this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 210 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Fuck Reddit. Scumbags.

RIP Aaron.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 8 months ago (1 children)

RIP Aaron indeed. May his fighting spirit be the anchor point for any community that's succeeding Reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 152 points 8 months ago (7 children)

When can we start shorting the stock? /s

[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (15 children)

Hmmm, let's see.


  • Failing company rooted in a more traditional framework they're trying to break out of

  • Said company has no idea what they're doing and keep doing ridiculous things to "break out of" traditional framework

  • Keeps doing things no user/customer asked for

  • Said company has no real effective long-term game-plan and keeps changing tack because of bad previous choices

  • There's a good chance the company could go completely bust because of lack of good business plan and solid leadership


Redditors: Reddit is the new GameStop!! DRS!! MOASS!!!

[–] [email protected] 35 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Keeps doing things no user/customer asked for

I'm pretty sure the advertisers - their real customers - asked them to show more ads.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Huffman is ostensibly following Elon Musk's lead, and last I checked, Musk had pretty effectively chased away a massive amount of what one might call "rational" advertisers. Reddit is absolutely following a similar path, and soon enough there will be advertisers who no longer want to be associated with a toxic brand.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago

Ostensibly? I think you mean obviously/openly.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700

It's not just similarities; Steve Huffman is openly and directly copying Musk. Honestly, given Ex-Twitter's performance, I have no idea why any investors are allowing that.

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[–] [email protected] 138 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Well we have 6 weeks to prepare for the next mass exodus lads and lassies

[–] [email protected] 61 points 8 months ago (2 children)

i.e. Have a backup account on a small instance ready for when the big ones get ddos'd

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Why should the IPO change anything at this point? It's not like it'll have any immediate effects on the website.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's not the IPO that will cause the exodus. Its the first actions that Reddit takes to appease shareholders that will cause people to leave

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The Lemmy Piracy communities are about to receive the last of the dedicated reddit holdouts.

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[–] [email protected] 108 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Founded in 2005 by web developer Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, Reddit became best known for its niche discussion groups and its users voting "up" or "down" on the content posted by other members.

I appreciate this extremely sly shade at Steve Huffman.

He's not an entreprenuer because he didn't do dick between leaving Reddit and coming back to Reddit whereas Ohanian had a few other companies in his back pocket.

I mean, Ohanian sucks, too, but this sentence is just Reuters kicking dirt in Steve Huffman's smarmy little bitch face and I'm fucking here for it.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 8 months ago (2 children)

And Huffman’s programming skills weren’t even that great because they quickly brought in Aaron Schwartz to make it all work, yet they always conveniently leave him off of the founders’ list.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago (2 children)

This is literally the story of almost every successful tech venture. Even in the company I work for, the CEO was a former salesperson while the dev who started it all was still a dev after 20 years. He singlehandedly created the entire product catalog but no one outside of the company knows his name. The CEO's name is all over everything, including a "book" he "wrote".

There's always a low profile nerd somewhere in the background who is absolutely key to the whole operation but they rarely get cred.

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[–] [email protected] 99 points 8 months ago (12 children)

Oh good, some breathing room to finish Voyager's new onboarding flow

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Goodness I hope the gamestop nerds find a way to absolutely destroy this. If there is any chance of a scheme working, I will invest.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Time to buy shorts. Or puts. Or kangaroos. Whatever.

I don't know a fucking thing about stonks.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 8 months ago

Perfect, you'll fit right in

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Founded in 2005 by web developer Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, Reddit became best known for its niche discussion groups and its users voting "up" or "down" on the content posted by other members.

Disgraceful, disgusting, lying scum. Say his name: Aaron Swartz

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Aaron Swartz actually didn’t found Reddit. He built a similar company that wasn’t gaining traction, and as both of them were under y-comb and Reddit secretly seeded fake accounts, Swartz and y-comb decided to merge into Reddit. Swartz was sort of their first and hardworking employee instead of a co-founder.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Reddit doesn't exist without him period full stop. His didn't get traction and theirs didn't work.

Not the same thing.

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Seems like a terrible investment, I can’t see what they can possibly do to add value. Everybody who wants to use Reddit is already on it and anything they do to try and milk it will just lose them users.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I've had the impression for a long time that Reddit could stand to lose a large part of its users in order to be more profitiable. The nerds getting into long winded "ackchually" "debates" are making the site worse for the meme scrollers and they are also not the type to click on ads. They're not trying to attract more users, they want to maximise revenue from the existing pool. I don't think it's a coincidence Reddit has been slowly moving away from "discussion board" and towards image and short video (like the other three big platforms) because that's where the money's at.

