Bozicus

Being an asshole who doesn't care about user experience doesn't mean he's not also an idiot and/or trying to hide evidence. I personally agree that the "hiding evidence" in general thing is unlikely, and that deleting all conversations in order to get rid of just a few is extremely unlikely, but I think "idiot" is supported by evidence.

Huffman has actually said publicly that he is inspired by what Elon is doing at Twitter, which, at best, suggests that he doesn't read the news. I don't think there's anyone who thinks Elon is doing a good job except Elon, and there's concrete, objective evidence that this is not true. So unless there's a "getting paid to destroy Reddit deliberately" conspiracy (I have yet to see any convincing argument for that), there's something wrong with the way in which Huffman evaluates information and makes decisions. I won't insist on "idiot" for that kind of lack of brain operation, and you're probably right that there's a pragmatic reason for deleting user conversations,but asshole alone doesn't cover Huffman's recent behavior, IMO.

I'll have to take your word for how Instagram has developed, since I have used Instagram for a total of about 15 minutes, and found it confusing and unpleasant. And it's definitely a good argument for expecting them to shift ground and go for what's left of Reddit, (maybe after they've mopped up what's left of Twitter, which might not take long, since Twitter is busily mopping itself up).

When I say "Instagram in a Twitter skin," I'm going off articles saying that Threads uses Instagram's algorithm, which seems a little less likely to change than the user interface/general style...? I can try to find my exact sources, if you like. It seems like Meta might have business justifications for adding a separate Reddit-replacement service, though there could be equally strong reasons to morph Threads for that purpose. I'm morbidly interested in seeing how it develops.

I would definitely expect purchase tracking to be stricter than ad view metrics, yeah. And I know a lot of companies that used to have customer-friendly return policies have rolled back most or all of those policies (with or without non-enhshittification reasons). So I was at least partly joking, though I am getting less and less surprised about what bots are able to do. AI technology advancement just keeps accelerating.

Good point about brand awareness. In all seriousness, I think there's psychological research suggesting that brand awareness is valuable in and of itself, though I think there's a limit to how negative the publicity can be and still be valuable to brands. Otherwise, I don't think there wouldn't be the concept of "brand safety" for ad placement.

I feel like bots are basically the optimal tool for cheating automated systems, since it seems reasonable to fight automation with more automation, like the cat-and-mouse development race for captcha. I don't have the technical expertise to back that up, though, just a general feeling that Murphy's law applies to all engineering.

…an entire mouse, eh? Obviously this is the ur-text for those ads where someone sticks a smartphone in a blender and only the blender survives.

The “posts that look like ads” thing almost caused me to quit the site years ago.

The cost of participating is that you have to give Reddit your identity, complete with bank account and tax information.

…you laugh, but there are people whose entire career is based on creating that scenario.

I think “there’s no viable business model “ is where they are, yeah. I think if they had taken a different path… I don’t know, several years ago… they might have found one, but they just keep throwing away their assets.

Username checks out.

Did you see that thread with LLMs telling us what they thought of Reddit? They didn’t say it’s great.

…so the endgame here is bots that can make purchases, but immediately return what they bought for refunds?

Agreed that Threads is sinister, but I think a lot of the reason politicians dislike Tik Tok is that it’s exporting massive quantities of American users’ data to China. US politicians don’t really take it seriously enough to believe that teenagers could use it to start a revolution, but they are pretty sure the Chinese government can use it to spy on Americans.