lemmy.world IS NOT a general discussion area. find another community.
my bad…
-manitcor
@manitcor Wtf!! What an asshole CEO
So far Spez’s legacy includes, in no particular order:
- Changing other peoples’ comments
- Starting a war with the 3rd party app devs who made reddit the easily accessible platform it is (browsing reddit on the toilet wasn’t nearly as common before the first apps came out, and all of the first ones were 3rd party)
- Being a moderator on the jailbait subreddit, a community for sharing sexually suggestive pictures of underage teenage girls
- Forcing new moderation teams on communities whose moderation he didn’t agree with
- Straight up lying about the 3rd party apps and their developers every step of the way
Way to go, Steve Huffman! You had a community of volunteers build your platform for you and now you’re taking it all away from them. I’m sure this won’t backfire.
I posted this previously elsewhere.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc’s founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
Never even heard about this. Why haven’t they been sued by the surviving family members or some pro-bono representative?
I posted this previously elsewhere.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc’s founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
spez is also a doomsday prepper who dreams about living as some sort of lord in a post-apocalyptic feudal society
“Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
I have spent a lot of time with very rich people over the years for work and they will certainly bite it incredibly early in the apocalypse. If someone is born into wealth, they are almost always fundamentally inept in basic ways. The longer someone stays rich, the more inept and abstracted from the world they become. They are entirely ensconced in a bubble of their own making. Money opens so many doors and protects them from so many just basic consequences of living that they entirely forget that those obstacles exist.
They are also just constantly, constantly being glad-handed and yessir’ed into an excessive amount of confidence. They know it too, but they can’t really trust anyone so they just make friends with people who they know would steal the wallet off their corpse but happen to be nicer about it than the other ones who would also do it because they have nowhere else to turn. Other rich people aren’t trustworthy to them either because they are only either more or less rich, above or below them.
It’ll go down pretty much how it did in the last third of the movie Triangle of Sadness. They are building bunkers that their handlers and others will actually live in. Not to mention that anyone that knows they were a potential engineer, actively or passively, of the downfall of man will have someone to take it out on right in front of them.
Bill Murray would probably survive. Saw it in a movie.
I agree with most of this. Also my movie in my cue.
Eddit. God damned fat fingers
I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.
In a post-apocalyptic world? That skinny nerd (not to be meant as a slur, I myself am a nerd)?
Yeah I sorta doubt that. He’d need to 1) not be an asshat and 2) have a fair bit more physical size, strength and fighting ability
I wonder if this assclown realizes that his fortune will be worth fuck-all if society collapses, and with it goes his power.
" I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader." No steve, it’s 100% egotistical.
Spez looks and acts like a pussy that would be under someone boot 15 second after shit hits the fan. Boy is a walking fake confidence.
I think he’s overestimating his power and abilities. More likely scenario is the other survivors try to recreate that scene from Deliverance with him.
Of course he’s overestimating about himself, he’s a narcissist
He has mistaken having a lot of money for having leadership talent or any useful skill that would be valuable in a situation where infrastructure has completely collapsed and fiat currency is worthless. He is not physically strong, he doesn’t inspire people to follow him, he doesn’t know how to find and prepare food, how to source water, how to build shelter, how to make fire…
He knows nothing at all that would make him useful as anything beyond “that guy who digs graves” until he eventually dies from the physical exertion that his candy ass has never actually had to deal with.
He strikes me as one of those clowns who buys a ton of bitcoin as their prep.
Lmao does he even know how to chop firewood?
C’mon, he’s a ‘leader’, he can just have his
slavesfollowers do it
this guy is such a loser
That’s going to be hilarious when the actual warlords stop by and kick in his door.
Pff, as if they’d risk getting banned from the
formerfront page of the internet! Cuz, ya know, that’ll still be super relevant in a post-apocalyptic scenario… 🙃
He actually moderated jailbait? I always assumed he was the type of person to have an alt for it, but to actually use his real account? What a scumbag.
He was briefly added without his knowledge. He removed himself after he noticed.
Is your comment threatening him? Why are you blackmailing him, man? How is he going to work together with you now that you’ve so aggressively threatened him?
Why is your comment so badly coded? I can’t help you optimize your comment, Google didn’t help me write mine.
Being a moderator on the jailbait subreddit, a community for sharing sexually suggestive pictures of underage teenage girls
This one is a lie, he was added as a moderator by another mod, at a time when anyone could do so. Lets please stop spreading this.
