- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
lemmy.world IS NOT a general discussion area. find another community.
my bad…
-manitcor
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@manitcor Wtf!! What an asshole CEO
So far Spez’s legacy includes, in no particular order:
- Changing other peoples’ comments
- Starting a war with the 3rd party app devs who made reddit the easily accessible platform it is (browsing reddit on the toilet wasn’t nearly as common before the first apps came out, and all of the first ones were 3rd party)
- Being a moderator on the jailbait subreddit, a community for sharing sexually suggestive pictures of underage teenage girls
- Forcing new moderation teams on communities whose moderation he didn’t agree with
- Straight up lying about the 3rd party apps and their developers every step of the way
Way to go, Steve Huffman! You had a community of volunteers build your platform for you and now you’re taking it all away from them. I’m sure this won’t backfire.
I posted this previously elsewhere.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc’s founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
Never even heard about this. Why haven’t they been sued by the surviving family members or some pro-bono representative?
spez is also a doomsday prepper who dreams about living as some sort of lord in a post-apocalyptic feudal society
“Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
I have spent a lot of time with very rich people over the years for work and they will certainly bite it incredibly early in the apocalypse. If someone is born into wealth, they are almost always fundamentally inept in basic ways. The longer someone stays rich, the more inept and abstracted from the world they become. They are entirely ensconced in a bubble of their own making. Money opens so many doors and protects them from so many just basic consequences of living that they entirely forget that those obstacles exist.
They are also just constantly, constantly being glad-handed and yessir’ed into an excessive amount of confidence. They know it too, but they can’t really trust anyone so they just make friends with people who they know would steal the wallet off their corpse but happen to be nicer about it than the other ones who would also do it because they have nowhere else to turn. Other rich people aren’t trustworthy to them either because they are only either more or less rich, above or below them.
It’ll go down pretty much how it did in the last third of the movie Triangle of Sadness. They are building bunkers that their handlers and others will actually live in. Not to mention that anyone that knows they were a potential engineer, actively or passively, of the downfall of man will have someone to take it out on right in front of them.
Bill Murray would probably survive. Saw it in a movie.
I agree with most of this. Also my movie in my cue.
Eddit. God damned fat fingers
I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.
In a post-apocalyptic world? That skinny nerd (not to be meant as a slur, I myself am a nerd)?
Yeah I sorta doubt that. He’d need to 1) not be an asshat and 2) have a fair bit more physical size, strength and fighting ability
I wonder if this assclown realizes that his fortune will be worth fuck-all if society collapses, and with it goes his power.
" I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader." No steve, it’s 100% egotistical.
Spez looks and acts like a pussy that would be under someone boot 15 second after shit hits the fan. Boy is a walking fake confidence.
I think he’s overestimating his power and abilities. More likely scenario is the other survivors try to recreate that scene from Deliverance with him.
Of course he’s overestimating about himself, he’s a narcissist
He has mistaken having a lot of money for having leadership talent or any useful skill that would be valuable in a situation where infrastructure has completely collapsed and fiat currency is worthless. He is not physically strong, he doesn’t inspire people to follow him, he doesn’t know how to find and prepare food, how to source water, how to build shelter, how to make fire…
He knows nothing at all that would make him useful as anything beyond “that guy who digs graves” until he eventually dies from the physical exertion that his candy ass has never actually had to deal with.
Lmao does he even know how to chop firewood?
C’mon, he’s a ‘leader’, he can just have his
slavesfollowers do it
He strikes me as one of those clowns who buys a ton of bitcoin as their prep.
That’s going to be hilarious when the actual warlords stop by and kick in his door.
Pff, as if they’d risk getting banned from the
formerfront page of the internet! Cuz, ya know, that’ll still be super relevant in a post-apocalyptic scenario… 🙃
this guy is such a loser
I posted this previously elsewhere.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc’s founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
Is your comment threatening him? Why are you blackmailing him, man? How is he going to work together with you now that you’ve so aggressively threatened him?
Why is your comment so badly coded? I can’t help you optimize your comment, Google didn’t help me write mine.
Wow I didn’t know he ran r/jailbait. Gross.
He was forcefully added as a mod on the subreddit. Reddit used to have a system which allowed you to make someone mod without requiring them to accept.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/1477psa/comment/jnuy0xf/
When people add you as a mod, you can still leave. He never did. That subreddit in particular was known to have the blessing of the reddit admins to operate and eventually made ‘subreddit of the month’. Then a news org picked up that reddit was hosting this content and then they shut it down.
They were well aware of what was going on. Andrewsmith is right, there is some plausible deniability there, but with the everything else we know about Steve Huffman, I’m not so sure I can agree with his assessment that it was forced upon him.
Andrewsmith is right,
As he often is. That guy knows more about Reddit than Huffman does. Hope he moves to Lemmy.
