12 ms·

Why did Reddit even have an AMA for this? Everyone knew it would turn out exactly like it did. The most difficult questions went unanswered. The answers they d

by slg 3y ago

Why did Reddit even have an AMA for this? Everyone knew it would turn out exactly like it did. The most difficult questions went unanswered. The answers they did give were either just bland corporate speak or actively detrimental, giving their critics more ammunition including opening Reddit up to accusations of libel. The whole ordeal seems to leave them in a worse position than if they just never did the AMA.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
To control the narrative.
- Natsu 3y ago
  This isn't exactly the first drama from Spez... https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/5emsq3/reddit_reacts_after_uspez_admits_to_editing_users/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/5emsq3/reddit_reacts...
dogleash 3y ago
If they don't say anything, they're incommunicative. But if talk and say effectively nothing, they might get egg on their face for people watching. However they can convince people who don't pay much attention that it's just a disagreement.
mustacheemperor 3y ago
At this point my theories are 1) Ego and emotion are driving decisions at reddit or 2) Reddit's leadership has run the numbers and genuinely thinks it will benefit their profitability plans if the users reacting negatively to these changes all leave. This is well past the point of just killing 3rd party apps because the API changes alone would have accomplished that. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." What do you do when incompetence would be unbelievable in scope and malice would be unbelievably incompetent.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  reddit receives hundreds of millions of dollars per year of free moderating from their community. The community is the only valuable thing in reddit. The website is worth nothing, the eyeballs and free labour are everything. When the parts of their community with outsize influence start talking about abandoning the site to somewhere else it threatens both their hundreds of millions in free labour per year, and also the future of their site. Reddit exists as it does today because Digg made a series of bad decisions that led to mass movement away from Digg. The same thing can happen to Reddit.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    As has been mentioned a few times: When Digg fucked up, reddit existed as a growing but small competitor. Reddit has no such competitor.
    - fphhotchips 3y ago
      That may be true in the US but it's not everywhere, and it certainly won't be for long. Anyway, for many, the competition is "nothing at all". I will never download the official Reddit app. It's that bad. The mobile experience is worse. I'll just find something more productive to do with my time.
      - danudey 3y ago
        I use the official mobile app, and also use Apollo (because I like having two separate apps for two separate accounts I use). The official mobile app is just inexplicably bad. The other day I was browsing through the 'Popular' tab, and every time I clicked on the thumbnail for an article, it took me to the web page... of some other article. Completely unrelated as far as I could tell. Tap on a CNN article about Trump indictment, instead get an EW article about Gwen Stefani (or whatever, I don't remember what it was). It was consistent, too. Every article went to a different article instead, but tapping on that article always gave you the same different article. Tapping onto the comment screen and then onto the article gave the correct article. A few weeks ago, the problem was different; I would tap on an article, and it would load up some other article, and then also the article I was trying to read. I'd read it, close it, then have to close the other article, then I'd be back at the main list. For the longest time, refreshing an article list would result in a bunch of broken-looking entries in the list view; entries without titles, titles overlapping images, entries that were too big, and so on. Refreshing again often fixed it, but then gave me a new set of articles as if I'd already read the messed up ones it had brokenly tried to show me. This used to happen every single time; then it was just sort of random, about 50% of the time. I haven't noticed it lately because I got out of the habit of refreshing lists and I just kill the app when I want to get newer content. There's also a little hovering downwards-arrow symbol to skip to the next top-level comment. It's black, it's fairly large, and it hovers over the content. You can't get rid of it whether you want it or not. The best you can do is toggle a preference that says "I don't want this to be movable", and then it sits in the corner, over top of the content, forever (except when it bugs out and sits in the middle of the screen on the left side forever). For the longest time, the comment box to type your comment into was a fixed size; if your comment didn't fit into two or three lines, then your text wrapped onto the fourth line or whatever, except the text box wouldn't scroll so you couldn't see what you were typing. I got in the habit of copying the text to Notes, writing my comment there, and then switching back to Reddit. 