I kind of feel bad for spez.. what would you do if you were in that position?
I have never been a leader at a big company (or anywhere...), and honestly I am pretty ignorant when it comes to money and business, so maybe that's why I feel this way but... isn't this what for-profit companies ultimately are supposed to do? (make money?)
Reddit is blowing up today over his internal memo, and that's when I kind of started to feel bad for him. Wouldn't an internal memo be expected at a time right now? Wouldn't it say that kind of stuff? I'm just curious but for others, if you were in his position, what would you do right now? Is there a better move to be made? What should he have said in that memo? I kind of feel bad for him. At the end of the day he helped create reddit, and it must kind of suck to watch your own project devolve and people come to hate you.
The thing about this API decision that got to me is how abrupt it was - 30 days or thereabout. That doesn't seem like very long. But aren't these decisions usually made by multiple people? (not just a CEO?) I also think it sucks that reddit app hasn't been made accessible to vision impaired folks. So maybe he sucks as a leader, but is that a reason to hate him?
I'd love to better understand.
This was one of the biggest reasons I am leaving reddit as an Apollo user. Maybe in spez’s mind getting rid of third-party apps with very little forewarning was just a gamble to have a higher IPO valuation. But never mind that it negatively affects so many people with accessibility issues or like me who liked reddit because of Apollo - but emphasizing you are a profit-based company and resorting to vilifying these third-party vendors in an attempt to gain some sort of empathy is really unethical and I can’t bring myself to think I am anything else but a product. Trust thermocline is real.
I am leaving reddit because of the Apollo treatment, and I am not even using Apollo.
The way this is handled is atrocious.
This was it for me as well. I had vowed to leave reddit if RedReader stopped working. It looks like it will keep working, so I probably would have stayed and mostly ignored the drama.
But then I read about spez slandering the Apollo dev and witnessed the truly pathetic AMA (I expected nothing and was still disappointed). And I said to myself, why am I helping these jerks get even richer?
So, i deleted my account and found a really cool discord server and Tildes. That's honestly way more social media than I have time for anyway.
I was listening to an NPR segment about all of this yesterday, and they mentioned that Steve/Reddit have effectively stated that the wealth of conversation and discussion on Reddit is being used by AI, and they want a cut of that. So yes, we are absolutely the product.
And in 2023 I am so tired of being the product, of my data and footprint and whatever being sold, and Reddit deciding to chase that trend just rubs me the wrong way. I got on Reddit because they banned the Stumbleupon toolbar during my senior year of high school. It's so different from what it was back then so it's no skin off my nose.
Absolutely. Steve Huffman is a CEO, and professional behavior is expected as a result. If the intent was to kill third party apps, and it clearly is, the respectful thing to do would have been to clearly state it from the outset, provide a plan to make the transition as painless as possible (this would include giving the time for third party app developers to transition out of Reddit before shuttering API access, working in tandem with moderators to identify important moderation and subreddit management features missing from the first party tools and get them implemented before locking out the existing third party tools, and making sure the first party application is a viable successor for all the existing third party app users), and actually doing it.
Instead, Reddit applied their long-standing policy of providing cookie-cutter statements claiming the community's feedback is valued... then proceeding to throw out broken features that no one asked for, vague promises to do better that go nowhere, and doing absolutely nothing regarding what was actually requested (Remember ProCSS? Reddit sure doesn't seem to). Actively trying to discredit Christian through lies, coming from the CEO himself no less, is the rotting cherry on this stale cake that was probably a major factor in transforming this from the latest round of community grumbling about concerns not being addressed into outright revolt.
I just came to comment on the fact that you've got 2 instances of very subtle German mixed into your otherwise entirely English post.
What are you spotting as German?
In the 3rd paragraph, for "what is" (I can't make any sense of it otherwise).
In the last sentence of the second last paragraph. I may actually have gotten this one wrong because I initially thought it was meant to say "It was both...".
I'm going to be removing comments in this topic that contain personal attacks, insults, name-calling, etc.
I think there's a possibility for a decent discussion to be had here, but keep it reasonable.
sorry, I didn't mean to stir the pot. Please feel free to remove this thread if you think it will do more harm than good, or I am happy to remove it myself. I am new to this site and really enjoying it because the conversation is civil (breath of fresh air for me on the internet). I don't want to derail that in any way.
Thanks. This is one of the downsides of Reddit that it turns into a circlejerk with no actual criticism or value.
spez is a doomsday prepper who thinks that he'll "[...] probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove". Personally I'm not a huge fan of a leader who is actively planning for a societal collapse where people will be enslaving each other.
Also, there's the whole thing where he was getting into arguments on reddit and then editing other users' comments. That's not super cool either.
It wasn't quite this. He's never edited the comment of someone he was actively arguing with - that I've ever heard of.
The edit-gate thing was when TheDonald got pissed about Reddit banning the Pizzagate sub, and a thread there was full of people posting 'fuck /u/spez' which was still pinging him at the time. He went in and edited people posting "fuck /u/spez" to change the "spez" to usernames of mods of TD. In the aftermath, Admin manually disabled username-mention notifications on his account.
Still wildly petty and the worst possible optics, but there's value in accuracy of the story.
I'll also mention that those same users had been harassing spez for months, and he was decidedly at his wit's end. It's important to understand the context and motivations of actions like these, because it's not as simple as "he's a bad guy that lies and cheats". You can push anyone to their breaking point, even if they're a big time CEO.
Definitely accurate, but disabling mentions feels like cheating because... it is.
Either you're using a reddit account or you aren't. If you don't want to engage with the community then stick to that separate blog platform they used to have. If you want to look like you're engaging the community then live with the engagement you generate.
It's like the story about the guy who finds unpleasantness everywhere he goes: if everyone wants to tell you that you suck, you probably do. Gaming your own system to avoid that feedback only insulates you and leads to compounded problems.
Eh, out of all the grievances I have against spez, this isn't one of them. Disabling username mention notifications is an option that is available to everyone on Reddit, and using that option because your inbox got spammed with abuse (whether warranted or not) is perfectly normal in my book if only to get it back into working order.
That option was only given to the public after it was created for spez. It's not like he was simply using an existing feature.
I agree that it's good that the feature exists. But if you have to code a new feature to protect yourself from virulent user feedback then you've already been doing a poor job of listening to user feedback. And instead of taking that lesson to heart, spez insulated himself further.
This is a CEO that's been running on his credibility as a founder since returning:
In retrospect, this is an incredibly telling quote. Playing the "This is what I originally wanted it to be" card instead of plugging in and wrestling with the community's norms like a living tree is how we got here.
That isn't true, the option is there in the original commit that added the feature in 2013 (2 years before spez came back as CEO). Username mentions were only available to users with Reddit Gold for a while, but the ability to disable them was added at the same time the feature was, and has always been available to everyone.
editing it to the mod names is kinda funny given the context. broken clock, twice a day, yadda yadda.
There have been plenty of shitstorms because of misbehaviour that was blown completely out of proportion or even outright invented. Pizzagate was an absolutely ridiculous story and people still believed it.
You don't need everyone in on that shitstorm. With an audience of millions, one short message from just a single percent is a denial-of-service attack.
2a. I was using the "If everyone you meet is an asshole..." figure of speech, the moral of which is to consider the common denominator in all these negative interactions.
2b. The site had a built-in way to handle this: ban spez. You can't message banned users, hence they can't be pinged. Doing so would have shown some insight into the severity of his fuckup. Two birds, one stone.
Eh. Disabling mentions was something the community had been requesting for months prior to that change - I'm mixed. I'm glad it got made because mentions were a phenomenal harassment tool - but it's grating that it took bullying the guy who founded the site to make it, and even more so that they kludged it together as a DIY solve to keep him out of trouble, then realized that it's something useful to users.
I think it's a lot more nuanced than that honestly. Sometimes that sort of wisdom of crowds is wrong, and that's more and more likely for 'celebrity' figures - the aphorism is remarkably apt for normal blokes like you or I, but for more famous people it starts breaking down.
Sure, there's some element where all people suck - and if we tunnel-vision on the parts that suck we can construct defensible arguments why this or that specific person definitely sucks. At the same time, I think it's worth keeping in mind that there are some people that the public, or groups within the public, are absolutely determined to hate, and just as determined to justify their hatred of.
I think that part of the problem with Spez is that the community is so determined to shit on him, and has been for so long, that he's gotten so inured to the constant criticism that he's unable to distinguish the irrational hate from the completely justified criticism. He's the guy at the head of reddit, a site so big that it cannot possibly make it's entire userbase happy with their choices, and so no matter what the site chooses to do - it's Spez's fault and he's clearly a terrible person for it.
