“They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” Mir says. “The content of the users is what makes the platform worth visiting. These hosts kind of run into this confusion that their hosting is the reason people are going there, but it’s really for the other users on the medium.”

  • dan@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    If it wasn’t hurting them they wouldn’t be doing damage control.

    It’s working, keep it up.

    • lunacybooth@readit.buzz
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      1 year ago

      They wouldn’t be lying about trying to work with devs

      Its fascinating watching him keep digging. He bullshits, gets caught out, so he bullshits about a different dev. Rinse. Repeat.

    • heartlessevil@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      It’s seriously hilarious that the “damage control” has been more damaging than the blackout itself

      • the_robomafia@readit.buzz
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        1 year ago

        Definitely I would have gone back if not for the complete and total disrespect spez has shown towards the community

      • darkmugglet@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Ironically, if Reddit has been up front and said they were killing third party apps, and kept their mouths shut they would have faired better. For a stupid play like this, speaking only makes it worse. This is going to be taught in business school on how to kill a business.

        • TechyDad@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          They could have even gotten third party apps to pay for API access. They just needed to set a fair rate and a workable timeline for the change.

          Instead, they said “we’re charging $20 million starting next month. Good luck trying to stay afloat with those sudden costs!”

          Reddit could have increased their profits and kept users/moderators happy, but they chose Burn It All Down instead.

  • runarskoll@beehaw.org
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    Not trying to sound like La Palice but in all the articles and posts about this issue, they seem to miss the core of what is making users mad (the mods fight is different, although in the same direction, but solvable).

    The thing to the user who’s generating content and not only swiping their finger is: they don’t want to experience Reddit as other users experience Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or Twitter. They follow issues, not people. If you get in the middle of this relationship between the anonymous user and their discussion on an issue, with your tricks to track them, to show them your promoted content, etc. you’ll be told to fuck off.

    There’s nothing to improve in the Reddit Official App. Everybody hates the principles it’s created on, much ahead of the poor design choices and lack of features. That’s what’s being taken from us, by hijacking third-party apps: the possibility to focus strictly on what’s being discussed.

  • slartibartfast42@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Reddit’s plans—driven by an urge to make the company more profitable as it inches toward going public

    Correction: Reddit’s plan is driven by an urge to make the company profitable.

  • Linnce@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    “Any plan that involves endless and continuous growth is bound to run into scale issues, which is where I think Reddit and Twitter are running into problems,” Mir says. “You can’t inflate the balloon forever. It will pop at some point.”

    I’m looking at you too, Netflix.

  • Elysium@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I hope Redditors don’t cave and cease protesting, clearly it’s working if Reddit has to force subs to reopen.

    • Smellmop@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I haven’t been on since the 10th and I was on it near constantly before that. If reddit sync isn’t going to be around 10 days from now then I have no plans to use the site anything like I used to. I literally have no desire to learn their crappy app and lose the curated experience I had set up for myself. The only redditing I plan for the future is googling for specific questions in niche communities.

      • Elysium@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        The only redditing I plan for the future is googling for specific questions in niche communities.

        Same, though you could possibly find some non Reddit answers to your questions

    • Michael Kazarnowicz@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Same here. I’m trying to find other ways to support the protests. The community I’m moderating there will migrate over to here (yay!) but I don’t expect more than a couple hundred to move. I will keep moderating the community over there (because we’re a gay community and a safe space for trans men which is sorely lacking on Reddit), but I’ve deleted the app from my phone and only use old.reddit.com with uBlock origin to make sure I’m not contributing to Reddit’s bottom line.

  • PenguinTD@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    funny how the article does not mention lemmy or kbin, but put in disclosure that their parent company have stakes in reddit. And the best the author can do is

    If users have invested significant time in a community, it’s going to be a pain to find something amid the sea of federated upstarts that all claim to be the next best thing.

    The mentioned article by Rory Mir actually mentioned lemmy and kbin, cause it’s EFF. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/what-reddit-got-wrong

  • Johnnypneumoniac@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    I want it to hurt them. I want it to fail. But I fear they’re doing this now because they’ve run the numbers and are pretty sure the vocal minority that will leave permanently won’t be noticed in a month.

    • heartlessevil@lemmy.one
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      Well, two things about that. In their interviews, Huffman says this decision making is based on Elon Musk at Twitter. I think this implies that Huffman is not basing this on numbers but on ideology and an example set by Musk. It’s simply “If I’m a rich tech bro and a richer tech bro does x, I can become a richer tech bro by copying them!”

      Secondly, they can crunch the numbers, it doesn’t mean they are right, or that they are not subject to change in unexpected ways. Digg V4 was also a calculated decision, but they greviously miscalculated.

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    What really did it for me was Huffman’s quote on how “Reddit users, communities, and discussions are one of the largest data sets that cannot be given away for free” (summarized quote).

    The rumored IPO made an entire corporation do a 180 so ruthlessly and clumsily in a way that I have never seen. It’s destroying itself and rightfully so.

    • techno156@kbin.social
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      Except that it already has been. They’ve already scraped it, and can refer back to either the archives, or just scrape Reddit like they do with other websites if they want to pull more information.

      They didn’t pay before, why would they bother paying now? Worst case is that they just exclude Reddit (like they did Twitter), and train from other sites instead. It’s no great loss.

    • Bowen@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Fidelity dropping reddit’s valuation by ~40% made me go “oh boy that’s bad news” when I saw it at the start of the month.

      Imagine thinking you’re cashing out at 10 billion and now you’re only getting 6. The horror.

      • Nechesh@beehaw.org
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        Imagine you’re an employee thinking you’re going to have stock worth 100k, and suddenly it’s worth 60k and falling.

        • Bowen@beehaw.org
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          Sure, that is pretty crappy. But I liken that to employees who build their budgets and personal financing around bonuses. Nice to have, but not a guarantee and wrong thing to assume you’ll get them. Always assume equity will be zero, IPOs benefit C-levels and investors heavily.

          I can’t find much on reddit’s equity offerings for employees but I imagine it’s, at best, a pittance. Their other benefits are top notch though. No wonder they “don’t turn a profit”.

          • Nechesh@beehaw.org
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            I agree with you. My point was that 40% is a big hit, especially if you’re not already wealthy. It might even be enough to start disgruntling workers.

            • Bowen@beehaw.org
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              I’m thinking that’s why that memo got leaked, there’s already dissension among the ranks. I’m sure he’s absolutely livid like his idol Mr Musk.

    • dan@lemm.ee
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      I honestly can’t believe he’s being so egotistical about it. Insults mods as “landed gentry” and users’ concerns as “noise” - those are literally the people that have created this “valuable dataset” he’s coveting so greedily.

      • minorsecond@kbin.social
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        That’s why I nuked all my posts and edited every one of my comments to point to kbin / lemmy before deleting my account. They may revert my changes, but I at least wanted to try to prevent them from benefiting from me in any way.