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.”
Gaslighting is exactly right. They also did a fair amount of goalpost shifting, cited non-existent rules to engage in punitive/retaliatory behavior against anyone who wasn’t 100% on the party line, etc.
And don’t forget outright libel against the Apollo dev before he came back with recordings.
The only reason why they decided to pull this stunt is because more mods left than they expected and they’re realizing there aren’t enough qualified people out there to replace them.
I hardly think that’s fair. They also completely underestimated the quality impact there would be on reddit from losing mod tools, and they’ve also had just about enough time to start to realize how very very much they don’t know about accessibility needs for the disabled.
The fact they completely forgot about disabled users. I really don’t understand how that got past the lawyers.
I mean personally I hadn’t though about blind users (which maybe says a lot about me) but I’m not a corporation it’s honestly baffling that reddit would forget too, and that nobody pointed out (or if they did they got shut down).
It’s straight up insulting that once pointed out publicly, reddit didn’t immediately walk back its behaviour.
I’m not sure they even care, they just need to pad the numbers long enough to IPO and sell. It’s a pump and dump, but Steve is a moron and doesn’t know how.
Which is exactly why they’re running /r/place again tomorrow: they’ve lost traffic and the need to pad the numbers so they expect (probably rightfully) that /r/place will give them numbers to offset their losses.
Of course, they’re going to totally ignore the image that comes out of /r/place, which is probably going to be “API - fuck /u/spez”. Or maybe they’ll invite xQc and his cult to grief the instance again. Or do the thing where admins can ignore the rate limits again.
Por que no los dos? They only care because it’s going to hurt their IPO.
Steve doesn’t understand that though. Like at all.
Spez is the face, but he isn’t the board. From the start everyone has given him too much credit when it isn’t due.