The whole point of YC was to imbue every founder with "do not be evil" in their DNA. Otherwise, it's a cartel.

This is pretty clear-cut case of Huffman not only trying to lie publicly (for no apparent reason, no less!) but then further trying to damage his reputation.

I'm unreasonably upset about this, and should probably step away from computers for a bit. I don't know if I'm getting old and just feeling like "it's the end of an era," or what. But I grew up in a 2008 that was unlike anything on display here.

That’s not really the job of the startup investor. At best you try to screen for that. But like active ethics education… no.

I'm sorry to say, but that's not in line with reality. Is there a specific source that has led you to believe this?

"Do not be evil" is a fairly vague tenet anyhow. The "whole point" of YC (if there ever was such a thing) at inception, was to test a thesis that pg et al had regarding startup incubation. It was actually a somewhat controversial idea at the time, so much so that YC had trouble finding investors.

Afaict, as long as you are a success, YC doesn't really care how you get there, as long as it isn't something illegal or otherwise obviously detrimental for investors. This is, of course, in part because one of the simpler proxies for "evil" is legality. Investors do often end up benefiting from legislation lagging behind tech and moral gray areas.

Au contraire, YC loves it if you get ahead by breaking the law. See Airbnb.

The US has been pumping money into their economy (AKA, some chosen entities in it) since the middle of the 90's, with more and more countries just copying their strategy with time.

There was a decrease on the rate of money pumping on 2000, and a reversion for a month or two in 2008 (followed by an increase by an order of magnitude). It was an era.

Reddit in 2008 had open groups for sharing ("legal") sexually suggestive photos of underage girls. ie. they had like swimsuits and stuff on. Reddit has never been about morality.

At this point, they haven't been very successful financially and at acquiring power. Nobody cares what reddit wants... they're nobodys on the tech / business scene.

Now they're looking at all these financially successful and powerful companies and are regretting not selling out earlier. The reddit that people love probably wasn't ever going to be forever. Maybe as a non-profit like wikipedia? What's the point of continuing if you won't even get your "bastion of free speech"?

Reddit was never going to make it much further as a company with no moderation or explicit ethos (other than free exchange of ideas), with minimal advertisement and monetization. These changes have been executed poorly, but they needed to act quickly. Basically, they're trying to put the genie back into the bottle, not be "the cool" social media company, and keep things afloat.

As upset as we may be have they really failed? Have they done anything to substantially lower their standing as a company. They haven't lost users, the growth numbers don't look bad to me, especially compared to some of the better recent years.

What they haven't done is turned that into money or status. Tons of businesses are successful with the "be a dick and hope they don't care strategy". People generally don't like big sacrifice. A monthly charge isn't practical, nor would it be welcomed either. They need to be in full control of the eyes and start monetizing.

the era of getting good value by providing good value seems foregone.

now we focus on extracting maximal value in the short-term/for self and acting that it's naive and dewy eyed to expect anything else. which casts such behaviour as the status quo instead of being shameful. which results in an overton window where "i got mine" is all that matters.

"These days" .. but was it better before?

The ruling class literally spoke a different language (aristocraties in europe french and the clerics latin).

That made it even easier to seperate realities and not accidently share insights to peasants what they are not supposed to hear.

"Community" is such an intangible KPI.

That said, I don't think community could be considered tangible in any context?

Community is tangible.

And there are tangible KPIs for measuring the health of a community.

But Reddit's community health is clearly not proportional to Reddit's profits.

It's just another way of saying: VCs and users don't agree what makes Reddit great.

How do you define tangible vs. intangible assets so that community ends up being a tangible asset?

I said "Community is an intangible KPI" and someone asked "What makes you say Community is intangible?" -- but I didn't say that. Then I said "Community is tangible" and what I meant by that is: There is a well understood definition of what a community is. Now you ask "How do you define tangible vs. intangible assets?" but I'm not saying that community value is easily convertible into economic value.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset.asp

  An asset is a resource with economic value that an individual, corporation, or country owns or controls with the expectation that it will provide a future benefit.

  Assets are reported on a company's balance sheet. They're classified as current, fixed, financial, and intangible. They are bought or created to increase a firm's value or benefit the firm's operations. 

   An asset can be thought of as something that, in the future, can generate cash flow, reduce expenses, or improve sales, regardless of whether it's manufacturing equipment or a patent.

I assume that shareholders are not stupid when it comes to the cost of potentially killing communities, and they believe that more ad exposure + some AI model based on Reddit's data will deliver more economic value than the current free API.

I think where the difference in conviction is:

  - How much will killing 3rd-party apps as we know them affect Reddit's community health?
  - How much will a deteriorated community health affect the future output of LLMs based on Reddit data?

The cost of automated detection of story arbitrage is also falling, e.g. hypothetical StoryGPT analysis of testimony to a blockchain (or paper) notary.

Hedge funds have a financial incentive to uncover deception or incongruent claims.

When the new investors found out, my business partner demanded I remove CTO from my website, writing it was "technically incorrect".

Would like to have one-party consent recording all over USA.

You can always take notes, write down things about the conversation, you can even write down the whole conversation without consent

So essentially you can have a transcription of a conversation, but not the audio recording (without consent)

With contemporaneous notes, you control the editorial aspects of it and have no legal risk in most situations. If you know you are exposed to some sort of problem, email yourself to make discovery easy. Otherwise, keep a handwritten journal.

This is what makes it weak. You show me your beautifull contemporaneous notes which show that you are a saint and you are dealing with the devil and I will assume that you left out the bits undermining your viewpoint.

> and have no legal risk in most situations

This is acknowledged by the very thread you are responding to. They said they wish every conversation were 1 party consent. The very fact that they are wishing for this means they understand that they might have legal liability now.

Thus, I record all my interviews so I can review them later... and use them if I find a need to.

Remember: always assume you're being recorded.

Even if it's illegal the court of public option makes it's own rulings, and even if you 'win' legally you could still be ruined.

99 times out of 100 it's immediately forgotten but there have been a few times when I've been really really glad to have a contemporaneous record of a meeting.

  > especially for weaker party.

edit: maybe you are not OP, but I still see now.

It's not an answer I would have liked, but it seems like it would have been far more in character.

Was he though? In the audio it's clear he took it as a threat straight away. He literally said so. And the threat he understood was that the ApolloDev would create a fuss and make a lot of noise. Which the ApolloDev went on to do. The ApolloDev's response to Spez saying this was "I didn't think you took that as a threat" while posting an audio of him taking it as a threat. Then saying it's a blatant lie. While posting audio of spez saying he's taking it as a threat and using common language for moving past threats in business calls "I'll hope that's not what you meant" which is always code for "I'm going to pretend you didn't do that." You can say he was wrong but I don't think you can say someone is lying for believing something that is wrong.

Reading the transcript of the conversation with the Apollo dev, it was a fairly awkward exchange, and the Apollo dev was using all these innuendos to imply that a monetary exchange would avoid a negative outcome.

I don’t think we know who it was specifically at Reddit that acknowledged the Apollo dev was not delivering a threat. The transcript notably attributed that to a general “Reddit”, not the CEO. Do we even know that the CEO was on the call? Why didn’t the Apollo dev note who was speaking?

Especially after the way he was acting on the call to try and negotiate a cash payment, I don’t entirely trust the Apollo dev’s telling of events.