Do they care? The mob will shout for a week or two and then turn their attention somewhere else. spez (the reddit chief) said something like that about their users, and he was absolutely right. A few days ago I was re-reading some of those threads about reddit API changes from ten months back where so many users claimed it was their last message and they were leaving for good. Almost none of them did. I checked two dozen profiles and all but one of them had fresh comments posted within that same day.

I actively quit producing content and deleted my account.

Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I do feel like the quality of discourse has taken a nose dive.

The discourse is about the same, trouble is the only mods left are the truly batshit ones.

If that's true, wouldn't that imply that the mods aren't very effective?

You get what you pay for. ;)

I went from very active on multiple subreddits to barely posting once every few months. Instead of answering programming questions or helping people get in shape I'm on other sites doing other things.

Changes like that are hard to measure.

> I went from very active on multiple subreddits to barely posting once every few months. Instead of answering programming questions or helping people get in shape I'm on other sites doing other things. Changes like that are hard to measure.

Changes in sentiment can be hard to measure, but changes in posting behavior seems incredibly easy to measure.

It’s the rule of ten (I made that up) 1:10 upvote. 1:10 of them comment. 1:10 post.

The people barking are actually the least worrisome, they’re highly engaged. The meat of your users say nothing and are only visible in-house.

That said, they also don’t give a shit about most of this. They want their content and they want it now. I am very confident spez knows exactly what he’s talking about.

Some salty downvotes going on in here!

Imagine how many people I actually pissed off to get those downvotes!

How do you measure without the API?

I stopped browsing Reddit. I imagine the people who posted comments to Reddit saying they’re going to leave Reddit aren’t a representative sample.

Same. Redditor for 15 years and the API thing was the last straw.

I didn’t post about not engaging with or using the platform anymore. Nor did I delete my account, since it still holds some value to me. But I slinked away into the darkness and now HN is my social media tool.

Same here on everything you mentioned

Delete early, delete often. Never keep an old Reddit account around. I torch mine and build anew every year just out of principle.

I didn’t have a schedule, but probably had 5 or 6 accounts over the years… purging, deleting, and a few weeks later rejoining. The last time I deleted everything was before the API changes, and it was the last straw. I haven’t attempted to create a new account and don’t browse at all. I used to spend hours per day there. Now the only time I end up there is if a search engine directs me there for an answer to a specific question I have.

For me it's been every six months. I've even given some creds for burned accounts to the void for the heck of it.

That said, I think you could easily correlate my hn activity with my reddit usage (inverse proportionality). Loving it tbh, higher quality content overall and better than slashdot ever was

Same! Except I've basically stopped using reddit. It used to be that if I got a "happy cake day" then I knew nuking the account was overdue.

I honestly have given up in this battle.

I'm curious, what do you think deleting accounts and starting new is going to do?

They'll just link it all together another way.

they can.

you can’t.

15y account here too - also quit. Tried lemmy for a while and didn't like it. At least it helped me kick the reddit habit. Don't even go there anymore

https://old.reddit.com/u/speff

I'm guessing the ones who actually left Reddit did what I did - they disengaged from the site and then deleted all their content and accounts. It's pointless to complain without any actual power.

The relevant stakeholders here are the potential future employees, who are seeing in public exactly how OpenAI treats its employees.

They probably care more about the effect on potential hires who are gonna second think by the fact that part of their pay may be cancelled due to some disagreement

This is them fucking over their employees though, not the public, and in a very concrete manner. Threats to rob them of millions - maybe tens of millions - are going to hurt more than losing access to a third-party Reddit client.

And the employees also have way more leverage than Reddit users; at this point they should still be OpenAI's greatest asset. Even once this is fixed (which they obviously will do, given they got caught), it's still going to cause a major loss of trust in the entire leadership.

Employees are replaceable. Outside of a very specific few, they have very little leverage. If an employee loses trust and leaves or “quiet quits”, they will simply be replaced with one of the hundreds of people clamoring to work for them. This is why unionization is so great.

