“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?
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.”
Thanks for the info!
You’re right. Another source is here: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/13/we/
Thanks for sharing that!
The tapeworm
king. people with tapeworms are actually fairly cool, but kings have historically been rather cruel and unjust.
Mr C missed an important one–teachers! But technically I’m talking about is as a class when I do it, so maybe not? We might never know.
Yeah, because he is the Lord of Snoo.
He called the mods landed gentry, so he literally does view himself as the king.
As in “You know nothing, Jon Snoo”? :')
“We” as in Reddit’s VC backers.
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).
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.
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.
you can think of them as different windows into a similar structure. They look different, they’ll assemble the data a bit different, and might even send slightly different forms–but they’re close enough that it’s all legible, all interpretable into their formats.
And kbin and lemmy have very similar formats! But it’s possible for mastodon (the twitter analogue) to interact with kbin and lemmy as well. Even though they present the data in a different way, with different sorting criteria for your feed, and different ideas on how subscribing to a community or a person works, at the end of the day the formats are very similar: a parent post with a bunch of comments.
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How is everything he says just such a gigantic PR disaster.
Taking a poll on this one: Spez’s PR people
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have all been fired in one broad, disastrous sweep like his idol muskrat did
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are tied up in the closet, ugly crying into their ball gags and slamming their heads against the wall
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inhabit shallow graves
His ego is too big to listen to any advice.
He admitted having calls and beeing inspired by Muskrat
Dude, looked at the dumpster fire twitter is and though to himself, that’s what I want!
These billionaires/millionaires, they live in a different world. Nobody around them contradicts them if they don’t value dissent, and most don’t. You wouldn’t believe the universe in which they live in…
Would not be surprised if he thinks, that reddit ist dependent on him personally.
Someone cleverer than him came up with that “don’t wear Reddit swag for your own safety” comment in the “leaked” memo. They absolutely wanted media coverage of that “internal” comment. Intimating that the protesting users are dangerously crazy without actually saying it is entirely consistent with Spez’s attempt to defame Christian Selig and gaslight us all about it, but too clever to have actually come from Pigboy.
You give him to little credit, that’s a manipulator 101 things.
Taking a poll on this one: Spez’s PR people
- have been replaced with a poop emoji
Sir Patrick Stewart?
-
Seems like your typical dumb tech bro, who lucked out by failing upwards all his life. The only valuable thing in his life is his bank account.
I’m genuinely surprised he was able to keep his mouth shut for all these years. You could tell what kind of person he is if you paid close attention, but it seems the protests have removed the filter he had before. I feel like it’s such an odd and sudden change.
Because he’s only in charge by accident. Reddit was built by Redditors, but he had the password 🤷🏻♂️
I know nothing about his personality but I guess he is just very simple honest person
Except more than once recently he’s been caught in a lie about the developers of Apollo and RIF and his communications with them. He’s not honest and he’s proven that multiple times
Being simple and honest is a virtue if the things you’re saying are principled, being simple and honest when you’re a slimy businessperson with zero sense of moral agency just makes you a fucking leech
But he wasn’t being simple and honest. Simple and honest would have been.
“Regrettably we have decided to remove API access to the vast majority of third party clients, except those designed specifically to provide moderation or accessibility features that the official app currently lacks.
We know this will be very disappointing to many of our users, and a body-blow to developers who have worked hard on their apps.
The truth is that advertising revenue is crucial for our ongoing survival, as is the demographic information that we can gather through our own app.
Application developers should stop taking subscription renewals immediately. We will work with them to help reimburse subscribers for the remainder of existing subscriptions. “
Something along those lines.
Just a thought that’s gonna disappear into the aether…
The amount Huff-spez was going to charge Apollo was the opportunity cost, not the real cost. That is, they figured that each Reddit users was worth X amount each month, give or take, in revenue that could be generated from tracking and advertisement. That actual cost per user was more like 5% of X. If Huffspez was being honest and transparent about this, he could say to users, hey, if you pay X per month, we’ll turn off all advertisements, not sell any of the data associated with your usage, and stop tracking you as much as possible and still have our site work. (I know tracking can’t stop completely, but it can be reduced.) But that’s not what is being presented to end users; they’re only being given the ability to use the official reddit app.
Then again, the promise of cable television and streaming services was that we would pay for the service, and not be force to watch ads. And then companies figured out that they could be more profitable by also selling ads, and then requiring subscribers to pay even more to reduce the number of ads. So any claims from Huffspez that you could subscribe and not be tracked etc. would have been, rightly, viewed with derision.
Let’s not devalue basic virtues. Honesty is honesty.
Would you rather he flat out lie that “we’ll look into it” or him being honest “I’m not going to do anything about it”. Being honest lets us know where he stands so we can make our plans about migration easier.Calling them virtues is charitable if you’re doing this while willfully refusing to acknowledge the fact that you stand on millions of hours of volunteer labor and you’d rather spit on them than give them their due. It’s a lie by omission.
He could try to tell the truth with more tact, though, to avoid sounding like a complete douchebag.
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.
Ellen Pao 2: Electric Boogaloo
This time, they’re angry at the right person
It’s interesting that this story is being picked up by business news sites now. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it’s at least catching the business world’s attention.
