The funny thing is the bastards are still trying to pretend this is all just about people losing free access to the API, when it is now quite firmly about them and their plantation mentality toward users and their unskillful power tripping. It’s all how weak people think strong people act, and it’s equal parts infuriating and pathetic.

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.

I think this is an underrated point. There’s a lot of money stress out there right now. There’s a lot of people with jobs who have anxiety that they could lose those jobs. There’s a lot of Redditors who have come to see Reddit as an online home and a community that values them. All that anger and fear and stress is just looking for an outlet. And here comes the smug CEO pressing all three of those buttons at once?

And I’ll take your point one step further. Pretend it’s three months down the road, this has largely all run its course, a bunch of people have left for good, and you are one of Reddit’s primary investors. Your analysts tell you that you have lost 40% of your investment due to this debacle and that unless Reddit takes some steps RIGHT NOW to win its user base back and show the mods they’re listened to and valued again, you’re likely to lose more. These people will happily sacrifice Spez in a cocaine heartbeat under such conditions. A little public pillorying while they blame Spez for everything, a little faux contrition from the board and a promise to do better, the appointment of a CEO with some charisma and people skills who will lead some foo foo initiative to look into user complaints and do a little grandstanding – this is the playbook.

This is really the first piece in the media that I’ve seen acknowledge that, for the protesters, it’s no longer so much about the app and it’s all about Reddit’s ugly and dismissive response.

It’s like going to your boss and saying ‘There’s a problem with the working conditions and we need to make a change’ only to have your boss say ‘This isn’t an issue and I’m not going to fix anything and you’re just wanting something for nothing, like you always do… quit being such a pussy or I’ll fire you’. The complaint might have started out about working conditions but as soon as your boss goes into asshole mode, it’s going to be about what he said to your face. And that’s why at this point it ain’t going to matter what Reddit says about how this is about an app, and why it won’t matter how many ‘official spokespeople’ it runs up the flagpole to pretend that Spez wasn’t patronizing the folks who generate all his content for free and making naked threats to the mods who keep the fora running for free.

There’ll be a lot of people who will end up being too disinterested or callow to react to all this, and that’s their right. For others, Reddit was kinda a huge chunk of their day and their social existence and they don’t want to walk away from it, and that’s their right too. I don’t think this is going to be the end of Reddit so much as I think it will be seen as the beginning of the end. But there can be no question that the real problem isn’t an app anymore, it’s the scrawny-ass CEO and his weak man’s idea of how a tough man leads. Because threatening the mods isn’t a show of strength, it’s insecure weakness. Steve Huffman just doesn’t have the chops to be in his current role, let alone in charge of damage control from the protests.

The only good thing about any of this is the unintentional irony.

If nothing of consequence is released, I’ll pay a little more credence to the theories that this is an inside job meant to discredit the opposition. If OTOH the data does show a disturbing level of detail being collected on users, and it exposes Reddit’s secret shadowbanning and deboosting of folks it doesn’t like, it’s going to empower the resistance like nothing else that’s happened yet. Spez is arguably in the self own business but this would take it to brand new heights.

People HATE that deboosting shit. People HATE the idea that the corps track this data to try and get inside your head and see how you think and act, so they can better influence it to their own ends. And right now, it’s no longer really about an app as it is, it’s all about meta. This will be gasoline on the fire.

I trust it more, I’d say.

I knew of Nate Silver back when his claim to fame was as a sabermetrician and the creator of a statistical model used to predict how baseball players would perform in the future based on present and prior statistical data. That was PECOTA. I actually liked PECOTA. In the long run I think you’d call it a useful failure. But Nate’s baseball takes were actually very good and quite objective in nature. And he obviously was very good working with statistics.

I got amped up when I learned he was taking his skills into the arena of political analysis. If you remember the early years had a mix of success and failure but was usually good enough to draw onlookers. But something went wrong with all that after a few years – Silver started showing bias in favor of candidates that he had consulting deals with. The objectivity just wasn’t there, he was acting as a paid spokesman would. And the quality of his predictions suffered, as did his demeanor after a while. It was disappointing.

I regard the guy as someone with a deep understanding of political statistics and data who can help paint a very detailed picture, but he displays too much bias to be trusted to remain objective when it matters. It’s kinda like having a defense lawyer. You always know in advance whose side they will take.

Whoever the new guys is, I guess we’ll see whether he will remain a statistician, or follows Silver into trying his hand at becoming an influencer.

Here’s my take.

Don’t worry about the Reddit people. Don’t think you, we, have to make Lemmy into something because Reddit still exists and we want all those people to come over here. Don’t try to make this place a ‘better Reddit’. Let it be Lemmy. Let all that handle itself.

When Felon screwed up Twitter, Mastodon bent over backwards in the attempt to lift and shift Twitter people over to Mastodon, but the people who loved Twitter really didn’t stick, because they needed the artificially driven engagement and numbers that were blown out of proportion by bot and NPC participation. They went over to Mastodon and were like ‘uh, this ain’t it’ and they went on their way – and that was a feature, not a bug. The ones who stayed, stayed because Mastodon was different from Twitter – and we loved the differences once we got used to them. That was also a feature, not a bug.

There will likely be several platforms, open source, closed source, volunteer led or corporate, who try to capture Reddit emigres. People will end up picking the one they like best because they like it best. For me, as someone who has been on Reddit since the very early days, there was a lot to like there and also a lot to dislike. And to me, there were a lot of people in Reddit who I’d just as soon found a different home that suited their likes and dislikes instead of having a huge captive population lift and shift over here and spend the next god knows how long trying to turn Lemmy into what Reddit was. If this place never get 20% the size of Reddit, but you end up getting more meaningful engagement here the way one does at Mastodon vis a vis Twitter, to me that’s not just a win but a big win.

Two cents, yours to keep.

This is fan service for his troglodytes.

Who else would give them such opportunities?