He ‘doubled down’ because there was nothing else he could do. Iamthatis was meticulous in his takedown, and short of apologizing, there was nothing spez could say to make it better.
Agreed, I have no idea how he thought it was a good idea. I’m sure his PR and legal team tried to talk him out of it - or they’re all idiot yes men. Cards were already stacked against him and he just made it all worse.
Then he should have apologized?
Absolutely should have apologized. Who knows what he’s thinking.
At least FlyingLaserTurtle apologized. Kinda felt hollow to me though compared to what he said.
It was good that they apologised but it probably the easiest thing out of the long, long list to apologise for.
Agreed, and while nice that it happened, doing so when you are just plain wrong is kind of the bare minimum.
You know that’s a big no no from his legal team.
His legal team more likely advised him to not comment on it. Doubling down is just slander / libel. If his legal team did tell him to talk more about it AND to not apologize, his legal team is big dumb
spez also just seems incredibly salty for someone that must have everything in life, yeesh
The basic mistake I see us all make is assume that Spez has any emotional attachment to Reddit (let alone anything close to how attached we are to it). He doesn’t.
Once you realize that he’s 100% in it for the money and is utterly uncaring about Reddit’s users (i.e. you), you’ll realize that he couldn’t give less of a shit about actually addressing our concerns.
This will also make you immune to any PR sanitising lies him and his team spout, as all such lies hinge on your willingness to give him some benefit of the doubt. We shouldn’t.
The example I give again, and again, and again is Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. Craigslist remains private (which shields it from being gutted by Wall Street vultures, for sure) so we don’t know for sure, but Craig is believed to retain a controlling stake alongside current CEO Jim Buckmaster and eBay (which purchased a large stake from an exiting employee).
Craigslist makes about $600 million annually, and I’m sure provides a nice living for the executives and employees there, but has remained true to its core function of providing transparent and easy classifieds posting to everyone (mostly for free, even!)
Notice what happens when an organization becomes a vehicle for profit, beyond simply “self-sustaining profit.” Notice how taking on investors practically guarantees that outcome.
I thought Reddit was dead the day Conde Nast bought it. They’ve survived quite a bit longer! This day had to come. Let’s move on.
We can build something that primarily exists to create a community.
I had no idea Conde Nast bought Reddit. That is unreal. As someone who used to adore Wired magazine, fuck Conde Nast!
Yeah, no use saving Reddit. Give up your darling, let better things take over.
We shouldn’t give the benefit of the doubt to a man who’s shown himself on multiple occasions completely incapable of good faith any more than a hedgehog should give an owl the benefit of the doubt.
a hedgehog should give an owl the benefit of the doubt
I didn’t realize that owls and hedgehogs were mortal enemies.
To be fair it probably depends on the species of owls and hedgehogs involved, I know owls will sometimes go for hedgehogs here in the UK.
yeah pretty much
spez sees 3rd party users as an obstacle between himself and more money. so he will gladly trade the bad pr and loss of certain users if it means that even a small fraction end up switching to the official app and it gains him another 0.1% in wealth for the IPO
he claimed that old.reddit wasn’t going anywhere, but we all know that it will be crippled to the point of unusability
Idk what the point of the ama even was, it’s not like he was going to hear anyone out, and everyone that commented was just asking “why are you such a bad person?”
I -think- that it was to try and keep mods around by ensuring that they won’t (maybe) take away their tools.
Yes yes we are working on mod tools they will be there “soon” - reddit for the last 8 years.
“Why are you such a bad person?” - because money.
I had no idea in what scenario imaginable that this was going to go well or improve things, even when it was announced.
“Hey Steve, you were right. We realize we were taking your mercy to keep the API for granted. We’ll not only cancel the subreddit blackouts but we’ll stop using 3rd party apps, install the official app and click on 5 ads just because of how admirable your AMA post was.”
-Redditors in Steve’s mind
That’s what I did…
No wait, I’m here now after 13 years on Reddit. My mistake.
I hope this mess they created destroys their site, they deserve it for being such smug asshole pricks about the whole thing.
