https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blackout-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-rcna89544
Steve Huffman, the Reddit CEO, told NBC News in an interview that a user protest on the site this week is led by a minority of moderators and doesn’t have wide support.
The striking workers are pompous, gilded aristocrats, we must break the strike and crush the unions so us poor common CEO's can have a chance at a little fairness. Woe is me!
In the interview, Huffman also praised the cost-cutting by Twitter owner Elon Musk, calling the reduced headcount there an example of how a social media site can be without the massive revenue of a company like Google.
I mean, wtf
calling the reduced headcount there an example of how a social media site can be without the massive revenue of a company like Google.
My brother in Christ, you raised the head count
Right? It's like wikipedia tripling their paid staff, then complaining that they aren't getting enough donations to break even.
Users ARE the product - the trick is to make using the site attractive enough that they'll stick with it regardless.
Elongated has a rabid fan base built around what were perceived to be real accomplishments towards the betterment of mankind. That's not true, of course, but he's also actually wildly, wildly rich.
By contrast I have yet to find a single person who supports Spez or even likes him at all. His accomplishments, real or imagined, are nothing. He's rich but so, so, so much less rich that the contrast is like comparing our moon to the sun.
This is like a kid with a plastic butter knife comparing himself to John Wayne Gacy.
He’s doing this on purpose.
He’s repurposing leftist talking points into a pro-corporatist clusterfuck as an attempt at populism. He knows that there are a fair number of people and communities on Reddit that will be overall supportive of these politics.
The idea is to get people thinking, “Yeah, I’ve heard that term before, it’s bad! And yeah, I’ve dealt with power-tripping mods before, so it must be true!” If they haven’t been paying attention to the finer points of the news around this (blackmail claims on C. Selig, gaslighting about 3rd party apps not wanting to work w/ Reddit, etc.), then this may be enough to get some people on Reddit, Inc.’s side. It worked for some people with Trump, for others with Musk, and with Huffman’s recent praise of Musk’s managerial style…
I don't know if using metaphors where the logical extension of mods being landed gentry is your product being a feudal kingdom, you the king, and the users the peasants is necessarily all that clever of a quote to start spreading around.
Agreed. The only problem is that I think most people will stop at landed gentry and say, "BAD!" without thinking through the full context like you just did.
Thats exactly what I expect out of a large swath of redditors. All this just to avoid the work of making the official app not suck.
The fact that he keeps making comments at all is so weird to me. Like he is truly terrible at PR. Every time he opens his mouth the situation gets worse for him.
When a man becomes so rich and his "thing" so popular, he thinks he is smart enough to be an expert in anything all at once
Reminds me of SBF's bizarre interview spree right before he got arrested. Or Alex Murdaugh that southern lawyer that killed a bunch of people and stole a bunch of money and thought it would be a good idea to testify in his own trial and got destroyed by cross-examination smh
ya my immediate reaction was "wow, how tone deaf." It's pretty clear to me that this clown is just repackaging the same talking points the VCs are using to influence his weak-minded ass.
When a tree dies, it dies slowly. The heart of it rots, and then the roots stop growing, and only much later do the branches stop growing new green leaves. By the time the whole trunk falls over, there've been raccoons burrowing into the rotten heartwood for years.
Then be the racoon. Drive up the cost. Upload hour-long videos of white noise or pictures of John Oliver beeing sexy. I think I am going to create a couple of throwaway accounts just to show how unprofitable reddit can be ;)
He's a privileged white boy complaining about slavery while operating scheme to not pay his employees.
Following the true core of (his alma mater) UVA’s founder’s principles. He’s probably fucking one of the in-house supermods on the side, too.
If I can't win I'll make my own rules...Jesus guy just admit you were wrong.
Side note, did anyone see how /r/Pics handled this after they opened back up because it was beautiful. Around 2300 users voted to open /r/Pics again and 37k users voted to keep protesting in their own special way.
Damn I never thought I would want to go back but this temptation might be too great, I gotta see those sexy pictures.
I think that goes for all authoritarians really, I mean, post WW2 east Germany was the German Democratic Republic, which was anything but democratic under Soviet occupation. Fascists for sure, but don't think authoritarian communists don't use the same playbook.
