It's more than likely that they'll inject their own softball questions and focus on those instead of addressing everyone's concerns in any meaningful way.
May not even need to be an astroturfer, it could be u/spez directly. Don’t forget that he went rogue and modified a user’s comment in the Reddit database!
For this being such an important moment for the site, it’s absurd that the link they announced didn’t even have a set time. And they haven’t added one.
I don't think there's anything Reddit could do at this point to not let it be a PR disaster. That includes changing their stance. What they're doing is so egregious, naming and shaming and lying about people who brought immense value to the community for years. All out of misguided greed.
I was talking with a friend about this the other day and he brought up a good point. If you were about to IPO as a company, this is not a bad decision from a business standpoint (cut costs, bring as many users as possible under your control). Obviously the way they executed the decision could be harmful to them, but based on the pressures they're under, I can't see how you could blame them too much. Which is why the only enduring platform has to be something federated like mastodon or lemmy, since they won't have the same economic/capitalist pressures to make the product worse.
Rich and influential entities should be subject to more accountability, not leniency. I agree that for-profit entities with motives are good reason to be wary of them, but it's no reason to let them evade responsibility for their actions.
Also, no company's success should ever depend on alienating its users and slandering longtime contributors.
> If you were about to IPO as a company, this is not a bad decision from a business standpoint (cut costs, bring as many users as possible under your control).
the parallel for traditional companies is choosing to bust unions, and a month before you IPO is an absolutely terrible time to choose to bust your union unless you're absolutely 100% sure you're immune to a "strike".
in this case it's not just picking a fight with powerful stakeholders (like mods) but also turning off features that a ton of users interact with the platform via, and trying to force everyone off third-party clients onto the new experience and native app. In this model the users are a stakeholder that you're picking a fight with at the same time.
the best time to do it is 20 years ago, the second best time is today, unless today is a month before you IPO.
I think the original intention was to get ahead of the story but I think the apollo dev's announcement that he's shutting down the app is going to make that difficult at this point.
Or that company cares what the Reddit community thinks and is convinced that they have an ace in the hole. An ace like, say, having full control over the platform and being able to make the AMA look like it goes however they want it to.
Depends on which part of the community you're talking about. Many of the top-voted comments on some of the "sub blacking out" threads were to the effect of "TIL that there are third party apps." [0]
That part of the community is the part that Reddit probably wants to preserve, and that part could very easily see an AMA that appears to clear everything up and then get mad when their sub moderators go ahead with the blackout anyway.