… and they totally omitted Aaron Swartz as a founder.
The actions of Reddit the last few years (and especially the last few months) have probably increasingly caused Aaron to spin in his grave so much that he could power Los Angeles and San Francisco both with his beyond-the-grave outrage if anyone cared to harness that energy source.
Also a meh article, with spelling and grammatical errors (deliberate?) and omitting even simple details.
Not even mentioning Schwartz was a huge indicator that this is a bullshit paid-for story from Reddit/Spez. Absolutely NOBODY who would bring up the founding of Reddit without mentioning Schwartz unless they were paid not to. This is a hack piece from a paid shill.
NYT don’t do “paid” stories.
However, the journalism is superficial (lazy) and seems to skim across the surface. This was written by someone who doesn’t understand the tech – so they interviewed someone pro (Spez) and someone con (the super mod) – did some ping pong with quotes and TADA! An article!
Reporter: To sum up, this expert representing the major Meteorological associations says it is currently raining. And this expert from the “Crack Pot Society” says it isn’t. I have a window right next to me and…both sides make good points so you’ll have to decide for yourself.
Noticed that, too, did ya?
Nm, upvoted after checking user posts.
“GROW UP” says /u/spez, former moderator of /r/jailbait
thats actually a wrong rumour , he was appointed mod of r/jailbait unknowingly , didnt mod jailbait , and anything.
he also wasnt it willingly. it was in a time when reddit was still young and allowed Moderator appointments.
we shouldnt spread lies.
Dude was a founder and admin of the site, allowed himself to be appointed, and allowed the sub to flourish. I think we’re grasping at straws here. But I get your sentiment about being honest.
While he was appointed without his knowledge, he/reddit left that sub available for years without doing a thing while it was reported all of the time. So still a shitbag.
We don’t know that either way.
What we do know, for sure, is that he gave the moderator of /r/jailbait (and other NSFW reddits) a singular trophy, “pimp daddy” that no one else has been issued.
Agreed. There’s enough factually terrible stuff Mr. Huffman does.
To be fair, wasn’t he added as a mod by someone who was trolling?
He openly supported the head mod, even gave him a custom award.
grows up
“NOT LIKE THAT!”
he wouldn’t like you to grow up too much
What a disgusting article. I wonder how much spez paid for it, or if the author (apparently a ‘longtime Redditor’) had his account threatened. That, or maybe he’s just so used to corporate bootlicking that his first response to seeing a distressed billionaire was to start lapping at his soles.
Also, this puff piece reeks of arrogance. We fucking made that website what it was, and now this pathetic weasel thinks he no longer needs us? And there’s dumbasses on Reddit who defend this shit???
deleted by creator
Spez, or some other party involved in the financialization of Reddit and has an incentive to tilt opinion maybe. It’s all the kind of things that seem to happen.
I have seen the kind of thing you’re talking about plenty of times of Reddit and twitter in the past. Where users are shitting on a company, then all of these weird apologetic comments start coming out of nowhere, that nowhere near that many normal people would be spouting in defense of a shit move by a shit company.
The lack of negativity and divisiveness right away was noticable on here. The responses all looked much more respectful too.
I wish I had your faith in humanity, but I do believe that a lot of these idiots genuinely believe that spez is fighting against the ‘evil powermods’ to ‘protect the rights of the users’.
or if the author (apparently a ‘longtime Redditor’) had his account threatened
Why such an unbelievable theory?
You’d be surprised at how many dicks a ‘power user’ could eat to retain their account.
And there’s dumbasses on Reddit who defend this shit???
You gotta remember that there are tons of casual users (which probably outnumber 3rd party app users, if we’re being honest) that haven’t ever known anything else, and they see all this noise as an interruption to their day-to-day scrolling.
One of the subs I used to frequent most often (r/hockey) was full of users who were pissed that it was blacked out for the final game of the Stanley Cup playoffs, so there was no live thread for the last (and biggest, most important) game of the season, and thought anyone who supported the blackout was just being whiny.
I’ve just accepted that Reddit’s base has shifted, its no longer what I remember it being, and I’m not a part of it.
Estimates of TPA users were pretty low. Like 3%. That said the majoriy of the content and moderation also only comes from like 1-3% of users as well. So it was always a question of how much those two small groups overlapped. You can afford to lose a large chunk of casual users. If you lost 50% of your content posters and moderators, they’d be fucked. Stale front page would be the death knell for most casual users. They aren’t loyal. They’ll jump to TikTok or Instagram or wherever to get their meme fix.
We had a live thread here, and it was awesome.
