concealmintReddit's unpopular changes were inspired by Elon Musk's layoffs & cost-cutting
Imagine cribbing notes from a guy that has seen the social network he purchased drop in value by 2/3rds.
i mean, depending on what do you want to do, this might be a good idea. their motivations remain unknown, maybe they wanted to burn the place to the ground before an ipo, you never know
This comment made me chuckle.
maybe they wanted to burn the place to the ground before an ipo, you never know I admittedly don't know much about IPOs, but...wouldn't that tank the value and lessen the profit from said IPO?
sure, if your incentives are purely economic, then it does not make sense. but, just look at what musk did with twitter - he burned bulk of its value, sure, but he also had ideological incentives to flood that place with altright chuds, and that worked. this does not make sense here tho
4amI’d bet there’s gonna be some Saudi money in that IPO.
as in, who would like to see that place burn? like russian govt wanted to destroy livejournal because there was some nest of opposition. i don't know who would that be, but there are some solid candidates
Yeah, I still can't figure out what sort of mentality makes that seem like a good idea.
For Musk there's at least a chance of some sort of thought process going on there. Narcissistic people tend to think that everyone else is just like them (although maybe a lesser version of themselves.) Musk has had a very serious addiction to Twitter for a long time, therefore everyone has a very serious addiction to Twitter, therefore we can charge people a ton of money for their Twitter and since they can't leave they'll have to pay for it. And legal repercussions? Why, he's never seen those in his life!
Maybe spez is the same, just with a bunch of alt accounts so that he can post in /r/jailbait or whatever. I can see why he might want to turn reddit into 9gag if that's all he's ever used it for himself and isn't capable of understanding the concept of other people having different uses for it.
But at some point he must notice that it's not been going well? Right?
greed is helluva drug. i think the simpler explanation is he thought it's all going to bring him more profit
Imagine cribbing notes from a guy that has seen the social network he purchased drop in value by 2/3rds.
Step 1 - buy company for billions of dollars
Step 2 - do stupid shit with it
Step 3 - lose billions as valuations drop
Step 4 - ???
Step 5 - profit, apparently?
AKA "How to MySpace your social media site."
Nah. The MySpace guy sold his company for half a billion, retired and lived happily ever after while the people that bought it off of him had to watch their investment slowly die.
Yes. And News Corp, who spent $800 million on MySpace, fucked it up and sold it ten years later for about a tenth of what they paid for it. Which is the incident I was referring to.
But the guy who created it got out fine, which was what I was referring to. Much like the Twitter creators. They understood the limited lifetime these things have and sold them to fools who thought they knew better.
But the guy who created it got out fine, which was what I was referring to. Much like the Twitter creators. They understood the limited lifetime these things have and sold them to fools who thought they knew better.
But the guy who created it got out fine, which was what I was referring to. Much like the Twitter creators. They understood the limited lifetime these things have and sold them to fools who thought they knew better.
hikarulsiStep 4 is money laundry
CEOs are psychopaths, especially tech CEOs. they're all either publicly or privately glad elon took the PR hit of being the first to cut off 3PAs and make the site fucking garbage
Sociopaths. But yes I otherwise agree with you.
Everything I've read says otherwise.
Small nitpick, but psychopaths do not lack empathy. In fact, they have a high level of empathy. It's how they know how to exploit and manipulate others so well. They would not be so successful at the top if they were not aware of other people's insecurities, and how to manipulate those insecurities to their advantage.
From my understanding, they have a sense of cold empathy where they can very easily identify the feelings that someone is feeling in order to manipulate them, but they do not actually feel those feelings themselves, so they aren't actually empathizing. They don't feel sad when they see someone crying, but they can certainly understand they're sad and they know how they should react to it.
I mean that describes me but I don't try to manipulate people.
Any chance you're on the spectrum? We tend to feel it differently.
Also some psychopaths don't make it a game to manipulate people, and can come off as basically normal people. https://youtu.be/u2V0vOFexY4
There's definitely a good chance people would consider me on the spectrum. I learned how to be sociable though and I feel pretty normal for the most part.
I dont agree with analysing human behavior under such a lens though and I think psychology will completely reconsider its approach in the next 50-100 years as it has in the past.
I agree with the overhaul part, but some things need to be categorized so people can be helped.
