Reddit's unpopular changes were inspired by Elon Musk's layoffs & cost-cutting
Reddit's unpopular changes were inspired by Elon Musk's layoffs & cost-cutting
Imagine cribbing notes from a guy that has seen the social network he purchased drop in value by 2/3rds.
Yeah, I still can't figure out what sort of mentality makes that seem like a good idea.
For Musk there's at least a chance of some sort of thought process going on there. Narcissistic people tend to think that everyone else is just like them (although maybe a lesser version of themselves.) Musk has had a very serious addiction to Twitter for a long time, therefore everyone has a very serious addiction to Twitter, therefore we can charge people a ton of money for their Twitter and since they can't leave they'll have to pay for it. And legal repercussions? Why, he's never seen those in his life!
Maybe spez is the same, just with a bunch of alt accounts so that he can post in /r/jailbait or whatever. I can see why he might want to turn reddit into 9gag if that's all he's ever used it for himself and isn't capable of understanding the concept of other people having different uses for it.
But at some point he must notice that it's not been going well? Right?
CEOs are psychopaths, especially tech CEOs. they're all either publicly or privately glad elon took the PR hit of being the first to cut off 3PAs and make the site fucking garbage
Sociopaths. But yes I otherwise agree with you.
They're both extremely similar words so it's no surprise people get them mixed up, like psychologist vs psychiatrist. However I don't see a sociopath ever becoming the CEO of a successful (at any point) company.
I don't even know that spez is a psychopath, but he's absolutely panicking and in way over his head.
Imagine cribbing notes from a guy that has seen the social network he purchased drop in value by 2/3rds.
Imagine watching Twitter circle the drain and thinking "I should make similar decisions"
Fascinating to watch the internet get worse and worse in real time. It seems enshitification is inevitable for any big and centralized website
We're just swinging back towards decentralization, in 10 years we'll be going the other way again.
Honestly I don’t think we will see much of a swing. The people who are fed up with it will move to platforms like this while the vast majority will remain on sites like Reddit or twitter. It’s the same with adblockers, most people don’t bother with them because they just don’t care. That said, I don’t see anything wrong with decentralized sites like lemmy staying on the smaller side, it draws less attention from the same people who have ruined the larger sites.
That's funny, my decision to quit Reddit and delete my accounts there was inspired by my decision to quit Twitter and delete that account.
This is pretty much confirmation that the API change is just the beginning. I give it two months until users have to pay to become mods.
Whale whale whale
Of course Huffman admires Musk, they're both pricks.
Here's a Nitter link for those who don't like giving Twitter clicks:
Is Nitter just a Twitter mirror or is it a separate network?
Neither, though it behaves a bit like a mirror. It is a Twitter client that fetches data server-side.
Brief summary here: https://nitter.net/about
It might be neither; I expect it's a frontend.
https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/44762/-/comment/186899
Even I dislike Elon Musk now, used to be a big fan, was difficult for me to come to terms with.
I started reading about Lemmy about ten minutes after reading this the first time. I can’t support that kind of stupid
the Twitter subreddit has been constantly full of people complaining about the changes to Twitter for the last few months lol. i can't imagine having access to that and thinking that copying Twitter is a good idea or something that would be popular
When would tech companies realize that layoffs NEVER increase efficiency? The amount of work getting done is directly proportional to the amount of people at a company, because if a company can increase its work efficiency during normal operations it would have done so already.
The amount of work getting done is directly proportional to the amount of people at a company
This is absolutely not true.
This is one of the most well known writings on software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
Besides, its not just about efficiency, but about scope and use of resources. In economic boom cycles there is more capital to play around with non-essential ideas. When that access to capital dries up, so does viability of keeping extra resources for things that are not essential.
That's not the goal, the goal is to make profits go up now to appeal to shareholders. The future doesn't matter, the CEO can just dip when their money has been made.
It's not just tech companies, though - Twitter and Reddit are circling the drain for the same reason that you can never find an employee in Target and call center waits are so bad. There are two basic ways for a company to increase profits, and everyone is picking the wrong one.
The first way to increase profits is to invest some of them back into the company, by paying staff more/paying for more staff and getting better equipment to enhance the customer experience. This method relies on happy customers sticking with the company, but because of that, it takes time, and they can't immediately tell if it's working, so they might not know if their improvements are actually helping or not for quite a while. A very human analogy for this is trying to improve how much energy you have through self-care, exercise, and a good diet - it'll probably work given time, but it won't do much by tomorrow or next week, and it might even seem actively unpleasant at first.
The second way to increase profits is to cut costs. This is basically instant gratification for businesses: anything they cut is an immediate boost to their profits because it's money that stays in the company's coffers. The flip side of this is that it completely hamstrings their ability to do just about anything. Less staff means more stress on the remaining staff, increased turnover, and less man-hours to devote to projects that might increase profits when completed. Still, companies tend to choose this method because it makes the shareholders happy now and it makes the C-suite look like they made the company a bunch of money. To continue my analogy from earlier, this method is basically like trying to improve your daily energy level by doing cocaine: it works really well right now, but it'll leave you feeling like garbage tomorrow, and if you keep doing it to maintain that energy, you end up feeling worse and worse without it, and eventually you might end up selling something that you need to get more.
So, in short, everything sucks because businesses are now trying to snort up all the cash like they're a 1980s businessman doing lines off the changing table in a public restroom.
So, in short, everything sucks because businesses are now trying to snort up all the cash like they're a 1980s businessman doing lines off the changing table in a public restroom.
A particularly apropos analogy because these kinds of business decisions reek of Reaganomics-era thinking.
That's not at all my experience of 25 years in Tech both in that industry (Products, Services and even Startups) and others (mainly Finance).
More people (or more time - i.e. overworking) most definitelly do not mean more results and in some case can even mean less results.
If seen departments 3x as large producing less than half the results, and way more so when talking about small teams (in my area 4 senior devs familiar with each other can outproduce a whole department of mid/junior-level devs).
Curiously Tech Startups were especially inneficient, probably because they tended to hire young and enthusiastic people ("With a tendency to run really hard whilst not knowing were they're trying to get to") and don't really have much in the way of software development processes whilst well established (but comparativelly boring) companies hired the kind of people in their 30s or more with families who want a good steady salary, and had well established team structures.
But don't take my word for it, just read books like "The Mythical Man Hour".
I think you misunderstood me. My point was if your company/project was already running incredibly inefficiently, cutting more people would not make the remaining people more efficient somehow out of fear, because what caused the inefficiency is still there, you just have more things for each of them to do now.
The way to increase efficiency is to figure out what part of the whole process is causing waste and aim to minimize that, but that is HARD because it requires understanding your process, which is why they just do the lazy thing and fire a bunch of people to appease the almighty shareholders, so that they can say they did something.
Think of the saving of cutting off your nose! Sure, it may spite your face but you have to understand the shareholder value of a leaner face!
No lie, I thought the whole time that smug asshole was gonna show up online, or twatting away on the Internets true haven for hate speech, and say he bought reddit or was trying to.
He's rich and fucking dense enough to do it.
Elon: running a successful company to the ground.
u/spez: Taking notes.