- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Wow. That is a truly horrendous interview. This saga just keeps getting better. That interview is somehow the absolute worst thing he’s done so far, and he’s pulled a lot of shit.
The only thing more gross than Elon Musk is an Elon Musk imitator. He’s just. so. angry.
For me he’s also stupid, I mean, you’re managing one of the biggest websites in the world and you don’t know accessibility is an international standard?? You need “guidelines” before you know what you should implement in your own official app? (he said this during the AMA) Come on …
A lot of these tech goons are losers in their personal lives and get huge ego strokes being able to control these platforms. Any questioning of their actions is perceived as a direct challenge to them as a person.
The way he setup Pao so he could look like a savior is still the worst thing he has done. Or maybe dealing with CP as a mod of jailbait.
If that just became the worst he’s ever done, I can’t wait another week before he stoops another 10 feet lower.
It’s always important to take a step back and consider that the mega-rich exist in a totally separate reality than the rest of us do. They were raised in a way that they were never forced out of infancy into adulthood like the rest of us were. I hope that eventually we realize that it’s not responsible to allow major institutions to be under the control of adults whose worldview has never progressed since the time they were toddlers.
Hey, sorry y’all had to defederate from our server.
I guess I thought I understood what that meant, but I somehow didn’t quite grasp that we can both still subscribe to third party communities like here at technology@lemmy.ml, and continue to interact indirectly through those channels. So the whole defederation thing matters even less than I thought it did.
Sorry to be off topic but some people at lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works might benefit from seeing this explained.
just an FYI, despite you seeing their comment, they can’t see yours.
Ok I see. And the reason for that is because beehaw has defederated my server, but my server has not defederated beehaw, correct?
Kinda confusing, I guess I thought of federation as a bilateral agreement for some reason, but actually each instance unilaterally decides who to federate with, and its not always reciprocal.
Yes. Think of it like blocking someone. beehaw defederated from sh.itjust.works so they can’t see anything from sh.itjust.works. not comments, not threads, not communities. 100% blocked. whereas the reverse isn’t true. you’re not able to get communities or content from beehaw (because they blocked and aren’t sending it to you), but their comments and threads elsewhere in the fediverse are still shared with you. This thread is hosted on lemmy.ml, so everyone federated with lemmy.ml can see it and interact with it; this is why you can see the beehaw user’s comment.
However, since beehaw defederated with sh.itjust.works, your reply remains unseen by them. sh.itjust.works could mutually defederate/block beehaw and you wouldn’t see the comment. but that’s up to your instance whether you wanna do that or not.
Ok thanks for explaining. I don’t see any reason we would defederate beehaw, they only blocked us because trolls were signing up on our server and spamming toxic stuff to their communities. Totally understandable, and hopefully we can reconnect with them once this platform matures a bit.
I know some people on lemmy.world were discussing defederating with beehaw because they were thinking it was annoying/confusing to have beehaw stuff show up even when beehaw defederated with them (and thus results in situations like this).
personally, I’m of the philosophy that it’s good to federate with as many instances as possible. and that’s how kbin has been doing things so far. other instances may wish to intentionally select which instances they federate to craft particular experiences (like what beehaw did). just depends on what you’re after.
Defederation should honestly be saved for the worst of the worst. What beehaw has done just doesn’t really make much sense. They’re intentionally blocking themselves off from the rest of the fedi, and I don’t think it’s because of trolls/spam. It seems like any comments that don’t fit the culture they want are seen as a reason to defederate.
I mean that’s fine for them, they can stay in their bubble, but it means their users could potentially miss on a lot of content as well; it honestly hurts them more than the rest of us. And the longer they stay that way, the more they’ll suffer, unfortunately.
I feel like even though this is all pretty chaotic in the short term, it feels like it could be a pretty good learning experience for the strengths and weaknesses of federating in general
I love you for explaining this so clearly, I was actually so confused about this I may or may not have misinformed someone else, oops.
Hate to be the one to break it to you, but they can’t see your message. Check it from the beehaw instance yourself.
this helped clarify something for me. which was whether it just nuked the replies to the lemmy.world/sh.itjust.works comment, or only that one comment. seems like it just removes the entire chain.