1+1=2, people with borderline personality disorder have trouble maintaining relationships, people on the spectrum have issues with social cues and empathize differently, and people with dyslexia struggle to read.
Those aren't good or bad things. They just are. And it's important we recognize them. These diagnoses doesn't create the symptoms, the symptoms create the diagnosis. The symptoms are there whether you ignore them or not... and to even be classified as a disorder, something needs to be hindering your life in some way.
My mom always disregarded my worries about being different with "well we're all a little crazy/different" and I think that was just her way of coping without identifying that she may also need help (psychiatry and psychology and the stigma in general we're not great in her day). I wish I'd been helped sooner, because the difference between me with medication and me without is absolutely night and day, to the point where anyone that catches me on a day I forget to take my meds is insistent on asking me what's wrong.
See I don't agree that these categorizations are capturing anything true in nature though. Its not as if, for example, that there are certain genetic expressions as there are for different colored eyes, where we can look at some genes and say "this and this are off, so this person has borderline personality disorder", "this and these genes are present, so this person has autism and this other person, adhd". Without the absence of any such factors, you have to ask, what are these categories actually capturing? The only answers seems to be, that they're a group of symptoms, and worse still, a group of symptoms as seen by the judgement of a human being, based on the biased storytelling of the participant.
It seems to me, these categorizations are a very simplistic attempt of organizing certain behaviors/characteristics seen in people, by people, but they do not capture at all the why or how someone behaves in a way they do. For example, I think it's entirely backwards to say someone has issues maintaining a relationship BECAUSE they have borderline personality disorder.
The reasons any one person may have issues with relationships can be a complex multitude of various ordinary factors which could befall any ordinary human being under the same circumstances, not easily present even to a trained psychologist/psychiatrist.
Another criticism I have is that it seems to me that alot of these issues are environmental. For example, I fit all the markers for ADHD. In an environment where I have to sit for 8 hours a day, do things Im not interested, do repetitive tasks for long long term goals, I am absolutely miserable as I have been. I get depressed, I don't socialize, I can't make relationships, etc. But as soon as you put me in an environment where I am free to do what I want, challenged with things I find interesting, all of a sudden literally all that flips. I am the most productive social person out there. Under one circumstance if I go to a psychiatrist, I have ADHD/depression/anxiety disorders, and the other I am a model healthy person, or even a manic. What gives?
I think there is a danger to people categorizing themselves with such terms too, coming to see ALL their behaviors in a certain light because of a diagnosis, and not looking deeper.
ScrumblesPAbernathyThink of the saving of cutting off your nose! Sure, it may spite your face but you have to understand the shareholder value of a leaner face!
GreenPlasticSushiGrassHere's a Nitter link for those who don't like giving Twitter clicks:
Matt Binder (@MattBinder)
i thought Reddit CEO Steve Huffman came off bad in his interview with The Verge this new one with NBC News is disqualifying Reddit's unpopular changes were inspired by Elon Musk's layoffs & cost-cutting (like not paying bills) at Twitter. insane. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700
MisterMooIs Nitter just a Twitter mirror or is it a separate network?
It might be neither; I expect it's a frontend.
skyeit's an open source front end for Twitter iirc
KabakaNeither. It is a Twitter client that fetches data server-side.
Brief summary here: https://nitter.net/about
freebrick"Opportunity" = $$$
FramecodeOf course Huffman admires Musk, they're both pricks.
NivekkImagine watching Twitter circle the drain and thinking "I should make similar decisions"
No lie, I thought the whole time that smug asshole was gonna show up online, or twatting away on the Internets true haven for hate speech, and say he bought reddit or was trying to.
He's rich and fucking dense enough to do it.
SensEven I dislike Elon Musk now, used to be a big fan, was difficult for me to come to terms with.
Anti Weeb PenguinI also used to be a big fan of musket until i realized what his beliefs were
Musk has just ridden on the coattails of others genius and then taken credit for it. His behavior over the past couple of years is borderline moronic.
Sadly i didn't know that back then
the Twitter subreddit has been constantly full of people complaining about the changes to Twitter for the last several months lol. i can't imagine having access to that and thinking that copying Twitter is a good idea or something that would be popular
Margot RobbieWhen would tech companies realize that layoffs NEVER increase efficiency? The amount of work getting done is directly proportional to the amount of people at a company, because if a company can increase its work efficiency during normal operations it would have done so already.
