• Regna@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    … and they totally omitted Aaron Swartz as a founder.

    The actions of Reddit the last few years (and especially the last few months) have probably increasingly caused Aaron to spin in his grave so much that he could power Los Angeles and San Francisco both with his beyond-the-grave outrage if anyone cared to harness that energy source.

    Also a meh article, with spelling and grammatical errors (deliberate?) and omitting even simple details.

    • raz0rf0x@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not even mentioning Schwartz was a huge indicator that this is a bullshit paid-for story from Reddit/Spez. Absolutely NOBODY who would bring up the founding of Reddit without mentioning Schwartz unless they were paid not to. This is a hack piece from a paid shill.

      • Temple Square@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        NYT don’t do “paid” stories.

        However, the journalism is superficial (lazy) and seems to skim across the surface. This was written by someone who doesn’t understand the tech – so they interviewed someone pro (Spez) and someone con (the super mod) – did some ping pong with quotes and TADA! An article!

        • Konman72@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Reporter: To sum up, this expert representing the major Meteorological associations says it is currently raining. And this expert from the “Crack Pot Society” says it isn’t. I have a window right next to me and…both sides make good points so you’ll have to decide for yourself.

    • Evono@lemmy.world
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      thats actually a wrong rumour , he was appointed mod of r/jailbait unknowingly , didnt mod jailbait , and anything.

      he also wasnt it willingly. it was in a time when reddit was still young and allowed Moderator appointments.

      we shouldnt spread lies.

      • ImFresh3x@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Dude was a founder and admin of the site, allowed himself to be appointed, and allowed the sub to flourish. I think we’re grasping at straws here. But I get your sentiment about being honest.

      • Animoscity@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        While he was appointed without his knowledge, he/reddit left that sub available for years without doing a thing while it was reported all of the time. So still a shitbag.

      • ic33@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        We don’t know that either way.

        What we do know, for sure, is that he gave the moderator of /r/jailbait (and other NSFW reddits) a singular trophy, “pimp daddy” that no one else has been issued.

    • danc4498
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      1 year ago

      “Grow Up” says guy trying to make millions off other people’s content

  • tinwhiskers@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Reddit is now further away from a public offering than it was last year, Mr. Huffman said.

    Well, that slightly warms my heart.

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    1 year ago

    What a disgusting article. I wonder how much spez paid for it, or if the author (apparently a ‘longtime Redditor’) had his account threatened. That, or maybe he’s just so used to corporate bootlicking that his first response to seeing a distressed billionaire was to start lapping at his soles.

    Also, this puff piece reeks of arrogance. We fucking made that website what it was, and now this pathetic weasel thinks he no longer needs us? And there’s dumbasses on Reddit who defend this shit???

      • IAccidentallyCame@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Spez, or some other party involved in the financialization of Reddit and has an incentive to tilt opinion maybe. It’s all the kind of things that seem to happen.

        I have seen the kind of thing you’re talking about plenty of times of Reddit and twitter in the past. Where users are shitting on a company, then all of these weird apologetic comments start coming out of nowhere, that nowhere near that many normal people would be spouting in defense of a shit move by a shit company.

        The lack of negativity and divisiveness right away was noticable on here. The responses all looked much more respectful too.

      • Dark_Blade@lemmy.world
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        I wish I had your faith in humanity, but I do believe that a lot of these idiots genuinely believe that spez is fighting against the ‘evil powermods’ to ‘protect the rights of the users’.

    • justhach@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And there’s dumbasses on Reddit who defend this shit???

      You gotta remember that there are tons of casual users (which probably outnumber 3rd party app users, if we’re being honest) that haven’t ever known anything else, and they see all this noise as an interruption to their day-to-day scrolling.

      One of the subs I used to frequent most often (r/hockey) was full of users who were pissed that it was blacked out for the final game of the Stanley Cup playoffs, so there was no live thread for the last (and biggest, most important) game of the season, and thought anyone who supported the blackout was just being whiny.

      I’ve just accepted that Reddit’s base has shifted, its no longer what I remember it being, and I’m not a part of it.

      • Greenskye@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Estimates of TPA users were pretty low. Like 3%. That said the majoriy of the content and moderation also only comes from like 1-3% of users as well. So it was always a question of how much those two small groups overlapped. You can afford to lose a large chunk of casual users. If you lost 50% of your content posters and moderators, they’d be fucked. Stale front page would be the death knell for most casual users. They aren’t loyal. They’ll jump to TikTok or Instagram or wherever to get their meme fix.

