He ‘doubled down’ because there was nothing else he could do. Iamthatis was meticulous in his takedown, and short of apologizing, there was nothing spez could say to make it better.
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Agreed, I have no idea how he thought it was a good idea. I'm sure his PR and legal team tried to talk him out of it - or they're all idiot yes men. Cards were already stacked against him and he just made it all worse.
Then he should have apologized?
Absolutely should have apologized. Who knows what he's thinking.
At least FlyingLaserTurtle apologized. Kinda felt hollow to me though compared to what he said.
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spez also just seems incredibly salty for someone that must have everything in life, yeesh
I hope this mess they created destroys their site, they deserve it for being such smug asshole pricks about the whole thing.
I was expecting some humility, admission of faults and an olive branch.
Instead, the CEO just doubled down and comes to the AMA with canned, smug responses. What a joke.
As people were pointing out on Reddit, in this case I don't actually hope that, because the people who suffer as a result are the users. Tons of useful content that users have created and contributed, other people would just never have access to again.
The basic mistake I see us all make is assume that Spez has any emotional attachment to Reddit (let alone anything close to how attached we are to it). He doesn't.
Once you realize that he's 100% in it for the money and is utterly uncaring about Reddit's users (i.e. you), you'll realize that he couldn't give less of a shit about actually addressing our concerns.
This will also make you immune to any PR sanitising lies him and his team spout, as all such lies hinge on your willingness to give him some benefit of the doubt. We shouldn't.
The example I give again, and again, and again is Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. Craigslist remains private (which shields it from being gutted by Wall Street vultures, for sure) so we don't know for sure, but Craig is believed to retain a controlling stake alongside current CEO Jim Buckmaster and eBay (which purchased a large stake from an exiting employee).
Craigslist makes about $600 million annually, and I'm sure provides a nice living for the executives and employees there, but has remained true to its core function of providing transparent and easy classifieds posting to everyone (mostly for free, even!)
Notice what happens when an organization becomes a vehicle for profit, beyond simply "self-sustaining profit." Notice how taking on investors practically guarantees that outcome.
I thought Reddit was dead the day Conde Nast bought it. They've survived quite a bit longer! This day had to come. Let's move on.
We can build something that primarily exists to create a community.
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We shouldn't give the benefit of the doubt to a man who's shown himself on multiple occasions completely incapable of good faith any more than a hedgehog should give an owl the benefit of the doubt.
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yeah pretty much
spez sees 3rd party users as an obstacle between himself and more money. so he will gladly trade the bad pr and loss of certain users if it means that even a small fraction end up switching to the official app and it gains him another 0.1% in wealth for the IPO
he claimed that old.reddit wasn't going anywhere, but we all know that it will be crippled to the point of unusability
Idk what the point of the ama even was, it’s not like he was going to hear anyone out, and everyone that commented was just asking “why are you such a bad person?”
I -think- that it was to try and keep mods around by ensuring that they won't (maybe) take away their tools.
Yes yes we are working on mod tools they will be there "soon" - reddit for the last 8 years.
"Why are you such a bad person?" - because money.
I had no idea in what scenario imaginable that this was going to go well or improve things, even when it was announced.
"Hey Steve, you were right. We realize we were taking your mercy to keep the API for granted. We'll not only cancel the subreddit blackouts but we'll stop using 3rd party apps, install the official app and click on 5 ads just because of how admirable your AMA post was."
-Redditors in Steve's mind
That's what I did...
No wait, I'm here now after 13 years on Reddit. My mistake.
I just deleted my main account of 3 years and also my 2 alts.
I deleted my 10 year old account. I was annoyed for a while, but this is just dumb. Fuck spez
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"[...] recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.”
Well, Selig did wait with leaking that phone call until he felt like all the bridges had been more than burned from Reddit's side and he officially did not want to do business with Reddit anymore, so I don't think that will be an issue...
In fairness, he posted the recording after Spez repeated something false about the call Selig was on.
@Knusper And, more than that: it shows the typical modus operandi of the Shitty and Pissy Evil Zombie. When people don't fall for his bullshit, he tries to divert attention into something else, an intrinsically disingenuous tactic. All of that with the implicit consent of the company as a whole.
