"You'll get over it"
Many HN readers should recognize that as the words a certain admin of fark.com.
For those that don't recognize it, the short version of the story was the admins had developed a new front-end to Fark, but they didn't make a general announcement an update was going to happen. The just deployed it one morning... and left for a convention. When the change was discovered a little while later... well... lets just say it was not a popular change[1]. More importantly, nobody know what was going on, making emotions run even higher due to the lack of communication from the admins.
So after being left to stew for 4+ hours - and over 10k posts from confused and angry users - an admin does the absolutly worst thing possible, and made a single post with those four words: "You'll get over it". There were three main reactions to this. Many of us closed the browser and went back to work or otherwise avoided the drama. Maybe 10-15% of users spent the next day flaming the admins at about 10k posts/hour. Finally, about 1/3 close their accounts and left, permanently.
I suspect reddit is in the middle of a similar situation right now.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that the Fark story doesn't really end there. Years later, Fark admin Joe Peacock gave one of the more important talks[3] (at NOTACON 8) I've ever seen, about what exactly went wrong, and the bad decisions that made a catastrophe inevitable. Joe discusses what may be the most important lesson for anyone managing a place where users choose to spend their free time: if you don't involve your user in the decisions and changes that affect them, they wil simply find another place to hang out.
[1] which some of us still[2] partially-revert: https://userstyles.org/styles/60176/fark-theme-un-v3-0-relea...
[2] when I remember; apparently haven't posted last year's fixes sigh
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI (in typical fark style, a few of the talk's slides may be borderline NSFW)
TL;DR - just watch [3], where a fark.com admin gives some *very good advice on how to interact with your users.
I remember the Fark 2.0 backlash for Jeff's comment.
Yesterday, Ohanian appears to have made a similar comment, beginning to snowball in infamy:
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...
This is a great talk for anyone managing communities. Reddit's current situation does bear many resemblances, especially with kn0thing's "Thank you for the feedback. I hope you change your mind about reddit, but if not, you're entitled to your opinion." response.
That statement from kn0thing made me think "pride does indeed come before a fall". Let's see!
Amazing story! Also thanks for the video, I can't believe it has only 1000 views..