Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is continuing his damage control tour, this time via a new interview with The Verge. Despite...
  •  Kwakigra   ( @Kwakigra@beehaw.org ) English
    35•1 year ago

    It’s always important to take a step back and consider that the mega-rich exist in a totally separate reality than the rest of us do. They were raised in a way that they were never forced out of infancy into adulthood like the rest of us were. I hope that eventually we realize that it’s not responsible to allow major institutions to be under the control of adults whose worldview has never progressed since the time they were toddlers.

  •  HiT3k   ( @HiT3k@beehaw.org ) English
    33•1 year ago

    Wow. That is a truly horrendous interview. This saga just keeps getting better. That interview is somehow the absolute worst thing he’s done so far, and he’s pulled a lot of shit.

    The only thing more gross than Elon Musk is an Elon Musk imitator. He’s just. so. angry.

    •  ILeftReddit   ( @ILeftReddit@kbin.social ) 
      11•1 year ago

      It’s hilarious how people have literally paid app developers for a better way to experience reddit and he’s mad about that. Like sorry you’re a talentless hack. The only reason reddit is as popular as it is was down to the stars aligning back in the digg days. That’s about it, first mover advantage with your only other competitor shooting themselves in the foot.

      •  100_kg_90_de_belin   ( @100_kg_90_de_belin@feddit.it ) 
        1•1 year ago

        I used most 3rd-party apps for Android and the official one is simply the worst.

        Lemmy clients are already better than Reddit’s official apps.

        You’re right about the first mover advantage: there was a small time window in which Reddit was the town square of the Internet, but it turned to shit when the brass decided to milk users like data money cows.

  •  tom   ( @tom@lemmy.fmhy.ml ) English
    4•1 year ago

    Honestly, we should just leave it behind and focus on making communities here better. They have every right to cut off their nose to spite their face on their own website. Let’s learn from that for the future in contributing to making someone else’s website great.

          •  Burndown   ( @Burndown@kbin.social ) 
            2•1 year ago

            I’ll have to find it, but multiple places he’s talked about Reddit being used by companies to train their AI systems. It’s painfully obvious that he’s looking for both moral and immoral ways to monetize Reddit immediately. I give it 3 months before this is announced.

        •  tal   ( @tal@kbin.social ) 
          2•1 year ago

          I mean, I get that Reddit isn’t making money. And that during the growth phase of a dot-com, it’s okay to burn money in the name of growing the userbase, but that he has to transition to making money at some point. Investors gave him money, hundreds of millions, if I recall correctly, in the expectation that he can generate a return. He’s getting near the point where he has to do that. And the return they’re going to expect is going to be in the neighborhood of what other dot-coms can generate from their investment.

          Like, the people yelling at him for being “greedy” in that he’s aiming to make Reddit generate a return at all aren’t realistic. That is something that always was going to have to happen, from the day that Reddit started. If you look at the issues that the moderators are taking up with him, they’re trying to come up with a way that Reddit makes money and their concerns are also met.

          The problem is that some of the moves he’s making to try to make a return have really negative impacts, and a number of people want something that has less of a negative impact.

          If the Fediverse can support similar functionality based purely on cash donations, or based on some other model (e.g. Usenet runs on software developed by the community, but generally one has to pay a commercial Usenet provider for service to cover the costs), or a “users donate resources” like BitTorrent and provide a better experience, then that’s great. But the Fediverse is also going to have to figure out how to handle the costs of hardware and software development and all that, if it wants to be a competitive alternative. There are some hard questions that may come up down the line for the Fediverse too. The long term for something the scale of Reddit cannot be Earnest paying all of the money out of his personal pocketbook to Cloudflare to handle ramping up kbin’s capacity or something like that from the main Lemmy instance operators.