He let Ghislain Maxwell mod a bunch of subs until she eventually went to jail. It was common knowledge that its was her account but no problem from the pedo reddit admins
It was never proven that the account was hers and it was literally just users automatically claiming that account was Ghislaine Maxwell because that account stopped posting around the same time she got arrested. Nothing bugs me more than that myth being parroted as if it was proven fact.
U/maxwellhill was a monster‽ Say it isn’t so…how could he have known…FUCK spez
While it’s certainly better than actively moderating a community…
Is being the admin of a website that actively hosts jailbait and required a massive media outrage to finally remove it that much better? I get free speech and all, but I mean, the subreddit straight up catalogued which pictures were “fap material” and encouraged people (including parents) to take candid photos of the children around them.
A community like that wouldn’t last a millisecond in a server I host.
It’s not like it was a small sub either, IIRC. I’m not going to google jailbait to find the stories, but it must’ve been a few hundred thousand subscribers I think. At a time when the big subs had a few mill at most.
Even though it was ethically very bad, it was legal. And Reddit had a policy of not removing content, unless it was illegal or doxxing.
The fact is that they wanted to follow the same principles as the government, and allow complete freedom of speech. And if you are following freedom of speech, the ethicality of content is irrelevant.
Reddit never approved of r/jailbait. They simply allowed it.
Ahhh, ty. It did seem even worse than expected for him to have been actively running that sub.
Forced promotion
He did not
Yea this will kill Reddit. Maybe not right away but soon.
I mean, look at what it’s taking to kill twitter and influencers are still all over it.
Because it’s actually not the same thing, “Twitter” = “influencers”. Without celebrities, Twitter simply dies. The same cannot be said about Reddit.
hi, just happened to see you in here lol
Being a moderator on the jailbait subreddit, a community for sharing sexually suggestive pictures of underage teenage girls
This one is a lie, he was added as a moderator by another mod, at a time when anyone could do so. Lets please stop spreading this.
Maybe he did not moderate it actively, but it was allowed to continue and even promoted by reddit until media got a whiff of it.
At the time, there was a lot of popular sentiment, on reddit itself, that the internet should be free and it should allowed to continue so long as it was legal.
No one is forcing you to apologize for pedophiles on reddit
He actually moderated jailbait? I always assumed he was the type of person to have an alt for it, but to actually use his real account? What a scumbag.
He was briefly added without his knowledge. He removed himself after he noticed.
WAIT. Spez was a mod on fucking r/jailbait??? WHAT???
Changing other peoples’ comments
Wait the guy changed someone’s comment?
Yeah he changed one comment saying: “Fuck u/spez” by replacing “spez” with one of the r/the_donald mods. This was also done silently so no * to indicate the comment had been edited.
Yes. I believe it was people on the donald subreddit, which could be seen as funny, because most sane people (myself included) don’t agree with them politically, but it’s still a huge misuse of admin powers and proof that he has no integrity. Can’t let other peoples’ rights be violated if we want to keep our own.
Yeah, he got busted for it and wrote a half asked apology claiming he would change. Claimed he was just trolling…
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez
Yes, its even listed on the Wiki page for reddit under 2016 controversies
Has it been removed? Seems to jump from him becoming CEO to the banning of loli?
Further down the page under “Other Controversies”
Further down the page under “Other Controversies”
Deleted my account, removed Apollo, starting to feel at home on Lemmy. No way I’m going back.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
They should tread lightly. Reddit in no way has the ability to function (edit: at least on short notice) without volunteer mods. To some degree they can find scabs, but I honestly don’t know how many and how good.
i love that they’re making this extreme choice over fucking advice animals which haven’t been relevant in literally 10+years
Is it just me or is this going directly against what Reddit once aimed to be?
Corporations and Shareholders ruin everything
I’ll watch spez digg this grave. I’m not shocked, we have all seen it happen before.
This place feels real, and personally that’s all that matters. Reddit has been plastic for a while now. I’m happy to watch the ceo handle it like such a stooge, it almost seems like he wants to tank the company before tencent eats it all up.
Saw this coming the moment the blackouts were being planned
We can only hope reddit dissappoints their moderators so much they’d rather moderate lemmy communities :)
Honestly not too surprising. But good luck moderating the bigger subs without the old volunteers.
It’s an absolute non-starter. The amount of random… I’m a medium fish there and there’s SO MUCH you have to know to mod a sub, plus you’re constantly in PR mode with the users to keep everyone happy and enjoying your work. Communication skills. Bot wrangling and sometimes creation. Automod. Css. Rule modifications. Enforcement and reviewing existing threads for rule violations. PLUS you have to know the existing culture or you’re gonna make everyone mad.
I kinda want to see it. Reddit would explode.