Ya, it also works that way if you block someone too. Unlike Twitter/Discord which show “you’ve blocked this message”, on here they simply don’t exist, nor do any replies to them.
I’m not really in the mindset of blocking people, but that’s good to know.
Interestingly though, other instances can still see the full chain. I’m on vlemmy.net, and all of the comments are visible to me.
The Verge interview is Here
The tl;dr is it’s the AMA part 2: electric douchealoo
These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free.
I just can’t believe that a CEO of a company who doesn’t pay their moderators would actually say something so tone deaf.
And blatantly false.
Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up
LMFAO that ship has fucking sailed. They already used Reddit data through 2021 and got everything they needed for free. Huffman is locking the barn after the horses are already out, and setting it on fire. What a fucking dumbass.
Also no sane company would pay that ridiculous price for training a LLM on memes
Why paying exorbitant api prices when you can scrape for free? Like all those image models clearly trained on scraped watermarked stock images
LMFAO that ship has fucking sailed. They already used Reddit data through 2021 and got everything they needed for free. Huffman is locking the barn after the horses are already out, and setting it on fire. What a fucking dumbass.
Plus they can just scrape the data without using the API. It’s a red herring, just a lie to cover up his desire to kill third party apps.
He managed to paint Reddit as the victim in this, double down on their decision, and then paint the moderators and App developers as the ones hurting users.
Insanity.
It’s funny how he’s playing this out to be about third party apps like Apollo. Like yeah, that’s what the community cares about, but the reason they’re making the changes is because he’s fucking anal about OpenAI and other companies finding such success with products they have built using data scraped via the Reddit API.
He wants some of that money, not the comparatively tiny amount that Christian got from Apollo.
He also doesn’t seem to get that people root for an underdog. Had he been more serious about how they are upset that companies use their API to build massive tools that they can sublicense to other companies, like Microsoft, and make lots of money, people might agree with that.
What he’s framing it as though, is a big company like Reddit vs small indie app developers, like Christian Selig. Guess who the underdog is in that scenario, Hm?
Dude could literally invent a developer program to help support “sanctioned” third party devs that pay some sort of a yearly fee to access the API and raise cost like he is now to fend off LLMs. But nah, I’d expect that out of somebody that is actually wanting to solve the problem. Lol
That sounds unnecessarily complex. Just force an authentication of the client (ergo, make it so you can’t access the API without logging in) and add api rate limits per user, maybe with higher limits on users that have the paid Reddit membership tier.
But I don’t think that was the point anyway. It’s less work to just start charging for the API. That way they can charge companies like OpenAI, and drive others to use their main app, letting them sell targeted adverts to them too.
For the sake of poking on a solution further. Auth would limit web scrapers, which they don’t want given how valuable user comments and posts were. Rate limiting can cause perf issues depending on how calls are being made and you’d have to make considerations based on metrics of usage, clients, calls per client etc etc, which is even more complex than full blown access to a “managed/sanctioned” client. A sanctioning system gives them full control of the pipeline, with the trade off being that it’s a bit more work on their end to vet them.
But yeah, clearly a solvable problem, but it’s just malice at this point on their part.
This is better, but would still suck.
I want to use proprietary services as anonymously as possible.
That’s not the point for Reddit. They need to show a path to profitability for investors on the Reddit planned IPO. They plan on harvesting every last ounce of user data, and those third party apps deny them that every last ounce of data. That is why they won’t back down.
I commented another place in the thread here about how Huffman is bsing about this “profitability” angle and I can’t link to it. :-( Path to profitability for reddit is a pre-seed 1 funding conversation that should have already been iterated on and solved by now, especially if they are going to IPO. Even if they were to harvest user data, that can be done with transparency, but they just don’t want to do it.
They kinda already have something along those lines, or at least it’s in the works. I’m pretty sure that’s what Devvit is supposed to be, but rather than actually finish that project, they’d rather crusade against the Apollo app for some reason
It’s funny how he’s playing this out to be about third party apps like Apollo. Like yeah, that’s what the community cares about, but the reason they’re making the changes is because he’s fucking anal about OpenAI and other companies finding such success with products they have built using data scraped via the Reddit API.
The data could just be scraped without the API anyway.
