And the alienated customers might not come back, even if the park owners realise the mistake and get rid of the fee.

This is exactly what happens most of the time. Check out the short Twitter thread on the thermocline of trust.

On the surface I agree with you but please remember that content quality need not be high. 9gag is apparently still going despite, well... Points vaguely at 9gag

The 95% of people who didn't have the good sense to leave

Their valuation has dropped by at least 20% this year based on what’s been reported.

They care.

I couldn’t think of a worse time to try an IPO, though. They’re selling into an already less than enthusiastic market. Although there’s been recoveries on parts of the tech sector, if the VCs are hurting for funds and the institutions are being conservative, it’s going to be a disaster.

I am not sure that the bad press over the APIpocalypse is going to have a lasting effect in and of itself, but if they’ve lost users or have slowed growth in the US market as a result, that definitely might. Elon destroying all remaining value at Twitter and spurring an exodus to Threads and other sites is also going to make people question hopping onto a big social media investment because the market has become less predictable than it was a year or two ago.

The late 90s were where you could use an IPO as a take the money and run exit strategy. I think they should have avoided Musking the site and instead pushed all out for growth and look to get acquired, maybe by a Chinese company looking to own a large US-based social media company.

It really looks like the financial decisions at reddit are being handled with the same level of competence as the site policy decisions.

They won’t, Spez is the ass clown they need to toe the line and take the bad press for all this. Once they get what they need, they’ll reward him but make it look like he was fired and hope you’ll be to happy to realize.

They should. At least half of this debacle was created by the mind-numbingly horrible communication straight from his mouth (or fingers). Even if they just said look guys our CEO is dick, he shouldn’t have insulted the moderators and passionate users who loved apps…it isn’t ok snd we’re sorry. Even just that would be something.

They intended on crushing third party apps, they don’t care about users or moderators…that will never be different. The lying, insults and douchbagery was the cherry on top.

I used to browse Reddit with my Adblock turned off, man, so they would make money. The people that are the most pissed cared the most…

The irony is that Pao was brought in to implement changes that Spez wanted. Remember he used to own it, then sold it and “stepped down” as CEO to bring Pao in. Then he took the seat back again after she left. But this time they just skipped that step entirely, because Spez has just been making the unpopular changes himself.

So I don’t actually think it’s the case this time. If it were, Spez wouldn’t be CEO during all of these changes. I think Spez is simply trying to cash out when the company goes public later this year. He doesn’t care what the users think of the changes, because he’s entirely focused on the investor valuation. He’s doing everything he can think of to claw profit out of a site that has never been profitable, simply so he can point to this quarter during the IPO and go “Look! Reddit makes a lot of money! It’s worth a lot, and the stocks I’m offering should sell for a lot too!”

I hardly think that's fair. They also completely underestimated the quality impact there would be on reddit from losing mod tools, and they've also had just about enough time to start to realize how very very much they don't know about accessibility needs for the disabled.

I'm not sure they even care, they just need to pad the numbers long enough to IPO and sell. It's a pump and dump, but Steve is a moron and doesn't know how.