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Spez: this will blow over Also spez: this cannot be allowed to continue
Not for nothing, but a key feature of fascism is that you're "enemy" is both weak and strong at the same time.
So the blackout is not a big deal AND the mods coordinating the blackout are too powerful...
ACAB - All CEOs Are Bastards
If you're a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders
This comparison is so stupid; is spez gonna send me an ID or something? Will I need to hand Reddit my birth certificate or anything in order to keep using it and sign a contract with them or something? Where is that contract gonna be registered?
Anyone would be able to look for any place where there is a vote, then join the community, vote whatever they want and then casually walk away. Or you could follow all subreddits or a bunch of them that you want to influence (say any pro-ukrainian ones). Then you'd cast a vote to whoever you'd like and walk away.
It's so ridiculous!
Okay if you want to talk like that make Reddit a CO-OP or shut up.
How can this guybhave such a persecution fethish when he litterally holds all the cards.
Ah, so the blackout isn't as "unsuccessful" as he wants people to believe it to be...
Yeah, really. Didn't the actual blackout technically end a few days ago? Seems that it didn't just go away.
Maybe it’s more than a lot of noise
I really wish users, who are the only ones that bring real value to a site like Reddit, could vote out the CEO. I guess we are voting with our feet, but it's a shame that we have to go through this stupid lather/rinse/repeat cycle with every user contribution site.
I've seen some here openly despair that leaving reddit didn't do anything.
Spez, CEO of Reddit and former mod of the r/jailbait subreddit losing his shit very publically for days proves otherwise.
...And it's also a reminder that the reddit community we loved has already been destroyed by ownership, anyone returning would be returning to a shadow that disdains its own users and works to disempower them with every update. They're even undeleting user's deleted posts. If they can't respect users enough to be able to delete their own content, why enrich them?
Holy shit was he seriously a mod of that subreddit? Good lord...
Back in the olden days of reddit, mods didn't need to accept their position. So, it was a troll tactic to promote people to moderator of a controversial sub and then take a screenshot. I have no knowledge of spez's moderating history, but I imagine this is the most likely scenario.
he participated pretty heavily in the sub either way.
Oh wow, that's one of those quirks that in hindsight feels like a major oversight lol
It was hilarious the first couple times it came up - but it absolutely was a massive oversight, especially in light of how wild-west the subreddit space was in that same era.
Maybe. On the other hand, Reddit wouldn't be the first major social media platform that got its start focusing on sexualization and sexual harassment if he was...
The real crime was how he didn't do anything about it once he knew about it. Same with many other questionable subs, perhaps he enjoyed them or maybe he didn't, but he sure tolerated them being around polluting the waters. They brought in traffic, aka money, and that's all he cares about.
If I let a bunch of crackheads live in my house and endlessly defended their presence until I was forced by public pressure to reluctantly send them away the shit they got up to in the interim was at least partially my fault in my opinion.
I'm sure restoring deleted data will go over really well in Europe.
Already sent my GDPR request for my data and complete data deletion. In a few month, I will just have to look for my posts and comments, kindly provided by reddit, and denounce/sue them if they didn’t comply. That should sit well with investors ;-)
Such a laugh and after putting in arbitray rules himself. If he is such a democratic guy maybe he and the board shoud be able to be voted out by the membership too.
Yeah let's see how that works out... Not like the communities literally voted... Nah...
The implication here that the blackout was mods on a power trip when in my experience, most subreddits were already put to a vote, and the users voted for this.
He realized he needed to make a push in the press, so he resorted to the only way he apparently knows how to communicate: lying.
I already had it mulling in my head privately, but this shit conches it for me: spez has to go. He broke community trust, and continues to more and more as this thing drags out.
Article says 3500 subs participated... More than double that did, hell more than that are still down right now.
I've noticed that a lot of articles have been underselling the protests.
Funny. That is a feature I wanted for a long time. Question is how in the world will it be implemented. Probably going to pull another Elon and only allow Reddit premium members to vote. Kinda shows the blackout is working and he is trying to find a 'good' PR way to weasel his way out.
Bots will vote in the mods they want.
Too bad I shut off my premium as I refuse to give that assclown another cent from my pocket or my attention to ads on that site.
Hmm wonder where he got that voting idea from????
That kid is in over his head here. He was "hired" as CEO after Ellen Pao's high heels poked through the glass floor, despite him having no education or experience in leadership of that level. There was no one else willing to pick it up at that time. He was like "ok, I'll do it" (as per his own introduction) and users were like "ok, he was there from the start, maybe he understands us. He's one of use, he also can't iron a shirt."
I'm all for letting the common man take control, but this is clearly a guy who thinks he's the next tech-jesus or something, just because the userbase grew out of Facebook.
