Louis Rossmann is a bit of a provocateur, but what he’s saying in this video is the bare and unvarnished truth. If Reddit cared about its users and its moderators, the CEO’s internal messaging would be less like “this will blow over” and more like “what should we do to meet these people in the middle?”
There is no meeting in the middle when you’re up against institutional investors who have put literally hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to fund your operation. I almost feel bad for Steve, he really has no choice, it’s just a shame to see him falling into line and reciting exactly what the board wants him to say.
And by the way, this is why Beehaw has so much promise. The incentives of the operators and the users are aligned. There is no third party with outsized power waiting for the chance to pull the rip cord and enshittify the whole thing.
He definitely has a choice. As a founder of Reddit, if he really believed that this was the wrong move, he could refuse to do something he disagreed with and make the board essentially have to fire him.
I walked away from a well paying job myself several years ago because I disagreed morally with choices being made by the company. It is absolutely something that people can do, especially someone of his means.
Unfortunately we live in a society where it’s easy to separate responsibility for actions taken at work with actions taken personally; indeed, that is the whole premise of a limited liability company. But I still hold Steve personally responsible for his choices, and I think he is selling out the values of Reddit, and his own values if he ever had any, for money.
I too left an insanely well paying job due to ongoing moral compromises I couldn’t carry forward with. The thing here is Reddit itself has no value without content provided by it’s userbase. They offer no commodity outside of the hosting and user website. To suddenly rugpull 3rd party developers is a shit move against the community that contributes content which enables monetization via user metadata, ads and coin revenue.
Reddit is actually nothing without it’s userbase, and it’s far-reaching userbase is enabled through phone apps, mod tools and other 3rd party support. Hell even most moderators are UNPAID. It’s a gaint sham to suddenly demand payment from 3rd party developers, and it’s ONLY because they’re losing out on ad revenue and that sweet sweet marketing user data they sell which Apollo (and other apps) do not collect.
Meh, beehaw seemed promising until they unilaterally decided to cut off large parts of lemmy. I get why, but I moved to another server because I want to control my own experience
I get why
I’m out of the loop. Why did they de-federate with other lemmy instances?
lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works both are basically a free-for-all to signup, and they were dealing with heavily increased amounts of trolls from those instances. They are currently in talks with the admins/mods of those instances to try to rectify the problem and re-federate, but to keep beehaw a safe space, where losers can’t walk in off the street and acost their userbase, they needed to remove federation from these instances.
There are only a handful of full-time admin/mods for beehaw and they don’t do this for a living, this is something they do on the side, for no pay. It is not in their best interest nor the best interest of the users to let hundreds of new accounts from an entirely different instance run roughshod over their server.
It is entirely reasonable. The user above will not “control their own experience” until they have started their own instance. How long until the admins they’re currently under make a decision they don’t like at u.fail? Who knows, could be days, could be years, but the thing is: it’s likely.
Rossman only hit my radar in the past week, but that can be said of a shitton of things at this point. Having no history with his work, I’m currently impressed with the level-headed descriptions of the situation with Reddit he’s been posting.
Beehaw has provided the bridge from “I hope something can be a suitable replacement for Reddit” to “Wait, why the fuck would I want to go back to that?” and has made me realize I need to closely examine more defaults in my life.
I’ve been following him for years at this point. The one recurring theme… He’ll get into something new… get fucked over by it… learn from it… then detail exactly what should have happened/what went wrong/why/etc without much preconceived bullshit or leaning to any particular stance… And he always takes responsibility for all his fuck ups. I wish more people were like Louis.
Used to be a fan of Louis back on my days of computer repair shop. Nice to see he is still going strong!
But yeah, the writing on the wall is clear, and it’s not just Reddit. Imho, this situation emphasizes the importance of smaller, connected communities rather than massive social media platforms. We came to love massive social networks, but didn’t realize the consequences of getting lost in the crowd and becoming mere data points for profit. Small, connected communities offer a more personal and respectful alternative.
What we have here with the Fediverse is a gold mine. Picture 00’s phpbb forums, but all with access to each other. That just sound like a good time to me. It’s rough around the edges, sure, but it’s our own corner of web.
That’s how I’ve been starting to see this all as well. The seperate, smaller instances remind me a lot of 00’s phpbb forum, but it’s with the UX of Reddit. Lastly the intercompatibility feels comparable to e-mail: It doesn’t matter that I use gmail and you use Outlook, we can still send eachother an e-mail and both servers will talk to eachother without any issue. It’s the some of the best of many worlds and I’m feeling Lemmy and Kbin are here to stay for me.
What’s sad is that the 00s phpbb were a step back from Usenet and BBSs that federated in the 80s.
Excellent point. Fidonet, Usenet, IRC, even email lists all solved this problem decades ago. And they mostly worked quite well. The web based generation was a step backwards in many ways.
Oh yeah, I totally forgot the Usenet, before my generation, sorry!
Innovation is a spiral, ain’t it?
He ends the video with this, which I thought summarized his thoughts well:
" ‘No hit to revenue.’ (quoting Hoffman) Your 2 day blackout did nothing. But that doesn’t mean that it has to be in vain. Because you can convert that blackout into an indefinite one, at the blink of an eye. That’s what I’m doing. And that’s what I hope all of you do as well. I want you to teach Steve Hoffman a lesson. I want you to teach him a lesson that his website is not valuable because of the domain name, the servers, the API, or the brand. It’s valuable because of you."
This was a great point, yes. The whole blackout can only really have an effect if the users show that it was not “just noise”, that they don’t want to be treated as addicts that you can just ignore, because they can’t just leave.
I always used the official app for Reddit and used new Reddit on pcs, but how can you return to a platform that abuses its partners like this. They way they treated the Apollo developer and now basically insult their users and unpaid moderators, it is almost unbelievable that a company would go this far to upset its users.
There would probably have been less uproar if they just said in an honest way, from next month on we will ban all 3rd party apps, instead of lying about everything, act like you are listing to the community and then not answer anything. There is no way upsetting your users like this can be good for selling the company …
I really thought I’d have trouble moving on from Apollo. I do still fully support Christen so have stopped using Reddit on blackout day one. Between Lemmy and kbin I’ve been getting my fix scrolling for info. While it’s not perfect, it’s getting there and I like the federation aspect. So FU u/spez
This was a great watch, thanks. I haven’t watched Rossmann since I did tech support for Apple but he’s always been the side of the average joe. I’m currently going back and watching his other videos regarding this Reddit shittery.
Louis is great. He’s a big advocate for the end user in all sorts of situations from right to repair, smart/cloud tech, to pretty much any issue where a big business screws over their users. Been watching him for years. I totally agree, keep the blackout ongoing and move away from Reddit. Fuck /u/spez.