Absolutely, but the API offers a really smooth and convenient way of doing it without a lot of extra processing overhead. Scraping HTML is a little bit more involved.
But using an API requires integration with every individual site they want to consume. Crawlers do not. For the same reason, LLMs aren’t using the API.
Reddit could also enforce existing limits or change their TOS to explicitly ban this activity of it was indeed leading to millions of dollars in additional operating expenses. They have done neither.
Huffman is just lying about OpenAI and others being the problem.
The unwillingness to back down is mind boggling.
I think he has shown his true form, he was always a cunt and not a very intelligent one. But now that the games afoot he has shown his true colors. The only thing he cares about is $$$$
Don’t forget that he also ran the sub r/jailbird, which totally makes everything…uhhhhh…yeah…makes it…
Edit: phone autoassume changed the name of the subreddit, I’m actually fine with that.
Be careful; someone might jump down your throat to say that “there was a time in Reddit where someone could add anyone as a moderator” but fail to provide any proof of this (that u/spez was added as mod to troll him). For all we know, spez himself actually mods jailbait, just not actively.
Also, if you were added against your will, especially to somewhere like that, why would you not remove yourself immediately? He’s the cofounder of Reddit, it’s not like we’re talking about some rando who checks his account once a year and doesn’t pay attention to potential changes they didn’t make, PLUS he’s literally an admin with server side access which makes any claims of “well you couldn’t remove yourself once added as a mod” invalid, there is no way he didn’t notice it and no way he could not remove himself. He wanted to be there and wholeheartedly endorsed such content being hosted from Reddit until the public rightfully got outraged and forced them to ban it.
Can’t back down when you’re a narcissistic liar
yea this guy screams narcissist
Not even willing to negotiate or come to some kind of understanding anymore. Just straight up treating the community that put him where he is as if we’re the bad guys.
Need to come off macho and confident for the shareholders/potential shareholders.
I genuinely believe this is the real reason.
he needs competition
My first comment in the entire fediverse will be:
FUCK U/SPEZ
I’d hate to be that guy
Truly
Well, he is probably hated a lot more than a few months ago, but will also likely get a huge stack of cash when reddit does the IPO…
Balls in his mouth
I appreciate his contribution to growing the fediverse everyday with all these gifts.
The 9to5mac article has just the right amount of spiteful contempt. Nice.
Honestly, we should just leave it behind and focus on making communities here better. They have every right to cut off their nose to spite their face on their own website. Let’s learn from that for the future in contributing to making someone else’s website great.
The best revenge is living well.
I agree, let’s just forget them and make a cool place for us here
All experienced mods are welcome. We value your contributions here.
Folks have made millions.
It sucks to be you, Reddit.
It’s hilarious how people have literally paid app developers for a better way to experience reddit and he’s mad about that. Like sorry you’re a talentless hack. The only reason reddit is as popular as it is was down to the stars aligning back in the digg days. That’s about it, first mover advantage with your only other competitor shooting themselves in the foot.
I used most 3rd-party apps for Android and the official one is simply the worst.
Lemmy clients are already better than Reddit’s official apps.
You’re right about the first mover advantage: there was a small time window in which Reddit was the town square of the Internet, but it turned to shit when the brass decided to milk users like data money cows.
My god… he is such… a fucking… idiot. Holy shit… I’m just surprised he’s lasted this long as “CEO”. I work in tech and I’ve seen interns and entry level engineers exercise better decision making. I guess being strongman is more important to him than saving his company and/or protecting his image as a sensible leader.
How not to CEO 101
Most CEOs would pretend to care or be concerned even if they didn’t change paths lmao
grabs popcorn
pOpCoRn tAsTeS gOoD
It’s a reference to the last time u/spez was an asshole. Come on! No need to downvote.
To be fair, the downvotes might also be part of the joke. That comment was the most downvoted in Reddit history before EA came along.
And it’s not like there’s karma on Lemmy so I don’t care lol
But yeah keep going back to their site and watch their ads, that’ll show them for sure.
Or, you could do what I do - use [https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit) with an ad blocker. That hurts them on two levels -
- They have to pay for you to use the site and,
- Their ads are blocked.
