Nah I think it’s clear he wanted it to leak. He’s just an egomaniac who thinks he’s actually a good leader. That section of the memo was for investor confidence. (It’ll pass, no revenue effect so far, etc.) The other part about warning employees not to wear Reddit gear in public for fear of violence was meant for the press and for the uninformed, to try to garner sympathy and paint the protestors as bad actors.
Obvious tactic, paint the other side as violent and you’ll get sympathy. Won’t someone please think of the corporation.
Make no mistake, spez would love to see someone in a reddit tshirt beat up on the street. He’d be able to plaster that everywhere he could showing how sad his side is
It’s working, too. The Forbes article which I saw posted either here or on Kbin didn’t even push back on Huffman’s claim that traffic from LLMs was the reason for the price hike, and I haven’t seen any big publication use the audio or transcripts showing a slam-dunk case of slander (or libel, whichever one applies to text) against the Apollo developer.
The other part about warning employees not to wear Reddit gear in public for fear of violence was meant for the press and for the uninformed, to try to garner sympathy and paint the protestors as bad actors.
Glad people aren’t blind to this obvious ploy. When LGBT violence is at an all time high I don’t think you need to be worried about wearing a reddit shirt.
Unfortunately, plenty of people are blind to it. While a large chunk of Reddit’s users and communities are offline in protest, there is a sizable “anti-blackout” sentiment growing among the newer users there who weren’t paying attention until now. They don’t know why their subreddits went dark or why users are upset, but they’re quick to direct their anger towards “powertripping mods” instead of the company leadership and policies that incited all of this. It’s a very “don’t care, got mine” mindset by people who have a very minimal understanding of the issue.
That’s why I’m not sure that letter was intentionally leaked. He said all the wrong things for de-escalating this situation, he just added more fuel to the fire.
I think Spez has already written off the users who were upset by all of the controversy. His new strategy is to try to alienate them from the average user/lurker of Reddit so that they don’t become sympathetic.
The fact that the memo ends with a disingenuous assertion that Redditors who are upset by these changes are violently dangerous is a thinly-veiled attempt to defame and dismiss a very legitimate protest.
He expects so because he’s going to have his admin staff de-mod all the rebels, open the subs back up, and ruthlessly ban anyone who says a word about the controversy. The user population that remains will eventually go back to sleep, and all will be well in Reddit-land.
This. There will always be people attracted to power, even power as ultimately meaningless as being a reddit mod. Spez will enlist a new squad of wanna-be petty tyrants.
Threatening to site-wide ban moderators who keep their subreddits dark (on the basis that they’re disrupting the regular function of the website.)
Actually banning them if they follow through on another blackout.
Doing a bit of overtime to moderate /r/redditrequest, on the condition that people don’t request subs that already have more than two million subscribers.
After reading his message I blocked Reddit at DNS level. I wasn’t planning to leave it completely before, but now I’m not planning to unblock it till when u/spez will be there.
I mean, the charitable read is the CEO of the company reassuring the entire company that they’ll be OK. That’s his entire job. Yes, it’s a pretty crappy thing to say but we all weren’t the intended audience. He’s there to rally the troops and keep morale up.
That said, fuck u/spez and I’m way happier over here than there.
This was precisely the wrong thing for him to say if he wanted that to happen
Seriously. Talk about poking the bear, he got me pissed all over again. Never going back to reddit now.
That’s because spazzy spez didn’t think his internal memo would leak.
Nah I think it’s clear he wanted it to leak. He’s just an egomaniac who thinks he’s actually a good leader. That section of the memo was for investor confidence. (It’ll pass, no revenue effect so far, etc.) The other part about warning employees not to wear Reddit gear in public for fear of violence was meant for the press and for the uninformed, to try to garner sympathy and paint the protestors as bad actors.
Obvious tactic, paint the other side as violent and you’ll get sympathy. Won’t someone please think of the corporation.
Make no mistake, spez would love to see someone in a reddit tshirt beat up on the street. He’d be able to plaster that everywhere he could showing how sad his side is
A false flag is a typical right wing move. I can picture spez doing it. He should pick some kid name Aaron just to make it that much more spiteful.
I dislike u/spez as much as the next guy, but man, that’s dark.
I mean there is a lot of money riding on this. I’ve seen people getting killed for 3 grand.
It’s working, too. The Forbes article which I saw posted either here or on Kbin didn’t even push back on Huffman’s claim that traffic from LLMs was the reason for the price hike, and I haven’t seen any big publication use the audio or transcripts showing a slam-dunk case of slander (or libel, whichever one applies to text) against the Apollo developer.
Glad people aren’t blind to this obvious ploy. When LGBT violence is at an all time high I don’t think you need to be worried about wearing a reddit shirt.
Unfortunately, plenty of people are blind to it. While a large chunk of Reddit’s users and communities are offline in protest, there is a sizable “anti-blackout” sentiment growing among the newer users there who weren’t paying attention until now. They don’t know why their subreddits went dark or why users are upset, but they’re quick to direct their anger towards “powertripping mods” instead of the company leadership and policies that incited all of this. It’s a very “don’t care, got mine” mindset by people who have a very minimal understanding of the issue.
That’s why I’m not sure that letter was intentionally leaked. He said all the wrong things for de-escalating this situation, he just added more fuel to the fire.
I think Spez has already written off the users who were upset by all of the controversy. His new strategy is to try to alienate them from the average user/lurker of Reddit so that they don’t become sympathetic.
The fact that the memo ends with a disingenuous assertion that Redditors who are upset by these changes are violently dangerous is a thinly-veiled attempt to defame and dismiss a very legitimate protest.
He expects so because he’s going to have his admin staff de-mod all the rebels, open the subs back up, and ruthlessly ban anyone who says a word about the controversy. The user population that remains will eventually go back to sleep, and all will be well in Reddit-land.
Lol good luck finding new mods that will be any good after pulling a stunt like that. They certainly aren’t going to pay for any either.
The News and Worldnews subreddits prove there are people still willing to lick Spez’s boots.
This. There will always be people attracted to power, even power as ultimately meaningless as being a reddit mod. Spez will enlist a new squad of wanna-be petty tyrants.
They could easily do that by:
They never shut down, along with a few other biggies. TiL just reopened.
After reading his message I blocked Reddit at DNS level. I wasn’t planning to leave it completely before, but now I’m not planning to unblock it till when u/spez will be there.
I mean, the charitable read is the CEO of the company reassuring the entire company that they’ll be OK. That’s his entire job. Yes, it’s a pretty crappy thing to say but we all weren’t the intended audience. He’s there to rally the troops and keep morale up.
That said, fuck u/spez and I’m way happier over here than there.