Hi Snoos,
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.
Both pretending to give a shit about his employees and painting protesters as potentially violent people.
Fuck you spez, the only person deserving of a gut punch is you not your employees.
His persecution fetish is showing
he is a doomsday prepper after all...
That number ended up being more than 8000 and there are still more than 7000 in private or restricted mode. Although they are starting to come back online now.
He's right though - it will pass. The question is, will Reddit be the same once it does pass? Will enough moderators and contributors leave to reduce the quality of the content?
Personally, I don't really care anymore. I'm not going back if I can't use a third party app and I haven't had a problem using Lemmy for the past two days instead. I just need to find the best communities for me which will take time but I'm sure that it'll be a good replacement.
I’m at a point where even if I could use third party apps again I wouldn’t return to Reddit. Don’t want to support a guy like spez.
I've discovered Lemmy, which I like a lot, so I wouldn't return to reddit either.
Although I do miss the large communities, but oh well, hopefully more people will jump ship towards the fediverse.
Of the 8,828 participating, 7116 are still currently dark according to: https://reddark.untone.uk/
I've been using that website to track for the past few days and it has been accurate. It has links and status of every subreddit. You can click on the link to easily confirm the status is accurate.
6749 now, so the number is definitely going down. Hopefully some of the big fish still hold firm.
Fucking love the inginuity that people have for solutions and workarounds like this. I'd never thought to kick up a website like that to monitor the subreddits participating. This is so well made too!
The right thing to do would be for the subreddits that went dark to go permanently private on June 30th. The two day protest can be framed as a warning.
If this doesn’t happen there will not be any changes. The Reddit leadership treated the protest as simply something they would need to “get through” before things return to normal.
The modcoord sub that organised the initial blackout are encouraging subs to remain dark in response to this. It seems like a lot of subs are going to remain dark.
If a sub doesn't want to go dark (stopdrinking was given as a community support example), then a touch-grass-tuesday is recommended to close the sub every Tuesday as an ongoing reminder.
Seems like Reddit has taken the protest as "a bit of noise, but business as usual soon". So, time to kick it up a notch
is there a discord where things are being organised?
Opened infinity and went to r/modcoord to find info on how they coordinate with each other but I found nothing
Edit: bruh, I'm blind, I missed this info when checking their subreddit description:
Edit2: I can't send screenshot so there's text version:
Discord - you can request access by sending us a modmail from your own subreddit's modmail (for mods of subreddits participating in the blackout)
That's basically every major corporate strategy this day and age -- wait 6 months everyone will forget. They keep seeing it happen again and again, so of course they're getting bolder and bolder. We the public need to quit being pushovers. Where we spend our time energy and money is a far more valuable vote than the one at the ballot box. We will die from our own conveniences.
I don't know if Lemmy is the solution, but it certainly feels like the right direction to me.
Hell, even if people move back to reddit, I've made the choice to stay on Lemmy, and give a small community everything I've got.
This guy is an asshole, but unfortunately he is right. A 48 hour "protest" isn't going to solve anything, either go indefinite or don't bother. If almost everyone comes back it just means they won. This could the time for change, but it probably won't be.
It did have an effect. Remember the context: Reddit is trying to look 📈 big and growing now, because they will start selling Reddit shares. If no visible protest, buyers would just see the reality that Spez is showing them like "ad revenue remains stable" and "app adoption is skyrocketing!"
Even if temporary, that amount of outage made the news, which means potential buyers get to see a bit of dirty underwear sticking out of Spez's drawer. Business Insider reports on "Reddit's falling IPO valuation" already.
It is costing them, which may cause change. Clearly too little too late for too many people, but hey at least the assholes lost money.
Good.
The good part here is that they're losing money, but I doubt it'll be enough for anything more than a sop. Spez the asshole seems pretty firm on his decisions, and people are eventually going to come back. Like Louis Rossman said, this is just showing them is that no matter how bad they treat their users, they'll always be back in 2 days max, and that's what counts in the end
I also think it had an effect but won't be immediately visible. Just look at Lemmy. It grew exponentially. There's people here now. And reddit has reached tipping point, so from now on it will slowly go downhill, just like it happened with so many other behemoth platforms. It doesn't happen overnight. It's just that slowly but surely creators will keep migrating and that's all that matters
I sincerely hope so
I agree, but I don't think you need to go whole hog on the first round. Makes you seem more amicable to go dark for two days then see what the company does.
As we can see they apparently need to ramp it up to get it into their heads that people are not happy
As long as people are actually willing to go back on strike if nothing changes then yes, you're right. But I have my sincere doubts about it.
I had forgotten how nauseating corporate doublespeak can be. This can't be for employees. I cannot fathom how any competent professional would actually this seriously.
Imagine unironnically calling your employees Snoos
I think every big-ish company has pet names for employees. It might be a requirement to IPO.
"we have not seen any significant revenue impact so far" - coming from a guy who is known to edit users comments about him to make criticism disappear and just days ago was caught lying to people about the Apollo dev . And when Spez got called out for it, he wasn't even man enough to apologize. If this lying weasel says the sun is shining, I take my umbrella out.
It's only two days, and their revenue mostly come from ads that most likely paid based on contract. So I also don't think it will affect their revenue
Yeah lots of people apparently haven’t been in a tech company with the CEO saying ‘everything’s fine’ only to get hit with layoffs shortly either, even if his word was worth more than the square root of fuck-all which we know it’s not he’d be obliged to lie if ad revenue was through the floor.