Good summarization. And I am sure it WILL explode if they dont start paying serious mods serious money for something that was done FOR FREE by the community before. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
It’s ironic, too, because their entire refrain is “we’re broke”. Well then. Now you lost most of your big subs and a ton of users AND you’re broke. Guess at least we fixed the bandwidth problem.
Meanwhile it was all over ChatGPT training on their API. You’d think that woulda been step 1 to fix.
Maybe I’m missing something but is there a reason they couldn’t have started addressing all of this with a terms of service agreement for the API? They demonstrated they can make exceptions for some accessibility apps, so if AI is the issue, then why not focus on that? If they wanted to force ads on apps, they can make that happen as part of the agreement too. As much as people wouldn’t like it, this would still be a better posture than now.
The current situation appears so poorly though out to me, but I’m just a guy.
I agree requring third party apps to contain their ads would have been a WAY better move. It’s funny to me though that Reddit claims to be unprofitable but pulls in $456 million and some change per year. Greedy fuckers
How fucking stupid do they have to be to complain about 3PA not paying their way (BS anyway - the net gain of users using Apollo etc is a win for Reddit) when REDDIT are the ones not serving them up? Then they frame it in a way that sounds like Apollo are taking advantage of them.
Why not include ads in the API responses, tagged as ads, and let the app developers implement a way of showing them. If an individual User pays for Reddit Premium - ads aren’t sent in the API responses.
My leading statement wasn’t a question. Reddit and spez aren’t stupid - they think we are. Fuck them.
Reddit even already treats ads as a post type (hence the karma and comments on ads). All they had to do was say “you must show our ads” and if they caught a major app filtering out ads, block their API keys.
I don’t even think paying an API licensing key is that unreasonable. In fact it’s quite common. But the price they’re asking is completely absurd and doesn’t scale appropriately. They also didn’t give app developers time to assess and discuss the pricing before implementation started.
There were SO MANY ways to handle this better, that would have been more profitable for them, and would have left people feeling more good about that things were being handled in a reasonable way. This decision making process screams of hubris. I’ve said it a couple of places, but it gives the impression that Reddit fundamentally doesn’t understand reddit. Reddit’s greatest value is ease of community creation and curation. Many of the decisions they’ve made since rolling out New Reddit have stood to restrict and inhibit this core interaction.
I genuinely wonder how Spez et al view reddit. What do they think the point is? What do they think people are there for?
I was the ultimate freeloader/user. I used reddit nearly everyday for 13 years, never once bought premium or any reddit gold or any sort of rewards and blocked every ad.
They definately could have forced me to pay a subscription or something somehow without just completely shuting down how I browse the site.
It’s so utterly bizarre and stupid.
It’s just corporate accounting. They’re profitable but they essentially cook the books to get the tax benefits of being “unprofitable”. This is why amazon is still occasionally “unprofitable” even though they’re growing year over year. You can’t just keep taking out loans to buy and build new warehouses if you’re actually unprofitable.
Huffman is just a greedy piece of shit. He, himself, made a comment when talking about Apollo that implied this developer is sitting on millions and he deserves a cut of it. API calls in terms of cost to the company cost fractions of a penny and plenty of large companies make money off their API. They could charge the base cost and add 10% for the profit. The problem is a realistic and reasonable cost for reddit’s API would probably cost the apollo dev maybe a few grand a year. Like I said above, Huffman thinks there’s a lot more money to wrangle out of developers there, but I’d bet the apollo dev was barely making a fraction of a percent on Huffman’s net worth.
Right? I’d have talked to OpenAi and told them the situation. OpenAI can probably afford ANY api fee by now so that would’ve been the most logical first step.
Well whatever, reddit needs me more than I need reddit so I’ll stay here for now. I like it here :)
I’ll like it better here when I can set up all my retro gaming communities again, but yeah. Same as when the twitter thing happened and we went to mastodon. Community is much better for being smaller, and full of the kind of people who seek something like this out.
Be the change you want to see and set it up!
It’s definitely gonna happen. I might end up just setting up a server first and doing it that way, it feels like the easiest way to go about things.
I was invited to become a mod on r/daystrominstitute a few years ago and within about a month realized that I didn’t have the time or emotional capital to invest in that job. It’s challenging, especially in a sub like that where there are pretty serious rules governing discussion and it burned me out really fast. The people who do it (well) have a passion for it; plucking some rando to be a head mod is going to kill a sub.
the thing is – none of that needs to exist! this is why reddit started to get so shitty, no one can keep it all straight; it’s simply too much considering how meaningless all the stakes are. i as a user never asked for constant review of threads for rule violations nor gave a shit about css or anything.
TBF a lot of the backlash against the protest on reddit also boils down to “it doesn’t matter to me, so it’s not needed”. Fact is if moderation is done right you don’t notice it. I add new t-shirt bot spam sites to auto-mod the second I come across them, for example, so they only ever get posted once.
