Reddit's CEO really wants you to know that he doesn't care about your feedback
Reddit's CEO really wants you to know that he doesn't care about your feedback
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is continuing his damage control tour, this time via a new interview with The Verge. Despite...
Wow. That is a truly horrendous interview. This saga just keeps getting better. That interview is somehow the absolute worst thing he's done so far, and he's pulled a lot of shit.
The only thing more gross than Elon Musk is an Elon Musk imitator. He's just. so. angry.
For me he's also stupid, I mean, you're managing one of the biggest websites in the world and you don't know accessibility is an international standard?? You need "guidelines" before you know what you should implement in your own official app? (he said this during the AMA) Come on ...
A lot of these tech goons are losers in their personal lives and get huge ego strokes being able to control these platforms. Any questioning of their actions is perceived as a direct challenge to them as a person.
If that just became the worst he's ever done, I can't wait another week before he stoops another 10 feet lower.
The way he setup Pao so he could look like a savior is still the worst thing he has done. Or maybe dealing with CP as a mod of jailbait.
It's always important to take a step back and consider that the mega-rich exist in a totally separate reality than the rest of us do. They were raised in a way that they were never forced out of infancy into adulthood like the rest of us were. I hope that eventually we realize that it's not responsible to allow major institutions to be under the control of adults whose worldview has never progressed since the time they were toddlers.
Hey, sorry y'all had to defederate from our server.
I guess I thought I understood what that meant, but I somehow didn't quite grasp that we can both still subscribe to third party communities like here at [email protected], and continue to interact indirectly through those channels. So the whole defederation thing matters even less than I thought it did.
Sorry to be off topic but some people at lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works might benefit from seeing this explained.
Hate to be the one to break it to you, but they can't see your message. Check it from the beehaw instance yourself.
The Verge interview is Here
The tl;dr is it's the AMA part 2: electric douchealoo
These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free.
I just can't believe that a CEO of a company who doesn't pay their moderators would actually say something so tone deaf.
And blatantly false.
Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up
LMFAO that ship has fucking sailed. They already used Reddit data through 2021 and got everything they needed for free. Huffman is locking the barn after the horses are already out, and setting it on fire. What a fucking dumbass.
LMFAO that ship has fucking sailed. They already used Reddit data through 2021 and got everything they needed for free. Huffman is locking the barn after the horses are already out, and setting it on fire. What a fucking dumbass.
Plus they can just scrape the data without using the API. It's a red herring, just a lie to cover up his desire to kill third party apps.
Also no sane company would pay that ridiculous price for training a LLM on memes
Why paying exorbitant api prices when you can scrape for free? Like all those image models clearly trained on scraped watermarked stock images
He managed to paint Reddit as the victim in this, double down on their decision, and then paint the moderators and App developers as the ones hurting users.
Insanity.
It’s funny how he’s playing this out to be about third party apps like Apollo. Like yeah, that’s what the community cares about, but the reason they’re making the changes is because he’s fucking anal about OpenAI and other companies finding such success with products they have built using data scraped via the Reddit API.
He wants some of that money, not the comparatively tiny amount that Christian got from Apollo.
He also doesn’t seem to get that people root for an underdog. Had he been more serious about how they are upset that companies use their API to build massive tools that they can sublicense to other companies, like Microsoft, and make lots of money, people might agree with that.
What he’s framing it as though, is a big company like Reddit vs small indie app developers, like Christian Selig. Guess who the underdog is in that scenario, Hm?
Dude could literally invent a developer program to help support “sanctioned” third party devs that pay some sort of a yearly fee to access the API and raise cost like he is now to fend off LLMs. But nah, I’d expect that out of somebody that is actually wanting to solve the problem. Lol
That sounds unnecessarily complex. Just force an authentication of the client (ergo, make it so you can't access the API without logging in) and add api rate limits per user, maybe with higher limits on users that have the paid Reddit membership tier.
But I don't think that was the point anyway. It's less work to just start charging for the API. That way they can charge companies like OpenAI, and drive others to use their main app, letting them sell targeted adverts to them too.
They kinda already have something along those lines, or at least it's in the works. I'm pretty sure that's what Devvit is supposed to be, but rather than actually finish that project, they'd rather crusade against the Apollo app for some reason
It’s funny how he’s playing this out to be about third party apps like Apollo. Like yeah, that’s what the community cares about, but the reason they’re making the changes is because he’s fucking anal about OpenAI and other companies finding such success with products they have built using data scraped via the Reddit API.
The data could just be scraped without the API anyway.
My first comment in the entire fediverse will be:
FUCK U/SPEZ
I'd hate to be that guy
Truly
Well, he is probably hated a lot more than a few months ago, but will also likely get a huge stack of cash when reddit does the IPO...
Balls in his mouth
Honestly, we should just leave it behind and focus on making communities here better. They have every right to cut off their nose to spite their face on their own website. Let's learn from that for the future in contributing to making someone else's website great.
The best revenge is living well.
I agree, let's just forget them and make a cool place for us here
All experienced mods are welcome. We value your contributions here.
The unwillingness to back down is mind boggling.
