I used Relay for years. I’d love to support the dev, but no way I’m paying Reddit anything directly or indirectly. They won’t get my money, my content, or even my eyeballs if I can help it. They’re extorting the users and the devs with this, and I’m not gonna reward them for bad behavior. Time to move on.

Because C-Level people are more about “how can this company make money” and less about “how can this company treat its workers/customers well” (unless the latter leads to the former).

They are told that increasing value for the investors is the thing that matters. If you have to make “tough choices” that abuse the workers or destroy the brand, oh well. It’s worth it if that revenue number keeps going up. To them, it’s an acceptable loss to keep the board happy.

Every company that has VC, investors, or stock is going to be like this at one point or another. It’s just getting more blatant and obvious now. Disney, WB, Netflix, Twitter, Reddit…it’s a list that just keeps growing.

If what they’re saying is true, that might happen anyway. A lot of moderation is done using third party bots that use the API. Without those, it all has to be done manually and no one has time for that. Even then a lot of the manual moderation is done using third party tools (again, impacted by the API change).

Reddit’s about to pull an implosion that’ll make Twitter and Digg look like blips. I got the heck out of there and now I’m just sitting back with my popcorn and tea watching it all burn down.