I’ve been wanting to boycott Reddit for a long time, and the list of problems I had with it was very long. It took this API issue to finally get some community action.
But in short, Reddit is moving away from genuine community, and more towards fake astroturfed corporate content with manipulated comments and unabashed bot activity.
I’m seeing a lot of worrying trends.
The whole idea of Reddit is changing. It used to be the front page of the internet and that encompassed basically everything. Now it seems like there’s a lot of focus on making it advertiser friendly
Then we see Spez basically spitting in the face of the community. Mocking them, calling the unpaid mods “entitled” and just showcasing that he actively seems to despise the users.
Now we’re seeing Reddit do shady stuff like undelete comments. Destroying any trust the community may have had in the website.
The 3rd party app issue was just the kindling that ignited all the other issues
His open anger has been pretty surprising, I feel like the past year has seen more and more of the owner class going totally masks off with anger when the peasants don’t just get in line to follow orders.
Apart from Spez and Musk, what other examples are there?
Oooh I consume these types of anti-labour news a lot, so I can provide at least a few examples of open disdain for unions (or those they represent).
https://www.wcbi.com/barstool-sports-co-founder-settles-over-anti-union-rant/
Me too. Just so I can crush it and reassert my dominance.
Mask off indeed, more clearly it couldn‘t have been said. Authority and dominance seems to be the root of this struggle of CEOs against those lower in the hierarchy.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/20/business/nightcap-ceos-behaving-badly/index.html
An article detailing a few more such cases, which a few of them I had heard about on Reddit before. I doubt we‘ll hear of it as much in the future. I would highlight this nugget:
Her response was, more or less: Shut up about the dang bonuses and focus on your jobs. (She later apologized in an email to staff, saying she was sorry her message “seemed insensitive.” (A sentiment that would probably go a bit further if she’d subbed “was” for “seemed,” but whatever.))
https://fortune.com/2022/12/29/bernie-marcus-home-depot-woke-people-socialism-labor-shortage/
"People just hate capitalism now. Because of “socialism,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times published Thursday, “nobody works. Nobody gives a damn. ‘Just give it to me. Send me money. I don’t want to work—I’m too lazy, I’m too fat, I’m too stupid.’’
Great view he has of the working class huh? How nice of him to put it all out there so nobody has to wonder.
If you continue the article, you can find even more shining examples of this condescending mentality right out in the open:
Last year, online mortgage company Better.com fired more than 900 employees after CEO Vishal Gard publicly accused hundreds of staffers of being unproductive, not working long or hard enough, and therefore “stealing” from the company and its clients. Much of the criticism has been aimed at younger members of the workforce, who earlier this year were referred to as a “very entitled generation that has never had to sacrifice” by BlackRock President Robert Kapito.
Cryptobros are gross too (I even like using Monero and before that Bitcoin but fuck me do I hate these Crypto CEOs with a passion!)
https://cryptoslate.com/kraken-ceo-lashes-out-against-some-employees-for-being-bad-fit/
If you look at his tweets, he entertained debate for a bit because he is openminded, but then “back to dictatorship it is” since they need to “help billions of people” … by making billions off scamming people with shitcoins I guess.
“It’s like a social movement,” said the 40-something, who struck a resemblance to his online identity: a cartoon brown-haired guy in a sweater vest. “Our next generation is very against going to the office. It’s a big issue that’s a lot bigger than a lot of us realize.”
Oh no, a social movement!! Scary! Workers have opinion and say them on Twitter! He had to stop tweeting at them that WFH sucks cause they said mean words. :(
Funny to me is how many of those articles are on websites you‘d think of as serving business interests, and yet they seem critical of CEOs anyway, maybe because there is no way you can twist their actions or words to the positive. At least not for me.
See another one which is less about words and more about perceptions: https://www.business.com/articles/broken-pedestals-the-dark-sides-of-popular-ceos/
I went for that cause it‘s got one quote by Fuckerberg that fits nicely with what I am presenting in this comment:
“You can be unethical and still be legal; that’s the way I live my life.”
How well put! That is exactly it, no ethics or ethics they do have and actively choose to ignore. Our leaders, ladies and gentlemen.
I could go further here and give examples in German too since I am aware of those as well, and politicians jump on it too to appease their sponsors I guess, but at least here our unions are representing workers too so it‘s less unipolar torrent of shit falling down, we can sling it right back up.
Those are probably the highest profile examples.
Everything else is way smaller scale, and often more about the tone than even what is being said. There’s a general “how dare anyone push back” or a complete failure to understand what life is like (some of this overlaps with the “ok boomer” stuff).
I’d point to:
- Martha Stewart’s rant about RTO
- Many many of the “nobody wants to work anymore” rants we’ve seen
- The tenor of Starbuck’s anti-union actions
- The communications I’ve seen from my (large) company and those at friends’ (obviously not going to list which)
It’s not like I’ve been keeping a list but those are what come to mind first.
