Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's letter to Reddit employees in response to blackout

gary@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 743 points –

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/

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I'm sure many will go back to Reddit but some wont. I for one will be staying on Lemmy as I've found it a breath of fresh air.

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.

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.

Same! The mood here reminds me of the good old days when everyone on Reddit wasn't a cynical asshole.

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.

Yup I'm staying here too. It's already feeling like home.

Yeah, I'm sold on Lemmy too.

You didn't have to buy it, it's free. /S

Dad, stop it! Mom said to remind you the the roof still needs fixing…

I think Lemmy will definitely be able to serve as a suitable replacement for Reddit, the wacky Reddit comments everyone knows and loves won't die out with Reddit, they'll live on here on Lemmy.

I’m fully committed regardless of how good the replacement is. I paid for Reddit premium every month since 2016 to try and support the thing I loved. I gave out 65+ gold before premium to also support a thing a loved.

I cancelled premium after the AMA and deleted Apollo. No going back period.

This might be why they have not seen a monetary hit yet, it won't be until people's premium cancellations hit that Reddit will see a cash flow issue.

The Humanist Report on YouTube lost monetization last month and he slowly saw his subscriber count drop day by day as people's subscriptions got canceled instead of renewed after 31 days he was somehow still at 9 subscribers. Fortunately he did a video and called out YouTube and people went on his patreon to fund him instead of him relying at all on YouTube. He got monetization back but you can never trust YouTube to not screw people.

They won't see much of a monetary hit from most of the people that were using the free API. It will be like YT since 2017; a slow decline and complete loss of technical utility. It will be another zombie garbage platform because this is all the company is focused on. It is a massively oversimplified perspective of where value is created in reddit. I believe the entire house of cards is anchored by the most niche and obscure places that have useful information and support. Monetizing the types of users that make up these communities is completely counter productive. These are the true influencing anchor users that everyone is grounded to all the way down the intellectual pyramid (plateau). All the other social stuff is peripheral to the technical utility of knowing you can find an answer to a super obscure question by asking on reddit. It is just like how you used to be able to find the answer on YT; now you can't find that one video posted by the expert that had 3 uploads 10 years ago. This is the change reddit is making. It will take time for this utility to errode away but this outcome is guaranteed.

Same here. This morning I've removed my ten years worth of content from Reddit as I don't want them to even generate the slightest bit of revenue from it, removed my account and do not feel bad about it in the slightest.

I'm done with the way Reddit handles the community feedback and done with the "don't you dare to have a differing opinion or we'll downvote to oblivion" mentality that prevailed in a number of subreddits.

The latter is just human nature. You're not going to get away from that especially as lemmy grows 🤷

Yeah, as much as people say they're meant to serve a different purpose, the upvote and downvote buttons will always serve as "I agree" and "I disagree" buttons.

Yeah, guess that's true. But for now I'll just enjoy the more positive vibe I've picked up so far.

I deleted 15 years of comments last week. Nothing too valuable lost but it's definitely the end of an era. Looking forward to something new and not corporate owned.

what tool did you use to delete your comments?

I deleted one 11 year account and 3 three year accounts. The amount of absolute repeat garbage bots on all my homepage, and throughout popular was so bad, it just became Facebook, but angrier.

Is there a fast way to delete comments? I found a nuke Reddit extension but only for chrome and it only did posts. I have a shit ton of comments out there still.

I used shreddit.com, you don't need a premium account to remove all your comments. You can just select 'all content' from the dropdown that allows you to select from which point in time you want to nuke your stuff.

Yeah I agree, honestly I just get real sick of corporate assholes and get unreasonably angry, so I don't want to "give-in". I've been going back on RIF to spread word of Lemmy to see what I can do, but come July 1st, that won't really be an option anymore since I'll have to navigate through their ad-ridden app and will eventually give them money.

Once June 30th hits, I'm wiping my reddit account and moving over here. Seems much nicer here

Same here, the engagement level is well worth the transition and I'm tired of corporate silos, federation FTW!

I'm not sure how many users will actually stay away. But if even a small fraction of the mods for these big subs stay away Reddit's gonna have a problem.

Lemmy will pull some mods away, traditional forums will pull some away, and that could really hurt.

However, only time will tell if that ends up happening.

