I love that the CEO calls the users voicing their displeasure "noise".
When those users voice opinions on other things, it's called content. When those users voice their opinions against reddit, it's noise.
Hoffman continues to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what Reddit is.
The very people that give your platform its value are revolting against you, and you think it's noise.
What's your product? What do you create? In what way will Reddit thrive only with what you put into it? Where do you think the content you lace your ads between comes from?
I don't really understand why it had to be this way. It's so easy to think of other ways this could have been handled. Even just announcing the same change with 6 months of lead time rather than 1 month would have gone over better. Or boil the frog and gradually introduce API restrictions. It's as if the CEO is purposefully being as belligerent as possible to rile people up.
> It's as if the CEO is purposefully being as belligerent as possible to rile people up.
The CEO is following the new leadership playbook, which you should recognize by now, as it's used by Musk, crypto leaders, Zuckerberg, and many more inside and outside of tech.
* Fundamentally it's just following the social (media) trend: Demonstrate brazen, over-the-top arrogance, disregard for consequences, and no empathy. I'm sure people recognize that pattern.
* Applied to CEO roles, it means publicly demonstrating contempt toward groups of people who are (individually) weaker than you, including employees, customers, protestors, etc. And it means disregard for consequences, such as Musk's actions when bidding $40 billion for Twitter, and afterward; or much of what has happened in crypto. It demonstrates your power, demonstrates their powerlessness (if they capitulate), and makes you look like you have extreme confidence and little empathy - which is very trendy now, of course. Disregard for consequences works until they occur. It's basic con-person tactics, the most obvious bad sales techniques.
* When challenged, act more aggressively or with more contempt. Double down.
* Play the victim and characterize those who oppose you as violent threats - which again shows disinterest and contempt for them and their arguments. One remarkable place you can see it is some US Supreme Court justices - it's such a powerful trend in 'leadership' that these people with untouchable lifetime positions even do it. (In case you missed it, Reddit's CEO used this technique.)
These 'leaders' protray themselves as brilliant, innovative, and highly capable, and people assume they must be - after all, they run these big companies. They are just corrupt and swept up in the latest fashion. Power corrupts, no surprise.
The sad part is that I see many on the other side of these issues actually believe this crap - they believe they are powerless and unilaterally disarm, as if the leaders are using the Force when they say, 'you have no power' - 'Oh, I guess I have no power' and they despair. (And then they tell everyone else the same.)
At the cost of a little faith in demoracy (write large - the power of individuals working together), they hold all the power. Our ancestors who in the same way built much of the freedom and society we have now, must be amazed. We just give it all away. The worst of our society haven't given it away - look at Bud Light. Reddit should be toast, or at least the CEO. People just wake up and act.
Or they're broke and reddit is soon to be bankrupt.
But even so, if they had just said that, the outcome would be so much different. Because as of now it seems like they're fucking people over for the sake of fucking them over.
> It's so easy to think of other ways this could have been handled.
Well, assuming Reddit executives were telling the truth about their goals/needs, which I don't think they are.
They claim the purpose was some kind of emergency band-aid to stop the service from hemorrhaging cash from evil large-scale data-sucking AI developers without compensation... But in that case, they could have simply introduced it as a fresh terms-of-service restriction, with some payment-tier to come later that permits that use of the data.
Just cap all existing API keys to roughly the number of users they currently have.
Everyone who is currently using RIF or Apollo or $whatever can continue to use it. They can't add any new users.
Super simple, nobody is losing anything, nobody is having anything taken away. All new users would be fed into the app. Eventually the 3rd party apps would have died off. It would have been a slow, painful and QUIET death.
Because they want to IPO as soon as possible, so showing a bump of revenue from API shows the promise of more revenues for investors.
Remember they took a 41% cut in valuation recently. IPO is going to be challenging so they want to show as many different streams of revenue as possible.
My guess is that 3rd party apps have reached a user threshold where they pose a potential future risk of pulling the rug out from under Reddit enough to give some non-negligible traction to an alternative. After all, once you've got the app installed, the back end server can be replaced with something else and you can find ways to streamline new user account creation where needed especially if they are paying customers, even offering to reserve existing Reddit usernames on other platforms.
