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It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform an

It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community. I really hadn’t expected that. Corporate doublespeak is one thing, and management decisions aren’t necessarily always in the interest of their users - but such an egregious act is really beyond the pale. From the IPO mindset, what questions does this raise about the risk to the business from the leadership’s lack of integrity? And not just the propensity to lie, but to get caught so blatantly. Why would even a ruthless money-over-everything Wall Street investor want to gamble on that? And kudos to Christian for doing what he did. Bullies need to learn that the truth will come out eventually, and if the revelation they can’t gaslight with impunity is a shock to them - good. Edit: not to mention Christian's full-time job has just been ended by this policy change. How especially and thoughtlessly cruel to now also make him out to be an extortionist liar, and for nothing really.

napsterbr 3y ago
At this point, I'm just glad Apollo's author will be able to get some indemnification (and cover his refunds) with the likely lawsuit that will come from this lie.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Then he might finally be able to cover the API costs for a month.
Demmme 3y ago
I actually believe reddit when they say the impact is small I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website. If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web (or web mobile or the official Reddit app), the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority. Of course I think the behavior is shitty but I don't think most people really care and reddit will not see any real impact of it either.
- Hoyadonis 3y ago
  >If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web Of course it's not. According to this site, around 3/4 of their traffic is from mobile. https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/ https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/ HackerNews, I love you, but some of the comments in here are detached from reality. You'd be hard pressed to find any social media company that gets more traffic from desktop than mobile in the year 2023. This site is the exception, not the rule.
  - layer8 3y ago
    Mobile includes mobile web browsers.
    - Sharlin 3y ago
      And I can guarantee that there are approximately five people using Reddit via a browser on mobile. Mobile means the app, to a precision of two or three significant digits.
      - tootie 3y ago
        I'd wager you're completely wrong. Reddit at this point gets a ton of traffic from search. Remember the old 90/9/1 rule. 90% of users are just browsing cat pictures and are eyeball fodder for ads.
      - layer8 3y ago
        I’m one of those five people then. Very casual use, but that’s probably the large majority of Reddit users.
        Sharlin 3y ago
        I'd wager that most Reddit users these days, casual or not, are only dimly aware that the platform even exists as a website. Or at least a large plurality.
bardfinn 3y ago
Their fight with ad blocking is the same Cold War every other social media site has. If they’re serving ads off of distinctly named infrastructure, or even distinctly subnetted or IP-addressed infrastructure, an adblocking router config will kill them no matter, & there’d be people writing those and distributing them. Their only hope would be to serve ads inline with content, to defeat those. Which … they already do, I think? I dunno. It would be how they’d serve adverts to Apollo users and RiF users. I think the biggest adblocking issue they have is people on desktop chrome & Firefox. Who already aren’t using the API. They didn’t lock old.reddit out of new features; it’s a really unwieldy codebase, and making changes to old,reddit is like shaking a wooden water tower. It holds up the water tank as long as it’s a static load, not dynamic. I’ve had to read / maintain / debug source code in my career - and I’ve read the old open sourced Reddit code, and it is … well, it’s not designed for building up and out. It’s not even designed for maintaining over time. It was designed to get a message board running with occasional weekly downtimes, and a lot of “you broke reddit” and a bunch of RSS feeds and API endpoints, and no view to end user experience. It was built with the same mindset as building windows 3.1. Coding some of the features would be like backporting their support code to windows 3.1 - but not as libraries, as device drivers.
- sroussey 3y ago
  Ad blocking companies then come to publishers with extortion payment plans.
bardfinn 3y ago
[flagged]
- digging 3y ago
  > Yet another thing is that two-day boycotts … don’t … work. It’s “we’re going out of town for a weekend”, except at scale. It just shows Reddit that some moderation teams will participate in a power-flex protest that is a result of some folks angry that Reddit is no longer their golden goose, no longer laying golden eggs for them. My only disagreement is to say that some subs will be going dark permanently, which does work. Otherwise, carry on, and thank you for your service to the community.
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
