They are hoping people start "forgetting" like they have about twitter. I'm of the impression that reedit's core users are too stubborn and too involved to let this slide. At best this trigger a vote of reddit's board and they oust the idiot that is responsible, and we can hope for a better stance from the next one. Realistically it will probably blow over and people that actually care will move to or create something similar. VC/corporate greed knows no bounds when it comes to the original integrity of the business
Is it possible they want to change that? I'm sure the board is aware of how the site works and how important all the unpaid labor is to keeping it alive. But maybe they don't like that? It seems like the most profitable thing for a social media platform is to make it appeal to everyone, and not just "reddit people", for lack of a better term.
My normie friends who all have instagrams and tiktoks are not on reddit because it's full of "reddit people", and those people are... weird to them. They still make fun of me for being a "reddit guy" despite having deleted my account years ago. Reddit wants to go public, and I think they know that they have to shed that reputation if they're going to be successful with that. They must have known what a shitstorm these API changes would cause, so maybe it's all already priced in, and they're ok with a mass exodus and they have some horrible plan to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Of course, that would completely ruin reddit, but the point is to make money above all else.
How old are you? Because I feel like Gen Z makes jokes about “Reddit guys” and “Discord mods” but they all absolutely do use those platforms. They’re basically unavoidable.
I’ve seen more than one tiktok with 100k+ likes joking about how they add “reddit.com” to their Google search queries to get real results instead of SEO/sales funnel optimized shit
I'm a millennial, so I can't really speak for zoomers. But to speculate, I'd say that a lot of people are on discord because if you play video games, you're probably on discord to socialize and/or to use the audio/video chatroom stuff when actually gaming. But the reddit thing seems more like a "lifehack" content thing than anything else. I doubt many people saw that tiktok and created a reddit account because of it, which is what I consider "using reddit". And 100k seems like a lot, but couldn't that just be all the reddit users who also use tiktok?
When you go to college, the only anonymous forum you can use is your college's subreddit, when you apply for internships the only forum for somewhat actionable career advice is cscareerquestions, and when applying to Law School or BSchool all the relevant information/tips/guidelines/strategies are all hosted on LawSchoolAdmissions and MBA.
We all know Reddit is a toxic piece of garbage but where else can you find actionable advice at scale?
I haven't seen as much hate for Discord, but Discord has a discovery problem and is still kind of niche.
They could ditch all the moderators by choosing to ditch them. But what would they replace them with?
Mods do useful work that needs to be done, and anything Reddit could do to replace them is going to cost so, so much more. The alternative is a site overrun with trash.
Twitter seems to be on a poor trajectory. What Reddit is up to is bad enough, but if the leadership was looking at Twitter and thinking "yeah, let's do that", that would be even sadder.
Twitter has also been bleeding advertisers, the estimates I saw in a recent NYT article put it at 59% down from the same time last year. I don't see how that's sustainable for a company with a debt structure like Twitter's.
> They are hoping people start "forgetting" like they have about twitter
Forget about twitter or forget about Twitter's latest issues and decisions? Because I used to open twitter 3 times a day to periodically check in on recent research and stuff. I stopped doing that (maybe once a month now) because all of my fav researchers would get vitriol in the comment sections.
Sure, it's all fun & games when everyone is in on the joke. Just like the flat earthers, up until some musician gets into a twitter spat with Neil Degrasse Tyson over the flatness (or lack thereof) of the Earth.
Only with birds, we'll have non-ironic activists burning down chicken coops and claiming the so-called "meat" we buy in supermarkets is some kind of mind control or Soylent Green, and all evidence that it started as a joke will be taken as evidence of a coverup.
True, unironic Flat earthers are still an extreme fringe of mostly mentally ill people. If anything, the most common conspiracy theory about flat earth is that it's a psyop to discredit...other conspiracy theories lol. You'd be considered as a complete weirdo for believing in flat earth even amongst qanon types.
It's funny though since the "5g tower burning, covid denying flat earther" caricature has become so overused that some believe that it's actually a real thing. But in reality it's so incredibly uncommon
That was speculation of where the fledgling #BirdsArentReal movement could end up, but I'm really not serious about my criticism of the meme.
As a sibling comment to yours pointed out, true believers of things like a flat earth are an extreme minority and I'm not particularly concerned that a parody conspiracy theory will cause much harm. I doubt the few true believers will be burning chicken coops any more than flat earthers are blowing up globes. (I really hope I'm not wrong about that, I do like chicken quite a bit).
And we, as a society & individuals, can't and shouldn't be 100% serious about everything 100% of the time. We should be able to laugh at things, even very serious things. For example I find it pretty funny that some Russian tanks are being abducted by Ukrainian farmers w/ tractors. I can also see how deadly serious it is: It's not like they're just a few viral videos made by influencers, it's everyday people like farmers trying to take deadly resources out of the hands of an invading army.