One example is the site's controls on content and discourse. Half the site wants Reddit to take "hate-speech" more seriously and has a very credible case that the site fails to control racism and homophobia in a way that allows them to recruit adherents, cultivate hate movements, and harass their 'enemies' from the platform. The other half the site wants Reddit to provide more of a "free-speech" platform and has a very credible case that the site's policies around 'hate' are inconsistent, biased in their implementation, and serve to stifle reasonable and healthy dialogues. They both have very credible points, if looked at from their own perspective - each side's vision for the site is mutually exclusive and they're going to blame Spez if Reddit moves in the "wrong" direction.
I also see this when modding on reddit - people are going to be upset that their submission was removed. Consistently. Doesn't matter if we have a rule against it, if we've provided an alternative venue for that content or dialogue, if the community damn near lynched mods for not removing that content prior ... we personally are the terrible people who are clearly powertripping and are mad about our teeny wieners for daring to remove their post. Even if all of them would, separately, agree that the other guys' posts should be removed and theirs was just special and different, they'll all get together and agree we're shit because they all had a bad experience. Comes a point where being "an authority figure" - using the term extremely loosely - is all it takes to get people to hate you.
Spez is kind of an asshole from everything I've seen and he's definitely a "reddit" personality to the core ... but I also think that he gets dogpiled so damn much, under unreasonable conditions, that in order to cope with that experience, he's modeled his relationship with the site where he's ignoring community feedback by default. Like, that's not excuses for him - I think that deciding to interact with the community and be so present and available is his decision and that means he's on the hook for the consequences of it.
(copying my comment above)
That isn't true, the option is there in the original commit that added the feature in 2013 (2 years before spez came back as CEO). Username mentions were only available to users with Reddit Gold for a while, but the ability to disable them was added at the same time the feature was, and has always been available to everyone.
Thank you for that! - it's certainly been a minute, so I'd forgotten.
I just vaguely recall that there was something specific done to, or inside, how his account with regards to username mentions, that was above and beyond what the rest of us had access to.
And I'd been on the Gold train already, so I wouldn't have seen preference panel turning off of mentions in that same way I don't think.
Very, very well said.
... especially this bit.
One of the articles I read about spez returning in 2015 had a rather telling quote:
Stealth editing a comment makes a lot more sense in the context of that quote.
One of the things that I'd point out though, is that spez returned as a savior, freeing reddit from "Chairman Pao" and returning us to its roots. With the exception of the intractable free speech vs hate camps you rightly point out, much of what he gets dogpiled for seems to be trading on his trust as a founder in order to implement changes to the detriment of the community. 2015 reddit would have burnt the site down if it knew the changes to be instituted on spez's watch.
It's been quite a few years since I'd describe spez as being present, available, and interacting with the community.
And like I can vaguely relate - at least, I know that one of my most irritating personality traits is believing that I'm funny.
I'd like to think I'd have recognized that was a time to step backwards, but I can also relate to the "heh eh eh they think they're funny, I'm funny too" response there. It took a lot of learning to successfully internalize that generally - reasonable or not - other people expect you to behave better than they expect of themselves, and many times even better than they're willing to treat you. Doubly so if you're occupying some position of trust or responsibility.
For sure - but that's still how Spez and how Reddit like to present him in relation to the community. They've worked hard to present him as someone who is relatable, who is part of the community, who listens to and understands the users of the site. As "the alpha redditor" as it was said above - both Spez and reddit corporate have played off of his ties to the community hard in selling his leadership to the site.
I think Reddit culture, fundamentally, has this issue related to it's OG's and towards "community membership" where they can over-value originalism and in-grouping. The site has never really gotten past the culture where it was a small niche aggregator community competing with the big corporate sites, so "Our People" were the best and we'd support our own community members as a goal unto itself. Being an original founder absolutely counted for Spez - in large part because we'd framed the problems with Yishan or Pao as because they were "outsiders" and that was why they made changes to the site that people didn't like.
We see the same thing with free-speech communities cramming words and opinions in Swartz's mouth posthumously about how he would have opposed this or that change or how he would have defended Nazi communities or Jailbait on reddit, because Swartz is the OG Founder who "really gets it" because he stood for free speech elsewhere. Spez got the same heroes' welcome treatment when he returned to displace Pao, because at the time most of Reddit did not understand that Pao was hired as a scapegoat, or the changes she was hated for were both ultimately necessary - and coming from above her head.
He's not really responsible for most of the changes since 2015 - any more than any other figurehead would have been, at least. Changes are coming from the policy department, from legal, from the stakeholders or the board, as advice from marketing ... there's absolutely been some massive unforced errors in the past decade, and I think this API issue is a solid example - but even that isn't wholly Spez making a shit decision. That's something that's probably rooted across multiple different departments and teams, and also coming from 'above' Spez as well. His instructions from the board are likely to tune up the business towards a successful IPO, the VCs want to offload their unprofitable investment while other people still think it's going to turn into a moneymaker down the road.
I think that was definitely true when spez returned. I don't think it's significant anymore though, there's just been too much dilution.
Yishan was at least in line with what Aaron Swartz had said. And I think Alexis, though no longer involved with the site, was still talking about reddit being a platform of free speech. I don't remember any revolt against Yishan, though it was a long time ago.
Pao was definitely framed that way. But she also did an infinitely better job with her AMA during the revolt than spez just did. Can you imagine what would have happened if she'd pulled a spez?
Spez was a Trojan horse.
I don't know about that.
Obviously the board is a player here. But when CEOs are in fundamental disagreement with a board then they quit or push back until they're fired. That hasn't happened, so I think you're being far too kind to spez here.
Ultimately his job is to put the people in place to make the right decisions. Did chat 1.0 get built despite him saying it was a dumb waste of money? Chat 2.0? The incessant "reddit is better in our shitty app" somehow got shipped without his permission and the entire dev team has been on strike since to ensure it remains up? The mobile apps they bought somehow got much worse and no one noticed because spez used Apollo too? That's nowhere close to the tip of the iceberg, he's been dreadful.
It's less that I'm being too kind to him, and more that I'm wanting to make a point of not leaving him as Next Pao.
I think the problems Reddit faces go a lot deeper than just Spez and I think that repeating the Pao/Yishan cycle with Spez is going to result in them getting back to the same place again. Putting the whole state of the site onto the CEO is also giving a free pass to all of board, investors, and staff working groups that contribute to its' current state. Far more than I'm faintly interested in excuses for Spez, I'm much more committed to not letting everyone else off the hook for the sake of shitting on Spez.
I guess where I'm going with all of that is that Spez was chosen because he was the best person to sell the community on what was happening. He deserves full responsibility for taking that bargain and stepping into that role. However, if Spez didn't take up the role, someone else would have, and the site would probably have made a nearly identical list of missteps and errors.
It really depends where you personally are wanting to draw a line for "free speech" as a concept. kn0thing (Alexis) has been super clear that he supports the site's current stances around preventing hate-speech, misinformation, and harassment. I very genuinely believe that Swartz would not have remained a free-speech absolutist when faced by the current state, and scale, of Reddit. Spez was almost the loudest of the three as far as free speech and libertarian dreams, to my experience with his early days on the site; his changes in stance more recently I think were largely reflective of the new information and new context that Reddit's growth had forced him to face.
So like, where is your line, why do you draw it there, what counterpoints might exist ...
I think it's always been acknowledged and has been genuinely true that Reddit aspires to be a free-speech platform, within reason - and that there have been a number of times where 'reason' did strongly dictate that absolute free speech is not in the platform's or the community's interests. The site was not better for hosting Jailbait, or for allowing Pizzagate / Q to organize and stage harassment campaigns or real-world attacks on their perceived enemies. It's widely acknowledged, if not necessarily provable, that Spez protected TheDonald for several years before they eventually went too far too often and the community was banned.
I think it's important to differentiate between him being a patsy - and him being personally responsible for directly dictating each and every change that we don't approve of. I'm happy to criticize him for the former, but I think going all the way to the latter is excessive and is manufacturing excuses for other people who don't deserve that kind of protection. I don't live in a fantasy world where he's somehow blameless and everything that sucks is totally coming in over his head and from below him - I just don't subscribe to the opposite, either, where he Is The Problem and if he gets replaced then everything will be better.
If someone else was running the company, would chat 1.0 have been built anyways? Would they have tried to "fix" 1.0 by building Chat 2.0? Would they still have continued trying to push app usage on mobile, and continued the development of New Reddit in ways that help ad visibility but suck for the community? Would leadership & board have still prioritized site engagement (Chat projects), increasing ad visibility (Chat, New Reddit, App), boosting App metrics (App, API)? Is there a world where a CEO could oppose things that are supposed to make the company profitable - and keep their job?
If someone else was running the company and objected to the goals underlying any of those things, do you imagine they'd still be running the company?
I don't. I think those things are part of the enshittification that comes with large platforms seeing growth and chasing metrics, and that the board would have rotated leadership until they found someone willing to take those sort of steps with regards to developing Reddit. Each feature might not be quite the same as today, they might make a few different mistakes, or miss some of the ones that actually happened ... but I also don't think that there's an alternate reality where reddit is wildly popular and profitable, but who's sitting in the CEO chair is the only difference.