50% of the time, the Reddit app would reload and I would lose the comment that I was replying to, but the other 50% of the time I could paste my comment in and post it. When creating a new post, you first put in the content you want (title, body, image, whatever), and then you hit 'Next' and choose a subreddit. It gives you a list of suggestions, based not on subreddits that you're subscribed to or post to regularly, but rather subreddits that you've engaged with lately. I saw a post from /r/doordash yesterday, so now the app is suggesting maybe I want to post there, or /r/Weddingattireapproval. Note that some subreddits don't allow self posts, or don't allow image posts, but you have to create your post first before choosing a subreddit that maybe doesn't allow it, forcing you to go back and change your post type/content. This feature seems just generally really stupid. It goes on and on. It's a genuinely horrible app which can rarely even get the basic functionality working, and bugs stick around indefinitely.
adamckay 3y ago
It's worthwhile pointing out his wasn't a genuine AMA - it was a "ask me anything we have a pre-written answer for" [1]. It's an obvious thing to do because the whole situation has been received badly by the community, so you'd expect some preparation of good answers to likely questions, but to copy and paste blindly the pre-written answers from the PR team is just pure laziness and a blatant disregard for the community you've built. 1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/jnkch10/?context=10000 https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
ASalazarMX 3y ago
Such a lousy AMA, Spez only made 14 comments, and it was locked after that.
- danudey 3y ago
  Spez made 14 comments, the others made 7 combined, all in reply to 26,000 comments or so.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  It isn't locked. You can still comment.
  - ASalazarMX 3y ago
    It was locked when I tried to comment yesterday.
FireBeyond 3y ago
> The most difficult questions went unanswered. Almost EVERY question went unanswered. He spent approximately 35 minutes replying to 14 questions, essentially all of which were from Reddit "PowerMods" (that cadre of 6 moderators that control >118 of the Top 50 subreddits), and most of those answers were single paragraph rehashes of the same point: "We'll keep talking to developers", and multiple of those questions appear to have scripted, as noted when he answered a question: "A: blah blah blah", then rapidly edited out the "A:".
- donmcronald 3y ago
  The whole idea had Bill Cosby "meme me" vibes right from the start and after he answered the blackmail question I think he'd have been better off talking about Rampart. Why would you even answer that question?
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > Reddit "PowerMods" (that cadre of 6 moderators that control >118 of the Top 50 subreddits) Not only is this provably untrue but your math is nonsensical. EDIT: Provably untrue proof -- top 100 subreddit moderator list: * https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be6e151 https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be...
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/updated_and_sanitized_six_powermods_control_118/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/upda... https://www.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/comments/gk0w4c/to_have_independently_moderated_subreddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/comments/gk0w4c/t... You were saying? Even the Reddit admins didn't deny it, in that second post.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      I was saying that it is provably untrue. Moderators of the 100 top subreddits: * https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be6e151 https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be... Your links from 3 years ago showing screenshots are not relevant to what I claimed.
shmatt 3y ago
