Bozicus

I feel personally attacked.

The posted content is almost all backed up elsewhere, iirc. My understanding is that the risk is less having a huge amount of content being generated on specific servers than it is having a lot of users concentrated on those servers. Restoring data from backup or migrating communities (from a content perspective, as in, rehosting) is a lot easier than having people locked out, or, worse, losing accounts altogether.

I think part of the solution is to normalize the idea that you subscribe to all the communities on a topic you're interested in, even if they're small, so wherever something gets posted, you see it. Eventually some of those communities may be closed in favor of the more active ones, but as a subscriber, there's no opportunity cost.

If they want to pretend they're not doing it, sure, I'll pretend I don't see it. If I think they're fudging the dice too much, and it bothers me, I might bring it up with them privately, or I might suggest a group discussion, or I might just leave.

In general, I try to evaluate a GM as the whole package, rather than just the individual choices they make. If I like their campaigns, there's no point in picking on individual decisions (beyond obligatory mild grumbling, of course, lol). Sometimes, they're going to get results using techniques I wouldn't choose, which is fine. If I don't like their campaigns, there's still no point in picking on individual decisions. I would rather drop out as soon as I realize something isn't working out than stick around, lose my temper, and say something I will regret.

I think all the companies in that field are equally shitty, it's just a matter of what your (least) favorite kind of shittiness is, and/or who has the monopoly in your area.

Yeesh, this just gets worse and worse. :-(. I have zero respect for a company that can't even make it easy for you to pay them. It doesn't even benefit them to make it hard to pay. It's just a failure.

Yeah, at first I was like, "well, they probably have a separate receiving email, which is not that weird..." but on a paper letter?! Send them back an ad for fire insurance or something. (Not shredded paper, that can damage post office sorting equipment).

That's possible, but I feel like if they did understand, they would use that understanding to suck a little less hard. It's not just the bad policies, or the bad implementation, or even the bad timing, it's that they're not even taking PR seriously as part of the process. It would not be difficult or even particularly expensive for them to hire one (1) person who is good at PR, and take their advice. They don't seem to have bothered, which really suggests they don't know it's important.

Yes, they might think investors won't understand why users are upset, and they might be right. But most people seriously considering putting money into a social media platform are at least vaguely aware of the fact that it's not going to make money if the users leave, and they will notice bad PR. The API protests have shown up repeatedly in at least three publications that serious investors follow. If anyone at Reddit was really paying attention to the interpersonal parts of the scenario, it would have occurred to them that some problems are easier to avoid than they are to hide to investors, and interpersonal conflict is one of them.

(Edited to add: "how and when to avoid pissing people off" is taught in business school, I think. Point being, it's possible Huffman thinks investors are too stupid to evaluate his decisions, but I think investors are, on average, likely to understand that Reddit needs some way to hold users other than just "we have lots of content," since people who have careers in business and finance deal with human factors a lot).

Tough crowd, I guess. :-(. But you did have a couple people join, which is a couple people more than would have joined before. That's not zero.

We're all used to these massive platforms with 9-digit numbers of users, but there's no need to be that big for everyone to have a good experience. I doubt anyone on Reddit regularly interacted with more than a tiny fraction of the total userbase, even if they hung out in the big subs.

I'd say it's mostly formatting, and what brands have to do to get them. Sponsored posts are the ones disguised as regular posts, which is easier on some platforms than others.

You mean if the stable state is to have a layer of management on top of daily operations, and the management never mixes with operations? Yeah, although to be strictly fair, someone has to do the annoying financials, and those people would not be helpful to people doing other kinds of work. I think that's just a way of restating the problem.

I think another part of the problem is that business don't want to have a stable state, they want to grow constantly, which becomes a problem for an increasing number of people no matter how a business is structured. It never really surprises me when ambition gets businesses in trouble, though sometimes I wonder how they manage to make the mistakes they do.

A company whose billionaire quits can usually get a millionaire replacement, without much loss of utility. CEOs get shuffled around all the time without any particular effect on the company they "run." I think they mostly run lower executives, who run managers, who run lower/middle managers, who run supervisors who know something about what the company actually does, and run the people who do tangible work. The CEOs who get into the news for doing something dramatic to a company are the exception.