“Protest and dissent is important,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told the AP. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything.”
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I’m presuming when he says “we” he means the royal “we”, ie “I”. I’m not expecting him to negotiate on it. The next CEO will, though, in a couple of months.
“Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we.’”
- Mark Twain
Yeah, so which is spez again?
While that quote has been attributed to Twain (and several others) over the years, there is nothing to suggest that Twain used this particular phrasing nor was he the originator of it. That credit goes to George H Derby, under the pseudonym John Phoenix, back in 1855.
The trifecta of “kings, editors and people with tapeworm” has been widely attributed to Mark Twain, but like so many witticisms credited to him, there’s no record he ever said it. It’s also unlikely that Henry David Thoreau ever made the remark once ascribed to him: “We is used by royalty, editors, pregnant women and people who eat worms.”
Worms, or more specifically tapeworms, figure prominently in we-related humor. The earliest known joke to combine parasites and pronouns comes from George Horatio Derby, a humorist from California who assumed the pen name John Phoenix. “I do not think I have a tapeworm,” he wrote in 1855, “therefore I have no claim whatever to call myself ‘we,’ and I shall by no means fall into that editorial absurdity.”
Thanks for the info!
You’re right. Another source is here: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/13/we/
Thanks for sharing that!
king. people with tapeworms are actually fairly cool, but kings have historically been rather cruel and unjust.
Yeah, because he is the Lord of Snoo.
He called the mods landed gentry, so he literally does view himself as the king.
As in “You know nothing, Jon Snoo”? :')
“We” as in Reddit’s VC backers.
The pigheaded doubling- and tripling-down on this is impressive in a way. Let’s see in a couple of months how many actual content creators left reddit and came here or somewhere else. I do hope spez is left with an empty site full of lurkers and bots, after all people who actually provided content for free for years leave him in the dust…
Then again, I’m not going back there anyway, so to be completely honest I don’t care that much - the fediverse is my new home (even though I’m repulsed by the name).
I can’t go back; they banned my account, after 12 years, and a few hundred thousand karma. I like to think that, in some small way, I helped make reddit a better place than it had been. And now I couldn’t contribute, even if I wanted to.
But really, why would I want to? The point of contributing to a community is to make it better for everyone. Huffman/spez has made it clear that these contributions are not valued, even though they’re the currency that allows them to make money by selling advertisements.
Same. A few years back when there was a big shift to make reddit Social Media™ (which it is not) because that’s what gets money from investors they started clamping down on anything non-circlejerky because they were trying to grow subs and promote it as the Happiest Place On The Intarwebs.
the fediverse is my new home (even though I’m repulsed by the name).
The name doesn’t bother me as much as not reeealy understanding how it all works together. Like, I know kbin and lemmy are different things, so I’m not sure why kbin is all full of Lemmy content.
I’ll have to wait for it to solidify in my brain a little bit more.
you can think of them as different windows into a similar structure. They look different, they’ll assemble the data a bit different, and might even send slightly different forms–but they’re close enough that it’s all legible, all interpretable into their formats.
And kbin and lemmy have very similar formats! But it’s possible for mastodon (the twitter analogue) to interact with kbin and lemmy as well. Even though they present the data in a different way, with different sorting criteria for your feed, and different ideas on how subscribing to a community or a person works, at the end of the day the formats are very similar: a parent post with a bunch of comments.
How is everything he says just such a gigantic PR disaster.
Taking a poll on this one: Spez’s PR people
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have all been fired in one broad, disastrous sweep like his idol muskrat did
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are tied up in the closet, ugly crying into their ball gags and slamming their heads against the wall
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inhabit shallow graves
His ego is too big to listen to any advice.
He admitted having calls and beeing inspired by Muskrat
Dude, looked at the dumpster fire twitter is and though to himself, that’s what I want!
These billionaires/millionaires, they live in a different world. Nobody around them contradicts them if they don’t value dissent, and most don’t. You wouldn’t believe the universe in which they live in…
Would not be surprised if he thinks, that reddit ist dependent on him personally.
