happybadger [he/him]

Fuck yeah. Burn baby burn.

It’s 8% of the shares in total. Everything prior was purchased in venture capital drives well below the IPO price. We both know that the price is going to crater after that. My incentive is to buy in now and cash out the moment it launches, but that’s also their incentive and they’re doing so much quicker with far more shares. If I kept my shares, my only hope would be that whatever dividends it pays out cover the 24/7 customer service job of moderating at the state minimum wage. It wouldn’t at the amount it allows me to invest. The people drawing much more profit from their much cheaper shares will make that 24/7 customer service job worse as the website becomes worse to use and everything I say on it is sold to train the LLMs that are threatening labour more broadly.

The gamble every person who got that message faces is whether or not they think they can cash out within the first day. After that there is no happy ending for reddit, its mods, its users, or people dumb enough to invest in the modern Myspace.

r/snackexchange was fun. I sabotaged the subreddit by embracing Spez’s call for user democracy, making everything about it up for a vote every day. Some weird little goober ratfucked that and the admins made them the head mod, despite them only participating in the subreddit one time ten years before and there being two existing mods who programmed third-party tools we were protesting for. Those tools were necessary for running the subreddit. The users instantly turned on this guy despite me being a more or less absent mod for years and destroying the subreddit in protest. He became a proxy for the admins and caught so much flak that he has only posted a couple times since, and not in r/snackexchange.

There were a few larger subreddits that got mod couped with similar hate toward the scabs, but having seen the worst case example it’s great. They do their big power move and it’s the gun. When they threatened to do it in r/Science the guy requesting it was an antivaxxer who markets herbal supplements. Let a thousand fuckups bloom.

That might happen but that’s not where the real pressure point is. Sometime shortly after the IPO, whatever hype exists around it is going to give way to the reality that reddit is an unprofitable company at the end of a tech bubble built on 0% interest rates that aren’t coming back. There is no way for reddit to become profitable without making itself unusable and sanitising the NSFW content that drives a huge amount of its traffic. When the price tanks, they’ve bribed their 75k most loyal users and mods into accepting the IPO with advanced purchase options at what might be the high point of its value. That’s when shit stands to rupture. Reddit will have failed everyone to enrich Steve Huffman and the venture capitalists who invested in their earlier rounds and there’s no way for them to control that tantrum spiral.

The last one showed four important things:

1. It can be coordinated super easily and has broad support amongst the mods

2. It’s popular with most users outside of sports subreddits and they’re hostile toward scab mods and admins.

3. Reddit fundamentally has zero response to it and anything they try compounds their issues. They can’t offer mods anything short of the wage that 24/7 customer service job for a multi-billion dollar company should entail. They can’t censor the protests without it causing a Streisand effect and major backlash which reinforces points 1 and 2.

4. Mods don’t have any control over the subreddit anyway. It’s arbitrarily taken away and given to anyone who asks for it. The only consequence for anyone protesting is reddit saying you can’t do the volunteer work that you’re protesting over the conditions of already. The next schmuck still has to do that work with those conditions knowing reddit hates them just as much as they hated you.

I think the next mod strike is the breaking point for the website. They’re going to have a worse response, people are going to be angrier, and the shareholders are going to add a whole new layer of demands that can’t be enforced without making everything worse for mods and users. Once that mod exodus hits, the website instantly becomes unusable and full of wildly illegal things. There’s no Plan B for that which isn’t very expensive.

https://www.reddit.com/dsp

They just sent out the emails for offering their 75k most valuable users advanced purchase. It’s based on your total karma and/or your total moderator actions. It’s that latter where I think they’re really going to get fucked. Volunteer labour is such a massive part of reddit not immediately being consumed by redditors and bots. If I took on a dozen moderators for a smallish subreddit like /r/snackexchange, maybe one of them would stick around past a month. Of those who did they either treat it like a 24/7 on-call job or they do advanced labour like programming 3rd-party tools. It’s absolutely terrible work and the only reward for it is more work, now with extra enshittification from investor pressure.

Lose those mods and it’s a doom spiral for the entire website. What’s the Plan B? Hundreds of paid customer service agents doing that work or trying to do the mod coups that failed last year because the new guy sees he’s being fucked just as hard as the old guy? Organic user traffic is going to plummet once that quality filter is gone and they see the version of the front page. The next wave of admin crackdown to enforce investor demands is going to provoke another mod strike and compounded with the stock price falling I think reddit might be going the way of Digg very fast.

edit: Also, the top tier for moderators is 5k actions. The loyalty of someone willing to do 5k un-fun things is now dependent on the value of a stock for a company that can’t turn a profit, and they can’t turn a profit without making things massively worse for the person willing to do 5k acts of labour for them. There is no way to make any of those 5k acts of labour fun and any attempt to short of being paid is a pizza party NFT which will only piss them off more.

They gave r/snackexchange to some random guy who had participated in the subreddit one time a decade ago. When he was getting weird and manipulative trying to reshape the subreddit, his top priority was instituting a new ID verification service of his choice.

The first guy to request control of r/science was an antivaxxer who sold supplements.

It’s so wholly arbitrary and underhanded. I just stopped interacting with my other subreddits and don’t care what happens to them.