this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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I personally don't think the protests are working. But they are getting reddit admins to show they have no interest in the communities on reddit and as a result, are helping push everyone to wonderful new communities that don't generate revenue for the owners of reddit. So I just may be misunderstanding the goal of the protest, but it's definitely doing something!
How do you define "working"? I think it was pretty obvious from the beginning they were never going to change their minds
However they accomplished
The IPO is fucked regardless of what reddit does next, they are in a lose lose situation. Anyone who thought they would turn around and change their mind is delusional and doesn't understand how maniacal CEOs work
What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that there is no turning back. There is no reason for them to keep ANY mod that participated in the blackout or said anything negative about the API decision even if they reopen and try to appease them now. Might as well mutually self destruct
Right, I think this is what people are misunderstanding. Reddit was never going to change their minds. I was hoping that maybe the API prices were negotiable, or maybe they were going high to start with then going lower later to make them look like the nice guy. But in no way were Reddit just going to say "oopsie, our bad" and go back to how it was.
So why protest, then? Well, exactly what you said: if Spez is going to ruin the site, lets help him do it. Let's create an absolute dumpster fire, let's demonize him in the press, let's spoil the IPO, let's make "fediverse" a household term.
If that is the point of the protest, it's worked with flying colors. Spez is losing his mind, entire mod teams aren't just getting kicked out they're getting out right deleted. More bad press, more people jump ship, fediverse exploding with activity, new Lemmy servers spinning up left and right.
It took Digg about 2 years to shed its users and it'll probably take Reddit longer than that because I think Reddit has become more entrenched than Digg ever was, but I think it'll happen. Twitter is a shell of what it was before Elon, and Reddit will become just as big of a joke. From cultural phenomenon to laughing stock in 2 weeks, because of one guys ego. Same as it ever was.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
In fairness, the IPO was probably knackered already. One of Reddit's main investors, Fidelity Inc. dropped their valuation of Reddit shares by almost half some months ago, and I can't imagine that would do particularly good things to any IPO efforts that Reddit might have been trying to pull. Were I an investor, I'd probably steer away from Reddit if their valuation suddenly plummeted by that much.
Never mind the whole API changes lately, which both puts the users into an uproar, and makes a mess of things that could cause advertisers to pull out, dropping their revenue even further, and the AMA/Interviews with the CEO don't only show the CEO to be a liar, but have him admit that Reddit is unable to make its own first-party app profitable, unlike third-party apps that let users access the site, which smells like mismanagement. I'd have a lot of questions, and none of them are good.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the recent changes were an effort to try and salvage their stock price, by pushing AI, and bumping up their revenue by making AI companies pay to use the API to integrate their models with Reddit, and/or as a way to pump and dump Reddit, so that they can get out before the money runs dry.
That being said, this whole debacle is making Reddit stocks tastier for risk-tolerant investors; The more the valuation plummets now, the more potential it has to bounce back.
Most likely long-term outcome of this whole thing IMO: The valuation continues to go down for the next several months as the fallout from this API decision and subsequent protests drives away more users and advertisers and generates more bad press. Eventually the internet forgets about it (minus the "power users" who have already migrated elsewhere), and Reddit will wait until well after that for their IPO. Whether before or after the IPO, u/Spez will be replaced as CEO. While that likely won't change much, it'll be a symbolic move to say "we listened to the users/investors." After which, valuation will quickly recover to pre-debacle levels.
Only question from there is whether the loss of the "power users" was enough to send the site on a permanent downward trajectory. My guess is probably not; plenty of people left to fill that void. Reddit will continue on, as a slightly shitier, more investor-friendly site.
I honestly got the impression that the u/Spez AMA was intentionally shitty, as an attempt to scapegoat him. I cannot fathom how a multi billion dollar company could allow that to happen unintentionally. It was comically bad. They're just waiting until after the API change goes live to actually can him, so they don't have to change the decision.
Yeah. I don't intend to go back there, but I still think the garbage fire is important. Mainly because it makes it impossible to be a bystander. Before the blackout, there was a some amount of naysayers. Now, those people don't get as much value out of Reddit, so they will be more inclined to cut their losses and leave the site.
Well, no, there is a way to turn back. The shareholders can fire spez and replace him with someone community-friendly. A lot of goodwill has been burned, but that would put out the fire pretty quickly, at least.
Except that it wouldn’t fix the fact that a lot of 3rd party developers are done. Even if Reddit sacked Huffman and rolled back the API changes, the odds of Apollo, RiF, Sync, etc. developers coming back is basically zero after all of this.
And now that they’ve shown their hand with the mods, the odds of getting their good mods back are slim-to-none as well.
If they brought on a new CEO who kept removing mods forcefully and telling blind people to get fucked I don't think that goodwill would last very long. They would have to give up something to get on everyone's good side.
I'm there until the 30th when rif dies mainly posting in defence of mods and offering alternatives.
I mean, yeah, they could.
They won’t. But they could.
Realistically, the damage is done, so it doesn’t matter. The people who have left aren’t coming back. The people who haven’t left, don’t care.
It also achieved bleeding users into other services like Lemmy and kbin, which wouldn't have happen if literal idiots weren't running Reddit.
A better way of phrasing it would be that reddit is saying the protest isn't having much of an effect. Which is clearly not the case. Or that the protest is working in the sense that it's dramatically disrupting reddit. The stated goals of getting them to change their policies seems unlikely to come to fruition though.
If the protests weren't working at all, reddit's admins wouldn't care and wouldn't be reacting to those protests. That they're taking such heavy handed actions to change things would suggest that the protests are working.
That doesn't mean they'll succeed in the end. I don't know. But they're certainly working to some degree.
I suspect the ones who will leave have already left. Most of the “content” repost bots or bots posting from other places (TikTok, news sites,)
(cont'd) will die with the API change
I noticed it seemed that unitedkingdom was mainly bots or the paid troll farms e.g. for the American evangelical movement etc. pushing anti lgbt, anit abortion..... Or at least that or all the pro choice, pro lgbt have jumped and the scum has flaoted to the top.
Probably there will be a second wave of people leaving on July 1st
(raises hand) yep
Well, not "everyone" is choosing to see that, sadly:-(. I suppose I get it, they don't want to hear that what they love is gone. It IS sad, but it's also the truth.