Reddit is already due for a problem regardless of what the mods decide to do. Bots are no longer going to be a thing thus multiplying the work required for a mod by an unknown factor

Wait, can you explain this a bit more? I'm not the most tech savvy, but I'm reading this as things like automod and gandolf bot all being gone - the former being potentially worse? (No hate to LOTR fans, of course!)

Most mod tools and bots rely on API access and are just as affected by this change as third-party Reddit clients.

After the outrage started, Reddit has stated that they will make exceptions for mod tools and accessibility apps, but it requires manual approval, and a number are likely to be declined in spite of it. Particularly when considering that a lot of moderators made use of mod tools which were contained within these third-party clients that are shutting down, and are likely not going to be spun off into separate tools.

Yeah many people don't really realize just how bad it is when moderators leave, especially for a platform like Reddit where the mods are unpaid volunteers. On a different platform where they pay moderators they could just hire new ones, but with Reddit currently hemorrhaging money they are very much not going to be able to hire brand new moderators for every mainline sub.

Plus you have to account for the fact that while there are people who might be able to take their place now that number will quickly diminish I say become swamped with work and lack the proper tools to do decent moderation. It does not bode well for Reddit's future.

Honestly I'm just waiting to see if short story communities move over. I liked to pass the time reading things like nosleep stories, and if those communities move over here I'll delete Boost and only use Lemmy, but so far I haven't seen much.

Same boat, and I made a decent commission off writing short pieces for people off Reddit. Hoping a similar community pops up here eventually

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I’m so glad to not see ads all over the place. I’m also glad to not see low-level top comments; so far the conversations have been of higher quality, they’re more thought-out. I haven’t been back to Reddit since Monday, and although it’s been a learning curve and a little tough without the amount of content, I’m enjoying lemmy quite a bit.

I'm in the same club as you...better quality content here as I'm figuring out Lemmy and Jerboa too. No more Reddit

I was able to make an account on here finally, I'm never going back now! Woohoo! Gonna go use one of those reddit data deletion tools this afternoon.

This was me. I spent an inordinant amount of time just trying to get an account going. I won't be back to Reddit.

Do you have a link to such a tool? I'd love to get rid of all my contributions to reddit.

https://shreddit.com/

Makes the whole deal crazy simple. Great app. Afterwards just delete your account since the tab is already open. Got 2 accounts zeroed and deleted earlier. They run as background jobs so once you hit go, you can shutdown your computer and it'll run to completion.

Do you have such a tool? What does it do?

I’ve two accounts: 1 at 14 years and the other at 8. I’d love to be able to remove my presence from that website.

Shreddit deletes your comments but you still have to go delete your account

Hmm…

I only find "Shreddit" as an Android app. Is that what you're referring to? Also thanks for the information!

TBH i didn't know there's something like lemmy in the fediverse before reddit did what they did to shut down subreddits.

But I'm really glad that they did this and that I found lemmy because of it. The whole tech behind it and the decentralization is very fascinating and I'm happy that I can see how it all will evolve over time, hopefully keeping the imo very good and positive course. :)

Maybe I'll look at reddit every now and then, but at least my intention is to stay here and use lemmy more often than reddit. ^-^

Same. Already moderating here, but I doesn't even have to, really, because everyone is nice for now

I think I'll comment here but mainly lurk there at times. It's still good if I'm looking for something that has to do with my hobbies, unless this booms than that will change things.

Honestly there's nothing reddit offered me that I wasn't already finding on my own. Maybe I'm in the minority but I would rarely search reddit specifically for info as it often got me unanswered threads or nothing specific to my situation or need. I usually figure out most of my own stuff so my needs are very specific.

Yep. I have no ties to Reddit, other than the name. Lemmy has proven to fill the void the last few days, so this is where I'm staying.

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My notes:

  • As expected, a blackout with a set end date is seen as toothless by Reddit leadership
  • I hate when companies refer to their employees with some "cute" nickname, like "Snoos"
  • He expects some Reddit users to actually resort to physical violence, painting them as the irrational bad guys in this whole situation?

He expects some Reddit users to actually resort to physical violence, painting them as the irrational bad guys in this whole situation?

Spez has played the victim the entire time, why change tack now?

People are upset, is it me that's out of touch? No, it's the redditors who are wrong.

He is delusional or triying to scare the poor Snoos. If anyone is angry about this and looking for a face to punch they have a clear target and is not some dude with a reddit t-shirt.

They are looking for a suit, no tie, popped up collar wearing, venture capital dudebro looking, jailbait ex-moderating, failure of a CEO.

