this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration

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### About Community Tracking and helping #redditmigration to Kbin and the Fediverse. Say hello to the decentralized and open future. To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/

founded 1 year ago
 

As with many other subreddits, /r/LegalAdviceUK (which had been dark since the start of the blackout) has been sent a thinly-veiled threat by Reddit.

So they've reopened in order to start moving the entire community of 810,000 subscribers to somewhere else.

As you can imagine there are a number of legal professionals who moderate that sub, and they really don't take kindly to being threatened. They sign off their reopening message with "Fuck /u/Spez and long live John Oliver." but for the real fun you might want to look up a very famous British legal case they reference, Arkell v Pressdram 1971.

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[–] Perry@kbin.social 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm absolutely baffled over how much of a clusterfuck Reddit and particularly Huffman personally has turned this into.

Why in the ever loving PR suicide by not shutting the fuck up, did Reddit think that starting a war against their own moderators would be a good idea? I'm wondering if I have ever seen a company handle a situation this badly before. This is utterly insane.

Huffman has somehow managed to take a mild inconvenience that would blow over in a few days and turned that into a major crisis and then turned that crisis into an existential threat to the future of the company.

[–] athos77@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I made this comment in another thread last week, but I think it still holds up:

I think what this entire debacle has revealed is how incredibly unfit Huffman is to be involved in running a major site, much less one with as much reach as reddit.

I've read most of his comments and it's all centered around "reddit can't afford to keep paying everyone's API fees while everyone else makes bank". Which is fair enough.

But it also reads like a CEO who simply hasn't been paying attention to much of anything and who woke up one morning to realize that they'd already handed away the company's most valuable assets by letting Google and ChatGPT and other LLM companies harvest everything they need to build their products while reddit happily and blithely pays the bills. And now that other companies are starting to look profitable by building off what reddit paid to give away, Hoffman is both massively jealous and panicking, desperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

Only instead of going through every company that uses the API, figuring out how much they use and what they use it for and how necessary that use is for reddit's business, it looks like he panicked and tried to charge everyone the same rate. He didn't do any research into the issue and realize that Google harvests massive amounts of data that it uses in it's search results and to improve and program it's products and makes massive amounts of money, vs small apps that run basic queries that massively improve the reddit experience and that don't make much money at all. He just wants to charge everyone the same amount and keeps demanding that small apps pay the same as Google, because he's pissed he wasn't paying enough attention to notice what was going on.

And he's scared shirtless because he's had an easy run of reddit CEO, and now people are asking questions about his lack of vision and he's afraid that no one will ever give him such an easy and lucrative job ever again. And $10 million in the bank plus whatever stock options he has may look like a lot of money to us peons, it really isn't among the people he wants to keep hanging around with.

The one thing he's doing half-smart is the spin game. That's what that AMA was about, not to engage with the community, but to put out a dozen or so pre-written quotes that reddit could point to in interviews and say "look, here, this is what's really going on, and we've tried."

In the end, I think Huffman's massive failings can be summarized in his comment that "[reddit will] continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive" - as if the arrival of profits is inevitable and no one needs to do anything to ensure their safe journey. Which seems to summarize his period as CEO: just coast along like normal and surely some profits will arrive - and then panic when the profits start arriving for companies with CEOs who do they job and attention to their business.

[–] 50gp@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

add in some jealously towards 3rd party apps providing better service, wasting time and money on failed reddit NFTs and avatars, general cost-cutting moves with post-pandemic layoffs and closing API (like nobody is going to waste even more of their bandwidth with other types of scraping) and you have spez the prepper techbro playing CEO

"[reddit will] continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive" - as if the arrival of profits is inevitable and no one needs to do anything to ensure their safe journey.

Is THAT how his comment is supposed to be interpreted? I'm an accountant, and I read it as "we're drowning, and we're going to go bankrupt without a new vertical!" If he said that as a sound bite for IPO news, he seriously miscalculated imo.