The Verge reacting to Reddit's spokesperson trying to discredit them
Reddit spokesperson asking for a war with The Verge 🤡 Source: https://www.tiktok.com/@verge/video/7248607902544448811
Wow, spez is taking on The Verge now? He thinks he's a lot bigger deal than he really is...
It's amazing hubris. Pride comes before a fall they say.
I don't think this will be Digg v4 (though I could be wrong). The alternatives aren't ready. But the foundation is being laid, and that'll never go away. If they ever pull something like this again, that will likely end them.
And at this rate, they may do that next month.
The man speaking in this clip is Nilay Patel. Hes the Editor in Chief at The Verge.
He also used to be a lawyer before moving to journalism full time. So he knows Bullshit when he sees it.
I used to think that The Verge were just a bunch of Apple zealots who couldn't even do a pc build video properly. They've come along way since then. Reddit would be absolutely insane to try and take on something like The Verge.
Side note , Nilay also has a podcast called Decoder where he interviews the heads of companies to get an idea of how they run and what their goals are. Its a pretty good show and I reccomend it. The one where Nilay takes on the head of Substack was hilarious
The hit piece Nilay did on Elon was fucking savage and one of the best things I've ever read on that site
Thanks for the link, that article is delightfully savage. I laughed so hard my cat came over to check if I was dying.
Wow, that was very on point. Great read.
"You just bought yourself for 44 billion dollars." Really good indeed.
I found his point about how the content moderation is the product to be insightful, and I haven't thought about it that way before. I wonder how he feels about Lemmy in that regard.
"A podcast about org charts."
Sounds interesting, I'll have to take a look
Thanks for the informations !
A transcript for those who prefer to read. (using flixier so forgive the lack of speaker indication and the few corrections I made.)
Transcription:
[redd]it is very unhappy that people are talking to us.
They have decided that their official position is that they will wait for us to make mistakes and then issue corrections in order to discredit our journalism.
That's straight up what they're doing.
I know this is what they're doing because we have a statement because they told us.
They told us Tim Rami, who runs coms at Reddit. This is the blanket statement will no longer comment on hearsay.
Unsubstantiated claims or baseless accusations from the verge will be in touch as corrections are needed.
Oh, my God.
I've been playing this game a long time.
We'll wait for you to make a mistake.
So then we can correct you and say your reporting was wrong is the oldest trick in the book and we are just not gonna fall for it.
So we're just gonna print this statement in every story from here on out, like that's the way it's gonna go.
If they want us to get it right they can... They can tell us what is actually happening, but I will come back to we're gonna take the people on the ground.
We're gonna take the users.
We're gonna take the moderators.
We're gonna take the employees every time.
And if you think they're wrong, you can tell us and you can explain why they're wrong.
But we're not gonna stop because you've you're running like a 1920 press playbook.
Like whatever.
Like I'm we're just gonna burn you every time and that it's that attitude.
It's this aggressive posture where people are worried and they're coming to reporters and saying,
Here are our worries.
Here's the communication we have received that makes us feel threatened.
And Reddit's response is Shut up.
That's what breaks your community.
Thanks 😊
An automated transcription bot for linked audio or video content (longer content, interviews, etc.) would be incredibly useful.
Thank you!
Thanks for the transcript!
The Verge has been covering the shit out of the Reddit death spiral and I’m so here for it. Good for them.
Same, their coverage has made me feel way less terrible about all of this. Just knowing someone is out there calling Reddit on their BS makes it easier for me to accept that Reddit is no longer a safe place for me and move on.
It's also one of the very few that's been pretty accurate about it, I'm impressed.
This just amazes me. It seems as if their blinded by power. Actually thinking they're the true and only Frontpage of the internet.
Spez here thinking that the content hosting is more important than content generation. Reddit's value to the community or advertisers is a result of the users, not Reddit Inc.
The big difference between Reddit and Facebook/twitter is that they were content moderation companies and they failed because they didn't invest enough in it to keep the platform from going toxic.
Reddit has free content generation, free content moderation and they still can't make a fucking profit.
How funny would it be if it leads to a shit show where actual journalists start demanding their fair share of advertising generated off their articles?
Reddit can beat mods because of money, but these giant media conglomerates both have money and are hurting their own advertising numbers because 99% of redditors never read the article. They have motivation and opportunity to get legal
Yahoo moment
We'll no longer comment on hearsay, unsubstantiated claims, or baseless accusations from The Verge. We'll be in touch as corrections are needed.
Setting aside the ridiculousness of this position, the statement also doesn't make sense at face value, right? I think I understand what they're trying to say, but aren't those two sentences in conflict? Isn't getting "in touch as corrections are needed" literally making "comment on hearsay, unsubstantiated claims, or baseless accusations"?
This is their “gotcha” move - if they don’t comment, it’s unsubstantiated hearsay. If they do comment it’s because it’s wrong.
