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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's letter to Reddit employees in response to blackout (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by gary@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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Starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private. We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us. A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout. Thank you, team.

We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.

There's a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we've seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.

While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.

I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don't want you to be the object of their frustrations.

Again, we'll get through it. Thank you to all of you for helping us do so.

Edit to include source: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/13/reddit-ceo-blackouts-no-revenue-impact/

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[-] FeEngage@lemmy.world 45 points 1 year ago

Saddens me that while the community could muster a great effort, the short 2 day time limit of the blackout wasn't enough.

[-] Jentu@lemmy.film 46 points 1 year ago

I don’t know if I’d take his word at face value. This reads like he’s talking to potential investors, not Reddit’s user base. Of course he’d want to assure them that everything is okay and they should still give him money.

[-] 6xpipe_@lemmy.world 31 points 1 year ago

It's an internal message to employees of Reddit. As someone who's been in the corporate world for a long time, I've seen some variation of this message many times. Economic downturn, bad press, low sales, losing expected incoming cash... there are a lot of catalysts for this style of message.

Most messages we're seeing are from users, who want Reddit to crash and burn or just do what the masses want, or whatever. But, on the other side is a bunch of people who may be worried about how this whole thing will affect their livelihood. Even if Reddit stays up another 20 years and not everyone loses their job, what scale will it be? Will Reddit fire some amount of their workforce to make up for lost income? Will I be someone who gets fired?

These are the thoughts that this message is intended to address.

[-] Jentu@lemmy.film 7 points 1 year ago

Got it, I didn't realize it was internal. Though they likely also knew it'd get leaked.

As for the workforce, I feel for them, though any business that is highly dependent on unpaid labor is something I personally wouldn't apply to.

[-] matzah 4 points 1 year ago

In the corp world as well, and I can say with a lot of certainty that spez knew and likely hoped this would be leaked publicly. It was written both with the intention of assuaging current staff and angling their optics for the watching public. My company had a minor recent PR issue and our CEO drafted and sent something very similar.

[-] someguy3@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 year ago

At this point you know all memos will be leaked.

[-] 6xpipe_@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

These are the thoughts that this message is intended to address.

[-] briongloid@aussie.zone 21 points 1 year ago

I don't think a larger timeline would have been accepted as easily, 48hrs was very approachable and will result it many subs continuing after having ripped the bandaid off.