The man speaking in this clip is Nilay Patel. Hes the Editor in Chief at The Verge.
He also used to be a lawyer before moving to journalism full time. So he knows Bullshit when he sees it.
I used to think that The Verge were just a bunch of Apple zealots who couldn’t even do a pc build video properly. They’ve come along way since then. Reddit would be absolutely insane to try and take on something like The Verge.
Side note , Nilay also has a podcast called Decoder where he interviews the heads of companies to get an idea of how they run and what their goals are. Its a pretty good show and I reccomend it. The one where Nilay takes on the head of Substack was hilarious
The hit piece Nilay did on Elon was fucking savage and one of the best things I’ve ever read on that site
Thanks for the link, that article is delightfully savage. I laughed so hard my cat came over to check if I was dying.
The Verge has been covering the shit out of the Reddit death spiral and I’m so here for it. Good for them.
It’s also one of the very few that’s been pretty accurate about it, I’m impressed.
Same, their coverage has made me feel way less terrible about all of this. Just knowing someone is out there calling Reddit on their BS makes it easier for me to accept that Reddit is no longer a safe place for me and move on.
Wow, spez is taking on The Verge now? He thinks he’s a lot bigger deal than he really is…
It’s amazing hubris. Pride comes before a fall they say.
Burning bridges…
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
For real. My brother is one of those people who is like “they aren’t gonna die from this so why should I care blah blah blah”. He thinks if protesting won’t have the immediate impact that people want then those no reason for it to happen
Effective protest means accepting going without and inconvenience.
In an instant gratification society, that is anathema.
Mods aren’t going to put in the unpaid time just to make Hoffman rich.
Can anyone explain to me, please, how is this good (financially) for the reddit investors? I mean, I ran from reddit since I only accessed it from sync. Didn’t really care for the ‘politics’. Now I get here and see there’s a lot more to it than just the shut down of 3rd party apps (which I understood as a financial decision). If money’s the motivation for all of this, how is it financially healthy?
If Reddit kills 3rd party apps it can absorb (or at least hope to do so) users of those apps and have complete control over how they access Reddit. Reddit can then feed them more ads, trackers and whatnot, all of which would translate into more revenue for Reddit, which is a net positive for shareholders.
There’s also the fact that companies training LLMs would be interested in paying those exorbitant fees to get training data as they likely can afford those fees.
So in short, Reddit likely wants to become a content farm for LLMs. As for the users, Reddit doesn’t care given their recent statements. So if some c*cks stay on Reddit, spez will just inundate them with more ads because why not, free money is free money, until everyone leaves.
Third party app users only made up ~3% of total reddit traffic. The revenue potential there is miniscule. It was never about the money, but about control.
I don’t trust reddit reporting that value accurately. Not saying it is a huge percentage, but they likely doing some things to minimize the numerator and maximize the denominator.
But yeah, definitely about control. They could have monetized users on third party apps with more reasonable API pricing. People would probably have barely noticed and that’d be new revenue for reddit that didn’t exist before.
If they charged 1/3 of what they are for third party clients to access the API and required Reddit Premium for API access…. They could have made a mint! Plus they could have reported huge upticks in subscribers to their service. THAT would have looked good to Wall Street for an IPO.
Instead we get this fuster cluck.
This just amazes me. It seems as if their blinded by power. Actually thinking they’re the true and only Frontpage of the internet.
Spez here thinking that the content hosting is more important than content generation. Reddit’s value to the community or advertisers is a result of the users, not Reddit Inc.
I mean to be fair, I imagine when communities were in blackout things were looking dire. I haven’t been to reddit since, but I imagine things are pretty much back to normal? So it’s clear he can sort of spit on the reddit userbase how much he wants. People will still come back.
Noooo, it has not returned to normal at all. When the protestors left, a flood of other people came in to take their place. It was enough to create a noticeable shift in tone. I would now describe reddit as a whole as barely left-leaning. Almost every sub moved a couple notches noticeably rightward.
It has cancer. Prognosis not good, when monetization was the root cause.
Uh, if what your saying is true, that sounds like an absolute victory for Spez. He never wanted good communities, he wanted communities he could market to. Having the idiot right wing that buys Chinese hats that says MAGA is absolutely the audience he wants.
In fact, if you’re all correct and the old social media is just straight going to the right wing and the left wing goes underground to techie sites like Lemmy, their voices will get magnified. Which is already happening with bud and Starbucks. Oh we are fucked…
Thing about the internet is the spaces are not set. You can’t conquer a country like you can in real life, because none of the space actually exists. It’s all numbers of users, because there is a finite number of them, and they can only hang out and contribute in so many spaces.
They move into one, another shrinks. People come here, this one grows. That’s all. Think of it less as some kind of strategy game and more of fluids flowing and interacting in a complex system.
Sure, but some places do have more influence on the public discourse than others. Lemmy will remain relatively uninfluential until it becomes more user-friendly, and/or more well-known. So any left wing stuff here is going to have less of an effect than it did on Reddit or other such places, for now.
Steve Huffman is an absolute tit.
No. People like tits.
We’ll no longer comment on hearsay, unsubstantiated claims, or baseless accusations from The Verge. We’ll be in touch as corrections are needed.
Setting aside the ridiculousness of this position, the statement also doesn’t make sense at face value, right? I think I understand what they’re trying to say, but aren’t those two sentences in conflict? Isn’t getting “in touch as corrections are needed” literally making “comment on hearsay, unsubstantiated claims, or baseless accusations”?
This is their “gotcha” move - if they don’t comment, it’s unsubstantiated hearsay. If they do comment it’s because it’s wrong.
deleted by creator
I mean. My account has been a daily driver for the better part of 17 years. The name is original enough that if I went a week or so on an alt I would get requests for takeover from others.
I haven’t been on since it all started. And I won’t close the account. Just let it sit.
Go one further, edit and delete all your posts.
Please don’t do that unless you are replicating them somewhere else.
Gosh I HATE when I I stumble upon a reddit thread from Google when trying to solve a problem or something, and the comment which may have been the solution is removed or edited by one of those redact bots.
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
Saying it once was enough i think.
(Or you fell into a bug.)
weird. submitted it once. got triplicated somehow.
Oh ok, my bad😅
TIL the fediverse has an echo.
Echos and operate at different timelines with the synchronization differences between different instances.