  To clarify, I'm not opining personally on reddit's API changes at all in my comment. I'm pointing out that regardless of anyone's opinion of the API changes, Steve's behavior is just egregious, ridiculous, and cruel. You certainly raise good points about the policy change itself and about the ensuing debate and my own view is certainly closer to yours than to "not care / no position." I'm just not talking about it here, my comment was my stunned reaction to steve huffman's abominable public behavior.
- wordsarelies 3y ago
  The latest revelations have started pushing folks to completely removing their content from the platform. Nuke reddit (only on the edge extension store it looks like) is giving their frontends a workout.
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  There have been subreddit going dark for 2-3 days en masse in the past. IIRC they usually accomplished their stated goal.
  - bardfinn 3y ago
    The AI “gold rush” has already left the station, yyeeeaarrsss ago. The people who are going to monetize it are the people for whom the threshold of entry to the data sets is an insignificant threshold even at tens of thousands of dollars a year - and they’re the same entities already owning rights to datasets. And don’t need Reddit’s. They could Elsevier a bunch of researchers who get institutional grants, but that’s not going to be a predictable, dependable, forecastable revenue stream. For anyone with experience in pricing data services for partners, and anyone with experience with auditable, publicly owned businesses (like Reddit is trying to become, through IPO) the API TOS & the “premium” firehose pricing is about having all the costs and cost centres of their business operations either justified by a revenue stream, or having a potential revenue stream assigned to those cost centres, or having a business case justifying the existence of that cost and cost centre, OR having a pricing model on that aspect of business which justifies it only being operated as a distinctly separate business model from the main business. If that happens, then they’d likely spin it off as a subsidiary business, or a licensor, and operate it in a way that locks down their liability from privacy violation cases or GDPR violation cases etc. In short: Reddit isn’t doing this for an “AI Gold Rush”. Reddit is doing this because they have to structure their business operations in a way that limits liabilities, minimizes or justifies cost centres, and maximizes profit streams. To get people to buy the stock. To show that the company is profitable and is leveraging all their assets.
DecayingOrganic 3y ago
After carefully reading the comments and going back to the post, I take back my argument. It was flawed and did not represent the whole picture. I apologize for that. I think it wasn't a threat, but rather an unsuccessful attempt to sell Apollo before time runs out. I apologize for the confusion I created with my poor argument. I need to read more carefully. --- I initially clicked on this post fully prepared to be outraged at Reddit and its CEO, but after carefully going through the audio, I just can't share that sentiment. I've listened to the recording multiple times, making sure that I'm not missing any crucial points in the conversation. It is evident to me that this statement, "if you want Apollo to go quiet," did come across as a threat. Yes, the developer tried to backtrack later in the call by adding "in terms of API usage," but the damage was already done. Steve's side even provided several opportunities for him to clarify his statement, claiming that he couldn't hear him properly. I understand that many members of this community are rightfully upset with Reddit and its actions in recent years (me included), but we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that it really felt and sounded like a threat. --- Transcript of the call: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f915e6a5c7014 https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9... Audio: http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-31-end.m4a http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
- DeRock 3y ago
  The complaint was not with the audio call itself, but how Steve had paraphrased the audio call to others not in attendance, specifically saying: > Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." > Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us." In the audio call Steve apologizes for the misinterpretation after clarifying, but then goes off and still makes claims of threats.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
  I’m curious what the threat here is. Is the implication that they can pay 10 Million and he shuts down the app quiet or he shuts the app down revealing the cost of the API?
  - 3y ago
dylan604 3y ago
>Bullies need to learn that the truth will come out eventually, At this point, this is just speculation and wishful thinking on your part. History has shown that this is not always the outcome. Things we try to teach kids like "winners don't cheat, and cheaters don't win", "crime doesn't pay", or any similar platitudes do not hold true in real life which adults live. If Reddit were to die tomorrow, it would affect me in no way. So this has all been a bunch of popcorn eating for me to watch everyone on their soapboxes make outlandish statements made on pure emotion.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  It's the same as people always saying "The winners write the history" while most of what the public took as gospel about Nazi Germany came from the very people who ran it, like autobiographies and memoirs from literal Nazi military higher ups. The myth that Germany lost the war because of "human wave tactics" of the Soviets is exactly one of those lies from the losers.