A huge part of their problem is IMO the poor execution of perfectly reasonable ideas. IE: the app sucks. That doesn't mean having an app is bad. It sucks for a hundred different reasons that all make sense on the surface, that aren't bad ideas when engaged with individually and assuming execution is good. Reddit fucks it up by flubbing the execution and bundling all hundred things that suck into one app. Chat isn't necessarily a terrible idea, Reddit just did an ass job of building it, and an even worse job of launching and supporting it. It lacks a clear need-case prior to launch, but so did the comment section and that became Reddit's main claim to relevance once it was added.
A lot of the most annoying shit they've done has been the low-hanging fruit, the obvious option, as far as getting a platform on that scale to be profitable. It's not that the ideas are bad, but the execution. It's the uncreative and context-blind shit that faceless suits and corporate ghouls come up with to monetize an online community when they have no meaningful connection to the community and no understanding of its culture.
Spez is happy to take their cheques, and deserves full blame for choosing to be figurehead, for knowing better and still signing off on changes - but I don't think he's fully the sole person responsible for the app being shit or for the aggressive push towards New Reddit. Reddit is likely to continue being shit with or without Spez' leadership, unless the post-IPO board decides to prioritize very-long-term site viability ahead of immediate ROI.
That's fair of course, but everyone other than the board reports to spez, so...
I'm sure the board deserves a great deal of blame. But boards are also ultimately filled with smart people who have to be made to understand what they're in charge of. And the higher you go in the organization the more your job involves managing up.
I'd like to hear more about the Yishan portion of the cycle. He was by far my favourite CEO. I don't remember him being part of the Pao/spez revolt dynamic.
I don't know about that. There definitely was a movement that blamed him for it.
But there's also been a shockingly repetitive narrative that appears in reddit dustups: "The CEO you're mad at right now is secretly the person that's been on your side the whole time!!!" Yishan said that about Pao, and today spez went back to that well himself:
”Well, we’ve been talking about this forever. I think one of the ironies is I was probably the only guy at Reddit defending these apps for a long time."
It feels like someone like Altman has been coaching the CEOs.
But the community wouldn't have put up with it if it wasn't coming from spez -- and kn0thing, to a less active extent -- so whatever bullshit might have followed would have had less penetration before user revolt. They're the cooks the frogs in the pot trusted: if anything they deserve more vitriol.
Certainly someone else would have been saddled by the same boards and employees, but I'm not sure why you think the same mistakes would have happened after that. Unless the board told him upfront that he was a pawn and denied him hiring and firing authority it's quite easy to see another CEO doing a better job over the past seven years.
Definitely true. I was referring to the Yishan era though.
There's definitely a good chance that's true. Though 2013 was only two years before spez returned and changed the free speech policy, so I think it's safe to say he'd probably have held out longer.
For sure. Though Reddit was explicitly a free speech platform under Yishan, though for pragmatic reasons, not absolutist principles.
This feels like a false dichotomy. Most CEOs aren't a patsy. Most CEOs don't directly each and every change.
Of course everything wouldn't magically be better with a different CEO. But a CEO is responsible for shaping the vision, outlinging the path by which that vision will be carried out, and holding everyone below him accountable for managing that execution.
Certainly not. But I also can't envision any non-founder remaining CEO after the past 8 years.
Enshittification is my new favourite word.
But of course a different CEO wouldn't be the only difference! Yes, I think Sam Altman, Paul Graham, et al are escaping a great deal of heat here. But the idea that the current state is largely unavoidable doesn't follow unless you're all-in on the "YC demands a patsy CEO" angle. Which... might be true? I don't know enough about how YC operates to really comment.
If you think adding chat made sense then I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you work for Google.
Having to kill third party apps since you're not turning a profit after pissing away money on terribly-implemented crap instead of investing in fixing your own apps because you could get away with not doing so due to always relying on third party developers to build that ever more imporant mobile acess point for you -- including the now first party apps you bought and ran into the ground -- despite never including your ads in the API you gave them might be the most incompetent path a CEO has trod since Yahoo gave Mark Cuban $5.7b.
It feels like a bunch of kids got the chance to get the band back together and have been left to run a clubhouse. If spez isn't CEO, is KeyserSosa still CTO?
Of course spez isn't the sole person responsible and ditching him wouldn't be a magical panacea. But he's absolutely the person responsible for the other people who are responsible, if that makes sense. He's the guy whose job it is to set a vision, chart the path for management, and know when to move on from those who aren't executing.
CEOs make big bucks for a reason, and I can't help but think he was brought in because he was the perfect Trojan horse to deal with reddit's hateful subreddit problem, not because he was actually qualified to run a site of reddit's size. The only way his continued presence makes sense is in light of Yishan's legendary tongue-in-cheek conspiracy:
The only way spez still having this job makes sense is if he owns too much of the company.
So Yishan's time at Reddit felt like the shortest - or at least had the fewest things being actively on fire during his tenure - and wasn't a very loud administration.
He was the first leader of the company to walk the company meaningfully backwards from the free speech ethos that early founding had instilled, and he was seen as responsible for the first massive erosion of the pseudo-libertarian ideals that Reddit (community) had previously assumed the site operated under.
Personally speaking, I supported (still do) those changes, as things like Creepshots were a huge and growing problem to Reddit culturally, and a greater risk to Reddit Inc as a source of liability as well. It was under his management era that Reddit reached 'critical mass' as far as platform growth and accessibility, and he did have to deal with several hateful or otherwise problematic communities during his tenure. The site was faced with a hard fork in it's potential future - it could go the 4chan path route, or the Facebook route. Filthy or sanitized.
As an aside, I think Pao gets 'credit' for much of the campaign against Hate Speech on reddit, but in actual fact I think she was more responsible for making it more explicit policy that Reddit would take action against those communities, formalizing a precedent that Yishan set when taking single-case actions against precursor communities. I believe that the tactic under his watch was attempting to nip the really hateful ones before they reached "outrage" sizes, and then permitting the borderline ones as "less-awful" pressure-release communities.
Yishan ran a lot of the site informally and without overt policy changes, and I think that was both his biggest success as a leader and his biggest weakness as a CEO. He ran things in a case-by-case manner that vibed really well with the community of reddit at the time, but he did seem to struggle to make systemic alterations that would have staying power or set the company up for the future. I think a bunch of what he had to say in that specific comment is from a lens of being safely out the door and able to tell a slightly slippery version of things. My impression at the time was that he'd been replaced by a board seeking someone who would push Reddit to write rules that would accomplish and 'canonize' the calls that he was making on a one-off basis during his tenure.
I think his statement about Pao wanting to avoid mass-banning and defending grey area at least checks out - that is supported by the under-the-hood whispers I was hearing in that era. Not that she supported them or was secretly "our" friend, defending free speech - but that Pao understood how contentious the policy change around hate speech and communities would be, and wanted to limit the scope of the targeted communities to those that weren't easily defensible. I think she was well aware that if Reddit turned its focus too wide, the community risked revolt in a time where Reddit was not yet firmly entrenched online and there was risk of harm beyond what Reddit could weather.
You're not wrong. I think we run into a space where Reddit tends to excessively villainize one specific target and often the truth is a lot more nuanced than that. I also think that there tends to be an attempt from leadership and peripherals to try and intervene on behalf of the target with some outright obfuscation, which often involves versions of "but they're on yoouuuuur side!!!" like you note.
That said, I don't really see Spez putting his influence to work in protecting T_D was really on 'my' side or the side of Reddit - unfortunately that community was hyper-toxic to the rest of Reddit and the lack of useful consequences for them left them emboldened as far as their excesses. I certainly didn't intend to bring that up as if it was marks in his favour: TD was a problem and Spez protected them. Like, when I have a coffee community getting brigaded for weeks by TD, for merest rumour that we banned a specific conservative-aligned coffee company - I think it's a case where the community is obviously in a state of excessive harm to the rest of the platform. No matter how much you or I might support the existence of a conservative space to host those views, in abstract.
I wouldn't go as far as "false" dichotomy so much as 'exaggerated' - I think it was safe to assume neither of us is taking those as the sole options present.
I am remarking that the amount of blame heaped on Spez at the moment is bordering on one pole of that example, and to my perception that framing is effectively as absurd as both poles of my example. I do think that Spez is setting himself up as scapegoat for the board, and will be following the Pao playbook down the road. He's an asshole, but he's gone so far towards antagonizing the community and drawing heat onto himself personally that even taking polite credulity into account - it challenges suspension of disbelief that Spez isn't aware of how awful his approach is from a PR perspective. At this point, I think it's safe to assume some portion is intentional.
