Reddit

while this article sheds light from another angle on the investablility of reddit as a commercial property, it still misses the mark regarding the real issues that spez has caused while making the mods appear as somewhat entitled thugs rather than the expired laborers that they are. in any case, spez is made to look incompetent nonetheless.

i think the clock is ticking for either spez to walk things back, renegotiate API terms, or simply resign. I believe the latter will be the well-earned end result.

I think every article is missing a key issue and no one has asked Spez yet..

If 3rd Party Apps and AI services are making millions (as he asserts) why isn't Reddit competing in those areas?

3rd Party Apps aren't in a war of new features, putting a 5-10 person development team together to analyse the competitor apps and match the features would kill off the unique selling point of the 3rd Party Apps. Why hasn't Reddit done this?

LLM aren't new, the first appeared in 2018. Why hasn't Reddit assembled a team to exploit their own data? In my experience 1 data scientist backed by 2 software engineers can do a lot. It isn't a huge amount of people needed.

Even if you buy his argument that they companies are profiting from Reddit, Reddit is a platform those companies are building value from. Reddit isn't providing those services and so those companies profits aren't "stolen" from Reddit.

It's like company who sells art supplies. They sell them to a painter for £100, then a painter sells their artwork for £1000. The art supply company then gets upset it didn't get £1000 for its supplies.

I wish they actually did a bit of research on why people are protesting. Saying the third party apps simply "keep communities vibrant" completely misses some major points. Personally, I'm more furious how spez handled the AMA. He showed that the reddit staff has no interest in listening to anything that concerns the community. We're all just an obstacle between them and their deserved money.

This article from TechCrunch had a line that really confirmed some suspicions I'd had about this:

[Spez] told the publication that he was the person inside the company who was responsible for this policy change that affect these apps.

If you thought Reddit's absolute refusal to do anything in light of all the bad press was borderline sociopathic, there you go. Spez is taking all of this personally.

Great article, thanks for sharing. It’s nice to see news outlets accurately capturing then situation.

They make a good point about the free labour, the disconnect is huge. They want reddit to go public so they can make millions of dollars off the backs of indentured servitude. So when do the nods cut their cut? No way is reddit going to hire moderators for the 7000+ subreddits that went dark, so the salting the earth well and truly.

There's a certain schadenfreude in seeing the outcome of spez's misguided choices. I'm still very sad about Reddit. For me, RIF was Reddit.