My prediction is that shortly after the IPO we'll see .old go away, and a further sterilizing of subreddits ability to forge unique identities. The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators, buuuut they haven't had trouble after the API debacle so maybe there are more people willing to provide free labor than I assume!

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 8 months ago

Cool. That'll be a fun trainwreck to watch.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 8 months ago

Ooh, I can finally short!

[–] [email protected] 55 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Contrary to many in here, I don't think this will cause another exodus from reddit. those who might be concerned by this have already left or reduced their time on the platform

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (5 children)

If Facebook hasn't had a mas exodus, neither will Reddit.

Facebooks death is slow and ongoing, and I'm pretty sure Reddit's will be too.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I don't know where you are getting your numbers. maybe it's your selection bias, but facebook's userbase keeps groing, and even if its getting less teenager engagement, those teenagers are flocking to Meta's other platform Instagram.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago (6 children)

I’d expect another big exodus around then.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 8 months ago (12 children)

Yes. Best thing we can do is be ready (from a tech perspective) and welcoming (from a human perspective). They'll come or they won't.

Compared to summer, Lemmy now has thousands more users, hundreds of active communities (no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects), actual made-on-lemmy content in a bunch of places, and a bunch of apps that mostly have the bugs worked out. It's probably fair more appealing now to join than it was in summer.

We still have roadblocks: general confusion about federation (the email analogy seems to be working best), difficulty properly explaining how to sign up, a harder time finding communities, and it's impossible to migrate between instances without starting fresh.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (2 children)

no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects

I'm always saddened by how not-active some of those subjects are. For example: Even many large games struggle to have dedicated, active communities on Lemmy (assuming I'm not terrible at finding them, which is sadly also possible). Even some of the largest games have only completely dead communities here. A huge draw of Reddit for me was to be able to talk about the games I play with other people who do too. And mostly, the games I'd love to talk about aren't in the top 10 most played games list.

Now I could try to (re)vitalize those communities I would love to see around, and I have done so shortly after the exodus (on my previous account that died with the instance it was on). However, there's only so much talking into the void I can do until it gets boring.

I also feel like that might be a big issue for people coming over. After I manage to explain to my friends how federation works, they ask me to help them find the [topic of their interest] community, and all I can show them is a community with 10 threads, all over 3 months old and with 0 comments. Sadly it shouldn't surprise anyone they're not sticking around after that.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I think part of the problem is that we migrants decided that each reddit community also needed a corresponding lemmy community right out of the gate. For example, on reddit, there is r/hockey, then there's a sub for each individual team. However on lemmy, the team subs are dead due to insufficient traffic, and stay dead due to the exact chicken-and-egg problem you describe. The solution is to congregate in a larger community instead, where traffic is higher, even if you're posting about your relatively popular game. So as a Winnipeg Jets fan, I should post in the lemmy hockey community and not the Jets community. Likewise, if you want more chatter about Cyberpunk2077, post in the general gaming community. It works reasonably well for now, and if the signal to noise ratio ever gets bad in the larger community, then you can split off into specialty topics.

Ironically, reddit also went through this exact process 10-12 years ago. r/science became too noisy, so people ended up in r/physics and r/chemistry, and r/askscience and such. We need to start with communities with larger scope until they're active enough to split.

At this very moment I'm looking for a discussion on sci fi oriented table top rpgs. On reddit, there is dedicated discussion forums for a few of them. Here, I'll post to [email protected] because there's more people there. Off I go!

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 8 months ago (16 children)

I've never bought options before, but I'm in for 10grand and shorting the shit out of this.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If you're serious, just remember the old saying "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you or I can remain solvent"

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 8 months ago

I'm curious how they will tank their worth by then, as is tradition.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago

Easiest short of my life.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago

Wouldn't be surprised to see lemmy activity spike in March. Probably not as big as during the API debacle, but still.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Is it even worth anything to investors anymore at this point? Huffman kind of destroyed any faith anyone had in Reddit, seems like it's just going to slowly turn into an ad distribution service to scam people who don't know any better lol

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago

Well yeah, but that's worth a lot.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago

Buying puts on that bitch on day 1.

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