The actions he's doing now only confirms that he's trying to get his payout and then let it rot. He is just like you and me. Get a check, go home. No visionary ideal, not virtues. Yeah well, at least I have some integrity.
I wouldn't trust him to operate a broomstick let alone a billion dollar company.
Reddit is over with.
In spez's interview with the Verge, he hyperfocused on the fact that locked communities whose "we're locking" posts were comment-disabled would have had a lot of dissent in the comments if the mods had been brave enough to leave them enabled. Completely ignoring, of course, the fact that the upvote ratios told a story of massively overwhelming support.
How does the literal CEO not realize that a comment section with a fair number of dissenters in a highly-upvoted post is just rabble-rousing and don't actually represent a majority? Like, in a scenario where you have 20k upvotes, 1k downvotes, and a comment section where a few hundred people are pissed off and arguing, spez is presenting that as a dissenting majority. What?
What are the odds he gets a rude awakening when he gives this power to the users and they vote in favor of keeping the mod teams in place? (That would imply some awareness of how his site works, though.)
Man, that entire interview with The Verge was infuriating to read. I ended up deleting all of my comments/submissions from my almost 16 year old account right after reading it. Saying he wouldn't work with Apollo or RIF because they already "threw in towel", just reeks of insincerity. I mean, they both wanted to work with reddit but were basically shut out completely.
He keeps saying they knew about the changes for a while, but in reality the prices weren't released until a couple of weeks ago and it was less than 6 months ago (January) that they were told there were no major changes coming to the API in the medium to long term... like years. Then the changes, without mention of price, were announced April 18th and it wasn't until the end of May when the pricing was official. Plus, they changed how they calculated API limits. Before, it was Client ID + User ID, so each user of a 3rd party app had a limit and now it is just Client ID, so of course any app that has a significant amount of users is going to go over that limit instantly.
Everything, every step of the way has been so disingenuous and rushed.
Reddit talks about their new Developer Platform, but as of last week at least it was invite only and developers that inquired about it got no response. They talk about mod tools in the works to replace what 3rd party apps did, but none of it is released. Just so unnecessarily rushed when it would have been much better to get your dev platform and mod tools at least somewhat open and have like a 3 month grace period after announcing the prices so devs could have a chance to make changes to their apps. Spez just comes out of this looking so out of touch with the community. What a shame.
I do think it must be hard for some of the mods. Me I can just walk away from this madness. Mods if you have put your heart and soul into it... well harder. Still how can it be much clearer. Time to move on for them too.
Specially for some mods of the smaller more niche subs. I talked to one who supports the blackout but couldn't do it for fear that he/she would lose the small community he/she has.
Yeah I love the subreddit I moderate and haven't felt ready to "pull the plug" and walk away completely, though I'm putting up more boundaries around the time I put in to moderating, and have created an account here to start exploring Reddit alternatives, especially if this API thing ends up being step one (or maybe more like step five lol) of a larger "enshittification" process. More broadly speaking I feel like I've seen stuff like this happen enough times online to realize that the profit incentive itself is just harmful, so I want to support and be a part of communities that aren't ultimately going to ruin themselves for the sake of profit
I want to support and be a part of communities that aren't ultimately going to ruin themselves for the sake of profit
I agree. If I found lemmy before all of this, even in 2022, I probably would have signed up.
Yeah this is definitely step 5 type of deal. A while ago, they stopped adding api features for apps. So most apps couldn't add any functionality. And not only that but even if you do somehow keep access to the api, you can't do so with NSFW content. So they also took away something from api access.
Then there was the thing where apps couldn't start with the name Reddit (like Reddit Boost had to turn into Boost for Reddit). I think Reddit is Fun was okay because it sounded less like an official app and just describing reddit or something. Not sure why they got to keep it.
The whole new reddit redesign to feel more like Facebook is just gross.
All the 9,000+ awards that meant nothing? Like you get a free one a day and maybe you get the wholesome one so you ironically give that award to a post about dying animals or something. So many posts just have so many random "awards" that it just feels like jingling keys in front of us to keep us engaged.
Reddit may not be dead yet. Maybe not for a while. But I'm not going to be holding on to the very last second. It's been getting worse for a long time and this was just a good excuse to jump before it gets worse.
It will be fun to see what changes they make to moderators due to the blackout of this highly unpopular decision that they refuse to back down from.
Yeah, it was hard enough for me to walk away from my small hobby subs as a user, I can’t imagine the difficulty as a moderator. They’re usually some of the most invested in the subject to want to become a moderator in the first place, and then they’ve devoted all the time and energy to it for the love of the community. I don’t envy them either.
I don't have much sympathy for this. If you really just care about the community, then just move the community to lemmy/kbin/discord/irc/whatever. These people are just afraid to lose their power over the community, not the community itself.
CEO and admin making wildly unpopular decision that users almost unanimously went against complaining about how undemocratic his website is. Is he really this unaware?