My expectation is that closer to the IPO, he'll step down 'humbled' and Reddit Inc can turn to the community and make out like they've fired the Bad Man and we should all be happy now. Their PR department can make an absolute festival out of selling the narrative to public press that "Reddit's embattled and unpopular CEO pushed out" as a way of convincing potential public investors that the site's relationship with it's userbase is on the mend and trending positive, so it's a far stronger investment going forward.
It's not really that they're seeking a spineless patsy, per se - but that they're looking for someone who is willing to be steered. YC and a lot of VC firms place a large amount of value in getting informal control of firms. They want strong capable leaders with vision, but as incubators and investors they also firmly believe they know better than most of the CEO's 'under' them and they also expect to get a certain amount of influence over the direction of the company. I've never been in a room with YC, but during school I did cross over with a lot of smaller tech/startup incubator investor groups.
What they're actually looking for in leadership does seem to hover within contradiction: they are looking for a strong bold leader that doesn't need much oversight and support, but who would make decisions the same way and for same outcomes as they themselves would, who is also open to being steered when the board seeks to intervene. There's this underlying understanding that many companies passing through VC spaces will eventually hit a point where what is best for users, or best for the company itself, is not necessarily best for the investment group - and they do very much expect that when you reach that point, you will think of your investors and make good on your commitments to them.
Part of my crossover with that space was a series of working group and similar consultations regarding how to assess feedback from leadership of client firms when their concerns about users/company health were necessary and expert advice, and when the VC should be pushing to overrule them in favour of getting their proverbial pound of flesh. I was, to be fair, very junior in that room and just grinding out resume credits with a communications consulting firm ran by one of my profs - but it was a very neat window inside how they see their relationships with the companies they invest in.
lmao no, I wish my payroll came in with google-sized numbers.
It's more that I can absolutely understand where the business case for adding chat came from and why the various stakeholders on Reddit's side thought it was a great idea. Even if I personally can say from my time on reddit and my background that it's not a good fit for the culture of the site - I think there's a niche corner where a great execution of a chat client was super valuable. Look at Discord, where it started off as a voice tool, but their network of interconnected and subdivided live chatrooms is their biggest and most successful niche at the moment.
At the time Reddit was launching first iteration of chat features and trying to figure out how to do subreddit-wide chat and similar, Discord was not yet overwhelmingly occupying that space, and there was a clear demand for exactly that sort of platform/service. If Reddit's execution wasn't terrible and chat V1 had been successful, they could be occupying that space instead of Discord.
This is one of those things where I think what is good for the company or it's users and what is good for VC really start gapping from each other.
There's definitely an underlying lack of imagination and fundamentally poor execution on a lot of products and changes coming from the very top - but I also think that VC and potential investors like to hear that Reddit is acting to better take control of it's publishing environment. From a user perspective, we can see that they're somewhat taking a knife to the golden goose - but VC knows if they can show the market three golden eggs in advance of the IPO, it doesn't matter if the goose dies a while after the sale takes place. I don't think it was well-executed or handled, but I do think that from the boardroom perspective it's not as wildly stupid as it seems from our level, and a better handled version of the same choice was very likely in Reddit's future effectively no matter what happened.
Like, from where I sit, expansion of API, some manner of ad-serve, and a revenue-sharing model would have been the best thing as far as continued growth and engagement for the site. But that's with a far more detailed understanding of the site and it's culture than I think the board or even upper-level staff necessarily have. Getting those users into Your Own app, getting them into the optimized app environment that prioritizes the metrics investors want to see ... those are things that boards of struggling companies like to hear, that investors want to hear about.
Just remember how much that playbook puts Spez under Altman's thumb as far as favours owed and influence over the long-term direction of the company, and how much direct and indirect meddling was involved from YC-aligned investors and staff in order to make that come to pass.
It's the same reason that dictators often promote wildly underqualified people into key governance positions - it leaves the promotee highly indebted to the boss, and keenly aware that their ability to retain their position and their paycheque is contingent on continued fealty and the ongoing success of their boss. This is quite close to the sort of relationship between VC and Company that I described above - you want a "strong leader" for the company, but who is also biddable when the VC comes calling. Playing Altman/YC's games with them are the main way for Spez to get back into the money if the Reddit IPO pays out.
Also very happily presided over a nascent Reddit where /r/jailbait was awarded "Subreddit of the Year". The guy is an enabler of some absolutely awful things; Reddit has been the contagion point of some of the worst our society has to offer, with devastating consequences, and the responsibility for that lies solely with Reddit's ownership and management.
that's fair. editing the comments was really unprofessional, even if it was a great troll lol
i'm pretty sure society will collapse at some point, seems inevitable, but I don't think it will happen in my lifetime.
I understand the logic that it probably wasn't spez's sole decision to make the API calls pricing unreasonable. However, that doesn't excuse his behavior and responses during the AMA he had shortly after. The way he chose to conduct himself and try to dirty another person's name is just unacceptable.
Moreover, I think a lot of people are tired of being squeezed out of every single cent they have. Idk about others, but I'd be more than happy to pay and support something I like if it was reasonably priced. However, if the person/company is coming at me with the intent of trying to take as much money as possible from me whilst offering a product they purposely made worse, then they can forget about getting a single cent from me.
Calling out the apollo dev's app in public as being inefficient was a really, really nasty move, indeed, and I was very put off and even shocked by that (though when I first saw that comment it was another admin who made those claims, not spez). I do think it was very unprofessional to call out another dev (as spez did later in his AMA), even if they are a dev who is causing your company problems, or even if that dev acted unprofessionally towards you. Best move would have been to not say anything there, or say something like "we're in contact with so and so, but we disagree on the move forward; we wish them best with their future endeavors, but sadly, it won't be with reddit" or something professional like that. Hard agree on that part.
he also tried to claim that selig, the person who runs apollo, blackmailed reddit even though selig recorded audio of the call that proves that it was a simply a misunderstanding - and was acknowledged as such during their call.
That behaviour, and the comment editing from a few years back, are the things I couldn’t overlook. To deliberately lie in the hope of harming another person’s reputation, purely as an attempt to preserve his own, is something that tells me all I need to know about his values.
There are far bigger issues in the world, and I wouldn’t remotely say I hate him. None of this is close to being a big enough part of my life to justify hatred, and even if reddit totally implodes the harm done isn’t likely to scratch the surface of other companies that are literally killing people and the planet on a daily basis. But in the explicit context of a “what do we think of his place in all this?” thread, I have fundamental problems with the person he’s shown himself to be.
Has he made poor decisions as a CEO? Yeah, sure, and it’s annoying - but that doesn’t necessarily say he’s a bad person. The fact that, when push comes to shove, he actively chose to throw others under the bus when they did nothing wrong: that’s something I can’t square with the label “good person” in any reasonable way.
I did see that, and I listened to the released call recording prior to the AMA as well. In fairness, my impression of that call when I was hearing it, was that the apollo app creator was being a little unprofessional as well. But that is just me, and I could be wrong (guess it's all subjective anyway). Even if he was though, for spez to call him out in response was wildly unprofessional.
I don't see how he was being unprofessional. You're saying that the CEO of a major website is a human deep down in spite of his recent behavior, but the developer of a 3rd party app making a tongue-in-cheek joke is being unprofessional? I'm having a hard time bridging the gap in standards that you hold each person to.
I might have miscommunicated. Of course, I extend the same thoughts to both apollo app creator and I feel very bad for him in this situation (he's losing his project very abruptly, and got called out unfairly and tangled in this whole mess); I don't think poorly of him, I just thought he was a tad unprofessional in the call, that's all. But I think spez was wildly unprofessional in his response to the situation, no doubt about it.
Ah ok, thanks for clarifying, appreciate the response.
That incident is what took me from "I'm not a fan of this and think we should push back, but I can believe that they're in a tough spot" to "what the hell, let this burn".
I couldn’t believe he made that comment about the company being unprofitable in a public forum. Directly to Christian with the max amount of attention in an AMA. It felt very amateur hour.
I wouldn't be in his position. I'd have done everything differently at every step that got him to where he is now. I've had to make unpopular changes to communities, albeit considerably smaller ones than reddit, but I never bungled it as badly as he has done. It's entirely possible to be a for-profit business and still remain community focussed and give a shit about your users. You talk to people, you explain things honestly and clearly. You don't dump the people who help you in the shit with impossible timescales and unmanagable bills.
The most important thing in my experience is talking to the people who have a stake in the thing you're doing. Listening to them, and being honest with them, and then following through on promises you've made. Do as much as you can out in the open for everyone to see.
I don't hate spez. He's not worth the effort. I'm too tired to give that much of a shit about him.
I agree completely - I don't feel bad for him, as he is just suffering the consequences of his decisions and, let's be honest, making truckloads of money while doing it. He has drifted so far from who he was when reddit started that all I feel is sad. He's so sublimely convinced that he's right that he keeps saying things that are just obnoxious and ill thought out, and everyone that is dumping on him has a right to do so, because he put himself in this situation.
