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It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one, he could compromise a bit by at least expanding the deadline on the pricing change

• account42 3y ago
  Does the Reddit CEO seriously address their employess as "Snoos" and people put up with this??? SV culture is more fucked than I even though possible.
• michaelcampbell 3y ago
  The new "leader" model which CEOs are cottoning on to is doubling down on belligerence no matter how bad the idea. As goes politics, go corporations.
• prox 3y ago
  What is “our teams are on it” in this context? PR or media influencing? What could teams mean here and what do they do?
  • the_gipsy 3y ago
    Just everybody working at the company.
  • SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
    It would probably refer to both media-facing PR efforts and direct negotiations with any powermods or app developers who are willing.
• xwdv 3y ago
  If the CEO backs down then he’s weak. He needs to publish a hard hitting memo that chastises third party app developers for not creating more sustainable businesses. If Reddit cannot meet it’s revenue goals it will shut down, period.
  • larksimian 3y ago
    Bollocks. Tumblr is still around and probably has been losing money for longer than people here have been alive. No one is throwing away the kind of audience reddit has. Now the CEO might lose his job, but let's not get that twisted up with Reddit's survival.
    • gary_0 3y ago
      Tumblr went from selling for $1B in 2013 to $3M in 2019. The brand persists but as a business it's a dismal failure. If Reddit follows that arc it will be a dismal failure as well.
      • tut-urut-utut 3y ago
        Why should we care if it’s financial failure for its owners as long as it brings the same value to its users?
        • tirpen 3y ago
          If it's too much of a financial failure, it will shut down and provide zero value to its users.
        • midoridensha 3y ago
          Tumblr doesn't bring the same value to its users as it did before; it's basically forgotten these days, much like MySpace.
          • easyThrowaway 3y ago
            Ironically enough, tumblr is going trough some sort of "indie/lo-fi" renaissance now that Automattic bought them. I don't think they even want to go back to being an alternative to FB/Instagram/Twitter.
• bredren 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • mattmanser 3y ago
    Enough with the ChatGPT already. If you didn't write it, don't post it.
    • Grimburger 3y ago
      There really should be some law or adage coined for this by now. No one wants to hear GPT's opinion because it doesn't have one.
      • TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Nah, GPT's output can be very valuable and insightful. But you don't get it with a low effort "please summarize the key points of the text below\n\n{paste some text here}". I propose the rule to be what it is already: put some effort into your comment, make it add something instead of just taking space and attention. This works for human and GPT and human/GPT ensemble commentary. And the prescription for low-effort spam? Downvote and flag.
      • wiseowise 3y ago
        I do. Sometimes.
      • johnnyanmac 3y ago
        >No one wants to hear GPT's opinion because it doesn't have one. google doesn't have an opinion either when taking any search result at large. And that's all ChatGPT is doing here.
    • esquivalience 3y ago
      I thought the approach was interesting. It's being used here as an empathy engine: what might (other people) say?
      • 3y ago
• gary_0 3y ago
  If they bored people with "we listened" PR waffling while just being more sneaky about user-hostile changes, they could have gotten away with anything. I mean, that's the playbook, isn't it? But blatantly giving your unhappy users the finger is a great way to keep them angry and thus motivated. Steve Huffman has set millions of dollars of value on fire and damaged Reddit's brand for no apparent reason (except maybe a bizarre personal vendetta against certain third-party app developers). Strange times.
  • zozbot234 3y ago
    > just being more sneaky about user-hostile changes, they could have gotten away with anything. I mean, that's the playbook, isn't it? Isn't that pretty much what Reddit was doing before spez came back as CEO, though? (Where being "sneaky" about user-hostile changes also included de-facto exempting the users they rely on most from them - their volunteer mods and, to some extent, their 'power' content contributors.) This screwup has all played out within a month or two - there were smaller controversies before, but nothing compares to this.
    • gary_0 3y ago
      Yeah, that's what they were doing, and it was working well enough. Dark patterns are evil but quite effective. My guess is that investors are banging on the door wanting their payout, and the people on the other side of that door are panicking. Reddit Inc was probably a money furnace, like a dot-com of old. But it turns out a bunch of nerds and aficionados piping text through your servers does not equate to a hundred-billion-dollar business.
• paganel 3y ago
  > It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one You don't negotiate with blackmailers, because this is what this is now, blackmail. If things continue like this I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • dehrmann 3y ago
    They don't have the resources to take on that much moderation at scale. Maybe given two years and a big tech budget or six months and a big moderator budget.