Also he’s blundered pretty badly but he’s not a moron, that memo was inevitably going to leak and it’s classic strikebreaking tactics to go over the heads of the ‘union reps’ and try to get the ‘workers’ (not sure what the terminology is when nobody’s actually a paid employee) to fight among each other.
Spez (Verb): to ruin something out of a combination of ignorance and malice
"I'm going to completely spez this place."
Yep, that's a new verb, for sure
Someone should send a box of Lemmy t-shirts to Reddit HQ. For their protection.
Then why do you only do the opposite?
That’s only true when you use a generally accepted definition of the word “improving.”
When you use the capitalist robber baron definition, he’s spot on!
Destroying usability, improving profitability!
A little off-topic, but who calls their employees 'snoos'? Am I missing some context here?
The reddit mascot is named Snoo. It’s still off-putting in this context.
That explains, but yeah, still off-putting :')
It has an Oompa-Loompa vibe to it
Yeah, no kidding :’) Guess we have to wait for spez to sprinkle golden wrappers across the platform to find users to pick the new CEO from
Snoo is the name of the reddit alien mascot
Thanks! :)
Twitter people pre-musk call each other...........Tweebs.....
It feels manipulative to paint this whole thing as if there is a violence risk to reddit employees. Spez is seeing hate because of his direct actions and he is, IMHO, deserving of a lot of the vitriol. Also, this is clearly a management move, not a decision by employees. Lastly, reddit gear exists for non reddit employees, I've seen meetups with users in reddit shirts. I think that comment was a dog whistle to playing the victim under the guise of being a nice guy to his employees, when his direct action is causing the problem.
Just need an Apollo for Lemmy and I can move away
https://github.com/derivator/tafkars/tree/main/tafkars-lemmy This'll do it!
Hey that's awesome! Lemmy/Reddit shim
Unfortunately, Christian effectively vetoed Apollo for Lemmy, but there is an iOS app in active development: Mlem. The team seems passionate and last I heard there are about 8K testers hammering away at the app. You can get Mlem via TestFlight.
I am one of the testers! Its pretty damn good so far, and I can't wait for more features to come out.
Maybe there will be a flutter app sometime and I will be able to contribute code to it.
Unfortunately, Christian effectively vetoed Apollo for Reddit, but the Mlem team seem passionate, and there are about 8K testers for the app, which you can get through TestFlight.
his arrogance makes it easier for me to stay off the platform for good
Fuck u/Spez
Fuck u/spez
Reddit employees will be able to easily know that more than 1000 subs went dark. They’re also probably well aware about how ad revenue works on the platform.
This message wasn’t really aimed at the employees. It was aimed at the MBAs and bankers who are preparing the IPO. It was meant for investors to say “everything is fine and this is normal…”
The public offering will be a disaster, hopefully. I don't see how investors aren't questioning Spez's leadership after handling this is the worst way possible. Could of been straight or worked with the third party developers to integrate ads and premium. Instead he jacks up API rates to close apps like a coward instead of just telling it how it is. Mindblowly terrible leadership.
For sure, I also can’t believe reddit has much intrinsic value when it’s botted/astroturfed to oblivion… I think that tech savvy investors are aware of these issues and may just end up shorting the stock. No matter what someone’s making money off of this.
The 'We have not seen any significant revenue impact" might have something to do with investors not questioning anything. Hell for all I know the API change might have been their idea in the form of "Hey Elon started to charge of the api and nothing burned to the ground. Why don't we try".
They might want to check again...
ftfy spez
To be fair, if reddit employees are put in any danger by this debacle that will say far more about redditors themselves than spez. Hell it might say enough that he is concerned enough to forewarn employees.
Yeah, I highly doubt anyone's gonna get punched in the face or shanked over this. Maybe some heckling out in public at most. I'm guessing anyone who is even remotely upset about this stuff is either too wise or too timid to resort to actual violence
Damn, makes me wish we had reddit markup lol.
Is reddit markup patented? If not someone could create a fork/mod of lemmy with this feature.
It's not, it's a format called markdown. Several apps have support for it already, but it's not foundational to Lemmy. The UI services just have to render it (it's just text with characters denoting format)
I know what markdown is my guy. Are you sure it's standard markdown? I was under the impression that reddit had their own dialect but I could be wrong.
Most of it is pretty standard. Spoiler tags and a few other addendums is there but all within the flavoured markdown spectrum.
Tbh, he's not wrong. Subs are coming back up, so why would he have done something
if he alienates the most prolific people, it won't matter much if the subs come back
That and Lemmy platform let them bypass crappy moderators by curating their own community however they want.
Absolutely. He also pushed a lot of people over the edge (including me). I know at least 2 people who quit Reddit, and for at least me and one of them, it's permanent.
They definitely are loosing users with this move, even if the subreddits come back.
So sad to see that ALL the third-party app devs aren't backing up about this and goes dark too.
@chocolatine wow, they really seem concerned about it.
I wouldn't take it as face value, it reads more like a deliberate leak to the press, than an actual email to employees.
Not that warming people not to identify themselves as Reddit employees isn't a sensible message, emotions are high and it only takes one crazy person.
@flibbertigibbet it does seem to be a pretty legitimate warning tho. I mean, you wouldn't want wearing a visible Reddit T-shirt or something right now.
Exactly. Hopefully he has actually said that to his people and not just leaked it to the press.
That email seems more thought out than anything he has said to the public...