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.
Then he should have apologized?
Absolutely should have apologized. Who knows what he’s thinking.
You know that’s a big no no from his legal team.
His legal team more likely advised him to not comment on it. Doubling down is just slander / libel. If his legal team did tell him to talk more about it AND to not apologize, his legal team is big dumb
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?”
“Why are you such a bad person?” - because money.
I hope this mess they created destroys their site, they deserve it for being such smug asshole pricks about the whole thing.
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.
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.
I had no idea Conde Nast bought Reddit. That is unreal. As someone who used to adore Wired magazine, fuck Conde Nast!
Yeah, no use saving Reddit. Give up your darling, let better things take over.
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.
a hedgehog should give an owl the benefit of the doubt
I didn’t realize that owls and hedgehogs were mortal enemies.
To be fair it probably depends on the species of owls and hedgehogs involved, I know owls will sometimes go for hedgehogs here in the UK.
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!
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 😉
Yeah, I think your right. The content creators and submitters will leave and then there is nothing left.
Lurkers (me) are leaving too, hopefully en masse.
All late-stage capitalists (like spez) are sociopaths. It’s a prerequisite.
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.
It’s unfortunate you went about it the way you did since they can still monetize off of the entirety of your comment and post history. When you delete your account, all your comments and posts remain. They’re just no longer attached to your account name since that is what you deleted.
I was a bit more malicious and did the opposite by keeping my account intact, but gutting everything from within. So now every thread I ever commented in has “user deleted comment” sprinkled all throughout hundreds or thousands of threads.
My account is now a fine metaphor for what reddit has become. Just a hollow facade of what it once was.
I deleted all my posts before I left :) I couldn’t be arsed to do it for comments, though.
If your account is still active, I’d suggest PowerDeleteSuite. It worked well for deleting my thousands of comments for me.
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.
In the goodbye post of apollo they were talking about their previous talk with reddit a few months ago. It was the reddit engineers and apollo devs finding a bug together, it genuinely looked like the 2 parties respected each other highly. It’s crazy how fast things went south.
Money fucks with the brain
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.
It’s us the users who create & place value within that platform. In subjects of our interests. Reddit company is adamant with their decision with limiting our precense alone.
Make sense that people have started migrating into other places/ services such as this one.
I feel like this person’s comment re the AMA deserves a wider audience 😂
Post the entire thing to /r/funny and it will be the only funny thing posted to that subreddit in years
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.
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.
