Tashlan

Fuck u/spez

What does the Open in the name stand for, then?

Very, very tired of companies embracing openness and share-alike mentalities when it’s their turn to take and then skulking pit when it’s their time to give. Reminds me of how Crunchyroll started off selling a subscription to stream other people’s pirated and fansubbed anime.

Jay Peters has been fantastic in his reporting on this, and generally stuck to observable facts. That Reddit is now being a bitch to him just further cements my impression of their leadership. They cannot even handle their own actions being described.

There’s a case to be made on either end. The best thing would be for people to move to better pastures with dignity, but the malicious compliance and worse create headaches and embarrassment for spez that may pay off in the press, or at some other date. Mods getting banned for making their accounts porn accounts certainly know they’re going out the door, but they’d prefer to be thrown out.

And ultimately, for the veteran redditors who are watching all this, they want to see the end with their own eyes.

I think the dirty secret is that social media is both an incredibly vital part of people’s lives and businesses, but it’s free and ad revenue doesn’t really make anyone the crazy profits their valuations suggest it should. That it’s happening all at once is I think partly attributable to financial tightening – higher interest rates mean people have less patience with money they’ve floated, partly that Twitter going weird gave everyone else cover to do the same, and my personal opinion, the Writer’s Strike gives a little room for the companies to do dumb shit without having to worry about getting roasted on late night.

Letter from Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian to Digg Founder Kevin Rose, from Internet Archive of http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose

Kevin,

It’s been a while since you cleverly debuted digg on ScreenSavers on that “Slashdot Killers” segment.

Funded by Y Combinator, Steve Huffman and I started work on reddit in June 2005, which we launched a month later. A month after that, we learned about digg and realized this was going to be an interesting new space – we had some catching up to do.

Remember those great days? It was long before Facebook was confusing people with awkward privacy settings, before Twitter existed, and even pre-dating the “social media” industry – back when “social media gurus” were simply called “tools.”

You built a remarkably popular website with an adoring fanbase most companies can only dream of. Diggnation was a brilliant decision and paved the way for Revision3, which doesn’t get half of the press it deserves. In short: you were in the zone.

And we got lucky, frankly. We sold to Condé Nast in 2006, which stayed hands off, let the site keep growing, and even encouraged us to open source – the site has grown to over 1/2 million unique visitors a day. And all of that is run by only 4 awesomesauce developers (edit: and one fantastic community manager!); I think the math comes out to 1 dev for every 2 million monthly uniques.

You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round.

I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”

Those are your words from that aforementioned 2004 video segment.

Now what matters is how many followers & influence a user has and how many followers & influence they’ve got.

Where have we heard this before: Twitter? Facebook? GoogleBuzz?

Kevin, you absolutely deserve all the credit for starting the movement – fascinating things happen when online communities can efficiently share content. Whales get silly names and we can expose the tragedies our fellow man endures faster than ever before.

It’s a damned shame to see digg just re-implementing features from other websites.

But I’ve got a strong feeling it’s not you making these decisions anymore; and to see your baby abused like this must be awful.

This really should’ve been called “an open letter to digg’s VCs” (but what kind of linkbait would that be?) because they really ought to give the power back to the founder.

All the best,
Alexis

I’m not online so I can stare at websites, and any website will do. I want discussions, people and content. A platform with five users, as you say, has relatively little value to me unless they’re like my best friends.

Damn, ordinarily I’d follow this coverage at r/anime_titties

Nsfw is also dead on mobile web. And just a reminder that nsfw isn’t just porn, it’s also cannabis and vape content, and likely other content that touched “sensitive” subjects.