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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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[-] TragicNotCute@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago

I’m fully committed regardless of how good the replacement is. I paid for Reddit premium every month since 2016 to try and support the thing I loved. I gave out 65+ gold before premium to also support a thing a loved.

I cancelled premium after the AMA and deleted Apollo. No going back period.

[-] mycatiskai@lemmy.one 14 points 1 year ago

This might be why they have not seen a monetary hit yet, it won't be until people's premium cancellations hit that Reddit will see a cash flow issue.

The Humanist Report on YouTube lost monetization last month and he slowly saw his subscriber count drop day by day as people's subscriptions got canceled instead of renewed after 31 days he was somehow still at 9 subscribers. Fortunately he did a video and called out YouTube and people went on his patreon to fund him instead of him relying at all on YouTube. He got monetization back but you can never trust YouTube to not screw people.

[-] j4k3@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

They won't see much of a monetary hit from most of the people that were using the free API. It will be like YT since 2017; a slow decline and complete loss of technical utility. It will be another zombie garbage platform because this is all the company is focused on. It is a massively oversimplified perspective of where value is created in reddit. I believe the entire house of cards is anchored by the most niche and obscure places that have useful information and support. Monetizing the types of users that make up these communities is completely counter productive. These are the true influencing anchor users that everyone is grounded to all the way down the intellectual pyramid (plateau). All the other social stuff is peripheral to the technical utility of knowing you can find an answer to a super obscure question by asking on reddit. It is just like how you used to be able to find the answer on YT; now you can't find that one video posted by the expert that had 3 uploads 10 years ago. This is the change reddit is making. It will take time for this utility to errode away but this outcome is guaranteed.