If a Reddit IPO is coming, then this could simply be a form of de-risking. It's a double edged blade, because higher quality 3rd party apps may increase the platform's value while you're on their good side, but rub 3rd party app developers the wrong way and they might start getting clever ideas. A short notification period may reduce the chance of clever ideas reaching manifestation.
I don't understand why the users aren't just leaving? Surely the software/infrastructure can't be that hard to replicate, especially on a "subreddit" level?
Why don't a few big mods just go this route and tell everyone else?
They're running out of cash, investors want their money back, and their answer it seems is to turn reddit into onlyfans, which requires they wrest-back control of all the NSFW parts of it.
> A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout
I find a CEO referring to their employees as 'Snoos' to be offputting personally.
I'm sure it's meant to be a fun and inclusive term but the guy is sending out a pretty serious email that ends in, "I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations."
The tone strikes me as weird for this message and I feel like the term 'Snoo' is infantizing at best?
Maybe I'm alone, it just feels super weird to hear that coming from someone with the title of CEO at a company of more than 100 people
Reading the full letter[1] I think the first use of that term seems generally fine ("Hi Snoos,") whereas the 2nd one comes across as grossly tone-deaf (which is exactly what I expect from reddit at this point), mostly because the first one is just the opening greeting and can be a bit more colloquial while the 2nd one is addressing actual human beings who are suffering from the strain ("working around the clock" etc) and feels like he's trying to dehumanize them.
The whole letter seems incredibly tone-deaf. calling the protests "noise" is incredibly dismissive of their user base and their concerns. The whole section about not wearing reddit gear outside is an obviously farcical attempt to paint people who oppose this change as violent when they are more likely to be people who never go outside, let alone people who are prowling around with weapons looking for vengeance for API changes.
One Snoo not working around the clock is /u/Cryfi the Snoo responsible for helping my subreddit land and manage AMAs. They were unceremoniously shown the door and none of the mods were notified.
Snoo is the name of the reddit alien. I believe it was going to be the original name of the site (what's new - what'S NOO).
Since "redditor" is a community name, it makes sense there would be a different internal/employee demonym and Snoo fits the site as good as any other name might.
I also think it’s weird and infantilizing at best (patronizing at worst) to call your employees ‘Snoos’ or ‘Metamates’ or any such corponym (for lack of a better term), regardless of the context.
Lots of tech companies have silly names for their employees, I think it might have originated with “Googlers” but some companies (like Reddit) went a little further. (“Snoo” is also the name of the little Reddit alien mascot.)
It reminds me of that movie Spy Kids where the villain kidnaps people and turns them into these teletubby like creatures.
Looking back, that was kind of some heavy body horror for a kids movie.
But yeah, “Snoo” is easily the worst tech company name for their employees I’ve heard. I had no idea Reddit had an internal name for their employees. This is way worse than “meta mates” or whatever Zuckerberg ended up coming up with.
"I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations.”
Overreaction much ? Are we really become that desensitized as a society? I find that hard to believe.
"My executive decisions were perfect, and do not need to be questioned, because I am a vic--I mean, we are all victims of unfair treatment by our regular users who have collectively gone insane and dislike all of us for no reason, a problem we must overcome as a team, right?" /s
Usual bait and switch from Reddit. Pretty much all investor funded companies follow this path sooner or later. Lock the platform, squeeze the profit. Sad, but not much can be done about it.
It seems that the end game of corporate controlled social media is for corporate interests to control what you read or watch.
Happened with the feed of Facebook. originally was a true social network where you scrolled through what your family and friends posted. Now it is a algorithm designed to maximize attention and sell influence,
Happened with YouTube. Used to be really pro independent user … now the search functionality is barebones giving you maybe one or two results… the rest promoted content.
TikTok just straight up controls what you consume from the get go
Reddit wants to join in the same model. Heavily corporate moderated content masquerading as “use content.
Sadly I am not too hopeful for a new platform. Any true open forum upvote downvote platform will be torpedoed before it can get going …
All they had to do was make API access require Premium. $4/month and all the pieces were laying there. Thats twice as much monthly profit as their current super inflated API pricing would bring them for the same users.
