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Wow. That is a truly horrendous interview. This saga just keeps getting better. That interview is somehow the absolute worst thing he's done so far, and he's pulled a lot of shit.
The only thing more gross than Elon Musk is an Elon Musk imitator. He's just. so. angry.
For me he's also stupid, I mean, you're managing one of the biggest websites in the world and you don't know accessibility is an international standard?? You need "guidelines" before you know what you should implement in your own official app? (he said this during the AMA) Come on ...
It’s funny how he’s playing this out to be about third party apps like Apollo. Like yeah, that’s what the community cares about, but the reason they’re making the changes is because he’s fucking anal about OpenAI and other companies finding such success with products they have built using data scraped via the Reddit API.
He wants some of that money, not the comparatively tiny amount that Christian got from Apollo.
He also doesn’t seem to get that people root for an underdog. Had he been more serious about how they are upset that companies use their API to build massive tools that they can sublicense to other companies, like Microsoft, and make lots of money, people might agree with that.
What he’s framing it as though, is a big company like Reddit vs small indie app developers, like Christian Selig. Guess who the underdog is in that scenario, Hm?
It’s funny how he’s playing this out to be about third party apps like Apollo. Like yeah, that’s what the community cares about, but the reason they’re making the changes is because he’s fucking anal about OpenAI and other companies finding such success with products they have built using data scraped via the Reddit API.
The data could just be scraped without the API anyway.
My first comment in the entire fediverse will be:
FUCK U/SPEZ
The Verge interview is Here
The tl;dr is it's the AMA part 2: electric douchealoo
These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free.
I just can't believe that a CEO of a company who doesn't pay their moderators would actually say something so tone deaf.
And blatantly false.
Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up
LMFAO that ship has fucking sailed. They already used Reddit data through 2021 and got everything they needed for free. Huffman is locking the barn after the horses are already out, and setting it on fire. What a fucking dumbass.
Also no sane company would pay that ridiculous price for training a LLM on memes
Why paying exorbitant api prices when you can scrape for free? Like all those image models clearly trained on scraped watermarked stock images
LMFAO that ship has fucking sailed. They already used Reddit data through 2021 and got everything they needed for free. Huffman is locking the barn after the horses are already out, and setting it on fire. What a fucking dumbass.
Plus they can just scrape the data without using the API. It's a red herring, just a lie to cover up his desire to kill third party apps.
The unwillingness to back down is mind boggling.
Need to come off macho and confident for the shareholders/potential shareholders.
I genuinely believe this is the real reason.
I think he has shown his true form, he was always a cunt and not a very intelligent one. But now that the games afoot he has shown his true colors. The only thing he cares about is $$$$
My god… he is such… a fucking… idiot. Holy shit… I’m just surprised he’s lasted this long as “CEO”. I work in tech and I’ve seen interns and entry level engineers exercise better decision making. I guess being strongman is more important to him than saving his company and/or protecting his image as a sensible leader.
Honestly, we should just leave it behind and focus on making communities here better. They have every right to cut off their nose to spite their face on their own website. Let's learn from that for the future in contributing to making someone else's website great.
I appreciate his contribution to growing the fediverse everyday with all these gifts.
Is this thing on?
Fuck you u/spez
Reddit's CEO wants me back, and he's not having me this way.
The 9to5mac article has just the right amount of spiteful contempt. Nice.
It's always important to take a step back and consider that the mega-rich exist in a totally separate reality than the rest of us do. They were raised in a way that they were never forced out of infancy into adulthood like the rest of us were. I hope that eventually we realize that it's not responsible to allow major institutions to be under the control of adults whose worldview has never progressed since the time they were toddlers.
Folks have made millions.
It sucks to be you, Reddit.
It's hilarious how people have literally paid app developers for a better way to experience reddit and he's mad about that. Like sorry you're a talentless hack. The only reason reddit is as popular as it is was down to the stars aligning back in the digg days. That's about it, first mover advantage with your only other competitor shooting themselves in the foot.