I immediately heard alarm bells when I read the title. This dude really said 'users need to let Reddit grow up" in response to this dude’s disgusting behavior.
Reddit is now further away from a public offering than it was last year, Mr. Huffman said.
Well, that slightly warms my heart.
That’s an odd way of saying he failed at his job.
task failed successfully.
We did it!!??
Meta AF.
I’m curious but don’t know where to find this info: Is this truly affecting the IPO? I had heard it suggested the IPO was imminent, so has all this public pushback affected the timeline and/or probability of it happening at all? It would be such a delight to see Spez’s strategy end in real consequences.
Is NYT paid to totally distort the truth like they did in that article?
The day after moderators closed down hundreds of Reddit forums…
Hundreds? I mean, I guess that’s true, if you say 88 hundreds… Almost 90 hundreds.
I’m not even to the interview, and I’m already having trouble swallowing this article.
“Spez gets fellated by the NY Times”
NYT: manufacturing consent since before you were born, and after you die
Explicitly? No.
Are they giving Spez softball questions and failing to challenge answers because otherwise he’d stop talking to them? Yeah, absolutely.
While New York times is far better than the New York Post. And the Washington Post is far better than Washington times. They are all for profit ventures owned by thieving wealthy capitalists. They’ve always pushed their own perception and agenda. Whether or not we ever realized it. And that agenda has never been about sustainability, fairness, or accuracy. It’s always been this way to one extent or another. It’s just that the consolidation of ownership etc as made the market much less competitive and accountable.
I don’t believe Washington Times is actually intended as a moneymaking endeavor. It’s a weird little mouthpiece funded by the Unification Church. As a DC region native, I’ve seen them give that rag away at every opportunity and sell it at cost – according to the Times itself, it lost a billion dollars over 33 years before turning a profit for the first time in 2015.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/14/washington-times-reaches-profitability-after-33-ye/
whether or not it is intended to make money directly. they aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They’re making money back on it somehow even indirectly. And part of it is a brainwashing and placating a section of the populace to turn them against their own interests and fight against everyone else. That’s why there’s so much money in AstroTurfing for oligarchs. No one will agree with them out of principle unless there is enough principle to pay them adequately.
You’re misunderstanding. The Washington Times is a fire oligarchs throw money into by giving away for free and selling it at cost so they can spread far-right wing propaganda (and print Mallard Filmore strips.) It’s a much more extreme example of what you’re talking about.
So, he’s really sticking to this claim that it costs Reddit to send API info. Wow. I guess your average casual user will probably buy that.
Spez has 2000 employees and nobody that can run a server.
According to his comments, he paying for server time. If he is not lying (and lying would also be making material false statements ahead of an IPO - even rich people go to jail for stealing from rich people) he a spending $10 million per year for just the Apollo traffic. That means he is paying 100s of millions per year total.
For that spend a decent CEO would bring that in house.
Good thing he’s not known for being a liar.
It looks like they’re sending everything, including api calls through Fastly as an edge service with their actual boxes being hosted with Amazon services. It’d be more likely they’re paying 10m a year to host the whole site, depending on how much Fastly is charging them for traffic.
Let’s not pretend to believe that the price hike is meant solely to cover the actual costs. My opinion is that this is a veiled attempt to restrict who’s allowed to use the API by setting the price unreasonably high, where only large corporations, who profit from scraping reddit’s content, can afford it. Big Data and AI research in particular.
Like the telecoms selling data caps
Technically speaking, that data has some cost; just that Reddit’s actual cost to serve that data is far lower than what they’re trying to charge Third Parties.
It also has the opportinity cost of the viewer not getting first party ads or giving tracking data. Even with these things, though, it’s still nowhere near what they’re charging.
Also, fuck ads and tracking data.
They also had a revenue and/or profit sharing agreement with one of the bigger Android apps up until a little bit after Huffman took over as CEO. So it’s not like they couldn’t have had a slice of the pie anyways.
As I’ve said before, unrealized capital is not a cost.
Unless you run a shitty business.
The whole framing that Spez is bringing maturity is incredibly disingenuous. The “mature” approach is to impose change with no attempt at reaching consensus over a community-driven platform?
What is the mature part of expecting volunteers to keep performing free work as they are actively antagonized? Is he going to pay all moderators and dissatisfied content creators? I don’t think so.
They are just using “mature” as codeword for monetized. Or maybe in that classist sense of “learn to submit to your betters, peons”.
They want reddit turn reddit into a cash cow and we are the product.
It’s sad.
You’re only the product if you still visit there.
Well there’s the problem
Reddit, which is based in San Francisco, has in recent years tried to turn from a rough-and-tumble internet message board into a full-fledged social media business by adding executives and strengthening its advertising capabilities.
