What, if anything, could Reddit do (other than rebuke their annihilation of third party apps) to regain your trust and consider going back to their platform?
Spez to step down and Reddit to charge reasonable rates for their API.
I understand that as a heavy Apollo user, I would not have generated any ad revenue for them. But I’d be happy to spend a few dollars a month to cover the costs.
But now that I’m getting used to Lemmy, I don’t want to give Reddit back any power they have lost. One man was able to ruin what was a world community.
I was an active user there for something like 16 or 17 years. I watched it grow up from when it was smaller than digg. It was my goto, a place where I felt at home, where there were great displays of cleverness and compassion. It has slowly decayed from its early greatness but pockets of it kept me going like tolkienfans and askhistorians. This latest thing feels like spez just took a shit on the entire concept of Reddit, declared war on it and I will never forgive him for that. He never understood the creation he participated in. You don’t own Reddit. You can only be its custodian. Reddit is not a place. Its a community. Now that community needs to be here, which is a good thing because clearly any corporate ownership of a community will only end badly.
11yr r*ddit refugee here.
Franky - nothing short of torching it and rebuilding it from scratch.
Firing Spez is the bare minimum, but there’s no guarantee that the successor won’t be another moron oinker. Federating won’t be profitable (not that R*ddit ever was) and there’s no way that they’ll be making every contributor a shareholder.
There’s no way I’ll be going back, the system will fail again because it’s predicated on a flawed ideology.
In no particular order:
- Remove API changes
- Remove u/Spez and his lovely executive board
- Make the site a non-profit project without ads, since most of the work is done by volunteers anyway
Oh, and for fucks sake: Remove that shit stain that is the official app from the universe.
Seconded,
Spez and the board are #1 on the list though. I said in a post on reddit the other day, if, in his own words, reddit “hasn’t been profitable for years,” then he and the rest of the board have absolutely zero business running the company!
Though I’m wary about the access to government assistance that non-profit status would open them up to… However, that does force them to be 100% transparent with their finances.
Seconded,
Spez and the board are #1 on the list though. I said in a post on reddit the other day, if, in his own words, reddit “hasn’t been profitable for years,” then he and the rest of the board have absolutely zero business running the company!
Though I’m wary about the access to government assistance that non-profit status would open them up to… However, that does force them to be 100% transparent with their finances.
Not profitable just means their costs are higher than regular income. Their costs include paying themselves. Spez could have taken less money if he chose to. They were getting investment money to keep going at that rate though.
Seconded,
Spez and the board are #1 on the list though. I said in a post on reddit the other day, if, in his own words, reddit “hasn’t been profitable for years,” then he and the rest of the board have absolutely zero business running the company!
Though I’m wary about the access to government assistance that non-profit status would open them up to… However, that does force them to be 100% transparent with their finances.
If the board stuffed spez into a locker and undid his stupid decisions (they cant just take his shares but they CAN fire him) I would go back just to gloat and laugh, but nothing will ever make it my only social media site.
I don’t see myself going back. The remaining trust I had in the platform was burned by spez and the executives.
But setting that aside, what they could do is:
- Fire spez.
- Come up with a real plan for 3rd party apps with reasonable timelines and costs. (Really late for this though.) Provide 3rd parties access to polls and other parts of the platform that are currently missing from the API.
- Actually deliver on moderator tools that they’ve promised for 8 years.
- Allow the porn subs to have API access again.
- Kick out the hegetsus shit or at least let users block them like they used to be able to do.
The things you mentioned, along with an apology and reparation to 3rd party apps so that they reopened again would keep reddit as a competitor.
I unsubbed from 218 subs about a month ago because of how little I was actually enjoying there, but the last 10 or so would be worth a visit.
At this point, there is nothing they can do. Even reverting all the changes will never undo the damage Steve caused.
Pretty much. At this point I wouldn’t go back. I’m excited for a change anyways.
I would say I wouldn’t go back.
But realistically if no alternative becomes big enough, eventually with time people will start going back, and so would I.
I mainly used reddit for specific things and not much as a general time waster, so in the long term I’ll have no choice if it stays as the main community for those things
Remove the current board, spez, and pretty much every executive. Roll back the decision, issue an apology to all users, undo the bans issued to protesting accounts (except awkward turtle), and kiss my hairy ass.
In my view there’s nothing they could do.
Reddit is, in a sense, a parasocial company. It relies on the good will of its users and moderators to generate and moderate content for the site. Users then develop a sense of community and an identity around the site. The fiction of a social relationship then continues.
By adopting a policy that makes it difficult for third party applications to persist and by their behaviour in the intervening weeks, they’ve highlighted the economic nature of users/moderators relationships with the site.
People generally don’t like when a social relationship is treated as economic by one party, typically the other party is offended. It’s almost like if a friend came to your house for dinner and at the very end said thanks and slapped $10 on the table then left. Unless there was a clear discussion beforehand about chipping in for ingredients etc, it kind of cheapens the interaction.
So effectively, if my relationship with Reddit is now less social and more economic, then why would I contribute to them without compensation? This is especially true for moderators who collectively are estimated to provide $30 million per year in free labour for reddit.
I am, of course, aware that the relationship always was economic at its heart, and the site wouldn’t function if people had to be compensated for their interaction. But the illusion has been shattered and in my view can’t be repaired.
Replace the CEO
Free api -> Rif works again.
My list of demands in short
I don’t think there is anything. They’ve shown their true colours over the past few weeks and it has not been a pretty sight.
I see little point in wasting more of my time on something so toxic.
Spez to step down and Reddit to charge reasonable rates for their API.
I understand that as a heavy Apollo user, I would not have generated any ad revenue for them. But I’d be happy to spend a few dollars a month to cover the costs.
But now that I’m getting used to Lemmy, I don’t want to give Reddit back any power they have lost. One man was able to ruin what was a world community.
I don’t know. Nothing. It would feel gross walking back in there like nothing happened.
I’d have to see nothing short of a saint head the company. It would have to be a complete 180 in terms of management.
Even then, I wouldn’t feel good about Reddit anymore.
I’m done there. I want to try this new adventure that I think has the potential for a healthier underpinning. I’m going to try and help it grow, and maybe the architecture will catch on and get us a little further away from all the corporate controlled entities that show their true colors when they think they can make more serious money.
They should fire Huffman, enter into an honest conversation with 3PA developers on what’s a reasonable price point and a reasonable timeline, back off on all the mod firing, and tell the users they were wrong and misguided. Even if they did all that, though, I don’t see myself going back (and my account was 8 years old with 247K karma, pretty much all from comments, so I was an active user).