phpisthebest 3y ago
Spez has always made Ellen Pao look like a genius CEO
that_guy_iain 3y ago
> It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community. I listened to the audio. It was very clear from the get-go the minute he said pay me $10m they were taking it very seriously, they said repeatedly "I just want to be very clear about what you're saying" and then said "that's sounds like a threat". The wording doesn't really make sense for a native English speaker when talking about a buyout. And they end that part with "I'm just going to hope that's not what you meant." which is generally how someone acts when they think you've threatened them but are going to be civil about it. So I don't think it's fair to say it's a blatant lie. And wouldn't you know it, what they thought was being threatened is what is happened?
- yankjenets 3y ago
  I listened to the audio as well. Can you please explain how you think Spez interpreted the threat? He thinks that Apollo is threatening to blast them on social media? Slander him? Break his legs? Murder him?
  - that_guy_iain 3y ago
    >He thinks that Apollo is threatening to blast them on social media? Threaten him with pretty much what he did. We'll go quietly instead of making a large amount of noise and complaining and getting the generally hostile Reddit user base riled up.
    - officeplant 3y ago
      Except thats not at all what he said. The noise referred to the amount of API "noise" he generates. Which reddit likes to pretend is costing them millions.
      - that_guy_iain 3y ago
        I didn't say he said it, I said that's what I think Spez thought.
mrguyorama 3y ago
>It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie Spez was the person who got caught editing a users comment in the backend to make them seem like an asshole or otherwise change the public perception of a question and response This is 100% in line with something I would expect from Spez (the CEO)
- 23B1 3y ago
  Whats really telling, though, is that he's managed to hold on to his position despite everything.
  - bcrosby95 3y ago
    Because people, in general, don't give a shit. About anything really. Unless you directly inconvenience them in some way.
    - ljm 3y ago
      And Reddit has been online the whole time. People love boycotting within Reddit, but they’re still using Reddit to do that.
      - robby_w_g 3y ago
        Except now Reddit is taking away the primary method of using Reddit for many users
      - Clent 3y ago
        This is where Reddit users get to prove if they have what it takes to boycott for what they believe in.
  - brookst 3y ago
    Birds of a feather. Presumably the board and major investors have similar ethical standards.
jupp0r 3y ago
"Why would even a ruthless money-over-everything Wall Street investor want to gamble on that?" I think you are missing an even larger point here. What is Reddit without its communities and users? At the end of the day, if people are no longer love using Reddit, there's nothing left to their business. How anybody thinks that the API decision was a good one in light of that (alienating your own power users) is beyond twitteresque.
wpietri 3y ago
> It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community. I would like to be astounded. But Reddit has taken $1.4 billion in venture capital, meaning they are expected to make VCs well more than that. And one way that can happen is aggressively juicing the short-term numbers and IPOing, so that VCs can dump their holdings before everybody realizes that they were sold a bill of goods. I suspect that they were thinking nobody would catch them like this. Or that even if they did, people would have forgotten by the IPO pop. I think there's a fundamental conflict of interest in the business models of web communities. I saw somebody sum up Web 2.0 as "you do all the work, we make all the money", which totally applies to Reddit. Those communities can work well on a pay-the-bills basis. But investors generally don't give a shit about communities; they just want money. So from the perspective of the economic rational actor, the right thing to do is to strip-mine the years of goodwill built up, maximizing short-term revenue. That will set the business up for long-term failure, but by that point it will have been sold off. That's an important part of the private equity playbook and has been for a while. A good example is Simmons Mattress: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/buyout-firms-profited-as-simmons-debt-soared/ https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/... And Cory Doctorow has been talking about this as enshittification: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
- raywu 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing these goldmines
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >I suspect that they were thinking nobody would catch them like this. Or that even if they did, people would have forgotten by the IPO pop. Yeah true. Still seems like a legally asinine thing to do. It was really as simple as "I did not see eye to eye with Apollo" and you can power trip all you want after that. I don't know if there is a slander case here, but a C level executive shouldn't even risk it to begin with. likely not, given how strong libel/slander laws in the U.S. are. Funnily enough, correcting the story so quickly before damages were done may have weakened a case.