You’re asking why do CEOs speak out? Do q&as? Fireside chats? Of course they all speak corporate speak Most of the top questions were childish and useless, asking to get rid of the ads, go back to the original spirit of Reddit. Comparing the pressure and decision making process of a CEO who raised 1.3 BILLION dollars to some basement dweller who’s shutting down their app out of spite (pretty sure they could sell the app for $5M today no questions asked) After so many rounds of raising, I’m being generous if I guess that spez owns 5% of Reddit stock. Reddit is being run right now by the biggest investment firms in SV. Rigjtfully looking for ROI. It would literally make them more money to shut down Reddit than to do what everyone in the AMA is asking them to do In terms of accessibility, I understand they have a roadmap. I don’t understand how they don’t have 400 ADA lawsuits on court right now. Every corporation I worked for had been flooded by copy paste ADA lawsuits, and an app or 3rd party apps aren’t enough, the website has to be fully accessible
- ddingus 3y ago
  Too many sales. Too many dollars handed out today for expected value in the future. The trouble is people showed up for what Reddit was. Let us call that the Aaron Reddit. That Reddit was sustainable and could be expressed as by users for users. That vision picked up a ton of users who love threaded, frank, unfettered discussion. It was never going to make millions, but it would have endured for a very long time. All that changed upon each sale. And this last one is brutal, leaving current owners holding the bag. These changes to crank out big returns are toxic to a very high percentage of users. And they are where the content comes from too. Someone else is going to reproduce the original Reddit vision and when they do, this one will dry up just like Digg did.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Gentle parallels to Ready Player One. Edit: “Oasis” sounds like a fine name for a non profit alternative to what Reddit coalesced.
    - ddingus 3y ago
      Indeed!
EMCymatics 3y ago
I think they wanted to demonstrate their resolve. Their messaging is probably to get all of the other apps ect to sell out to the big boys or essentially get fired from their own company. The language model war is in full swing now the moats are starting to form. They're betting big on continued engagement or they actually want it to fail. Time will tell.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > Their messaging is probably to get all of the other apps ect to sell out to the big boys or essentially get fired from their own company. Sell out to whom? The offer of API access is a lie -- everyone who has asked to setup a billing situation has been ignored.
  - EMCymatics 3y ago
    I don't have any answers just a prediction. I'm probably wrong. >everyone who has asked to setup a billing situation has been ignored. Well that's kinda messed up.
personjerry 3y ago
My highlight from the CEO's replies: >> How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement? > We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable. Self burn. Those are rare.
- CamelCaseName 3y ago
  I mean, that's the truth. That's the only answer I had any respect for.
- sleight42 3y ago
  Read to me as honest and petty. The 3Ps figured out how to monetize at the edges when Reddit can't.
- spopejoy 3y ago
  Beatings will continue until morale improves
SanjayMehta 3y ago
Hours have gone by, and many developers' questions are unanswered.
scarab92 3y ago
Just shouting this request into the ether, but if these reddit client developers teamed up to create a new alternate backend with a small API fee, the result could be amazing. A combination of their power user base and a small monthly subscription fee for access could result in something that can retain a niche subreddit feel across the site. With the possible exception of /r/science the larger subreddits are flooded in low effort posts and mostly unusable.
dada78641 3y ago
It's actually funny how exactly it went how everybody expected. It's like watching a movie that's setting up an incredibly obvious ending, and so the whole time you're waiting for a last minute plot twist to happen because it's just way too simplistic if they don't. But no, it went exactly as anyone could've predicted, no notes. 1. they didn't budge an inch 2. spez is a fucking jerk as always 3. it was over after only a small handful of questions, some of which may have been preplanned 4. we learned nothing new. It's exactly what everyone saw coming. gg. This most definitely seems to me like it was more of a "how dare they question me" spur of the moment decision by spez than a legitimate PR effort. At the same time it just reinforces the obvious conclusion that third party app devs were lied to and set up to fail.
tim333 3y ago
Dunno but communication and listening to users is good?
freediverx 3y ago
Yeah, that should’ve been a press release.