He shouldn't be the CEO; it's time for a change again.
Hoffman was a moderator of r/jailbait (possibly not by choice). He was
friends anda supporter of Violentacrez (searching for citation).Hoffman was admitted to editing posts that had content he didn't like.
He's not a good person by any measure. I'm not sure what there is to feel sorry for him about.
Just to add context to the jailbait thing - from what I heard, this was back when a mod could appoint any other user to be a mod of their subreddit, without any approval needed. So (again, based on what I've read), It wasn't voluntary.
Vive la revolution, all the same.
Ah, it seems that's the consensus online! Thanks! Good to know among his many faults he's at least (possibly) not a pedophile.
Not confirming this is what happened, but yeah this is how we have Snoopdog and some other colorful characters as mods on /r/circlejerk
I don't think he was ever really a moderator of r/jailbait. You used to be able to add mods without them having to accept. It was a thing, everyone back then knew not to take it seriously.
Violentacrez is interesting. He was a crazy power user, and the admins definitely were oddly close to him. He was very cynical though and came to think the admins were taking advantage of the mods. I suspect that was due to personal experience: the admins likely saw him generating huge nsfw growth for reddit — though it's odd they didn't keep him at more of an arm's length, it was more like wrist's length.
I don't know that spez was ever actually "friends" with him though.
Oh I don't doubt that. Violentacrez was a hardcore mod who made reddit a lot of money. One of the admins definitely made comments defending his presence and role, though I can't remember which one.
I'd distinguish between that and being "friends" though. To me calling them friends indicates a personal relationship, and that's not something I've ever heard. It certainly might be true, however.
I think he just relied on him as a mod and power user keeping the site active. They gave him user of the year or some similar award.
Ok, I was unaware of that, definitely food for thought. It's hard for me to judge if someone is a good person or not without knowing them personally, so I'll stay reserved there. But even for people who do crappy things and hurt others, I still feel bad for them when bad things happen to them, but I know I'm weird in that way.
Empathy isn't weird, not at all. I understand the innate urge to sympathize. But at least for me, and at least for this particular man, he has shown who he is again and again and again. At this point, his public tantrums and blame-shifting behavior give me little reason to want to continue to extend that empathy.
It's worth drawing a very hard line between sympathy and empathy. Do I have empathy for someone who has badly hurt me? Yes. Do I have sympathy? Not in a million years.
Agreed! Compassionately, we should all strive to acknowledge the human in each of us, and the circumstances that life can throw our way. But we don't need to permit that person to continue to do harm. So on.
Either way - he's a Silicon Valley CEO, he's rich, and he's failed upwards* for years. None of those things will change. I'm sure he'll be fine.
*morally and ethically
That's fair. I don't like to ever pull back on empathy, personally. In fact, I like to extend it most towards the people who are off putting to me. It's an interesting exercise. It's also humbling for me, because it reminds me that I've done crappy things too, and I'm not perfect either, and also that maybe things are more complex than I initially thought.
It's an interesting philosophy, and I can see the appeal in it. For me there's a limit that any person can cross (usually at the point of endangering others) at which point extending empathy is no longer a safe option.
that's fair. Everyone is different and it can definitely be a confusing experiment, and I could see it having poor outcomes for some people. I won't press it further.
See, the thing is if the only way he can figure out how to make money with a property as substantial as Reddit is to do the things he is currently doing, well, that in my mind is simply poor and uninspired executive leadership. He's not fit for the chief executive role if he can't find a better way.
This is my stance. He's clearly really bad at business. reddit is an enormous website with million of daily users worldwide and he can't figure out a way to make the site profitable? Despite the fact that hundreds, if not thousands, of users regularly create their own improvements and monetize them regularly?
I wouldn't wish him death (though I'm not surprised there are psychos out there that do), but I do wish the world worked a lot more meritocratically, as we were told it did when we were kids. He's bad at business, as are tons of others. They don't deserve to have as much wealth/power/influence as they do.
It's very perplexing to me that this got past the company finance team, etc (assuming it did). This really feels like the absolute worst possible way to handle a company - it feels like none of the teams on Reddit talk to one another considering that company officials have constantly backtracked on their words and assurances. Aren't companies this large managed by more than one person?
I can agree with this. Poor decisions for sure, and maybe he sucks as a CEO.
that's fair. I just wish people will remember he's still a person. I saw comments on reddit where someone was wishing death on the family of reddit admins. It was disturbing.
I understand being annoyed at his decisions but with things like that internal memo, I almost feel like people are looking for a reason to hate. I just don't get what he's supposed to do. He's the head of a company, and I'm assuming he can't just unilaterally decide to reverse this API decision. So it seems at this point like maybe a damn if you do damn if you don't situation? Again though I don't know much about business so maybe I am uninformed here.
Pretty much. He seems to have one interest: himself. Anything he can do to look out for number 1 is on the table. As long as spez succeeds, spez doesn't care.
I think he has tunnel vision for a pay day in the next 6-12 months and is just powering through to get there. He doesn't speak like a CEO that's long for the job.
Killing off the API is doing more than just killing off 3rd-party clients. It's killing tools moderators use; It's killing accessibility for many people. That Reddit is doing this without even adding in replacements for these things is ridiculous and shows that it's not a move to better the site. I guarantee you that if Reddit improved their app, worked with mods to understand what they need, and vastly improve the accessibility of their site (and app), the reaction would not nearly be as strong as it is.
I agree, the reddit app sucks, and things would be way different right now if it didn't. I used it a couple times when I was trying to help my mom figure out reddit; damn, it was a mess... I understand where the backlash is coming from, and how reddit has screwed the pooch here (they had years to make a decent, accessible app and failed to do so, horribly), but I still feel bad for the position he is in at the moment because it seems like a no-win situation at this point.
He can always quit. It's not like he needs the money.
More importantly, he created his own no-win situation. If he'd communicated better, ensured the official app worked as well as the alternatives, and paid attention to what redditors and moderators actually wanted we never would have arrived at this point.
Thank you. Very true about being able to just leave. I honestly hadn't thought about that before you mentioned that (though it should be obvious.) Yes, it is clearer now that this likely is a hole he dug himself (reddit did have many years to get a decent mobile app together, etc. and sadly failed to do so)
On a side note, I think with regards to feeling bad, my thought isn't "he didn't do anything wrong, everyone is upset for no reason, and therefore I feel bad for him" it's more "this must suck, regardless if he did it or not, and so I feel bad for him." It's like, I can watch someone crash their car into a wall because they were being foolish; I will still feel bad for them because that's gotta suck, even if it's 100% their fault. Yes, consequences have actions but I damn I still feel bad for people when they meet their consequences. I hope that does clarify things a little.
I get it. Personally, I was invested in his return. Everyone on the site saw him as the founding hero, swooping in to save reddit from "Chairman Pao."
Turns out he was just back for another payday, Pao was actually a moderating force trying to manage up, and it was all downhill from u/Yishan.
It's kind of like the 2017 World Series: I was cheering hard for the Astros and deeply invested in their success. The cheating scandal wasn't just a series of poor choices, it felt like a personal betrayal because of that emotional connection.
I... I don't think I would have taken the venture capital route. Or even run Reddit as a for-profit company. Many years ago I helped to campaign for Twitter users to buy Twitter. It didn't go anywhere unfortunately, but I had the same dream for Reddit. Another option could have been to follow Wikipedia's example.
Instead they got stuck in the Silicon Valley funnel. Taking on investments from people who want a BIG return. Then the only goal becomes to have an exit strategy. Get bought up by one of the big five, or go public.
As for 'hating him', I'm not sure what you're basing that on. That sounds like you think people personally hate him for who he is. Who he is as a private person doesn't matter much. How he feels doesn't matter. What matters is how he does as figurehead for the company and his track record in that position. People don't want Huffman to change a flaw in his character, they want him to change how his company operates.
People have good reason to be unhappy with his performance as Reddit's CEO. And his own actions in the past, like secretly editing other people's comments, have made his job an uphill battle. Shepherding the community is 90% of his job. Or it should be. Or he should have given that job to a second-in-command. Someone high-profile, with real power and agency. Someone who understands that Reddit is nothing without the (power) users. Just because Huffman was there in the early days of Reddit doesn't mean he was ever up to the task of running the giant that it became.
Systematically not delivering on promises, failing to communicate clearly, antagonizing those who provide (a staggering amount of) free labor and services for his company... The CEO and his team just aren't very good at their jobs, I think.
He publicly lied about the words of the dev of Apollo, the most popular 3rd party app for reddit, and tried to make the Apollo dev look like the bad guy. Then when spez was confronted about his lies in the reddit ama, he doubled down and lied again.