Just as Reddit users stay on Reddit because there is nowhere else to go, the reality is that everyone worships leadership because they keep their paychecks flowing.

Yes, that "very little leverage" is why engineers & researchers near the bottom of OpenAI's career ladder are getting paid 900k/year (2/3rds funny money, admittedly, though in practice many people _have_ cashed out at very large multiples).

Thank you for proving my example. If you think your salary is what provides you leverage, then you are doomed

Employees are replaceable, sure, but that doesn't mean that you can't squander your good will with competent employees and end up only being able to hire sub-par employees.

Yes. OpenAI will only attract sub-par employees. And even if it’s not OpenAI, you simply raise your offered salary and suddenly the subpar employees vanish.

It’s not easy to get out of an abusive relationship

Sam Altman has stated over and over again, publicly: "I don't care what other people think." And I'm not paraphrasing.

Once you learn that online outrage doesn't actually impact your life that much, its easy to ignore. Gone are the days of public apologies and now we just sweep criticism under the rug and carry on.

I think trump taught us that very few people will stop you physically if you just ignore what they have to say.

It is hard to compete for high-end AI research and AI engineering talent. This definitely matters and they definitely should care. Their equity situation was already a bit of a barrier by being so unusual, now it's going to be a harder sell.

I know extremely desirable researchers who refuse to work for Elon because of how he has historically treated employees. Repeated issues like this will slowly add OpenAI to that list for more people.

Meanwhile the stock Google pays you can be cashed out same day. Really dumb move for OpenAI.

I think it might just be a consequence of an approach to business that, in aggregate, has been very effective.

The mob that Vox represents these days is miniscule

It’s remarkable to see the hoi polloi to stand by CEOs and big corporations, rather than defending the few parts of the media that stand for regular workers.

It's not about taking sides, it's about not caring. Everyone is tired of getting worked up over super rich CEOs being "aggressive" to their very rich employees and your,"if you're not with us, you're against us" attitude.

First they came for the Sheldon Coopers, and I did not speak out

How do you think those same CEOs would treat their not-so-rich employees?

This is how anything political (big or small P) works.

Aspirations keep people voting against their interests.

I personally worry that the way fans of OpenAI and Stability AI are lining up to criticise artists for demanding to be compensated, or accusing them of “gatekeeping” could be folded into a wider populism, the way 4chan shitposting became a political position. When populism turns on artists it’s usually a bad sign.

When the changes went through I nuked all my comments and then my account. I don't know if many others did the same, but if so it would mean that you wouldn't see our "I'm leaving" comments anymore, i.e. that we wouldn't be included in your samples.

Yeah, reading old threads is weird. The majority of everything is intact, but there's enough deleted or mangled comments that it is an effective minor inconvenience.

My activity on Reddit has gone way down since they stopped supporting .compact view on mobile. I definitely miss it and want to go back but it’s incredibly hard to engage with the content on mobile browsers now.

> I checked two dozen profiles and all but one of them had fresh comments posted within that same day.

I also remember when the internet was talking about the twenty four Reddit accounts that threatened to quit the site. It’s enlightening to see that the protest the size of Jethro Tull didn’t impact the site

Personally I only use Lemmy now. I never made a goodbye/fuck spez post, I just stopped using Reddit.

I think your sample frame is off, they did themselves unforced damage in the long run.

Honestly, from a moderation perspective, the dropoff has been stark - the quality of work behind the scenes has dropped off a cliff on most larger subreddits, and the quality of the content those subreddits facilitate has reduced in quality in turn.

It's definitely had a very impact - but since it's not one that's likely to hit the bottom line in the short term, it's not like it matters in any way beyond the user experience.

> A few days ago I was re-reading some of those threads about reddit API changes from ten months back where so many users claimed it was their last message and they were leaving for good. Almost none of them did. I checked two dozen profiles and all but one of them had fresh comments posted within that same day.

