He awarded a unique "pimp daddy" trophy to the creator of the sub and was suspected to be active on there under an Alt account. He also publicly defended the sub as a demonstration of free speech as the ceo of reddit and it didn't actually get removed until it became a big deal in the news and they got really bad PR. You can find out a little more from this post a couple of weeks ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36294430

Did you see the post a couple of days ago that showed ai language bots replying in reddit threads?

The admins are making bots shit on alternatives and downplay the protests. There's a very real possibility that you're being responded to by ai.

All your comments are likely being shadow banned. They're not letting people talk about spez on reddit anymore.

Reddit being a second-hand time machine is still profitable in the context of selling that data to LLMs. I genuinely don't think spez cares if reddit does, so long as he can sell the data.

That's because Huffman doesn't believe that ongoing community is his ticket to millions. He believes selling data to ai learning programs is. They don't need continuing users for that when they're sitting on almost two decades of content.

Just look at the actual actions of the admins. They're removing mods for privatizing subs. They're restoring erased content. They're shadow banning comments critical of the system. They're forcefully reverting changes to sub rules.

They aren't trying to get 20 million from the likes of a 500k/year company like Apollo, they're trying to get 20 million from billionaire companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. that are maybe more willing to shell out that kind of money for an emerging technology. Killing third party apps wasn't their goal, it was just an incredibly unpopular but necessary side effect because those apps use the same api that ai learning programs do.

Well..

1. Are you going to ask me if I want to go from a platform with no ads (3rd party reddit) to a platform where every 3rd post is an unavoidable ad (reddit official) or a slightly more complex but similar community with no ads anywhere (fediverse)? I don't want heinz ketchup telling me that their color is manufactured to be perfect a dozen times a day in my community. I paid a 3rd party app to remove that and I'm not going back.

2. Asking if it's harder to learn the reddit official app than beta testing various fediverse apps is missing the point. Reddit's app exists to extract money from you and has no reason to improve your experience by its nature. Beta fediverse apps exist to eventually polish the fediverse experience.

In Russia, it's a forced "voluntary" stay. They force you to stay, but they tell you (and all the people keeping an eye on this) that it's voluntary.

You should consider posting that screenshot around the bigger subs that are still resisting. Ask them to repost it as well. Don't go quietly, let the whole site see what lengths the admins are going to for the illusion that everything is fine.

No offense, this is a great site, but the word isn't going to get out from here.

If reddit backpedals, even just for damage control, it will cement just how much power the users and mods have over that site. As it should.

I think that's precisely why spez is going to do everything he can not to backpedal.

Are you surprised? The status quo does not want a new competitor. Unfortunately for us, the easiest way to keep the fediverse down is to not even acknowledge it as an option.

Does spez know that Twitter is hemorrhaging money?