this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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[–] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 417 points 1 year ago (37 children)

I just said this yesterday or two days ago when they announced they were going to start paying people for content, but it truly is amazing how Reddit can find another significant thing that will hurt them as a business and move forward with it.

It seems like they'd run out of things that could significantly hurt their business, they just keep finding something else.

Soon they're going to be down to basic features, And they'll be like hey look so hyperlinks don't work anymore. And then that'll be the end of the press release.

Their "business decisions" are insane right now.

It's very difficult to see this procession of self-mutilation technologically in another light other than deliberate corporate suicide. Like is someone going to benefit if Reddit goes bankrupt? Is that what's happening?

[–] gsa32@lemmy.world 208 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Reddit’s incompetence is so mind-blowing it’s unreal. Even a crackhead can manage Reddit better than spez

[–] Nollij@lemmy.fmhy.ml 128 points 1 year ago (4 children)

You mean Musk? Because it seems that whatever insanity that Musk does, Spez wants to copy verbatim

[–] gsa32@lemmy.world 74 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nobody said musk was competent 🤷‍♂️

[–] markr@lemmy.world 65 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] 567PrimeMover@kbin.social 45 points 1 year ago (9 children)

All that needs to happen now is for meta to launch a reddit clone that steals away all of reddit's users

[–] zeppo@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Maybe Elron can buy reddit and finish destroying it

[–] gsa32@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Wouldn’t surprise me if he did buy reddit

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[–] gsa32@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago
[–] Bushwhack@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

Give it a few months

[–] samus12345@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Considering how successful Threads has been, they'd be stupid not to try. So they probably won't.

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[–] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 62 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

It's truly shocking. Like all the Twitter stuff that musk is doing, seems in some way connected to his ego and they seem like genuine mistakes that he's making because he's completely out of touch and an a******.

But with Reddit, it's like I can't follow the logic of these decisions at all, I can't tie back these obvious blunders to any sort of logical troubleshooting decision making process for their company.

Perplexing

[–] Ducks@ducks.dev 62 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The logic is the same as Twitter, Spez said so: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700

Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.

[–] zeppo@lemmy.world 73 points 1 year ago

Ad revenue down 70%, who wouldn't want to emulate that!

[–] nightwatch_admin@feddit.nl 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fucking wat Spez been sniffing gas straight from the pump or wat?

[–] Cabrio@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago

Please, the Speztic has been fighting to cram his rectum docking nose deeper into the Elongated Muskrat's anus every chance he's gotten. He's the epitome of every single one of Elon's cucked, arse barnacle followers, the only difference is he also had a world class platform to burn to the ground in retarded mimicry of his waste of a good wankstain idol.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The logic is to destabilise public forums ahead of upcoming elections, so the wealthy can consolidate more power.

[–] rockprada@midwest.social 49 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I hate that this take seems like the conspiracy take but also is totally plausible. Just look to the example of the Arab spring and how instrumental social media was for organizing. By fragmenting all social media it’s a lot less likely you see a massive resistance if shit goes sideways.

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[–] zeppo@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We just don't have as much firsthand information about Splez because he doesn't try to make himself the center of attention on his platform and the news.

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[–] kbity@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's just Huffman, an Elon simp, deciding he wants IPO money and that the best way to make it is to blindly follow whatever Twitter does. Because, you know, Twitter's so hot and profitable right now.

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[–] Szymon@lemmy.ca 45 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Regulatory Capture is when corporations install favourable politicians and former employees into positions that enact policies and regulations favourable to the goals of industry (profit).

I think what we're saying here is Corporate Capture, where malicious players have captured major corporate entities in an attempt to neuter platforms that are used by the masses in an effort to control the messages given to the population.

People start talking about revolution, and suddenly the mediums used to enable free communication are removed.

[–] Donjuanme@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

Thanks for putting my thoughts into easily digestible words. Enshittification isn't natural, it's deliberate. Any CEO 's who throw up their hands and say they're all of ideas are just trying to pull the rip cords of their golden parachutes, given to them by people who want us to believe it's unavoidable.

Was not breaking something that hard? No, but it doesn't pay as well.

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[–] HolidayGreed@lemmy.world 80 points 1 year ago (8 children)

It’s all going to plan. A wealthy investor has paid a lot of money to shut down popular platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Knowledge is power and they can afford to, and have the incentive to keep us in the dark. Can’t have us poors rising up against inequality if we have no soapbox to stand on.

[–] rbhfd@lemmy.world 65 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Any proof you can offer on this, except for your hunch?

[–] cynar@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

It fits with existing patterns depressingly well. The issue is, it's generally very subtle.

E.g. Murdoch once even admitted on camera what he does. He "suggests" what he thinks should happen to politicians. Those that either agree, or follow his "advice" start getting negative stories about them dropped from his papers etc. Conversely, those that disagree get their positive stories dropped more. Once a few politicians have had their careers ended by it, most of the rest fall into line, it's only minor favours. Until it's not; and all the previous favours suddenly risk looking very bad in the press...

