Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is continuing his damage control tour, this time via a new interview with The Verge. Despite...
BigDale123
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12Y

The unwillingness to back down is mind boggling.

@[email protected]
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02Y

I think he has shown his true form, he was always a cunt and not a very intelligent one. But now that the games afoot he has shown his true colors. The only thing he cares about is $$$$

@[email protected]
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2Y

Don’t forget that he also ran the sub r/jailbird, which totally makes everything…uhhhhh…yeah…makes it…

Edit: phone autoassume changed the name of the subreddit, I’m actually fine with that.

@[email protected]
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2Y

Be careful; someone might jump down your throat to say that “there was a time in Reddit where someone could add anyone as a moderator” but fail to provide any proof of this (that u/spez was added as mod to troll him). For all we know, spez himself actually mods jailbait, just not actively.

@[email protected]
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2Y

Also, if you were added against your will, especially to somewhere like that, why would you not remove yourself immediately? He’s the cofounder of Reddit, it’s not like we’re talking about some rando who checks his account once a year and doesn’t pay attention to potential changes they didn’t make, PLUS he’s literally an admin with server side access which makes any claims of “well you couldn’t remove yourself once added as a mod” invalid, there is no way he didn’t notice it and no way he could not remove himself. He wanted to be there and wholeheartedly endorsed such content being hosted from Reddit until the public rightfully got outraged and forced them to ban it.

@[email protected]
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02Y

Can’t back down when you’re a narcissistic liar

@[email protected]
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12Y

yea this guy screams narcissist

@[email protected]
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12Y

Reddit’s CEO wants me back, and he’s not having me this way.

@[email protected]
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12Y

Will be really interesting to see how this works out for them. They’ll definitely lose a lot of users but I wonder if they’ll end up getting enough of them to download the official app that they decide it was worth it.

justhach
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12Y

I feel like its going to be a lot like the Twitter meltdown after Musk took over: a lot of noise in protest, a shittier experience for the user base, but it will ultimately live on because people would rather adapt to the new paradigm then move onto something unfamilliar.

@[email protected]
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02Y

It’s always important to take a step back and consider that the mega-rich exist in a totally separate reality than the rest of us do. They were raised in a way that they were never forced out of infancy into adulthood like the rest of us were. I hope that eventually we realize that it’s not responsible to allow major institutions to be under the control of adults whose worldview has never progressed since the time they were toddlers.

@[email protected]
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02Y

Hey, sorry y’all had to defederate from our server.

I guess I thought I understood what that meant, but I somehow didn’t quite grasp that we can both still subscribe to third party communities like here at [email protected], and continue to interact indirectly through those channels. So the whole defederation thing matters even less than I thought it did.

Sorry to be off topic but some people at lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works might benefit from seeing this explained.

Otome-chan
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02Y

just an FYI, despite you seeing their comment, they can’t see yours.

Ok I see. And the reason for that is because beehaw has defederated my server, but my server has not defederated beehaw, correct?

Kinda confusing, I guess I thought of federation as a bilateral agreement for some reason, but actually each instance unilaterally decides who to federate with, and its not always reciprocal.

Otome-chan
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02Y

Yes. Think of it like blocking someone. beehaw defederated from sh.itjust.works so they can’t see anything from sh.itjust.works. not comments, not threads, not communities. 100% blocked. whereas the reverse isn’t true. you’re not able to get communities or content from beehaw (because they blocked and aren’t sending it to you), but their comments and threads elsewhere in the fediverse are still shared with you. This thread is hosted on lemmy.ml, so everyone federated with lemmy.ml can see it and interact with it; this is why you can see the beehaw user’s comment.

However, since beehaw defederated with sh.itjust.works, your reply remains unseen by them. sh.itjust.works could mutually defederate/block beehaw and you wouldn’t see the comment. but that’s up to your instance whether you wanna do that or not.

Ok thanks for explaining. I don’t see any reason we would defederate beehaw, they only blocked us because trolls were signing up on our server and spamming toxic stuff to their communities. Totally understandable, and hopefully we can reconnect with them once this platform matures a bit.

@[email protected]
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12Y

My first comment in the entire fediverse will be:

FUCK U/SPEZ

@[email protected]
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12Y

The Verge interview is Here

The tl;dr is it’s the AMA part 2: electric douchealoo

001
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12Y

These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free.

I just can’t believe that a CEO of a company who doesn’t pay their moderators would actually say something so tone deaf.

@[email protected]
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12Y

Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up

LMFAO that ship has fucking sailed. They already used Reddit data through 2021 and got everything they needed for free. Huffman is locking the barn after the horses are already out, and setting it on fire. What a fucking dumbass.

