“Protest and dissent is important,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told the AP. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything.”
I’m presuming when he says “we” he means the royal “we”, ie “I”. I’m not expecting him to negotiate on it. The next CEO will, though, in a couple of months.
“Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we.’”
- Mark Twain
Yeah, so which is spez again?
The tapeworm
While that quote has been attributed to Twain (and several others) over the years, there is nothing to suggest that Twain used this particular phrasing nor was he the originator of it. That credit goes to George H Derby, under the pseudonym John Phoenix, back in 1855.
The trifecta of “kings, editors and people with tapeworm” has been widely attributed to Mark Twain, but like so many witticisms credited to him, there’s no record he ever said it. It’s also unlikely that Henry David Thoreau ever made the remark once ascribed to him: “We is used by royalty, editors, pregnant women and people who eat worms.”
Worms, or more specifically tapeworms, figure prominently in we-related humor. The earliest known joke to combine parasites and pronouns comes from George Horatio Derby, a humorist from California who assumed the pen name John Phoenix. “I do not think I have a tapeworm,” he wrote in 1855, “therefore I have no claim whatever to call myself ‘we,’ and I shall by no means fall into that editorial absurdity.”
What is wrong with this guy? He has cause irreparable damage to the brand and the platform.
For someone who said it’s the app developers who aren’t willing to work with reddit to reach an agreement, it sure sounds like he was (surprise surprise) lying.
Reddit - We want to work with you, but it’s 100% our terms non negotiable.
Also Reddit - they don’t want to work with us on finding a solution
As Louis Rossmann quite rightly points out, nobody has ever gone to war with the internet and won.
This guy is a founder of Reddit right? One seriously has to wonder what the hell happened. The damage control by Reddit so far has been nothing short of shambolic and in large part because of their treatment of its users.
I mean, it’s like he’s never browsed Reddit before.
Yeah he is one of the founders, but Huffman was always in it more for the profit. Aaron Swartz was the one with the vision, he was an activist and believed in free information. Sadly Swartz committed suicide after being arrested for sharing academic journals from a secured computer at MIT. Federal prosecution decided to make an example of him for multiple felonies.
and silo’d academia has only gotten 100x worse since then. i can’t even imagine how much progress has been lost thanks to greedy academic “journals” keeping anyone from reading their papers, stopping widespread peer review, and destroying scientists’ ability to assemble wide bodies of evidence
Wasnt swartz only there for a brief time after a merger and only really on the masthead. It was mostly Huffman and Alexis that started it in their college dorm. Alexis was def more the vision/community guy and Steve more the coder iirc.
I’d argue that all three of them would still be considered the co-founders considering how early Swartz was brought into the picture. Of the three though he for sure had the smallest impact on what reddit became after its first corporate buyout.
A small correction: Swartz didn’t share the journal articles. There’s reasonable doubt on whether he was ever planning on sharing them or not, but he was arrested for the downloading of the articles not the sharing.
This guy is a real piece of work. I don’t know why anyone would continue using Reddit at this point.
Yeah i left on the 12th and haven’t been back. I’ve only automatically opened Apollo two or three times lol
“Now if you’ll excuse me, my ship and I have an appointment to keep at the bottom of the ocean.”
I don’t even give a shit about the future of reddit or going back anymore. reddit is dead to me. what I am wishing to see, though, is spez being ousted as ceo and looking even more like a dumb bitch. that will be hilarious news
I don’t even give a shit about the future of reddit or going back anymore.
I’m with you there. For me, the important thing is that you can have great communities online if you keep the noise down. If he wants to take his game home let him, we can play somewhere else. I just hope all the scientists make it, especially Andromeda. So many great discussions, I hope it can continue as we continue to navigate our way out of the mess that is the 2020s.
The pigheaded doubling- and tripling-down on this is impressive in a way. Let’s see in a couple of months how many actual content creators left reddit and came here or somewhere else. I do hope spez is left with an empty site full of lurkers and bots, after all people who actually provided content for free for years leave him in the dust…
Then again, I’m not going back there anyway, so to be completely honest I don’t care that much - the fediverse is my new home (even though I’m repulsed by the name).
the fediverse is my new home (even though I’m repulsed by the name).
The name doesn’t bother me as much as not reeealy understanding how it all works together. Like, I know kbin and lemmy are different things, so I’m not sure why kbin is all full of Lemmy content.
I’ll have to wait for it to solidify in my brain a little bit more.
I can’t go back; they banned my account, after 12 years, and a few hundred thousand karma. I like to think that, in some small way, I helped make reddit a better place than it had been. And now I couldn’t contribute, even if I wanted to.
But really, why would I want to? The point of contributing to a community is to make it better for everyone. Huffman/spez has made it clear that these contributions are not valued, even though they’re the currency that allows them to make money by selling advertisements.
Same. A few years back when there was a big shift to make reddit Social Media™ (which it is not) because that’s what gets money from investors they started clamping down on anything non-circlejerky because they were trying to grow subs and promote it as the Happiest Place On The Intarwebs.
Yep. Because them forcing/strong-arming subs to reopen definitely speaks to the Reddit admins believing this is not changing anything.
Even if a vast majority of people don’t protest because they’re simply lurkers, the problem is it’s the power users, the ones who generate quality content and moderate their subs for free who are protesting.
If I were Reddit, that’s the bit I’d be worried about.
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I agree. I’ve left reddit and ended up here in the fediverse, i wouldn’t use official app and hate adverts.
My wife, who’s a regular lurker and occasional poster, uses official app and didn’t even know any protest was happening as it didn’t disturb her little corner. She and those groups will just carry on.
Plenty of us are done and out. But enough will stay for it to ‘blow over’ as well, as u say
Until all of us slowly put the pieces together, get content going, and then you tell your wife hey this is actually really good now you should check it out, and then she too leaves in a year or two or three or whatever.
I wish people would cut down with this noise(see what I did there). F him and his platform, coming here and having to read about him everyday, it kinda annoys me.
It was like this for a few months on Mastodon when Twitter did the same. At least spez doesn’t have any kind of celebrity status: I was able to go out with some friends last night and not a single person raised this topic. (A couple of them know what Reddit is, but none of them really use it much. And I’m sure no one in the group other than me knows who its CEO is.)
I just hope we have a good network of people here after this story fizzles out of the news. I’d be happy with kbin never becoming as popular as Reddit, so long as there’s a healthy bunch of curious people sharing and discussing interesting links.
I think reddit is more replaceable than Twitter. It seems the stickiness of Twitter has to do with the specific individuals on there. People don’t want to leave not because they get news about famous people, but because the actual famous people are on there. And the famous people don’t get the same status recognition on other platforms, so they want to stay their too. I can get my news from anywhere, and reddit was just the best tool to facilitate that. Lots of communities used Reddit, but you can build that community other places too, reddit was just a really suitable place to do so.
Let’s be real, fedi’s favourite subject of discussion is itself, and its second favourite subject of discussion is how bad all the sites fedi is supposed to be a replacement for are.
I’m hoping that dies down soon, one of the signs a site is doing well for users is that it stops with the navel-gazing shit.
If people posted their own OC instead of reddit threads this place would be dope.
