Very poor leadership.

Spez was smart enough to realize that there's value in aggregate votes on text content in specialized niches for training AI, but too dumb to recognize that the owners of that value are the users and moderators and not Reddit corporate, and that the greatest frontend contributions have been by 3rd party developers.

So he complained about "landed gentry" while implicitly suggesting he sees Reddit as a monarchy where he sits on the throne.

Which in turn pushed users and moderators and 3rd party developers to look elsewhere.

It's the beginning of the end for the site that for a few years now was my pick for "massive untapped and underappreciated value."

It's wild that he failed so badly in even just ad sales. Targeting my profile there based on something like a vectordb of comments, posts, and liked content would have been 1,000% more relevant than Google or Meta could have offered advertisers.

But the fool couldn't even get their basic search to work.

While many comment on how Reddit enhances Google searches, the flip side of that is how insane it is that people go to Google to search Reddit.

Incompetent man child ruins company. A story as old as companies (and part of why "founder driven startups" is such a piss poor model for entrepreneurship).