Snoo is so cringe

What is a snoo?

Snoo is the reddit mascot (lil alien with an antenna), and I guess reddit corporate refers to its employees as Snoos, which is so cringeworthy.

If my company referred to us as anything but “team members” I’d die on the spot.

"Team member" implies equality. I prefer the term "employee"

I get called BUM, for bargaining unit member. It is better than most alternatives.

I can't even imagine a company calling me a "Snoo". Imagine explaining that to your family or friends.

It's the name of the reddit alien logo. It's also the name they call the employees apparently.

Oh wow, reading it summarized in your three points instantly reminded me of the behaviour of an emotional abuser. The last one specially hits hard, classic bully telling it's actually the bullied one.

Remember he has a doomsday bunker, he's totally loving the roleplay of someone upon whom the masses will turn.

Tbf, those irrational people do definitely exist. Not that they represent the majority or anything, but even one isolated attack would be a big problem (obviously), so I agree it's best to be on the safe side there.

Yup. He made the mods and users the bad guys and he is just trying to be the good guy. He's a dick, probably a narcissist, too. He's the victim, blah blah blah.

Those little Snoos. That company is like a family. A bunch of rockstars. How could those evil mods and users do this to them?!

He has to create a good guy/bad guy or us/them situation to rally the troops. Following Trump101.

The last one is wild

On top of the presumption that any of them would even want to wear Reddit SWAG right now

Everyone loves corporate merch!

I shit you not, small corpo I work at actually set up an internal e-shop where employees can buy merch. And somehow no employees were reported dying of laughter and there were even a few positive emoji reactions on slack.

Ridiculous. As an employee, if you want me to wear the company's logo, you better give me that shit for free. Then I might wear it.

Those emoji reactions came from the boot lickers trying to ingratiate themselves for a promotion by demonstrating how much they love the brand and the vision and the culture of the company.

I did sales for awhile, this is probably correct. You would be in multiple whatsapp groups and it was very important you reacted to things with happy emojis if you wanted to get anywhere.

Those are typically also the least helpful people that will want your help for anything, but will throw anyone under the bus to look better.

I work for a call center, has centers all over the world...they have a "store" where you can spend "<company name> points" (the fake currency they made)...I was given 100 points so I went to the store to see what I could buy....

Among a lot of things I cannot remember what they all were but the only thing I could afford with the 100 points was a damn pair of flip flops wit the company logo on them.

I suspect that the fact that he had to call out that they are not seeing any significant revenue impact probably means that they actually are seeing an impact.

Yeah, there's no way they aren't seeing an impact of our actions between people canceling Premium and reduced ad impressions because of the private subs.

He's projecting confidence because he wants us to think we're not having any effect on them and come back.

The memo as a whole is encouraging employees to keep working and not lose faith or get scared; that part is telling them that they're not going to get laid off due to declining revenues.

Of course it's all BS, businesses can't predict the future, but I'd agree that advertisers and subscribers didn't suddenly cancel en masse. It'll take more action to see effects there.

And they already laid off some employees recently, it could probably re happen soon.

significant

So far

Those are some interesting qualifiers. It's only been 2 days so maybe that's why it's not "significant" yet.

I don't think it's a lie, but it highlights that revenue is all they're thinking about.

Hasn't he also stated Reddit is not generating a profit? Which has got to be another obvious lie, seeing as how long they've operated and how massive their site is.

Nah that is most likely very true. If they go public that would also be quite obvious as they have to release all their financials. A lot of giant organizations are not/were not making money for a long time, including Snapchat, Twitter, Uber, etc.

There is a huge cost to running these things.

When I moved to Mastodon, I stopped caring about the Twitter dumpster fire. It was great.

I am trying to do the same with Lemmy, to forget about Reddit. It's gone. We are here now.

So far I'm not disappointed moving to lemmy. The only thing I haven't found yet is an equivalence to oddly satisfying but I'm sure it'll pop up someday

Heck just post something oddly satisfying doesn't even need to be anywhere specific. I browse all. I never really stick to subscribed.

I don't know where to find them and honestly don't want to. I appreciate the work that others did to post and will wait till that happens. If I see one I'll start a sub but till then I wait : P

In one of the lifeboats, it’s hard not to look back at the Titanic

That's a noble sentiment but in the words of Dave Chappelle "I'm petty and my family is to."

Am I the only one bothered by him referring to people as "Snoos"? It's so cringy.

