I used to work in a place where we constantly got looked at by security companies and consultants. The wisdom of that time? Companies don’t hire security firms and consultants to find nothing, so no matter how asinine or impractical it is, they’ll still file it because an empty report is bad for business.

Our security handling was pretty strict, and we had to constantly talk customers off the ledge and kindly inform them that their consultant was blowing crazy swamp gas up their asses. My favorite was a firm that listed all Easter eggs as a vulnerability. An open source package could raise the list of developers with a secret key combo, and so the customer saw this on their report and raised a stink. The customer had no idea what this all meant, but their consultant had scared the crap out of them, so we had to layer on a patch to disable the stupid thing.

I’ve been on the internet long enough to know that any argument that goes on for long enough is going to get uncivil. You’re also very unlikely to convince someone who feel threatened by your point.

So I’ve got a soft ‘respond once’ policy. if someone replies to one of my comments, I respond once to clarify my position and address anything important. If I have failed to make my point by then, then my writing ability will continue to be insufficient in n > 2 comments, and I am adult enough to let them have the last word.

It’s not surprising. A lot of these CEOs run around in cliques. They have forums, news letters, Chatrooms, and social events. When Silicon Valley Bank went down, the CEO of the company I work for was giving us news from other CEOs he was talking to from a shared Chatroom they set up, basically a discord for CEOs.

The other point is that many CEOs are slaves to trend and have a deep fear of missing out.

In a way, they’re organized, and combined with the above, that’s part of why when one big company hops everyone leaps behind them as if they’re moving as one (it’s all a dick-measuring Highschool clique contest though, which is why I don’t use the word conspiracy). I would not be surprised if Huffman and Musk both repeated their rhetoric to an adoring crowd of fellows before they took it to their feeds. It’s maybe why they speak so brazenly, because there is a little echo chamber of people who worship at the altar of Survivorship bias in the hope that heaven will send them more bigger-dick pills.

I don’t disagree that there are evident growing pains, but I think a lot of people leaving Reddit have their head screwed on ass backwards about what “leaving” implies and demands.

Many of the redditors trying the fediverse aren’t trying the fediverse. They’re looking for Reddit, and nothing is ever going to be more Reddit than Reddit. You have to accept that the technology, terms, and culture may be different.

Many people are leaving Rome expecting to arrive in Carthage. What we have instead is a camp. The fediverse is still very small, new, and under developed. The moderation tools and culture are not established. Reddit went through years of growing pains to get to where it is now.

So yeah, you left something people put a lot of time and energy into, of course it’s going to suck a bit for a while. But it comes back to why you left - was it because of the interface changes, or the implied constitutional changes?

If you left because of Interface changes alone, you will not last. You want to consume, and not build.

Otherwise, If you’re like me, you’re sorta tired of putting effort into communities that get dumped on by corporate interests, and who are only willing to work towards safety so long as it furthers the bottom line. The fediverse kinda sucks right now, but it offers the promise of building something that may actually serve its community rather than a VC.

Like fixing a house you own versus an apartment you rent. Reddit will always be limited by what its share price demands. The fediverse will not be. I think it’s worth fighting for here rather than Reddit or other mainstream platforms.

Reddit employees will be able to easily know that more than 1000 subs went dark. They’re also probably well aware about how ad revenue works on the platform.

This message wasn’t really aimed at the employees. It was aimed at the MBAs and bankers who are preparing the IPO. It was meant for investors to say “everything is fine and this is normal…”

In a way, I mourned for reddit a long time ago. I stumbled (literally, stumbleUpon’d) reddit way back before the great Digg migration, when it was still mostly a haven for techies. The site went through a great many changes. Some good, some bad, some just… different.

At some point it got a little much. I’ve known for a number of years that I was growing increasingly alienated from it. Part of it was the Nazis and Reddit’s inability or unwillingness to deal with any of the hate and bots. Part of it was the pervasive meme / low effort image culture. Those things were always there, but there was a time it’d get you the stink eye and an annoyed upvote.

Besides Hackernews (which has always been full of a certain Silicon Valley type), there wasn’t really too many places to go. I’ve just been kinda waiting in the funeral parlor, hoping a ride to something else would come while I mostly browse the niche subreddits.

It’s my hope that this incident starts the seeds of old forum culture as expressed through multiple lemmys. That’s a pretty ambitious hope, but still. It’s well past the time for the big social media networks to break up.

Specifically infinite/increasing-growth capitalism.

They need to grow profits/value. These social media tech companies have about saturated potential user base. People are foreseeing a slow-down in ad budgets, and user-data is becoming a commodity. These realities, plus the need to drive up profits, leaves these companies with “no choice” but to seek more and more user-hostile features and rent-seeking behavior to satisfy investors. This was probably a long time coming, and was sorta delayed by valuation gains via an overpriced market. Now the investor love affair with tech has cooled a bit, and they’re asking more for hard-profit on the balance sheets.

The other thing that is ripping through social media platforms is a kind of ‘outrage’ or FOMO among leadership that LLM builders like OpenAI are eating lunch at their table by consuming their user content for training. This feeds into the previous point because they think that their users content can be a product of its own beyond attracting more users or being leveraged by ads. I am not so sure about this because these companies have already gotten their ‘lunch’ if they wanted it, and I am dubious about the value of a model built on data as provided by Reddit’s finest minds, and these platforms have patently failed to stop disinformation bots (which will get worse from these LLMs). But who knows.

Agreed. I think the post-IPO layoffs will be aggressive in Reddit’s case.

It’s not clear to me how reddit could possibly “grow”. They’ve hit peek influence, and ad-revenues haven’t really been a growth factor that has excited investors. They’re not really a technology powerhouse like Facebook or Google - all they have is their central product. So, when the IPO drops, all I can see for reddit is a future of aggressive layoffs and strong enshittification of Reddit as they seek capitalistic eternal increasing growth.