It seems like lots of big companies are going this way. Trying to hit short term profits through massive, risky changes in direction, stocking up on managers and officers while suddenly firing half your workforce, taking massive payouts and crippling long-term potential, trying to hire in new bodies to throw on the pile as cheaply as possible, idolizing idiots like Musk who go around unplugging servers…
The submarine company is also an example of this. Why listen to material scientists or engineers when you can cut corners to save a buck? Submarine experts told the CEO it was just a matter of time before the carbon fiber went pop, and that would be really bad for anyone inside at the time. But they saved so much money!
Huh.... because they are all describing a particularly shitty work environment, there is a good bet that there are other employees who feel that way. It might indeed not be the protests that kill Reddit - but Reddit itself that kills Reddit.....
He's had money thrown at him from VCs, thousands of people generating content, and administering content for free, sitting on a goldmine of data and goodwill and Community spirit, and he's managed to lose money, burn bridges, and fuck up the whole deal all for thppe sake of chasing a few dollars of API revenue and a bruised ego. All while others make millions and gain significant community support using the exact same data with business models he could have just copied or shared in.
He's had every opportunity. He's fucked it up at every step.
he's managed to lose money, burn bridges, and fuck up the whole deal all for thppe sake of chasing a few dollars of API revenue
Let's call this what it actually was though, there was no attempt at making money from the API. This was entirely to shut down 3rd party apps. Smart AI companies will just scrape reddit. The only people affected by this are 3rd party app developers and users.
This is even more amazingly incompetent. There are a near infinite other ways they could have handled 3rd party apps not showing ads, but they instead chose the brute force method that makes no one happy.
Fair point. And yes, there's just so many ways he could have made money from third party apps and their users without trashing them. The AI explanation just didn't make any sense to me at all.
A business brain would have followed the money. He's just following half-witted ideas/ego. I don't think he really realises or understands what he had.
The thing that gets me is that rif used to have a revenue sharing arrangement, which was axed when spez came in. He literally had a functional way of profiting off of third party apps and he threw it out.
Remember the threat that Reddit presented to capitalism's status quo around the height of antiwork and GME.
If Reddit falls, it will be on purpose. Same as the 180 of Twitter as a somewhat legitimate forum - Twitter being a key organizing tool during the Arab Spring (with the Saudis being the largest investor in Twitter behind elon of course).
Billionaires do each other favors to keep the class war in balance.
yeah i’m not sure this theory holds water… it’s pretty obvious the community won’t just give up: everyone saw what happened with mastodon
the fediverse is ideologically opposed to corporate and capitalist interference, so they’re just pushing people to a platform that they have even less control over, in a manner that pushes people to be more anti-capitalist, to a platform whose very existence is about being anti-corporate!
mayyybe you could say that combined with threads the “long play” is to embrace, extend, extinguish essentially moving reddit to facebook? but that’s a stretch and a half
i agree with hanlons razor here: spez is just a fucking egotistical moron
That kind of work environment is unsurprising given he idolizes Musks Twitter. From what I have heard, in general Musks companies are known to be horrible to work for.
Wow thanks for posting, what a read. I suspected average employees would not like what is going on.
I can relate, up until recently I was in a company whose product and decisions I strongly disliked and browsing r/antiwork like wild to cope. I was close to burnout due to the mismanagement and work heaped on me.
Until eventually something in me snapped and I went and found a better job. Is everything good here? God no, but my current manager is nice and my workload more manageable for now and I learned I have options if it grows unmanageable again, a lot of options actually.
So thanks for those who keep posting to move on as well, it‘s a bit repetitive and perhaps obvious, but useful nonetheless for those who don‘t see it yet.
Though if one loves the product and coworkers and work and the main shit thing is the management, maybe a union would be the more useful solution. It‘s a good way to influence some of these decisions, perhaps what makes my current employer better is the presence of a union.
Love it. Good for them for sticking to some kind of guns. Reddit’s behavior doubling down this past couple weeks has soured my taste for the place even more. Ready to watch it burn - although I have a feeling it will be a slow, simmering death.
Will be interesting to see what all plays out after July 1st
I don't get why people are clinging to the idea that reddit will suddenly give a fuck. They are unprofessional, rude, liars. It doesn't matter if they bend down and kiss your ass with a million false promises. They won't follow through.
Look at what happened to interestingasfuck, they are approaching a week with no mods and completely locked down. You can easily make reddit implode themselves with their hubris of mods being easily replaceable. They have shown that is not true. Y'all will be removed anyway before the IPO, they won't risk this again. So hurry up and let them implode before they have time to figure out an alternative before the IPO
what I don't get is why someone would go out of their way to try and convince somebody else that a protest is meaningless while the protest is going on. why would you take time to convince others to stop, what is there even to gain from that? only reddit would want that. if the protest was truly meaningless you wouldn't have to argue against at all. clearly the protest have an effect on you and on reddit.
Yep, the whole thing had ordinary and third party app users pitted against each other, only because blaming the mods would've reopened the subs faster than going against reddit itself. And the fact that 90% of reddit don't use third party app makes it that much worse. Goddammit spez you cunning mf.
Among higher than average users it seemingly was. Given that reddit was saying the third party apps were using above average amounts of API calls per user. They said it's because of the 3PAs baing unoptimized but it was likely that more engaged users used 3PAs.
Wow so they've prioritised the casual users over the power users... You know, the ones who actually post the content... This should go well /s
Anecdotal, but I've been talking about this whole thing to my partner. She doesn't really care though because, in her own words: "I tried to use Reddit a little while ago, but I didn't like the app"
It is. I was just using it because I thought I would support Reddit with it. But the recent changes showed what you get for that. Now I'm not using Reddit anymore.
i think it's cuz a lot of us were redditors who used it before they even had an official reddit app, and so it wasn't pushed on us as the default option. the older, more dedicated reddit accounts disproportionately made up the active userbase
I think you're correct. The older accounts definitely were more likely to use 3rd party apps I believe. I know I tried the mobile site and then several 3rd party apps before they developed the official Android app. I remember really hoping for "Alien Blue Android." I tried the official app when they gave a week? of gold for trying it and concluding my app, probably Sync, was much better.
I think if they'd made the official app really competitive from the start, a lot of daily users would have switched to it. They could have done things a lot differently and been profitable by now.
I knew I always used what looked like old reddit, but I could never remember changing the URL everytime, after that I used my mobile browser and then the official app.
God that was a battery, storage, and data intensive app.
Data plans back then were beaucoup bucks.
It was the damn notifications that made me almost quit Reddit and then I finally said "Fuck it let me try what all these reddit power nerds are always going on about.", and then I understood.
The interface for Sync, as an example, made it much easier and more efficient to use. I would argue that 3P users use more calls because using those apps allow you to browse and interact far more effectively without cutting through the swaths of "He Gets Us" ads that Sync users never even had to see. Ultimately, I suspect that tha was the true reason for the API changes. Lost ad revenue. Judging by what I saw just today being stuck briefly on the official Reddit app and the website taking care of last minute issues after Sync went down, it's bad. Wall of ads.
If they would just charge you reasonable price, or fix their own app, none of this would be an issue.
But it's about the data, not the money, because the data is where the real money is at.
If you had everyone who used Reddit, had all their browsing and tracking data, how long they scrolled and looked at whatever, how long they stayed on the page after, what they looked at next, so on and so on, you could sell it in multiple times to multiple people for multiple things and each data set be unique
teddit.adminforge.de
Oldest