napsterbr 3y ago

At this point, I'm just glad Apollo's author will be able to get some indemnification (and cover his refunds) with the likely lawsuit that will come from this lie.

moffkalast 3y ago
Then he might finally be able to cover the API costs for a month.

Demmme 3y ago

I actually believe reddit when they say the impact is small I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website. If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web (or web mobile or the official Reddit app), the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority. Of course I think the behavior is shitty but I don't think most people really care and reddit will not see any real impact of it either.

Hoyadonis 3y ago
>If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web Of course it's not. According to this site, around 3/4 of their traffic is from mobile. https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/ https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/ HackerNews, I love you, but some of the comments in here are detached from reality. You'd be hard pressed to find any social media company that gets more traffic from desktop than mobile in the year 2023. This site is the exception, not the rule.
- layer8 3y ago
  Mobile includes mobile web browsers.
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    And I can guarantee that there are approximately five people using Reddit via a browser on mobile. Mobile means the app, to a precision of two or three significant digits.
    - tootie 3y ago
      I'd wager you're completely wrong. Reddit at this point gets a ton of traffic from search. Remember the old 90/9/1 rule. 90% of users are just browsing cat pictures and are eyeball fodder for ads.
    - layer8 3y ago
      I’m one of those five people then. Very casual use, but that’s probably the large majority of Reddit users.
      - Sharlin 3y ago
        I'd wager that most Reddit users these days, casual or not, are only dimly aware that the platform even exists as a website. Or at least a large plurality.

bardfinn 3y ago

Their fight with ad blocking is the same Cold War every other social media site has. If they’re serving ads off of distinctly named infrastructure, or even distinctly subnetted or IP-addressed infrastructure, an adblocking router config will kill them no matter, & there’d be people writing those and distributing them. Their only hope would be to serve ads inline with content, to defeat those. Which … they already do, I think? I dunno. It would be how they’d serve adverts to Apollo users and RiF users. I think the biggest adblocking issue they have is people on desktop chrome & Firefox. Who already aren’t using the API. They didn’t lock old.reddit out of new features; it’s a really unwieldy codebase, and making changes to old,reddit is like shaking a wooden water tower. It holds up the water tank as long as it’s a static load, not dynamic. I’ve had to read / maintain / debug source code in my career - and I’ve read the old open sourced Reddit code, and it is … well, it’s not designed for building up and out. It’s not even designed for maintaining over time. It was designed to get a message board running with occasional weekly downtimes, and a lot of “you broke reddit” and a bunch of RSS feeds and API endpoints, and no view to end user experience. It was built with the same mindset as building windows 3.1. Coding some of the features would be like backporting their support code to windows 3.1 - but not as libraries, as device drivers.

sroussey 3y ago
Ad blocking companies then come to publishers with extortion payment plans.

bardfinn 3y ago

[flagged]

