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.
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.