Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (u/spez) royally screwed up so bad that over 5,500 subreddits (as of writing) are going private. But he made it even worse with his very brief AMA wherein he was caught using copy-and-pasted answers, got downvoted into oblivion so hard that the answers stopped showing up and Reddit had to pin a comment with links to the answers, doubled down on his debunked and untrue claims about Apollo’s developer Christian Selig, and pulled admins into an AMA that was meant to just be him.
I’m just scratching the surface of what u/spez and the fellow admins have managed to screw up in the last few days alone, too. This prompted an open letter from many moderators stating that it did not alleviate concerns and several subreddits have already started going private. It’s just embarrassing and made a bad situation way worse than it needed to be.
As I’m writing to immediately publish this, the subreddits are going private en masse prior to the June 12th blackout date. r/iPhone, r/DIY, r/LifeProTips, and more have already done so with over a thousand already doing so. That number rises the longer you watch.
Reddit certainly has a longer way to go to appeasing users and developers alike, two groups that make the site what it is today. The IPO might be breathing down their necks, but nothing they do to impress Wall Street should be at the expense of the community they have historically at least tried to embrace for all these years. There are solutions, and of course, the Reddit admins seem uninterested.
I hope the blackout is effective or at least gives the community some leverage.
And if you missed my brief 9 minute coverage of the situation, I published a video on Friday, which is below (YouTube embed):
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