I know I’m gonna sound like a total knob, but I didn’t even like the idea of a second place. Every April Fool’s event was unique and treasured-- Reddit mold, orangered vs periwinkle, Robin, even 2nd or circle for as bad as it was. Place 2017 (or was it 2016?) was obviously the best April Fool’s ever, and part of its treasure was its temporary nature. Doing place again in 2022 just felt wrong to me. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, but this time around it felt like it was almost undermining the first one, and with talks of doing place again the next year or every X years just felt so corporate and faceless among a new reddit that was running out of ideas.
And now here we are. They’re not just running out of ideas, they’re running the site into the ground and dangling a carrot in front of users like, “hey, didn’t you all like place the last two times? Here it is yet again!”
They’d probably discouraged their workers from new ideas since this one got into news and got copied by other sites. Super good metrics, need to stick with it.
Them posting it now is just fucking a corpse to show user engagement for their IPO or hiding damage they’ve caused. Overall pathetic.
Yeah, and it’s not even subtle to boot. If they had done it this past April Fool’s day after making an API announcement at the beginning of the calendar year, they might have had a smidge of plausible deniability. But now, three weeks after the beginning of some of their most controversial changes yet, on a random mid-July week, it’s an incredibly obvious drive to boost engagement, from both the current userbase and perhaps even a boost from the users who left to return to place a “fuck /u/spez”.
I don’t even understand how this gets greenlit. I mean, it’s definitely going to work, their engagement for the next week will be a YTD record without a doubt. But this just feels so mustache-twirlingly evil.
I know I’m gonna sound like a total knob, but I didn’t even like the idea of a second place. Every April Fool’s event was unique and treasured-- Reddit mold, orangered vs periwinkle, Robin, even 2nd or circle for as bad as it was. Place 2017 (or was it 2016?) was obviously the best April Fool’s ever, and part of its treasure was its temporary nature. Doing place again in 2022 just felt wrong to me. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, but this time around it felt like it was almost undermining the first one, and with talks of doing place again the next year or every X years just felt so corporate and faceless among a new reddit that was running out of ideas.
And now here we are. They’re not just running out of ideas, they’re running the site into the ground and dangling a carrot in front of users like, “hey, didn’t you all like place the last two times? Here it is yet again!”
They’d probably discouraged their workers from new ideas since this one got into news and got copied by other sites. Super good metrics, need to stick with it.
Them posting it now is just fucking a corpse to show user engagement for their IPO or hiding damage they’ve caused. Overall pathetic.
Yeah, and it’s not even subtle to boot. If they had done it this past April Fool’s day after making an API announcement at the beginning of the calendar year, they might have had a smidge of plausible deniability. But now, three weeks after the beginning of some of their most controversial changes yet, on a random mid-July week, it’s an incredibly obvious drive to boost engagement, from both the current userbase and perhaps even a boost from the users who left to return to place a “fuck /u/spez”.
I don’t even understand how this gets greenlit. I mean, it’s definitely going to work, their engagement for the next week will be a YTD record without a doubt. But this just feels so mustache-twirlingly evil.