Taking a poll on this one: Spez’s PR people
- have been replaced with a poop emoji
-
Seems like your typical dumb tech bro, who lucked out by failing upwards all his life. The only valuable thing in his life is his bank account.
I’m genuinely surprised he was able to keep his mouth shut for all these years. You could tell what kind of person he is if you paid close attention, but it seems the protests have removed the filter he had before. I feel like it’s such an odd and sudden change.
I know nothing about his personality but I guess he is just very simple honest person
Being simple and honest is a virtue if the things you’re saying are principled, being simple and honest when you’re a slimy businessperson with zero sense of moral agency just makes you a fucking leech
But he wasn’t being simple and honest. Simple and honest would have been.
“Regrettably we have decided to remove API access to the vast majority of third party clients, except those designed specifically to provide moderation or accessibility features that the official app currently lacks.
We know this will be very disappointing to many of our users, and a body-blow to developers who have worked hard on their apps.
The truth is that advertising revenue is crucial for our ongoing survival, as is the demographic information that we can gather through our own app.
Application developers should stop taking subscription renewals immediately. We will work with them to help reimburse subscribers for the remainder of existing subscriptions. “
Something along those lines.
Just a thought that’s gonna disappear into the aether…
The amount Huff-spez was going to charge Apollo was the opportunity cost, not the real cost. That is, they figured that each Reddit users was worth X amount each month, give or take, in revenue that could be generated from tracking and advertisement. That actual cost per user was more like 5% of X. If Huffspez was being honest and transparent about this, he could say to users, hey, if you pay X per month, we’ll turn off all advertisements, not sell any of the data associated with your usage, and stop tracking you as much as possible and still have our site work. (I know tracking can’t stop completely, but it can be reduced.) But that’s not what is being presented to end users; they’re only being given the ability to use the official reddit app.
Then again, the promise of cable television and streaming services was that we would pay for the service, and not be force to watch ads. And then companies figured out that they could be more profitable by also selling ads, and then requiring subscribers to pay even more to reduce the number of ads. So any claims from Huffspez that you could subscribe and not be tracked etc. would have been, rightly, viewed with derision.
Let’s not devalue basic virtues. Honesty is honesty.
Would you rather he flat out lie that “we’ll look into it” or him being honest “I’m not going to do anything about it”. Being honest lets us know where he stands so we can make our plans about migration easier.Calling them virtues is charitable if you’re doing this while willfully refusing to acknowledge the fact that you stand on millions of hours of volunteer labor and you’d rather spit on them than give them their due. It’s a lie by omission.
He could try to tell the truth with more tact, though, to avoid sounding like a complete douchebag.
Except more than once recently he’s been caught in a lie about the developers of Apollo and RIF and his communications with them. He’s not honest and he’s proven that multiple times
I don’t even give a shit about the future of reddit or going back anymore. reddit is dead to me. what I am wishing to see, though, is spez being ousted as ceo and looking even more like a dumb bitch. that will be hilarious news
Ellen Pao 2: Electric Boogaloo
This time, they’re angry at the right person
It’s interesting that this story is being picked up by business news sites now. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it’s at least catching the business world’s attention.
The Lord of Snoo is locked to the IPO, hopefully the IPO will fail and the board of the Snoo Platform, Inc. fired him.
Yep. Because them forcing/strong-arming subs to reopen definitely speaks to the Reddit admins believing this is not changing anything.
Even if a vast majority of people don’t protest because they’re simply lurkers, the problem is it’s the power users, the ones who generate quality content and moderate their subs for free who are protesting.
If I were Reddit, that’s the bit I’d be worried about.
As Louis Rossmann quite rightly points out, nobody has ever gone to war with the internet and won.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, my ship and I have an appointment to keep at the bottom of the ocean.”
u/spezzypants has an appointment with Davey Jones
This guy is a founder of Reddit right? One seriously has to wonder what the hell happened. The damage control by Reddit so far has been nothing short of shambolic and in large part because of their treatment of its users.
I mean, it’s like he’s never browsed Reddit before.
Yeah he is one of the founders, but Huffman was always in it more for the profit. Aaron Swartz was the one with the vision, he was an activist and believed in free information. Sadly Swartz committed suicide after being arrested for sharing academic journals from a secured computer at MIT. Federal prosecution decided to make an example of him for multiple felonies.
