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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's letter to Reddit employees in response to blackout (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by gary@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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Starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private. We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us. A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout. Thank you, team.

We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.

There's a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we've seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.

While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.

I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don't want you to be the object of their frustrations.

Again, we'll get through it. Thank you to all of you for helping us do so.

Edit to include source: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/13/reddit-ceo-blackouts-no-revenue-impact/

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[-] aaron@lemm.ee 43 points 1 year ago

this too shall pass

I believe there's going to be a moderator exodus. The flippancy with which Steve has handled this, and how he responded here, is going to stick in the craws of their enormous unpaid workforce. These are the people who have been there a decade plus, have seen the ebbs and flows, and are probably no longer willing to be unpaid servants to their clearly demonstrated monetary interests (at the expense of its users [product]). This was a turning point. They have way bigger problems to address than a 48 hour boycott.

[-] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Plenty of them will do that simply because they are currently using 3rd party apps, bots and other tools to moderate and won't be able to do it nearly as efficiently afterwards. The people at Reddit seem to have very weird idea of the value of their userbase, where they just look at the huge lurker mass and somehow completely ignore that without mods and content creators, there isn't anything for them to consume.

[-] randon31415@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

The question I've always wondered is... how many mods are already paid? Not by reddit, but by other media companies that pay them specifically to tilt the scales and suppress or promote particular viewpoints. Those people will want to remain part of the community - so supporting the blackout, but also if their paycheck comes from having power on reddit, they will also support reopening.

[-] DreamySweet@exploding-heads.com 6 points 1 year ago

They are either going to have to hire a ton of paid moderators or shut down every non-default sub. The former will be very expensive and the latter will kill the only good thing reddit has going for it.