I hope reddit advertisers can see this. Why would you want to be associated with a site that discriminates against the blind?
they already lost 4.5bn because of this. Their valuation was cut down to 5.5bn from 10bn just the other day
And if I remember correctly that value cut was from before all this happened so it’s probably fixin to drop even more
Here’s hoping. (yeah, I’m an unreasonable, hateful bitch. I despise what they did with the Apollo dev (and others) and I hope it bites them in the arse.)
I wish it lives. May we never forget Aaron’s dream for the platform. May we never forget it. It’s my goal in life to carry on in his and other’s footsteps so we may use what we have made to help others.
I think if he was still around, he’d be all for ActivityPub and stuff like Lemmy/Kbin.
He definitely would have been all about ActivityPub, if not involved with bringing it about. Still amazes me that he was one of the inventors of RSS, arguably a proto-ActivityPub.
May we never forget Aaron’s dream for the platform
Can you tell us about it?
That valuation cut was from before the whole shitstorm. We’ve yet to see the impact that this has all had on them, but given the attempts to crush the protests by the reddit admins, when they’ve just sort of ignored this stuff in the past, its likely not good
On one hand, it’s likely exactly what they wanted. They get a vanilla app with vanilla content, perfectly tailored for vanilla investors. The part they forgot is that the beacon of internet culture will never be vanilla.
They basically buzzfeedified themselves
They tumblr’d themselves and they haven’t even 100% gotten to the porn part. I hope all the only fans people on reddit have backups and start jumping ship.
Most amazing thing about them doing this is, its not some random CEO with no connection to reddit doing it. Its the literal founder
*co-founder
If I recall correctly
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/30/fidelity-deepens-valuation-cut-for-reddit-and-discord/
Valued at 10 billion when fidelity bought an ownership stake in 2021.
Currently they estimate Reddit is worth 5.6 billion
Well done team, I bet the investor calls are going great!
How it started: what if we built a platform where people create and moderate the content, but we just make all the money?
How it’s going:
If I understand the article correctly, that 5.6 billion evaluation was at the end of May - before any of this shitshow started
That valuation was inflated as fuck anyways
I mean I have first editions of the original runs from 1997 when they were brand new to the states. In fact, all of my cards are from the original set that was released, I never collected anything past the first 151 set. I’m not saying their valuation was not inflated, but it’s the usual trope of “oh hey, you remember that old nintendo, those old basketball cards, old baseball cards, etc… I got rid of them” trope
Now something that was super inflated, beanie babies and yes, I still have almost all of the old mcdonald’s ones still in bags from when I was a little girl. I don’t care that they aren’t worth monetary value, they are worth something to me sentimentally. Something I collected with my mom.
Only 5.5 billion more to go
Buy shorts? Buy puts?I need some ill advise, where’s wallstreetbets when you need them?
That would be a quad-leveraged short on their IPO you could be wanting. Go big or go back to Wendy’s.
We need an unethical life tips here on how quickly we can bankrupt reddit
Check sub.rehab
That’s not them actually losing money, though. They’re a private company, not a public one. Their valuation is just what analysts think that they’re worth—it has nothing to do with how much money they have.
Private companies (which is most businesses) are still worth something. If big investors like Fidelity value your business at $1bn, banks will absolutely consider that as collateral for loans and so on. And if they say your business has halved in value, they’ll consider that too.
True, but the valuation is for investors and per fucknut, Reddit isn’t making any money, hence the api push to a paid platform.
Also, Reddit is going public soon when they IPO and investors aren’t going to want to invest in a bot ridden, non active community.
I’d say 75%+ used Reddit on their phones and many of them used 3rd party apps.
The point is, Reddit IPOing soon and then this fiasco is the worst thing for them.
Splez recently said he thinks they will now go for the IPO later than they had planned originally. So I guess he’s hoping this will blow over, the public/investors will forget and they’ll recover. I’m not so sure.
They definitely pulled a digg. This is going to hurt them a lot more than they think.
Reddit is antsy to effectuate their exit strategy.
Or to put it more simply: everyone with a stake in Reddit, from pigboy Huffman, to institutional investors like Fidelity, to employees who earned equity is eager for Reddit to have their IPO so they can offload their shares on the public stock market.
Their valuation will be an important factor, if not the most important factor, that will determine for which price those stocks will initially be put on the market.
So while slashing the valuation in half will not directly lose them money, it could translate into the initial stock price being half of what they anticipated, causing them to get half of what they would’ve gotten had the valuation not be slashed in half.
There is no way in hell that people with equity in Reddit are not pissed about the slashing of the valuation, since they now anticipate getting a haircut as much as half of what they initially expected to get.
But valuation is a very real predictive measure on IPOs, and what Reddit is making all these bad decisions in preparation for. They tried to cut a little more pie by dragging third party app users onto their app to try and increase revenue and bump valuation, it’s just that it was so terribly misguided and executed that it had the opposite effect and blew up in their face.
