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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

Does Spez thinks this makes them look good?

And then you "blame" the 3rd party apps?

Sounds like a basic failure of housekeeping. But, but let's blame "remote work" or something like that, yeah

I think Spez feels his power/dominance is threatened by Apollo/Christian and he is lashing out because he thinks the problem is Christian, and not his own actions. I think it's possible investors are forcing him into a situation he disagrees with, but I suspect that's charitable.

I think his lack of self reflection rivals that of Triplebyte's CEO when they forced public profiles on people.

People understand when force is being used against them rather than persuasion, and nobody likes to feel like force is being used against them. I am very happy to see collective force being leveraged towards someone in a position of power.

I think Spez hasn't explored the idea that people value their anonymity, so attaching a credit card to an "anonymous" account isn't going to be popular. If reddit showed a desire to be frugal and fired all these awful dark pattern implementing UX devs who are devoid of professional ethics, and was ok breaking even instead of making money. I would strongly consider a 3-5 dollar a month donation not associated with an account. But they would have to trust the community enough to be somewhat open with their books.

Of course the real problem here is likely a violation of fiduciary duties to their investors, although given how things are turning out, he may already be liable.

> If reddit showed a desire to be frugal and fired all these awful dark pattern implementing UX devs who are devoid of professional ethics, and was ok breaking even instead of making money.

I suspect the direction to employ dark patterns comes from the top.

Yes, professional ethics means rejecting unethical things from the top.

Semantics I guess. The way you worded it just seems like a bunch of machiavellian UX designers brought these dark patterns to management who were simply ethically negligent. All I'm saying is that I suspect the UX staff were directed to do this or at least to drive installs through "whatever means necessary".

Steve Huffman (ie spez) made a deliberate choice to act without integrity, putting it mildly.

The company hoping to IPO too… Heck, I’ve been a user for a decade, I would have bought some shares. They could have made it super interesting for retail.

Absolutely not going to happen now, since we have a better sense for how the CEO handles difficult situations. I can only imagine the shitshow it must be internally with leadership like that.

> If reddit showed a desire to be frugal and fired all these awful dark pattern implementing UX devs who are devoid of professional ethics, and was ok breaking even instead of making money. I would strongly consider a 3-5 dollar a month donation not associated with an account.

You are a low value user to them. Why would they remove the thing that gets people looking at more ads? Most people don't pay for subscriptions if they don't have to, and the 3-5 dollars you'd pay per month is really nothing to them. People live in a tech and power user bubble not understanding that the vast majority of Reddit's 500 million user per month base simply do not give a shit about any of the drama that's happening and will continue to see ads.

The more I think about this the funnier it is. A third party app built by two guys is so much better than the official Reddit app that people are willing to pay actual money for it... and his response is to throw shade at the developrs?

Yeah, meanwhile reddit apparently has 2000 employees and can’t make a simple enough site written in react work well. It lags my $3000 computer that can run cyberpunk in ultra.

This is such an underrated point. I straight up can't use Reddit on my phone without quickly switching to the old interface. Seriously, my phone will just crash, and that's with trackers being blocked. I have no idea how they managed to make such a bloated UI, without even having anything new besides profile pictures.

That requires much less employees, which reddit cannot afford.

Hi Seph, sorry to contact you this way, but as you have left the Braid group, is there a way to contact you? You stated at your departure that we could message you, but your DMs are closed on Discord. No worries if you don't want to be contacted, just asking as you stated to be contacted via DMs, but your DMs are closed.

Flick me an email. No promises that I’ll reply, but my email address isn’t hidden.

Because third party apps are user agents, in the original sense of the word. The reddit app is Reddit's agent. The official reddit app exists to advance reddit's strategy. It isn't that reddit can't produce a better UI, it is that doing so isn't a part of their strategy.

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