It’s pretty much guaranteed that AMA is going to go over very, very poorly. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out people aren’t happy about this! I’d think of this as a “why bother” situation usually but I get the feeling spez is looking for attention/validation.
I think it's going to be a honeypot intended to draw out the critics. Their accounts will be banned and their comments hidden within minutes of saying anything even remotely critical.
Can't wait to speak my mind and let them ban my 16 year old account.
but I get the feeling spez is looking for attention/validation.
Is he though? His last comment on Reddit as of this time was 10 months ago. I don't think he really cares, if anything he's being pressured to do it (and possibly doing begrudgingly) because he's the more known "face" of reddit.
E: I'm not defending spez, btw. What I mean is just that I think it's likely he's an unwilling participant in all this. Reddit is just a source of income for him, he doesn't care what happens to it. He probably would rather be cruising on his yacht or whatever, than doing this AMA.
Even before the API debacle, Reddit has had some serious issue, and every one of those issues is u/spez. He can't just fight his way through this. The incentive to leave has always been there, and now he's pushing us over the edge, and he's gonna try to win us back with some empty words.
This is the same guy who stealth edited a comment of a user he was angry with and then justified his decision by saying he grew up being a troll on the internet. Leave the troll's playground and watch it crumble. Reddit isn't spez. It's all of us.
My memory is a bit foggy, but I believe it was something like: on a Donald Trump subreddit, a top comment with tons of upvotes was anti-spez. Tons of upvotes meant that tons of people saw it. That comment then changed to saying spez was awesome. No “user edited comment” or “admin edited comment” tag or anything, like what you normally see in edited comments. People banged on spez’s door about it and he admitted that he had both the power and inclination to stealth edit other peoples’ comments.
Since it was a Trump topic, way too many users let what happened slide, but it’s become just one more thing people can point to about Reddit’s issues.
Only 1 server is sending the changes to the other servers? So if the instance is the source, the same thing would happen? Or will most servers have the data already by then, and not receive updates?
If you view the data from Beehaw's interface, you see the data of Beehaw's database. If you view the data from Lemmy.world's interface you see the data of Lemmy.world's database. There's no guarantee of consistency between the databases of different instances.
I don't think lemmy provides tools for that (good), so normal moderators, can't do this. With direct access to the server, maybe. So make sure your server admin isn't spez.
I’m sure it’ll go well, everyone will have a great time, and /u/spez will do everything he can to make Reddit even better!
Hahahahaha no just kidding. He’s going to get absolutely flamed and duck the hard questions, which I have no doubt will be most of them. At this point I’m not sure if it’s a worse look for him to offer his weak justifications to an enraged community or not respond at all.
To me, the recorded calls from Christian are damning evidence that this isn’t a matter of fair compensation from users on 3rd party apps. They literally just set out to kill them and are doing it in the most disingenuous way possible.
Unless he's using this opportunity to repeal the API changes or officially resign as CEO and put somebody more competent in charge, I don't see this going well.
They don't need it to. They just need to have enough clueless investors for the IPO and snazzy graphics to mislead them enough so they aren't looking at what is actually happening that Reddit is actually imploding.
Being a realist, I wouldn't say Reddit will implode from this. A lot of people just come for the memes and don't really give a shit about BaconReader, Apollo, Reddit Is Fun, etc.
What it will do is drive far more people towards Reddit competitors. Lemmy instances in general have seen far more signups lately, and Tildes has exponentially increased in active users.
The part I'm worried about is what happens if Spez does the unthinkable and backs down.
Some of you may remember a Reddit clone called Voat that grew during Ellen Pao's brief tenure as Reddit's CEO. It was once poised to be the Reddit successor but was quickly abandoned due to server issues and Ellen later resigning. Voat nearly died, was resurrected by becoming a bastion for white supremacists when they were driven off of Reddit months later and survived for a few more years...
As for how Voat was near the end of its life, imagine nearly every comment being filled with offensive slurs...
I think it's a little more complicated than this: Reddit needs power users to make its ecosystem work. Mods of course, but also content creators and content, hem, reposters, who keep large communities active and interesting. If a significant enough fraction of these people give up on Reddit, the users who want funny memes will go get them from 9gag or wherever is most convenient for them.
I wouldn't be shocked if there is only comments from suspiciously young accounts that get addressed, posts like "How are you so brave to get up lead us to the promised land every day sir?" and "I don't have a question, I just want to thank you for saving me from the scourges of NSFW posts", while all the real questions are silently absent.
I partially agree with you that he's got guts, but I think more so that you hit the nail here:
Spez should honestly learn to read the room.
I think there may be something genuinely not right with his sense of social awareness. I'm not a doctor psychiatrist, etc., but when I read the post today from iamthatis about Apollo shutting down, the quoted text that came from spez really felt defensive to me.
What's the betting he'll back down in some way (which was the plan all along)? That way they'll get what they originally wanted but will look as if they've "listened".
I'm not sure I believe that will happen though, tbh.
My bet is that they'll announce that they're still charging for the API, but at a "drastically" reduced price. As you say, I think it was their plan all along. That way they can still milk third party apps, all the while still being able to say "we listened to the community" by not destroying them outright
I just don't get why they were doing per api call to the app at all, instead of a subscription to reddit for the users. I might have paid a bit to keep using redreader and avoid ads.
I would put money on that not happening at all. The suite of changes this time are exceptionally broad and seem 100% targeted at public investment. They can't back-down on deciding to go public, and they can't really go public with some of these things in place.
Yeah I don't expect anything to happen either. The big "blackout" having a predetermined duration of 48 hours is a joke. Reddit can just sit it out and be done with it. After reading the farewell post of the Apollo dev it also seems like Reddit is doubling down on their pricing model with no leeway.
I do find it odd that they chose the protest to be only 48 hours. What are they hoping to accomplish then? All spez has to do is wait for the 48 hours to end and resume his normal operations.
I don't think they will, but even if they did I kind of suspect the apps will still shutdown, they all announced their shutdown at once, I am sure they discussed amongst each other and reached a line in the sand with reddit. If I got that sort of treatment, even if they backed down I'd never trust them again, I'd never want to work with them again and I don't see how that sort of situation is tenable. So they could completely abandon the changes and still have achieved the result they want. However, at this point they've already vilified themselves to those who will ever care, so there's no reason to back down at all.
I dont get why hes doing it at all. There is no universe in which this doesnt end completely poorly, with nuked comment chains and tons of down votes. I expect a ton of users to get banned, and it would be very surprising if spez answers anything other than pre planned questions
I haven't seen Reddit this upset, collectively, since Ellen Pao. Doing an AMA is just going to throw gas on the fire. I dont see the play hes trying to make
The sad thing is... Ellen Pao did nothing wrong. All she really did was ban /r/FatPeopleHate. Victoria's firing was Kn0thing's doing but everybody threw Ellen under the bus for it. Oh, and she was trying to fight for keeping Reddit as a free-speech platform too.
It's amazing how sheepish the Reddit community truly is when everybody came back to Reddit the moment Pao was forced out.
She really didn't deserve the nickname 'Chairman Pao', especially when Spez was the one who pushed far stricter censorship measures, made ban-evasion a site wide offence and gave moderators so much power to abuse.
On the plus side, it's good to see a Reddit alternative that isn't either dead, a closed-garden like Tildes, or a white supremacist hellhole.
I never understood the Pao hate either. She wasn't in the CEO position long enough to do any substantial damage. And definitely not nearly as much as what /u/spez is doing now which is going to permanently and irrecoverably ruin Reddit.
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