As non native speaker - what does it mean?

I believe Snoo is what the reddit mascot is called.

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Looking at this thread in r/technology, it sure looks like most of the newer Redditors were just pissed by the blackout and don’t care about Reddit’s changes. That suggests to me that Reddit is beyond saving.

Why bother having competent and informed users when you can have people who just want to wolf down whatever is on their frontpage? /s

Dave Chappell cocaine meme: Y’all got any more of them… shitposts?

The way people bow and worship at the feet of billion dollar companies will never cease to amaze me.

A long time ago, back when getting a Gmail address required an invite, I was a big Google fan. They were doing some awesome stuff, and i didn't know much online privacy.

As I got older, and I started learning stuff, I became less and less of a Google fan, and now I avoid them and advocate for others to do so as well.

The abusive relationship people have with megacorps is just... SMH.

As someone who joined Reddit nearly 15 years ago, I can tell you it's been that way basically forever. The new people by and large never care about the changes that make the site worse. They never have. I'm sure there were even changes in the few years of its existence before I found it that I didn't care about when I got there.

Honestly I've been slowly changing my mindset from "I hope everyone on Reddit comes to Lemmy and Reddit shuts down". Because I realized what's more important is that I'M happy -and the community on Lemmy is already great. Let sleeping dogs lie. Even if reddit sticks around and succeeds that's great bc I've found my people.

Tbf the people that are currently using reddit( and responding) probably care less than the people that actually left/boycotting it ( and they wouldnt be there to voice their opinions)

I hope that’s true. But on the other hand, these zombified “endless summer” guys are exactly who we don’t want to make the jump to lemmy, right?

I also read lots of comments saying that the official app works so don't we share feedbacks to the official team and improve it instead. They never get it. We want to make our own choices of which app to use. Not to be forced to use the only app the official approves!

I'm glad the statement is quite arrogant. They will feel it and it will hurt. This is the first wave of the great Rexxodus.

We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far

As long as this is true zero fucks will be given.

This pains me as someone who worked in a customer-facing role at a software company. You're at work getting your ass kicked and leadership just shrugs and says it's ok because we're still making money.

As long as this is true zero fucks will be given.

  1. such things take time, i doubt that many of their clients are making orders and paying on 24h cycle.

  2. even if they did feel some impact, it would be utterly stupid to publicly admit that. (almost as stupid as announcing strike with an end-date, effectively telling the other party "all you have to do is to ignore us for 48 hours".)

You’re at work getting your ass kicked and leadership just shrugs and says it’s ok because we’re still making money.

In my case I was the software developer trying to make the best tool for our users only for management to force us to add more data collection and ways to squeeze a bit more money out of our customers. Profits went up, so it was "a success" and more was planned.

Now I work for the government, trying to make things better for citizens instead of share holders. Feels alot better.

Sorry for replying with a rant; it forced itself out of me.

If thousands of subs went dark for two days and they see no revenue impact, they must really not have any revenue.

Paying advertisers would run away from this crap screaming.

You’re at work getting your ass kicked and leadership just shrugs and says it’s ok because we’re still making money.

Exactly why I left my customer service job. Now that company is struggling because - surprise - customer service is gone to shit.

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A lot of this just feels like CEO talk. Obviously they do not want to back down but if enough big subs stay off then they might have to change course. I'm worried about the people who are addicted to reddit.

This shows they aren't gonna back down. If big subreddit s stay blacked out, the mod teams will be replaced. Spez seems super salty that Apollo and others have been able to turn a profit, but after all this time he still hasn't been able to make reddit money.

He hasn't been able to make reddit money because he's trying to turn a great platform into a chimera made out of the worst features of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok

If the app wasn’t so trashy people would be happy to pay them money directly. Nearly everyone on Apollo pays to use it

"The most important things right now are to stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward" How can people write shit like that and not realize that look like a knob

Well they say that:

"As of Wednesday morning, more than 6,000 subreddits remained inaccessible and in private mode after what began as a two-day voluntary shutdown. The blackout includes popular forums such as r/aww, r/videos and r/music, each of which claims more than 25 million subscribers on the platform. "

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/14/tech/reddit-blackout/index.html

"We absolutely must ship what we said we would."

Oh wow he's actually scared

He's scared of whoever he is shipping to, not reddit users.