I used most 3rd-party apps for Android and the official one is simply the worst.
Lemmy clients are already better than Reddit's official apps.
You're right about the first mover advantage: there was a small time window in which Reddit was the town square of the Internet, but it turned to shit when the brass decided to milk users like data money cows.
But yeah keep going back to their site and watch their ads, that'll show them for sure.
I use old.reddit on computer with ublock origin, I don't even know Reddit has ads, been visiting for 10+ years, never saw single ad, same on mobile where I use Boost + Adaway or Kiwi browser + uBlock origin, I will see how the 3rd party situation works out
I mean, I did too. But you can see why Reddit is grouchy about that. I mean, I have written a lot of content and posted it to Reddit, and maybe that has value that they can monetize. Or maybe there's some value that they can get from data-mining my activity on the server side. But they haven't been making money off my eyeballs directly, or data-mining information available on the client side, and I imagine that that's frustrating when they go crunch the numbers on their costs and revenue.
Or, you could do what I do - use [https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit) with an ad blocker. That hurts them on two levels -
And don’t post anything - contribute nothing.
Spez is already talking about monetizing users account histories. Just blocking the ads isn't going to stop them.
Have a citation for that? Because that sounds like a great link for an inevitable edited response to all my comment history
I'll have to find it, but multiple places he's talked about Reddit being used by companies to train their AI systems. It's painfully obvious that he's looking for both moral and immoral ways to monetize Reddit immediately. I give it 3 months before this is announced.
I mean, I get that Reddit isn't making money. And that during the growth phase of a dot-com, it's okay to burn money in the name of growing the userbase, but that he has to transition to making money at some point. Investors gave him money, hundreds of millions, if I recall correctly, in the expectation that he can generate a return. He's getting near the point where he has to do that. And the return they're going to expect is going to be in the neighborhood of what other dot-coms can generate from their investment.
Like, the people yelling at him for being "greedy" in that he's aiming to make Reddit generate a return at all aren't realistic. That is something that always was going to have to happen, from the day that Reddit started. If you look at the issues that the moderators are taking up with him, they're trying to come up with a way that Reddit makes money and their concerns are also met.
The problem is that some of the moves he's making to try to make a return have really negative impacts, and a number of people want something that has less of a negative impact.
If the Fediverse can support similar functionality based purely on cash donations, or based on some other model (e.g. Usenet runs on software developed by the community, but generally one has to pay a commercial Usenet provider for service to cover the costs), or a "users donate resources" like BitTorrent and provide a better experience, then that's great. But the Fediverse is also going to have to figure out how to handle the costs of hardware and software development and all that, if it wants to be a competitive alternative. There are some hard questions that may come up down the line for the Fediverse too. The long term for something the scale of Reddit cannot be Earnest paying all of the money out of his personal pocketbook to Cloudflare to handle ramping up kbin's capacity or something like that from the main Lemmy instance operators.
Right now, I haven't seen any ads on the Fediverse, and I haven't yet donated money to Earnest (though he apparently does have a "buy me a coffee" tip jar and people have sent him small gifts). Which means that right now, I'm relying on the gift of resources from Earnest and some Lemmy instance operators to me. Maybe they can afford that for a small number of users. But end of the day, if many more users show up, they are going to have to find someone else to help bear the costs on an ongoing basis.
The recent Reddit push has two underlying realities forcing a lot of companies/web services to push for other monetization:
Spez has been blindsided by these developments when he should not have been.
it also hurts them on a spiritual level since they want to kill off old reddit.
Fuck u/spez
So glad I deliberately got perma banned a couple of days ago then nuked my account. I also deleted all the tracking cookies and deleted Boost (sorry boost dev you guys are great keep fighting the good fight) and blocked reddit domain using ublacklist.
Fuck u/spez
I don't really engage much anymore because of busy life but I'll try to be more active here.