Good on the mod team of /r/videos! It must have been a difficult decision to walk away from a 26M+ sized community but I think it's definitely better to scuttle the ship and go down with it than capitulate at this point. This is a bold choice that's left Reddit between a rock and a hard place.

It’s Meta, you might as well ask ‘should the henhouse accept the fox’s invitation to a hearty banquet this evening?’

The bar for being Reddit circa 2010 isn’t that high to be fair, I know expectations have changed but Reddit was down intermittently for years to the point I’m amazed it got the traction it did in hindsight. People talk about Lemmy having tankies on it as though early Reddit didn’t have some even worse unsavoury subs and users too.

Even if they reversed the API changes, sacked Spez, reinstated i.reddit.com, ate an entire bucket of humble pie, and personally paid me £100 I'd still prefer the vibe here to be honest. It's way less angry and more authentic here.

Yeah lots of people apparently haven’t been in a tech company with the CEO saying ‘everything’s fine’ only to get hit with layoffs shortly either, even if his word was worth more than the square root of fuck-all which we know it’s not he’d be obliged to lie if ad revenue was through the floor.

Also he’s blundered pretty badly but he’s a narcissist not a moron, that memo was inevitably going to leak and it’s classic strikebreaking tactics to go over the heads of the ‘union reps’ and try to get the ‘workers’ (not sure what the terminology is when nobody’s actually a paid employee) to fight among each other.

I decided to jump before I was pushed and binned off Apollo the weekend before the strikes started. This place existing made that jump a lot easier I think!

We shouldn't give the benefit of the doubt to a man who's shown himself on multiple occasions completely incapable of good faith any more than a hedgehog should give an owl the benefit of the doubt.

What will immediately become ‘The Roast of Spez’ might be the last funny thing ever posted to Reddit at this rate to be fair.

That AMA is immediately going to turn into ‘The Roast of Spez’ and I’m honestly quite looking forward to it. It won’t change anything since Reddit’s already too far round the ‘enshittification’ U-bend but it might be the last funny thing that’s ever posted there.

Yeah it sounds harsh but once a subreddit got above 100k its quality inevitably took a nose dive unless this was actively moderated against which it usually wasn’t. Lurkers are fine in general but when the whole platform is mostly lurkers looking to doomscroll TikTok style rather the lurkers wanting to read (and upvote) decent high-effort content it all goes down the pan pretty quickly.

If Reddit’s role in the Fediverse is as a great big sponge to soak up the passive users who just want quick content then long live Reddit! Spez staying on as CEO and increasingly zombifying the platform is actually great for us because it will drive active users here and keep the passive users on Reddit.

Reddit’s always had inept management, Spez in particular can’t help but antagonise his users with a daft unforced error every couple of years. We don’t need to ‘win’, we don’t even need to actively do anything but exist. As long as nice places like this exist and Reddit does too Reddit’s inevitable cockups will provide a small but steady trickle of users.

Yeah I like HN but it's too niche for what this place and others are trying to be. I've used it a while but I don't think it's particularly relevant to people outside of the tech industry or at least broader STEM interest even though other things are discussed there from time to time.

Yeah I think it’s part of the natural cycle of social media for corporations to ruin things, increasing organisational complexity leads to management who can increasingly delude themselves their interests still align with the users when they’ve clearly drifted far apart.

I think the future is small, decentralised communities with no VCs, no ad men, and no CEOs. I’m much more excited to be a part of that than I am sad to see Reddit go.

Since the fediverse unlike the rest of the web consists mostly of people hostile to aggressive monetisation there’s a built-in limit to how ‘capitalist’ (in the popular sense rather than the technical sense) an instance can be in terms of funding it. Instances will be forced to find alternative ways to pay the bills to the traditional ‘our users are the commodity we sell’ approach of the corporate social media platforms if they want to stick around for the long run which will be a fantastic thing for the web I think.

Modern PHP is supposed to be a decent language these days rather than a collection of footguns so I wouldn’t write it off out of hand. It wouldn’t be my first choice of language but it still runs huge swathes of the web. What it will mean is it’ll be harder for Kbin to attract developers on a voluntary basis I think, if I’m giving my time for free I’d much rather spent it writing Rust than PHP even if PHP is decent these days.

Hmm, note to BeeHaw or maybe it’s just me but it’s very easy to fumble the delete button on mobile web.

To be fair the aim of ads generally isn’t to make you go ‘oh now I’ll go and buy that’, it’s more about unconsciously planting the idea that $product exists so when you actually do want to buy something you buy that brand. It’s why ‘show me as many as you like, ads don’t work on me’ is complete rubbish and the only real solution is blocking them entirely on a personal level and on a social level laws that restrict where and when they may be shown.

A particularly egregious example of psychologically manipulative advertising would be ‘Joe Camel’ who was nominally just a fun mascot but in reality existed to advertise cigarettes to children so they’d buy Camels when they were old enough. Given the prevalence of really awful advertising in the present day Big Tech really does deserve the increasing comparisons with Big Tobacco I think.

it seems no-one on Reddit’s leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.

Which is good news for us because even if this does blow over they will fuck up again and every time it happens we'll profit from it in new users. Spez's problem isn't that his dream is unattainable, his problem is that the person having that dream is him.

This feels a little bit like a Roman asking if we should build a steam turbine. It wasn’t beyond them to make a primitive version (one even existed!) but the necessary science and technology to do anything useful with it wouldn’t exist for a long time yet. Yes we have an idea of how we might potentially go about it but I don’t think it’ll happen until we’re flinging comets about like pool balls across the solar system.

I suspect if we do develop terraforming tech Earth will be the first target as we seek to undo the harm our mode of living has done to the planet.

This isn't the end for Reddit by a long way but it might in hindsight be seen as when its slow decline reached the point of no return.