True, but I still want to take it with stride that he's acknowledging there's something to lose. I don't think the ship can be necessarily saved (because of the all powerful shareholder), and that sucks. But I am feeling a small amount of schadenfreude for the situation.

Its better we stop depending on the single points of failure anyway. The psychopaths will always do whatever they want in the name of the shareholder - even when its not true.

That little quip at the end implying that they could be targeted in public over this, with the intention to have journalists write as if we are flying off the handle.

This isn't Rick & Morty's szechuan sauce crowd, these are the moderators and content creators of the website. We are peacefully protesting his poor conduct.

The worst that's happened is that he's had some memes made about him and himself alone.

I would love to watch reddit crash and burn, and for smeg-spez to get fired. But I'm mentally prepared for them to linger on for years and maybe even be profitable as they hang on to the countless dumb-dumbs who just don't know anything more than mindlessly scrolling through endless ads.

Meanwhile, the rest of us can still move on and enjoy what we're building to replace reddit in our daily routine, even if we can't make reddit itself go away like it should.

Unfortunately from what I've seen on big gaming subs is that enough users simply don't care. Take a look at /r/rocketleague for example. Mods made a post saying they can't permanently black out the sub due to it being owned by psyonix and the top comment on that thread has hundreds of up votes and comments saying they don't care about the API changes. It's really that mentality of "I don't care unless I'm personally affected" is why we're in this mess to begin with!

The sad thing is they are personally affected, they're just too damn ignorant to know. Even worse, they cling to their ignorance, which is frankly the worst sin a human being can commit.

I wonder how many of them use a 3rd party app and just don't understand what's about to happen. Or they use a 3rd party app and don't even realize it's 3rd party because they installed it ages ago from the phone store and to them it's just "reddit".

And some of them of course, use the horrible default app and are OK with it.

Honestly at this point, if those folks get stuck in the internet void...I don't think it's a big loss.

I think you didn't consider the horrifying third alternative. That they've been using and are used to the default reddit app/experience because that's the norm now

There's reads really passive aggressive. It clearly wasn't intended to actually say anything meaningful to staff but rather something for 1. media that pickup on (won't anyone think of the poor people attacked for wearing Reddit gear in public!), 2. appeasement of potential investors ahead of the IPO (our bottom line is rock solid folks, thousands of subs gone and no impact on profits!) and 3. an unsubtle dig at and gaslighting of people participating in the blackout (fools! This won't last, you'll all come crawling back and this doesn't affect many subs anyway!).

Spez just keeps doubling down on the Streisand Effect. Challenge accepted arsehole.

This makes me irrationally angry... especially the "snoos" part. WTF...

Yeah, that's some corporate dystopia shit right there...

"Death by snoo snoo" 😂

He's the CEO of a company on the verge of an IPO and he uses the rhetoric of a startup located in a garage

Yeah this is why I think the 48 hour time limit is unfortunate. I don't think it's going to have much long term effect, and the only real difference is going dark indefinitely until demands are met or just migrating elsewhere.

Thing is, ultimately people do have a choice as to whether they want to continue using Reddit without third-party apps.
I agree that regardless of any blackouts, Reddit will be fine in the end - most people simply don't mind using a Facebook-ified version of Reddit, and that's fine.

My hope isn't that Reddit will fall, it's that alternatives (like Lemmy) will rise, for those of us that do care about these issues.

There is a list of 300+ subs that are staying dark indefinitely. Some have tens of millions of subs. I expect that list will grow as more of this stuff comes out.

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.

meaning: the users are our enemy and they hate us....

No Steve, we just hate management, that's who better not wear reddit gear in public... Not the rank and file who don't make the braindead decisions that kill platforms.

I thought I was the only one thinking he is painting a clear image of the enemy. Together we will get through what they have done!

Exactly. He's creating a "common enemy". But legit we're all here sitting on our bums, closing our subs and moving to lemmy (or equivalence)

the "or equivalence" got me now. Is there something? I'm curious, I love competition, so I want to give it a try

Sorry I didn't keep that info in my head. I read a few from the reddark discord, went to the first one and was happy.

My best guess is to do a search for:

federated community

Or:

Communities like lemmy

Third idea to search:

federated community -lemmy

The - removes the results from the search that match lemmy

They want people to think the blackout etc. is not done by reasonable people, but by evil aggressive people.

Wherever Aaron is, I hope he can't see this.

I like to think he'd be promoting the Fediverse. Closer to the ideal of free speech than a centralized service.

