They’re thinking if they don’t make every last cent today their IPO will be a catastrophe and this will all be for nothing.
This is basically like a old wooden ship trying to outrun a hurricane by jettisoning everything on board that can be lost. Right now, they are not thinking long term in the slightest. It’s solely about stopping that valuation from dropping, and they’ll do anything at all.
Technically you can use Shortcuts to set whatever icon you want but it takes some effort to set up. And I don’t think it can use transparency so it’d have to take up the whole square (or out more effort into making the background of the icon match your background). And it’ll take a second longer to load the app as it goes through Shortcuts first
Shortcuts do not behave exactly like the default app icon when it comes to animations, notification icons, and so on, and they create a redundant duplicate icon. It’s not as big of an issue now that there is an app drawer on iOS, but it’s still less than ideal.
There’s still no justification as to why an user shouldn’t be able to control how things appear on their screen - a developer doesn’t get to choose what I see or not see.
They are most likely running out of runway with investors refusing to keep lighting more money on fire. And since their burn rate is still more than their revenue, they are pulling out all the stops looking for any new revenue stream.
When you’re that desperate, no idea is a bad idea, and there’s no time to think anything through fully, so they are going to just keep rolling out half-assed new “features” in attempt generate more revenue. It’s sad, but it blows my mind that they’ve never been able to generate more than $350m/year with one of the largest sites on the internet (for comparison, Twitter maxed out with 20x more revenue or $7b/year), so I don’t think there’s any chance spez & co are going to figure it out in time.
Well it doesn’t help when you continually invest in bullshit. If spez had just focused on maintaining the site this whole time instead of throwing money at all kinds of new features and other crap no one asked for, effectively burning cash to morph reddit into a Facebook knockof, how much better off could he have been at this point?
I say this with all seriousness: This, and the API pricing fiasco (not the price change itself but the gratuitously insulting and dishonest way it was handled), and firing Victoria which still strikes me as a sad thing, and “fighting back” by removing moderators who were doing a “protest” instead of just shrugging and ignoring it all, and removing reddit coins even from the tiny fraction of people who were actually paying for them, are all totally nonsensical and self-defeating actions from a strict business perspective. Anyone who runs so much as a corner pizza shop and has to interact with the real world could see how counter to reddit’s interests they are. So, why did they do it?
I genuinely think that the motivation stems on an individual personal level from the psychology of “Well you’re disobeying me, so I’ll punish you.” The users are being disobedient on my platform? Fuck them, I’ll show them what I think of them, and unless they get in line, I’ll do it even worse. Your icon’s pixellated now. How do you like that?
I’m sure it works on a personal level, for some definition of “works.” On a corporate level though, I think the results so far pretty much speak for themselves.
Don’t forget: they also deleted all messages pre-2023 with no notice.
Spez has said that he admires Musk’s playbook with Twitter and aimed to model after it. Considering Twitter’s outlook, I would say I admired the stones on a man trying to launching the IPO like this, but if he had any real stones, he wouldn’t have pressed these viciously unpopular moves that will reduce engagement and destroy the site over time.
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