It would be funny if they never built a paint brush tool into the interface, and some $100 an hour engineer has to sit there drawing over "Fuck Spez" all day by clicking individual pixels.
Sorry I’m not picking on you specifically, but every post about Reddit or r/place has someone saying something like “just leave” “any engagement helps them”, etc.
I think that’s exactly what they want.
They want the intelligent-but-cynical, hard-to-influence, infamously difficult-to-monetise dissenting mob to fuck off elsewhere, and leave them with the doomscrolling, passive users who are willing to use their app and happy to just look at whatever content is in front of them as long as sometimes there is a kitty.
The problem we have is that that mob of vocal users isn’t everybody. It probably isn’t even most users. I think they’d willingly lose us if it means the dissent goes with us.
So I don’t think this negative engagement is necessarily bad - it keeps their mismanagement in the news, and it opens users eyes to alternatives. And for me, that is the goal - to bring some of those awesome communities over to federated alternatives where no one corporate entity can take it away.
Plus it’s certainly going to be amusing if their flagship community engagement event (the output of which has been widely shared by the media in the past) has a giant “fuck spez” banner in it.
Yeah, a lot of people still haven't gotten this yet. Spez wants reddit to be friendly to stupid people who do stupid things like buy Trump NFCs. This entire thing is about purging the old, tech savvy, liberal/left crowd to make room for Facebook NPCs who are easier to monetize.
Doesn't reddit not make money though? Like, if traffic resulted in them making money, I'd agree, but everything I've heard would indicate using reddit with an adblocker literally costs them money.
Exclusively using reddit to protest should be fine IMO, just don't contribute anything that isn't a protest (including voting)
The argument is that it drives the active users and engagement up which allows them to show off those numbers to investors and it looks great for the upcoming IPO.
IMO though, I do believe that Reddit was losing money from 3pa because they’ve refused to say just how many users were using those apps compared to theirs.
So sad the only way to handle this pr crisis for the seems to be to launch another r/place. Sure I'll miss that, but using this to spin the narrative is stupid.
i hate spez as much as the next guy, but i don't think they care at all. everyone who visits reddit is contributing to the traffic numbers that they will show investors, including the people who write "fuck spez" on a page that those investors will never look at
If you leave spez wins. The majority of users will stay there and they either don’t care about, don’t understand, or don’t know about spez’s decisions. I’m sure spez would be happy to see all the protesting users who make him look bad leave.
Like anything that has life, there’s stages to death. Like the bloating and rotting, followed by the eventual popping of the corpse as the gasses that have been building up inside bursts out. Followed by the scavengers who will pick the corpse clean.
Sometimes some selfish little fucker will just swipe the whole thing. I had a mole decomposing on my driveway all week, and suddenly Sunday morning it's just gone! You can't even tell it was there.