For anyone out there who doesn’t want to browse to TikTok, the short version is that the Reddit communications staff refuses to comment on information that’s being used for upcoming stories, and instead they say that they will issue corrections after the fact.
This is of course an old tactic that companies have tried to use to discredit reporters, but it doesn’t work very well when you tell everyone that you’re using it.
gosh spez must be the dumbest person alive. how on earth does he manage to not kill himself every day out of sheer stupidity -.-
From a New Yorker interview years ago:
Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
It’s the result of Prosperity Jesus.
They believe they’re wealthy because they have natural talent. It ignores lots of people are more talented, and never got the same opportunities to be successful.
In a real apocalyptic disaster, they’d be the ones real leaders sentence to death (either overt or shunning them from the group) to set an example for the rest of the group.
At a similar time as The Verge was threatened I noticed some articles changed their tune and switched to downplaying the Reddit situation. The one I recall is Gizmodo reporting that Reddit traffic was back to normal.
It’ll be interesting to see how things play out at the end of this week when the 3rd Party Apps go offline, but to be honest I’m happy to say my new home is Kbin.social and don’t see the need for an active Reddit account, though I may lurk from time to time if I’m looking for some particular information that’s not yet on Kbin.
The game changer for Fediverse is stable mobile applications, once the Apollo shaped hole on my phone is filled I think it’ll be pretty much a drop-in replacement.
Eh if traffic has returned to normal it’s up to their journalistic integrity to report it.
If it hasn’t then they are lieing and it hurts the brand more
You’re 15 years too late to see “journalistic integrity”, son.
Its all about the motherfucking clicks!
traffic has returned to normal
This is a very non-specific statement. As a former moderator, Reddit gave us lots of metrics to measure “traffic”. Site visits, unique visits, engagement… all of these can be used to talk about “traffic”. It’s also not hard to spin up a couple bots, talk about site visits, not unique visits and call everything “normal”.
Metrics, especially vanity metrics are very easy to twist if you have a narrative to tell. And boy, does Reddit, Inc. have a narrative to tell.
Yep.
The first thing they taught us in my graduate level statistics class was:
Anyone can make a statistic that backs up their bias. You’re here to learn how to accurately represent a situation with statistics, and be able to point out when others are misusing statistics
That’s the hard part
Well done The Verge for not caving to the ridiculous machismo posturing. Reddit PR keeps digging their own grave deeper and deeper.
‘Most users’ will care when they lose all the content they relied on for their late-night doomscrolling.
Before they know it, they’ll find themselves in a sea of shit content and ads, and realize what they lost.
I’m assuming most of the doomscrolling content comes from bots. It’s all articles with clickbait titles auto-posted by the social media arm of news/blog/journal/etc. sites, then upvoted by bots for visibility to try to lure as many people in as possible for that sweet ad revenue.
We don’t care about most users, if they insist to ignore the fire alarms.
“We’re just going to passive aggressively fact check you afterwards to discredit you” seems like a pretty 2020 playbook to me.
Oooh, good to see it that you made it over from Reddit. I tend to avoid linking my account names – one more thing to make life difficult for eventual data-mining – but you probably know me as an American who comments rather a lot on /r/Europe. Saw you comment on the /r/ModCoord thread on all this too, hoped that you might show up here. :-)