Probably it’s all linked to the post-virus epiphanies about working conditions that have lead to things like the great resignation, the concept of quiet quitting (which is a bullshit term for me) and in general a bigger conscience of how work affects life
I am and always have been against walled garden internets, and against corporations owning and controlling what essentially becomes a part of people’s culture. I let myself get sucked into Reddit despite that without thinking about it, largely because a 3rd party app shielded need from the shittier consequences of that (like ads).
Watching spez display his true colors has just served as a reminder of why it’s not okay to build your communities somewhere that is at the mercy of a corporation. There’s just no way I’m going to support something controlled by someone like that. It’s a matter of principle now.
It’s disappointing to me how many people don’t seem to see it as a matter of principle, or else don’t see a principle as being worth any inconvenience, or being willing to give up anything they have gotten used to at Reddit.
Watching spez display his true colors …
He’s been this way since the beginning, always been a twerpy little tyrant.
Yeah that’s my impression though I’d been unfamiliar with anything about him before now.
I think reddit has just continued making more and more moves down their path towards the IPO, and all of those moves together have shown a lot of us that we’re not interested in staying on for the rest of the ride. Complicity towards corrupt or powerhungry mods of massive communities with tangible effects on the world (e.g. r/politics), censorship, revenue-focused anti-user actions, ignoring the community, downplaying the value of volunteer mods and threatening to replace them… Yeah, thanks, no. I’m good over here in the fediverse now.
I’ve also seen people saying their deleted posts/comments/and accounts are being been restored.
Bots
Guy is acting more and more musk-like, that’s enough for me to bolt. But I did exclusively use RIF app for last ~13 yrs. Whenever a Google search took me to native page I was shocked at how unusable it was on mobile
IMHO, the big challenge with what’s happening at Reddit and Twitter is that sensible people with reasonable asks are leaving the platform.
The only people that are left are people that believe the CEO’s disinformation, or just don’t care. So now you have a more extreme echo chamber.
For those of us who are happy to watch Reddit die, this is best case scenario. As the #enshitification continues, Reddit will accelerate the departure of sane users out to alternatives.
I put a lot of effort into my communities on reddit. Watching the platform make efforts to be more palatable to investors pre-IPO made it feel less of a community-based platform with ads to a clearly for-profit entity. I cleared my history and left.
If you also wish to, I wrote a quick HOWTO: https://sh.itjust.works/post/114629
The thing is, when reddit does it there are millions of users ready to make noise about it and investigate what is happening, as we’re seeing right now. Even some large media outlets are getting in on the story.
If an adminstrator of some small instance starts abusing his power, like… what are you gonna do but take it or leave? Nobody else is going to care.
So I dunno, I’m conflicted. I feel despite everything it’s harder to abuse power that much on reddit because it is kinda obvious with so many eyes on you, but then again - I prefer that power being split around so you can just leave elsewhere if you don’t like it.
But if the mod of a small instance starts abusing their power and you leave to a different instance, you’ll still be able to interact with the communities you had.
Yes! Very much so. They’ve become increasingly authoritarian over the years. These days just saying the word “trans” can get one banned from dozens of subreddits and even from the entire website. So far kbin.social has been pretty good, but there are a lot of users who want a safe space and don’t like opposing political views. Let’s hope either the owner believes in free speech, or I find an instance which does :)
One of my biggest fear is one day the reddit admins will get rid of downvote buttons in all of the subreddits. Just like how youtube get rid of the downvote button.
But that means no more fearing losing karma.
I have always used the official reddit website - I didnt even know 3rd party apps existed. But still, trying to kill 3rd party apps that way is unacceotable to me. Signed up for Lemmy instead, this is my first post over here.
Yes and no.
Broadly, at this point, I couldn’t care less what Reddit does. This is my new home.
In the weeks leading up to my move here though, it wasn’t so much that I was concerned about the third party apps specifically. I did use one - RIF - and the official app is complete garbage, so it would’ve impacted me negatively, but it was more than that. And yes - the certain increase in censorship was another issue, but still, it’s deeper than that.
Both of those things, and much more, are really just aspects of the process that Cory Doctorow has called enshittification, and that’s the thing that drove me away. And if I was still on Reddit, that would be the thing I’d be concerned about.
So it is the case for me that it’s not just about the third party apps, and that censorship is also a concern, but really those things, in my estimation, are just signs of a deeper, underlying issue.
Which I no longer have to care about.
I’ve left it behind so what Reddit does doesn’t really affect me directly, but I encourage the behavior I’m hearing about for one reason only. To further fan the flames past the simpler 3rd app argument and show what Reddit really was about in the end. People who went back or stayed because it wasn’t a big deal to them and the blackout was just whining might think differently when their content and usage gets hurt by the infighting and damage. Let it burn.
My concern about Reddit – and my reason for being here – is primarily around the distorting effect of profit motivation. That distortion comes as changes to sorting algorithms, changes to search, and the hiding of communities critical to Reddit or the endeavour of profiting off of other peoples’ opinions, creative works, and labour. So yes, I have some concerns around censorship.
It’s worth noting that I don’t have the same concerns around censorship here, though. Centralization and corporate control is my concern, not specifically that certain people feel entitled to an audience that doesn’t want to listen to them. People are free to find their tribe here, and the rest of us are free to not pay any attention to them.