Yeah, wasn’t part of Reddit’s reasoning for not backing down that the API backlash only affects a small subset of users and that most of their use base won’t notice what’s going on (besides being inconvenienced by the blackout)? This kind of shines a spotlight on the fact that everyone is seeing what’s going on.
I’d guess many journalists use reddit (like other some) for their work so they’re quickly picking it up and joining the protest in a “chaotic good” way they can try affect the outcome.
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.
I mean, we knew he was lying before the Blackout ever happened. The Apollo dev made it pretty clear in their thread.
Truth be told, he doesn’t give a shit about us, the money is in selling ads to show to people who want to go on an app to look at cats and memes.
Absolutely no judgment on those people, but the sort of people who get upset over APIs are not who spez wants to cultivate as a userbase, as a deliberate business move.
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
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.
I actually think they’re being realistic to say this will blow over, but from their perspective, not ours.
Power users are looking for alternatives, but inertia will keep a lot of users for them, and I’m sure many of the lazy “I have nothing to hide” people that think user tracking and targeted ads are just fine don’t even care about this. And moderators are replaceable, even by dictatorial fiat. I expect there must be a lot of would-be “little kings” ready for the “prestige” of moderating subs they like.
I expect Reddit to lose a lot of their best users, but they don’t need them. They just need eyeballs to serve ads to. As a business, it’s not necessary for Reddit to have good content, just to serve a lot of content of any quality. A large shithole is still a profitable shithole, and I think they’re fine with being a profitable, lobotomized shithole.
Long term it will be harder to keep people around if the quality content is somewhere else. At this point, it’s probably too early for most people to be interested in joining this space, but if over time this is where the content is, then more people will switch. Otoh, repost bots will keep things looking alive, so casual lurkers might not even notice. But if someone is just worried about quarterly bonuses, so what if they website dies a slow death over the next couple years?
Now its well established, like facebook, i think it’ll just settle to a rump of users who want the convenience of downloading an app and just getting straight on.
It’s not like reddit’s main characteristic was quality if the first place, it was the massive size and momentum that made it the de facto place to go to if you need to find a community or any info. It is definitely not going to die, especially if it’s just the users rioting and not the actual content creators that add OC to reddit. I’m just hoping this whole thing is enough of a kick to get alternatives like kbin and lemmy started, reddit doesn’t have to be gone for us to have a nice community here alongside it, it’s just a question of whether we have enough people to make it so.
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.
Honestly, that would be similar to the Twitter Migration. A lot of the good users left, and a ton of eyeballs remained at Twitter. Twitter became worse, Mastodon got better.
Reddit will lose a lot of the best users, keep a bunch of eyeballs. If the best users come to the fediverse, then it’s still a win for the fediverse because they’ve made it better here.
You’re not wrong about inertia. Short-term nothing will change, but with a much less stable foundation of power users generating and moderating good content, quality will drop.
In the long-term a significant drop in quality will mean a drop in users, particularly if something else of better quality shows up.
If your strategy us being a shithole, then you’d better hope nothing better shows up, because that’s the bet you’re making. Historically that’s rarely the case - something better always comes along eventually.
In the end it seems like Lemmy is going to be like Linux. A small userbase but dedicated one, and the community and website should hopefully catch up soon the same way Linux improved over the last few decades.
And like Linux on desktop, our marketshare might be small, but it should be more than enough to keep us going. Linux don’t need to dominate the desktop market for us to use it, neither does this website.
The Lord of Snoo is locked to the IPO, hopefully the IPO will fail and the board of the Snoo Platform, Inc. fired him.
As Louis Rossmann quite rightly points out, nobody has ever gone to war with the internet and won.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, my ship and I have an appointment to keep at the bottom of the ocean.”
u/spezzypants has an appointment with Davey Jones
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
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.
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.
He’s one of the founders but it seems not the smartest of them.
I think the calculus is: they can do it and not lose many users.
They think people leaving won’t move the needle or they are so fucked financially they have to take the risk.
I haven’t deleted my account, but I haven’t looked at reddit since before the blackout. Once rif goes away, I’ll likely never go back in any sort of active capacity.
I think they’ll feel this one. Maybe not at first but there are lots of old (10+ year) active (serious karma) accounts that are leaving. They’ll pull a Twitter and slowly die.
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
This guy is setting himself up to fund the IPO from authoritarian state sponsored VCs. They’re going to be most impressed by his hardline stance
Reddit being owned by Saudi Arabia and China is a definite possibility.
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.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head a bit, Reddit users were for all intents and purposes anonymous - you’d find usernames you recognise but it’s among a sea of thousands of others, and the posts would all blur themselves into one. By and large, you go into a thread on a topic, not because Person X posted it, but because it’s a topic you want to read about, and you upvote a comment because you liked it rather than because Person Y posted it.
Twitter is all about who you follow and you curate a follow list that matches what you want to see, and by return you engage with the people who engage with you. If the people who you’d want to follow on a replacement for Twitter aren’t there, or nobody can or will engage with you, it’s a shitty replacement for Twitter for your purposes. This is especially true with Mastodon, whose model is that you only see posts from the follow lists of people already on your instances, so if it starts off sucky then absent some external force, it stays that way.
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.
Did this guy wake up on the wrong foot some time ago?
Nah, I think he just wants to burn the bridge as he’s crossing it.
Man has 4 left feet and no hands apparently
Agreed