You want to swap the order of the text and the link there in Markdown. This:
[https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit)Yields this:
[https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit)
Whereas this:
[Old Reddit](https://old.reddit.com])Yields this:
Spez is already talking about monetizing users account histories. Just blocking the ads isn’t going to stop them.
I mean, I get that Reddit isn’t making money. And that during the growth phase of a dot-com, it’s okay to burn money in the name of growing the userbase, but that he has to transition to making money at some point. Investors gave him money, hundreds of millions, if I recall correctly, in the expectation that he can generate a return. He’s getting near the point where he has to do that. And the return they’re going to expect is going to be in the neighborhood of what other dot-coms can generate from their investment.
Like, the people yelling at him for being “greedy” in that he’s aiming to make Reddit generate a return at all aren’t realistic. That is something that always was going to have to happen, from the day that Reddit started. If you look at the issues that the moderators are taking up with him, they’re trying to come up with a way that Reddit makes money and their concerns are also met.
The problem is that some of the moves he’s making to try to make a return have really negative impacts, and a number of people want something that has less of a negative impact.
If the Fediverse can support similar functionality based purely on cash donations, or based on some other model (e.g. Usenet runs on software developed by the community, but generally one has to pay a commercial Usenet provider for service to cover the costs), or a “users donate resources” like BitTorrent and provide a better experience, then that’s great. But the Fediverse is also going to have to figure out how to handle the costs of hardware and software development and all that, if it wants to be a competitive alternative. There are some hard questions that may come up down the line for the Fediverse too. The long term for something the scale of Reddit cannot be Earnest paying all of the money out of his personal pocketbook to Cloudflare to handle ramping up kbin’s capacity or something like that from the main Lemmy instance operators.
Right now, I haven’t seen any ads on the Fediverse, and I haven’t yet donated money to Earnest (though he apparently does have a “buy me a coffee” tip jar and people have sent him small gifts). Which means that right now, I’m relying on the gift of resources from Earnest and some Lemmy instance operators to me. Maybe they can afford that for a small number of users. But end of the day, if many more users show up, they are going to have to find someone else to help bear the costs on an ongoing basis.
But he has so many better options. He could listen to his userbase and create a product they enjoy. Then explain his cost and ask for donations on the site (with a progres bar as wikipedia does). If you have goodwill in your userbase, you could even just ask people for money in a monthly fashion and give them some “Reddit Supporter” badge. Maybe a “Reddit Supporter” can then vote on the functionality that will be implemented in reddit.
If he’d communicate it well, he could even monetize the API fairly (let’s say 1-2x the ad revenue he would get with similar traffic) or monetize it on the user side (user has to pay e.g. $10 for yearly api key).
I can say for myself I’d be more than willing to donate to reddit if they asked for it and I had the feeling they were actually trying to listen to the userbase and improve the platform.
With his current behavior he’s just destroying any good-will of the userbase and therefore any direct monetization potential.
Oh, I’m not at all saying that he’s handling this in an ideal way. There is a laundry list of things that I think might be better-done. I mean, the very first thing for me would be him at least having an option to let people continue using the site the way they have been with a premium subscription. Might not be worth it for some, but for others, it would, and that immediately solves his problem for a lot of users, and maybe some of the most-fervently-opposed. I’d be willing to pay something for a subscription myself, especially since they already went to the work of setting up anonymized payments during the Bitcoin fad and a scheme for premium service. I don’t know if it’d be enough to make myself worthwhile to Reddit relative to what the company is going for, but I’d at least like to see their price point. Let me use a third party client as long as I have Reddit Platinum or whatever and then tell me what that costs each month.
I’m just saying that there is a substantial contingent that is really pissed off and who really does not think that he legitimately has to do something about Reddit cashflow. Like, asserting that Reddit losing money is just a lie, or saying that they just want any social media corporation to go down, that sort of thing. And, I mean, that’s just kinda decoupled from the financial obligations that he’s gonna be facing.
Any capable ceo worth their salt had to be thinking about this BEFORE their first round of funding, not 10 yrs later when they are “about to ipo”. Part of acquiring large amounts of funding is working thru these problems and having a concrete monetization plan. This isn’t something new and every single startup on this planet contends with resourcing and money. This problem isn’t unique to reddit and is a solved problem by other social media companies.
