just so this doesn’t overwhelm our front page too much, i think now’s a good time to start consolidating discussions. existing threads will be kept up, but unless a big update comes let’s try to keep what’s happening in this thread instead of across 10.

developments to this point:

The Verge is on it as usual, also–here’s their latest coverage (h/t @dirtmayor@beehaw.org):

other media coverage:

  • chrislenz@beehaw.orgEnglish
    51·
    1 year ago

    Wow. Spez is doubling down on attacking the Apollo dev. You’d think spez was new to reddit with the way he’s commenting.

    • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.mlEnglish
      16·
      1 year ago

      It’s bizarre to read his comment on that. It’s either psychopath behaviour, or… I just don’t know. I’m not a psychologist. It is worrying though, to see a human in charge of a social company act like that. He should probably be removed by some legal means just for that comment alone.

      • crank@beehaw.orgEnglish
        14·
        1 year ago

        I do not know much details about the internal power structures of a company like reddit, but it seems like this guy seems to be a real liability at the moment. I wonder why he is being allowed to go around doing this.

        Maybe they are giving him enough rope to hang himself so he can be removed from his position in a few days. Firing a disliked manager is a common union busting tactic. If he can be made into the centre of gravity for all the ire, canning him and making some small backtrack could have a lot of people reconsidering leaving reddit.

        Or maybe there truly is no plan…

      • Radicalized@lemmy.oneEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        Pao was used by design to piss people off. They made her CEO and had her implement on the changes they knew would be unpopular with the community, then “fired” her, complete with her own golden parachute.

        • Thrashy@beehaw.orgEnglish
          20·
          1 year ago

          Not sure what his responses are going to do for investors’ confidence, given that they mostly show a complete lack of understanding of his userbase, and the reaction to them implies that he’s trying to sell them damaged goods.

          I mean, I might have accepted a response along the lines of “We’re very sorry that we slandered the dev of the most popular third party app for our service, tensions have been running high of late and we’re all not at our best right now. Also, bottom line is that running Reddit is ruinously expensive and we desperately need to monetize users somehow, and this seemed like a viable option at the time.”

          Instead it’s all doubling down on everything, not giving any ground. They want those Elon Twitter API dollars (to the extent that anybody is actually paying those!) and they’re done with treating their users as anything other than content generation for LLM model training.

          • Stormyfemme@beehaw.orgEnglish
            13·
            1 year ago

            Again anything public facing is a lie. The rich investment firms know that it’s designed just to try and placate an unruly userbase. Now if something comes of it? Then they’ll care. If the blackout happens I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s wholesale usurpation of the mod teams to reopen the big ones.

            e: typo

            • Thrashy@beehaw.orgEnglish
              11·
              1 year ago

              I fully expect that subs with major frontpage presences are going to get taken over by the mothership and reopened almost immediately. They may even be able to find some poor saps to mod them, at least for a couple weeks until they realize that’s a full-time job. But the smaller subs are what long-time and power users end up diffusing to and what keeps them engaged with the site over time, and those are likely going to be dead or zombies shortly. Any investor putting money into Reddit for any reason other than short-term trading or hoping to be at the front of the line to pick over the corpse in a few years has failed to do their due diligence.

          • DJDarren@beehaw.orgEnglish
            8·
            1 year ago

            I think the way I see it is that the vast majority of Reddit users have no idea that any of this is going on, and wouldn’t care if they did.

            So from Corporate’s perspective, all they have to do is deal with a few weeks of whining and teeth gnashing, before everything calms down again and they can get on with whoring Reddit out.

            Ultimately they’ll end up back in the black again, and making enough money from the IPO to not give the tiniest rats ass about any of this. They’ll sail off into the sunset on a fleet of expensive yachts, and never give Reddit another thought.

            • UpperBroccoli@feddit.deEnglish
              3·
              1 year ago

              The people who don’t notice are probably not the people bringing the content or moderating the subs though.

      • Stormyfemme@beehaw.orgEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        It’s all corpspeak. It means nothing except to lie and gaslight users into staying so he can cash out.

    • aedyr@beehaw.orgEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      Yeah I think it was too much to hope there would actually be good-faith engagement at this point. It was just more corporate messaging.