While I definitely think it's a bad idea to closely equate the two. You are not that wrong. Fascists are far worse. But authoritarians in general are not desirable. When those in control of absolute power feel threatened for their power the well-being of those underneath them goes out the window. It's how you get waves of genocide under fascists. And dissenters under authoritarian leninist communism shooting themselves in the back of the head three times or falling out of the window backwards onto bullets.
Sounds like a people problem to me. We really gotta take better care of ourselves, don't we? All of us. How do you ever stop this from happening? Where do we go from here? I guess that's why the status quo is upheld.
What a slow rolling machine we are.
It definitely is a problem of human nature to be sure. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Most people just want to live their lives and don't seek power. The few that do seek power generally should never have it. But we do need some minimal power structures.
Part of the biggest issues is education. In western nations Political literacy and education is purposefully deficient. Because it benefits those in charge of the systems. Not to say it isn't similar in other style countries. Ignorance is always a useful tool however.
Yep. There is an obvious malice for personal gain. I can feel it.
I always narrow it down to education. But how. The ideology is so strewn about, by design.
We'd need to teach stuff like mindfulness in school. Something that should be taught, but would be looked down on as some flavor of other. I wish I was taught to think and live. I was taught how to keep my head down and hate myself. This is just how it is.
They really dug in deep. All over the world. Kudos to them for holding "power", whatever that is. I can feel it before I go to bed, telling me what I'm not allowed to say aloud.
People even pray to the ugly thing. Imagine that. Praying to something other than your own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others prayers.
Gotcha, both sides. If an ice-giant was to appear surely it would destroy the entire village. On a scale of 1-10 what you would rate the probability of the united states becoming authoritarian communist in the next decade? Hows about authoritarian fascist?
Did you see that they removed the top level mod of /r/Piracy and was looking for a new one? Soooo they support piracy now? https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35555
I love the irony of him calling Reddit a democracy while also refusing to budge on the API issue. You can’t have it both ways.
Democracy for the volunteers while Spez maintains the "landed gentry" only for himself. This shithead's lack of self awareness would be comically stupid if it were in any way comical.
Also I can't believe he doesn't see how problematic voting for mod privileges can be. There's a reason reddit has refused to allow users to vote out moderators in the past. If you allow voting, you allow outsidebrigadier, astroturfing, and also just petty mod squabbling. The solution reddit has always offered in the past was "create your own new subreddit for the idea you want and then get people to come over to it". In general it's worked. The existence of r/pics hasn't disallowed other picture-based subreddits from flourishing, same with r/funny and, well, actually funny subs.
Allowing votes on moderation just opens reddit up to a lot of shenanigans that I don't think the admin team is ready for.
This week’s rebellion is a response to part of Reddit’s plan to succeed as a business
Not a hint of bias in this article, is there?
Hilarious that he wants democracy to get rid of mods, but he wants absolute power for himself.
And tell me more how this will attract unpaid mods.
I think there will be mods either way. There are too many lonely people desperate for any kind of recognition and lust for power.
What we'll have to see if how that actually works out
So part of the issue with this "democracy" idea and making it easier to vote out mods is that Huffman has literally been found guilty of changing comments.
That, along with the fact that we can't trust reddit to not chime in with false accounts to swing the vote make me dubious that it would work.
I'll start believing in Reddit's commitment to direct democracy when users will be able to also vote out admins and u/spez if they don't like their decisions.
Until then, it's just corporatism under the guise of some fluffy words.
It's like when you let kids vote on what to do for the school faire.
Not only will the teacher and school change the result if they don't like the winning suggestion, you also can't vote to do nothing or protest the event
It's just a way to give you the illusion of autonomy to boost engagement. It's only a choice between the decisions they find (more or less) equally acceptable
Lol, more than half of my frontpage doesn't even show up, it's just the same subs over and over again. Made me check Lemmy more often
Ya I'm honestly getting better more thought provoking content here and stuff I'd never scroll past on reddit cause you have to really narrow your interests down cause how much there is. So I'm learning new stuff.