Reddit made themselves a real mess here and it's all SO stupid.
Of course, the two day blackout will not have huge revenue impact, but two week one will. And if it goes on beyond that, those who will have the most to lose will blink (i.e. Spez and investors)
If Spez doesn't blink, the investors will make him.
I don't think he's' going to win this one without making concession.
Imo the boycott isn't going far enough. The communities affected by this should just pool resources and either migrate to an existing clone or build one. If it sticks to only hosting text, and handles images/videos via external links hosting costs would be very manageable.
There's no reason something like Reddit needs to be privately owned, or commercial at all.
It will be interesting to see the eventual outcome of this saga. I have already seen backlash against the backlash in many subs. /r/NBA, which was mentioned in the article, had a poll one day before the blackout and made the decision based on 8000 votes (out of a total 8+ million members). Casual users were not happy to find out that they would have nowhere to discuss the most important game of the season, and the mod announcements were very heavily downvoted (the blackout happened nonetheless).
Will a chunk of users stay off the site permanently? Maybe. Will Reddit as a business be better off without these users? Also maybe. There's definitely a case to be made that the community would benefit from more casual participation minus power tripping and over moderation from the top 0.01%.
I hope this unleashes a wave of tools that allow you to exfiltrate content from these systems and put them in longer lasting storage that can be searched even when the original goes down.
Then we can just let all these services die every few years.
It seems to me like they could pass this cost to users instead of developers and just have API access an option on some subscription tier. Then allow third party apps to auth with users credentials. And then everyone would be happy? Maybe.
>a commenter let me know that some members had already set up shop on Kbin, a decentralized Reddit alternative that is interoperable with Mastodon and other services on the ActivityPub standard. While the interface is rough even by the standards of Reddit, it works just fine.
Works just fine for who, though? Not for non-technical people.
The FOSS community, especially the Fediverse community continually disappoint me by being so dismissive of, or even hostile to design critique. Nearly universally, trying to engage a project community in rethinking an interface is received like unsolicited criticism of someone's physique. Even as a software developer who's put many thousands of hours into FOSS development, AND a professional designer, And making it clear I'd be willing to research, design, test, and implement myself, the results are usually just as discouraging. I've stopped trying.
Without significant designer input, FOSS social media initiatives will always be two steps ahead technically but 10 steps behind in UX. After the November bump, Mastodon had lost the majority of the active users it had gained by February. I think that if something even comes close to a commercial social media UX, they stand a chance at being a real turning point the world's conception of how social media 'works.'
Every website, including Reddit, already has an API you don't need to pay extra for. It's called HTTP and HTML. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking that you need permission to choose what user-agent to access a site with; that's what the truly open Web is about.
The post by the Apollo dev made it sound like they had gone back and forth for a while before the final pricing was laid out. I wonder why reddit didn't come up with a price that worked for all parties. Isn't some money better than none + ill will from the community?
I always thought reddit was smarter than this. They were really born out of the ashes of digg and for a long time they remembered that. At this point they're in decline I don't think the bleeding will stop. Lots of young people already had a negative view of reddit and now redditors have a negative view of reddit too. I hope we can make a home in the fediverse I'm tired of giving my data to large corps with no recourse.
I highly suspect anything critical of Reddit is being flagged to death on HN. This post was #1 with more than 100 upvotes in 39 minutes. Now it keeps going lower and lower.
> the number of Reddits that have gone dark expanded from around 7,000 to more than 8,400
Annoyingly, there's no context for these numbers. Is this 10% of all subreddits? 90%? Does it cover half of all users? They're meaningless numbers that "sound big."
It would take a lot more than 2 days to see a response, and even then there was enough subreddits still active that /r/all honestly looked about the same.
[+] [-] whatsuphotdog|2 years ago|reply
When those users voice opinions on other things, it's called content. When those users voice their opinions against reddit, it's noise.
Hoffman continues to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what Reddit is.
The very people that give your platform its value are revolting against you, and you think it's noise.
What's your product? What do you create? In what way will Reddit thrive only with what you put into it? Where do you think the content you lace your ads between comes from?
