Spez and his ego are too invested in it now. He can't back down, his ego won't allow him to. Although, I could see a vote of no confidence from the board removing him and them saying "Oops our bad, we've removed him and we're going to listen to the community."

I almost wonder if the whole thing was a deliberate move to make some of us leave. They view us as negative value users.

Reddit and their sham AMA will be remembered as how NOT to manage a social platform and its PR

The AI excuse is a smokescreen. If it was really just about fleecing the AI bros they could have made a tiered system where free API access is rate-limited. The AI trainers "read" millions of times faster than people, so a paid access that lets them read that quickly would absolutely be worth paying for. This has always been about killing apps that don't give Reddit absolute control over what you see.

I think come July, Reddit will remember why websites offer free/low cost API access.

Everyone who wants the data will start busting out the web scrapers again. Chat GPT makes deciphering any obscuration techniques (changing class names, table formats, etc.) absolutely trivial.

It is bitter sweet, but I am excited to a new start in a much smaller (dare I say tighter?) community.

The short time I've spent here so far has been relaxing in a way. I don't feel rushed to get to the next post. The clunkiness on mobile reminds me of forums back in the early 2000s. I'm sure the nostalgia will wear off, but at this very hectic point in my life, it's nice to slow down for a change.

We've reached a point where leaders have realized that they can literally flip their supporters the middle finger, call them all idiots, and still have people consume their product. It used to be that CEOs used to at least try to hide behind PR image management consultants, but these days? Well, to quote our former US president "I could shoot a man in the middle of Fifth Avenue and people would still vote for me." And he's right. I'm not trying to get into a political discussion, more a societal one - this is where we are as a society - where leaders can do awful things and yet people shrug their shoulders and keep doing what they're doing as though nothing happened.

Louis Rossmann made a really good point about all of this too. A 2-day blackout is perhaps worse than doing nothing. All it does is prove that people will go away for a day or two, then come back and continue on like nothing happened. It proves that no matter how angry you make your customers, they'll be back.

I'm really glad to see so many communities have committed to going private indefinitely. I'm also glad to see just how many users are leaving the site "permanently" (one can hope they remain true to that). The only way that a company will learn is if they suffer consequences that actually affect their bottom line. PR doesn't mean jack these days, only profit.