Empathy for another person getting dogpiled on is understandable, but spez is a well-off tech CEO and thus has plenty of ability to access to whatever support he needs as a person to cope with all the hate. If he isn't able to take the heat from his/reddit the company's actions, he should either backpedal or step down.
that's true, but just because he's rich doesn't mean he's not a person. I'm not rich or famous or anything, but honestly sometimes I feel bad for those folks even more. I always thought being rich and famous must make it difficult sometimes to have genuine friends (because maybe people only want you for your money or connections.) I wonder sometimes if it's lonely.
I've heard enough firsthand accounts to know that fame is most certainly not for me. Riches, on the other hand...
More to your point of discussions about spez on reddit dehumanizing him, I think that's a symptom of discussions on reddit dehumanizing everybody. Redditors talk about real people like they talk about a cartoon character, and that attitude was one of the main reasons I've been lessening my time on that site for years.
This dehumanizing attitude seems to be an easy trap for any big online community, so I think we'll have to be very careful and deliberate here to avoid it, especially long-term.
Thanks for expressing this; that habit of dehumanizing folks was pretty much exactly why I wanted to post this. I think it's a dangerous habit with real-life consequences, that is not only common on the internet, but normalized and encouraged. I really wish this would change, and so I think it's useful to step back any time stuff like this happens and remember that is a real person. I intended my thread to be more in that vein, but I think it might have been misinterpreted or caused more issue than good, for which I apologize.
"Remember the human" is a really important reminder, but its gonna be a damn hard sell when there's legitimate grievance involved. Feelings are raw right now, so I'm sorry people are a lot more hostile than you intended.
Fame is a tricky one, especially for those born to it, and I know I’d struggle with it in many ways. It’s something that can’t be turned off, and may not even have been asked for in the first place.
Wealth is different. It might have some downsides, but anyone you see who has it has by definition made the decision that it’s worth it. Want to be sure about those friends and all the rest? Cool, you can buy a nice simple home outright, put more than enough away for any reasonable emergency, and give the rest to charity pretty much overnight. That “worst case” is a better life than the majority of people ever get a chance at.
I understand that few things are a total unvarnished positive, and that money does indeed have some drawbacks, but money buys choice and that includes the choice to stop having money if those drawbacks are too large.
None of that remotely means I think he deserves hatred or dehumanisation, and frankly the venom in social media pile ons sometimes is genuinely scary to me. That is in no way a fair consequence of his choices, I just don’t have anything like the same well of sympathy for him that I would if I’d seen any indication that he were trying to take responsibility for the things that are fair consequences of his choices.
Great points about money vs. fame and other thoughts you brought up here, thanks for sharing those thoughts.
I agree that it is important to remember peoples' humanity. Part of being human is having flaws. Spez' decisions have turned reddit down an unfortunate path. Reddit is a for-profit corporation. It took VC funding that typically entails a need for profit. Reddit hired someone who had a history of supporting and enabling pedophiles. Spez himself modified comments that criticized him. Now, reddit is squeezing out a worse user experience so that it can pay back VCs and prevent language learning models from using it. The time frame it gave for these changes was rapid. I don't know how much spez was involved with any of these decisions, but there has been some consistently bad decision making going on, and he is the CEO. The community has made it very clear that reddit's most recent decisions are not welcome, and spez has chosen to be defensive and to double down. In that way, he has made his bed.
I do think that there are other factors that are making people more mad than they would be otherwise. Inflation and record profits in certain industries has caused a lot of people to feel squeezed. When you add this to the media coverage of big tech companies and the (semi) recent twitter and twitch problems, I think we really are seeing a perfect storm of animosity towards big tech combined with animosity towards feeling like people are being financially taken advantage of. That doesn't make spez' decisions any more reasonable or better.
I think a lot of people would choose spez' riches, or even his fame. Given his position, riches and fame would seem to require with a level of responsibility that I'm not sure he's reaching.
well thought out reply, this all makes sense. thank you.
I don't think there's anything he could have said in the memo that could have satiated the controversy right now (short of reversing his stance), but he 100% could have avoided the current situation in the first place if he'd done a better job of communicating with the community, or honestly even just did what he actually said reddit was planning to do in his own prior statements. For example, even if we assume that his plan of monetizing API access is the right thing to do (which I personally disagree), he could have gone about it in a far less controversial way. He could have provided 6 months or a year's notice about what the pricing will look like, so they have time to update their apps and evaluate how their business model will change. If the lack of ads in Reddit's API is making it unprofitable, he could have very easily converted 3rd party app access into a reddit gold feature, something they already sell as a product and which would take minimal work to implement. He could have followed through on his own statements promising to be flexible with app developers with regards to the deadlines for pricing, as the Apollo and Relay app developers have made very clear they want to work with him. They're not shutting down because they have inherent objections to a subscription model, just the strict 30 day time limit.
This whole fiasco is a textbook example of how poor communication and a lack of willingness to listen to its own userbase, and while spez is not 100% responsible (as large companies almost never have decisions made by just one person), as the CEO of the company, he is by far the person with the greatest individual share.
And even then, as CEO, if you are being forced by the other powers that be into moving the company in a direction that you disagree with, then just step down. Spez is either directly responsible for the current direction Reddit is going or he is complicit. Since he is still CEO and presiding over everything that has unfolded, there's no scenario where he is unwilling.
All excellent points, can't disagree with any of this.
I don't hate him. I disagree with his decisions, and strongly believe that his priorities are not aligned with mine. I don't feel bad for him either, his position may put him in a lot of stress, but I'm sure he's being well compensated.
I try to avoid having strong feelings for people I don't really know.
Boring, right? :P
EDIT: Oh, and what I would do in his position? If I suddenly woke up in his body? I have no idea. I'd probably just offer Deimos a gazillion dollars to figure this out for me.
This seems wise and I'm going to steal this. Thank you.
I’d probably start by having a touch of humility. An approach more like “sorry guys, I know some of this won’t be popular but it’s the direction we need to go in for xyz reasons” would’ve gone a long way with people I think.
Also it’s a fair point about it not being his sole decision, but that’s sort of the purpose of a CEO - to take responsibility for all the decisions, good and bad, and be either payed extraordinarily well for it or to be the scapegoat and risk being sacked, respectively
That's an excellent take and I appreciate it. It has been handled very poorly, hard agree.
Without knowing what goals spez has, and what targets his bosses are giving him to achieve, it's hard to say what I would do in his situation.
I was explaining the fuss to a real-life friend the other day, and one point I made was that the prices the Reddit is charging for access to their API aren't "we need to make money, and we're passing on that cost to you" prices, they're "fuck you, close down your app" prices. Obviously, someone at Reddit has decided to get a monopoly on app users, so as to be able to serve ads to those users - and, instead of just blocking third-party app access to achieve that monopoly, they decided to charge them "fuck you" prices so that the app developers will close down their own apps (thereby making the app developers into the bad guys, in theory - but it backfired).
Would I do that? Probably not. I would charge the "we need to make money" prices. I wouldn't aim for an app monopoly to monetise Reddit users; I would aim to monetise the third-party apps.
But maybe that's why I'm not a CEO. Maybe I don't have the killer instinct it takes to make it big in this dog-eats-dog world.
That "AMA" was a public relations disaster. It should have been called "Ask Me Anything, but I don't promise to answer anything". It would have been better not to do an AMA at all, than go into a public forum telling users to "ask me anything", and then answering only 14 questions over the space of an hour and a half. And his "answers" aren't answers at all, they're just corporate talking points. Doing that AMA was worse than if they'd done nothing at all.
As for that internal memo... spez is 100% correct to say that this blowup will pass. All the previous ones have, with nothing changed. This one will pass too, also with nothing changed. The subreddits will re-open (or maybe not), and life will go on. The Reddit executives will carry out their plans to do exactly what they were always going to do. Reddit will continue to grow. Any subreddits that choose not to re-open will be replaced by new subreddits that do the same thing under different names (if the Reddit admins don't do a hostile take-over "in the interests of the users").
However, he's 100% stupid to put that in writing. He doesn't have the common sense that a toddler has, to avoid sticking their hand in the flame after it burned them. He deserves all the blowback he's getting for saying that in an "internal" memo which he must have known would be leaked to the public. Stupid boy.
It's important to note that in regards to this, their plans don't actually need reddit to be a useful site, a successful site, or anything. All they need is their IPO to bring in enough money so they can - probably - retire from the business on it. Cash out.
For that, they need the appearance of value. In theory the blackout could show that the users can "easily" sabotage the worth of the website and this could in theory make investors looking to buy nervous. But realistically, investors tend to think larger than even a long-term blackout. If the ad-revenue recovers in 4-5 days they couldn't care any less. In fact it might increase the perceived value, showing that the site is resilient to something like this.
Entrepreneurs and founders NEED to understand that profitability needs to be their primary goal at all times, from day one. You can run for a while without it, but there is a point where if you haven't hit it on your own, its gonna be forced on you against your will.
