whofearsthenight

joined 1 year ago

Could they have something to do with it? Yes, for sure. But the thing is that they didn't have to do any of this the way they did. They could have made an API plan that allowed third party apps to still exist/thrive, and also charge big companies that just want to use reddit to train LLM's. Change the pricing/terms based around this idea. They deliberately went after third party apps, and then double and tripled down on it in the face of massive backlash. If spez was competent, he would have been able to better pivot this conversation and make it about training LLM's for megacorps, but he didn't and even then it would have still been bullshit that is easily seen past.

I agree with this but I'll add in one more - it would have to come with spez resigning/being fired. Killing the apps was always the goal, and there is no way I would trust literally anything that is coming from reddit with him at the head. I don't think it's even a little hyperbolic to say flatly that he is a liar. Even if they reversed course 100%, I don't see how it fixes anything because I don't see how Christian or any of the other makers of those third party apps decide to continue working with this company.

And even then I don't think I'd trust reddit to do the right thing at all. Every change made to reddit basically since 2010 or later has either been bad, or their hands have been forced to do the obvious right thing by negative press. They've not proactively done basically anything positive for users in a decade, and this is more or less the story of what I'd call social media 1.0 (twitter, facebook, reddit, youtube, etc.) Especially with my experience moving from Twitter to Mastodon, I'm far more likely regardless of what reddit does to replace it with a federated option because the end goal of publicly traded social media companies just do not align with my values, and even more practically, do not align with an experience I want to have.