I’ve heard that moneied interests are paying Twitter and now reddit behind the scenes to ruin their respective communities. It’s because every time something happens that shakes the foundation of who’s in charge, it’s always a social media coordinated public effort behind the push for change. The most recent one I can think of is the Twitter-fueled women’s rights movement in Iran. Or even the push to get progressive names like AOC elected.
So now we have rich interests paying CEOs to sabotage their own companies in order to better maintain the status quo.
I know this concept falls squarely into conspiracy theory territory, but with Twitter and reddit, both once bastions of progressive organization, going to shit at the same time, and threads popping up with the messaging that they explicitly want to avoid news and politics, you can’t help but wonder if there’s a concentrated effort behind the scenes to break up communities that are actually starting to make a difference.
It doesn’t sound too outlandish. The destruction of Twitter seems to attract some replacement from the far-right groups, Threads is already gaining far-right pages promotion and Reddit is still in the phase of destroying a once very influencial community. And all in the same time as the beginning of the US electoral campaign. It really aligns with a concentrated effort
I mean what makes far more sense is that interests rates have skyrocketed, which means VC money dried up, which means these platforms that haven’t made money in over a decade suddenly have to figure out how to run themselves.
It’s not just Reddit and Twitter, it’s YouTube and Twitch also.
It also might have something to do with the people running the show are now being tasked with real work and it turns out they aren’t good at their job.
Yeah I think this is the Occam’s razor explanation that makes more sense. And why might Reddit be doing such a similar thing so soon after twitter? Spez has said he’s in touch with Elon and admires his business decisions. Simple as that.
For those in control … there is no more terrible thing than to have all your workers talking amongst one another to discuss how terrible their situation is and what they could all do about it.
It’s the same in prison … if the guards and management keep everyone in control by isolating them all. Once the inmates start talking to one another, they start to conspire and plan on what to do about their situation. If they plan long enough, they’ll figure out how to do illegal activity, find specialty items or contraband … give them more time and they’ll start trying to figure out how to break out of their situation.
Then when things go too far and all sorts of illegal activity is taking place and people are trying to break out … the guards and managers will shake up the prison and breakup the communications system they were all using.
They'll make everyone work like slaves and when payment time comes, they could easily change the rules to avoid paying out too much. They'll change rules and blame the content creators for it.
I deleted a 10+ year old account a couple of years ago. The accounts I deleted when the ruckus started were those I'd been using since then.
That 10 year old account a couple years ago bugged me awhile because I had the conceit that anyone at all on Reddit recognized my name or cared what I had to say. Eventually I got over that.
As a result, I felt almost no sting from wiping and deleting the younger ones. Maybe 5 minutes of feeling a little weird about it until I realized I'd given up exactly nothing.
I do feel like I recognize people here more probably because of the avatars. I see you around a lot, and I recognize Nepenthe, catch 42, and otomechan based on their avatars.
Funnily enough I always think you're Ernest for half a second before I realize I've done it again.
I assume that he's comparing the migration of Digg users to Reddit when Digg rolled out its very unpopular v4 interface to Reddit making the current changes to their policies today.
In the past, Reddit has cited not wanting to be in Digg's shoes as a reason for keeping around the old.reddit.com interface for users who did not like the new one, so not wanting to do a Digg v4 is a consideration that I believe has been on the minds of the company in past years.
You know, if it’s a hastily assembled bot based on GPT trained using public web data, there’s a good chance it’s already picking up a lot on anti-spez sentiment. There might even be an opportunity for ‘malicious actors’ to accelerate that outcome, should they choose.
Reddit could slim down management as moves toward an IPO
Thomas Maxwell
Reddit is preparing for an IPO amid controversy surrounding changes to its API.
Reddit employees say the company has a bloated leadership structure with too many managers.
Staffers were told earlier this year that they'd need to do "less but better."
As Reddit prepares for an initial public offering that could come by the end of 2023, it's looking to flatten its management structure, and employees say the company has become bloated with executive- and director-level employees.
Reddit filed for IPO in December 2021, when demand for new tech stocks was at a fever pitch. It said it surpassed $100 million in advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2021. It has also made large investments in artificial intelligence, acquiring the machine-learning startup Spell in June 2022 to help customize ad placements.
Since then, demand for tech stocks has dropped. Reddit laid off 90 employees in early June as it aims to reach profitability. Its revenue growth has slowed, The Information reported.
To prepare for the intense scrutiny of the public markets, Reddit is whipping itself into shape; managers told employees in product earlier this year that the goal was to do "less but better." Part of the mandate could include slimming down middle management.
Reddit is also examining areas of its business where it could squeeze costs. It recently announced a controversial decision to charge for access to its API, or application programming interface, which enables developers to build tools that connect to Reddit. It argued that it couldn't support third-party apps that use Reddit's content but don't provide any money in return.
