Agreed. Lots of discussion is still naturally around API pricing etc., but more fundamental is the fact that all of that user/mod-provided community is seen solely as an asset for the company to sell. The actual humans be damned.
it’s the scrawny-ass CEO
CEO aside, I reckon you could replace spez with any other exec chosen by the board and eventually this sort of business decision would be made. The mix of private ownership and profit motive suffices, I think.
100% this final point. It’s not spez, it’s the motivation of all companies geared towards investors and markets. They don’t even care what they actually end up producing, as long as it gives the appearance of profitability and growth. Spez is a largely replaceable part in this equation.
That’s not entirely correct. For-profit companies thrive when they serve their customers well. Since Reddit’s for-profit and yet its users are not its customers, the result is bad for users. But that doesn’t mean companies with better business models are equally bad. The beautiful thing about a free market is that competition drives bad companies out of business.
That might be true if we lived in a world where companies behaved like that. But given that they now answer to shareholders and the admitted priority above all others is to squeeze every possible cent out for those shareholders in the short term and that ignore long-term health, I don’t think the principal really applies any longer. Public companies or companies courting IPOs are literally not permitted to behave in the way you describe.
Also the free market is a complete myth. The market is constantly manipulated and distorted by those controlling the capital via methods such as monopoly, monopsony, trusts and vastly disproportionate “influence” over law makers and potential regulatory power.
We agree on the damage caused by short revenue reporting requirements for public companies. Just remember that private companies have share-holders too. The fresh fruit street vendor is a tiny business with one or more share-holders, competing against massive supermarkets.
About free markets being a myth, yes well there’s no true Scotsman. The guiding ideals of the concept of a free market are still in effect, despite all of the valid exceptions you listed. Fact is, Reddit can still be driven out of business.
I agree that on one level Huffman is a fungible element serving predictable motivations of moneyed investors. The idea that one should leverage every last cent one can for the maximization of shareholder value, this is certainly common thinking in the business world and will always have its champions among the richest and most powerful sources of investment. So in this regard I think I am in solid agreement with the two of you.
I disagree because I believe Huffman’s antics in the press have been extremely counterproductive, much more so than what you could expect from a typical CEO of a billion dollar company. If he had just taken the line from the beginning that goes ‘look, we’re ad driven, we need to become profitable, and we can no longer afford to let third parties give Redditors an ad free experience or subsidize AI training at no cost’ – this would not have exactly been popular, but it would have gone much better than they did with the hack job on Selig and the smarmy doubletalk about working with people who want to work with them. Or his patronizing dismissal of the protests as ‘noise’ that ‘will pass’, or his garbage about landed gentry and people wanting things for free, or the insecure threats about how mods will be removed and replaced if they don’t open their subs back up, or how he plans to emulate what Musk has done at Twitter. I don’t think that’s something you get no matter who’s in his place. I think most other people in his position would not have fired quite so many rounds through their own foot and in so doing, damaged Reddit quite so much. So in this regard I think Spez is an atypical case, I think he has royally screwed up, and that his idiosyncrasies aren’t doing his employers any favors at all.
Yeah, even if somehow the API changes were financially the right move, I cannot see how stuff like his comments in support of Musk helped one bit. I haven’t seen any news coverage that puts reddit in a positive light either. At best, it’s been neutral.
The CEO chooses the strategy for making money, though. I think the strategy Spez chose is a losing strategy and that reddit would have made more money by not alienating their users to the point of a bunch of people migrating and another bunch purposefully trying to sabotage reddit’s profit.
Agreed. Lots of discussion is still naturally around API pricing etc., but more fundamental is the fact that all of that user/mod-provided community is seen solely as an asset for the company to sell. The actual humans be damned.
CEO aside, I reckon you could replace spez with any other exec chosen by the board and eventually this sort of business decision would be made. The mix of private ownership and profit motive suffices, I think.
100% this final point. It’s not spez, it’s the motivation of all companies geared towards investors and markets. They don’t even care what they actually end up producing, as long as it gives the appearance of profitability and growth. Spez is a largely replaceable part in this equation.
That’s not entirely correct. For-profit companies thrive when they serve their customers well. Since Reddit’s for-profit and yet its users are not its customers, the result is bad for users. But that doesn’t mean companies with better business models are equally bad. The beautiful thing about a free market is that competition drives bad companies out of business.
That might be true if we lived in a world where companies behaved like that. But given that they now answer to shareholders and the admitted priority above all others is to squeeze every possible cent out for those shareholders in the short term and that ignore long-term health, I don’t think the principal really applies any longer. Public companies or companies courting IPOs are literally not permitted to behave in the way you describe.
Also the free market is a complete myth. The market is constantly manipulated and distorted by those controlling the capital via methods such as monopoly, monopsony, trusts and vastly disproportionate “influence” over law makers and potential regulatory power.
We agree on the damage caused by short revenue reporting requirements for public companies. Just remember that private companies have share-holders too. The fresh fruit street vendor is a tiny business with one or more share-holders, competing against massive supermarkets.
About free markets being a myth, yes well there’s no true Scotsman. The guiding ideals of the concept of a free market are still in effect, despite all of the valid exceptions you listed. Fact is, Reddit can still be driven out of business.
I agree and I disagree.
I agree that on one level Huffman is a fungible element serving predictable motivations of moneyed investors. The idea that one should leverage every last cent one can for the maximization of shareholder value, this is certainly common thinking in the business world and will always have its champions among the richest and most powerful sources of investment. So in this regard I think I am in solid agreement with the two of you.
I disagree because I believe Huffman’s antics in the press have been extremely counterproductive, much more so than what you could expect from a typical CEO of a billion dollar company. If he had just taken the line from the beginning that goes ‘look, we’re ad driven, we need to become profitable, and we can no longer afford to let third parties give Redditors an ad free experience or subsidize AI training at no cost’ – this would not have exactly been popular, but it would have gone much better than they did with the hack job on Selig and the smarmy doubletalk about working with people who want to work with them. Or his patronizing dismissal of the protests as ‘noise’ that ‘will pass’, or his garbage about landed gentry and people wanting things for free, or the insecure threats about how mods will be removed and replaced if they don’t open their subs back up, or how he plans to emulate what Musk has done at Twitter. I don’t think that’s something you get no matter who’s in his place. I think most other people in his position would not have fired quite so many rounds through their own foot and in so doing, damaged Reddit quite so much. So in this regard I think Spez is an atypical case, I think he has royally screwed up, and that his idiosyncrasies aren’t doing his employers any favors at all.
Yeah, even if somehow the API changes were financially the right move, I cannot see how stuff like his comments in support of Musk helped one bit. I haven’t seen any news coverage that puts reddit in a positive light either. At best, it’s been neutral.
The CEO chooses the strategy for making money, though. I think the strategy Spez chose is a losing strategy and that reddit would have made more money by not alienating their users to the point of a bunch of people migrating and another bunch purposefully trying to sabotage reddit’s profit.
“Fiduciary duty.”