          Right now, I haven’t seen any ads on the Fediverse, and I haven’t yet donated money to Earnest (though he apparently does have a “buy me a coffee” tip jar and people have sent him small gifts). Which means that right now, I’m relying on the gift of resources from Earnest and some Lemmy instance operators to me. Maybe they can afford that for a small number of users. But end of the day, if many more users show up, they are going to have to find someone else to help bear the costs on an ongoing basis.

          •  mrgreywater   ( @mrgreywater@kbin.social ) 
            4•1 year ago

            But he has so many better options. He could listen to his userbase and create a product they enjoy. Then explain his cost and ask for donations on the site (with a progres bar as wikipedia does). If you have goodwill in your userbase, you could even just ask people for money in a monthly fashion and give them some “Reddit Supporter” badge. Maybe a “Reddit Supporter” can then vote on the functionality that will be implemented in reddit.

            If he’d communicate it well, he could even monetize the API fairly (let’s say 1-2x the ad revenue he would get with similar traffic) or monetize it on the user side (user has to pay e.g. $10 for yearly api key).

            I can say for myself I’d be more than willing to donate to reddit if they asked for it and I had the feeling they were actually trying to listen to the userbase and improve the platform.

            With his current behavior he’s just destroying any good-will of the userbase and therefore any direct monetization potential.

            •  tal   ( @tal@kbin.social ) 
              2•1 year ago

              Oh, I’m not at all saying that he’s handling this in an ideal way. There is a laundry list of things that I think might be better-done. I mean, the very first thing for me would be him at least having an option to let people continue using the site the way they have been with a premium subscription. Might not be worth it for some, but for others, it would, and that immediately solves his problem for a lot of users, and maybe some of the most-fervently-opposed. I’d be willing to pay something for a subscription myself, especially since they already went to the work of setting up anonymized payments during the Bitcoin fad and a scheme for premium service. I don’t know if it’d be enough to make myself worthwhile to Reddit relative to what the company is going for, but I’d at least like to see their price point. Let me use a third party client as long as I have Reddit Platinum or whatever and then tell me what that costs each month.

              I’m just saying that there is a substantial contingent that is really pissed off and who really does not think that he legitimately has to do something about Reddit cashflow. Like, asserting that Reddit losing money is just a lie, or saying that they just want any social media corporation to go down, that sort of thing. And, I mean, that’s just kinda decoupled from the financial obligations that he’s gonna be facing.

          •  tal   ( @tal@kbin.social ) 
            0•1 year ago

            I mean, in theory I suppose that they could set up their own subscription systems, but their users would have to be paying out on a regular basis.

            looks thoughtful

            Actually, I’m not even sure that app authors are allowed to do that. Apple is really strict about purchases not going through the App Store for iOS – they want their 30% cut. And I don’t know if the App Store supports subscription models. Maybe it does, I dunno, don’t use an iOS device myself.

    •  Markoff   ( @Markoff@kbin.social ) 
      2•1 year ago

      I use old.reddit on computer with ublock origin, I don’t even know Reddit has ads, been visiting for 10+ years, never saw single ad, same on mobile where I use Boost + Adaway or Kiwi browser + uBlock origin, I will see how the 3rd party situation works out

      •  tal   ( @tal@kbin.social ) 
        0•1 year ago

        I mean, I did too. But you can see why Reddit is grouchy about that. I mean, I have written a lot of content and posted it to Reddit, and maybe that has value that they can monetize. Or maybe there’s some value that they can get from data-mining my activity on the server side. But they haven’t been making money off my eyeballs directly, or data-mining information available on the client side, and I imagine that that’s frustrating when they go crunch the numbers on their costs and revenue.

  •  wakamo   ( @wakamo@lemmy.ml ) English
    2•1 year ago

    So glad I deliberately got perma banned a couple of days ago then nuked my account. I also deleted all the tracking cookies and deleted Boost (sorry boost dev you guys are great keep fighting the good fight) and blocked reddit domain using ublacklist.

    Fuck u/spez

    I don’t really engage much anymore because of busy life but I’ll try to be more active here.