[protastus]

The Reddit board of directors should choose a CEO with better judgement because this doesn't look good.

While I am sad for the communities, I am excited at the opportunity to short this stock if it ever goes public with such poor leadership.

[phpisthebest]

This would assume that spez is not doing exactly what the Board of directors want.

I think is he, I think they think this will be better for the long term, users will be upset for a little while, but will not actually leave.

He has already said 3rd party apps make up a small amount of "traffic" and "90% fall in to the free plan" anyway.

So they are betting this is a tempest in a tea pot...

Sadly they are probably right because people are sheep and creatures of habit, for me I am going to archive my data before the 30th and purge all of my accounts. I personally am done with reddit, but I am likely the minority

[protastus]

The board wants the CEO to instigate drama and inflame their most passionate users against the company?

There's tremendous lack of tact about how this is being managed. Completely unnecessary and generally not good for business.

[phpisthebest]

> inflame their most passionate users against the company

this is think is the disconnect, they do not believe that is what they are doing, and given my tech bubble I am not sure they are wrong.

they have the data, i dont. I am sure their "most passionate users" are the ones using the official apps, and new interfaces, posting, upvoting, and commenting on cat photos, and cute animal memes, which is where their ads are targeted.....

[quantumsequoia]

I think he's referring to poor judgement by the CEO in immature PR handling. Even if raising the API prices is the right business decision according to the data, publicly slandering the Apollo developer seems like an unambiguously childish move

[sirspacey]

The Reddit community has a reputation for bullying leadership. He’s a founder & willing to stand up to them.

If all this negative press ends up driving attention in the broader stock market, it will probably work out come IPO.

So far, so good for preferred stockholders.

[phpisthebest]

isn't this about like saying the peasants have a reputation for bullying the king, then applauding the king for standing up to the unwashed masses..

[intended]

Yes, discussions between content creators and platforms are very ungentle these days.

[shostack]

They have a timeline to IPO. Reddit took $50m almost 10 years ago. They believe this will blow over quickly so they'd rather rip off the band-aid.

[genmud]

I highly doubt this is what their board had in mind when they said, "we need you to be on track to being profitable by q4 of 2023 so an IPO can take place".

I also don't trust what they are saying with regards to 90% will fall into the free plan. Is that 90% by volume of requests, by api key, by user id? It seems like the data isn't being shared in a transparent way.

You can have 90% of Reddit oauth clients never hit the free tier limit, but that doesn't mean shit if 90% of those oauth clients aren't actually being used. The fact that Steve keeps getting called out with receipts doesn't give me confidence in their assertions, given the lack of data.

[Dwolb]

Reddit might not need a CEO per se.

It might need a different governance structure.

Commercial and community interests can be in conflict.

What’s the leadership structure that recognizes this tension and delivers optimal outcomes in the long term?

[paulmd]

haha, imagine any HN'er giving social-media users (sorry, "community reps") a position of power and governance in their startup. No. God no. Fuck no, nobody in their right mind is letting the redditors drive the bus and set strategic direction and monetization/profitability/ec ("governance").

and you're probably guaranteed those community reps are the most annoying powermods/etc who you really kinda want gone anyway. No, don't, stop, come back, etc.

Look, this is going to be a bit blunt but I've seen these crises in major social media before (see: the Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka story) and the reality is that people's estimations of the value of their posting is much higher than reality. Yes, it will be a big ding to have powerusers and powermods depart the site. Yes, they will get some shreddit and GDPR removal of valuable content. The vast majority will not GDPR, and will keep posting cat pictures and discussing the merits of Android phones and scrolling memes and jerking off to hentai and onlyfans models, and that's what Reddit apparently wants to optimize for.

The takeaway from the Q+A with spez today is that they get it, they understand where you're coming from and they understand the community frustration, and they don't care. They've set their course and they're going to ride through it and the traffic on new.reddit and the native app is more important than losing 20-30% of users. And you can debate whether that will have long-term negative impacts (probably!) but that may not even be something that spez cares about after he cashes out. Or he may view it as a critical long-term goal that is worth a substantial amount of short-term pain.

But when you're Twitter, or Reddit, or even Tumblr, you can ride it out. Hell even Facebook is still fine.

Nobody is going to put redditors on the board to keep powermods from leaving. If that's your metric for success, put powermods on the board or I'm Going Outside, just close the browser window and get started with the grass-touching.

If you do that on your ycombinator startup you probably won't be running a ycombinator startup anymore.

[intended]

Apparently the value of all that shit posting is in powering LLMs. Something Stackoverflow, Reddit, Twitter are all upset about. Most likely all the image/art hosting sites and forums as well.

It’s a bit strange, on the one hand content is cheap, on the other hand it props up some very impressive tools (and valuations).

It feels like these two should be better coupled, but thats a problem I haven’t seen a solution to.

[mrandish]

They've probably tried recruiting a good CEO. The problem is no one remotely competent wants the job.

[bombcar]

I’m remotely incompetent and I’ll take the job for the right pay.

Heck, I’ll even be in/person incompetent.

[shmatt]

The Reddit board of directors don’t represent the founders, who have probably been long ago diluted to less than 10%

They represent investors who sunk 1.3 billion dollars into a company who was spending millions providing 3rd party apps a free api where users can’t be monetized. And is not currently profitable

If my previous experience means anything, the board wanted the price to be 100x higher or to shut down the api completely, and were talked down by spez