this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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What is Reddit CEO Steve Huffman doing?::Reddit CEO Steve Huffman seems to be preparing the company for an IPO. But is what’s good for the IPO good for the business?

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[–] [email protected] 121 points 1 year ago (16 children)

I don't understand this community's obsession with this man. If you're no longer on his site then why do you care what happens to him or Reddit? Just move on.

[–] [email protected] 137 points 1 year ago

I think it's like, when you have a horrible breakup and you keep wanting to hear about the horrible things happening in your ex's life that justifies you leaving them and/or gives you some sweet schadenfreude.

[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Because I used reddit for well over a decade and had hundreds of subs I followed. Friends and communities. Years and years of shared history. It has been a huge part of my life. And this turd is ruining it for everybody, and by everybody I mean millions og people. I’m not obsessed with the guy, but I am interested to know what is going on with the place I spent so many hundreds of hours on. Don’t get me wrong, I glad I found lemmy. It’s a great community, but it’s far from what we left behind. In time we’ll hopefully get there, but in the meantime for sure fuck that piece of shit spez.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My thoughts exactly. Reddit was an immensely widespread and unique collection of so many vibrant niche communities that has grown over nearly two decades and was wilfully destroyed in mere weeks.

I can't blame anyone who mourns the loss and resents the greedy pigfucker that killed it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I was there for over ten years and never made any friends. I must have been doing something wrong lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Not only did I not make any friends there, I went to great lengths to ensure my existing friends didn't know my username.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

*Usernames

I compartmentalised a lot using several sock puppets

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's okay friend. You're here, you can start now 👋

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago

Some people just want to watch ~~the world~~ spez burn. It's human nature to want "your side" to win, and he's the face of "the enemy"... Not the reddit community, mind you...Reddit Corporate.

.. But yeah...I agree with you. 😁

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like to watch train wrecks, but I don’t want to be in a train wreck.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Are you sure? Have you ever been in a train wreck before? Maybe it's fun!

Update: I just googled "train wrecks" and, while it doesn't look fun, who really knows for sure?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Well no, and I’ve never seen a live train wreck either. In general I’m fascinated by disasters. The people around me can all be freaking out and I’m like ‘wow this is amazing’. However train wrecks, airplane crashes, and high speed auto wrecks are all obviously dangerous enough so that I in fact have no desire for a first hand experience.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I did a study about that once. The only conclusion I could really make is that people involved in train wrecks don't like participating in post experiment questionnaires. Though on the bright side, their refusal to answer the questionnaire meant we could sue their families for the cost of the train because being in train wrecks is also apparently associated with not reading contracts.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Science is hard.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

This community is about technology and it’s one of the most popular websites.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I wiped and deleted my account, and haven’t been back except for a few specific searches and occasional clicks from Lemmy links. But part of me still has some hope that there will be changes that lead to a reversal back to free API, or at least that each new story and new fuckup will continue to push more people to Lemmy. More broadly, corporate fuckups in general will hopefully push people to decentralized platforms, so it’s always going to be interesting to read about.

I mean, we are on a Reddit clone that was created out of spite years ago, so bad news about Reddit will be relevant here for a while.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

I think watching his moves foretells the future of communities still on Reddit. Lemmy has learned from growing pains in the recent fast growth, but could it handle a true twitter-level meltdown's influx of users? I think Reddit needs to stay alive a little longer so community federation and migration is possible, THEN Reddit can melt down. Watching the person steering that shop is helpful in gauging urgency.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

I'm sure some people hover between them. The only reason I still go on reddit sometimes is that Infinity is still working. I think it would go to almost 0 if I genuinely had to use the official app.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

People sunk ungodly amounts of time into reddit.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well you better start understanding it, we can't let go. If Reddit were shattered into a million pieces tomorrow, we would still sing the bitter lamentations about the time they took away our most sacred API.