by slg 3y ago

toomuchtodo 3y ago

To control the narrative.

Natsu 3y ago
This isn't exactly the first drama from Spez... https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/5emsq3/reddit_reacts_after_uspez_admits_to_editing_users/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/5emsq3/reddit_reacts...

dogleash 3y ago

If they don't say anything, they're incommunicative. But if talk and say effectively nothing, they might get egg on their face for people watching. However they can convince people who don't pay much attention that it's just a disagreement.

mustacheemperor 3y ago

At this point my theories are 1) Ego and emotion are driving decisions at reddit or 2) Reddit's leadership has run the numbers and genuinely thinks it will benefit their profitability plans if the users reacting negatively to these changes all leave. This is well past the point of just killing 3rd party apps because the API changes alone would have accomplished that. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." What do you do when incompetence would be unbelievable in scope and malice would be unbelievably incompetent.

LegitShady 3y ago
reddit receives hundreds of millions of dollars per year of free moderating from their community. The community is the only valuable thing in reddit. The website is worth nothing, the eyeballs and free labour are everything. When the parts of their community with outsize influence start talking about abandoning the site to somewhere else it threatens both their hundreds of millions in free labour per year, and also the future of their site. Reddit exists as it does today because Digg made a series of bad decisions that led to mass movement away from Digg. The same thing can happen to Reddit.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  As has been mentioned a few times: When Digg fucked up, reddit existed as a growing but small competitor. Reddit has no such competitor.
  - fphhotchips 3y ago
    That may be true in the US but it's not everywhere, and it certainly won't be for long. Anyway, for many, the competition is "nothing at all". I will never download the official Reddit app. It's that bad. The mobile experience is worse. I'll just find something more productive to do with my time.
    - danudey 3y ago
      I use the official mobile app, and also use Apollo (because I like having two separate apps for two separate accounts I use). The official mobile app is just inexplicably bad. The other day I was browsing through the 'Popular' tab, and every time I clicked on the thumbnail for an article, it took me to the web page... of some other article. Completely unrelated as far as I could tell. Tap on a CNN article about Trump indictment, instead get an EW article about Gwen Stefani (or whatever, I don't remember what it was). It was consistent, too. Every article went to a different article instead, but tapping on that article always gave you the same different article. Tapping onto the comment screen and then onto the article gave the correct article. A few weeks ago, the problem was different; I would tap on an article, and it would load up some other article, and then also the article I was trying to read. I'd read it, close it, then have to close the other article, then I'd be back at the main list. For the longest time, refreshing an article list would result in a bunch of broken-looking entries in the list view; entries without titles, titles overlapping images, entries that were too big, and so on. Refreshing again often fixed it, but then gave me a new set of articles as if I'd already read the messed up ones it had brokenly tried to show me. This used to happen every single time; then it was just sort of random, about 50% of the time. I haven't noticed it lately because I got out of the habit of refreshing lists and I just kill the app when I want to get newer content. There's also a little hovering downwards-arrow symbol to skip to the next top-level comment. It's black, it's fairly large, and it hovers over the content. You can't get rid of it whether you want it or not. The best you can do is toggle a preference that says "I don't want this to be movable", and then it sits in the corner, over top of the content, forever (except when it bugs out and sits in the middle of the screen on the left side forever). For the longest time, the comment box to type your comment into was a fixed size; if your comment didn't fit into two or three lines, then your text wrapped onto the fourth line or whatever, except the text box wouldn't scroll so you couldn't see what you were typing. I got in the habit of copying the text to Notes, writing my comment there, and then switching back to Reddit. 50% of the time, the Reddit app would reload and I would lose the comment that I was replying to, but the other 50% of the time I could paste my comment in and post it. When creating a new post, you first put in the content you want (title, body, image, whatever), and then you hit 'Next' and choose a subreddit. It gives you a list of suggestions, based not on subreddits that you're subscribed to or post to regularly, but rather subreddits that you've engaged with lately. I saw a post from /r/doordash yesterday, so now the app is suggesting maybe I want to post there, or /r/Weddingattireapproval. Note that some subreddits don't allow self posts, or don't allow image posts, but you have to create your post first before choosing a subreddit that maybe doesn't allow it, forcing you to go back and change your post type/content. This feature seems just generally really stupid. It goes on and on. It's a genuinely horrible app which can rarely even get the basic functionality working, and bugs stick around indefinitely.

adamckay 3y ago

It's worthwhile pointing out his wasn't a genuine AMA - it was a "ask me anything we have a pre-written answer for" [1]. It's an obvious thing to do because the whole situation has been received badly by the community, so you'd expect some preparation of good answers to likely questions, but to copy and paste blindly the pre-written answers from the PR team is just pure laziness and a blatant disregard for the community you've built. 1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/jnkch10/?context=10000 https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

ASalazarMX 3y ago

Such a lousy AMA, Spez only made 14 comments, and it was locked after that.

danudey 3y ago
Spez made 14 comments, the others made 7 combined, all in reply to 26,000 comments or so.
Eisenstein 3y ago
It isn't locked. You can still comment.
- ASalazarMX 3y ago
  It was locked when I tried to comment yesterday.

FireBeyond 3y ago

> The most difficult questions went unanswered. Almost EVERY question went unanswered. He spent approximately 35 minutes replying to 14 questions, essentially all of which were from Reddit "PowerMods" (that cadre of 6 moderators that control >118 of the Top 50 subreddits), and most of those answers were single paragraph rehashes of the same point: "We'll keep talking to developers", and multiple of those questions appear to have scripted, as noted when he answered a question: "A: blah blah blah", then rapidly edited out the "A:".

donmcronald 3y ago
The whole idea had Bill Cosby "meme me" vibes right from the start and after he answered the blackmail question I think he'd have been better off talking about Rampart. Why would you even answer that question?
Eisenstein 3y ago
> Reddit "PowerMods" (that cadre of 6 moderators that control >118 of the Top 50 subreddits) Not only is this provably untrue but your math is nonsensical. EDIT: Provably untrue proof -- top 100 subreddit moderator list: * https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be6e151 https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be...
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/updated_and_sanitized_six_powermods_control_118/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/upda... https://www.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/comments/gk0w4c/to_have_independently_moderated_subreddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/comments/gk0w4c/t... You were saying? Even the Reddit admins didn't deny it, in that second post.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    I was saying that it is provably untrue. Moderators of the 100 top subreddits: * https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be6e151 https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be... Your links from 3 years ago showing screenshots are not relevant to what I claimed.

