Some of the communities that closed down in response to the API changes explicitly shifted to Discord

Sigh

Legitimately one of the most annoying things out of all of this is how so many tech writers have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to explaining the feelings and behavior of reddit communities. Like they don't ever seem to interview anyone or ask direct questions to understand what is happening, they just take a cursory glance at comment threads and pinned posts, and assume they understand what's going on. I can't count how many articles I have read that get the facts about this whole situation right but still seem to completely misunderstand it.

They did not "shift" to Discord, they used already established Discord channels in lieu of the subreddit, until the subreddit came back.

Many subs already had parallel discord channels, but users don't use one or the other, they use both. Because Discord is a fundamentally different kind of platform. It's exactly the same way that many forums back in the day would also have chat rooms attached. Same community, using two different methods of online communication, at the same time, for different purposes. No one would ever have suggested IRC was equatable to a forum.

All that happened was when the subs closed, users congregated in the Discord to stay connected. It was never going to be a new permanent home. They were not seeking a new home, that's the critical part. I've seen very, very few people suggest Discord as a permanent replacement and if they are it gets shot down. They were simply waiting out the protest on Discord until they could go back to Reddit or, if an alternative showed up, go there. It was a bomb shelter.

One of the weirder phenomena of the low interest rate era in tech was a tendency to see companies primarily as investments. The goal was not to have a functional business, but an exit, often via IPO or acquisition. I have begun to wonder if that explains what Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has been up to lately.

I can't pretend to know what King Steven is thinking, but his proclamations have certainly driven me to the exit. Two months ago at this time I had no clue King Steven would banish me for preferring BaconReader over the app with his Royal Warrant.

I haven't been able to post a comment on The Verge since the redesign. Huh.

Anyways: All of spez's spedding can be explained easily enough: He is in IPO exit mode. He wants out of this business so he can go be a piece of shit.

He really thinks he can get the valuation on reddit. I'm here to tell him he's delusional. The window came and went with the interest rates. An adjusted value with a new S-1 is going to be a serious write down on the real value and that's when his days are numbered.

He basically upset 5% of the user base and even that small amount has done irreversible harm to reddit. Everyone knows he wants out. Everyone knows he's fudging MDAUs. Everyone knows reddit has never been profitable. Was it worth it, you tumbling duckweed?

Quickly searched the article, no mention of Lemmy.

Hope we'll get mentioned in a future article

He stands there, on top of a (reddit) building, screaming

"I'm Homelander. I Can Do Whatever I Want"

While um..."raining" down on those below him...

Great question. The answer is making Reddit less good.

Killing “the front page on the internet”.

Investing in the fediverse

Was that really why people didn't like Ellen Pao. I just didn't like the way she was suppressing non damaging information not banning hate subs. Getting rid of the IAMA liaison was a bad call.

[w/r/t API kerfuffle] In some ways, this makes sense: third-party apps let users skip ads, which hits Reddit’s bottom line. The pricing, however, seems steep. Why?

Well, the answer is AI. Basically, former Reddit board member Sam Altman, who departed in 2022, admitted his company, OpenAI, had trained on Reddit data. I find it difficult to believe that Huffman didn’t know OpenAI was training using Reddit’s data, particularly since Altman sat on Huffman’s board. Suddenly, Huffman is saying the API is very valuable, especially to buzzy AI companies that investors have lately had the hots for. This seems to position Reddit as being in the shovels business during the AI gold rush.

This is the guy that used to mod the "jailbait" sub right? Looks like a creep

Wanking. Def Wanking.

Reddit is going to become irrelevant shortly. How sad.

Fuck u/spez

Plot twist: Spez secretly invented Lemmy

Is spez wrong? The community is openly letting themselves get cucked. Look at how r/place has already given up on revolting and is instead working together to boost Reddit's IPO value. The closed subreddit protests gave up. Nobody is caring about moderators being replaced. People are still going about the site like normal. So is spez really wrong that this was going to pass because the users clearly don't care if they're getting fucked, just like how people somehow still hang on to Twitter.

More like Huff-paint-man. Yeah.