Anyone who's played an online game in the past 30+ years knows that nothing is secure on a client machine. You have to rotate offsets and encryption keys constantly, and even then you buy yourself a few days at the most. You'd think google would have actual good engineers, what are they paying all that money for?

The amount of anxiety I have when asking a question there is insane. And I have 6k+ rep. They weren’t wrong, I do know the site well. I have used it a lot. But like, of me, an experienced user, is afraid to ask a question that’s messed up.

Yup that's practically the same problem I had. I posted maybe one question over the past 15 years. I got crapped on by one of their power users for not doing something properly and I never posted or asked a question again. I don't even remember what account I originally used, either.

This is sort of why I like ChatGPT, I don't get harassed for asking something incredibly stupid, and the crappy answers are about as bad as the "marked as duplicate" nonsense that gets me nowhere anyways. Why bother trying to interface with those communities ever again? IT in general already tilts heavily towards salty misanthropes, I'll pass on that.

I remember going to the vmware communities looking for help almost 20 years ago and some smug person was really upset that I didn't use the right wording when I was starting out. He spent something like 2 whole days worth of posting. It was a chore to divine what he was saying while stumbling through his weird rant/lecture about proper terminology. I eventually called him out on it and never went back.

So long story short, communities and companies who don't nip this kind of behavior in the bud and heavily moderate the assholes almost universally turn into the next expertsexchange community. Stack Overflow kind of leaned heavily into enshitification because of this, they eventually just stopped caring about what was being put on their forums, maintaining high content quality, and getting rid of argumentative power-users. Ironically reddit was a much nicer community and usually you'd find an answer or get help without the attitude, especially in the IT space.

Also not something I'm looking forward to. I wish it were feasible to run your own.

Not many have good calendar and contact list integration, especially if you're using an android smart phone.

The return of phpbb, who had that on their 2023 bingo card?

Plus discord's forum piece is straight up garbage. Moving your entire platform to discord is as crazy as doing it to reddit honestly.

I'm thinking that's why that memo got leaked, there's already dissension among the ranks. I'm sure he's absolutely livid like his idol Mr Musk.

Sure, that is pretty crappy. But I liken that to employees who build their budgets and personal financing around bonuses. Nice to have, but not a guarantee and wrong thing to assume you'll get them. Always assume equity will be zero, IPOs benefit C-levels and investors heavily.

I can't find much on reddit's equity offerings for employees but I imagine it's, at best, a pittance. Their other benefits are top notch though. No wonder they "don't turn a profit".

Fidelity dropping reddit's valuation by ~40% made me go "oh boy that's bad news" when I saw it at the start of the month.

Imagine thinking you're cashing out at 10 billion and now you're only getting 6. The horror.

Don't forget the 4 AITA subs, a few subs for some fandoms because admins can be trash (Making a Murderer has like 3 itself). It's fragmented on reddit too.

It's all coming together now. Elon is his role model and reddit's light treatment of alt-right nonsense under the guise of "free speech" is because he's a true believer (most have always suspected this). Not that it's all that surprising I guess, he is a CEO.

Human accounts and generally the main content creators on top of it. The ones who create posts, the ones who drive discussion and commentary.

The bulk of their ad revenue probably comes from lurkers and consumers, but their platform is built entirely on the aggregation of a small subset of the power users. You need both. He doesn't seem to really understand that. Sure you can replace mods, maybe they're better, maybe they're worse, but you can't replace content creators and force conversation.

He's definitely sweating bullets by the way he's throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.