[+] [-] extr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolverine876|2 years ago|reply
The CEO is following the new leadership playbook, which you should recognize by now, as it's used by Musk, crypto leaders, Zuckerberg, and many more inside and outside of tech.
* Fundamentally it's just following the social (media) trend: Demonstrate brazen, over-the-top arrogance, disregard for consequences, and no empathy. I'm sure people recognize that pattern.
* Applied to CEO roles, it means publicly demonstrating contempt toward groups of people who are (individually) weaker than you, including employees, customers, protestors, etc. And it means disregard for consequences, such as Musk's actions when bidding $40 billion for Twitter, and afterward; or much of what has happened in crypto. It demonstrates your power, demonstrates their powerlessness (if they capitulate), and makes you look like you have extreme confidence and little empathy - which is very trendy now, of course. Disregard for consequences works until they occur. It's basic con-person tactics, the most obvious bad sales techniques.
* When challenged, act more aggressively or with more contempt. Double down.
* Play the victim and characterize those who oppose you as violent threats - which again shows disinterest and contempt for them and their arguments. One remarkable place you can see it is some US Supreme Court justices - it's such a powerful trend in 'leadership' that these people with untouchable lifetime positions even do it. (In case you missed it, Reddit's CEO used this technique.)
These 'leaders' protray themselves as brilliant, innovative, and highly capable, and people assume they must be - after all, they run these big companies. They are just corrupt and swept up in the latest fashion. Power corrupts, no surprise.
The sad part is that I see many on the other side of these issues actually believe this crap - they believe they are powerless and unilaterally disarm, as if the leaders are using the Force when they say, 'you have no power' - 'Oh, I guess I have no power' and they despair. (And then they tell everyone else the same.)
At the cost of a little faith in demoracy (write large - the power of individuals working together), they hold all the power. Our ancestors who in the same way built much of the freedom and society we have now, must be amazed. We just give it all away. The worst of our society haven't given it away - look at Bud Light. Reddit should be toast, or at least the CEO. People just wake up and act.
[+] [-] CommitSyn|2 years ago|reply
But even so, if they had just said that, the outcome would be so much different. Because as of now it seems like they're fucking people over for the sake of fucking them over.
[+] [-] Terr_|2 years ago|reply
Well, assuming Reddit executives were telling the truth about their goals/needs, which I don't think they are.
They claim the purpose was some kind of emergency band-aid to stop the service from hemorrhaging cash from evil large-scale data-sucking AI developers without compensation... But in that case, they could have simply introduced it as a fresh terms-of-service restriction, with some payment-tier to come later that permits that use of the data.
[+] [-] AdamJacobMuller|2 years ago|reply
Just cap all existing API keys to roughly the number of users they currently have.
Everyone who is currently using RIF or Apollo or $whatever can continue to use it. They can't add any new users.
Super simple, nobody is losing anything, nobody is having anything taken away. All new users would be fed into the app. Eventually the 3rd party apps would have died off. It would have been a slow, painful and QUIET death.
[+] [-] AmericanOP|2 years ago|reply
Well, maybe not so surprising with their product team.
[+] [-] remote_phone|2 years ago|reply
Remember they took a 41% cut in valuation recently. IPO is going to be challenging so they want to show as many different streams of revenue as possible.
[+] [-] CMay|2 years ago|reply
If a Reddit IPO is coming, then this could simply be a form of de-risking. It's a double edged blade, because higher quality 3rd party apps may increase the platform's value while you're on their good side, but rub 3rd party app developers the wrong way and they might start getting clever ideas. A short notification period may reduce the chance of clever ideas reaching manifestation.
[+] [-] q1w2|2 years ago|reply
It causes irrational behaviors.
[+] [-] jrm4|2 years ago|reply
Why don't a few big mods just go this route and tell everyone else?
[+] [-] jupp0r|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sophistifunk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dakial1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lost_tourist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn2017|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CSMastermind|2 years ago|reply
I find a CEO referring to their employees as 'Snoos' to be offputting personally.
I'm sure it's meant to be a fun and inclusive term but the guy is sending out a pretty serious email that ends in, "I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations."
The tone strikes me as weird for this message and I feel like the term 'Snoo' is infantizing at best?