Greedy Pig Boy has said for a long time that Reddit isn’t profitable. That means they’re losing money every year.
It could also be accounting tricks. If they pay themselves a bunch of money, reddit inc. doesn’t make a profit, but the individuals working for it do.
I get advocacy and I think this is a major point in the API changes, but the blind community deserves better than to just be ammo for this fight.
There have been reports of the traffic to their advertising portal dropping by about 20% over the past month
I’m actually surprised that metric would change much, because the users viewing ads aren’t impacted by changes to the API or third party apps. So that’s literally just 20% of people who either stopped using the site in solidarity or couldn’t get to their content because of the protests.
It’s not out of solidarity, advertisers are worried they’ll turn into lightning rods: https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-reddit-as-advertisers-weather-moderators-strike/
If good people left Reddit, then the content that remains for the others might not be good enough to keep them engaged.
I hope reddit advertisers can see this
I see what you did there. (Pun fully intended)
Someone needs to start a “campaign” for naming and shaming companies who advertises on Reddit. “[This company] supports a company that actively discriminates against the disabled. #SayNoToReddit”
I already cancelled my Dashlane, after they did an AMA on Reddit during the blackout. I don’t support companies who cross picket lines.
Don’t know what else to say in agreement to your comment but I very much agree with it
We need to start taking back power from corporations because without us they are nothing
Transfer our reliance away from corporations as much as possible
honestly yes. While I do think “ableism” is sometimes took to a bit of an extreme, in this case it’s good… and serves the good purpose of making Reddit even less money, which is a good purpose in and of itself!
Thats a good one, companies would sure run away if enough people made noise
This is the way, hitting Reddit where it hurts.
People can complain and try to make Reddit listen but they do not care. As long as they have money rolling in from ads.
Plebbit: “Oh, look! Our loyal users are disliking our new changes. Hmm… maybe we should screw with em by messing with their (basic and expected) user freedom! That will make em go back to their e-home, that’s for sure!”
Reddit doesn’t care about their users, nor their volunteers. They care about $.
Edit: Like Lichess does, it’d be great to have a badge next to our user if we donate some to this server.
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I read the thread and I kind of cringed inside. I understand the moderators of r/blind want to keep the resources & information accessible but they actually tried to negotiate and sort it out with Reddit according to their words and Reddit just didn’t give a fuck about them. What I would’ve done is just nuke the sub and move to Lemmy yet they continue to eat shit from u/spez
I feel for them.
r/Blind is still a valuable resource for many people. No sense denying people access to it. r/Blind mods already created a Lemmy instance which they try to promote for their members. But learning new software can be challenging when you can’t see, especially if the software isn’t very accessible.
That is a fair, I just hate to see the community abused like that and being held hostage by one VC schmuck who doesn’t understand that he’s basically killing his platform.
r/Blind is still a valuable resource for Reddit to exploit many people, especially blind people.
I’ve not looked for myself, but does Lemmy or Kbin have good, accessible tooling? They’re both much more modern so I would expect that it would be a priority, but they’re also much less mature so I wouldn’t be surprised if little in that way has been implemented yet.
The frontend of Lemmy is an inferno app, which is a JS framework like react.
I noticed that command enter didn’t submit comments, so I made both a userscript and then later opened a pull request fixing it. The pull request has already been merged, so should be coming to Lemmy soon.
Back 13 years ago, I built the compact interface to reddit. Now, I’m a much better developer than I was then, but Lemmy front end seems a hell of a lot more organized
I genuinely have no idea, regardless, this Stockholm syndrome needs to stop. Understanding when you’re not welcomed is crucial to a community’s success.
they actually tried to negotiate and sort it out with Reddit according to their words and Reddit just didn’t give a fuck about them.
More than that, during his AMA, spez actually said he was actively working with them. Fucking liar!
I mean… we all knew that was just corpo talk. CEOs lie, that’s their profession.
This is following a predictable pattern:
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Person/group reaches out to admins in good faith to discuss changes.
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They don’t hear anything at all.
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Reddit touts them as an example of how they’re working with people.
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The admins get back to them.
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They don’t listen or care about the concerns and aren’t going to change anything.
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they actually tried to negotiate and sort it out with Reddit according to their words and Reddit just didn’t give a fuck about them.
More than that, during his AMA, spez actually said he was actively working with them. Fucking liar!
It’s not like Lemmy has great mod tools.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. We’re seeing in real-time solid apps pop into existence. The one I’m using right now was only released a few weeks ago. Sync is a big one that just released their app today, albeit under a “coming soon” tag.
It’s pretty crazy what’s going on right now.
As long the API is free, and anyone can whip up instance suited to their need, it’s only a matter of time and effort until a good mod tool is created
Just pointing out that no reasonable person wanted the reddit API to be free, rather just a price that actually reflected the real cost to reddit.