Lots of people have pointed out problems with your determination, but here's another one: can you really tell none of those people are posting to subvert reddit? I'm not going to go into details for privacy reasons, but I've "quit" websites in protest while continuing to post subversive content afterwards. Even after I "quit," I'm sure my activity looked good in the site's internal metrics, even though it was 100% focused on discouraging other users.

The risk is not users boycotting them. The risk is OpenAI having trouble recruiting and retaining top talent, which will cause them to eventually fall behind the competition, leading users to naturally leave.

I haven't stopped using it immediately, but it definitely added to the growing list of problems. I don't use that site anymore, except when a search result directs me there. Even then it's a second choice of mine, because I need to disable my VPN to access it, and I won't login.

I actually find myself to be using reddit much less. It’s not that I protesting, but it feels like the community changed into something more like Facebook folks. It doesn’t feel cutting edge anymore, it’s much more tamed stale. The fresh stuff isn’t on Reddit anymore.

Every legal clause that affects company ownership is accepted by the CEO and the board. It's not something VP or general counsel can put there. Lo and behold, signatures from Altman and Kwon are there.

>Company documents obtained by Vox with signatures from Altman and Kwon complicate their claim that the clawback provisions were something they hadn’t known about.

>OpenAI contains multiple passages with language that gives the company near-arbitrary authority to claw back equity from former employees or — just as importantly — block them from selling it.

>Those incorporation documents were signed on April 10, 2023, by Sam Altman in his capacity as CEO of OpenAI.

Completely wrong. Not remotely close to true.

Imagine if someone not representing ownership directly could just put clauses that alter the ownership and alter shareholder agreements.

Employment letters, with equity grants, are practically never signed by anyone on the board, and for companies of any size, practically never signed by the CEO. There are a bunch of people who can bind a company legally, and it's one of the things they figure as part of their governing docs, board process etc.

Parent and those quotes from the article aren't talking about employment letters. They're talking about incorporation/equity documents.

That's not what I said.

The text in the letter must be approved.

> The text in the letter must be approved

Employment agreements don't even need to be approved by the CEO, let alone the Board. Delegating this responsibility is fairly common.

That said, Sam chose to sign. The buck stops with him, and he has--once again--been caught in a clear and public lie.

I'm not talking about grant-making case by case, but delegation authorization resolution itself. Delaware General Corporation Law has sections describing how it can be done.

> delegation authorization resolution itself. Delaware General Corporation Law has sections describing how it can be done

How what can be done?

Nothing in Delaware law says the CEO--let alone the Board--has to sign off on every form of employment agreement. That's a classic business judgement.

fwiw, re-reading your initial comment, I think you may have meant to say one thing and have inadvertantly said two things. The comment sounds like you are saying any clause in any contract which has any effect on equity. You might have intended to say any clause in the contracts you then copy/pasted, which deal with process around granting equity.

?

Again, wrong.

It's just not how the world works. It's legally not required, and in practice not done. If the board and CEO had to sit around approving every contract change in every country, my goodness they'd have no time left for anything else.

I wrote: Every legal clause that affects company ownership is accepted by the CEO and the board.

I did not write: Every legal clause is accepted by the CEO and the board.

I read it. It's just not right. Companies have all kinds of processes in place for who can negotiate what and up to what limit and who has to agree if it goes above this or changes that or whatever. There are entire software packages around contract management to route contracts to the right place based on the process the company has in place.

You're right that in general Sam Altman isn't countersigning every OpenAI employee contract.

However, at some point a lawyer sat down and worked with people to write the form-contract, and someone said "you sure? you want them to sign an NDA on exit? with a clause that lets you claw back equity? (implicit: because that's not normal)"

The form-contract is changing frequently at a company going through a lot of corporate changes and with a lot of freakishly talented employees who probably negotiate hard on contracts.

To be clear, he may well have known. But it isn't a given and in the grand scheme of things on a CEO brain, it would have been way down the list of capturing mind share.