"We will not tolerate any lies being told about us. If we hear any, we'll let you know."
Right, but essentially that reads that everything is true and they couldn't find anything wrong. Since they didn't contact the Verge. It's confusing because at least to me this is them rolling over and giving up.
I think it's spez's attempt to make a "cool" statement, like Hans Niemann's "chess speaks for itself"
What I took from that is that I can assume everything that The Verge is saying about Reddit is true unless Reddit says otherwise. And they haven't.
To be honest, though, given that Reddit has been caught lying on multiple occasions recently, I wouldn't be inclined to believe their "corrections", anyway.
I also don’t understand how not commenting is supposed to discredit Verge. And what does the Verge guy mean when he says “so we’ll just print this statement every time”? How is that going to help them?
Not commenting = not providing The Verge with any information, so The Verge doesn't have anything that comes directly from reddit that could reflect negatively on them.
Reddit only reaching out when a correction is needed is done in bad faith. The hope is that, by saying "you got this wrong, which is not surprising because none of the information you're getting is coming directly from reddit," the reader comes to the conclusion that The Verge isn't reliable and nothing they publish about this topic should be trusted.
By printing that statement, The Verge is undercutting reddit's attempt to discredit them. It basically tells the reader: "If we got something wrong it's because reddit has decided that it's more important to hope we make a mistake (that they will try to make into a big deal), rather than communicate clearly to make sure the true story gets published accurately." In other words, reddit hopes The Verge screws up, so they can spin things and convince people to believe reddit instead of believing The Verge. The Verge is saying "we see the game you're playing and we're not gonna play it. And we're telling everyone that you're trying to play this stupid game.
Steve Huffman is an absolute tit.
No. People like tits.
They're pretty charming and it's fun to feed them over winter, but the amount of excrement that results can be astounding. Better keep them at some distance from the house.
Still waiting for spez to tell us what thatis said in private that differ from what he did in public. That's one correction I don't see his comm guy doing.
Iamthatis has spez dead to rights and is handling it with grace.
he's always been a class act
I mean. My account has been a daily driver for the better part of 17 years. The name is original enough that if I went a week or so on an alt I would get requests for takeover from others.
I haven’t been on since it all started. And I won’t close the account. Just let it sit.
I would mass edit all of my comments but I've helped contribute to community knowledge of reddit throughout the years and I don't want that to disappear
If their was a way to add an extension to my existing comments during mass edits to keep the original content but also add to it then I would
I believe there is an "append" function in the API. I'm on Mobile otherwise I'd look it up
Can anyone explain to me, please, how is this good (financially) for the reddit investors? I mean, I ran from reddit since I only accessed it from sync. Didn't really care for the 'politics'. Now I get here and see there's a lot more to it than just the shut down of 3rd party apps (which I understood as a financial decision). If money's the motivation for all of this, how is it financially healthy?
If Reddit kills 3rd party apps it can absorb (or at least hope to do so) users of those apps and have complete control over how they access Reddit. Reddit can then feed them more ads, trackers and whatnot, all of which would translate into more revenue for Reddit, which is a net positive for shareholders.
There's also the fact that companies training LLMs would be interested in paying those exorbitant fees to get training data as they likely can afford those fees.
So in short, Reddit likely wants to become a content farm for LLMs. As for the users, Reddit doesn't care given their recent statements. So if some c*cks stay on Reddit, spez will just inundate them with more ads because why not, free money is free money, until everyone leaves.
Maybe, the problem with old reddit is that it's as much about the comments as it is the content. Comments are hard to advertise on. Where card style scrolling content is great for advertising. Scroll a couple cards with a 20-60 second engagement, look at an ad, scroll a little more. . ..
However, I don't see this as being a great way to farm content for language models, the content engagement tends to drop significantly with the endless scrolling so my guess is that it's a short term play to prove they can sell ads before the IPO.
Please correct me if I'm mistaken but isn't the reddit dataset used to train LLMs from before Chat GPT became widely known? I was under the impression data from that point onwards was poisoned and not useful for training purposes
I can't seem to find it now but I remember there being a ~90gb .zip megadb upload that got passed around a lot on machine learning reddit subs that was a snapshot of reddit before x date
Reddit totally has the potential to compete with tiktok in the mindless scrolling for a much more massive audience.
They can consolidate all their users and better track their routines and serve them more mindless addicting content which advertisers love.
I expect there will be major changes to how the app works in a few months to the point it becomes completely unrecognisable. Kind of like how musical.ly turned into tiktok overnight
It's not clear to me that this decision is financially healthy for Reddit. Even aside from the consequences of upsetting a lot of users (which has already made advertisers unhappy, since they prefer to advertise to people who aren't upset; there's been a noticeable decrease in ad spending on the site lately), Reddit only makes money from this move if anyone actually pays for the API, and/or they can force more people to use the official app. Whether they get more takers for the app, I don't know. We'll find out next week. But I don't think a lot of people are going to pay for the API. Most third-party apps can't, and neither can a lot of people who might use the API for research.