Reddit has had css since before the Digg migration.
This is like how some companies view their IT teams:
- Everything’s working, why do we pay you?
- Stuff’s broken, why do we pay you?
The “backlash” is from the users who want no moderation so they can say whatever shit they want with no repercussions, and those are the ones who will be the most active once the mods leave and the decent people after when the assholes chase them off. Not a good way to attract advertisers.
as a user never asked for constant review of threads for rule violations
You might not, but us very satisfied users of the shining beacon of magnificience in reddit’s cesspool, /r/AskHistorians, did and that was (is?) a model of the contribution to civilisation and human knowledge can be made in a well regulated space on the internet. But those very erudite and busy professionals and scientists moderating there will in all likelyhood throw in the towel and I am afraid anything that comes in its place in another medium would stuggle to reach the same level.
If you want to see what a forum site looks like without any of that stuff, look at 8kun/8chan. I don’t think you realize how unusably terrible reddit would be without mods.
Looks like reddit is about to hire 1000 unpaid interns
Interns using chatgpt, we’re gonna see such a firehose of shit
Imagine the seo blogspam grade comment threads it will turn into
Wait…the comment seems to indicate that the primary mod did not want to go dark, and an inactive mod came in and made it go dark. I understand being upset…but this does not seem like anything a Reddit admin would do?
It isn’t surprising at all, it’s about hard money not about communities and fuzzy warm feelings. It seems everyone is working hard down at Reddit to make as much money as they can out of an IPO for a zombified carcass.
It was a matter of time before the admins started doing this. Fuck Spez, you piece of shit
This is why they need to link an alternative like Lemmy and encourage to share it around.
Reddit doesn’t disallow mods from posting “Join us on Discord” and this will create a slow and steady move to a new platform.
I’ve been posting about lemmy in r/modtools and a couple of the niche subreddits I follow that didn’t shut down. I’ll be sticking with lemmy no matter what happens over at reddit, the people in charge over there have shown utter contempt for the users and moderators.
I was skeptical at first. Decided to give it a shot and, while obviously not perfect, I like it a lot so far.
I think my biggest issue before is actually a feature rather than a bug. I used to think, “federation is too confusing for the average person, it’ll never take off”.
But considering how hostile the average comment is on Reddit, keeping the “average” user away might be the best thing about Lemmy.
While the idea sounds great in the short-term, sites like this need a huge community to actually become useful. It’s cool as a little nod back to the old style of internet communities, but without a large following it’s too easy for stuff like this to just fade away. Losing a single server like lemmy.world wouldn’t shut down the entire system now, but imagine what would happen to the average user if their endpoint for news/media just disappeared and they were forced to make a new account and find all of their old communities again.
It’s still neat, and I intend to give it as fair of a shot as I can, but we’re ultimately going to “need” an influx of non-contributing-cat-picture-lurkers to push a few of the top servers up to the levels of involvement needed to support a persistent community.
The idea behind this place is pretty cool but I’m with you. Neither this place, nor are the users, ready for migration “today” to flip from Reddit to this experience.
It actually takes effort to understand what to do here. I deal with idiots at work all day, the first hint of effort or difficulty with anything, especially entertainment, people will walk.
It’s like how the internet was great when it was mostly nerds. Sure, there are plenty of asshole nerds, but I’ll take a smart asshole over a dumb one - especially since a lot more of them are dumb than not.
Sadly, many people I have recommended it to have acted like it was the most difficult thing in the world to understand. The initial learning curve really wasn’t that bad, IMO but it seems like a lot of people want to be spoon fed.
It doesn’t matter that it’s not that bad, just that it’s harder than staying on reddit.
It may or may not take off to the point of replacing reddit, but I think the exodus if people now and especially after the end of the month will lead to it having at least the same amount of users as Mastodon. Maybe more, since the average reddit user is probably more tech-savvy and more willing to migrate to a different platform than the average Twitter user (since they follow subreddits rather than individual users). And a roughly Mastodon sized lemmy is more than usable to replace reddit imo
Do you know what the user population of mastadon was before and after Elon’s takeover?
Do you know what the user population of mastadon was before and after Elon’s takeover?
Before Elon, it was about half an million, now it’s about 4.5 million, though about a million of the new users made an account and then immediately went back to Twitter, so it’s more like 3.5 million
Still, nothing to sneeze at. Glad reddit is going through the same thing right now. If peertube or whatever other YouTube fedi analogue takes off I think we could see federation of social media take off and really become its own bubble.
I’ve been considering recommending this to a few friends, but I’m worried about a response like this. I definitely recognize there’s a learning curve, and I’m still picking up a lot just a few days in, but man it took me maybe 15 -20 minutes max to figure out enough to sign up to an instance, find some communities, and post (I think all those words are right…).
