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Megathread for Reddit Blackouts and News - Week 1
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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Technology
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If i may dream, the actual solution to this issue would be a mod/user takeover along the lines of a factory occupation, or a more peaceful worker buyout. (Sometimes the former leads to the latter.)
When the tools of production are a server farm, how do they get taken over? What does it look like?
To be a little more grounded, the real targets of this action should not be "reddit" or /u/spez. It should be whoever is actually in charge. Do we know who that is?
Disturbingly, there is really no way to know who actually owns a private company like Reddit. Once it goes public, then the owners will be the shareholders (and in reality, the owners are the major shareholders who have a controlling stake).
The only clue to the current ownership is whatever management wishes to disclose. Spez wrote a blog post in 2021 indicating that they issued $250M in "series E funding" to existing and new investors.
If there are any finance bros around here, they may be able to dig up some sort of disclosures from bond auctions to try and see who bought it.
The only confirmed investor I know about is Tencent. They invested in 2019. Its possible they were also some of the "existing investors" Spez referred to in 2021.
Bottom line: nobody knows who owns Reddit. But apparently the owners think this guy Spez is a good fit to run their company, somehow.
He's exactly what they want. A complete straw man with a hateable face, a genuine Nimrod that thinks he's the smartest guy in any room he's ever been in. Sprinkle in being a privelaged yes man and he's the perfect face for an ownership group that wants to remain anonymous. He's literally Tom from Succession, might even be who that character is based on IRL.
The older redditors may remember that he was moderator of some VERY dodgy subreddits back in the day and tried to cover it up. We remember, it will come back to haunt him at some point.
If you can sate my curiosity, what dodgy subreddits?
It's difficult to prove these days as most of that era was wiped and the internet archive doesnt have much from that time.
There are some people saying it was possible to add arbitrary users as mods for a while, some that say he made himself a mod as part of cleaning up that subreddit. but a lot of people also say he was a mod for a very long time.
/r/jailbait
Do you mind me asking which dodgy subs? I'm mostly familiar with his election 2016 (non)work and half assed too little too late follow up. I was on Reddit from 2010 or 2011, but I really don't recall knowing anything about senior leadership until 2014 or 2015
/r/jailbait
Yikes, I had no idea Tencent is a Reddit investor. That's another big reason for me to steer clear of Reddit!
I think the Fediverse is an illustration that innovation can thrive without profit motive. Maybe just copying services, picking up the pieces, and moving there is the only reasonable protest anyone can do on the Internet.
In essence, to make one's own website, with blackjack, and hookers.
Actually...forget the website!
And thus lemmynsfw.com was born
I don't know how you'll get a capitalist prepper to surrender his golden goose.
Dont ceos serve the board? I am only vaguely framiliar with this kind of business but i donnot think he "owns" it? But i may be confusing that with a post IPO structure.
Board is elected by shareholders. Until the IPO, there's no way of knowing what percentage of the company each interested party owns. If spez or his buddies own 51% or more of the company, the company runs on "fuck you, I do what I want" style. The leverage investors would have would be 1) what to do with the percentage of the company they own 2) withdraw money 3) buy out spez and his buddies 4) sue if they can prove the company misrepresented what it was going to do with their investment money.
Which route they'd prefer would depend on their assessment of the total valuation of the platform and the contractual terms of their initial investment
great answer thank you!
so, sounds like #3 could be good if there is anyone decent with enough money to spend on it. which I can't imagine who that would be.
A lawsuit would take ages, even if it was simple, which I doubt would be the case, and I doubt a judge is going to make specific rulings about API fees or whatever.
Wild fantasy: form a collective (some sort of formal co op structure) of users/mods/devs and buy out some investor(s), OR wait til the IPO and buy lots of shares to have a formal voting bloc. What do you think? I am thinking of some sort of semi democratic/representative structure. Better or worse? It burns to the ground in chaotic drama, or it manages to be barely coherent enough to function with all internally competing interests?
I would advise against buying stocks in a corporation as part of a hostile takeover. If reddit has a competent legal team (though I'm not convinced they do), such an action will accomplish nothing and the company will simply be flush with cash from the IPO. Alternatively, you succeed, and then what? What does distributed governance of a community hosting platform look like? How do you tackle all of the financial pressures that led Reddit to turn into what it is today? I think the more sustainable solution is to put your energy into advocating for alternative platforms such as here, tildes, or squabbles
Also, I never recommend any financial investing strategy that doesn't put you first. Not that I'm saying the stock market is good, but because it's part of an overall exploitative system, and your financial strategy needs to be your plan for navigating that system. Foolhardy investment strategies run a ton of risk of feeding the exploiters and leaving yourself with nothing to survive on. I know that sounds bleak and dramatic, but seriously, please distrust banking practices the exact right amount to keep yourself from getting hosed
OK, ok you talked me out of even a day dream. I do remember hearing about people trying to make changes at... coca cola (?) doing shareholder action trying to get them to stop stealing water from people or something like that and it basically didn't work.
Agree wrt stock market etc. I mean the whole thing is based around the workers at the companies being fucked and you are just trying to get in and exploit them a bit extra. That is your best case scenario as an "investor". I was kind of filling in an implied worker coop thing I guess. Anyway this kind of intervention has been attempted in various venues for decades and never works as far as I know. Sometimes worker take over and worker buy outs do work and I guess that is more what I am really thinking of. I am thinking of the 3rd party devs, mods and users as workers. But you are right they never succceeed to take over via sneaky means; only directly.