You know the phrase “business genius”?
Spez is a business idiot.
He’s had money thrown at him from VCs, thousands of people generating content, and administering content for free, sitting on a goldmine of data and goodwill and Community spirit, and he’s managed to lose money, burn bridges, and fuck up the whole deal all for thppe sake of chasing a few dollars of API revenue and a bruised ego. All while others make millions and gain significant community support using the exact same data with business models he could have just copied or shared in.
He’s had every opportunity. He’s fucked it up at every step.
Business idiot.
Fire spez.
he’s managed to lose money, burn bridges, and fuck up the whole deal all for thppe sake of chasing a few dollars of API revenue
Let’s call this what it actually was though, there was no attempt at making money from the API. This was entirely to shut down 3rd party apps. Smart AI companies will just scrape reddit. The only people affected by this are 3rd party app developers and users.
This is even more amazingly incompetent. There are a near infinite other ways they could have handled 3rd party apps not showing ads, but they instead chose the brute force method that makes no one happy.
Reddit is incompetence. That is their lifeblood.
Fair point. And yes, there’s just so many ways he could have made money from third party apps and their users without trashing them. The AI explanation just didn’t make any sense to me at all.
A business brain would have followed the money. He’s just following half-witted ideas/ego. I don’t think he really realises or understands what he had.
Honestly, Reddit could have bought Apollo and then done absolutely nothing different and this would have gone over much better.
Remember the threat that Reddit presented to capitalism’s status quo around the height of antiwork and GME.
If Reddit falls, it will be on purpose. Same as the 180 of Twitter as a somewhat legitimate forum - Twitter being a key organizing tool during the Arab Spring (with the Saudis being the largest investor in Twitter behind elon of course).
Billionaires do each other favors to keep the class war in balance.
I… had not thought of the situation from that perspective.
On the one hand, I want to look at this and say ‘conspiracy theory’… but on the other hand I could potentially see this being possible.
On the third hand, when in doubt, apply Hanlon’s Razor: don’t attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
yeah i’m not sure this theory holds water… it’s pretty obvious the community won’t just give up: everyone saw what happened with mastodon
the fediverse is ideologically opposed to corporate and capitalist interference, so they’re just pushing people to a platform that they have even less control over, in a manner that pushes people to be more anti-capitalist, to a platform whose very existence is about being anti-corporate!
mayyybe you could say that combined with threads the “long play” is to embrace, extend, extinguish essentially moving reddit to facebook? but that’s a stretch and a half
i agree with hanlons razor here: spez is just a fucking egotistical moron