Agree 100%, something tells me A) he really didn't know B) it's still scuzzy.

I'm taking a mental note to remember why mom always said to read e v e r y word before you sign.

I should have learned this at a younger age, somehow ended up 50/50 in an LLC I always assumed was going to be 70/30. Cost a lotttt of time and energy, essentially let them hold the company hostage for $60K later, after some really strange accounting problems were discovered. (my heart says they didn't take money, but they were distracted and/or incompetent)

Equity grants are usually signed by the board, although a lot of companies treat this as a meaningless formality and present it as though the document your manager signs is the real one. If you take a look at equity grants you've gotten in offer letters in the past, I bet they have "effective on board approval" in there somewhere.

The public statements would suggest either that Sam Altman is lying or he signs anything that is put in front of him without reading it. I'm inclined to believe that whatever is said is PR (aka BS). In a court of law it is the written and signed contracts that are upheld.

> Do they expect anybody to believe they didn’t know about clawback clauses?

Why wouldn’t they? I’m sure you can think of a couple of politicians and CEOs who in recent years have clearly demonstrated that no matter what they do or say, they will have a strong core of rabid fans eating their every word and defending them.

They’re only apologetic because they got caught in a PR shitstorm. They would not otherwise. Being an sh*bag company that claws back equity is a huge red flag and can drive away the critical people who make up the company. They started an arms race, but with companies with much deeper pockets. Meta will be more than happy to gobble up any and every OpenAI employee who no longer wants to work there.

Yes, I've definitely seen people believe that in various discussions. Combine "Altman said they'd totally never done this" with "the ex-employee who first wrote about this didn't write with absolute 100% clarity that this applied to vested equity", and there's enough cover to continue believing what one wants to believe. And if the news cycle dies down before the lie is exposed, then that's a win.

Obviously that should not be possible any more with these leaked documents, given they prove both the existence of the scheme and Altman and other senior leadership knowing about it. Maybe they thought that since they'd already gagged the ex-employees, nobody would dare leak the evidence?

People are so gullible. Sam Altman deserves zero benefit of doubt. His words should be ignored, his words do not prove anything whatsoever.

Not trying to play the devil's advocate here, but I am thinking how this would play out if I ever opened a spinoff...

Let's say I find a profitable niche while working for a project and we decide to open a separate spin off startup to handle that idea. I'd expect legality to be handled for me, inherited from the parent company.

Now let's also say the company turns out to be disproportionately successful. I'd say I would have a lot on my plate to worry about, the least of which the legal part that the company inherited.

In this scenario it is probable that hostile clauses in contracts would be dug up. I surely would be legally responsible for them, but how much would I be to blame for them, truly?

And if the company handles the incident well, how important should that blame putting be?

> I'd expect legality to be handled for me, inherited from the parent company.

That sounds like a really bad idea for many many reasons. Lawyers are cheap compared to losing control, or even your stake, to legal shenanigans.

It's been stultifying the older I get to see how easy it is for people to lie to themselves and others, everywhere.

You have to be really attuned to "is this actually rational or sound right, or am I adding in an implicit 'but we're good people, so,'"

Right. The big change is bad faith argument developing into unapologetic bad faith developing into weaponised bad faith.

It accelerated rapidly with some trends like the Tea Party, Gamergate, Brexit, Andrew Wakefield, covid antivax, and the Ukraine situation, and is in evidence on both sides of the trans rights debate, in doxxing, in almost every single argument on X that goes past ten tweets, etc.

It's something many on the left have generally identified as worse from the right wing or alt.right.

But this is just because it's easier to categorise it when it's pointing at you. It's actually the primary toxicity of all argument in the 21st century.

And the reason is that weaponised bad faith is addictive fun for the operator.

Basically everyone gets to be Lee Atwater or Roger Stone for a bit, and everyone loves it.

> It's something many on the left have generally identified as worse from the right wing or alt.right.

