What is Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman doing?

Some of the communities that closed down in response to the API changes explicitly shifted to Discord

Sigh

Legitimately one of the most annoying things out of all of this is how so many tech writers have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to explaining the feelings and behavior of reddit communities. Like they don't ever seem to interview anyone or ask direct questions to understand what is happening, they just take a cursory glance at comment threads and pinned posts, and assume they understand what's going on. I can't count how many articles I have read that get the facts about this whole situation right but still seem to completely misunderstand it.

They did not "shift" to Discord, they used already established Discord channels in lieu of the subreddit, until the subreddit came back.

Many subs already had parallel discord channels, but users don't use one or the other, they use both. Because Discord is a fundamentally different kind of platform. It's exactly the same way that many forums back in the day would also have chat rooms attached. Same community, using two different methods of online communication, at the same time, for different purposes. No one would ever have suggested IRC was equatable to a forum.

All that happened was when the subs closed, users congregated in the Discord to stay connected. It was never going to be a new permanent home. They were not seeking a new home, that's the critical part. I've seen very, very few people suggest Discord as a permanent replacement and if they are it gets shot down. They were simply waiting out the protest on Discord until they could go back to Reddit or, if an alternative showed up, go there. It was a bomb shelter.

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"They didn't shift to Discord, they just moved temporarily to discord. How can writers get it so wrong"

Lots of mods posted a note saying "see you on Discord" when they shut down. This is not exactly an egregious error.

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- Yeah. Rather a decent number of communities have actually moved to Discord, or are trying to, including a decent sampling of larger communities like MFA.
  
  There's been some kind of wonky takes in Fediverse about some of those moves that seem to reject the validity of migrations that aren't coming to our spaces. Mods will post "going to Discord, fuck this place" and they're like "it's temporary, Discord isn't a forum".
  
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I really hope they don't replace Reddit with Discord, it's a closed-source software with data not being indexable by a search engine. Even if they did find a solution to index all that data into a search engine, it would be awful to have to install a software to actually see/interact with it.

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- Well the good news is if you actually go to the Discords who attempted to move over from subreddits, they're all unnavigable messes with zero way to actually find new information or posts, so the whole thing has been a failure. Why people thought a cringy closed source gamer chat platform was a good replacement is beyond me. They were wrong and the results show this. Discord is not for that use case and is not remotely a Reddit replacement.
  
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- Not to mention it's almost impossible to keep up with a very active Discord server
  
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Didn't /r/malefashionadvice explicitly close the subreddit and recommend everyone go to their Discord? I can't check it now since I'm at work, but if I remember right, it is still closed with the mods saying they expect to be removed at any point.

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- Yes, they left a message with a link to their Diacord.
  
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- You sure it wasn't "let's go to discord to get updates where we will move"? Discord won't work well unless it's a very small community.
  
  Edit: I just joined and they created many smaller channels, I guess that helps them scale to larger number of users. So yeah I was wrong, but I still insist for majority of subreddits discord isn't a matching platform and more like a compliment, when you want to talk live with somebody.
  
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- You are absolutely correct about this.
  
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Like they don’t ever seem to interview anyone or ask direct questions to understand what is happening, they just take a cursory glance at comment threads and pinned posts, and assume they understand what’s going on.

Being a staff writer with deadlines will do that to you.

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Reddit was way better than discord. This is a step backwards for humanity. Thanks, spez.

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@deweydecibel Is that how Ruqqus started? Because new /m/ruqqus discussion started here

@mastermind

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Might I suggest using Discord as an alternative to Reddit?

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- Idk I have heard people talk about something called Lemmy? And kbin? Anyone know anything?
  
  /s
  
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One of the weirder phenomena of the low interest rate era in tech was a tendency to see companies primarily as investments. The goal was not to have a functional business, but an exit, often via IPO or acquisition. I have begun to wonder if that explains what Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has been up to lately.

I can't pretend to know what King Steven is thinking, but his proclamations have certainly driven me to the exit. Two months ago at this time I had no clue King Steven would banish me for preferring BaconReader over the app with his Royal Warrant.

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I haven't been able to post a comment on The Verge since the redesign. Huh.

Anyways: All of spez's spedding can be explained easily enough: He is in IPO exit mode. He wants out of this business so he can go be a piece of shit.

He really thinks he can get the valuation on reddit. I'm here to tell him he's delusional. The window came and went with the interest rates. An adjusted value with a new S-1 is going to be a serious write down on the real value and that's when his days are numbered.

He basically upset 5% of the user base and even that small amount has done irreversible harm to reddit. Everyone knows he wants out. Everyone knows he's fudging MDAUs. Everyone knows reddit has never been profitable. Was it worth it, you tumbling duckweed?

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It's probably not even 5%, but it was a part of the site that felt so strongly about their engagement that they preferred specific apps to use for that engagement. And we are seeing that evicting that small percentage had an huge effect on the quality of the place, providing the content that kept the rest engaged.

