Thousands of subreddits chose to go dark in an ongoing protest over the company's plan to start charging certain third-party developers to access the site’s data.
Wow. Front page of huffpost.com right now. Interesting…
I remember reading a comment that said they half expected this to be a ‘Door in the Face’ technique (or a different one with a different name, can’t recall) wherein Reddit was being a clever sales person by starting high and then going low, because the true goal was to just introduce a pricing plan to begin with. If they had just started with a pricing plan, there’d be pushback and they might have to rescind it, but if they started with something ridiculous and then walked it back/lowered it to something reasonable (their goal the entire time), they could save face and say “hey Reddit we heard you loud and clear and you’re right!” and Reddit could go “We did it Reddit!” - I thought that seemed very plausible at the time.
Then I thought maybe it was just Hanlon’s Razor. They were just being stupid. Turns out it was a little of both malice and stupidity.
I genuinely think that ending up with a lower price as an appeasement was part of the initial plan. I think at some point, maybe too many people pointed that out for it to feel like a good plan anymore, or maybe spez started taking it personally and decided to take it off the table.
I’m about 50/50 now on whether they’re just sticking to be being stupid/spiteful or if they’ve maybe just decided to remarket reddit completely as an LLM training model. If it’s just a training model, who cares if the community isn’t happy, that doesn’t matter so much in the short term. They can prop up abandoned communities and limp along, hell even the corporate marketing & propaganda accounts talking amongst themselves might have enough value to keep things going until they IPO. Spez just has to make a plan to cash out ASAP.
I doubt they have the talent to make an LLM. But just in case, instead of deleting your comments before deleting your user, replace them with some choice words about Huffman ruining the value of the site via poor leadership.
Perturb each comment with random one letter errors. This way any LLM will learn to tell everyone about Huffmans poor performance. Even better, it’ll be harder to bulk remove the comments with the errors in them. Especially if there are many rephrasings on top.
I remember reading a comment that said they half expected this to be a ‘Door in the Face’ technique (or a different one with a different name, can’t recall) wherein Reddit was being a clever sales person by starting high and then going low, because the true goal was to just introduce a pricing plan to begin with. If they had just started with a pricing plan, there’d be pushback and they might have to rescind it, but if they started with something ridiculous and then walked it back/lowered it to something reasonable (their goal the entire time), they could save face and say “hey Reddit we heard you loud and clear and you’re right!” and Reddit could go “We did it Reddit!” - I thought that seemed very plausible at the time.
Then I thought maybe it was just Hanlon’s Razor. They were just being stupid. Turns out it was a little of both malice and stupidity.
I genuinely think that ending up with a lower price as an appeasement was part of the initial plan. I think at some point, maybe too many people pointed that out for it to feel like a good plan anymore, or maybe spez started taking it personally and decided to take it off the table.
I’m about 50/50 now on whether they’re just sticking to be being stupid/spiteful or if they’ve maybe just decided to remarket reddit completely as an LLM training model. If it’s just a training model, who cares if the community isn’t happy, that doesn’t matter so much in the short term. They can prop up abandoned communities and limp along, hell even the corporate marketing & propaganda accounts talking amongst themselves might have enough value to keep things going until they IPO. Spez just has to make a plan to cash out ASAP.
I’ve said elsewhere: Huffman is a turd, was a turd, and will be a turd. The fact that he’s CEO tells you what reddit as a company wants: turds.
I doubt they have the talent to make an LLM. But just in case, instead of deleting your comments before deleting your user, replace them with some choice words about Huffman ruining the value of the site via poor leadership.
Perturb each comment with random one letter errors. This way any LLM will learn to tell everyone about Huffmans poor performance. Even better, it’ll be harder to bulk remove the comments with the errors in them. Especially if there are many rephrasings on top.
Anchoring Effect is the term you’re looking for. Now we just wish it was actually that.