This just amazes me. It seems as if their blinded by power. Actually thinking they’re the true and only Frontpage of the internet.
Spez here thinking that the content hosting is more important than content generation. Reddit’s value to the community or advertisers is a result of the users, not Reddit Inc.
I mean to be fair, I imagine when communities were in blackout things were looking dire. I haven’t been to reddit since, but I imagine things are pretty much back to normal? So it’s clear he can sort of spit on the reddit userbase how much he wants. People will still come back.
Noooo, it has not returned to normal at all. When the protestors left, a flood of other people came in to take their place. It was enough to create a noticeable shift in tone. I would now describe reddit as a whole as barely left-leaning. Almost every sub moved a couple notches noticeably rightward.
It has cancer. Prognosis not good, when monetization was the root cause.
Uh, if what your saying is true, that sounds like an absolute victory for Spez. He never wanted good communities, he wanted communities he could market to. Having the idiot right wing that buys Chinese hats that says MAGA is absolutely the audience he wants.
In fact, if you’re all correct and the old social media is just straight going to the right wing and the left wing goes underground to techie sites like Lemmy, their voices will get magnified. Which is already happening with bud and Starbucks. Oh we are fucked…
The over-politicization here is annoying tbh. I still use Reddit for two things. To check on a reality tv show’s subreddit and to check Cricket discussions. I hope they move somewhere else, but neither are let or right wing. It feels like you’re seeing something you don’t like and attribute qualities you don’t like on to it.
How is this comment any different from a right wing person saying:
He never wanted good communities, he wanted communities he could market to. Having the idiot left wing that buys Chinese hats that has Mao pictures is absolutely the audience he wants.
It’s the same with Twitter. Apparently it has gone really right wing since Elon took over. But I’ve not noticed as I mostly follow football, tech, and music stuff.
Elon himself has gone really right wing, and coming out in public with some of the same hate and nastiness that Twitter showcases. There was a stink a while back because companies were seeing their ads posted next to full-on neoNazi content, which is absolutely the last thing a large company wants when they pay for advertising on a social media platform. I’m glad it’s not affecting you personally, but it’s part of why people are trying to move to p. much any other platform.
Because the right absolutely does buy maga hats and scam commemorative coins. The left does not buy Mao anything. Because we’re not a cult.
I get it. I’ve seen both left and right do that tbh. But what does it have to do with Reddit?
Right buys MAGA hat and is a cult so reddit is going right wing?!
Thing about the internet is the spaces are not set. You can’t conquer a country like you can in real life, because none of the space actually exists. It’s all numbers of users, because there is a finite number of them, and they can only hang out and contribute in so many spaces.
They move into one, another shrinks. People come here, this one grows. That’s all. Think of it less as some kind of strategy game and more of fluids flowing and interacting in a complex system.
Sure, but some places do have more influence on the public discourse than others. Lemmy will remain relatively uninfluential until it becomes more user-friendly, and/or more well-known. So any left wing stuff here is going to have less of an effect than it did on Reddit or other such places, for now.
The man speaking in this clip is Nilay Patel. Hes the Editor in Chief at The Verge.
He also used to be a lawyer before moving to journalism full time. So he knows Bullshit when he sees it.
I used to think that The Verge were just a bunch of Apple zealots who couldn’t even do a pc build video properly. They’ve come along way since then. Reddit would be absolutely insane to try and take on something like The Verge.
Side note , Nilay also has a podcast called Decoder where he interviews the heads of companies to get an idea of how they run and what their goals are. Its a pretty good show and I reccomend it. The one where Nilay takes on the head of Substack was hilarious
The hit piece Nilay did on Elon was fucking savage and one of the best things I’ve ever read on that site
A transcript for those who prefer to read. (using flixier so forgive the lack of speaker indication and the few corrections I made.)
Transcription:
[redd]it is very unhappy that people are talking to us.
They have decided that their official position is that they will wait for us to make mistakes and then issue corrections in order to discredit our journalism.
That’s straight up what they’re doing.
I know this is what they’re doing because we have a statement because they told us.
They told us Tim Rami, who runs coms at Reddit. This is the blanket statement will no longer comment on hearsay.
Unsubstantiated claims or baseless accusations from the verge will be in touch as corrections are needed.
Oh, my God.
I’ve been playing this game a long time.
We’ll wait for you to make a mistake.
So then we can correct you and say your reporting was wrong is the oldest trick in the book and we are just not gonna fall for it.
So we’re just gonna print this statement in every story from here on out, like that’s the way it’s gonna go.
If they want us to get it right they can… They can tell us what is actually happening, but I will come back to we’re gonna take the people on the ground.
We’re gonna take the users.
We’re gonna take the moderators.
We’re gonna take the employees every time.
And if you think they’re wrong, you can tell us and you can explain why they’re wrong.
But we’re not gonna stop because you’ve you’re running like a 1920 press playbook.
Like whatever.