A small correction: Swartz didn’t share the journal articles. There’s reasonable doubt on whether he was ever planning on sharing them or not, but he was arrested for the downloading of the articles not the sharing.
Wasnt swartz only there for a brief time after a merger and only really on the masthead. It was mostly Huffman and Alexis that started it in their college dorm. Alexis was def more the vision/community guy and Steve more the coder iirc.
I’d argue that all three of them would still be considered the co-founders considering how early Swartz was brought into the picture. Of the three though he for sure had the smallest impact on what reddit became after its first corporate buyout.
and silo’d academia has only gotten 100x worse since then. i can’t even imagine how much progress has been lost thanks to greedy academic “journals” keeping anyone from reading their papers, stopping widespread peer review, and destroying scientists’ ability to assemble wide bodies of evidence
He’s one of the founders but it seems not the smartest of them.
I think the calculus is: they can do it and not lose many users.
They think people leaving won’t move the needle or they are so fucked financially they have to take the risk.
I haven’t deleted my account, but I haven’t looked at reddit since before the blackout. Once rif goes away, I’ll likely never go back in any sort of active capacity.
I think they’ll feel this one. Maybe not at first but there are lots of old (10+ year) active (serious karma) accounts that are leaving. They’ll pull a Twitter and slowly die.
This guy is a real piece of work. I don’t know why anyone would continue using Reddit at this point.
Yeah i left on the 12th and haven’t been back. I’ve only automatically opened Apollo two or three times lol
I wish people would cut down with this noise(see what I did there). F him and his platform, coming here and having to read about him everyday, it kinda annoys me.
It was like this for a few months on Mastodon when Twitter did the same. At least spez doesn’t have any kind of celebrity status: I was able to go out with some friends last night and not a single person raised this topic. (A couple of them know what Reddit is, but none of them really use it much. And I’m sure no one in the group other than me knows who its CEO is.)
I just hope we have a good network of people here after this story fizzles out of the news. I’d be happy with kbin never becoming as popular as Reddit, so long as there’s a healthy bunch of curious people sharing and discussing interesting links.
I think reddit is more replaceable than Twitter. It seems the stickiness of Twitter has to do with the specific individuals on there. People don’t want to leave not because they get news about famous people, but because the actual famous people are on there. And the famous people don’t get the same status recognition on other platforms, so they want to stay their too. I can get my news from anywhere, and reddit was just the best tool to facilitate that. Lots of communities used Reddit, but you can build that community other places too, reddit was just a really suitable place to do so.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head a bit, Reddit users were for all intents and purposes anonymous - you’d find usernames you recognise but it’s among a sea of thousands of others, and the posts would all blur themselves into one. By and large, you go into a thread on a topic, not because Person X posted it, but because it’s a topic you want to read about, and you upvote a comment because you liked it rather than because Person Y posted it.
Twitter is all about who you follow and you curate a follow list that matches what you want to see, and by return you engage with the people who engage with you. If the people who you’d want to follow on a replacement for Twitter aren’t there, or nobody can or will engage with you, it’s a shitty replacement for Twitter for your purposes. This is especially true with Mastodon, whose model is that you only see posts from the follow lists of people already on your instances, so if it starts off sucky then absent some external force, it stays that way.
Let’s be real, fedi’s favourite subject of discussion is itself, and its second favourite subject of discussion is how bad all the sites fedi is supposed to be a replacement for are.
I’m hoping that dies down soon, one of the signs a site is doing well for users is that it stops with the navel-gazing shit.
If people posted their own OC instead of reddit threads this place would be dope.
This guy is setting himself up to fund the IPO from authoritarian state sponsored VCs. They’re going to be most impressed by his hardline stance
Reddit being owned by Saudi Arabia and China is a definite possibility.
Did this guy wake up on the wrong foot some time ago?
Agreed
Man has 4 left feet and no hands apparently
It’s not? Well, Paint Hufferman, I’m right here on Kbin along with thousands of others. Evidently, something has changed.