shmatt 3y ago

You’re asking why do CEOs speak out? Do q&as? Fireside chats? Of course they all speak corporate speak Most of the top questions were childish and useless, asking to get rid of the ads, go back to the original spirit of Reddit. Comparing the pressure and decision making process of a CEO who raised 1.3 BILLION dollars to some basement dweller who’s shutting down their app out of spite (pretty sure they could sell the app for $5M today no questions asked) After so many rounds of raising, I’m being generous if I guess that spez owns 5% of Reddit stock. Reddit is being run right now by the biggest investment firms in SV. Rigjtfully looking for ROI. It would literally make them more money to shut down Reddit than to do what everyone in the AMA is asking them to do In terms of accessibility, I understand they have a roadmap. I don’t understand how they don’t have 400 ADA lawsuits on court right now. Every corporation I worked for had been flooded by copy paste ADA lawsuits, and an app or 3rd party apps aren’t enough, the website has to be fully accessible

ddingus 3y ago
Too many sales. Too many dollars handed out today for expected value in the future. The trouble is people showed up for what Reddit was. Let us call that the Aaron Reddit. That Reddit was sustainable and could be expressed as by users for users. That vision picked up a ton of users who love threaded, frank, unfettered discussion. It was never going to make millions, but it would have endured for a very long time. All that changed upon each sale. And this last one is brutal, leaving current owners holding the bag. These changes to crank out big returns are toxic to a very high percentage of users. And they are where the content comes from too. Someone else is going to reproduce the original Reddit vision and when they do, this one will dry up just like Digg did.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Gentle parallels to Ready Player One. Edit: “Oasis” sounds like a fine name for a non profit alternative to what Reddit coalesced.
  - ddingus 3y ago
    Indeed!

EMCymatics 3y ago

I think they wanted to demonstrate their resolve. Their messaging is probably to get all of the other apps ect to sell out to the big boys or essentially get fired from their own company. The language model war is in full swing now the moats are starting to form. They're betting big on continued engagement or they actually want it to fail. Time will tell.

Eisenstein 3y ago
> Their messaging is probably to get all of the other apps ect to sell out to the big boys or essentially get fired from their own company. Sell out to whom? The offer of API access is a lie -- everyone who has asked to setup a billing situation has been ignored.
- EMCymatics 3y ago
  I don't have any answers just a prediction. I'm probably wrong. >everyone who has asked to setup a billing situation has been ignored. Well that's kinda messed up.

personjerry 3y ago

My highlight from the CEO's replies: >> How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement? > We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable. Self burn. Those are rare.

CamelCaseName 3y ago
I mean, that's the truth. That's the only answer I had any respect for.
sleight42 3y ago
Read to me as honest and petty. The 3Ps figured out how to monetize at the edges when Reddit can't.
spopejoy 3y ago
Beatings will continue until morale improves

SanjayMehta 3y ago

Hours have gone by, and many developers' questions are unanswered.

scarab92 3y ago

Just shouting this request into the ether, but if these reddit client developers teamed up to create a new alternate backend with a small API fee, the result could be amazing. A combination of their power user base and a small monthly subscription fee for access could result in something that can retain a niche subreddit feel across the site. With the possible exception of /r/science the larger subreddits are flooded in low effort posts and mostly unusable.

dada78641 3y ago

It's actually funny how exactly it went how everybody expected. It's like watching a movie that's setting up an incredibly obvious ending, and so the whole time you're waiting for a last minute plot twist to happen because it's just way too simplistic if they don't. But no, it went exactly as anyone could've predicted, no notes. 1. they didn't budge an inch 2. spez is a fucking jerk as always 3. it was over after only a small handful of questions, some of which may have been preplanned 4. we learned nothing new. It's exactly what everyone saw coming. gg. This most definitely seems to me like it was more of a "how dare they question me" spur of the moment decision by spez than a legitimate PR effort. At the same time it just reinforces the obvious conclusion that third party app devs were lied to and set up to fail.

tim333 3y ago

Dunno but communication and listening to users is good?

freediverx 3y ago

Yeah, that should’ve been a press release.