just so this doesn’t overwhelm our front page too much, i think now’s a good time to start consolidating discussions. existing threads will be kept up, but unless a big update comes let’s try to keep what’s happening in this thread instead of across 10.

developments to this point:

The Verge is on it as usual, also–here’s their latest coverage (h/t @dirtmayor@beehaw.org):

other media coverage:

  • Rhabuko@feddit.deEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    What a colossal shit show. They’re hellbent on destroying third party competition before the IPO. Next on the chopping block are old.reddit and porn.

  • nvck@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    what blew my mind, and the minds of many other people on reddit is that they (reddit) have 2,000 employees and yet still can’t piece together a good and accessible experience for their users…

    • GraceGH@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      No matter how many developers you get, you’re never going to have a good product if the guy calling the shots won’t allow it. I’m confident that the developers working on Reddit probably know damn well that their product is trash and there’s nothing they can do about it because their job isn’t “make a good site” its “do what your boss tells you to do”

      • nvts@feddit.deEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        That’s absolutely right, I’m not a developer, I’m a UX/UI designer. I recently had a contract where the contractor slaughtered my initial design to the point where I almost started to hate it, but I was bound by contract to finish it.

        If reddit wants, their developer can absolutely build a top notch app.

  • tango_octogono@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    In my opinion, we’re reaching a moment where people are realizing that having lots of users doesn’t matter that much if you can’t monetize them. We took a lot of services for granted that maybe don’t make any financial sense, which probably only survived because both the company and investors hoped that as long you could attract users, you could monetize them later.

    I think that “later” is now.

    Today I noticed that youtube has a new feature that unlocks more bitrate, but only for premium users (there’s two 1080p options, one normal and another with more bitrate). I’m expecting that these social medias and other tech companies will try to monetize us further

    • Kissaki@feddit.deEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Question:

      How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?

      Answer:

      We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.

      This is where I lost all hope.

      There’d be all kinds of better ways to go about making profit / becoming financially sustainable. This is blatant ignorance and mismanagement, without hearing or seeing anything. Complete mismanagement.

  • chrislenz@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Wow. Spez is doubling down on attacking the Apollo dev. You’d think spez was new to reddit with the way he’s commenting.

    • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      It’s bizarre to read his comment on that. It’s either psychopath behaviour, or… I just don’t know. I’m not a psychologist. It is worrying though, to see a human in charge of a social company act like that. He should probably be removed by some legal means just for that comment alone.

      • crank@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        I do not know much details about the internal power structures of a company like reddit, but it seems like this guy seems to be a real liability at the moment. I wonder why he is being allowed to go around doing this.

        Maybe they are giving him enough rope to hang himself so he can be removed from his position in a few days. Firing a disliked manager is a common union busting tactic. If he can be made into the centre of gravity for all the ire, canning him and making some small backtrack could have a lot of people reconsidering leaving reddit.

        Or maybe there truly is no plan…

        • Thrashy@beehaw.orgEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          Not sure what his responses are going to do for investors’ confidence, given that they mostly show a complete lack of understanding of his userbase, and the reaction to them implies that he’s trying to sell them damaged goods.

          I mean, I might have accepted a response along the lines of “We’re very sorry that we slandered the dev of the most popular third party app for our service, tensions have been running high of late and we’re all not at our best right now. Also, bottom line is that running Reddit is ruinously expensive and we desperately need to monetize users somehow, and this seemed like a viable option at the time.”

          Instead it’s all doubling down on everything, not giving any ground. They want those Elon Twitter API dollars (to the extent that anybody is actually paying those!) and they’re done with treating their users as anything other than content generation for LLM model training.

          • DJDarren@beehaw.orgEnglish
            0·
            1 year ago

            I think the way I see it is that the vast majority of Reddit users have no idea that any of this is going on, and wouldn’t care if they did.

            So from Corporate’s perspective, all they have to do is deal with a few weeks of whining and teeth gnashing, before everything calms down again and they can get on with whoring Reddit out.

            Ultimately they’ll end up back in the black again, and making enough money from the IPO to not give the tiniest rats ass about any of this. They’ll sail off into the sunset on a fleet of expensive yachts, and never give Reddit another thought.

            • UpperBroccoli@feddit.deEnglish
              0·
              1 year ago

              The people who don’t notice are probably not the people bringing the content or moderating the subs though.