Let’s backtrack to 2020. Back then there was some protest in USA about cop violence and racism, it had repercussions in Reddit (with a bunch of subs closing down in protest, as usual). kn0thing used this opportunity to resign from the board of directors of Reddit, claiming that he wanted to be replaced with a black candidate.
Perhaps kn0thing knew what would happen? Not the exact events, mind you; but he knew Reddit Inc. and spez well enough to know that they’d eventually fuck it up, lose a lot of money, and lose face. So he jumped off ship earlier, pockets and reputation unharmed.
What do you think about this?
(u/kn0thing, RL name Alexis Ohanian, is the co-founder of Reddit, alongside Steve “piece of shit” Huffman and Aaron Swartz.)
There’s no way he could have known. Plus whatever the endgame, spez won’t “lose” money.
The impending IPO will at worst make him a little bit less rich than predicted
It’s possible he knew the company would have to change drastically to IPO. There is no way they were not talking about IPO’ing for years before officially announcing it.
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I may be wrong but I think that he knows well enough how spez and the company behave, to somehow think “those guys will screw it up”. And he doesn’t look like the type of person who’s socially motivated enough to give up his position for the reason that he claimed.
The impending IPO will at worst make him a little bit less rich than predicted
Perhaps way less rich. I think that he predicted two days of protest and not much else, but things clearly blew out of proportion. In this sense, he’d be losing money in comparison with what he wanted.
kn0thing was responsible for the Victoria/Pao situation, and made a legendarily downvoted post defending it.
You just got me to go on Twitter for the first time in a long while to see if he had said anything on this whole fiasco. So here is what I found from him. Someone asked about it and he responded “no comment” and then when he got challenged on that:
I resigned in protest 3 years ago to push the company to ban Hate communities. I have nothing to say.
Feels like the API stuff or monetary loss wouldn’t be a the issue here, but he had an understandable disgust with some of the communities that were on Reddit and the inaction on them. Most likely wouldn‘t support fediverse (which also contains hate communities) and is still on Twitter unbothered by Musk and all that mess, which I think is fascinating considering how many more Q crazy MAGA racists I see now whenever I follow a Twitter link.
That’s a fair point. If he was being genuine, this proves my crack theory false.