I consider myself pretty reasonable, and I wanted the API usage to stay free. They were already making money from all this advertising. Maybe if they hadn’t wasted time and resources on garbage features no one needed, they wouldn’t have had to create this mess.
Honestly, considering the state of modern capitalism, someone at Reddit probably got scolded cuz some dickhead executive hadn’t been able to buy enough yachts this year or some shit.
Does that mean Lemmy is ableist and evil too???
No, it just may take a bit of time for it to become accessible.
I’m curious how accessible Lemmy is to users who need to use assistive technology, and whether the many 3rd party app developers are making their apps accessible.
The nice thing about open source is that motivated developers can fill out whats needed.
In for-profit companies there’s always some money-making feature that kicks accessibility down the road. The way I get my work colleagues to give a fuck is to remind them that most blind people aren’t born that way, some circumstance causes the blindness - and therefore any one of them could end up on the other side of the fence begging for basic access one day, so act accordingly now.
I’m not sure about the current offerings, but I think former Reddit apps transitioning to Lemmy (such as Sync) should retain any accessibility compatibility/features they had.
Actually, open-source software can be great for accessibility and I’ve been testing Lemmy with a screen reader.
Overall Lemmy is pretty close right now once a few roadblocks are removed. The audio captcha was broken, I helped fix that in the code just a couple of days ago but it hasn’t been released yet (at least not in lemmy.world).
After that I mostly see more subtle issues, not complete deal breakers. I haven’t started looking at moderator features, though.
Abelist fucks over there.
Wow, why am I surprised… They said they were going to keep accessibility for the blind, but it sucks so bad, it’s useless.
Things are getting worse. Some subreddits like /r/breastfeeding, which were private from the start, are now being forced by Reddit to make their subreddits public. It’s completely stupid. r/breastfeeding NEEDS to stay private to keep creeps and weirdos away.
enshittification
u/Spez really didn’t take the community seriously with the protests which has lead to this mass exodus. Crazy how they killed their platform so quickly with the writing on the wall in neon bright colors.
I’m curious what the actual traffic differences are today from previous. Is it really a significant exodus, or just a blip in the scheme of things.
There’s a huge difference between reading reddit (with ads blocked ;)) and actually being active on reddit (i.e. posting/commenting – adding content).
I believe the former will not decline so fast, there is simply too much info on reddit, especially on niche subjects, from experts. I’ll probably keep ‘using’ reddit for my search results and such. But I’ve stopped commenting and posting. Reddit needs content, not just readers/traffic.
If there is a decline it will probably be slow, and it will mostly affect the quality of content. If power users leave, it won’t make much difference in quantity, but quality, well… And when it comes to 3rd party apps I would imagine most of those users weren’t the casual ‘read a few posts a day’-users, but the really active ones.
I’d also be curious to see the difference and if reddit actually felt it in their bottom line
“I didn’t realize that the big button labeled self destruct would be a problem if I push it. I just wanted more space for my money printing machine to print more money and the button was in the way!”
Really looking hard at how the intention of building a community to sell it at a profit has turned out for Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and now Reddit. People are burned out from constantly trying to chase the next big app. It’s at the point now where everyone knows playing into corporate social media will only result in its eventual death, so what’s the point in engaging?
Why would someone that was once a mod for Jailbait subs not be a scumbag?
I’d like to say i’m surprised but i’m really not and i doubt anyone else here is.
It’s just sad to see how far reddit has fallen.
Eh I wouldn’t call it sad. Reddit is literally just a forum hosting site. The fact you and I are posting here is proof that there are many other avenues for random people to communicate ideas to each other.
Yes, but all of that knowledge available in one place, all extremely easy to navigate through conventional search engines or pushshift-based ones… it’s going to take a lot to rebuild that here (and maybe even more for search engines to understand how to properly index fediverse pages). All because a greedy ass started idolizing the most self-centered person alive.
This is happening because it’s about to become obsolete and redundant. This is their last grasp at trying to make the last ten years worthwhile.
Obsolete and redundant? Google themselves said their search results were heavily impacted from the blackout. It fulfills a niche no other social media has (well, except the fediverse or Reddit clones but I doubt they were afraid of them) and it was working perfectly for the common user. Only issue is it wasn’t ready for IPO, and spez really wanted to go public.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is discriminating against people with disabilities!
I wonder if this could be considered a violation of the ADA. They have no alternatives in place for people with disabilities.
It really is remarkable how fucking awful he is
I have not been on reddit for the past 3 days. I try my best to not visit the site when it comes up in search results, I either use web archive or google cached results to find what I’m looking for.
Is this legal in the US?
The US courts are currently split on this. The 9th and 11th circuits hold that a business website must correspond to a physical business to enforce the ADA on them. The 1st Circuit has required fully online businesses to also have ADA accessible websites.
Don’t link to reddit, use teddit 😄
