The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…
Imagine that once upon a time (5-15 years ago), I actually had addblocker disabled on reddit, because I considered it worth supporting. lol
These guys aren’t happy with some support. They want all the support i.e. money. Feels like no tech corporation thinks about its products long term anymore. Just the most readily available cash grabs possible, even if it means possibly losing future revenue.
Well, as other people have said, it looks like they were preparing to sell Reddit, or take it public, or whatever, and they wanted to make it look as profitable and purchaseable as possible.
The end result is the same, but the reasoning is a bit different.
Anyhow, if that’s true, I dare say they’ve achieved the opposite result now.
We even used to run “thanks for not using adblock” ads in rotation, when there were no other ads to run. I had a picture of a squirrel that was in rotation there
Yes, that was funny and kind of endearing. Back then it also seemed like the goal was more to stay as kind of a community service, but of course the servers needed to be paid. Now it seems like they want it to return huge profits like Facebook and YouTube. It seems like a completely different mentality, where the ideals have vanished. And this is very clearly reflected in the userbase IMO.