From his responses you can see reddit will continue their path. and if you think about it, everything is going well for them.
the probability that a critical mass of users will leave is still quite low. they will get rid of a lot of moderators that don’t fall in line. what is left will be a community that won’t mind the direction reddit is going.
reddit will turn boring, but the shareholders won’t care. as long as they manage to keep enough users after the api change the site will recover.
the only positive thing here is that a lot of dedicated people may join other platforms and start building new communities.
Yeah. It’s like a toxic workplace. The old dogs might leave but those who hate change or new guys who don’t know how it used to be will stay
Tbh
HOW THE FUCK DID I OVERESTIMATE SPEZ
The fucking bar was on the ground and he didn’t pass it what the hell
You didn’t expect him to have a shovel.
I understand that Reddit needs to monetise. It’s not a link aggregate site anymore, hosting video/image files is expensive, Reddit operates at a loss and the 3p users cost them even more. They have reason to be dismayed that they operate at a loss while 3p apps using their API do not.
And I understand their concern with adult content. They can’t control if 3p apps will display it with or without checks, but Reddit hosts it; limiting it on 3p apps is probably the better choice to them than removing it from their site entirely. After all, they’re operating at a loss; they can’t afford the fines and fees. Sexual content is heavily legislated.
But goddamn. Limited negotiation with devs, adversarial communication (to the point of outright animosity), frankly absurd timeframe, the use of accessibility as negotiation for the blackout… there’s no good faith anymore.
Reddit is user-generated. The users are the content, their engagement is Reddit’s product. Users that don’t want to engage with their platform give them less sellable product. The users that engage the most (commenting, contributing, moderating) are the minority, and also the ones most likely to use 3p tools.
Reddit has good grounds for wanting to monetise. There are good reasons for bringing devs to the plate about how to do that. Devs were readily agreeing to covering their costs in calls, and expecting to negotiate what the revenue margin should be. Mutually equitable arrangement.
But this was handled so fucking badly, communicated so fucking badly (by one of the devs too tbh), that an equitable arrangement cannot possibly be reached anymore. Nobody wants to bargain in good faith anymore.
Now all the users want Reddit to cancel all the changes, publicly apologise, and remain operating a loss. Now Reddit wants devs to shut up and pay up, and blame them for the situation they’re in.
Now everybody loses, because devs close apps, high-activity users contribute less or outright leave, and Reddit decays down into a pit of low-interaction lurkers picking over ad-bleached bones, until it’s considered so unprofitable and unrecoverable that it is shut down entirely.
And nothing of value to the Reddit community was gained.
I’m liking it here
Same. This reminds me of old school (10+ years ago reddit). Where you could just find something cool and jump in the comments and talk about it. It wasn’t an argument fest or people plugging their shit or an army of bots it was just people talking about something they all happened to see and like.
Looks like spez is done with the AMA. His responses constitute 0.07% of comments in the thread.
I only saw one sarcastic answer. Did he actually say anything of substance?
Few political not answers, some f-you answers, personal attack to Christian.
I would say that PR was disastrous, people rage that he wasn’t prepared for obvious questions and 0 informational value of this AMA.
that’s a moment
Archives to some of his “answers”
This is going as well as expected lol
so far the AMA has been up for about 20 minutes, and he’s answered 3 questions. heavily downvoted as expected.
And he’s already started with the personal attacks against Christian Selig, the Apollo author. Already. Barely 10 minutes into the AMA and he’s already personally attacking someone. What a piece of shit.
spez has never struck me as particularly capable of reading the moment, so i’m hardly surprised by that.
My only thought about this is that I wish people would stop using awards on comments lol. You’re giving the site money! Feel like I gotta spray users with a water bottle like no, no, stop that
He’s said four things in response to questions - every one of which is a deflecting non-answer and one of which is a personal attack. Lol. What a surprise
Lmao
Probably the thing that disgusts me the most in all this is how spez has been constantly trying to drag Christian Selig’s name through the mud when it’s crystal clear that he (spez) is the problem.
Love to see the downvotes; wonder if he’ll beat out EA’s legendary disaster.
I wonder what he was expecting. Honestly surprised it wasn’t heavily curated. Deleted my account but wish I saved it to ask him when he was going to resign.
Edit: Haha wow. He expectantly is getting hammered. I like to think he was living in some bubble and now his ego is getting a reality check.
I feel like the “real reason” behind this stems from the pricing for AI training. Reddit wants to capitalize on its user-generated content for AI training. the safest way to do this, and ensure that no AI company can do this, and those large AI companies can’t argue that they’re getting unfair pricing compared to app developers.
That’s reddit’s big plan: sell user-generated content to large AI companies. That’s how you make a platform like reddit profitable. You resell content you got for free to massive companies willing to pay high prices for that content.
Effective July 1, 2023, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user / month for a typical Reddit third-party app).
Effectively forcing app devs to become middle-men collecting on reddit’s behalf. Mob boss behavior. ’
I guess it “looks better”, to cut someone off at the knees before murdering them outright.
Lmao from spez’s comments it would seem that iamthatis is well and truly off the christmas card list