Basically, only big companies can afford the new prices, and if big companies pay, Reddit will make a profit. But big companies don't become big companies by paying for overpriced commodities. API access for sites that have similar content costs a lot less than what Reddit wants. So, of the big companies that could pay, Microsoft is quietly modifying its products to avoid paying (you can't upload from their hardware directly to Reddit anymore, for example). Google is introducing a service that is meant to take traffic away from Reddit, I doubt they'll want to buy overpriced API data. AIs have already slurped up a lot of Reddit data, and can just scrape the site if they want more. The API is not the only way for bots to get access to Reddit's data, just the easiest. Probably someone is going to pay for API access, at least in the short term, but I really don't see this going well in the long run. People just don't buy products that cost more than they're worth. Even if Reddit's data was worth the inflated price they're asking, the API is not the only way to get that data. And I am pretty sure it's not that valuable to anyone except the people who can't afford it.
Third party apps are the only ones who need API access to survive, and therefore the ideal customers for Reddit's API, but Reddit would rather fish for the customers that aren't there than do business with the customers that are. Or, were, until a few weeks ago. Now--not so much. Christian Selig could have put a significant chunk of change in Reddit's pocket on an ongoing basis if they'd negotiated a decent price, since Apollo was doing well, and Selig wanted to work with them, but no, Reddit had to ask a price Selig literally couldn't pay, so Reddit gets nothing, users lose Apollo, and no one is happy. Infinity is going to try to make it work, but I doubt that'll be much money for Reddit, and I doubt it'll last more than a year, tops.
To be fair, in theory, charging for API access would give Reddit an additional revenue stream, which is probably what Huffman told investors. But no company that actually makes money from selling API access does it at this price point, or without, y'know... trying to keep customers instead of chasing them off. This is how Twitter did it, and Twitter is losing more money on a regular basis than Reddit has ever made. But it's not my business, so what do I know... [/Kermit drinking tea]
Man. Nilay's ego can be a bit irritating at times, but he's damn good at holding brands to account. Their editorial policies around background information, NDAs and transparency are likewise much stronger than lot of publishers these days.
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
For real. My brother is one of those people who is like “they aren’t gonna die from this so why should I care blah blah blah”. He thinks if protesting won’t have the immediate impact that people want then those no reason for it to happen
Effective protest means accepting going without and inconvenience.
In an instant gratification society, that is anathema.
Mods aren't going to put in the unpaid time just to make Hoffman rich.
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
Preach it brother!
Burning bridges....
Oh, that felt soooo good to watch.
Throwing everything out of the pram
I had a fullscreen button on my phone. Was that not working for you?
A fullscreen button for vertical video bullshit that was copied from a TikTok post, which was clipped from a real podcast? I'm shocked this doesn't also have JPEG artifacts and Facebook reaction memes.
Who does Spez think he is?? The king of the world? I can't believe the things he says and does.
CEO's tend to show traits associated with sociopaths. Spez is dumb as a bell on top of that.
Maybe they just need to post another phone recording that directly shows Huffman is a blatant liar and see what "corrections" come from PR.
The Verge discredited themselves with that whole PC building fiasco, but I'm glad they're covering the reddit debacle. I don't know what the admins are thinking but my suspicion is that they aren't thinking at all.
I mean I wouldn't be that harsh on them, they aren't a PC building YouTube channel (and yeah they probably should have never trusted a random guy to make that video for them). Here it's very different, this is about journalism and that guy is their editor in chief.
Yeah, plus the PC build is not as discrediting as it is funny and really cringe to watch.
Great to see this stuff come out about Reddit and journalism as of recent, not like it's our first rodeo with Reddit being pro-censorship.
There is a LinusTechTips Video where they build a PC together (the guy from the original verge video) and he explained what happened. Have nothing but respect for that dude for doing that now...
Oh wow, that's pretty cool of him actually. Thanks for linking the video!
I am pretty sure nobody actually cares about that video now
I was just teasing anyhow, I've been reading their articles for years. The Verge is alright.
Most people didn't care about it then either, because most people don't make blanket assumptions about a news site based on the content of one author one single time.
considering they have employees saying their CEO needs to go, they are randomly banning users who post things approved by mods and in line with tos, they are banning even the most slimey mods for no reason and the CEO is putting out infinite inflammatory statements in a row, I'm sure the atmosphere in which the admins work is somewhere between -3 and -53.
and all of those things are from news just this week. So of course we'll never know how much the admins are fucking up, but considering all of these things it's like gardening in a tornado. I honestly wouldn't put it on them; can't assume they're all the same as the CEO.
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
reddit, ickiness, so on
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
