Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's letter to Reddit employees in response to blackout
Starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private. We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us. 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. Thank you, team.
We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.
There's a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we've seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.
While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.
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.
Again, we'll get through it. Thank you to all of you for helping us do so.
Edit to include source: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/13/reddit-ceo-blackouts-no-revenue-impact/
Same! The mood here reminds me of the good old days when everyone on Reddit wasn't a cynical asshole.
Jerboa is already a better app than Reddit's official app, so I'm quite happy to give the Lemmy and Jerboa devs time to iron out the kinks.
Wowzers. No offense at all to the Jerboa devs but this really contextualizes for me just how bad the official app must be.
I want baconreader for Lemmy!
The official Reddit really is so bad. Using Mlem on iOS for now, but I would die for an Apollo-for-Lemmy client. (Christian, plz)
That would be a perfect outcome, that Sync (What I used on Android) and Apollo (iOS) just rebuilt their apps for Lemmy.
If Sync retools to Lemmy/kbin, they’ll have me for life
LJ Dawson said he would look into it but my guess is it would require a lot of work and a whole new app.
I did notice that he killed the official sync subreddit as well as almost all of his comments on reddit. I get why people are killing their content but it just feels like reddit is going to get to play the "victor writes the history" card. Luckily i already joined the sync discord in anticipation of him killing his content for reddit.
The community efforts in the discord are incredible - they've already got it largely working
They're getting Sync to work with Lemmy? If they do, I am happy to pay up for that!
I think there's a project that allows for apps using Reddit API calls to interract with Lemmy just by changing the URL in the app. Maybe something like that would be useful in making it easier to convert Sync to working on Lemmy instead of Reddit, well that and other minor changes to accommodate Federated features.
Here's to praying! Happy to even pay for pro again!
Yeah, I'm with you there. I paid twice and will gladly pay a third time.
Lemmy is fun pls
The official app is terrible beyond belief.
The main reddit app sucked so bad. I loved Joey. Would love it if they moved it to Lemmy/KBin
God why is everyone on reddit a cynical asshole?
It's a reflection of society as a whole, unfortunately.
You got a point there. You can tell by all the terrible choices large(r) companies are making, with the most recent being Reddit itself.
I think there's more to it because there are people on Reddit who act like assholes on Reddit but in real life you'd never know since they seem like nice people.
It's not reddit. It's the pseudonymity of the internet. I've met people who just didn't understand they were talking to real people because they were just typing at their computers. I noticed that 20 years ago for the first time and it didn't really change over the years. the only thing one could blame reddit for is "being popular enough to attract idiots".
IMO there's something about the style of vote-moderated public posting that leads people to want to posture as confident and authoritative, even when they don't have a lot to add. And cynicism is a cheap way of looking smart (since it undercuts the need to deal with complexity and nuance). So there's a constant bias towards posting cynicism or framing ideas cynically.
On the flip side, shorter comments are easier to read, and sarcastic/cynical retorts/summaries are more likely to get upvoted when they're shorter/funnier than effortposts. So there's also maybe a bias to upvote cynicism.
In my experience there's just something about Reddit and many Online forums that just tends to bring out the worst in people.
It really was getting bad over there. People were apt to take nearly anything you shared and fill in the blanks with their own imaginary context, then get angry and/or confrontational over it. For example, one of my last interactions was about an elderly uncle of mine who suffered from burns all over his body and gave up living after 50+ days of agony. A sad story with no purpose other than to convey the sad nature of these injuries. Hop on the next morning to find that a guy was berating me, all but certain I was somehow angry that my uncle gave up after 50 days of absolute fucking agony, and assuming I would have preferred the man just suck it up or something. I didn't know what to offer this person other than a good old fashioned "What the fuck are you talking about?"
This type of thing was becoming more and more commonplace. Just angry people expecting and assuming the worst of everyone else. If it wasn't some shitty take on an otherwise innocent post, it was unprovoked outrage over my username, even if absolutely nothing in my conduct or post history stands to suggest I'm pro-Stalin, pro-fascist, or pro-Soviet.
Reddit has gotten super hostile. Sometimes I would have someone try to start a fight with me over nothing at all, I go to their profile and the whole thing is just them picking fights with everyone. Like they aren't trolling they are just always ready to harass people about the most benign things.
Especially awful are the bigots who spend all their time dropping hateful comments on LGBTQIA posts - actively seeking them out just to kick and scream and get in everyone's faces, then moan that people are mean to them just for "asking questions" and "having opinions."
Really hoping Lemmy doesn't end up with the same problem. At very least it's small right now, and these types like to be where the crowds are so more people can hear the fuss they're making.