Breakingviews - Reddit’s golden geese foul up its IPO plans : reddit

[–] BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

while this article sheds light from another angle on the investablility of reddit as a commercial property, it still misses the mark regarding the real issues that spez has caused while making the mods appear as somewhat entitled thugs rather than the exploited laborers that they are. in any case, spez is made to look incompetent nonetheless.

i think the clock is ticking for either spez to walk things back, renegotiate API terms, or simply resign. I believe the latter will be the well-earned end result.

[–] Valdair@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think the only way this ends amicably between the community and Reddit at this point is Huffman is ousted and then they can finally entertain other deals for API access. I'm sure they're looking at the insane profits AI companies are raking in largely off of data they scraped from sites like Reddit for free and thinking "WTF". My impression is third party apps got caught kinda in the crossfire on this and weren't actually their main target, but Huffman has managed to turn it in to some weird kind of ego issue now he's accusing multiple developers of antagonizing the platform, refusing to work with them, when we have proof from several of them in multiple instances of the direct opposite. Attempts to reach out that go unanswered. An impossibly timeline to implement changes. Trying to throw the Apollo dev under the bus only to double down when confronted with proof he lied to press. Utterly bizarre. He needs to go.

[–] beefcat@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

My problem with the AI narrative is that AI companies probably don't even use the API, they use a web crawler to scrape directly from the website. And any who are using the API can pretty easily switch

[–] LiemPong_Pagong@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

@Valdair

@greenfish @BrooklynMan

My take on this is maybe spez is the least problematic. I mean sure. He is a dick and fuckin malicious. But I think he is also just a fall guy. I'm sure these plans were decided by the people pulling the strings in the background.

Ousting spez will not solve the problem. But it is hella satisfying to see though. I bet after this, no matter the outcome, spez will be let go anyways. And still those responsible for the fiasco will be secure in their thrones and also unnamed.

Reddit will not improve, let's face it. Even if they rescind their decisions now. They have seen what can happen and they're likely to implement more controls in secret and also gradually.

Maybe they tested a theory of theirs, that's why we see their move as idiotic. They tested how strong the communty has become, and we've shown them all our cards. And now that they survived, they'll slowly work their way to get the upper hand. Gradually chipping the independence of their userbase.

I've already moved on and accepted that the reddit I knew is gone. Even if they decide to make the api free for 3rd party tools. They have seen their weakness and will be slowly patching it off.

[–] nevernevermore@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m okay with him being portrayed as incompetent but I agree spez is far more malicious than he is a bumbling idiot

[–] clegko@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

You can be both an idiot and malicious. Seems that’s what is going on here tbh.

[–] stevecrox@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

I think every article is missing a key issue and no one has asked Spez yet..

If 3rd Party Apps and AI services are making millions (as he asserts) why isn't Reddit competing in those areas?

3rd Party Apps aren't in a war of new features, putting a 5-10 person development team together to analyse the competitor apps and match the features would kill off the unique selling point of the 3rd Party Apps. Why hasn't Reddit done this?

LLM aren't new, the first appeared in 2018. Why hasn't Reddit assembled a team to exploit their own data? In my experience 1 data scientist backed by 2 software engineers can do a lot. It isn't a huge amount of people needed.

Even if you buy his argument that they companies are profiting from Reddit, Reddit is a platform those companies are building value from. Reddit isn't providing those services and so those companies profits aren't "stolen" from Reddit.

It's like company who sells art supplies. They sell them to a painter for £100, then a painter sells their artwork for £1000. The art supply company then gets upset it didn't get £1000 for its supplies.

[–] Burndown@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wish they actually did a bit of research on why people are protesting. Saying the third party apps simply "keep communities vibrant" completely misses some major points. Personally, I'm more furious how spez handled the AMA. He showed that the reddit staff has no interest in listening to anything that concerns the community. We're all just an obstacle between them and their deserved money.

[–] ritswd 4 points 1 year ago

This.

When I learned Reddit was effectively shutting down third-party apps, I thought it sucks but it’s their prerogative. I didn’t delete the Reddit app yet, or create a Lemmy account.

It’s Huffman’s increasingly entitled behavior after it that shocked me and pushed me here. His tactical decisions have been really destructive, I think it’s realistic that he might get shown the door. 🤞

For that reason, I used to think that if they fire him, I don’t need them to change anything else, I’d go back to Reddit; but the community on Lemmy has been far better than I was expecting, and it wasn’t as hard to get over its UX quirks as I was first fearing, so now I’m not sure I’d ever want to go back. It’s kinda nicer around here in the end…

[–] JanoRis@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

As reddit is turning 18 the next few weeks, I kinda see Spez as an abusive Stepfather, who sells his children into a prostitution ring(IPO).

He doesn't care about the site, once the IPO is over he will just take his moneybags and leave

[–] lracicot@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

There's a certain schadenfreude in seeing the outcome of spez's misguided choices. I'm still very sad about Reddit. For me, RIF was Reddit.

[–] nevernevermore@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Great article, thanks for sharing. It’s nice to see news outlets accurately capturing then situation.

They make a good point about the free labour, the disconnect is huge. They want reddit to go public so they can make millions of dollars off the backs of indentured servitude. So when do the nods cut their cut? No way is reddit going to hire moderators for the 7000+ subreddits that went dark, so the salting the earth well and truly.

[–] panoptic@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

I do wish they'd been clearer about the issues created for mod and accessibility tools and I wish any of the articles would note the 'misrepresentation' of the conversation with the Apollo developer

[–] AuthorInkwell@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Ya' hate to see it...
Oh, no, wait. You don't! ^-^