  • hrrsn 3y ago
    Remove the mods, and replace them with who, exactly? They've pissed off everyone that was offering free labour.
  • onion2k 3y ago
    I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods The impact of this would be to make lots of subreddit unmoderated, leading to a huge amount of spam, adult content in sfw subreddit, cross-posting, etc. The impact would be to let everyone know just how much free work the mods do to keep Reddit tidy and valuable. I don't think you're wrong (except maybe on the timescale) but I do think the strategy would shoot the CEO in the foot again.
    • worthless-trash 3y ago
      I say that if they -DO- remove the moderators, we should go back and be human spambots.
      • onion2k 3y ago
        we should go back and be human spambots Judging by my HN history I don't think I ever stopped.
• danjc 3y ago
  He's playing a longer game, trade union negotiation style.
• TeMPOraL 3y ago
  I love this bit: > While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia. What is the term for when there's a worker strike and instead of engaging with organizers/union representatives, the company approaches some individual workers and teams, trying to convince them to get back to work (or at least make it seem like those workers are likely to break rank), in order to start an inner conflict between the workers and have the strike collapse on itself? Because that is what they're doing here. Explicitly ignoring the "union reps", and driving a wedge between rank-and-file "workers", under a guise of caring for accessibility. -- EDIT: and it's pretty clear to me this memo was meant to be leaked, and it was carefully written to address the subreddit moderators and users. It says, "meh, this is just a regular Tuesday nothingburger drama, it's pointless and will blow over - but hey, someone has a good point about accessibility, and we care and listen, so we're now actively working on it; we ain't talking with Apollo and RiF devs because they're being unreasonable drama queens, and for the love of $deity, don't be unreasonable like them; we're actually afraid some of you may rough up our employees - is that really who you want to be?".
  • formerly_proven 3y ago
    Strike breaking
  • _kulang 3y ago
    Scabs
    • edanm 3y ago
      I think "Scabs" is the term for the workers working despite the strike, not for the general tactic itself.
  • dopidopHN 3y ago
    In French : Les jaunes
  • 3y ago
• skc 3y ago
  Ultimately he's right I think. Most of the sports related subs I follow are indeed back after a 48 hour hiatus.
  • mitchell209 3y ago
    People started this blackout without any alternatives. Twitter users had Instagram, Facebook (even though that’s a worse shitshow and IG is owned by Meta), tiktok, Mastodon, and probably a couple others I’m forgetting. There’s nothing equivalent to reddit with half as much daily activity as even the worst Twitter-alternative, so they’d never catch on. People append “reddit” to google searches now, that’s how integral this site has become to the internet. The strikers should have waited a few days to a couple weeks before this strike instead of reacting immediately. Every sub is pointing to their own discord server. That’s absolutely not an alternative and a chatroom will never replace a global forum. The Denver Nuggets sub didn’t even shut down because they were so excited about their potential win. That’s literally the best time to show solidarity and they fucked that up because they cared more about posting 1 sentence meme or hype comments to a game thread.
    • dopidopHN 3y ago
      I knew about lemmy before hands, and I got « pitched » at least 6 or 7 Reddit alternative yesterday. All are sad empty forum but well. That’s what it is.
      • mitchell209 3y ago
        I had to dig around to find a few names and I had 0 idea what those were when people were dropping them as seemingly viable alternatives. If you decentralize, you don’t get any users who are able to be monetized, and if you centralize it, you’ll end up with another reddit API situation in half a decade when people get greedy or stupid.
  • rchaud 3y ago
    The 3rd party apps are still alive. The real test will be what viewership looks like once the official app is the only way in.
• JanneVee 3y ago
  Yeah this is really impressive, this time around the discontent feels different. There from my point of view there was a decline for a long time for the usefulness of reddit for me. I thought it was only me getting older but now that I see this happening is that it isn't just me. They have consistently worsened the conditions for quality contribution with their default interfaces. I didn't realize it until now how important it is until now, because of this protest. I've already left and if my little anecdote is anything to go by, other might feel the same and do the same as me.
• spatulon 3y ago
  Does it really have 2000 employees? I remember when they were owned by Conde Nast and had something like 5-10 people. I know they have a lot more users now, and have added features like image and photo hosting, but to go from that to 2000 employees is quite the blowup.
• randomdata 3y ago
  > he could compromise a bit by at least expanding the deadline on the pricing changes There are only so many days until bankruptcy. Investors are done funnelling in more and more to keep the lights on. While that would be reasonable under normal circumstances, in this panic situation there won't be a Reddit left by the time third-party developers are given reasonable time.