Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
The writing is on the wall. Those who are staying on Reddit despite everything u/spez said recently are literally asking to be shit on and will fully deserve it.
Even if he actually thought that, why the fuck would you say that right now when a large amount of your community is revolting against you? Comments like these are only further destabilizing a bad situation. If I was on the board, and even if I fully supported the changes, I would have him removed for adding more fuel to the fire.
The article mentions him and Elon having chatted a handful of times. I guess he’s probably sucking up to Elon as he thinks he might be able to secure some cash from him in the form of an investment or a merger with Twitter.
It could be a suck-up investment play. The problem with hoping a narc like Elon invests in you is that the second you’re not useful to them, they will dispense with you like a dirty cumsock. See: all the people who tried to suck up to Donald Trump and ended up with damaged reputations.
Reddit seems to be in a bad way financially. Their investors have written them down. They’re still making losses. They’re laying people off. They’re implementing these absurd API changes. They need to make a lot of changes to monetize something that’s hard to monetize, and I think that this is a sign of much worse things to come for them and their users. Despite their success at online relevancy, they’re actually a bad business and I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point they got bought out by private equity and picked apart.
The sad part is that it didn’t need to be this way. I think in trying to get hyper-growth and relevancy among normies, they ended up investing too much into areas that would help them do that. If they had stayed content to remind a simple forum, I think they could have been a sustainable business. But the VCs demand to have a unicorn, I guess.