    • Imhotep@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      or if the author (apparently a ‘longtime Redditor’) had his account threatened

      Why such an unbelievable theory?

    • HRDS_654@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I immediately heard alarm bells when I read the title. This dude really said 'users need to let Reddit grow up" in response to this dude’s disgusting behavior.

    • JeffCraig@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Reddit leadership clearly no longer aligns with what it’s core users want.

      That doesn’t mean there won’t be new users that like whatever changes come, but the shifts they are making go against the original purpose of the site. That means people looking for that core experience will eventually look elsewhere.

      We just need to let Reddit go. It was always going to go this way. Like all things run by corporations, it all goes to shit for the almighty profits.

      • Dark_Blade@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You’re right, sadly. Any for-profit social media venture will eventually turn into another Reddit, and the only way to deal with these issues is to come up with something that a corporation can’t just enshittify for the Almighty Dollar.

    • RestrictedAccount@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Spez has 2000 employees and nobody that can run a server.

      According to his comments, he paying for server time. If he is not lying (and lying would also be making material false statements ahead of an IPO - even rich people go to jail for stealing from rich people) he a spending $10 million per year for just the Apollo traffic. That means he is paying 100s of millions per year total.

      For that spend a decent CEO would bring that in house.

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It looks like they’re sending everything, including api calls through Fastly as an edge service with their actual boxes being hosted with Amazon services. It’d be more likely they’re paying 10m a year to host the whole site, depending on how much Fastly is charging them for traffic.

      • rtxn@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Let’s not pretend to believe that the price hike is meant solely to cover the actual costs. My opinion is that this is a veiled attempt to restrict who’s allowed to use the API by setting the price unreasonably high, where only large corporations, who profit from scraping reddit’s content, can afford it. Big Data and AI research in particular.

    • Anomander@kbin.social
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      Technically speaking, that data has some cost; just that Reddit’s actual cost to serve that data is far lower than what they’re trying to charge Third Parties.

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        It also has the opportinity cost of the viewer not getting first party ads or giving tracking data. Even with these things, though, it’s still nowhere near what they’re charging.

        Also, fuck ads and tracking data.

        • Zorque@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          They also had a revenue and/or profit sharing agreement with one of the bigger Android apps up until a little bit after Huffman took over as CEO. So it’s not like they couldn’t have had a slice of the pie anyways.

    • s38b35M5@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The day after moderators closed down hundreds of Reddit forums…

      Hundreds? I mean, I guess that’s true, if you say 88 hundreds… Almost 90 hundreds.

      I’m not even to the interview, and I’m already having trouble swallowing this article.

      Edit: I guess “Spez talks to NY Times” was hyperbole… There’s no interview, lol

    • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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      While New York times is far better than the New York Post. And the Washington Post is far better than Washington times. They are all for profit ventures owned by thieving wealthy capitalists. They’ve always pushed their own perception and agenda. Whether or not we ever realized it. And that agenda has never been about sustainability, fairness, or accuracy. It’s always been this way to one extent or another. It’s just that the consolidation of ownership etc as made the market much less competitive and accountable.

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        I don’t believe Washington Times is actually intended as a moneymaking endeavor. It’s a weird little mouthpiece funded by the Unification Church. As a DC region native, I’ve seen them give that rag away at every opportunity and sell it at cost – according to the Times itself, it lost a billion dollars over 33 years before turning a profit for the first time in 2015.

        https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/14/washington-times-reaches-profitability-after-33-ye/

        • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          whether or not it is intended to make money directly. they aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They’re making money back on it somehow even indirectly. And part of it is a brainwashing and placating a section of the populace to turn them against their own interests and fight against everyone else. That’s why there’s so much money in AstroTurfing for oligarchs. No one will agree with them out of principle unless there is enough principle to pay them adequately.

          • Tashlan@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            You’re misunderstanding. The Washington Times is a fire oligarchs throw money into by giving away for free and selling it at cost so they can spread far-right wing propaganda (and print Mallard Filmore strips.) It’s a much more extreme example of what you’re talking about.

    • Anomander@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Explicitly? No.

      Are they giving Spez softball questions and failing to challenge answers because otherwise he’d stop talking to them? Yeah, absolutely.

  • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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    The whole framing that Spez is bringing maturity is incredibly disingenuous. The “mature” approach is to impose change with no attempt at reaching consensus over a community-driven platform?

    What is the mature part of expecting volunteers to keep performing free work as they are actively antagonized? Is he going to pay all moderators and dissatisfied content creators? I don’t think so.

    They are just using “mature” as codeword for monetized. Or maybe in that classist sense of “learn to submit to your betters, peons”.