Yes, he founded a social company at the beginning of the boom.
He also sold it in 2006 and regretted it. He chose to climb back in a decade later because he regretted not cashing out with a bigger bag.
Nah. He doesn't feel bad. He hasn't apologized for lying about what Christian said. He's about to cash out and he knows it. He doesn't care, so why care about him. He and his millions will be fine.
From a personal point of view it must really be awful to see basically the entire world being against you, and I know in his position I would have trouble sleeping at night. But from a professional point of view I absolutely don't feel bad for him. He's the CEO, and his business decisions will have consequences on his career and public image that are directly of his own making.
IMO he isn't the right CEO for the job. Some CEOs are better at the startup stage while other are better at the later stages. If the board of directors is unable to see how damaging his choices are to the brand and can't make him steer anywhere else but into a wall then I don't know how well Reddit will fare in the future.
Spez sold Reddit for 10M along with kn0wthing back in the day which Spez has said he severely regrets. It's pretty clear now that he wants to get his bag with an IPO, the health of Reddit be damned.
It may not have been the CEO who originated the whole idea, the pricing, etc. but it's absolutely the CEO's role to make sure that decisions being made are in line with the overall strategy for the company. The responsibility still lies with him, and maybe it eventually leads to profitability. For me, if this decision and the way it's been handled is indicative of the overall strategy for the company (along with many other issues, certainly not the first straw in the pile) then I'm personally not willing to continue there.
I don't feel bad for people making decisions I disagree with, nor suffering the consequences of those decisions if the consequences meet the the scale of the offense. I feel bad for the mods, and community members having to deal with this corporation after investing so much of their time and not receiving due respect for what they've built.
Consequentially, this could mean that the whole kerfuffle including the botched communication is in line with the overall company strategy. That's also something important to keep in mind.
He's the Chief Executive, so in the end the decision falls to him. He's in charge of the messaging and the execution of the planned API transition and that part I think he screwed severely. There was plenty of time to massage this into a smoother transition.
Well, he's responsible. I don't think the CEO is usually the one in charge of doing something like this, or even designating who is, that'd be someone else. Head of marketing might be responsible for picking the person for the communications effort, for example.
Still, if that person would be the wrong choice, that means the head of marketing isn't good at picking people, which in turn means the CEO is bad at picking a head of marketing. Ultimately, the fish smells from the head.
I doubt he's singularly responsible for these decisions, but then that AMA where he had the opportunity to engage with concerns and perhaps rehabilitate his image didn't really go too hot either. The whole thing about "[riding] out" the current predicament is telling about the leadership's priorities, and seemingly sets the site on a path to follow the typical social media platform trajectory of poisoning its own source of value. I don't think any rephrasing or massaging of the message would've helped. Also, from what I read, reddit was turning in a respectable profit already, but seemingly not enough? It seems the strat will be to grow until the balloon pops instead of thinking of sustainability.
Sustainability has never been a core tenet of capitalism, unfortunately. I think spez was hoping to cash out before the balloon popped.
I generally try to be sympathetic to people and see where they're coming from. This is not a no-win situation for Spez. He could walk-back what he said and apologize publicly to Christian and Apollo and the users, then step down. He wouldn't get any money from the IPO (maybe?) but it would save the site.
Do you remember where you read that? Spez claimed in the AMA that Reddit had never run a profit, but showed no proof. Also, numbers can be massaged.
Investopedia says:
You know what, I was thinking of the post that the Apollo dev made in the app’s sub, but that was all estimates of revenues. I suppose we’ll find out sooner than later once they go public.
Overall I don’t feel bad for him due to the reasons outlined by other people. But the outrage over the internal memo is insane. I talked more about it in another thread, so I won’t rehash it here. But the jist is this: that memo is the type of memo that management should always send in situations like these. It doesn’t really matter (for this part of the discussion) that Reddit basically created the issue themselves. If my company went through a situation like this and leadership did not send out a memo like this, I would be upset. Yes, it is nothing but empty platitudes, but that is what is expected for an internal memo.
Steve has already done enough incriminating actions during this incident, and I have been learning about more that happened before this incident too. Let’s just be mad at the stuff that is actually bad. We don’t need to make up malice where it doesn’t exist. That is what separates honest anger from the internet style hate bandwagon that causes so many issues.
I totally agree - it's what I expect management to do - let the employees know that it's happening, and to have a conversation and also to let them know there's going to be anger. If they just acted as if it wasn't happening (which many many tech companies have done recently) it's way worse.
The fact that spez is killing something wonderful is deserving of anger. The internal memo - not so much.
He's a liar who's unafraid of doing whatever it takes to get what he wants. This situation is about making infinite profit in a system that requires infinite growth. I don't feel bad for any CEO that would rather go public and be forced to look at infinite growth than be sustained and find ways to profit off of the service you offer. I especially can't feel bad for a CEO that really says its core users can just go somewhere else, as he said today with regards to the blackouts.
The blackout was meant to send a message. The memo suggests that he is not listening at all. Users here have by and large left reddit behind, but the commenters you are seeing are still there and would like to stay. Those commenters are coming to grips with frustration and disappointment and trying to decide how best to respond.
Also outrage and anger grow and are popular in online spaces, especially if they seem righteous or justified. I don't fully understand it, but I read Max Fisher's book the Chaos Machine about social media. One takeaway from the book is that outrage promotes online engagement. People respond to content that makes them angry.
The moderators have put in untold hours cultivating communities they care about and keeping them safe. Cutting off the apps before replacing their third party tools is profoundly disrespectful of them, and of the value they have brought to reddit. Low vision users are getting ignored, or nearly so. Personally, I hope the Apolloapp developer sues u/Spez for libel.
I would also like to add that it's not just those with low-vision accessibility needs that are being left behind and ignored. Reddit ignores almost all accessibility needs and are not compliant with ADA standards.
I don't have ADHD but I installed LeechBlock NG yesterday. It's not the perfect solution but it's a tool that could help some people.
On Windows, I have found that Cold Turkey is a useful tool that is not as easily circumventable as a browser extension. It's free tier allows blocking domains.
No sympathy from me at all. In the early days of reddit he was involved in some highly questionable stuff, a few years ago was making questionable decisions, and clearly still to this day he's more concerned with making fat stacks of investor and AI company cash off the backs of the site's userbase.
Also he seems like a complete nut.
I simply wouldn't be in that position. But then I recently walked away from a job that paid laughably well because I could see the toll the mental and ethical contortions were having on my health.
I could say that plenty of other people don't have the same hang ups but let me call a spade a spade: capitalism is mostly about eating or being eaten. I'm so done with this dichotomy. I'm a vegan for a reason. I don't want to bring more pain and death into this world. I also don't want to receive it.
Others see things differently.
Put another way: I don't see people succeed at that level without either being ignorant of the harm they're causing or being utterly monstrous because they are fully aware of it.
I don't hate him as a person. I hate him as a CEO. He said things that CEO shouldn't say or at the very least shouldn't say the way he did.
The internal memo should be internal, but one should really expect it to leak eventually. And he made bold statements that sounded disparaging/belittling in the current situation (I'm not native English speaker, I hope the message gets along).
I, as registered Reddit user at the moment, feel offended by his statements, and it's actually users who make the site and his words basically translate to "I don't care what they think, they will conform" for me. If they want to go public, the very first thing should be firing him. He isn't making Reddit look better and favorable at the moment.
So once again - I wouldn't slap him in the face if I met him on the sidewalk, but I would fire him if I had the power. I don't have the power though, so I will just stop using Reddit, as I do not approve the way it is going now.
How ironic that all they had to do was just copy all the good things of 3rd party apps, make lots of options... well, actual options instead of hard-coded mess and they could have had the best app out there and I could have switched back to it with many other people (I believe). But no, instead of making our service the best out there, we just charge unbelievable money to cut the best apps out and we still run the same shitty service... This isn't how it's done. I would love to see Reddit go down because of their recent actions and statements, I really would!
I appreciate the honest thoughts. All these responses give me perspective. Yeah, I think he's handled this whole thing very poorly, I can't deny that at all. And I can see better now why he doesn't seem to be a very good CEO, after reading a lot of the responses in here. I think beside that I still just feel kind of bad for him though... Nothing specific about spez, I just tend to feel bad for anyone who gets publicly slammed, politicians, celebrities, random people who screw up and go viral, stuff like that. I doubt anyone intentionally tries to suck at their job also, so maybe he did try and do his best, but just isn't cut out for a CEO job, and it always feels bad to fail at a job (I have failed at many so maybe that's why lol). I do understand why others wouldn't share the view of feeling bad for him, and I don't mean to offend anyone. It was just some things I was thinking about today. Appreciate all the honest responses.
