I disagree that the punching bag strategy is effective - even looking beyond the obvious example w/ knock-on effects Elon has done from Twitter -> Tesla, you’ve got Adam Neumann w/ WeWork, Travis Kalanick w/ Uber, etc. who’ve taken similar personality deflection strategies - it only caused more long-term harm than good for both medium-term operations and brand reputation.

It’s not a sustainable strategy and it’s pretty cringy to see it happen from an investor perspective.

Wrong? No. But leadership is about communication and diplomacy as much as strategy. Short term gameplay aside, it doesn’t take much effort to pretend to attempt to placate power users and it doesn’t cost anything besides pride to do so. At least Reddit had a half-decent communication strategy with the Boston Bomber debacle - can’t say the same with this one.

In any case, whilst you won’t get the r/funny’s of Reddit going private forever, you do have some big ones like r/iphone saying they’re blacking out indefinitely.

It’s pretty myopic of the leadership team to think that you shouldn’t at least attempt to make an user relations play here.

The Verge: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’

There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.

That’s an absolutely tone deaf response from spez. The talking points are exactly what I expected and I’m not surprised, but man, whoever’s running PR at Reddit is really dropping the ball.

If they do IPO, anyone who buys into it wholeheartedly deserves the deep losses the company will incur long term - it seems no-one on Reddit’s leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.

Yeah, don’t hold your breath for a Lemmy/kbin port of Apollo:

The amount of work it would take to port all the API endpoints over to Lemmy or Kbin or something, that would be a gargantuan amount of work that I’m not sure I have the capacity for. And then just the complexity of making it work. Long term, it’s a big question mark for me that, at this stage, I’m not sure I’m totally interested in pursuing. But it’s also one of those things where I completely wish it the best. And if something that was decentralized kind of became the norm, I think that would definitely be a win for everybody.

Everyone needs to start the conversation with their loved ones as soon as they can to question anything that seems out of character. It doesn’t matter if they sound like or look like them - if anyone is asking for money or sensitive information, question it no matter what.

I know a lot of folks may feel like that’s an impossible task, especially with parents and older relatives, but it’s possible - I just recently had a conversation with my parents, and I was bracing myself for it to be an uphill battle, but they were switched on and got it. You’ve gotta at least try.

I try to have the best of both worlds - my home is primarily run on a Zigbee network from a Raspberry Pi with a Conbee, which is then linked up to Homebridge which talks to HomeKit (being in the Apple ecosystem).

This means I get the creature comforts of a consumer home cloud service like Apple Home, but I get to call all the shots - controls are all local, and if I wanted to get my home off the cloud, I can without any reprocussions.

It’s surprisingly very reliable as well - I haven’t had a single minor hiccup for more than 12 months, and even then, the last one just required a reboot of the Pi.

Even a change in atmosphere with communities from this would be substantial, though - even if there isn’t a day and night change with active users, if enough of the power users have left and discussions don’t really meet the “vibe check”, that’ll just naturally kill off user activity and it’s pretty much the same result