this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One piece of advice a mentor gave me is that whenever a problem occurs, there are 3 possible root causes

  • didn't know
  • didn't care
  • material issue

This was initially given in reference to work. But the more I think about, it's everywhere.

Didn't know is when you expect a certain outcome but there are unintended consequences.

Didn't care is more about a person knowing something bad could/would happen and doing it anyway.

And material problems is just "shit happens".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How would this apply towards the Reddit API situation? I'm torn between didn't know and didn't care

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Usually scenarios have some mixture of all three.

As far as my understanding, I think reddit just didn't know how much mods rely on 3rd party apps. Or at least didn't understand. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt there. So, it's like they knew that they needed to increase profits but didn't immediately see the issues with their fix until told by the community. Think about the Sonic the hedgehog movie. They didn't realize how shitty their product was until someone told them

But it's clear that reddit didn't care about maintaining the moral of their free labor. When told of the issues, we got all these other terrible responses.

As far as material problem, I'd say that it comes down to their business model in general. It's not anyone persons fault, but a business that relies on volunteer labor, probably shouldn't be a for profit business in the first place. You could also argue that when the site crashed the first day of the blackout, that may have also been a material problem combined with didn't know.