I like your points about the necessity of humor and i think its the only way to the future for us without mass psychosis and cultural schizming. When biomorphic-engineered bird-drones can fly autonomously, and pigeons have been carrying IP for the ruling class for thousands of years, we are going to need some comedy to settle the #birdsarereal issue
I was one of these individuals, when i went to dive into it a little more, it looks like ebay is randomly suspending tons of people as being reported on twitter, with their support chat being down.
Not exactly related but: a couple of weeks ago I suddenly had my account 'restricted' on eBay and told I could no longer sell or receive payment for anything I'd sold until I uploaded a load of personal ID documents [passport / driving licence, etc] to confirm my identity. This, after I'd been buying and selling on eBay for 19+ years.
Browsing their 'community' forum, it became clear that eBay have done this to loads of people recently, including many who had been members even longer than me. What disgusted me even more than this obnoxious privacy invasion was the number of people on the forum who'd actually sent eBay all the required documentation instead of telling them to go fuck themselves.
Luckily I had no uncleared payments in my account. So I've just stopped using eBay. It's just a pity there's no viable alternative. Nothing like a bit of healthy competition to help rein in the jaw-dropping arrogance of these mega-corporations
Why does google (or any company for that matter) think this is a good idea? Especially with jobs in the tech industry being so abundant and people chomping at the bit to hire SWEs/SREs.
By adjusting pay to local cost of living Google is effectively saying that they will provide their employees with the same standard of living regardless of their location. In lower cost of living areas this means an accordingly lower salary, because a Bay Area salary would otherwise afford an employee a better standard of living.
As for losing talent, Google is sufficiently established that the majority of freshly minted computer science and software engineering graduates are still desperate to work for Google if they can get in. And Google doesn't need to hire all the top talent to grow or run with the same profit margins.
I suspect software engineering salaries for new hires will start declining in nominal terms within the next decade or so, as (1) automation lowers demand for engineers on the business side (2) the labor supply keeps growing (3) non engineers in tech companies demand adjustments to their own pay to match engineers or start leaving for other companies that do, leaving less money to pay engineers (4) MBAs keep moving into management and start cutting labor costs for their most expensive individual contributors to increase profits and satisfy shareholders.
When new graduates make as much as doctors, with only a fraction of the education, while every other profession, with the exception of junior investment bankers, including technical ones and non-software engineering professions, are lucky to crack $75k, I don't see how the current job market is sustainable.
It seems like people are constantly pessimistic about future salary for Software engineers. I'll present the opposite case, with the advent of software eating the world, good software engineers are infinitely more valuable than a good doctor or a good lawyer or whatever. This is only going to continue to get more extreme with software controlling more and more. Someone could stand up a web service or reduce server costs and save / make a company literally millions of $ (100's of millions at big tech). This was not possible 20 years ago when the job was much harder. Now conversely because its gotten much easier to write code, bad software engineers are basically worthless. So I predict what we'll see is an even more 2 tiered software developer salary market, where the best developers command crazy money while the bad devs get paid middling wages.
> By adjusting pay to local cost of living Google is effectively saying that they will provide their employees with the same standard of living regardless of their location. In lower cost of living areas this means an accordingly lower salary, because a Bay Area salary would otherwise afford an employee a better standard of living.
Except you are now stuck and can't transition back to a HCol area because all these years you were building less equity.
A 1M house in the Bay Area sells for 1M. A 300K house in Anywhere sells for... you guesses it, 300K.
I'd put a slightly different spin on it- sure, junior positions will be automated and commoditfied, but I don't see senior salaries going down. There's a key difference between software engineers and doctors:
No matter how good a doctor is, they can only treat so many patients and/or train so many juniors. A software engineer can scale almost infinitely in some respects. In this they are more like the investment bankers you mention, indeed in some circumstances interchangeable
I would think that relying on folks straight from school or from 4-ish years of hacking is very risky when it comes to more complex products. Unless you retain some of those expensive, grumpy, possibly-now-remote designers...
EDIT: debugging skills are earned through experience, not taught.
You’d think… I’m definitely seeing a trend towards less experienced hires at inflated positions at the tech giants. It’s something they’ve fought off for a while but seem to be losing the battle. The “senior” engineer from a company of 3 with 2 years of experience behind them post-bootcamp has finally made it into the big leagues.
The amount of production outages we’re starting to see across Azure/GCP/AWS is telling if you ask me.
They've been going that way for a long time because it was the only way to keep up headcount growth after their initial growth phase pulled in all the experienced people who were already willing to move.
Even when I was there, the number of inexperienced grads who had never known anything except Google was growing rapidly. And they unfortunately seemed much more prone to bizarre outbursts, bad behavior and extremism of various kinds. They took where they worked for granted.