Honestly, whatever Reddit does at this point doesn't matter. Lemmy works decently and for all else, why not try using something different? The internet is a bigger place than it seems. I prefer touching grass to wasting any more time thinking about Reddit.

I'm over the internet being Reddit Twitter Facebook YouTube. Since avoiding Reddit, deleting Facebook and hating twitter I'm actually visiting websites again.

Remember when there were alternatives to YouTube?

ya im kinda there with you

lemmy may be inconvenient or kinda weird imo, but who cares. reddit is lame with them shutting down RiF so fuck em, i could do with less CoNtEnT i guess.

plus it is kinda fun to figure it out. havent had something like this on the net in a while for myself. forgot that sometimes being a netizen is work

I sure hope some subreddits to go private indefinitely this 30th, just to shut up this imbecile.

No matter what this guy says or does, millions have switched to Lemmy not only is it like reddit, its better, its what reddit used to be.

Now, all will calm down for reddit but the boat started to leak and many will not go back. Just like many didn't go back to twitter. We will see a slow and steady increase of fediverse activity.

This is truly the web3 we all deserved.

Not to put a damper on, but it's more like 50k who started posting on lemmy in the past week for a total of 110k. We basically doubled the user count, but still are an order of magnitude away from 1 million.

It's 60k actually

Edit: 60k people joined, not total amount

You’re looking at lagged statistics, it’s over 112k now.

https://the-federation.info/platform/73

3 days ago it was 8k new users a day, then 10k and in the last 24 hours 20k new users have signed up to Lemmy.

Hoping to see the acceptance and acceleration of Lemmy continue.

Well, maybe the 1000000 contained a bit of marketing but the point is that many of the people discussing this here probably didn't know Lemmy existed 3 weeks ago and that number will only increase. There is nothing that can stop the fediverse from eventually overtaking everything else as its not a single entity. Also, growth may not be exclusive either, its not required for reddit to fail so that fedi can succeed. They can coexist.

This is truly the web3 we all deserved.

I hate that web3 was taken by the crypto idiots. Federation makes so much more sense as "web3"

not only is it like reddit, its better

Enh…

Yeah I think Lemmy still has a lot of wrinkles to iron out before we can even say "close to", but hey, everything's gotta start somewhere. Here's hoping.

"be mindful of wearing Reddit gear"??? this doesn't feel like this was said in good faith at ALL.

Judging by other high-profile people who do something that people don't like, he's probably getting a fair amount of death threats so is feeling the hostility. Not sure why he thinks the average employee would be targeted though.

I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public.

Lol, good ole fearmongering. Also,

The only long term solution is improving our product

Loading shit with ads is hardly improving it. I mean it will make you more money, and thats all that matters under this shitty system of ours, but thats still not improving.

In conversation with a few others? At the prices they were talking about no one will use it. It was something like hundreds of dollars per year per user to reddit.

They are happy to make concessions for the 3PAs that are providing something they need and can't replace right now. But be certain that those 3PAs will be killed off the very moment they're no longer needed.

Absolutely. This is a power grab and nothing more. They will come for those apps next.

I was trying to stress the importance of this to a friend but he doesn't mind using the official Reddit app. I told him that they're coming for old reddit.com next and he got quiet. It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when.

I thought the others had managed to stay in the free tier if API usage or something

Will they be able to stay in the free tier if they absorb users migrating from Apollo, Sync, RIF, etc.?

Reddit is going to be a ghost town in a few months at this rate. If they wanted to push the website and app so hard, why not just make using a client a premium feature and charge for it? Give the users the option. Instead they had to go the worst route possible with this.

I wish I could share your confidence, but it's surprising how eager the average person is to let garbage be shoved down their throat before they're willing to change their habits. Just look at twitter, a complete dumpster fire that still has a huge amount of traffic. I'm willing to bet the large majority of those who simply browse reddit doesn't really care about the whole API shitshow, hell they were probably already using the official app in the first place.

Well he threw us the gauntlet. Let's pick it up.

Imagine trying to fight the internet...

I'll just call them noisy but be dismissive of their opinion and the protest. Surely, that will calm them down.

this too shall pass

I believe there's going to be a moderator exodus. The flippancy with which Steve has handled this, and how he responded here, is going to stick in the craws of their enormous unpaid workforce. These are the people who have been there a decade plus, have seen the ebbs and flows, and are probably no longer willing to be unpaid servants to their clearly demonstrated monetary interests (at the expense of its users [product]). This was a turning point. They have way bigger problems to address than a 48 hour boycott.