I was expecting some humility, admission of faults and an olive branch.
Instead, the CEO just doubled down and comes to the AMA with canned, smug responses. What a joke.
As people were pointing out on Reddit, in this case I don’t actually hope that, because the people who suffer as a result are the users. Tons of useful content that users have created and contributed, other people would just never have access to again.
I just deleted my main account of 3 years and also my 2 alts.
I deleted my 10 year old account. I was annoyed for a while, but this is just dumb. Fuck spez
Could you help me figure out how to reply to a post on Kbin? I can reply to comments in a post, but can’t comment on the post itself, I can’t find an option for it.
Very very bottom. That’s something that should be fixed.
The box for commenting on a post should be at the bottom of the rest of the comments.
Yep, 11 years and 82k karma wiped out yesterday. The only posts I left were some comments on a thread where I was helping folks navigate to Lemmy. I’m at my new home.
"[…] recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.”
Well, Selig did wait with leaking that phone call until he felt like all the bridges had been more than burned from Reddit’s side and he officially did not want to do business with Reddit anymore, so I don’t think that will be an issue…
In fairness, he posted the recording after Spez repeated something false about the call Selig was on.
@Knusper And, more than that: it shows the typical modus operandi of the Shitty and Pissy Evil Zombie. When people don’t fall for his bullshit, he tries to divert attention into something else, an intrinsically disingenuous tactic. All of that with the implicit consent of the company as a whole.
And as a self-fulfilling prophecy this justifies the recording. If you’re going to deal with a company that should not be trusted, you need to protect yourself, and that is what Selig did.
You can’t fire me! I quit!
Admitting that “Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.” just shows to the world, that they don’t know how to run a business. This should be warning shot for every investor.
When i read that i was honestly astonished how they expected anyone to invest in reddit at all
Exactly! I’m not a rich investor person, but nobody with a brain would invest in a company bleeding money, and that was such a terrible move to admit. If their PR isn’t a half-working AI after firing all those people, they should’ve been horrified between that and the Christian Selig/Apollo comments.
You also can’t count on Reddit becoming a meme stock, especially with absolutely zero regard for the users who make these meme stocks happen.
This whole thing is all about trying to monetize user-generated content by selling it at a high premium to large AI companies. If they allow a lower pricing tier for 3pa’s, other companies/individuals will find a way to use that lower tier for training models, and this is the only thing spez sees as a viable profit model for reddit.
I have no clever thing to say except it seems Spez is, without joking or being mean, clinically insane.
The dedicated content creator userbase is long gone, and it shows. The casual content creator is leaving. The lurker and occasional poster will have nothing to read, except the thinly veiled ads pretending to be organic posts. It’s quickly becoming a digital wasteland. Fun to digg through maybe, just like we leaf through an old book sometimes.fun to digg through
ICWYDT 😉
Yeah, I think your right. The content creators and submitters will leave and then there is nothing left.
Lurkers (me) are leaving too, hopefully en masse.
All late-stage capitalists (like spez) are sociopaths. It’s a prerequisite.
He responded to a whole 14 questions. Truly, a hard day’s work for the CEO of Reddit.
He had a monocle measuring to get to
Don’t worry, the answers he gave were all pre-written anyway. Probably not by him!
I’m not understanding a shit about kbin vs lemmy, but in doubt I just created an account on both and I’m on my way to delete my reddit account. Hi new friends!
Lemmy and kbin are different things which work on the same backend and are part of the fediverse. Similar to how mastodon is fediverse counterpart of Twitter, lemmy is fediverse counterpart of Reddit, and kbin is a unique thing which is more akin to old school blogging sites.
Okay, now that’s more clear, but I’m struggling to understand if I have to use all of them separately or I can do it all through kbin…I can use Lemmy and Mastodon through kbin somehow, right?