And as a self-fulfilling prophecy this justifies the recording. If you're going to deal with a company that should not be trusted, you need to protect yourself, and that is what Selig did.
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He responded to a whole 14 questions. Truly, a hard day's work for the CEO of Reddit.
He had a monocle measuring to get to
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Admitting that “Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.” just shows to the world, that they don't know how to run a business. This should be warning shot for every investor.
When i read that i was honestly astonished how they expected anyone to invest in reddit at all
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I have no clever thing to say except it seems Spez is, without joking or being mean, clinically insane.
The dedicated content creator userbase is long gone, and it shows. The casual content creator is leaving. The lurker and occasional poster will have nothing to read, except the thinly veiled ads pretending to be organic posts. It's quickly becoming a digital wasteland. Fun to digg through maybe, just like we leaf through an old book sometimes.
fun to digg through
ICWYDT 😉
Lurkers (me) are leaving too, hopefully en masse.
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I'm not understanding a shit about kbin vs lemmy, but in doubt I just created an account on both and I'm on my way to delete my reddit account. Hi new friends!
Lemmy and kbin are different things which work on the same backend and are part of the fediverse. Similar to how mastodon is fediverse counterpart of Twitter, lemmy is fediverse counterpart of Reddit, and kbin is a unique thing which is more akin to old school blogging sites.
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well i didn't expect much
well i wondered if it would be possible for reddit to walk back their decisions but it appears that they won't, which sucks a lot
it was a fun ride for the last... almost 17 years. but I'm out on June 30th. I'm happy to make a new home here on Lemmy!
After seeing the responses, I realized Reddit is a lost cause and deleted my account of 11 years. My "exit interview" answers were... salty.
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It's probably a good thing, the fediverse will thrive because of it, and we'll never have to worry about the horrible monopoly-on-communities doing something ridiculous anymore.
This feels so surreal. I just watched a video the other day about how Apollo used to have a friendly relationship with Reddit. It’s so weird how spez is doing all this mudslinging. No good deed unpunished.
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Since u/spez seems to want to continue down this road and bar people of experiencing reddit the way they want, I decided to delete all of my post and comment history within my account there.
It's obvious that those of us that want to continue to use 3rd party apps are considered dead weight in his eyes, so I decided that anything and everything I posted is likely of no value to Reddit.
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Kinda glad this happened. This is getting so much more PR than Spez could have anticipated. Former Apollo user here, loving the app on iOS & it’s pretty straightforward. Hope this gets more active and i think this might be my new home :)
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Rip reddit
I'm all for users migrating here but there's so much vitriol from these users which I don't think benefits a platform like this. I for one would like to see people leave their hate for Reddit at the door and not use this as a haven for their rage.
Post the entire thing to /r/funny and it will be the only funny thing posted to that subreddit in years
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A fitting death knell for Reddit that their CEO would have an emergency AMA go down as one of the worst ones of all time. This week is going to be one for the internet history books. I'm really looking forward to Monday.
Let's be real - I don't think reddit is going anywhere quite yet, even after this. It's going to get worse and worse while heavily active users and mods start to leave and stuff, but it's shambling corpse will still exist for a long time in a heavily advertised hell scape with shit to non-existant moderarion.
The truth of the matter is that while the real die hards like us will find a home in places like this, the vast majority will not care. Honestly, I'm fine with that. Most the people coming in to places like that aren't the ones driving good discussion
Agreed, it's honestly kinda refreshing to have a space with smaller, more engaged communities. The conversations I've had so far on here have been much more enjoyable than most I've had on reddit in the past few years.
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Truly hope everyone else realizes how bad of a CEO he is and he gets ousted. He even admitted Reddit wasn't profitable. Sounds like he should have been on top of that way before now.
I was surprised by how insane the ama got. Considering Reddit is a major social media platform, I expected them to act more professional and pretend to care about people's input, attempting to make their users look like they are at least fine with these changes. I prefer the actual outcome more, love how spez doubled down on the allegations he made against Apollo while everyone blasts Reddit so much they can't do much about it unless they start taking extreme measures.
I feel like this person's comment re the AMA deserves a wider audience 😂
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