Plenty of them will do that simply because they are currently using 3rd party apps, bots and other tools to moderate and won't be able to do it nearly as efficiently afterwards. The people at Reddit seem to have very weird idea of the value of their userbase, where they just look at the huge lurker mass and somehow completely ignore that without mods and content creators, there isn't anything for them to consume.

The question I've always wondered is... how many mods are already paid? Not by reddit, but by other media companies that pay them specifically to tilt the scales and suppress or promote particular viewpoints. Those people will want to remain part of the community - so supporting the blackout, but also if their paycheck comes from having power on reddit, they will also support reopening.

This whole statement strikes me as tone-deaf. They want to "ship" the product, but the product is just removing accessibility. It literally makes the platform worse.

Not going back to reddit. I'll manage without it.

I notice he says about a thousand when the article cites closer to 8,000 subs going dark. This is probably the closest they’ll get to admitting the protest did anything at all to Reddit.

You know you're doing the right thing when you have to instruct your employees not to wear your brand to avoid confrontation.

Saddens me that while the community could muster a great effort, the short 2 day time limit of the blackout wasn't enough.

I don’t know if I’d take his word at face value. This reads like he’s talking to potential investors, not Reddit’s user base. Of course he’d want to assure them that everything is okay and they should still give him money.

It's an internal message to employees of Reddit. As someone who's been in the corporate world for a long time, I've seen some variation of this message many times. Economic downturn, bad press, low sales, losing expected incoming cash... there are a lot of catalysts for this style of message.

Most messages we're seeing are from users, who want Reddit to crash and burn or just do what the masses want, or whatever. But, on the other side is a bunch of people who may be worried about how this whole thing will affect their livelihood. Even if Reddit stays up another 20 years and not everyone loses their job, what scale will it be? Will Reddit fire some amount of their workforce to make up for lost income? Will I be someone who gets fired?

These are the thoughts that this message is intended to address.

Got it, I didn't realize it was internal. Though they likely also knew it'd get leaked.

As for the workforce, I feel for them, though any business that is highly dependent on unpaid labor is something I personally wouldn't apply to.

In the corp world as well, and I can say with a lot of certainty that spez knew and likely hoped this would be leaked publicly. It was written both with the intention of assuaging current staff and angling their optics for the watching public. My company had a minor recent PR issue and our CEO drafted and sent something very similar.

I don't think a larger timeline would have been accepted as easily, 48hrs was very approachable and will result it many subs continuing after having ripped the bandaid off.

Yep, that's how lots of strikes are organized. Start with the initial demands, give a timeframe, and if unaddressed escalate further

I work on a corporate team and often companies will allow team members to wear anything to work as long as it’s branded. This, employees have an incentive to spend that money to customize their look at work, if that’s important to them. It is to some people.

My company has a code that brings all items down to cost, and I have bought some uniform items that way to mix up what I wear at work.

The company that I work for is a small business with a great local reputation; wearing my company’s logo is a positive for me. Can’t say that would be the case if I worked for Reddit.

That honestly sounded terrible until you said they were selling the work branded attire at cost. I suppose that's not too bad a situation.

All I can say is that for every person voicing their opinion and leaving by making a scene, there are many more of us just silently deleting our comments and posts and just disappearing from reddit. Those are the ones reddit should be concerned about.

Agreed, I've just stopped logging in. I'm not even going to bother deleting posts but I've moved. There's no hope I'm gonna start using the official Reddit app.

I do miss a few subreddits but Lemmy has plenty to keep me busy during my toilet breaks.

What are those subreddits? Maybe there should be a "lemmy community wishlist" community for reddfugees to see about getting conversations rolling. I know I have a few

That's what I did. Deleted all of my 8 years or so of posts and left the account there. Won't delete it yet but not really using it anymore. This fediverse thing is pretty cool.

Between this and the fact that r/AdviceAnimals is apparently back with Reddit moderators, I think Reddit will go on. They own everything and can re-open every subreddit whenever they want. Many of the more technical/informed Reddit users will remain absent from the site but the bulk of casual users will likely remain. Whether the content that's left will satisfy them remains to be seen.

I'm OK with that. I don't need a "forum" with 500 mio users. I need one with 100k. That is enough users to get subject matter experts from most fields and lively discussions on most topics.

