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.
The Verge has been covering the shit out of the Reddit death spiral and I’m so here for it. Good for them.
It’s also one of the very few that’s been pretty accurate about it, I’m impressed.
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.
Maybe they just need to post another phone recording that directly shows Huffman is a blatant liar and see what “corrections” come from PR.
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.
Oh, that felt soooo good to watch.
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.
Thank you!
Thanks for the transcript!
Thanks 😊
An automated transcription bot for linked audio or video content (longer content, interviews, etc.) would be incredibly useful.
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.
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 am pretty sure nobody actually cares about that video now
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.
I was just teasing anyhow, I’ve been reading their articles for years. The Verge is alright.
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.
deleted by creator
What’s the context? I don’t know this story.
They made a pc build video which was bad. Lots of bad stuff in it which you shouldn’t do when building a pc, sort of stuff which would make common sense not to do. It got ripped to shreds by other YouTubers who did their own videos about it.
Probably still all on YouTube.
I was just making a joke, The Verge isn’t that bad. I’ve been reading their articles for years and they’re a decent enough outfit as tech journalism goes.
It’s as important as Ethics in Game Journalism!
That’s when The Verge (and Polygon) truly discredited themselves. But I’ll gladly take them as allies in the fight against reddit.
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!
…it was one guy, 5 years ago, and he’s not even at The Verge anymore.
It’s time to let that go.
What!? That was 5 years ago already???
It’s kind of bonkers, isn’t it :(
In my mind, 2000 was still 10 years ago…and then I look at what year it currently is. Oof.
Time is sneaky like that.
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.
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”?
I think it’s spez’s attempt to make a “cool” statement, like Hans Niemann’s “chess speaks for itself”
This is their “gotcha” move - if they don’t comment, it’s unsubstantiated hearsay. If they do comment it’s because it’s wrong.
It’s just a gotcha to them. If I read an article from The Verge and Reddit hasn’t commented on it, I’m not even going to remember that quote, let alone make that connection that the article must be unsubstantiated hearsay.
It must make them feel better saying it though.
Even if they do, every article about Twitter comes with:
Twitter responded to inquiries with the poop emoji, as they do every time.
This is worse, because reddit is saying if anything was wrong, they would have responded. So it looks like reddit just agrees with anything that doesn’t get a response.
Logically, yes, but in the context of journalism, it’s actually doing a company a favor to give them a chance to comment before the article is published. If a company wants to say “no comment,” or be rude, that’s a choice they can make, but a poop emoji is refusing to comment and being rude.
Imagine you’re writing an article about Twitter’s policies, and you know all your sources are angry, so you think you should try to get Twitter’s side. Maybe your sources are distorting the facts. So you send a polite email to Twitter, because you are a professional, and regardless of your own feelings, you want to present the facts. Twitter auto-replies with a poop emoji. No matter how you look at it, that’s inappropriate.
And at this point, I don’t think anyone is asking Twitter about the facts, politely or otherwise, lol. I’m not sure if a publication would even print a correction from Twitter, if they bothered to submit one. If you tell the press to screw off and not ask you for facts, you will find it very difficult to get them to publish anything you say ever again, even if you want them to. Reddit isn’t there yet, but that’s the kind of fire they’re playing with.
As a “gotcha” it’s pretty weak too. What they’re coming across as saying is that if corrections are needed, they’ll make them. Ergo, no correction issued means no correction is needed. And then if they do try to correct it, it becomes a question of whether you can trust Reddit’s word which hasn’t been very trustworthy anyway.
Yes. It’s a horrible way to deal with the media and falls apart with even a little bit of scrutiny, but I never said it was a good strategy.
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.
Thanks for the great explanation!
“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.
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.
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
Saying it once was enough i think.
(Or you fell into a bug.)
weird. submitted it once. got triplicated somehow.
TIL the fediverse has an echo.
Echos and operate at different timelines with the synchronization differences between different instances.
Oh ok, my bad😅
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
Fwiw, you can delete duplicate comments.
i did, they showed as “deleted by creator” and now they are back. whelp. looks like there are some sync issues. (posting/deleting from web app)
Ouch. Sorry for all the downvotes you get. Ah, but they don’t really matter on lemmy 😉
Yeah. It’s wild (and a bit buggy) out here on the federated frontier, and I love it.
Who cares about downvotes? 🙃
They didn’t matter on reddit either :)
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.
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!
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
