Dan GillmorJun 17, 2023

Reddit's CEO keeps making inapt, inept, and ignorant analogies to describe its users -- especially the moderators, volunteers who have spent countless hours making the site's communities so valuable.

Here's an accurate analogy: Reddit regards these people as replaceable cogs in a machine owned and absolutely controlled by the company.

I won't use Reddit again unless the top management, and its attitudes, are replaced -- with a genuine community focus.

Meanwhile, I'm finding alternatives.

Show threadRichad A
@dangillmor Before Musk bought Twitter we gave them the benefit of the doubt. I think that was a mistake. I think the Twitter community should have stood up against the Musk Twitter acquisition but they didn't. The result is that Twitter has been destroyed and is now just a shell of what it was. That they say it lost 66 percent to 69 percent of its value shows that this is not a feeling, this is a reality.
That's relevant to Reddit because Huffman said that he admired what Musk has done, and would like to do the same for Reddit. Reddit is on the same course as Twitter.
There are alternatives like lemmy, kbin and there was one other that I forgot, at the time I write this.
In the 90s and the first half of the zeroes we had a diversity of choice, for online communities. I feel that we are returning to this diversity of choice now. The monoliths, the internet giants have had their day. I hope that we revert to smaller, more convivial communities. It will be nice to be on enthusiast funded social media, rather than venture capitalist funded media.
Maybe we can throw off the "internet users are addicts" insult away, at last.
Jun 17, 2023 at 8:23amWeb