Actually, there was money to be made with that.
Reddit generates enough to continue being Reddit through the gold program.
What happened was Reddit got sold, and that large amount of money raised expectations about "making money", in particular, equating massive traffic to massive potential dollars.
Reddit would have been just fine, and would have seen few real financial issues had it not been burdened with providing a return for a rather large sale price.
Just because it can be sold, may not mean it should be.
There is an inherent conflict between users goals and how they derive value from a site like Reddit, and the builders who may or may not align with what attracted users in the first place.
It's a difficult problem, and one that Aaron spoke to a few times. The idea of sustainable community discussion was solid, and clearly resonant with a lot of people and probably the broadest demographics around.
Reddit appeals to everyone from teens on up. Kind of amazing.
It's current owners paid a price high enough to remove the sustainable discussion idea from the table, favoring a more monetized model.
That has had ripple effects. Not all good, though some are.
Today, Reddit has factions. The vast majority use Reddit casually, often on mobile. The basic app works, but not well.
There is a much harder core set, a good third or more, and I'm one of those, who just uses the old school browser interface, which works just fine on modern mobile.
This third contains many of the community minded people. There is growing angst over changes and a steady divergence in directions, leaving many who understand Reddit, and it's users well, in an increasingly rough place.
I don't see it ending well.
Frankly, someone is going to do the sustainable discussion thing again, and maybe get it right. Making gazillions won't be in the cards, but a very nice living will be.
Should that happen, whoever does it will own discussion big time.
The strength in users funding user discussion comes from the absence of that inherent conflict that always manifests when money gets too big and expectations fail to align with what users see as the real value.
Maybe people being the customers, in the sense of one another, not so much to deliver ADS, is worth exploring more. It won't be as sexy as something that sells, or that will IPO in a way that sets up founders for life, but it may well be the perfect place to deliver answers to some of the harder questions related to large group discussion dynamics.
I have been experimenting with the idea of not making a bunch of rules that define how shitty people can be to one another.
What is stated is being a good human is no risk. The more shitty someone is, the greater their costs and risks get.
Risks include bans, time outs and such.
Costs include various forms of enforced compliance being required to post.
Remedies for being a good human are basically a return to normal peer status.
In particular, a gradual escalation of cost to contribute long before a time out or ban happens, seems to signal to people. A lot more is recoverable.
I see others modeling these things, demonstrating deescalation, and in general trying to recover things before any admin type action is taken. I also see them mentoring newbies toward the safe positive. Her important as that kind of distributed person to person action does not require tools, and cannot be bought.
This very strongly suggests community norms can be used instead of explicit rules to manage things toward value and away from noise.
Ever notice how alphas looking to start shit have a keen interest in the rules? Of course! They want to know what they can get away with.
Take that away and their behavior does change.
A secondary part of all this involves evaluating risk reward for trolls and others making noise.
I'll not put it here, as my thoughts are incomplete and some work is in process, but I will say indirect means, including tools, automation, filters, rules are all indirect means, and do not address the risk reward inherent in causing grief.
I will also say we can't do much about the low risk inherent in just making an account to chat, but we can definitely impact the reward.
There are more ways to get at this than we see out there right now.