digging 3y ago
> Yet another thing is that two-day boycotts … don’t … work. It’s “we’re going out of town for a weekend”, except at scale. It just shows Reddit that some moderation teams will participate in a power-flex protest that is a result of some folks angry that Reddit is no longer their golden goose, no longer laying golden eggs for them. My only disagreement is to say that some subs will be going dark permanently, which does work. Otherwise, carry on, and thank you for your service to the community.
mustacheemperor 3y ago
To clarify, I'm not opining personally on reddit's API changes at all in my comment. I'm pointing out that regardless of anyone's opinion of the API changes, Steve's behavior is just egregious, ridiculous, and cruel. You certainly raise good points about the policy change itself and about the ensuing debate and my own view is certainly closer to yours than to "not care / no position." I'm just not talking about it here, my comment was my stunned reaction to steve huffman's abominable public behavior.
wordsarelies 3y ago
The latest revelations have started pushing folks to completely removing their content from the platform. Nuke reddit (only on the edge extension store it looks like) is giving their frontends a workout.
Rebelgecko 3y ago
There have been subreddit going dark for 2-3 days en masse in the past. IIRC they usually accomplished their stated goal.
- bardfinn 3y ago
  The AI “gold rush” has already left the station, yyeeeaarrsss ago. The people who are going to monetize it are the people for whom the threshold of entry to the data sets is an insignificant threshold even at tens of thousands of dollars a year - and they’re the same entities already owning rights to datasets. And don’t need Reddit’s. They could Elsevier a bunch of researchers who get institutional grants, but that’s not going to be a predictable, dependable, forecastable revenue stream. For anyone with experience in pricing data services for partners, and anyone with experience with auditable, publicly owned businesses (like Reddit is trying to become, through IPO) the API TOS & the “premium” firehose pricing is about having all the costs and cost centres of their business operations either justified by a revenue stream, or having a potential revenue stream assigned to those cost centres, or having a business case justifying the existence of that cost and cost centre, OR having a pricing model on that aspect of business which justifies it only being operated as a distinctly separate business model from the main business. If that happens, then they’d likely spin it off as a subsidiary business, or a licensor, and operate it in a way that locks down their liability from privacy violation cases or GDPR violation cases etc. In short: Reddit isn’t doing this for an “AI Gold Rush”. Reddit is doing this because they have to structure their business operations in a way that limits liabilities, minimizes or justifies cost centres, and maximizes profit streams. To get people to buy the stock. To show that the company is profitable and is leveraging all their assets.

DecayingOrganic 3y ago

After carefully reading the comments and going back to the post, I take back my argument. It was flawed and did not represent the whole picture. I apologize for that. I think it wasn't a threat, but rather an unsuccessful attempt to sell Apollo before time runs out. I apologize for the confusion I created with my poor argument. I need to read more carefully. --- I initially clicked on this post fully prepared to be outraged at Reddit and its CEO, but after carefully going through the audio, I just can't share that sentiment. I've listened to the recording multiple times, making sure that I'm not missing any crucial points in the conversation. It is evident to me that this statement, "if you want Apollo to go quiet," did come across as a threat. Yes, the developer tried to backtrack later in the call by adding "in terms of API usage," but the damage was already done. Steve's side even provided several opportunities for him to clarify his statement, claiming that he couldn't hear him properly. I understand that many members of this community are rightfully upset with Reddit and its actions in recent years (me included), but we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that it really felt and sounded like a threat. --- Transcript of the call: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f915e6a5c7014 https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9... Audio: http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-31-end.m4a http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...

DeRock 3y ago
The complaint was not with the audio call itself, but how Steve had paraphrased the audio call to others not in attendance, specifically saying: > Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." > Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us." In the audio call Steve apologizes for the misinterpretation after clarifying, but then goes off and still makes claims of threats.
the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
I’m curious what the threat here is. Is the implication that they can pay 10 Million and he shuts down the app quiet or he shuts the app down revealing the cost of the API?
- 3y ago

dylan604 3y ago

>Bullies need to learn that the truth will come out eventually, At this point, this is just speculation and wishful thinking on your part. History has shown that this is not always the outcome. Things we try to teach kids like "winners don't cheat, and cheaters don't win", "crime doesn't pay", or any similar platitudes do not hold true in real life which adults live. If Reddit were to die tomorrow, it would affect me in no way. So this has all been a bunch of popcorn eating for me to watch everyone on their soapboxes make outlandish statements made on pure emotion.

mrguyorama 3y ago
It's the same as people always saying "The winners write the history" while most of what the public took as gospel about Nazi Germany came from the very people who ran it, like autobiographies and memoirs from literal Nazi military higher ups. The myth that Germany lost the war because of "human wave tactics" of the Soviets is exactly one of those lies from the losers.

