The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…
Imagine that once upon a time (5-15 years ago), I actually had addblocker disabled on reddit, because I considered it worth supporting. lol
Proof that people will gladly support a good product.
These guys aren’t happy with some support. They want all the support i.e. money. Feels like no tech corporation thinks about its products long term anymore. Just the most readily available cash grabs possible, even if it means possibly losing future revenue.
Well, as other people have said, it looks like they were preparing to sell Reddit, or take it public, or whatever, and they wanted to make it look as profitable and purchaseable as possible.
The end result is the same, but the reasoning is a bit different.
Anyhow, if that’s true, I dare say they’ve achieved the opposite result now.
Spez explicitly said in his AMA that third party apps were profitable while reddit wasn’t.
Which isn’t mutually exclusive, plus he can’t really talk about any planned sales before they are actually announced anyway.
Yeah, at this point, they could completely reverse course and it still wouldn’t make a difference to me. I’m glad they took it this far actually because I didn’t like the way the site was going long before this but there weren’t any decent alternatives that I was aware of. My addiction kept me there, but this has made it pretty easy to leave with the glances back just being curiosity about whether the whole thing is on fire or becoming a steaming pile of shit.
So, shall we start calling this ‘the Reddit Effect?’ We haven’t had anything new to supplant the Streisand Effect for awhile, I feel like something like this is overdue
So the Reddit Effect would be a company trying to do something to raise it’s value or make it look good that has the opposite effect?
I don’t think there’s another name for that, so sure, why not?
Might be the digg effect ;)
It’s not just tech companies. It’s any company with greedy owners.
Same curve with Netflix. Pirating went down when they started. They themselves, but all the other Streamers as well have gone so greedy that the good product is no longer supported. Reputation ruined, war with customers ensues.
I was a paying premium member with ads enabled until recently.
We even used to run “thanks for not using adblock” ads in rotation, when there were no other ads to run. I had a picture of a squirrel that was in rotation there
Yes, that was funny and kind of endearing. Back then it also seemed like the goal was more to stay as kind of a community service, but of course the servers needed to be paid. Now it seems like they want it to return huge profits like Facebook and YouTube. It seems like a completely different mentality, where the ideals have vanished. And this is very clearly reflected in the userbase IMO.
During a part of that, reddit was a loss-leader subsidiary of Condé Nast. The magazine side took care of all the “corporate” stuff (legal, hr, marketing), letting reddit itself be lean and fast; it was all engineers more or less, and they all used reddit all the time.
Dude, I paid for Reddit Premium or Gold or whatever the fuck it’s called for 5+ years just to support. I wish I could claw it all back.
11 year account…makes it pretty easy to imagine. It was a very different site back then.