If they bored people with "we listened" PR waffling while just being more sneaky about user-hostile changes, they could have gotten away with anything. I mean, that's the playbook, isn't it?
But blatantly giving your unhappy users the finger is a great way to keep them angry and thus motivated. Steve Huffman has set millions of dollars of value on fire and damaged Reddit's brand for no apparent reason (except maybe a bizarre personal vendetta against certain third-party app developers). Strange times.
> just being more sneaky about user-hostile changes, they could have gotten away with anything. I mean, that's the playbook, isn't it?
Isn't that pretty much what Reddit was doing before spez came back as CEO, though? (Where being "sneaky" about user-hostile changes also included de-facto exempting the users they rely on most from them - their volunteer mods and, to some extent, their 'power' content contributors.) This screwup has all played out within a month or two - there were smaller controversies before, but nothing compares to this.
Yeah, that's what they were doing, and it was working well enough. Dark patterns are evil but quite effective.
My guess is that investors are banging on the door wanting their payout, and the people on the other side of that door are panicking. Reddit Inc was probably a money furnace, like a dot-com of old. But it turns out a bunch of nerds and aficionados piping text through your servers does not equate to a hundred-billion-dollar business.
But blatantly giving your unhappy users the finger is a great way to keep them angry and thus motivated. Steve Huffman has set millions of dollars of value on fire and damaged Reddit's brand for no apparent reason (except maybe a bizarre personal vendetta against certain third-party app developers). Strange times.