Maybe he did not moderate it actively, but it was allowed to continue and even promoted by reddit until media got a whiff of it.
At the time, there was a lot of popular sentiment, on reddit itself, that the internet should be free and it should allowed to continue so long as it was legal.
No one is forcing you to apologize for pedophiles on reddit
WAIT. Spez was a mod on fucking r/jailbait??? WHAT???
Yea this will kill Reddit. Maybe not right away but soon.
I mean, look at what it’s taking to kill twitter and influencers are still all over it.
Because it’s actually not the same thing, “Twitter” = “influencers”. Without celebrities, Twitter simply dies. The same cannot be said about Reddit.
hi, just happened to see you in here lol
Wow I didn’t know he ran r/jailbait. Gross.
He was forcefully added as a mod on the subreddit. Reddit used to have a system which allowed you to make someone mod without requiring them to accept.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/1477psa/comment/jnuy0xf/
When people add you as a mod, you can still leave. He never did. That subreddit in particular was known to have the blessing of the reddit admins to operate and eventually made ‘subreddit of the month’. Then a news org picked up that reddit was hosting this content and then they shut it down.
They were well aware of what was going on. Andrewsmith is right, there is some plausible deniability there, but with the everything else we know about Steve Huffman, I’m not so sure I can agree with his assessment that it was forced upon him.
Andrewsmith is right,
As he often is. That guy knows more about Reddit than Huffman does. Hope he moves to Lemmy.
He let Ghislain Maxwell mod a bunch of subs until she eventually went to jail. It was common knowledge that its was her account but no problem from the pedo reddit admins
It was never proven that the account was hers and it was literally just users automatically claiming that account was Ghislaine Maxwell because that account stopped posting around the same time she got arrested. Nothing bugs me more than that myth being parroted as if it was proven fact.
U/maxwellhill was a monster‽ Say it isn’t so…how could he have known…FUCK spez
While it’s certainly better than actively moderating a community…
Is being the admin of a website that actively hosts jailbait and required a massive media outrage to finally remove it that much better? I get free speech and all, but I mean, the subreddit straight up catalogued which pictures were “fap material” and encouraged people (including parents) to take candid photos of the children around them.
A community like that wouldn’t last a millisecond in a server I host.
It’s not like it was a small sub either, IIRC. I’m not going to google jailbait to find the stories, but it must’ve been a few hundred thousand subscribers I think. At a time when the big subs had a few mill at most.
Even though it was ethically very bad, it was legal. And Reddit had a policy of not removing content, unless it was illegal or doxxing.
The fact is that they wanted to follow the same principles as the government, and allow complete freedom of speech. And if you are following freedom of speech, the ethicality of content is irrelevant.
Reddit never approved of r/jailbait. They simply allowed it.
Ahhh, ty. It did seem even worse than expected for him to have been actively running that sub.
Forced promotion
He did not
Changing other peoples’ comments
Wait the guy changed someone’s comment?
Yeah he changed one comment saying: “Fuck u/spez” by replacing “spez” with one of the r/the_donald mods. This was also done silently so no * to indicate the comment had been edited.
Yes. I believe it was people on the donald subreddit, which could be seen as funny, because most sane people (myself included) don’t agree with them politically, but it’s still a huge misuse of admin powers and proof that he has no integrity. Can’t let other peoples’ rights be violated if we want to keep our own.
Yeah, he got busted for it and wrote a half asked apology claiming he would change. Claimed he was just trolling…
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez
Yes, its even listed on the Wiki page for reddit under 2016 controversies
Has it been removed? Seems to jump from him becoming CEO to the banning of loli?
Further down the page under “Other Controversies”
Further down the page under “Other Controversies”
I’ll watch spez digg this grave. I’m not shocked, we have all seen it happen before.
This place feels real, and personally that’s all that matters. Reddit has been plastic for a while now. I’m happy to watch the ceo handle it like such a stooge, it almost seems like he wants to tank the company before tencent eats it all up.
Wait…the comment seems to indicate that the primary mod did not want to go dark, and an inactive mod came in and made it go dark. I understand being upset…but this does not seem like anything a Reddit admin would do?
It was a matter of time before the admins started doing this. Fuck Spez, you piece of shit
Ayy, fuck /u/spez
Lemmy should make itself as much like Reddit as it possibly can except for the small handful of money-grubbing cunts who’d rather destroy communities than allow them to exist without profiting from them.