It depends a bit by what you mean by left and right, but if you take something like Marxism that was always 100% a propaganda effort created by people who owned newspapers and the pervasiveness of propaganda has been a through line e.g. in the Soviet Union, agitprop etc. A big part of the Marxist theory is that there is no reality, that social experience completely determines everything, and that sort of ideology naturally lends itself to the belief that blankets of bad faith arguments for "good causes" are a positive good.

This sort of thinking was unpopular on the left for many years, but it's become more hip no doubt thanks to countries like Russia and China trying to re-popularize communism in the West.

Propaganda at a national level, it's always been that, and I take your point for sure.

I think perhaps I didn't really make it totally clear that what I'm mostly talking about is a bit closer to the personal level -- the way people fight their corners, the way twitter level debate works, the way local politicians behave. The individual, ghastly shamelessness of it, more than the organised wall of lies.

Everyone getting to play Roger Stone.

Not so much broadcast bad faith as narrowcast.

I get the impression Stalinism was more like this -- you know, you have your petty level of power and you _lie_ to your superiors to maintain it, but you use weaponised bad faith to those you have power over.

It's a kind of emotional cruelty, to lie to people in ways they know are lies, that make them do things they know are wrong, and to make it obvious you don't care. And we see this everywhere now.

Well, I was referring to Marx and Engels. That's sort of how the whole movement got started. The post-Hegelians who turned away from logic-based philosophical debate to a sort of anti-logical emotional debate where facts mattered less than the arc of history. That got nationalized and industrialized with Lenin and Stalin etc, but that trend precedes them and was more personal. It was hashed out in coffee houses and drinking clubs.

You see the same pattern with social media accounts who claim to be on the Maxist-influenced left. Their tactics are very frequently emotionally abusive or manipulative. It's basically indistinguishable in style from how people on the fringe right behave.

Personally I don't think it's a right vs left thing. It's more about authoritarianism and the desire to crush the people you feel are violating the rules, especially if it seems like they're getting away with violating the rules. There are just some differences about what people think the rules are.

> Personally I don't think it's a right vs left thing. It's more about authoritarianism and the desire to crush the people you feel are violating the rules, especially if it seems like they're getting away with violating the rules. There are just some differences about what people think the rules are.

Oh I agree. I wasn't making it a right-vs-left thing, but rather neutering the idea that people perceive it to be.

I would not place myself on the political right at all -- even in the UK -- but I see this idea that bad-faith is an alt.right thing and I'm inclined to push back, because it's an oversimplification.

OpenAI is deeply sorry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4

I mean it's not like anything is going to happen to them anyway.

People will continue to defend and worship Altman until their last drop of blood on HN and elsewhere, consumers will continue using GPT, businesses will keep hyping it up and rivers of cash will flow per status quo to his pockets like no tomorrow.

If one thoroughly wants to to make a change, one should support alternative open source models to remove our dependency on Altman and co; I fear for a day where such powerful technology is tightly controlled by OpenAI. We have already given up so much our computing freedom away to handful of companies, let's make sure AI doesn't follow. Honestly,

I wonder if we would ever have access to Linux, if it were to be invented today?

>People will continue to defend and worship Altman until their last drop of blood on HN and elsewhere

The percentage of HN users defending Altman has dropped massively since the board scandal ~6 months ago.

>consumers will continue using GPT, businesses will keep hyping it up

Customers will use the best model. If OpenAI loses investors and talent, their models may not be in the lead.

IMO the best approach is to build your app so it's agnostic to the choice of model, and take corporate ethics into consideration when choosing a model, in addition to performance.

Yep, it's more like he reviewed and/or requested those clauses to be there than anything else.

It has become a hallmark of Western civilization to first of all Cover Your Ass, and where it gets exposed, to Pretend It's Covered, but when its photos get published, to Sincerely Apologize, and when pressed even more, to come out afresh with a Bold Pro-Coverage Vision and Commitment.

But maybe there's a further step that someone like OpenAI seems uniquely capable of evolving.