phpisthebest 3y ago

Spez has always made Ellen Pao look like a genius CEO

that_guy_iain 3y ago

> It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community. I listened to the audio. It was very clear from the get-go the minute he said pay me $10m they were taking it very seriously, they said repeatedly "I just want to be very clear about what you're saying" and then said "that's sounds like a threat". The wording doesn't really make sense for a native English speaker when talking about a buyout. And they end that part with "I'm just going to hope that's not what you meant." which is generally how someone acts when they think you've threatened them but are going to be civil about it. So I don't think it's fair to say it's a blatant lie. And wouldn't you know it, what they thought was being threatened is what is happened?

yankjenets 3y ago
I listened to the audio as well. Can you please explain how you think Spez interpreted the threat? He thinks that Apollo is threatening to blast them on social media? Slander him? Break his legs? Murder him?
- that_guy_iain 3y ago
  >He thinks that Apollo is threatening to blast them on social media? Threaten him with pretty much what he did. We'll go quietly instead of making a large amount of noise and complaining and getting the generally hostile Reddit user base riled up.
  - officeplant 3y ago
    Except thats not at all what he said. The noise referred to the amount of API "noise" he generates. Which reddit likes to pretend is costing them millions.
    - that_guy_iain 3y ago
      I didn't say he said it, I said that's what I think Spez thought.

mrguyorama 3y ago

>It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie Spez was the person who got caught editing a users comment in the backend to make them seem like an asshole or otherwise change the public perception of a question and response This is 100% in line with something I would expect from Spez (the CEO)

23B1 3y ago
Whats really telling, though, is that he's managed to hold on to his position despite everything.
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  Because people, in general, don't give a shit. About anything really. Unless you directly inconvenience them in some way.
  - ljm 3y ago
    And Reddit has been online the whole time. People love boycotting within Reddit, but they’re still using Reddit to do that.
    - robby_w_g 3y ago
      Except now Reddit is taking away the primary method of using Reddit for many users
    - Clent 3y ago
      This is where Reddit users get to prove if they have what it takes to boycott for what they believe in.
- brookst 3y ago
  Birds of a feather. Presumably the board and major investors have similar ethical standards.

jupp0r 3y ago

"Why would even a ruthless money-over-everything Wall Street investor want to gamble on that?" I think you are missing an even larger point here. What is Reddit without its communities and users? At the end of the day, if people are no longer love using Reddit, there's nothing left to their business. How anybody thinks that the API decision was a good one in light of that (alienating your own power users) is beyond twitteresque.

wpietri 3y ago

> It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community. I would like to be astounded. But Reddit has taken $1.4 billion in venture capital, meaning they are expected to make VCs well more than that. And one way that can happen is aggressively juicing the short-term numbers and IPOing, so that VCs can dump their holdings before everybody realizes that they were sold a bill of goods. I suspect that they were thinking nobody would catch them like this. Or that even if they did, people would have forgotten by the IPO pop. I think there's a fundamental conflict of interest in the business models of web communities. I saw somebody sum up Web 2.0 as "you do all the work, we make all the money", which totally applies to Reddit. Those communities can work well on a pay-the-bills basis. But investors generally don't give a shit about communities; they just want money. So from the perspective of the economic rational actor, the right thing to do is to strip-mine the years of goodwill built up, maximizing short-term revenue. That will set the business up for long-term failure, but by that point it will have been sold off. That's an important part of the private equity playbook and has been for a while. A good example is Simmons Mattress: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/buyout-firms-profited-as-simmons-debt-soared/ https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/... And Cory Doctorow has been talking about this as enshittification: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

raywu 3y ago
Thanks for sharing these goldmines
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>I suspect that they were thinking nobody would catch them like this. Or that even if they did, people would have forgotten by the IPO pop. Yeah true. Still seems like a legally asinine thing to do. It was really as simple as "I did not see eye to eye with Apollo" and you can power trip all you want after that. I don't know if there is a slander case here, but a C level executive shouldn't even risk it to begin with. likely not, given how strong libel/slander laws in the U.S. are. Funnily enough, correcting the story so quickly before damages were done may have weakened a case.