Tech companies aren’t just businesses, they’re investments.
  • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
    1429·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • HeartyBeast@kbin.social
      561·
      1 year ago

      “They didn’t shift to Discord, they just moved temporarily to discord. How can writers get it so wrong”

      Lots of mods posted a note saying “see you on Discord” when they shut down. This is not exactly an egregious error.

      • Anomander@kbin.social
        8·
        1 year ago

        Yeah. Rather a decent number of communities have actually moved to Discord, or are trying to, including a decent sampling of larger communities like MFA.

        There’s been some kind of wonky takes in Fediverse about some of those moves that seem to reject the validity of migrations that aren’t coming to our spaces. Mods will post “going to Discord, fuck this place” and they’re like “it’s temporary, Discord isn’t a forum”.

    • proton_lynx@lemmy.world
      31·
      1 year ago

      I really hope they don’t replace Reddit with Discord, it’s a closed-source software with data not being indexable by a search engine. Even if they did find a solution to index all that data into a search engine, it would be awful to have to install a software to actually see/interact with it.

      • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
        23·
        1 year ago

        Well the good news is if you actually go to the Discords who attempted to move over from subreddits, they’re all unnavigable messes with zero way to actually find new information or posts, so the whole thing has been a failure. Why people thought a cringy closed source gamer chat platform was a good replacement is beyond me. They were wrong and the results show this. Discord is not for that use case and is not remotely a Reddit replacement.

    • InvaderDJ@lemmy.world
      18·
      1 year ago

      Didn’t /r/malefashionadvice explicitly close the subreddit and recommend everyone go to their Discord? I can’t check it now since I’m at work, but if I remember right, it is still closed with the mods saying they expect to be removed at any point.

      • takeda@kbin.social
        4·
        1 year ago

        You sure it wasn’t “let’s go to discord to get updates where we will move”? Discord won’t work well unless it’s a very small community.

        Edit: I just joined and they created many smaller channels, I guess that helps them scale to larger number of users. So yeah I was wrong, but I still insist for majority of subreddits discord isn’t a matching platform and more like a compliment, when you want to talk live with somebody.

        • InvaderDJ@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 year ago

          I’m pretty unfamilar with Discord, was after my time. But for the little I do know, I think you’re probably right. MFA might be a different kind of community where smaller more real time chats like Discord can work, but for the majority it doesn’t seem like it would be a good forum/reddit replacement.

          It’s certainly not for me at any rate.

        • JBloodthorn@kbin.social
          2·
          1 year ago

          Discord is great to hang out in large or small groups, but it is nearly useless for sharing information beyond a few pinned comments per channel. Their search is extremely “fuzzy”. Searching for anything and what you want is likely to be buried in results containing common words that look kinda sorta similar to the word you searched.

        • InvaderDJ@lemmy.world
          3·
          1 year ago

          And ironically enough I just saw a story where Reddit followed through on its threats to remove the mods. So they removed them all and the sub is back open, but locked so no one can post.

    • NounsAndWords@lemmy.world
      8·
      1 year ago

      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.

      Being a staff writer with deadlines will do that to you.

  • dhork@lemmy.world
    511·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • kingthrillgore@kbin.social
    47·
    1 year ago

    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?

    • dhork@lemmy.world
      15·
      1 year ago

      It’s probably not even 5%, but it was a part of the site that felt so strongly about their engagement that they preferred specific apps to use for that engagement. And we are seeing that evicting that small percentage had an huge effect on the quality of the place, providing the content that kept the rest engaged.

      I know people who are casual Reddit users and don’t care at all about the API access. But they can see that Reddit has jumped the shark. Content is far less interesting to them, so they are spending less time there.

      • jivandabeast@lemmy.browntown.dev
        21·
        1 year ago

        Also 5% of a userbase in the hundreds of millions is NOT a small number. And it’s not JUST them who are upset its their peers on the platform who would look at that and say “hmm that IS bullshit”

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
      12·
      1 year ago

      The horrifying thought of this whole ordeal is that, no matter how well or how poorly Reddit’s IPO goes, Spez still walks away from this thing as a millionaire. Golden parachutes and all.

      • Windex007@lemmy.world
        18·
        1 year ago

        I think it’s unlikely that the IPO will happen any time soon. Nobody wants to IPO while public sentiment is bad.

        I think it’s possible Huffman will get booted before the IPO. I also think a lot of his bonuses are contingent on the IPO.

        Like, he’s going to make bank no matter what… But if it’s any consolation, he’s probably going to fuck himself out of a significant amount of the potential total.

        • Eccitaze@yiffit.net
          6·
          1 year ago

          I honestly don’t think that he’s going to be forced out. To be blunt, the people who could force him out are likely the people who pushed for these changes in the first place. They wanted 3rd party apps to die so they could minimize costs caused by API usage, and force more users to the official app so they could put more eyeballs in front of ads while scraping more PII from users to sell. That mission has been fully accomplished. Literally all of the fallout–the protests, the decrease in content moderation due to less mods/worse mod tools, the decrease in content quality from power users leaving, the flood of “fuck /u/spez” on every comment thread, the stream of negative articles on the tech press, all of it–were literally not accounted for because they were considered to be externalities. Just as a chemical company doesn’t consider the effects of dumping waste into a nearby river, Reddit didn’t consider the effects of alienating the majority of the userbase that were responsible for making reddit what it was.

  • Blaze@sh.itjust.works
    34·
    1 year ago

    Quickly searched the article, no mention of Lemmy.

    Hope we’ll get mentioned in a future article

  • Blademax@lemmy.one
    28·
    1 year ago

    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…

  • DrPop@lemmy.one
    15·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
      35·
      1 year ago

      It’s called a glass cliff. The board wanted to do a bunch of really unpopular things, so they chose her to implement those changes and take the heat from the user base with her. Companies do it all the time, almost always it’s a woman, so “you just hate her because she is a woman” can be used as deflect. That’s why it’s called that, it looks like a woman breaking through the glass ceiling but it’s just a bunch of old white males pushing her off a glass cliff.

    • empireOfLove@lemmy.one
      15·
      1 year ago

      Ellen Pao was a fall guy. Reddit’s real management, including Huffman, needed to do some janky shit and wanted someone to absorb all the user hate who could then be gotten rid of.

    • Revan343@lemmy.ca
      4·
      1 year ago

      Getting rid of the IAMA liaison was a bad call.

      That really was the canary in the coal mine that Reddit was all downhill from there on out

  • yip-bonk@kbin.social
    141·
    1 year ago

    [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.

    • TeoTwawki@lemmy.world
      231·
      1 year ago

      Friendly reminder that only reason 3rd party apps didn’t have reddits ads was that reddot never modofoed the api to push them, and cancelled the agreememt with the one app that was sending reddit add money…