this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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The Verge: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’
That's an absolutely tone deaf response from spez. The talking points are exactly what I expected and I'm not surprised, but man, whoever's running PR at Reddit is really dropping the ball.
If they do IPO, anyone who buys into it wholeheartedly deserves the deep losses the company will incur long term - it seems no-one on Reddit's leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.
Is he wrong though?
We all know that users are going to come flooding back as soon as the closed subs open again. Reddit has been through controversy after controversy and has only grown in size. The truth is that most people on Reddit don't really care about third party apps, a lot didn't even know they existed before the Apollo dev spilled the tea on his conversations with Reddit. Spez knows this and is counting on it.
For this protest to have any teeth at all, the protesting subs need to stay blacked out indefinitely until Reddit starts negotiating realistically, or they start hemorrhaging users to alternative platforms.
so - as one of those people who really didn't know much about the 3rd party apps or even what the protest/blackout was, I was wishing for an alternative for quite some time now. Reddit has become an echo chamber where you're downvoted for having your own opinion, no matter how vanilla the "dissenting" opinion is. The trolliing and constant arguing gets old after awhile, and I don't think the current state of reddit is what the original intent of the platform ever was. This, for me, was why I gravitated toward Beehaw specifically. I'm not going back to Reddit. It reminds me of a playground full of bullies, itching for an argument. This platform is so much more my speed. And I feel like there are a pretty decent amount of people here who are in the same mind... for us, the alternative is welcome and Spez can wait til he retires for us to return because it's not happening.
Yes... I feel the same way. We will see. The last big blowup there was not a place to go (I went to voat for awhile, but it was just another walled garden filled with a certain type of vibe I did not really like that much). Lemmy seems pretty good now. We all know that moderation and a heavy "Do not feed the trolls" has always been the rule all the way back to Usenet and the early internet. One reason I choose Behaw is they seem to believe in that basic philosophy. Plus federation, people that do not like that, they can go to instances where they are happy too. Seems win win.
The big counter issue is scale. There are some areas where Lemmy does not cover well. These tend to be technical areas like Law.
I wish Lemmy had a really easy way for people to self host their own instances without having to know really much of anything at all about how it works (or at least an easy and comprehensive Guide to Self-hosting for Dummies!), so that we were less likely to end up with too many people on too few instances.
I've never self-hosted anything, and I know I could learn it, but it's still a project.
I do some self hosting for my own projects.. if you want to and have the time an resources it is fun in a way. It is trivial to start with 1 thing so try it out. Probably your OS already has servers installed.
However it is my opinion that it is better, for the most part, for most people to use tools hosted externally. There are economies of scale. It would really be truely stupid for masses of people to all have their own little homelabs. And being an admin is a serious trade with a lot of skills and it is a time sink. And it is risky. If we are doing stuff online that we want to last, that is important, there are reasons to leave it to smarty pants nerds. Just like home maintenece or health care or hair cuts... there is a role for hobby DIY and a role for getting a pro.
If you cant parse the documentation to figure out how to set it up, you are not competant to do it. The software is not ready to be run by a person of your skill level. And im not saying that to be shitty to you; i looked at the requirements and i think it would be more than i have the time/knowledge to do. I have tried and failed for this reason at lots of things.
This is really complex project. Try something simpler Here is a list (simple to ultra complicated): https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
There are a couple of selfhost(ed) communities on lemmy too
Wrong? No. But leadership is about communication and diplomacy as much as strategy. Short term gameplay aside, it doesn't take much effort to pretend to attempt to placate power users and it doesn't cost anything besides pride to do so. At least Reddit had a half-decent communication strategy with the Boston Bomber debacle - can't say the same with this one.
In any case, whilst you won't get the r/funny's of Reddit going private forever, you do have some big ones like r/iphone saying they're blacking out indefinitely.
It's pretty myopic of the leadership team to think that you shouldn't at least attempt to make an user relations play here.
The fact all those private and shuttered subreddits and deleted comments/posts already break a lot of "site:reddit.com" searches is a big deal for their traffic, too.
Which is good news for us because even if this does blow over they will fuck up again and every time it happens we'll profit from it in new users. Spez's problem isn't that his dream is unattainable, his problem is that the person having that dream is him.
I'm pretty sure his dream is just to make increasingly absurd amounts of money, every year more than the last: Line Go Up, forever. That dream is attainable in the short term, but utterly unattainable in the long term on a planet with finite resources.
He's just in it for the $$$, regardless of how, not for any of the things that're good about reddit. Someone who cared about reddit for any other reason wouldn't do this to it.
It’s definitely a weird response, since it’s directed at employees I would have expected him to try to be reassuring without downplaying or even really mentioning the blackout.
Should have been easy to just say something bland like “we believe in the changes we are making and how they will make our company better. “
At this point I'm convinced there's no one running PR, it's just Spez and his admin lackeys coming up with random stuff Musk-style.
Everything passes. Including reddit. waves hands this is all just temporary.
Type O Negative - Everything Dies has surprisingly fitting lyrics for the search of people for a place to stay.
I wasn't familiar with the band and for whatever reason based on the names I had thought it was going to be either an indie pop or a folk punk song.
I was not expecting I LIKE VITAMIIIIIIIIIINS to be growled at me like that, I had a good laugh.