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I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations.
Both pretending to give a shit about his employees and painting protesters as potentially violent people.
Fuck you spez, the only person deserving of a gut punch is you not your employees.
His persecution fetish is showing
he is a doomsday prepper after all...
This guy is an asshole, but unfortunately he is right. A 48 hour "protest" isn't going to solve anything, either go indefinite or don't bother. If almost everyone comes back it just means they won. This could the time for change, but it probably won't be.
It did have an effect. Remember the context: Reddit is trying to look 📈 big and growing now, because they will start selling Reddit shares. If no visible protest, buyers would just see the reality that Spez is showing them like "ad revenue remains stable" and "app adoption is skyrocketing!"
Even if temporary, that amount of outage made the news, which means potential buyers get to see a bit of dirty underwear sticking out of Spez's drawer. Business Insider reports on "Reddit's falling IPO valuation" already.
It is costing them, which may cause change. Clearly too little too late for too many people, but hey at least the assholes lost money.
Business Insider reports on "Reddit's falling IPO valuation" already.
Good.
The good part here is that they're losing money, but I doubt it'll be enough for anything more than a sop. Spez the asshole seems pretty firm on his decisions, and people are eventually going to come back. Like Louis Rossman said, this is just showing them is that no matter how bad they treat their users, they'll always be back in 2 days max.
I also think it had an effect but won't be immediately visible. Just look at Lemmy. It grew exponentially. There's people here now. And reddit has reached tipping point, so from now on it will slowly go downhill, just like it happened with so many other behemoth platforms. It doesn't happen overnight. It's just that slowly but surely creators will keep migrating and that's all that matters
The right thing to do would be for the subreddits that went dark to go permanently private on June 30th. The two day protest can be framed as a warning.
If this doesn’t happen there will not be any changes. The Reddit leadership treated the protest as simply something they would need to “get through” before things return to normal.
The modcoord sub that organised the initial blackout are encouraging subs to remain dark in response to this. It seems like a lot of subs are going to remain dark.
If a sub doesn't want to go dark (stopdrinking was given as a community support example), then a touch-grass-tuesday is recommended to close the sub every Tuesday as an ongoing reminder.
Seems like Reddit has taken the protest as "a bit of noise, but business as usual soon". So, time to kick it up a notch
That's basically every major corporate strategy this day and age -- wait 6 months everyone will forget. They keep seeing it happen again and again, so of course they're getting bolder and bolder. We the public need to quit being pushovers. Where we spend our time energy and money is a far more valuable vote than the one at the ballot box. We will die from our own conveniences.
I don't know if Lemmy is the solution, but it certainly feels like the right direction to me.
Hell, even if people move back to reddit, I've made the choice to stay on Lemmy, and give a small community everything I've got.
about a thousand subreddits have gone private.
That number ended up being more than 8000 and there are still more than 7000 in private or restricted mode. Although they are starting to come back online now.
He's right though - it will pass. The question is, will Reddit be the same once it does pass? Will enough moderators and contributors leave to reduce the quality of the content?
Personally, I don't really care anymore. I'm not going back if I can't use a third party app and I haven't had a problem using Lemmy for the past two days instead. I just need to find the best communities for me which will take time but I'm sure that it'll be a good replacement.
I’m at a point where even if I could use third party apps again I wouldn’t return to Reddit. Don’t want to support a guy like spez.
I've discovered Lemmy, which I like a lot, so I wouldn't return to reddit either.
Although I do miss the large communities, but oh well, hopefully more people will jump ship towards the fediverse.
Of the 8,828 participating, 7116 are still currently dark according to: https://reddark.untone.uk/
I've been using that website to track for the past few days and it has been accurate. It has links and status of every subreddit. You can click on the link to easily confirm the status is accurate.
6749 now, so the number is definitely going down. Hopefully some of the big fish still hold firm.
"we have not seen any significant revenue impact so far" - coming from a guy who is known to edit users comments about him to make criticism disappear and just days ago was caught lying to people about the Apollo dev . And when Spez got called out for it, he wasn't even man enough to apologize. If this lying weasel says the sun is shining, I take my umbrella out.
Yeah lots of people apparently haven’t been in a tech company with the CEO saying ‘everything’s fine’ only to get hit with layoffs shortly either, even if his word was worth more than the square root of fuck-all which we know it’s not he’d be obliged to lie if ad revenue was through the floor.
Also he’s blundered pretty badly but he’s not a moron, that memo was inevitably going to leak and it’s classic strikebreaking tactics to go over the heads of the ‘union reps’ and try to get the ‘workers’ (not sure what the terminology is when nobody’s actually a paid employee) to fight among each other.
It's only two days, and their revenue mostly come from ads that most likely paid based on contract. So I also don't think it will affect their revenue
Spez (Verb): to ruin something out of a combination of ignorance and malice
"I'm going to completely spez this place."
I had forgotten how nauseating corporate doublespeak can be. This can't be for employees. I cannot fathom how any competent professional would actually this seriously.
Someone should send a box of Lemmy t-shirts to Reddit HQ. For their protection.
A little off-topic, but who calls their employees 'snoos'? Am I missing some context here?
The reddit mascot is named Snoo. It’s still off-putting in this context.
That explains, but yeah, still off-putting :')
The only long term solution is improving our product
Then why do you only do the opposite?
That’s only true when you use a generally accepted definition of the word “improving.”
When you use the capitalist robber baron definition, he’s spot on!
It feels manipulative to paint this whole thing as if there is a violence risk to reddit employees. Spez is seeing hate because of his direct actions and he is, IMHO, deserving of a lot of the vitriol. Also, this is clearly a management move, not a decision by employees. Lastly, reddit gear exists for non reddit employees, I've seen meetups with users in reddit shirts. I think that comment was a dog whistle to playing the victim under the guise of being a nice guy to his employees, when his direct action is causing the problem.
Just need an Apollo for Lemmy and I can move away
https://github.com/derivator/tafkars/tree/main/tafkars-lemmy This'll do it!
his arrogance makes it easier for me to stay off the platform for good
Tbh, he's not wrong. Subs are coming back up, so why would he have done something
if he alienates the most prolific people, it won't matter much if the subs come back
That and Lemmy platform let them bypass crappy moderators by curating their own community however they want.
The public offering will be a disaster, hopefully. I don't see how investors aren't questioning Spez's leadership after handling this is the worst way possible. Could of been straight or worked with the third party developers to integrate ads and premium. Instead he jacks up API rates to close apps like a coward instead of just telling it how it is. Mindblowly terrible leadership.
The 'We have not seen any significant revenue impact" might have something to do with investors not questioning anything. Hell for all I know the API change might have been their idea in the form of "Hey Elon started to charge of the api and nothing burned to the ground. Why don't we try".
Reddit employees will be able to easily know that more than 1000 subs went dark. They’re also probably well aware about how ad revenue works on the platform.
This message wasn’t really aimed at the employees. It was aimed at the MBAs and bankers who are preparing the IPO. It was meant for investors to say “everything is fine and this is normal…”
be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. ~~Some folks are really upset~~ I've unabashedly put you in direct danger, and we don’t want ~~you to be the object of their frustrations~~ pesky lawsuits
ftfy spez
To be fair, if reddit employees are put in any danger by this debacle that will say far more about redditors themselves than spez. Hell it might say enough that he is concerned enough to forewarn employees.
So sad to see that ALL the third-party app devs aren't backing up about this and goes dark too.