@[email protected]
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12Y

LMFAO that ship has fucking sailed. They already used Reddit data through 2021 and got everything they needed for free. Huffman is locking the barn after the horses are already out, and setting it on fire. What a fucking dumbass.

Plus they can just scrape the data without using the API. It’s a red herring, just a lie to cover up his desire to kill third party apps.

@[email protected]
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02Y

grabs popcorn

@[email protected]
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22Y

pOpCoRn tAsTeS gOoD

@[email protected]
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12Y

It’s a reference to the last time u/spez was an asshole. Come on! No need to downvote.

@[email protected]
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2Y

To be fair, the downvotes might also be part of the joke. That comment was the most downvoted in Reddit history before EA came along.

And it’s not like there’s karma on Lemmy so I don’t care lol

HiT3k
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4
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2Y

Wow. That is a truly horrendous interview. This saga just keeps getting better. That interview is somehow the absolute worst thing he’s done so far, and he’s pulled a lot of shit.

The only thing more gross than Elon Musk is an Elon Musk imitator. He’s just. so. angry.

@[email protected]
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12Y

If that just became the worst he’s ever done, I can’t wait another week before he stoops another 10 feet lower.

@[email protected]
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22Y

The way he setup Pao so he could look like a savior is still the worst thing he has done. Or maybe dealing with CP as a mod of jailbait.

@[email protected]
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12Y

A lot of these tech goons are losers in their personal lives and get huge ego strokes being able to control these platforms. Any questioning of their actions is perceived as a direct challenge to them as a person.

Ulu-Mulu-no-die
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2Y

For me he’s also stupid, I mean, you’re managing one of the biggest websites in the world and you don’t know accessibility is an international standard?? You need “guidelines” before you know what you should implement in your own official app? (he said this during the AMA) Come on …

@[email protected]
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12Y

Honestly, we should just leave it behind and focus on making communities here better. They have every right to cut off their nose to spite their face on their own website. Let’s learn from that for the future in contributing to making someone else’s website great.

@[email protected]
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12Y

The best revenge is living well.

Dojan
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22Y

It’s funny how he’s playing this out to be about third party apps like Apollo. Like yeah, that’s what the community cares about, but the reason they’re making the changes is because he’s fucking anal about OpenAI and other companies finding such success with products they have built using data scraped via the Reddit API.

He wants some of that money, not the comparatively tiny amount that Christian got from Apollo.

He also doesn’t seem to get that people root for an underdog. Had he been more serious about how they are upset that companies use their API to build massive tools that they can sublicense to other companies, like Microsoft, and make lots of money, people might agree with that.

What he’s framing it as though, is a big company like Reddit vs small indie app developers, like Christian Selig. Guess who the underdog is in that scenario, Hm?

@[email protected]
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12Y

It’s funny how he’s playing this out to be about third party apps like Apollo. Like yeah, that’s what the community cares about, but the reason they’re making the changes is because he’s fucking anal about OpenAI and other companies finding such success with products they have built using data scraped via the Reddit API.

The data could just be scraped without the API anyway.

@[email protected]
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12Y

Dude could literally invent a developer program to help support “sanctioned” third party devs that pay some sort of a yearly fee to access the API and raise cost like he is now to fend off LLMs. But nah, I’d expect that out of somebody that is actually wanting to solve the problem. Lol

@[email protected]
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12Y

They kinda already have something along those lines, or at least it’s in the works. I’m pretty sure that’s what Devvit is supposed to be, but rather than actually finish that project, they’d rather crusade against the Apollo app for some reason

@[email protected]
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12Y

That’s not the point for Reddit. They need to show a path to profitability for investors on the Reddit planned IPO. They plan on harvesting every last ounce of user data, and those third party apps deny them that every last ounce of data. That is why they won’t back down.

@[email protected]
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12Y

I commented another place in the thread here about how Huffman is bsing about this “profitability” angle and I can’t link to it. :-( Path to profitability for reddit is a pre-seed 1 funding conversation that should have already been iterated on and solved by now, especially if they are going to IPO. Even if they were to harvest user data, that can be done with transparency, but they just don’t want to do it.

Dojan
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12Y

That sounds unnecessarily complex. Just force an authentication of the client (ergo, make it so you can’t access the API without logging in) and add api rate limits per user, maybe with higher limits on users that have the paid Reddit membership tier.

But I don’t think that was the point anyway. It’s less work to just start charging for the API. That way they can charge companies like OpenAI, and drive others to use their main app, letting them sell targeted adverts to them too.

@[email protected]
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02Y

My god… he is such… a fucking… idiot. Holy shit… I’m just surprised he’s lasted this long as “CEO”. I work in tech and I’ve seen interns and entry level engineers exercise better decision making. I guess being strongman is more important to him than saving his company and/or protecting his image as a sensible leader.

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