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Suggesting discord as a competitor to reddit is dumb when discord does not pop up in search results containing information that may provide the solution. Might as well call WhatsApp a competitor to reddit then.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's not all people used reddit for though. I'm also absolutely devastated about the amount of generational knowledge that lives on reddit right now, and sad that some of the biggest contributors of that have probably wiped their accounts by now, but for alot of the community aspects of reddit, and finding groups with similar interest, discord does perfectly well.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

For socializing discord can match it, but it's really more the database of information that is searchable and viewable by anyone who doesn't even use reddit and it not being gatewalled that makes Discord not even come close. It's too much of a closed ecosystem even among discord account users with having to be in a particular server to benefit, and servers have been shut down and information all lost for members too.

Socializing to me is secondary. Like when it comes to stackoverflow, xda, or whatever random forums pop up in searches it's really the solution that's at the forefront of importance than whether these users are friends or whatever for anyone trying to find a relevant answer to their problem.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 year ago

Great article, but it does miss one point IMO. Some fights are more important than others. Pao became unpopular among extremists who wanted to be allowed to push hate speech and discrimination. Funny the article didn't mention the revenge porn debacle.

That actually resulted in the Voat fork of reddit, which of course quickly became a cesspool, and ended up failing.

The fight Pao fought was necessary, for reddit to have a shred of respectability, and to even stay legal, and for reddit to not fall into a hole of hate speech and idiocy. Pao took the fall for decency, and was forced to leave. But AFAIK none of the things she did were reversed, because they were necessary.

What Steve Huffman is doing is not necessary, on the contrary it's thoroughly documented to be harmful to reddit as a service in general, and especially for mobile users, and even more so for people who are blind.

There's an enormous difference in the importance of the Hill Pao died on, and the hill Spez chose. However the article is pretty spot on about the difference in how the 2 situations are handled, and how Spez is actively making it worse.

[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve been using lemmy for a few days and literally forget about reddit until I see these posts. I love lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

He's trying to get a bag selling off the company his two smart buddies made.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I agree with most of this article except about Discord being Reddit's main competitor. I think Discord has a distinct enough feel that it's almost kinda separate from other social media. It's less so like a platform you make posts on and moreso a big text group with lots of features, which is perfect for some communities but stifling for others.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I don’t really get a lot of what people want to use Discord for. A couple web forums I used (ram by companies, for specific games) closed and they moved to Discord. How is IRC-style chat a replacement for a forum? They’re totally different formats.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

While I do like discord. It is like you say a completely different format. Shouldn't be compared to reddit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It just doesn't work for anything other than playing games together IMO.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Works well enough as a group chat / voice call app. That's what it's for. Before discord you had to pay for good group voice calls.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

ya, just op was saying people are trying to turn it into a chat hub and it's just not worth. If I want to text my friends I'll just text them in a group chat.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's good for things like support chat or quick questions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, that's kinda neat actually.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, the only problem is that even a forum channel would require you to create a Discord account and find that server before you can even see its content and that's just not acceptable for massive open communities like r/malefashionadvice that seems to be moving to Discord.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I'll be sticking with Lemmy anyhow but I have to admit it's a cool feature

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think discoverability is still a problem.

I use Discord for real-time communication, but leaving a platform that's closing up access for a platform with already closed access makes no sense to me. It doesn't solve the original problem.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That is an improvement for sure. The problem remains, though, that the info is locked in Discord and won't show up on search engines.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that's a pretty dumb comparison. Discord is a chat, reddit is a forum. They're fundamentally different.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Knowing him he's probably getting his two bottom ribs removed so he can suck himself off.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

I believe the kids call it "shitting the bed".

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Damn, I forgot about the Victoria Taylor controversy. Brings back some memories

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Hes busy roleplaying Nero, just finishing the touches on the costume now.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Drugs, obviously.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

well worth the read, I didn‘t know about the IPO background until now

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

and now I know where Durmstrang originated

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