Advance, the company that controls Reddit, would be wise to replace the CEO whose mismanagement and arrogance has led moderators of thousands of subreddits to go private in protest.
Put someone in place who realizes that the communities made the service in every way that matters.
Maybe Advance is hoping the protestors will go weak-kneed (as so many people on Twitter have done, sadly) and return.
Moderators, please, please don't back down on this. Stay dark.
(Corrected re extent of strike..)
@dangillmor
There Are No Unlockable Doors
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Or Unsingable Songs
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Shall I Say It Again, Yeah
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@jab01701mid @dangillmor I don't ask much. I just want you.
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Those account for negligible user traffic, so they don't really matter.
@dangillmor Everything I know about life in the C-suite would fill... a matchbook. Maybe. If I write big.
With that in mind: What are the odds a CEO (like Huffman) would undertake such a radical change, such an extreme new direction, without coordinating with his own superiors?
Do we have any reason to think this whole situation isn't the result of marching orders coming directly from Advance? What would that look like? Might we expect Reddit execs to make a halfhearted AMA barely defending a policy they disagree with?
@dangillmor The #RedDark site unfortunately doesn't tally what subs are going dark indefinitely or for how long, and it also makes the closed-but-public ones look the same as the open-and-public ones like AskReddit.
I don't see it happening but I think enough subs have decided to go dark indefinitely that it might actually hurt them enough to care.
@dangillmor
A CEO is always behind the shit; workers, the true innovators as we've seen, will be the owners soon enough.
This ain't partisan: this is facts!
@dangillmor For context, I was a daily active Reddit user and I’ve deleted the Reddit app this week to remember not to “accidentally” use it, I’m exploring Lemmy now, which ain’t half-bad so far.
My reason: I hope this CEO arrogant dude to be fired. I don’t have high hopes that the third-party apps will be saved in any meaningful way, and that’s sad but that’s ok to me; my goal is for this guy to be booted off, and it feels realistic, considering the poor handling of the situation and the likely poor growth metrics as a result.
Will I come back if he’s out? I dunno, Reddit was really nice but not exactly indispensable to my life. And Lemmy really doesn’t suck as a replacement, so…
@dangillmor they won’t. The CEO wouldn’t be CEO if his actions weren’t in line with their overall strategy and values.
If they replace him because of the poor PR, his replacement will be someone more or less identical.
@dangillmor I don't think this is actually about third-party apps. It's about data scraping by AI companies that train LLMs using Reddit as a dataset. More importantly, they're upset that they don't see any cashback on that.
Had it been about third party clients using too many API calls, they'd just tie the number of API calls to the user auth, and force users to get Gold if they want to use third party clients after exceeding a certain call limit.
It's not about the ads, that's just a plus.
@dangillmor Reddit is known to take over unmoderated communities of certain sizes. They put in their own people as moderators and try to find additional (free) mods further on.
The current moderators can't stay dark. But they can get replaced.
@dangillmor Hi, one of those Reddit Moderators, here.
One of the goals of the protest — and IMHO the most attainable — is to have Reddit Admins stop stepping on moderators’ feet … not for the sake of a relationship with Reddit, but so we can *actually serve our communities*.
We don’t “do free labour for Reddit”. We volunteer to run communities. Those communities backed a 2 day protest. Closing subreddits indefinitely harms those communities.
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