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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Louis Rossmann is a bit of a provocateur, but what he's saying in this video is the bare and unvarnished truth. If Reddit cared about its users and its moderators, the CEO's internal messaging would be less like "this will blow over" and more like "what should we do to meet these people in the middle?"
There is no meeting in the middle when you're up against institutional investors who have put literally hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to fund your operation. I almost feel bad for Steve, he really has no choice, it's just a shame to see him falling into line and reciting exactly what the board wants him to say.
And by the way, this is why Beehaw has so much promise. The incentives of the operators and the users are aligned. There is no third party with outsized power waiting for the chance to pull the rip cord and enshittify the whole thing.
He definitely has a choice. As a founder of Reddit, if he really believed that this was the wrong move, he could refuse to do something he disagreed with and make the board essentially have to fire him.
I walked away from a well paying job myself several years ago because I disagreed morally with choices being made by the company. It is absolutely something that people can do, especially someone of his means.
Unfortunately we live in a society where it's easy to separate responsibility for actions taken at work with actions taken personally; indeed, that is the whole premise of a limited liability company. But I still hold Steve personally responsible for his choices, and I think he is selling out the values of Reddit, and his own values if he ever had any, for money.
I too left an insanely well paying job due to ongoing moral compromises I couldn’t carry forward with. The thing here is Reddit itself has no value without content provided by it’s userbase. They offer no commodity outside of the hosting and user website. To suddenly rugpull 3rd party developers is a shit move against the community that contributes content which enables monetization via user metadata, ads and coin revenue.
Reddit is actually nothing without it’s userbase, and it’s far-reaching userbase is enabled through phone apps, mod tools and other 3rd party support. Hell even most moderators are UNPAID. It’s a gaint sham to suddenly demand payment from 3rd party developers, and it’s ONLY because they’re losing out on ad revenue and that sweet sweet marketing user data they sell which Apollo (and other apps) do not collect.