You can access and comment in Lemmy from kbin, but I’m not sure if you can do the same for Mastodon. But Mastodon users can certainly use their accounts to comment on Lemmy. The beauty of the fediverse (or threadiverse, as some guys like to call it)
I’ve gone ahead and made accounts on all of these services: lemmy, kbin, mastodon
Whichever interface I enjoy the most will likely be the main one I keep using for commenting/etc
this whole fediverse thing is pretty exciting and reminds me of old reddit, in a good way
Okay thanks. I’ll try to find out more
well i didn’t expect much
well i wondered if it would be possible for reddit to walk back their decisions but it appears that they won’t, which sucks a lot
it was a fun ride for the last… almost 17 years. but I’m out on June 30th. I’m happy to make a new home here on Lemmy!
After seeing the responses, I realized Reddit is a lost cause and deleted my account of 11 years. My “exit interview” answers were… salty.
It’s unfortunate you went about it the way you did since they can still monetize off of the entirety of your comment and post history. When you delete your account, all your comments and posts remain. They’re just no longer attached to your account name since that is what you deleted.
I was a bit more malicious and did the opposite by keeping my account intact, but gutting everything from within. So now every thread I ever commented in has “user deleted comment” sprinkled all throughout hundreds or thousands of threads.
My account is now a fine metaphor for what reddit has become. Just a hollow facade of what it once was.
I deleted all my posts before I left :) I couldn’t be arsed to do it for comments, though.
If your account is still active, I’d suggest PowerDeleteSuite. It worked well for deleting my thousands of comments for me.
It’s probably a good thing, the fediverse will thrive because of it, and we’ll never have to worry about the horrible monopoly-on-communities doing something ridiculous anymore.
This feels so surreal. I just watched a video the other day about how Apollo used to have a friendly relationship with Reddit. It’s so weird how spez is doing all this mudslinging. No good deed unpunished.
In the goodbye post of apollo they were talking about their previous talk with reddit a few months ago. It was the reddit engineers and apollo devs finding a bug together, it genuinely looked like the 2 parties respected each other highly. It’s crazy how fast things went south.
Money fucks with the brain
Since u/spez seems to want to continue down this road and bar people of experiencing reddit the way they want, I decided to delete all of my post and comment history within my account there.
It’s obvious that those of us that want to continue to use 3rd party apps are considered dead weight in his eyes, so I decided that anything and everything I posted is likely of no value to Reddit.
deleted by creator
Try PowerDeleteSuite on GitHub.
deleted by creator
No problem!
If that doesn’t work:
I’ll replace all of my content for “fuck u/spez” once I get it backed up.
I’m imagining every Redditor editing all of their comments to this, and Reddit slowly becoming nothing but “fuck u/spez” as it fades away. Like the last r/place when everything was taken over pixel by pixel with white squares. Kind of bittersweet.
It’s us the users who create & place value within that platform. In subjects of our interests. Reddit company is adamant with their decision with limiting our precense alone.
Make sense that people have started migrating into other places/ services such as this one.
Sadly he doesn’t care. He’s just keeping his eyes on the horizon awaiting all that ipo money so he can cash out.
Kinda glad this happened. This is getting so much more PR than Spez could have anticipated. Former Apollo user here, loving the app on iOS & it’s pretty straightforward. Hope this gets more active and i think this might be my new home :)
You mean app as in Apollo for iOS or app as there’s something for kbin?
There is Mlem listed on https://join-lemmy.org/apps
It’s an early test flight build - and there are some bugs - but it seems to work at least!
So happy to see quick app development for Lemmy. I did most of my redditing fsom my phone with third party apps since they predate the original app. In the early 2000s internet, I joined a smallish community just like Beehaw called Netalive.org. Hoping this community can re-create the feeling of talking to people without a mass lurker audience.
I’m using it now. It really has a way to go, but it’s a new app and I’m totally fine being patient with development.
I can really see this app becoming the next Apollo. The devs seem to be hard at work.
If the devs see this, thank you again for this app. So far, I’m really loving it 🙏🙏
Apollo for iOS. I’ve been a beta tester of it for ~5ish years.
I’m living in hope that this will catch on and Christian and the other third-party developers will work on Fediverse apps…
hopefully! I really love his how he does his designs & his very open transparency.
