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I have a pet conspiracy theory that the leadership there thinks this may rid them of "troublemakers". Huffman's seemingly ludicrous hardcore stance against third party Apps and mods who disagree with him would seem to reinforce this. Basically, they're chasing away the folks who are most likely to cause a ruckus when Reddit inevitably tries to go IPO or otherwise make a profit. Everyone is saying this is in prep for their IPO, but I agree with Huffman's analysis that now is a really shitty time to be pondering an IPO. My guess is he has a checklist of items he needs to accomplish on the site handed to him by leadership to make everything look good for an IPO. He may have realized a lot of these would not go well with the community - this isn't his first rodeo with this stuff - so he applied draconian measures, hardened his heart against the mods and app devs who made the site what it is, and is hoping and praying there will be something left when the smoke clears. And there will be, especially as they force subreddits back into the light and encouraging mods to turn on each other. Basically, this is a loyalty test, and all of the disloyal people are being forced out. The loyal people who will pretty much go with anything Reddit leadership wants will be all that's left, and they're banking that will be enough. Add the influx of Facebook and Twitter refugees who likely see all of this as just nerd posturing, and, yeah, Reddit will likely survive and go IPO. But it will not be Reddit. It will be a sad, corporate shadow of the vibrant community it once was. And it will not last. I honestly believe distributed social media - ActivityPub, BlueSky (ew), or something yet to come - will be the future. It will look like your favorite social media feeds now, but it will act like email, just hopefully with better moderation and spam handling. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and even YouTube will eventually relent and tie themselves to this ecosystem as a last ditch effort to stay alive, then probably picked apart by private equity vultures in an ignominious final act. EDIT: WOW - within five minutes of posting this, this other news story crossed my transom, more or less confirming my theory. Neat! https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-prote... |