And the insane amount of astroturfing!
i love that they’re making this extreme choice over fucking advice animals which haven’t been relevant in literally 10+years
This is informative and unfortunate.
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Additional additional context: The absentee head mod (legweed) returned a week before the protests and made a thread for all the mods of the sub to discuss whether to do a blackout. Basically nobody else meaningfully interacted except for the a single mod who was vehemently against it (CedarWolf), the same mod that was promoted by the admins.
The users of the sub overwhelmingly supported the blackout, but CedarWolf was involved in mass comment/post removals and bannings of pro-blackout content in the leadup. This included mod convo posts literally saying the community can’t make the decision for themselves and that they (CedarWolf) know what’s best for the community. At the same time legweed was trying to get other mods opinions but nobody actually responded until legweed make a stickied post to engage the community. This upset CedarWolf as he’d been spending most of his time suppressing those same conversations from happening.
I’m not saying an absentee mod should be able to show up an unilaterally private a sub, but in this case they were showing up to engage the community and the community was the one who asked to have it privated. None of the other mods really cared enough to argue, the one anti-blackout person was basically alone in their opinion and is equally responsible for a unilateral decision, except that one went against the community wishes.
Sure legweed was an absentee head mod, but CedarWolf wasn’t just active, he’s terminally online and has a really nasty superiority complex. I don’t think either is really head mod material but one sided with the admins and now they have the unilateral control they had already tried to exercise prior.
Source/Context:
Unsurprising that some power tripping mods aren’t willing to give up their little fiefdom
I’m not going to miss all this mod drama. Imagine being so wrapped up in your own bullshit, that you lose sight of the fact that you are a volunteer for a multi billion dollar capitalized organization, that has just a few guys literally about to cash out with billions here shortly. And it’s all on your back. Like what kind of muppet loser gets this drawn into dramatical bullshit like this?
The whole reddit thing was always going to disolve into an inevitable death spiral of horseshit, it’s only due to the honest to goodness mods trying to be good souls, that they were able to stave it off this long. The world’s just become too fucked up of a place when we are all connected like this, especially with the events of the last few years. Then you throw a few capitalists into the room, hoo boy.
The only way this Lemmy thing works out, is if it’s well moderated (ie keep the spam and the actual bullshit off, otherwise fuck off with all the weird incel angsty drama), and if we can somehow keep the fat cats away from it. The whole federated thing is pretty genius, and is probably the best solution we are going to be able to manage to come up with at this time, as a firewall for that sorta stuff. I’m really excited to see where it goes from here.
This is certainly a different story, but still, admin taking action here is not super common.
Perhaps we should start a new post with this new information to discuss?
I don’t really know it’s worth a new post, because I don’t think this information really changes what we will see happen, which is realistically three things:
- Subs that didn’t commit to an indefinite protest are already coming back online, like /r/technology. Admins will be happy with that and do nothing.
- Subs that did commit to an indefinite protest but didn’t do so unanimously will have lower mods reach out to Admins to get higher mods removed, and open the subs back up. This is what happened with Advice Animals.
- Subs that did commit to an indefinite protest and did do so unanimously will have old mod teams removed and new mod teams put in. If they do this, they will probably do it later, and while there may be some uproar, anybody who really cares about this by then will probably have already left reddit.
The fact that it was not super common previously doesn’t mean it won’t become more common, especially as precedent was set year ago.
Well, I say that because each of those three situations is different. 1 does not add to the scumminess. 2 is borderline, but if mods are fighting over this, it does make sense for admins to step in. They are the only one with the power to settle that. But 3… that’s just absolute scum.
The added info moved the advice animals case from 3 to 2 for me, and changes the situation. Have we seen 3 happen yet? I do expect it will happen, but has it happened?
added
Lol, now I kind of wish you hadn’t. The subreddit I got this from is private and it got enough attention to get me banned for leaking. Whelp…
lol oops, tbf, i told you what I would do
sorry though.
Since the text has been copied at this point from another source, mind deleting the image?
think ill do the image and the post, i posted this here because lemmy.world looked like a big gen discussion the other day.
Your diligence is appreciated!!
Deleted my account, removed Apollo, starting to feel at home on Lemmy. No way I’m going back.
The experience has been a lot smoother than I expected.
I was talking about this with a friend - reddit doesn’t have many unique features that folks want, and generally speaking the only thing reddit has of value is the community.
