What should I do now lol
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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Twitter blocked links Mastadon for a hot minute calling them spam or unsafe or something. IIRC they backed down after a couple of days. Reddit has already been getting shit press for the last couple of weeks, tech journos are watching this all unfold closely, is Reddit dumb enough to take an action that is blatantly censorship and anticompetitive? It would be totally unspinable.
If they do that, it'll tell you a lot about reddits thinking here. Spez current position is that the people complaining are a small minority and this will all blow over soon. If Reddit really believes that, then they best course of action is to let the complainers post their Lemmy/Kbin links, avoid a fresh round of bad press, and the lemmy/Kbin users will be gone in a couple of weeks and the reddit user base will remain largely intact. If Reddit views the risk of a mass migration to be a real and existential threat to their business, despite what they are saying publicly, then blocking Lemmy/Kbin links would make sense as a last ditch effort to keep their user base of casual users ignorant of popular alternatives, bad press being a necessary cost worth paying to try to retain the user base they need to sell for their ipo. All for that assumes Reddit is behaving rationally though, which Spez has shown isn't a safe assumption.
Agree that rationality is not a safe assumption. None of this has been rational- it feels like Spez is having a temper tantrum (as would a small child) and those around him are desperately trying to channel it into professional-ish actions.
Also makes sense if Spez is Ellen Pao 2.0- board decides unpopular changes need to be made, so they pay Spez extra to do 120% of what they want and be the fall guy. He goes nuts for a while, then resigns, and is replaced with some suit who looks good on TV and has a bit of social media cred. That guy then says all the right things to the community and walks back 20% of the changes.
This probably all pushes the IPO back a year or so, but if they think they can increase revenue in that time, it makes some sense.
At this point though I wouldn't put anything past Reddit.
I have to think someone there is smart enough to know if they block fediverse links that's a huge escalation that makes them OBVIOUSLY the 'bad guys' even in the eyes of people who DGAF about the API nonsense.
From the POV of a 3rd party observer, it COULD be argued that Reddit is just dumping freeloaders, a bunch of the users don't like it and want shit for free, and it's a stupid forum drama squabble.
But as soon as they start actively suppressing competitors, that becomes a lot harder to see as anything other than 'actively stopping their users who want to leave from leaving'.