It just seems he looked to much towards profit or selling the company (going public is kinda selling, isn't it?) instead of making the process uneventful or at least acceptable for users. It could have been in the works for a year already slowly shifting towards paid API (with some reasonable pricing), such changes can happen. But this really seems like quick and not really thought through selling of all the people who made Reddit what it is. And many of these people will leave or make some hard times for Reddit (moderators by setting subreddits to private) and Reddit should cease to exist (as we know it) as a result of such behaviour.
And him being CEO? He should speak clearly about the intentions, why they do what they do, where they want Reddit top go/shift etc. All they, or specifically CEO, did was lying and debase the whole protest. As a CEO he doesn't deserve better for his behaviour. Once again - I wouldn't harm him in any way if I met him, this is not personal, it's just business. While I may feel bad for the person as such, he could step down as CEO to not be part of this, so... it was and still is up to him, really. If he has the balls to stay as CEO after this, no pity for him from me.
I never was in a position anywhere near his, so I can't really say, but I guess I would behave differently if I wanted the community to approve of the way Reddit is moving towards. It doesn't look like he wants community to approve...
I agree with the spirit of your post. Whatever he may have done, it wasn't enough to warrant such aggressive action as the other side is now showing. Besides, he always stood up for free and fair speech even while incurring backlash on his own platform - which he could have easily curbed using his CEO/admin privilege.
As more and more time passes, public sympathy is moving towards the side of Reddit Inc. and Spez, the other side is seen as someone who hijacked the subs and is trying to kill the entire platform and conversations ecosystem. Instead of staying in the dark, those guys should come to the discussion table and have a chat about this. It'll be in the best interests of everyone involved.
Thanks for understanding the spirit of what I was posting. Yes, it's very sad that things just went on as they did. I really wish things had gone another way, because I think reddit can be such a valuable source of information. I am sad to see its decline to this point.
Spez has been on Reddit a lot longer than I have (and I imagime most people. Maybe even Deimos), so I think he should have known by now the best decision would have been to say nothing. Even if it was inevitable and this is a bankruptcy level decision, there was going to be no way to spin this publicly in a good way to the vocal part of Reddit.
So don't. But Spez only made it worse and borderline litigatable with his statements this week. This is unfortunately not the first time, so I can't exactly sympathize with him.
I've been on Reddit for 16 years, and IMO he's putting oil on the dumpster fire.
If it was a "the future of the website is at stake" issue, redditors would have banded together in a heartbeat. Spez would have faced criticism for bloat, but nothing close to this scale.
But this isn't an existential crisis. This is a "we want to make money" crisis of people yearning for IPOs and dreaming about cashing in training AI models. No one cares if Spez, Altman, or Conde Nast comes out further ahead.
I also cannot imagine Reddit as a company has no marketing/public-outreach people, he could have those do their job. Spin it. It sounds shitty, but hey, these people are exactly there to disseminate shitty news in a way that it's as palatable as possible, so yeah, they ought to be able to do it better.
Always keep in mind that while you might feel bad for a CEO like spez on a personal, humanitarian, level - and that's a commendable quality in you - they are usually so rich that if they wanted things to be different, they could trivially do it.
Essentially, spez is in that Woody Harrelson gif, drying his tears about this with all the cash he has.
So, while I cannot say with certainty what I would do if I had that much money, I will assume that like /u/elight I would not be in that position. I would hope I would not be as I'd rather give up a comparatively small portion of my wealth (compared to the mountain I'd still have) to fix things or walk away.
Fair points here, thank you.
I think it's important to look at the background around the API changes too.
This is all starting because ChatGPT acknowledged that they heavily relied on Reddit's API in 2021 to train it's ChatGPT systems. That flood of requests is what kicked all this off.
Now it's just punitive response tactics against any who are relying on the API to run their app or whatever else.
ChatGPT was even asked how they felt about the new API costs, and if they'd pay it, and they said they don't even use Reddit any more as they already scraped all the information they needed.
If spez and Reddit wanted to stop this, they should have cut the head off the snake 2 years ago, but they chose not to, and instead are now punishing everyone else as a result.
I would've not entered into a weird mix of personal/professional drama with an affected party.
I wouldn't have bothered with an AMA about it because those never go well. The community "wants" it but only uses it as an opportunity to abuse the person holding it, resulting in the few deep questions being asked in good faith being ignored.
I would've announced the price change, how to navigate it, and left it alone, and published documentation as needed.
I don't fault the memo, we live in crazy times and people are all fucked up about Reddit, so I totally get the concern. The response as expressed in many places has been completely over the top, vulgar, and inappropriate, so the concern about wearing Reddit attire isn't completely unfounded (specifically mischaracterization of /u/spez, which rapidly devolved into insults and slander despite there being enough to validly poke at). I also know that a 2 day blackout was going to blow over, as did many participating subs. As they thought about this, they decided to do longer or permanent blackouts. People didn't like to be reminded of a temporary boycott's major weakness.
I still think Reddit will win, and will not die in the end. I bet the majority of its users don't know, or know much, about what's happening or care because they use the app, not the website and community.
Quit myself to a cabin in Minnesota.
Two options:
Then, after a while, bring back secret santa and other community events, hire a good AMA director who is active in the AMAs, etc. Basically an effort to bring the spirit back to reddit.
Oh man, secret santa haha I haven't thought about that in forever (not laughing at your suggestion just a trip to see that.)
The only narrow circumstance I'd feel the slightest pity for Steven(Spez) is if there is more to the story regarding Christian(Apollo), and there are legal reasons Steven wasn't able to be more forthcoming or present contrary correspondence.
I say legal reasons, such as unlike Christian(who is Canadian), Reddit is headquartered in California, which is a two-party consent state.
While unlikely, Christian could have certainly released correspondence that confirms his own public narrative, knowing he would have to actively consent for Steve to record anything that could counteract that narrative.
I say unlikely because given Steven's, as well as other Reddit execs'(current + previous) past unprofessional behavior, it's easier to take Christian's narrative at face value.
Personally I'm not sure what price point for the API access would be reasonable.
To appease the third-party app users (which I am part of) I'd keep the access free to developers on the condition that the users need to have a Reddit Premium subscription. Since those users are likely to block ads and these apps are unlikely to show apps from Reddit, it makes up for the lost revenue and encourages users who wants to keep using their app to subscribe.
That way Reddit doesn't alienate third-party app users, it create a monetization path and it stops the big players in AI from siphoning Reddit data for free and for their own benefit.
Ok, if I were in the position that I'm the one enforcing a decision I know is not going to be popular and let's say I even endorse the position cause it will make a lot of money and that's all I care about... what do I do? I don't do what Spez does. I don't try to throw a very popular dev under the bus. I don't put out an AMA I have no intention of actually answering (and then try to throw the dev under the bus again after he's shown proof you lied about him).
I stay silent and just let the anger pass. It's the internet, I hate to agree with him on something but he's right most people won't be inconvenienced to leave and they'll throw their hissy fit and then keep on using hte site. So, you just stay silent and let the anger pass. You don't feed the fire. Feeding the fire just helps keep people angry and maybe strengthens their resolve to actually leave.
Spez did this to himself. And I'd argue it probably shows some narcissm that he couldn't just stay quiet and let it pass (especially as he seems to know that people will just move on eventually).
What's this new internal memo today? Did the contents of it get leaked? Anybody have a non-reddit link to it?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman
OP says "Reddit is blowing up" over it, but I don't see any sign. The people on r/inthenews are saying "yup, he's right that the drama will pass on its own."
sorry, i more meant the few subreddits i was looking at (as that's what I see when I go to reddit), but then again, those are subreddits dealing with reddit alternatives and the like, so I guess it would be expected. I don't really look at frontpage on reddit, so maybe my perspective is skewed here, I hadn't thought about that.
The API pricing is all part of business. Sure, it is obvious that he is driving out all the 3rd party apps for his own benefit, but he IS running a business, so I can, reluctantly, understand.
However, the way he treated the infamous AMA was disgusting to say the very least.
No one asked him for the AMA and he did not initiated out of his good will, so I guess that whole thing was a PR stunt. BUT he only posted 14 comments. Noted that I used chose the words "post comments" because he didn't even "replied" anything. There was clear evidence that all he did was copy-and-paste (edited out the "A:" while somehow keeping the "edited" part out of his edited comment). And don't get me started on the the blatant lie he said about Mr. Selig....
You know what, fuck /u/spez
If I was in Spez's shoes, they'd be doing a lot of honking, cause the dude is a clown.
He has continually ignored moderator and user complaints about the site and turned Reddit into a heavily censored mess. If anything the blackout is karma biting him in the backside.
Loads of users flock to Apollo, RIF, etc because the official app is a crock of shit. Killing these apps along with third party moderator tools is him hammering nails at lightning speed into his own company's coffin.
Hell no, fuck /u/spez. Done more then enough to prove time and time again that they're both an awful person and terrible at running a site.
What was the internal memo?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman
I don't feel bad for him in the least. He made his bed and now he has to lie in it.