If it’s serving ads and selling user profiles, be transparent about it. Mandate 3rd party apps to serve ads meanwhile reduce the need of a staff to try and come up with a god awful app that can’t load a video. Pour said money into infra-scaling instead.
Use differential privacy policies, obfuscate private data and inform + ensure users that the data being sold is to generate revenue so that the site can stay in the green and go public AND that their privacy is first and foremost. You can literally invent GDPR like privacy controls and STILL monetize user profile while keeping users happy.
If I can solve this in 10 mins, Huffman doesn’t get a pass for being an idiot. Sorry, don’t mean to sound ranty and aggressive but any sort of justification for reddit is really defending malice on his part and I feel like this needs to be said, particularly to an audience that are (rightfully so) perhaps giving him the benefit of the doubt when they don’t know any better.
Hope this helps paint a better picture of why I keep calling this guy an idiot. :-)
The recent Reddit push has two underlying realities forcing a lot of companies/web services to push for other monetization:
- The ad rates have cratered. The advertisers know users use ad blockers, and there will always be a whack-a-mole game going. So they’ve been demanding and getting lower rates.
- The Silicon Valley model of throwing millions at a project for years without returns is shrinking fast. Between eroded trust (Theranos) and the investors not limited to venture capital firms, there is more and more calls for returns to be shown from these companies. They’re restricting the money bucket. So sites like Reddit have to look to other ways to generate money.
Spez has been blindsided by these developments when he should not have been.
Have a citation for that? Because that sounds like a great link for an inevitable edited response to all my comment history
I’ll have to find it, but multiple places he’s talked about Reddit being used by companies to train their AI systems. It’s painfully obvious that he’s looking for both moral and immoral ways to monetize Reddit immediately. I give it 3 months before this is announced.
jesus christ
Is there an easy way to purge old comments?
Could also keep using 3rd party apps, apparently all those API calls are costing them millions.
Only the accessibility focused apps will be allowed by Reddit to continue free of cost. The other 3rd party apps will shutdown at the end of this month since their API costs will be too much for them to bear.
@ChargingDoorman sorry my comment was with a heavy dose of /s. Given they valued the Apollo traffic at ~20MM my tongue in cheek was saying to keep using the 3rd party apps cos it’s “costing” them so much money.
Only the accessibility focused apps will be allowed by Reddit to continue as long as they aren’t monetized. Sure, if you want to allow blind people to read Reddit because we can’t figure out how to do it, go nuts. But only as long as you don’t expect anything for your time and effort.
I mean, in theory I suppose that they could set up their own subscription systems, but their users would have to be paying out on a regular basis.
looks thoughtful
Actually, I’m not even sure that app authors are allowed to do that. Apple is really strict about purchases not going through the App Store for iOS – they want their 30% cut. And I don’t know if the App Store supports subscription models. Maybe it does, I dunno, don’t use an iOS device myself.
Apple 100% supports subscriptions for apps.
And don’t post anything - contribute nothing.
Makes me wonder how long old.reddit.com is gonna last.
Thing is he can still shill that to advertisers/investors as hey, once we kill off old.reddit we will get x% of new eyes on your ads!
it also hurts them on a spiritual level since they want to kill off old reddit.
I use old.reddit on computer with ublock origin, I don’t even know Reddit has ads, been visiting for 10+ years, never saw single ad, same on mobile where I use Boost + Adaway or Kiwi browser + uBlock origin, I will see how the 3rd party situation works out
I mean, I did too. But you can see why Reddit is grouchy about that. I mean, I have written a lot of content and posted it to Reddit, and maybe that has value that they can monetize. Or maybe there’s some value that they can get from data-mining my activity on the server side. But they haven’t been making money off my eyeballs directly, or data-mining information available on the client side, and I imagine that that’s frustrating when they go crunch the numbers on their costs and revenue.
Probably, but if you monetize “my data” (by tracking everything I do + the content I put on your site) you won’t get any ad revenue from me (I used old.reddit + ublock origin too).
If you don’t and you give me a service that’s valuable to me then I’m willing to pay (I pay for protonmail for example).
Reddit’s CEO wants me back, and he’s not having me this way.