When the userbase grows too much it just gets crowded and only the washed popular bullshit gets through.

Agreed. Any big migration won’t be felt until looking five years in retrospect.

I dont know if we have to wait that long. We have seen how a shake-up in some mod structures has changed the quality of a subreddit. Imagine that over multiple big subreddits. It could go really fast within a year.

Seems like putting out a public statement downplaying the situation like this is just going to encourage further protest.

Edit: just realized it was addressed to employees, but he had to know it would become public.

I've joined Mastodon after the twitter "melt down" and I have not gone back. It's quite good and feels like the BBS days of yore.

And I will stay here as well (lemmy) hoping to get the "reddit feel" back again.

As a fellow Reddit transfer, so far it feels like it has! There’s a couple of subs that where quite important to me so I’m hoping I can track them down on here, or get them up and going!

I hope this response further pisses off the subs who decided to do a fixed time blackout. The user base cannot be taken for granted. Reddit is only good as the content and the creators along with the mods.

Assholes, but i guess redditors deserve that much. They are doing the same job as many govs do and ppl are just getting their asses fcked.

Hey! I'm keeping this as it's sharing knowledge with new users from Reddit. However, in future please find another community to post this on, because it is not related to the lemmy.world instance specifically.

There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen.

your just noise.

I don't think anyone would care about someone wearing reddit gear but who the hell was doing that in the first place?

Loads of (but not only) tech companies give their employees stuff like umbrellas, backpacks, water bottles where sure you could buy your own but really why bother when you've been given something for free, usually that's pretty good quality, that works.

Sometimes you'll also get actually good clothes that are way beyond "free tshirt" quality as well, eg. I did a placement at a wind turbine manufacturer where all the permanent employees got really nice waterproof gear that was better than the stuff I have as someone who goes hiking fairly regularly, but I don't think that's so much of a tech company thing as probably about 75% of the people working at that company are expected to be outside in the rain on a windfarm, which is exposed to the elements by design, at least once in their career. They didn't have to provide such good kit and certainly not to people working in HR, IT etc. but they did anyway.

Here's the source article from The Verge

"In an internal memo sent Monday afternoon to Reddit staff, CEO Steve Huffman addressed the recent blowback directed at the company, telling employees to block out the “noise” and that the ongoing blackout of thousands of subreddits will eventually pass.

The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge, is in response to popular subreddits going dark this week in protest of the company’s increased API pricing for third-party apps. Some of the most popular Reddit clients say the bill for keeping their apps up and running could cost them millions of dollars a year. More than 8,000 Reddit communities have gone dark in protest, and while many plan to open up again on Wednesday, some have said they’ll stay private indefinitely until Reddit makes changes..."

The Meta Twitter-clone is allegedly going to have ActivityPub connectivity. That may be just the tip of the iceberg.

I just hope Meta doesn't get it's claws into activitypub at the roots. The whole point of this thing is to avoid corporate domination and I don't want them to turn it into a charade.

New guy here: What’s “activitypub”? Thanks in advance awesome human!

it's a standardized protocol for creating decentralized social networks. basically if everybody who wanted to create a social network agreed to use activitypub, they'd all be able to talk to each other, just like anyone can send email to anyone else, even if they aren't on the same email server.

this is why i'm against bluesky even though a lot of my friends are on it... it's just another walled off single-entity-controlled property. didn't we learn anything from twitter and now reddit!?

Thanks for the information! And I agree that distributed seems to be the best way forward…

My understanding of it is that its the software that federated services use to communicate with each other. Now, I don't know if i'm even right so take that with a grain of salt, i'm sure eventually someone 1 level higher than me on the techie tier list will give a more thorough answer.

I don’t think its a bad thing tbh as long as it is in the fediverse. Think of it as email. Google, Microsoft and many others are in the game but email stays the same

Just gotta watch out for the old EEE tactics Microsoft has pulled in the past, if they manage to stuff content into ActivityPub posts against the spec which encourage people to move to their "compatible" service and making the normal apps seem broken. Google does the same thing with Chrome features against web standards set by the W3C.

Yeah, It could be really "dangerous" for the Fediverse, I dread the moment when Facebook or another corp will start to fuck with it.

"Blank? Blank?! You're not looking at the big picture!"

He has a point with keep going forward. The reaction of reddit admins is what makes the change easy for me. I can waste my time here.