placements and ads.Perhaps these new technologies like the fediverse are the answer, the solution to put a brake on this ugly phenomenon.
I hope decentralization will be the beginning of a new “Internet Renaissance”, bringing back a bit of the spirit of the 90s.It’s typical for American web sites because it’s an American kind of leadership.
Unfortunately almost all popular web sites are American… :/
I guess there’s always the chance the board is letting him self destruct to offer him as the sacrificial lamb.
I don’t believe spez is self destructing, He’s doing what benefits both himself and the board in bringing about these changes. Your right about how the board will probably use him as the sacrificial lamb though, along with giving him a healthy severance package on the way out. Pretty sure they’ve even pulled that on a smaller scale before with all that AMA staff drama. It’s all an attempt to maximize profits for their shareholders when they turn Reddit public, and then they can cash out too. They won’t be reverting any of these decisions after, even when they do push spez under the bus, because we users aren’t the priority.
we users aren’t the priority.
You know what they say. If you’re using a service for free, then you’re not the customer, you’re the product. They don’t care about what we think in the same way a farmer doesn’t care about the opinions of his cows. It’s just never really been this glaringly obvious before.
Nah man, this is 2023. We’ve reached new levels of enshitification. You can pay for a service and still be the product.
Unfortunately, I can’t avoid it entirely, as there are some communities (like GenP) with information bases that still aren’t replicated here. I’d like to think that some of those communities will migrate over here eventually, but it hasn’t happened yet.
I’m probably a lot less negative about Spez than a lot of people here. I mean, end of the day, he spent hundreds of millions of investors’ dollars, and he’s gotta make a return for them. They weren’t donating to him to make a cool forum. They were expecting a return.
And this business model, at a high level, is the norm for dot-coms. Operate in money-losing mode, but have an especially-attractive service to grow the userbase. When you finally get a large userbase, then you have to shift over to monetizing them and being profitable.
I mean, Reddit was inevitably going to reduce user experience to try to generate more money at some point.
But none of that means that what Reddit is doing makes it the most appealing place for me. I mean, I’m over here not because I want Spez or Reddit to burn, but because it’s just not really the place I want to be with the changes. I’m not angry, but, for me, kbin is just preferable to Reddit now.
There are fewer users and less content on the Fediverse right now, but that’s okay with me. I moved to Reddit back when it was one page with mostly people talking about things of interest to the Reddit staff. It was a lot smaller than the Fediverse is now.
same here, I was gonna wait until July after the third party apps stopped working just to slowly adjust to the fediverse, but I deleted my account today after reading about everything that’s happened
I’m in a transition phase. I used to be on Reddit throughout the day, but now I only check in on the subs I was part of in the morning, and have a timer on my phone to remind me to stay off it (breaking the habit).
He’s trying to drive a wedge between mods and users, it’s disgusting behaviour.
I agree but this is really some cutting off your nose despite your face territory. It’s like someone had a conversation with him about not burning bridges with the people that provide him with free labor and what he took away from that conversation is that fire isn’t an efficient enough medium of which to destroy said bridges.
Just FYI, the idiom is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Agree on your points.
/m/boneappletea?
Spez is ruining the site. It is a shame.
The site was ruined years ago, this is just the final nail in the coffin (hopefully).
What bothers me most about this is how personal it sounds, and how emotional he’s getting. He’s not thinking rationally