Insider spoke with five current and former Reddit employees, who requested anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press or had signed nondisclosure agreements to receive severance. They described some leadership moves and road-map changes that caused what one employee described as "thrash."
The 18-year-old social-media company has long had a culture of "trying to do too many things and doing them really poorly and not finishing them at all," the same employee said. Internally, they said, the company would now focus on "having a simplified product plan and sticking to it."
A Reddit representative declined to comment on this story and pointed to a blog post about the company's acquisition of Spell.
A flattening at Reddit
Reddit executives presented a distribution of managers to direct reports during its last quarterly leadership summit in May in New York City. The distribution showed that many managers oversee four to six people. Managers who attended the summit told employees that leadership suggested the company would in the second half of the year consolidate teams with managers overseeing fewer than six employees, two employees said.
Employees say this could mean more managers may leave through managed exits.
Reddit is not the only tech company flattening its leadership structure. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that the company would reduce its number of product managers and directors to make it more efficient. Meta had given managers the option to be demoted, with the expectation that many would choose to leave. Shopify has also tried to flatten its organization.
Lost trust in leadership
Reddit employees said they lost trust in leadership after a series of missteps. For example, they said they were repeatedly told before the company conducted layoffs in June that layoffs wouldn't happen.
Product road maps changed in May as the company focused on the API changes and on boosting content creation by users.
The recent change to charge for access to Reddit's API also led to protests from moderators. While many employees supported the API changes, they said Reddit's moderators deserved credit for helping grow the site. A former employee who left in April argued that company leadership should have invested more in supporting moderators and that building tools for Reddit's moderator community "has never been a priority" for leadership.
"Reddit has long had staff who have worked hard to provide a better mod experience, but the will to improve this has never come from the top, and Reddit has yet to fund them to the extent they need to," one employee said.
Illustration of a Reddit logo on a mobile phone with a laptop behind it
Reddit.
Getty Images
On top of that, Reddit hasn't been able to fully integrate Spell's technology since its acquisition, two employees familiar with the matter said. One employee described Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, as having pushed through the acquisition despite opposition from vice presidents and directors, as well as bringing its founders as vice presidents and directors "despite Reddit not needing more of either."
Leadership shake-ups
Reddit had some leadership changes earlier this year. Jack Hanlon, who was the vice president of feeds, AI, search, and data, parted ways with the company in March, he and the company confirmed. Hanlon led product and engineering for several areas of the company, including machine learning and data science.
In May, Reddit's head of data science, Jose Lobez, was replaced by Tyler Otto, who'd joined Reddit from Hipmunk, a travel website Huffman founded.
Three employees described Lobez's departure as a surprise, as he was well liked within the data-science organization. "He basically grew the data-science organization himself — a big cultural figure internally," one said. They described Lopez as "pretty open both with reports and about the org as a whole," adding that he "helped deal with interorganization disputes pretty well."
On top of that, Reddit hasn't been able to fully integrate Spell's technology since its acquisition, two employees familiar with the matter said. One employee described Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, as having pushed through the acquisition despite opposition from vice presidents and directors, as well as bringing its founders as vice presidents and directors "despite Reddit not needing more of either."
Spez's hatred for 3ed party apps being successful and LLMs scraping reddit data is clearly based on his failures and jealousy of other people succeeding.
The problem is, many want a second Reddit. I and most here want something better than Reddit. Also, those that stayed with Reddit will not move until a precise copy is available, and someone holds their hand to help them move to this new platform. So many are plain lazy, hence so many stupid questions, because these idiots can't use Google. They want others to do it all for them.
So they can talk all they like about Reddit 2.0, but they are too lazy to find it, move to it, and shape it into what they want.
Karma was pointless. Just checked and apparently I ended up with 340k+ comment karma which was mostly repeating memes and reddit inside jokes and a few rants about Republicans. Posts that I thought had value tended to be downvoted (opinions of running role playing games).
The number doesn't mean anything and nothing of value was lost when I edited or deleted all of my reddit posts as most everything I posted also exists from other posts I have made on forums over the decades.
So in a roundabout way, karma was pointless and I hope it doesn't end up being a thing here.
I get what you're saying, but I wouldn't say it was pointless as a whole. Maybe it's because I'm looking at it from a slightly different perspective.
Karma did help push engagement, in fact, the system worked.
People cared about this number, and started to optimize their behavior such that they receive the largest amount of karma in the shortest time.
Since being active by posting / commenting facilitated getting karma, it helped produce a lot of content and made people interact with each other.
The problem with that is that it wasn't tied to quality (and couldn't be). As you said, that encouraged regurgitating the same meta over and over. It never incentivized good content, just quantity.
So my conclusion would be more like: Karma was pointless for animating users to create good and thoughtful content.
Instead it helped driving engagement forward, but at the cost of somewhat turning people into bots.
Posts receiving upvotes / downvotes is okay, but I'm not sure in what way reputation - or karma - should be displayed for a user account, publicly or privately.
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