I have a feeling like he is being squeezed by the investors. It feels like they want a tiktok/Instagram clone and he is the one that has to tell the Reddit community.
I don’t think this was his vision for the site or he would have done it years ago.
Like it doesn’t make it less shitty but more understandable I guess?
I get that he may be under pressure to make unpopular decisions, but I still can’t believe that he invited the whole of Reddit to an AMA and then just answered 14 questions - as if that wouldn’t turn out to be the PR disaster it was. Trying to think of a rational explanation beyond “just incompetent” is really hard after that - unless he has some hidden agenda that involves sabotaging Reddit. There’s surely no way he couldn’t have known that AMA would be a disaster.
I think the AMA was to slander the Apollo Dev and make him seem unreasonable. The 1$ per user and month line suggests this to me. Christian just pre-empted it with his post but since they had already made the announcement there was no going back now.
My reaction to the AMA was “…but he’s lying! How did he think that would end?!”