Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's letter to Reddit employees in response to blackout
Starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private. We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us. A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout. Thank you, team.
We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.
There's a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we've seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.
While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.
I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don't want you to be the object of their frustrations.
Again, we'll get through it. Thank you to all of you for helping us do so.
Hey! I'm keeping this as it's sharing knowledge with new users from Reddit. However, in future please find another community to post this on, because it is not related to the lemmy.world instance specifically.
Yeah this is why I think the 48 hour time limit is unfortunate. I don't think it's going to have much long term effect, and the only real difference is going dark indefinitely until demands are met or just migrating elsewhere.
That little quip at the end implying that they could be targeted in public over this, with the intention to have journalists write as if we are flying off the handle.
This isn't Rick & Morty's szechuan sauce crowd, these are the moderators and content creators of the website. We are peacefully protesting his poor conduct.
The worst that's happened is that he's had some memes made about him and himself alone.
I suspect that the fact that he had to call out that they are not seeing any significant revenue impact probably means that they actually are seeing an impact.
Looking at this thread in r/technology, it sure looks like most of the newer Redditors were just pissed by the blackout and don’t care about Reddit’s changes. That suggests to me that Reddit is beyond saving.
No matter what this guy says or does, millions have switched to Lemmy not only is it like reddit, its better, its what reddit used to be.
Now, all will calm down for reddit but the boat started to leak and many will not go back. Just like many didn't go back to twitter. We will see a slow and steady increase of fediverse activity.
A lot of this just feels like CEO talk. Obviously they do not want to back down but if enough big subs stay off then they might have to change course. I'm worried about the people who are addicted to reddit.
We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far
As long as this is true zero fucks will be given.
This pains me as someone who worked in a customer-facing role at a software company. You're at work getting your ass kicked and leadership just shrugs and says it's ok because we're still making money.
"As of Wednesday morning, more than 6,000 subreddits remained inaccessible and in private mode after what began as a two-day voluntary shutdown. The blackout includes popular forums such as r/aww, r/videos and r/music, each of which claims more than 25 million subscribers on the platform. "
I believe there's going to be a moderator exodus. The flippancy with which Steve has handled this, and how he responded here, is going to stick in the craws of their enormous unpaid workforce. These are the people who have been there a decade plus, have seen the ebbs and flows, and are probably no longer willing to be unpaid servants to their clearly demonstrated monetary interests (at the expense of its users [product]). This was a turning point. They have way bigger problems to address than a 48 hour boycott.
Between this and the fact that r/AdviceAnimals is apparently back with Reddit moderators, I think Reddit will go on. They own everything and can re-open every subreddit whenever they want. Many of the more technical/informed Reddit users will remain absent from the site but the bulk of casual users will likely remain. Whether the content that's left will satisfy them remains to be seen.
I would love to watch reddit crash and burn, and for smeg-spez to get fired. But I'm mentally prepared for them to linger on for years and maybe even be profitable as they hang on to the countless dumb-dumbs who just don't know anything more than mindlessly scrolling through endless ads.
Meanwhile, the rest of us can still move on and enjoy what we're building to replace reddit in our daily routine, even if we can't make reddit itself go away like it should.
A lot of sudreddits are vowing to go dark indefinitely in response to this it looks like. Many were already, but the official position on /r/ModCoord is an indefinite blackout for all but critically important subs.
There's reads really passive aggressive. It clearly wasn't intended to actually say anything meaningful to staff but rather something for 1. media that pickup on (won't anyone think of the poor people attacked for wearing Reddit gear in public!), 2. appeasement of potential investors ahead of the IPO (our bottom line is rock solid folks, thousands of subs gone and no impact on profits!) and 3. an unsubtle dig at and gaslighting of people participating in the blackout (fools! This won't last, you'll all come crawling back and this doesn't affect many subs anyway!).
Spez just keeps doubling down on the Streisand Effect. Challenge accepted arsehole.
I notice he says about a thousand when the article cites closer to 8,000 subs going dark. This is probably the closest they’ll get to admitting the protest did anything at all to Reddit.
I hope this response further pisses off the subs who decided to do a fixed time blackout. The user base cannot be taken for granted. Reddit is only good as the content and the creators along with the mods.
Honestly, whatever Reddit does at this point doesn't matter. Lemmy works decently and for all else, why not try using something different? The internet is a bigger place than it seems. I prefer touching grass to wasting any more time thinking about Reddit.
"In an internal memo sent Monday afternoon to Reddit staff, CEO Steve Huffman addressed the recent blowback directed at the company, telling employees to block out the “noise” and that the ongoing blackout of thousands of subreddits will eventually pass.
The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge, is in response to popular subreddits going dark this week in protest of the company’s increased API pricing for third-party apps. Some of the most popular Reddit clients say the bill for keeping their apps up and running could cost them millions of dollars a year. More than 8,000 Reddit communities have gone dark in protest, and while many plan to open up again on Wednesday, some have said they’ll stay private indefinitely until Reddit makes changes..."
In conversation with a few others? At the prices they were talking about no one will use it. It was something like hundreds of dollars per year per user to reddit.
I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations.
meaning: the users are our enemy and they hate us....
No Steve, we just hate management, that's who better not wear reddit gear in public... Not the rank and file who don't make the braindead decisions that kill platforms.
I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public.
Lol, good ole fearmongering.
Also,
The only long term solution is improving our product
Loading shit with ads is hardly improving it. I mean it will make you more money, and thats all that matters under this shitty system of ours, but thats still not improving.
Reddit is going to be a ghost town in a few months at this rate. If they wanted to push the website and app so hard, why not just make using a client a premium feature and charge for it? Give the users the option. Instead they had to go the worst route possible with this.
This whole statement strikes me as tone-deaf. They want to "ship" the product, but the product is just removing accessibility. It literally makes the platform worse.
I work on a corporate team and often companies will allow team members to wear anything to work as long as it’s branded. This, employees have an incentive to spend that money to customize their look at work, if that’s important to them. It is to some people.
My company has a code that brings all items down to cost, and I have bought some uniform items that way to mix up what I wear at work.
The company that I work for is a small business with a great local reputation; wearing my company’s logo is a positive for me. Can’t say that would be the case if I worked for Reddit.
All I can say is that for every person voicing their opinion and leaving by making a scene, there are many more of us just silently deleting our comments and posts and just disappearing from reddit. Those are the ones reddit should be concerned about.