I know people who are casual Reddit users and don't care at all about the API access. But they can see that Reddit has jumped the shark. Content is far less interesting to them, so they are spending less time there.

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- Also 5% of a userbase in the hundreds of millions is NOT a small number. And it's not JUST them who are upset its their peers on the platform who would look at that and say "hmm that IS bullshit"
  
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The horrifying thought of this whole ordeal is that, no matter how well or how poorly Reddit's IPO goes, Spez still walks away from this thing as a millionaire. Golden parachutes and all.

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- I think it's unlikely that the IPO will happen any time soon. Nobody wants to IPO while public sentiment is bad.
  
  I think it's possible Huffman will get booted before the IPO. I also think a lot of his bonuses are contingent on the IPO.
  
  Like, he's going to make bank no matter what... But if it's any consolation, he's probably going to fuck himself out of a significant amount of the potential total.
  
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Quickly searched the article, no mention of Lemmy.

Hope we'll get mentioned in a future article

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They only mention discord 🙄

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- Which is not a Reddit replacement. It works fundamentally different.
  
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He stands there, on top of a (reddit) building, screaming

"I'm Homelander. I Can Do Whatever I Want"

While um..."raining" down on those below him...

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Great question. The answer is making Reddit less good.

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Killing “the front page on the internet”.

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Investing in the fediverse

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Was that really why people didn't like Ellen Pao. I just didn't like the way she was suppressing non damaging information not banning hate subs. Getting rid of the IAMA liaison was a bad call.

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It's called a glass cliff. The board wanted to do a bunch of really unpopular things, so they chose her to implement those changes and take the heat from the user base with her. Companies do it all the time, almost always it's a woman, so “you just hate her because she is a woman” can be used as deflect. That's why it's called that, it looks like a woman breaking through the glass ceiling but it's just a bunch of old white males pushing her off a glass cliff.

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- Twitter's new CEO is on her own glass cliff. This tactic is so obvious.
  
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Ellen Pao was a fall guy. Reddit's real management, including Huffman, needed to do some janky shit and wanted someone to absorb all the user hate who could then be gotten rid of.

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Getting rid of the IAMA liaison was a bad call.

That really was the canary in the coal mine that Reddit was all downhill from there on out

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[w/r/t API kerfuffle] In some ways, this makes sense: third-party apps let users skip ads, which hits Reddit’s bottom line. The pricing, however, seems steep. Why?

Well, the answer is AI. Basically, former Reddit board member Sam Altman, who departed in 2022, admitted his company, OpenAI, had trained on Reddit data. I find it difficult to believe that Huffman didn’t know OpenAI was training using Reddit’s data, particularly since Altman sat on Huffman’s board. Suddenly, Huffman is saying the API is very valuable, especially to buzzy AI companies that investors have lately had the hots for. This seems to position Reddit as being in the shovels business during the AI gold rush.

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Friendly reminder that only reason 3rd party apps didn't have reddits ads was that reddot never modofoed the api to push them, and cancelled the agreememt with the one app that was sending reddit add money...

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Wanking. Def Wanking.

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This is the guy that used to mod the "jailbait" sub right? Looks like a creep

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Reddit is going to become irrelevant shortly. How sad.

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Fuck u/spez

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Plot twist: Spez secretly invented Lemmy

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Is spez wrong? The community is openly letting themselves get cucked. Look at how r/place has already given up on revolting and is instead working together to boost Reddit's IPO value. The closed subreddit protests gave up. Nobody is caring about moderators being replaced. People are still going about the site like normal. So is spez really wrong that this was going to pass because the users clearly don't care if they're getting fucked, just like how people somehow still hang on to Twitter.

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I mean... Twitter isn't doing great now. This one controversy won't sink Reddit, but it opened the door for competitors to grab a foothold. When the API issues were happening, people were scrambling for an alternative and there was nothing there. However, for the next Reddit controversy there will be a more mature Lemmy/kbin as an alternative with superior third party apps.

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- controversy won’t sink Reddit, but it opened the door for competitors to grab a foothold. When the API issues were happening, people were scrambling for an alternative and there was nothing there. However, for the next Reddit controversy there will be a more mature Lemmy/kbin as an alternative with superior third party apps.
  
  Enshittification commencing..
  
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Look where we are discussing that ex-platform. And that's all that really matters.

There are still speciality communities there not mirrored here, but give it a few more years. My first Lemmy account is now 3+ years old. Let's see where we are in 3 more years.

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- also, youve gotta remember that half of the people still on reddit are super-casual users who would likely never switch to a "harder" platform. a lot of people that are using reddit right now at this moment are people that havent been on it since 2009, theyre people that are still enjoying their first experience with a forum board type community because they come from facebook, snap and instagram. i can sympathize with it.
  
  given that the other super mainstream online platforms are absolutely infested with ads, nannying, bots and inorganic interactions, its no surprise that theres still a huge amount of people that that just dont know better or give enough of a shit about it.
  
  its kinda like more of the same in a different format for them.
  
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Permanently Deleted

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More like Huff-paint-man. Yeah.

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