Maybe I'm alone, it just feels super weird to hear that coming from someone with the title of CEO at a company of more than 100 people
[+] [-] AdamJacobMuller|2 years ago|reply
The whole letter seems incredibly tone-deaf. calling the protests "noise" is incredibly dismissive of their user base and their concerns. The whole section about not wearing reddit gear outside is an obviously farcical attempt to paint people who oppose this change as violent when they are more likely to be people who never go outside, let alone people who are prowling around with weapons looking for vengeance for API changes.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
[+] [-] marklyon|2 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
[+] [-] xatax|2 years ago|reply
Since "redditor" is a community name, it makes sense there would be a different internal/employee demonym and Snoo fits the site as good as any other name might.
[+] [-] quickthrowman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AmericanOP|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dimmke|2 years ago|reply
Looking back, that was kind of some heavy body horror for a kids movie.
But yeah, “Snoo” is easily the worst tech company name for their employees I’ve heard. I had no idea Reddit had an internal name for their employees. This is way worse than “meta mates” or whatever Zuckerberg ended up coming up with.
[+] [-] nickstinemates|2 years ago|reply
1: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
[+] [-] jsemrau|2 years ago|reply
Overreaction much ? Are we really become that desensitized as a society? I find that hard to believe.
[+] [-] badtension|2 years ago|reply
https://reddark.untone.uk/
[+] [-] Terr_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdmike1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TX81Z|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tananaev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmethvin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] givemeethekeys|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tredre3|2 years ago|reply
Providing an API for free for 15 years. Yeah, total bait and switch.
[+] [-] roody15|2 years ago|reply
Happened with the feed of Facebook. originally was a true social network where you scrolled through what your family and friends posted. Now it is a algorithm designed to maximize attention and sell influence,
Happened with YouTube. Used to be really pro independent user … now the search functionality is barebones giving you maybe one or two results… the rest promoted content.
TikTok just straight up controls what you consume from the get go
Reddit wants to join in the same model. Heavily corporate moderated content masquerading as “use content.
Sadly I am not too hopeful for a new platform. Any true open forum upvote downvote platform will be torpedoed before it can get going …
[+] [-] a2tech|2 years ago|reply
Reddit made themselves a real mess here and it's all SO stupid.
[+] [-] pcurve|2 years ago|reply
If Spez doesn't blink, the investors will make him.
I don't think he's' going to win this one without making concession.
[+] [-] p1necone|2 years ago|reply
There's no reason something like Reddit needs to be privately owned, or commercial at all.
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|2 years ago|reply
Will a chunk of users stay off the site permanently? Maybe. Will Reddit as a business be better off without these users? Also maybe. There's definitely a case to be made that the community would benefit from more casual participation minus power tripping and over moderation from the top 0.01%.
[+] [-] 2muchcoffeeman|2 years ago|reply
Then we can just let all these services die every few years.
[+] [-] monkpit|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chefandy|2 years ago|reply
Works just fine for who, though? Not for non-technical people.
The FOSS community, especially the Fediverse community continually disappoint me by being so dismissive of, or even hostile to design critique. Nearly universally, trying to engage a project community in rethinking an interface is received like unsolicited criticism of someone's physique. Even as a software developer who's put many thousands of hours into FOSS development, AND a professional designer, And making it clear I'd be willing to research, design, test, and implement myself, the results are usually just as discouraging. I've stopped trying.
Without significant designer input, FOSS social media initiatives will always be two steps ahead technically but 10 steps behind in UX. After the November bump, Mastodon had lost the majority of the active users it had gained by February. I think that if something even comes close to a commercial social media UX, they stand a chance at being a real turning point the world's conception of how social media 'works.'
[+] [-] userbinator|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ammut|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balvarez|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ent101|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Calamitous|2 years ago|reply
> the number of Reddits that have gone dark expanded from around 7,000 to more than 8,400
Annoyingly, there's no context for these numbers. Is this 10% of all subreddits? 90%? Does it cover half of all users? They're meaningless numbers that "sound big."
[+] [-] latenightcoding|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DimmieMan|2 years ago|reply
Unfortunately dead on...
It would take a lot more than 2 days to see a response, and even then there was enough subreddits still active that /r/all honestly looked about the same.