  • thecdc1995@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Well there’s the problem

    Reddit, which is based in San Francisco, has in recent years tried to turn from a rough-and-tumble internet message board into a full-fledged social media business by adding executives and strengthening its advertising capabilities.

    • IAccidentallyCame@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      The financial shit heads weasel their way into everything and fuck it up on us. This is what I like about this setup here, from the ground up it doesn’t seem like it can be bought our and IPO’d.

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          Yeah, I don’t want to see humanity keep on going like this. The profit incentive in some ways can increase the speed at which something develops, but it feels like we’re outgrowing it now that we have so many good communication/collaboration tools.

          The profit squeeze on everything feels like it does more harm than good.

        • MercuryUprising@lemmy.world
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          Because of greed. Not even just the founders, they could even be benevolent, but someone from the competition can just get greedy and attempt a buyout or try to cripple you by becoming bigger and constantly harassing your company. We have to bring back antitrust punishments and ban megamergers that have been running rampant.

        • Temple Square@lemmy.world
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          I know. Like why can’t “we have enough revenue to operate the business” be good enough?

          It’s either go big and go broke for these clowns.

      • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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        not wholesale. any one of them could spin up an instance and try to monetize it. But they would never be able to shut the rest down or stop them.

      • Manu@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        It’s OT but I‘ve sent you a message a few days ago. Can you take a look and tell me wether you received it or not? Thank you!

  • jerome@lemmy.world
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    oh fuck yoooooou… with that bullshit, using mature as a way to shame people. WE FUCKING MADE YOU.

    • pachrist@lemmy.world
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      No, no, you don’t understand. The people on Reddit don’t matter, and the content they create doesn’t matter. Reddit believes that the platform that serves the content is much more important than the creator or the content. The Soviet-block style building where Banksy creates his next critique of modern society is much more important than either the art or Banksy, obviously.

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    This week I realized that I’m reading these “about Reddit” stories more as a spectator than an involved party anymore. I’ve moved on. Feels good not to care enough to care.

    The nice thing about Reddit’s self-defeating move is we don’t have to do anything about it. It’s self-defeating.

    • pachrist@lemmy.world
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      Neither. He’s still gargling.

      Also, love spez’s constant deflection on mods, and here specifically super mods, being the source of the problem. Most of us have been on the internet for the majority of our lives. We know the difference between a butt hurt, power tripping mod, and a mod who’s concerned for the community they’ve been participating in for 10+ years.

  • HulkSmashBurgers@lemmy.world
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    Mr. Huffman and Alexis Ohanian founded Reddit in 2005 as a site with a countercultural attitude toward the internet and its advertising-based economy. Reddit espoused free speech at any cost, zero ads and an insular culture that laid a foundation for Web 2.0’s meme culture.

    Well how things have changed.

    • Dick Justice@lemmy.world
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      And framed it as just a few dozen moderators who protested. Nothing the user polls, etc. He notes that the users have “outsized power” over the site. Bitch, the users are the site.

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      People who have NYT accounts should post rebuttals adding all the shit they didnt

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        The mods/users need to write a counter-editorial and petition to get the NYT to publish it.

        • SoPunny@lemmy.world
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          And seriously in the comments. Lots of people read those, and they can be used to argue against viewpoints in the article, or raise questions that stick around in peoples mind. In election season spending a hour or two a week on a highly commented articles you can make a difference. Don’t see why it wouldn’t work with this kind of pr either.

  • VGarK@lemmy.world
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    Made an account on Lemmy 3h ago, best thing I’ve done to counter the need to constantly check Reddit :)

    • 1019throw@lemmy.world
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      I have both Lemmy and I kbin since the blackouts. I still check reddit on occasion for some major news or subs I visited, but it’s probably only 10% of what I used to.

      • JeffCraig@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Same.

        My goal is to make the full switch here eventually, but it takes time to find all the correct communities that can fully replace what is on Reddit.

        To be honest, Reddit was always one of those semi-addiction sites for me, where I would just go to waste time. I’d like to reduce that overall, so I’m going to focus more on contributing to specific communities.

    • Got_Bent@lemmy.world
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      Yeah, I don’t really understand what this all is, but after pressing through a few failed attempts to sign up and finding a compatible app, I figure if nothing else, it’ll give me something to read after next week.

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        The first steps were the hardest, I agree. Now I find it so odd that there are no ads at all😂

  • zeppo@lemmy.world
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    “Spez talks to the NY Times” sounds like a dream I woke up from and tried to shake off.