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
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.
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.
Additional important details: spez built Reddit and sold it off to Condé Nast because he thought it was a stupid little project that would soon be eclipsed and he wanted his payout.
He spent a few years traveling and then expressed regret at having sold it because it was becoming much bigger than he imagined.
He was rehired after Ellen Pao's very similar attacks on the user base.
Every morning he wakes up, looks in the mirror and thinks "if I'd just stuck with Reddit instead of selling it I'd be Jack Dorsey (of Twitter) right now. A real billionaire instead of a mere multi-millionaire. I invented the front page of the internet! It's a top twenty website! Why can't I buy an island? Like, a good one."
That's where he's coming from. And he currently thinks if he acts like Elon Musk he can be as rich as him.
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.
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.
same, I would have probably kept using reddit before his insane press releases this week. Done with it now.
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.
Who wants to bet this guy is adamantly opposed to ever seeing a therapist
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.
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?
Surely this is a thing here..
What bothers me most about this is how personal it sounds, and how emotional he's getting. He's not thinking rationally
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).
Every time spez speaks he literally contradicts himself. I genuinely can't even comprehend the shit that he spews. He literally says multiple contradictory statements in the same sentence. It's like watching someone know they can't win an argument, so instead they just spew random shit hoping something lands.
He’s following in the footsteps of his idol, Elon Musk
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).