No laws broken, no overt threats given, but the more it happens the stronger it becomes. It eventually helped cripple BBC news, in the UK, among many other problems.

Reddits behaviour fits this pattern too well. Something has been offered in the background. Initially, it was for small favours, but it's now reached a tipping point. I suspect they are hoping that they can fire sale the whole user driven system (everything must go [at once]). People fatigue on the constant news, and there's nowhere new to flow and reorganize.

[–] HappycamperNZ@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I doubt doubt it, but damn it makes sense

[–] AnonymousLlama@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago

Hard to prove that type of stuff. It could just be incompetent leadership but it's starting to feel like it's something more given how many back to back missteps they've had recently.

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[–] DragonAce@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I've played with this idea in my head on several occasions. It does seem rather insane how all social media sites are self destructing and making business decisions that are questionable at best. Given all the uprisings across the globe in recent years, it would not surprise me if there were various investors and governments who would pay good money to destroy those platforms. Also the sudden and complete self destruction of both Reddit and Twitter right as we're about to head into the 2024 US presidential elections, seems rather suspect as well.

The other idea I've been considering is that both Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists who are throwing a massive childish tantrum and burning it all down simply because the users on their sites made fun of them.

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 year ago

Whichever ends up being true Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists regardless.

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[–] wwaxwork@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm leaning into the theory it's someone in power in Saudi Arabia. A member of their royal family is heavily invested in Twitter, owns shares and fronted Elon a big chunk of money for Twitter and they would surely like to crack down on social media in pretty much every middle eastern country, what with those pesky women protesting by not wearing their hijabs and protests and riots happening over there in the past decade. The first thing they do when there is trouble is shut down twitter, shutting it down permanently makes things easier for them.

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[–] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 year ago

I don't know how you could more organically commit corporate suicide than the way they're going about running Reddit recently.

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[–] sorenant@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago

To prevent score manipulation, voting is now a premium feature.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 40 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Didn't they come out and say early on when they firsr introduced rewards that they'd made enough money to cover their server costs for many decades? Whatever happened with all that?

[–] BlooregardQKazoo@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They probably blew all of the money on Spez's pay and NFTs.

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[–] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Did they? Do you have a link to that? I'd be very interested in that. The whole situation is so bizarre

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe it covered their costs for old school reddit pre built in image/video hosting when it was essentially just text and thumbnails?

Now that they're no longer relying on imgur (which is doing it's own thing) they have to host their own images which is EXPENSIVE.

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[–] Tetra@kbin.social 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit is overall quite left leaning, with a lot of its communities being some of the biggest hubs for lefties on the internet (antiwork comes to mind, all the LGBT subs, majority of the big politics subs also heavily lean left).

I don't think it's that crazy a "conspiracy theory" to say that this could be intentional sabotage. IMO it's what's happening with Twitter also, I think the alt right is paying big to take down left leaning social media so they can control the flow on information. I know Musk and Spez are profoundly stupid but I don't think they're stupid enough to genuinely believe in their recent business decisions. I think these decisions make a lot more sense when viewed through that lens.

They got officially fact checked a few times and that put the fear of god in them, since their whole schtick relies on ignorance.

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[–] RavenFellBlade@sh.itjust.works 29 points 1 year ago

Yeah, actually. This has completely derailed what has historically been a powerful platform for progressive and leftist movements going into a US election cycle. Same with Twitter. Meanwhile, the MAGA propaganda machine at Meta chugs along unfettered.

I can't see any other motivation. There is certainly no economic incentive to run either business as they have been, but running the companies into the ground as a means to control or destroy opposition communication platforms definitely makes sense.

[–] jeffw@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago

Paying content creators, but not mods? That’s hilarious

[–] Clbull@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be fair the awards system was complete dogshit and just became a rich man's upvote and a way to financially brigade comments.

I remember the days when /r/the_donald gilded hateful comments/posts to game Reddit's frontpage.

Awards well and truly jumped the shark when the admins took Reddit Silver, a meme pic that people would often post to mock the act of gilding, and make that into an award that offered the recipient nothing other than a silver crudely-drawn emblem by their comment.

Normally I'd support the removal of this feature, but it's blatantly obvious they did it because Reddit's top payers abandoned the site and because they were fed up with watching "fuck u/Spez" posts getting gilded.

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[–] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

they'll be like hey look so hyperlinks don't work anymore

How much until all the links open on an internal browser like in LinkedIn?

[–] Screwthehole@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Someone always benefits when public companies go bankrupt or lose value, so yes.

Honestly, the part I don't get? That they didn't wait to start self sabotaging the business after the insiders had been able to offload their positions in an IPO.

Like, the usual way to do this would have been:

IPO at status quo Redditors buy shares Insiders sell shares and open shorts Reddit begins to implode itself Redditors hold bags, insiders laugh from their yachts

Who, at this point, is going to buy into reddit's IPO?

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