I've gone there a couple of times in the last few days to try to hunt down an invilte to tildes.net and it also feels like i'm doing something bad.
Message /u/Doug from an account that isn't brand new and ask if he has any more invites. That's who I got mine from.
After seeing what r/pics and r/gifs are doing I doubt voting would work out in his favor anyway. A surprising about of the user base is behind the protest.
It’s just a matter of migrating them to a new platform. Lemmy has a small learning curve, but unfortunately it’s enough to turn off a lot of users. Hopefully with the influx of users, someone smarter than me can figure out how to streamline the user experience here.
I don’t get the learning curve. I’ve been on it for 15 minutes. So far it looks exactly like Reddit. And seems more user friendly.
“I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” he said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”
How ominous. This was an interview excerpt, so I have no way of verifiably knowing what Huffman looked like as he said this... but I'm fairly confident that he must have been rubbing his hands together and salivating as his pupils slowly morphed into dollar signs.
Why on earth would he say that now?
Does he think the promise of more oppressive monetization is going to calm everyone down?
Will just lead to even more leaving.
Like I give a fuck anyway, reddit is dead to me now. Died a long time ago when my front page, even advice animals, got clogged with political and mediocre posts.
Reddit went mediocre a long time ago
As I go back there now after the protest, I find reddits' content less and less interesting. I used to be able to lose hours on there, now I get bored after 5 minutes and get back to lemmy. It'll keep on existing, but here's hoping many more mainstream and non-techy users like me found the fediverse and know there's valid alternatives now.
Some part of our brains knew we were losing the real people. It hasn't felt right there in awhile. I wonder how many bots we were talking to thinking they weren't.
I've commented more this week than the past year on there.
Tell me about it! I swear they have been making adjustments to their algorithms for the past months year.
Before thee protest, I've been getting increasingly annoyed at the content Reddit decides to show me. The subs I chose to follow are all great and often offer something engaging in the best ways possible, and finding a good piece of content there has never been an issue... expect for the past time, where I got what felt like pre-digested and advertiser-friendly posts that I was supposed to maybe vote on and keep scrolling.
I understand that business is about money, but seeing tech largely following the same practices and strategies just to keep pumping cash for execs to liquidate is so mind-numbing and obnoxious. That's gonna sound stupid, but sometimes I wish the tech people would just kick the finance people out of the field and do their own thing, which is what the average people like, too, simply because that's the conditions when really cool and enjoyable shit is born.
Or maybe we all should just collectively pile up some cash buy some land, build ourselves a self-sustainable settlement and get away from the hungry execs.
We all just lack spez's grand vision of a corporate future where we all are simply not allowed to avoid talking about Rampart.
The fact that I never saw any content from /r/switchhacks on my feed despite having been subscribed for years led me to believe that Nintendo had had a "discussion" with Reddit and they complied.
No posts? We've got to start planting seeds if we want to grow a garden.
I'll figure out something interesting to post there tomorrow.
I went back there for like 3 minutes today and found myself getting angry at some stupid argument that didn't matter to me really but still got to me. I don't need that, I got enough irl. Lemmy et al. ain't perfect, but at least it's not that shithole.
I honestly found myself browsing Facebook more and more over the past several months, rather than Reddit. It just wasn't holding my interest like it used to. I was a Reddit user from summer '07 until June 11th, 2023, but the switch to the fediverse was easy. I've really enjoyed the last few days here.
Is anyone else really entertained at this point by watching this pompus asshat's arrogance single-handledly dismantling the pretty solid reputation Reddit has as a social media platform? It's like I blink and he thinks "hmm, how can I say something worse to show everyone how strong and powerful I am?"
I mean if Reddit's going to go down, may as well go down in the most spectacular self-emulation possible. Solid alternatives are already formed and off to the races. Go off my guy.
He just need to hold it together long enough for the IPO. Catch his pay day, and then Reddit can die for all /u/Spez cares about the rotting husk he'll leave behind. Fuck him.
I won't lie, I'm kind of annoyed by the fact that the most active posts here are talking about reddit. Even so, here I am contributing to the "problem"
He could be saying this to appease investors. Meh he can go right ahead. Done with Reddit and the ad spam.
