The man speaking in this clip is Nilay Patel. Hes the Editor in Chief at The Verge.
He also used to be a lawyer before moving to journalism full time. So he knows Bullshit when he sees it.
I used to think that The Verge were just a bunch of Apple zealots who couldn’t even do a pc build video properly. They’ve come along way since then. Reddit would be absolutely insane to try and take on something like The Verge.
Side note , Nilay also has a podcast called Decoder where he interviews the heads of companies to get an idea of how they run and what their goals are. Its a pretty good show and I reccomend it. The one where Nilay takes on the head of Substack was hilarious
The hit piece Nilay did on Elon was fucking savage and one of the best things I’ve ever read on that site
Thanks for the link, that article is delightfully savage. I laughed so hard my cat came over to check if I was dying.
The Verge has been covering the shit out of the Reddit death spiral and I’m so here for it. Good for them.
It’s also one of the very few that’s been pretty accurate about it, I’m impressed.
Same, their coverage has made me feel way less terrible about all of this. Just knowing someone is out there calling Reddit on their BS makes it easier for me to accept that Reddit is no longer a safe place for me and move on.
Wow, spez is taking on The Verge now? He thinks he’s a lot bigger deal than he really is…
It’s amazing hubris. Pride comes before a fall they say.
Burning bridges…
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
For real. My brother is one of those people who is like “they aren’t gonna die from this so why should I care blah blah blah”. He thinks if protesting won’t have the immediate impact that people want then those no reason for it to happen
Mods aren’t going to put in the unpaid time just to make Hoffman rich.
Effective protest means accepting going without and inconvenience.
In an instant gratification society, that is anathema.
Can anyone explain to me, please, how is this good (financially) for the reddit investors? I mean, I ran from reddit since I only accessed it from sync. Didn’t really care for the ‘politics’. Now I get here and see there’s a lot more to it than just the shut down of 3rd party apps (which I understood as a financial decision). If money’s the motivation for all of this, how is it financially healthy?
If Reddit kills 3rd party apps it can absorb (or at least hope to do so) users of those apps and have complete control over how they access Reddit. Reddit can then feed them more ads, trackers and whatnot, all of which would translate into more revenue for Reddit, which is a net positive for shareholders.
There’s also the fact that companies training LLMs would be interested in paying those exorbitant fees to get training data as they likely can afford those fees.
So in short, Reddit likely wants to become a content farm for LLMs. As for the users, Reddit doesn’t care given their recent statements. So if some c*cks stay on Reddit, spez will just inundate them with more ads because why not, free money is free money, until everyone leaves.
Third party app users only made up ~3% of total reddit traffic. The revenue potential there is miniscule. It was never about the money, but about control.
I don’t trust reddit reporting that value accurately. Not saying it is a huge percentage, but they likely doing some things to minimize the numerator and maximize the denominator.
But yeah, definitely about control. They could have monetized users on third party apps with more reasonable API pricing. People would probably have barely noticed and that’d be new revenue for reddit that didn’t exist before.
If they charged 1/3 of what they are for third party clients to access the API and required Reddit Premium for API access…. They could have made a mint! Plus they could have reported huge upticks in subscribers to their service. THAT would have looked good to Wall Street for an IPO.
Instead we get this fuster cluck.
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
Saying it once was enough i think.
(Or you fell into a bug.)
weird. submitted it once. got triplicated somehow.
Oh ok, my bad😅
TIL the fediverse has an echo.
Echos and operate at different timelines with the synchronization differences between different instances.
We’ll no longer comment on hearsay, unsubstantiated claims, or baseless accusations from The Verge. We’ll be in touch as corrections are needed.
Setting aside the ridiculousness of this position, the statement also doesn’t make sense at face value, right? I think I understand what they’re trying to say, but aren’t those two sentences in conflict? Isn’t getting “in touch as corrections are needed” literally making “comment on hearsay, unsubstantiated claims, or baseless accusations”?
This is their “gotcha” move - if they don’t comment, it’s unsubstantiated hearsay. If they do comment it’s because it’s wrong.
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Steve Huffman is an absolute tit.
No. People like tits.
