I haven’t been able to post a comment on The Verge since the redesign. Huh.
Anyways: All of spez’s spedding can be explained easily enough: He is in IPO exit mode. He wants out of this business so he can go be a piece of shit.
He really thinks he can get the valuation on reddit. I’m here to tell him he’s delusional. The window came and went with the interest rates. An adjusted value with a new S-1 is going to be a serious write down on the real value and that’s when his days are numbered.
He basically upset 5% of the user base and even that small amount has done irreversible harm to reddit. Everyone knows he wants out. Everyone knows he’s fudging MDAUs. Everyone knows reddit has never been profitable. Was it worth it, you tumbling duckweed?
It’s probably not even 5%, but it was a part of the site that felt so strongly about their engagement that they preferred specific apps to use for that engagement. And we are seeing that evicting that small percentage had an huge effect on the quality of the place, providing the content that kept the rest engaged.
I know people who are casual Reddit users and don’t care at all about the API access. But they can see that Reddit has jumped the shark. Content is far less interesting to them, so they are spending less time there.
Also 5% of a userbase in the hundreds of millions is NOT a small number. And it’s not JUST them who are upset its their peers on the platform who would look at that and say “hmm that IS bullshit”
The horrifying thought of this whole ordeal is that, no matter how well or how poorly Reddit’s IPO goes, Spez still walks away from this thing as a millionaire. Golden parachutes and all.
I think it’s unlikely that the IPO will happen any time soon. Nobody wants to IPO while public sentiment is bad.
I think it’s possible Huffman will get booted before the IPO. I also think a lot of his bonuses are contingent on the IPO.
Like, he’s going to make bank no matter what… But if it’s any consolation, he’s probably going to fuck himself out of a significant amount of the potential total.
I honestly don’t think that he’s going to be forced out. To be blunt, the people who could force him out are likely the people who pushed for these changes in the first place. They wanted 3rd party apps to die so they could minimize costs caused by API usage, and force more users to the official app so they could put more eyeballs in front of ads while scraping more PII from users to sell. That mission has been fully accomplished. Literally all of the fallout–the protests, the decrease in content moderation due to less mods/worse mod tools, the decrease in content quality from power users leaving, the flood of “fuck /u/spez” on every comment thread, the stream of negative articles on the tech press, all of it–were literally not accounted for because they were considered to be externalities. Just as a chemical company doesn’t consider the effects of dumping waste into a nearby river, Reddit didn’t consider the effects of alienating the majority of the userbase that were responsible for making reddit what it was.
I haven’t been able to post a comment on The Verge since the redesign. Huh.
Anyways: All of spez’s spedding can be explained easily enough: He is in IPO exit mode. He wants out of this business so he can go be a piece of shit.
He really thinks he can get the valuation on reddit. I’m here to tell him he’s delusional. The window came and went with the interest rates. An adjusted value with a new S-1 is going to be a serious write down on the real value and that’s when his days are numbered.
He basically upset 5% of the user base and even that small amount has done irreversible harm to reddit. Everyone knows he wants out. Everyone knows he’s fudging MDAUs. Everyone knows reddit has never been profitable. Was it worth it, you tumbling duckweed?
It’s probably not even 5%, but it was a part of the site that felt so strongly about their engagement that they preferred specific apps to use for that engagement. And we are seeing that evicting that small percentage had an huge effect on the quality of the place, providing the content that kept the rest engaged.
I know people who are casual Reddit users and don’t care at all about the API access. But they can see that Reddit has jumped the shark. Content is far less interesting to them, so they are spending less time there.
Also 5% of a userbase in the hundreds of millions is NOT a small number. And it’s not JUST them who are upset its their peers on the platform who would look at that and say “hmm that IS bullshit”
The horrifying thought of this whole ordeal is that, no matter how well or how poorly Reddit’s IPO goes, Spez still walks away from this thing as a millionaire. Golden parachutes and all.
I think it’s unlikely that the IPO will happen any time soon. Nobody wants to IPO while public sentiment is bad.
I think it’s possible Huffman will get booted before the IPO. I also think a lot of his bonuses are contingent on the IPO.
Like, he’s going to make bank no matter what… But if it’s any consolation, he’s probably going to fuck himself out of a significant amount of the potential total.
I honestly don’t think that he’s going to be forced out. To be blunt, the people who could force him out are likely the people who pushed for these changes in the first place. They wanted 3rd party apps to die so they could minimize costs caused by API usage, and force more users to the official app so they could put more eyeballs in front of ads while scraping more PII from users to sell. That mission has been fully accomplished. Literally all of the fallout–the protests, the decrease in content moderation due to less mods/worse mod tools, the decrease in content quality from power users leaving, the flood of “fuck /u/spez” on every comment thread, the stream of negative articles on the tech press, all of it–were literally not accounted for because they were considered to be externalities. Just as a chemical company doesn’t consider the effects of dumping waste into a nearby river, Reddit didn’t consider the effects of alienating the majority of the userbase that were responsible for making reddit what it was.