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

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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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[-] Redfugee@lemmy.world 67 points 2 years ago

I suspect that the fact that he had to call out that they are not seeing any significant revenue impact probably means that they actually are seeing an impact.

[-] ilikedatsyuk@lemmy.world 34 points 2 years ago

Yeah, there's no way they aren't seeing an impact of our actions between people canceling Premium and reduced ad impressions because of the private subs.

He's projecting confidence because he wants us to think we're not having any effect on them and come back.

[-] zkikiz@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago

The memo as a whole is encouraging employees to keep working and not lose faith or get scared; that part is telling them that they're not going to get laid off due to declining revenues.

Of course it's all BS, businesses can't predict the future, but I'd agree that advertisers and subscribers didn't suddenly cancel en masse. It'll take more action to see effects there.

[-] XLRV@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

And they already laid off some employees recently, it could probably re happen soon.

[-] cobra89@beehaw.org 18 points 2 years ago

significant

So far

Those are some interesting qualifiers. It's only been 2 days so maybe that's why it's not "significant" yet.

[-] andobando@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago

I don't think it's a lie, but it highlights that revenue is all they're thinking about.

[-] 0U714W@slrpnk.net 8 points 2 years ago

Hasn't he also stated Reddit is not generating a profit? Which has got to be another obvious lie, seeing as how long they've operated and how massive their site is.

[-] andobando@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago

Nah that is most likely very true. If they go public that would also be quite obvious as they have to release all their financials. A lot of giant organizations are not/were not making money for a long time, including Snapchat, Twitter, Uber, etc.

There is a huge cost to running these things.