Two IMO on-point excerpts of the article:
The highest-ranked replies are very critical of the post. “What good is our feedback when reddit seems perfectly happy to ignore all of it?” wrote one user. “What’s the point?” Another pointed out that Huffman called mods “landed gentry.” “Show, don’t tell,” wrote another user — to which the admin replied, “Agreed.”
“A beginning of what?” replied one user. “This solves nothing, and just wastes everybody’s time.”
Reddit’s administration is sounding more and more like an abusive SO trying to gaslight you into staying in the relationship. “Baby I’ll listen to you, I swear.”
I feel like they might actually do this. It wouldn’t be the first time that they use a CEO to implement unpopular stuff, then fire him to say “everything is fine now” - cue to Ellen Pao.
They won’t, Spez is the ass clown they need to toe the line and take the bad press for all this. Once they get what they need, they’ll reward him but make it look like he was fired and hope you’ll be to happy to realize.
They should. At least half of this debacle was created by the mind-numbingly horrible communication straight from his mouth (or fingers). Even if they just said look guys our CEO is dick, he shouldn’t have insulted the moderators and passionate users who loved apps…it isn’t ok snd we’re sorry. Even just that would be something.
They intended on crushing third party apps, they don’t care about users or moderators…that will never be different. The lying, insults and douchbagery was the cherry on top.
I used to browse Reddit with my Adblock turned off, man, so they would make money. The people that are the most pissed cared the most…
The irony is that Pao was brought in to implement changes that Spez wanted. Remember he used to own it, then sold it and “stepped down” as CEO to bring Pao in. Then he took the seat back again after she left. But this time they just skipped that step entirely, because Spez has just been making the unpopular changes himself.
So I don’t actually think it’s the case this time. If it were, Spez wouldn’t be CEO during all of these changes. I think Spez is simply trying to cash out when the company goes public later this year. He doesn’t care what the users think of the changes, because he’s entirely focused on the investor valuation. He’s doing everything he can think of to claw profit out of a site that has never been profitable, simply so he can point to this quarter during the IPO and go “Look! Reddit makes a lot of money! It’s worth a lot, and the stocks I’m offering should sell for a lot too!”