I think he has shown his true form, he was always a cunt and not a very intelligent one. But now that the games afoot he has shown his true colors. The only thing he cares about is $$$$
Can’t back down when you’re a narcissistic liar
yea this guy screams narcissist
Need to come off macho and confident for the shareholders/potential shareholders.
I genuinely believe this is the real reason.
Not even willing to negotiate or come to some kind of understanding anymore. Just straight up treating the community that put him where he is as if we're the bad guys.
he needs competition
The 9to5mac article has just the right amount of spiteful contempt. Nice.
I appreciate his contribution to growing the fediverse everyday with all these gifts.
Folks have made millions.
It sucks to be you, Reddit.
It's hilarious how people have literally paid app developers for a better way to experience reddit and he's mad about that. Like sorry you're a talentless hack. The only reason reddit is as popular as it is was down to the stars aligning back in the digg days. That's about it, first mover advantage with your only other competitor shooting themselves in the foot.
I used most 3rd-party apps for Android and the official one is simply the worst.
Lemmy clients are already better than Reddit's official apps.
You're right about the first mover advantage: there was a small time window in which Reddit was the town square of the Internet, but it turned to shit when the brass decided to milk users like data money cows.
My god… he is such… a fucking… idiot. Holy shit… I’m just surprised he’s lasted this long as “CEO”. I work in tech and I’ve seen interns and entry level engineers exercise better decision making. I guess being strongman is more important to him than saving his company and/or protecting his image as a sensible leader.
How not to CEO 101
Most CEOs would pretend to care or be concerned even if they didn't change paths lmao
He is so out of touch.
So glad I deliberately got perma banned a couple of days ago then nuked my account. I also deleted all the tracking cookies and deleted Boost (sorry boost dev you guys are great keep fighting the good fight) and blocked reddit domain using ublacklist.
Fuck u/spez
I don't really engage much anymore because of busy life but I'll try to be more active here.
Has Boost specifically stated they were shutting down? I have only seen official posts for Since RIF, and Apollo. I was watching for it, but haven't seen it. I assume it will happen
Reddit's CEO wants me back, and he's not having me this way.
My jaw dropped reading the verge interview. Insane.
But yeah keep going back to their site and watch their ads, that'll show them for sure.
Or, you could do what I do - use [https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit) with an ad blocker. That hurts them on two levels -
- They have to pay for you to use the site and,
- Their ads are blocked.
You want to swap the order of the text and the link there in Markdown. This:
[https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit)Yields this:
[https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit)
Whereas this:
[Old Reddit](https://old.reddit.com])Yields this:
And don’t post anything - contribute nothing.
Makes me wonder how long old.reddit.com is gonna last.
Thing is he can still shill that to advertisers/investors as hey, once we kill off old.reddit we will get x% of new eyes on your ads!
it also hurts them on a spiritual level since they want to kill off old reddit.
I use old.reddit on computer with ublock origin, I don't even know Reddit has ads, been visiting for 10+ years, never saw single ad, same on mobile where I use Boost + Adaway or Kiwi browser + uBlock origin, I will see how the 3rd party situation works out
I mean, I did too. But you can see why Reddit is grouchy about that. I mean, I have written a lot of content and posted it to Reddit, and maybe that has value that they can monetize. Or maybe there's some value that they can get from data-mining my activity on the server side. But they haven't been making money off my eyeballs directly, or data-mining information available on the client side, and I imagine that that's frustrating when they go crunch the numbers on their costs and revenue.
R.I.P. Reddit.
How to nuke you valuation speedrun
They seem to be going for the "No such thing as bad press" strategy.
what a prick
Is this thing on?
Fuck you u/spez
My bet is on Covid brainfog. Someone on this level of intelligence wouldn't have created something amazing like Reddit.
Or he's just tired of it now, burnt out and wants to cash in before he leaves.
Wanting to cash in is logical & understandable. Being a complete idiot, getting caught lying and being contradictory in his statements is a sign of a problem. (also what he is doing & has done is lowering the value of his IPO so..)
He didn't create it. Huffman was always a tag along. He is happy to take credit for all the things he didn't do.
Aaron Swartz' story gets more and more sad with every passing year.
Goddamn I got covid brainfog and it was never this bad for me, worst I had was forgetting everything someone told me within 5 seconds unless I was writing it down
Will be really interesting to see how this works out for them. They’ll definitely lose a lot of users but I wonder if they’ll end up getting enough of them to download the official app that they decide it was worth it.
I feel like its going to be a lot like the Twitter meltdown after Musk took over: a lot of noise in protest, a shittier experience for the user base, but it will ultimately live on because people would rather adapt to the new paradigm then move onto something unfamilliar.
I don't think its fair to compare to Twitter though. Most people use Twitter to follow celebrities, not for user generated content. That's why this place needs to keep its momentum going and attract users beyond the initial spite created by reddit.
But it didn't really. Infosec which were the only people i followed all move to Mastodon and same with some other topics. The only topics left on Twitter are politics, beauty and entertainment and Elon fanboys. Their For You page now displays complete nudity every 5th post so that is making more peaple to leave.
What a myopic ding dong
Who's up to make work of scab mods harder?
Fuck u/spez
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