On a fine Monday morning, Steve Huffman, known colloquially as Spez, awoke from his gold-threaded sheets in his penthouse, sipping on his ethically questionable yet preposterously expensive civet coffee. He looked out his windows, the horizon offering the perfect view of his kingdom, his creation, his Reddit.

Having decided to raise the cost of API use to levels that would make a NASA engineer’s jaw drop, Spez had embarked on a mission to squelch third-party apps, steering users towards the official (albeit buggy) Reddit app. He chuckled to himself, confident that his plot was as foolproof as an uncrackable safe.

Little did he know, the storm was brewing.

As he logged on, dressed in his favorite power suit, he noticed the eerie silence. Subreddits, once buzzing hives of memes, jokes, and shower thoughts, were now as barren as the surface of Mars. The once-mighty r/AskReddit, now reduced to a ghost town, echoed with digital tumbleweeds.

Confused, he navigated to r/pics. The screen loaded and his eyes were met with an endless scroll of buttholes, every variety, shape, and color imaginable. His newly nanobot-manicured eyebrows knitted together in bewilderment.

“Must be a new meme trend,” he said, shrugging it off.

He then moved to r/science, a bastion of intellect and reason, only to find NSFW content occupying every single thread. The Higgs boson was being discussed in a manner Einstein could never have predicted.

“What in the name of…?” He blinked, checking whether he was still on Reddit and not some obscure corner of the dark web.

He decided to investigate, opening his mailbox. “Surely my loyal subjects will inform me what’s going on,” he mused.

And inform they did. His inbox was flooded with messages, each more colorful than the last. “Spez, you’re a legend!” one began, before ending with a plot twist, “…at being a daft cunt.”

“Has everyone lost their minds?” he wondered, failing to connect the dots.

He banished anyone who dared cross him, banning his way through his subjects like a monarch with an itchy trigger finger.

As the day wore on, Spez grew restless. His grand plan was not unfolding as expected. But, in his characteristic arrogance, he was certain that the chaos would soon subside and he would ascend as the one true app lord.

In his plush office, surrounded by screens showing falling Reddit stocks, he clutched a crystal ball he bought from a New Age store, whispering, “Soon, my Reddit will be worth billions…” The crystal ball, deciding it had enough, promptly rolled off his desk and shattered on the Italian marble floor.

In the end, a day that began with grand ambitions ended with a lonely billionaire, surrounded by pictures of buttholes, an inbox full of profanity, a shattered crystal ball, and a kingdom in chaos.

Unbeknownst to him, the Reddit community reveled in their rebellion. They might not have won the war yet, but oh, how they celebrated the battles. As the moon replaced the sun, one phrase echoed throughout the kingdom of Reddit, repeated in posts and comments, whispered in DMs, etched into the heart of the rebellion,

“Fuck Spez.”

I like to think in the alternate universe where Aaron Swartz doesn’t commit suicide, he eventually ends up making a competitor that doesn’t fall victim to the failures some of these companies have