The financial shit heads weasel their way into everything and fuck it up on us. This is what I like about this setup here, from the ground up it doesn’t seem like it can be bought our and IPO’d.
Everything has to be increasingly profitable and it’s maddening.
Because of greed. Not even just the founders, they could even be benevolent, but someone from the competition can just get greedy and attempt a buyout or try to cripple you by becoming bigger and constantly harassing your company. We have to bring back antitrust punishments and ban megamergers that have been running rampant.
Yeah, I don’t want to see humanity keep on going like this. The profit incentive in some ways can increase the speed at which something develops, but it feels like we’re outgrowing it now that we have so many good communication/collaboration tools.
The profit squeeze on everything feels like it does more harm than good.
I know. Like why can’t “we have enough revenue to operate the business” be good enough?
It’s either go big and go broke for these clowns.
not wholesale. any one of them could spin up an instance and try to monetize it. But they would never be able to shut the rest down or stop them.
And if it got really spammy, we can just block that instance.
I once worked for a company that had a chief imagination officer. And yes, their business card said CIO.
They must have been imagining they were important.
This week I realized that I’m reading these “about Reddit” stories more as a spectator than an involved party anymore. I’ve moved on. Feels good not to care enough to care.
The nice thing about Reddit’s self-defeating move is we don’t have to do anything about it. It’s self-defeating.
Made an account on Lemmy 3h ago, best thing I’ve done to counter the need to constantly check Reddit :)
I have both Lemmy and I kbin since the blackouts. I still check reddit on occasion for some major news or subs I visited, but it’s probably only 10% of what I used to.
Yeah, I don’t really understand what this all is, but after pressing through a few failed attempts to sign up and finding a compatible app, I figure if nothing else, it’ll give me something to read after next week.
Damn, I wonder if the author of that fluffpiece spit or swallowed after he was done.
Neither. He’s still gargling.
Also, love spez’s constant deflection on mods, and here specifically super mods, being the source of the problem. Most of us have been on the internet for the majority of our lives. We know the difference between a butt hurt, power tripping mod, and a mod who’s concerned for the community they’ve been participating in for 10+ years.
Mr. Huffman and Alexis Ohanian founded Reddit in 2005 as a site with a countercultural attitude toward the internet and its advertising-based economy. Reddit espoused free speech at any cost, zero ads and an insular culture that laid a foundation for Web 2.0’s meme culture.
Well how things have changed.
I miss Web 2.0. Hopefully the Fediverse can bring some of that back
oh fuck yoooooou… with that bullshit, using mature as a way to shame people. WE FUCKING MADE YOU.
Article is very biased towards Reddit the Company, and actively paints the protesting mods as being the sole instigators of the protest, calling them “super mods” which has a negative connotation, and makes no mention of the fact that many users and communities are also in support of said protest. It also paints the protesters as immature by positing the “question” of will the community “let [reddit] grow up”, implying that the protesters are stifling the growth of reddit. It is very sympathetic towards spez and calls the reddit community “rambunctious”, as if the reddit community are children, and only quotes negative examples of notable things the reddit community has achieved. It writes of the protests as if it’s a child’s temper tantrum that will go away with time.
The article paints the death of the Apollo app as the main reason for the protest, other than the one line of “Old-timers were also angry that the heady days of Reddit’s anticapitalist roots seemed to be officially over.”, which is inaccurate. It makes no mention of the many other reasons the community is unhappy and protesting, which includes, among others:
- the lack of accessibility features and proper moderation tools in the official app,
- the perceived dishonesty on the part of Reddit the Company,
- and the loss of faith in Reddit the Company in general.
It also doesn’t state the true reason why people were upset about the death of Apollo and other 3PAs, which is that those apps had the accessibility features and moderation tools that the official reddit app should have had but doesn’t, and the loss of these 3PAs means that the already back-breaking job of moderation is only going to get harder. It makes no mention of the fact that the unhappiness over the API pricing was due to the ridiculous price and the short time frame, instead painting these “apps like Apollo” as leeches that “send no money back to the company”.
tldr: article is very biased toward spez, making him seem like a sympathetic parent trying to control his rebellious children, generalising all protesting mods as bad “super mods”, and does not mention the real issues of the protest.
Pretty much all the media handling of this has been far too lenient on reddit, and far too happy to be critical towards moderators.
They mention in that article how reddit was strongly free-speech, but failed to address the fact that they are very far from that now
Never thought of Reddit as a “social media” site. It sounds like he’s trying to turn it into Facebook, bloated and mainly used for corporate business and your grandma.