Hoping folks start migrating to alternatives
Super smooth. Just need the content levels to pick up a bit but that will improve over time as more people catch on
Agreed. Feels like reddit but 15 years ago, before the dark times, before the Empire - Loving it so far, and reminds me of how the internet used to be this huge frontier before Corporations, Shareholders, and Advertisers moved in and ruined everything.
These Communities are smaller and some of the more niche groups aren’t here yet but that will change with time. Give it a year or two, and I’m sure those obscure, hilarious groups like Greendawn will migrate over, over.
It’s funny how relaxing Lemmy feels. It’s like I’ve been the frog in the slowly heating pot over the years and had no idea how harsh Reddit had become. Right now Lemmy feels like I thought Reddit has always been. But the idea of Reddit now feels so ugly. It’s the same feeling as getting away from bumper to bumper traffic and finally being able to set the cruise control and enjoy the ride.
That’s my hope for the Fediverse. We’ll get that frontier feel back while also having the giant easy-access network we’ve come to appreciate in the 10’s and 20’s (over).
It’s all a bit janky, but I feel like a real pioneer. This is how the pioneers must have felt lol. It’s a good feeling, making my way across uncharted lands, watching it all unfold and grow…
Same
That’s why we desperately need downvoting, making fake stories sink to the bottom.
my 2 'cents
who doesn’t have downvoting? I can downvote everything…
Oh I see now, your home server hides the downvote. other servers can downvote that content, I think.
Jerboa (the mobile app) also doesn’t hide the downvote, regardless of instance.
this is how reddit dies. not with a whimper, but with a greedy CEO.
get fucked spez!
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just the way they wanted it.
I know “seize the means…” has been made into a dirty phrase in the US, but yeah… take back our forum, people. this was never going to end well with a centralized, corporate entity like reddit. every mod knew this. time to build anew on our own land.
Is this internet feudalism?
This is what we call scab behavior, Kids do not be like this mod, do not be a scabb, if you see a picket line do not cross it. If everyone else is striking join your fellows and strike with them.
Scabs get scabs.
They should tread lightly. Reddit in no way has the ability to function (edit: at least on short notice) without volunteer mods. To some degree they can find scabs, but I honestly don’t know how many and how good.
It’s destined to become like Twitter, overrun by far-right assholes and lacking quality content. The mods who kept the worst of them off the subs will be gone, and the people who produced the best content will leave as the dregs take over.
Scabs, dregs… its like I’m in Warhammer 40k. You guys play Darktide? If not: a question from non-native speaker: are scabs and dregs a, more or less, common expression/term in English? I’m just trying to escape the trap when you notice something, you start seeing it all around.
Whenever there’s a strike, scab is a very common word. I don’t see dregs as much, but it’s not super uncommon either. In case you don’t know, a scab in this context is someone who is hired to replace people who are on strike and dregs are the most worthless part of something.
That’s entirely possible, although last I checked Twitter is only on it’s way there.
Oh yeah, it’s a slow process, but it’s inevitable.
Yeah, are they going to try to mod all the subs by themselves now? That’s not going to work out really well. Either there will be no moderation and everything will be trash, or they’ll have to hire people as moderators, which will cut into the profits they’re trying to show. They’re trying to bully people to behave how they want, and I hope it fails badly. But I’m still waiting for people to stop using twitter…
or they’ll have to hire people as moderators, which will cut into the profits they’re trying to show.
How many, on what timeline? They could go to this model eventually if they wanted, but with little to no notice it’s tough. (I also foresee niche subreddits becoming frustrating to use when the generic full-time moderators don’t understand them, and who knows how NSFW subreddits would work)
I have hope it’s different from Twitter, because there’s a party with leverage that’s fundamentally different from mindless scrollers. Not to mention I’m liking the alternative I’ve tried very much.
and who knows how NSFW subreddits would work
They want them to die, so they’ll do nothing about it. It’s not advertisers friendly.
I was reading a thread on here or Tildes yesterday and someone mentioned that what they think is happening is that the end goal is likely to have no actual mods an just have AI blanket moderators for the whole site removing the issue entirely. In all reality they’re probably right, and Reddit has probably been working on AI Mods for sometime now, so they will only have to do this until they can roll out the ai software. Which will probably be sooner rather than later.
Why hide it though? It’s a neat idea and if implemented well would be probably pretty efficient. I wouldn’t have any objections to the idea of it.
Reddit? Are they new? Never heard of it 🤣 Probably won’t get very big
