3 minutes later
Never forget he accused the Apollo dev of blackmail and doubled-down on the claim even after evidence disproved it.
Pretty sure that’s a crime in most places.
Honestly i’m sure this is the best thing that could happen for the reddit execs in terms of user engagement. Writing “fuck spez” on reddit is like shouting “save the planet” from a cruise ship.
I wrote about this elsewhere. Every post about Reddit or place has tons of comments like yours insisting that any engagement is good for Reddit. I disagree.
Reddit want dissenting users to leave! They have no interest in retaining it’s traditional userbase of cynical, lefty, tech-savvy users. They’re incredibly intolerant of advertising and difficult to monetise, and much of the reason why Reddit hasn’t made as much money as some of its competition.
They’d rather we all went elsewhere and left them with doomscrollng cryptobro memelords that don’t care if a post is a corporate shill or not, as long as it’s entertaining.
Sure, not engaging with their site reduced their numbers and thus value. But the number of users on Lemmy is a tiny fraction that I guarantee they’d be happy to lose if it made their userbase more tolerant of corporate bullshittery.
My goal isn’t to knock a fraction off their IPO valuation, it’s to bring other users and communities over to better platforms like this one. Or, perhaps, for Reddit to realise they done fucked up and roll back some of those user-hostile changes. That takes advocacy and reminding people of the failings of the platform’s admins.
This form of protest is valid and I support it.
How much coordination did this take? You’re only able to do a certain about of pixels right? Or did it freefall at the last minute?
i had this question a couple of days ago and today fell totally down the fuck spez rabbithole.
found myself on the main discord where the coordinators were talking to uruguay about doing the “u” after columbia (?) declined. guess hearing that, both uruguay and equador wanted in.
there was discussion of not stepping over the swiss flag in one of the letter because they were part of the coalition.
these folks are dedicated - many commented they hadn’t really slept since it went live. kudos to all of them for the passion they showed today.
tbh it was impressive and one of the best executed operations i’ve seen in a long time. very fun to see up close.
working for a global multinational company i only wish we were this efficient internally ❤️
There was clearly a large bot net which started stencilling the outlines of the letters, but then it was magic, everybody understood the assignment. The letters filled out in a handful of minutes. Then, then the whiteout slowed - the apes (mostly) agreed the job was done. It took another half an hour or so for the white fog to finally take hold.
There was no bot net doing the outlines. The r/placeDE Discord prepared an overlay and distributed it to many other large communities and twitch streamers.
At the time or the whiteout the r/placeDE had 6500 active users in the voice chat coordinating to draw the outlines. A German streamer sent his 100k+ viewers to draw the letters. Other big communities also contributed.
Shure some bots might be involved, but there was a tampermonkey overlay which showed where to put the right pixel. Many with this overlay worked ahead and the rest followed. Also some streamers coordinated hundreds of thousands of users.
… And just like that, Reddit is down site-wide. Awfully convenient.
We all want to have an immortal legacy. Any good he’s ever done is going to be overshadowed.
You can build 1000 bridges and fuck one clown. You won’t be known as a bridge builder but a clown fucker.
Ok given the conversation has to do with sexy clowns and the ace community I have no idea what to expect.
It also successfully distracted the userbase and isolated their protests from the rest of the site.
People make fun of Place but I think they knew exactly what they were doing.
Certainly drove their use statistics up a lot, which helps more than the incendiary messaging hurts them (IMO).
Eh, I think this can work like sponsored messages on YouTube videos: probably not immediately a lot of clicks on the product but over time more and more people recognize it and know what it is. And I like to think that over time Spez will be recognized as the soulless fucker who is hated by the very community he is trying to sell. Reddit lost a lot of charm in the last couple of months, even more than was already lost before and his name is tied to the whole thing. I hope!
Name recognition is a big thing. From now on, anything Spez announces will be dampened slightly simply by the fact that he announced it. Of course, Spez could just run the company without much fuss and stay out of the spotlight but he’s too egotistical for that.
They also screwed themselves over by playing the r/place trump card so soon after the last iteration in 2022. Rather than doing it to create a cool event to experience once every few years, they did it to drive engagement on Reddit. That’s made people lose interest and even if it’s another 5 years before the next one, many of them won’t come back. It’s a self-acknowledgement that the peak reddit era is finished and wouldn’t have happened without the prior backlash against their enshittification. It’s the type of thing that sets up the conditions for a death spiral, because they’ve resorted to tricks to get people to use the site and eventually they’ll run out of tricks.
Reddit admins right now