That's not the goal, the goal is to make profits go up now to appeal to shareholders. The future doesn't matter, the CEO can just dip when their money has been made.
It's not just tech companies, though - Twitter and Reddit are circling the drain for the same reason that you can never find an employee in Target and call center waits are so bad. There are two basic ways for a company to increase profits, and everyone is picking the wrong one.
The first way to increase profits is to invest some of them back into the company, by paying staff more/paying for more staff and getting better equipment to enhance the customer experience. This method relies on happy customers sticking with the company, but because of that, it takes time, and they can't immediately tell if it's working, so they might not know if their improvements are actually helping or not for quite a while. A very human analogy for this is trying to improve how much energy you have through self-care, exercise, and a good diet - it'll probably work given time, but it won't do much by tomorrow or next week, and it might even seem actively unpleasant at first.
The second way to increase profits is to cut costs. This is basically instant gratification for businesses: anything they cut is an immediate boost to their profits because it's money that stays in the company's coffers. The flip side of this is that it completely hamstrings their ability to do just about anything. Less staff means more stress on the remaining staff, increased turnover, and less man-hours to devote to projects that might increase profits when completed. Still, companies tend to choose this method because it makes the shareholders happy now and it makes the C-suite look like they made the company a bunch of money. To continue my analogy from earlier, this method is basically like trying to improve your daily energy level by doing cocaine: it works really well right now, but it'll leave you feeling like garbage tomorrow, and if you keep doing it to maintain that energy, you end up feeling worse and worse without it, and eventually you might end up selling something that you need to get more.
So, in short, everything sucks because businesses are now trying to snort up all the cash like they're a 1980s businessman doing lines off the changing table in a public restroom.
So, in short, everything sucks because businesses are now trying to snort up all the cash like they're a 1980s businessman doing lines off the changing table in a public restroom.
A particularly apropos analogy because these kinds of business decisions reek of Reaganomics-era thinking.
The amount of work getting done is directly proportional to the amount of people at a company This is absolutely not true. This is one of the most well known writings on software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
Again, we are talking about how cutting people during regular operation absolutely would not make the team more efficient, not adding people to a project last minute.
Late projects is just a theme used to convey the core ideas, as it is a common thinking/pitfall, but the reasoning of why late projects because later equally apply to initial software estimates.
The core idea is that software cannot be simple divided into "man months". That is, saying this software will take 80 manhours, and therefore 10 engineers can do it in 10 days, and a 80 engineers could do it in a day. The reasoning being 1. Software tasks are complex and not easily partitioned, and 2. Software projects require a lot of communication and the more people you have the communication channels needed greatly increase
That's not at all my experience of 25 years in Tech both in that industry (Products, Services and even Startups) and others (mainly Finance).
More people (or more time - i.e. overworking) most definitelly do not mean more results and in some case can even mean less results.
If seen departments 3x as large producing less than half the results, and way more so when talking about small teams (in my area 4 senior devs familiar with each other can outproduce a whole department of mid/junior-level devs).
Curiously Tech Startups were especially inneficient, probably because they tended to hire young and enthusiastic people ("With a tendency to run really hard whilst not knowing were they're trying to get to") and don't really have much in the way of software development processes whilst well established (but comparativelly boring) companies hired the kind of people in their 30s or more with families who want a good steady salary, and had well established team structures.
But don't take my word for it, just read books like "The Mythical Man Hour".
I think you misunderstood me. My point was if your company/project was already running incredibly inefficiently, cutting more people would not make the remaining people more efficient somehow out of fear, because what caused the inefficiency is still there, you just have more things for each of them to do now.
The way to increase efficiency is to figure out what part of the whole process is causing waste and aim to minimize that, but that is HARD because it requires understanding your process, which is why they just do the lazy thing and fire a bunch of people to appease the almighty shareholders, so that they can say they did something.
This is pretty much confirmation that the API change is just the beginning. I give it two months until users have to pay to become mods.
Whale whale whale
That's funny, my decision to quit Reddit and delete my accounts there was inspired by my decision to quit Twitter and delete that account.