Like I’m we’re just gonna burn you every time and that it’s that attitude.
It’s this aggressive posture where people are worried and they’re coming to reporters and saying,
Here are our worries.
Here’s the communication we have received that makes us feel threatened.
And Reddit’s response is Shut up.
That’s what breaks your community.
Wow, spez is taking on The Verge now? He thinks he’s a lot bigger deal than he really is…
It’s amazing hubris. Pride comes before a fall they say.
Pride comes before a fall they say.
[sees that Pride month ends June 30th]
GASP!
The Verge has been covering the shit out of the Reddit death spiral and I’m so here for it. Good for them.
I had a fullscreen button on my phone. Was that not working for you?
A fullscreen button for vertical video bullshit that was copied from a TikTok post, which was clipped from a real podcast? I’m shocked this doesn’t also have JPEG artifacts and Facebook reaction memes.
Maybe they just need to post another phone recording that directly shows Huffman is a blatant liar and see what “corrections” come from PR.
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
Saying it once was enough i think.
(Or you fell into a bug.)
weird. submitted it once. got triplicated somehow.
TIL the fediverse has an echo.
The Verge discredited themselves with that whole PC building fiasco, but I’m glad they’re covering the reddit debacle. I don’t know what the admins are thinking but my suspicion is that they aren’t thinking at all.
…it was one guy, 5 years ago, and he’s not even at The Verge anymore.
It’s time to let that go.
What!? That was 5 years ago already???
It’s kind of bonkers, isn’t it :(
In my mind, 2000 was still 10 years ago…and then I look at what year it currently is. Oof.
Time is sneaky like that.
Can anyone explain to me, please, how is this good (financially) for the reddit investors? I mean, I ran from reddit since I only accessed it from sync. Didn’t really care for the ‘politics’. Now I get here and see there’s a lot more to it than just the shut down of 3rd party apps (which I understood as a financial decision). If money’s the motivation for all of this, how is it financially healthy?
It’s not clear to me that this decision is financially healthy for Reddit. Even aside from the consequences of upsetting a lot of users (which has already made advertisers unhappy, since they prefer to advertise to people who aren’t upset; there’s been a noticeable decrease in ad spending on the site lately), Reddit only makes money from this move if anyone actually pays for the API, and/or they can force more people to use the official app. Whether they get more takers for the app, I don’t know. We’ll find out next week. But I don’t think a lot of people are going to pay for the API. Most third-party apps can’t, and neither can a lot of people who might use the API for research.
Basically, only big companies can afford the new prices, and if big companies pay, Reddit will make a profit. But big companies don’t become big companies by paying for overpriced commodities. API access for sites that have similar content costs a lot less than what Reddit wants. So, of the big companies that could pay, Microsoft is quietly modifying its products to avoid paying (you can’t upload from their hardware directly to Reddit anymore, for example). Google is introducing a service that is meant to take traffic away from Reddit, I doubt they’ll want to buy overpriced API data. AIs have already slurped up a lot of Reddit data, and can just scrape the site if they want more. The API is not the only way for bots to get access to Reddit’s data, just the easiest. Probably someone is going to pay for API access, at least in the short term, but I really don’t see this going well in the long run. People just don’t buy products that cost more than they’re worth. Even if Reddit’s data was worth the inflated price they’re asking, the API is not the only way to get that data. And I am pretty sure it’s not that valuable to anyone except the people who can’t afford it.
Third party apps are the only ones who need API access to survive, and therefore the ideal customers for Reddit’s API, but Reddit would rather fish for the customers that aren’t there than do business with the customers that are. Or, were, until a few weeks ago. Now–not so much. Christian Selig could have put a significant chunk of change in Reddit’s pocket on an ongoing basis if they’d negotiated a decent price, since Apollo was doing well, and Selig wanted to work with them, but no, Reddit had to ask a price Selig literally couldn’t pay, so Reddit gets nothing, users lose Apollo, and no one is happy. Infinity is going to try to make it work, but I doubt that’ll be much money for Reddit, and I doubt it’ll last more than a year, tops.
To be fair, in theory, charging for API access would give Reddit an additional revenue stream, which is probably what Huffman told investors. But no company that actually makes money from selling API access does it at this price point, or without, y’know… trying to keep customers instead of chasing them off. This is how Twitter did it, and Twitter is losing more money on a regular basis than Reddit has ever made. But it’s not my business, so what do I know… [/Kermit drinking tea]
I mean. My account has been a daily driver for the better part of 17 years. The name is original enough that if I went a week or so on an alt I would get requests for takeover from others.
I haven’t been on since it all started. And I won’t close the account. Just let it sit.
Go one further, edit and delete all your posts.
Please don’t do that unless you are replicating them somewhere else.
Gosh I HATE when I I stumble upon a reddit thread from Google when trying to solve a problem or something, and the comment which may have been the solution is removed or edited by one of those redact bots.
