Hug of death
Reddit Strike Has Started
331–340 of 1001 posts
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#332Forgive me if I'm making a simplistic reading of this, but it seems the CEO has said that whilst apps and bots are making some good money, Reddit is losing money. Assuming Reddit has already taken cost saving measures (with 2000 staff maybe not), then how can they continue as a business losing money? I wonder if a model would work where all monetization of api calls has to be done through Reddit and the API itself, a…
> then how can they continue as a business losing money?
The same way Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat and other loss-making companies do? Bring in new financing and new advertisers, fire staff.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... People have been saying this for 10+ years. No reddit alternative has proven to be viable. So the people at reddit know that "mass migration" is an empty threat. Where will you go instead? That's right. No where. Rather than quickly bleeding out like digg, reddit has simply achieved a stable stagnant equilibrium. It doesn't grow, it d…
Necessity is the mother of invention. A CRUD app with a UX so bad people feel the need to use third-party clients isn’t exactly a moat. Half the people here could scaffold a Reddit clone in a week or less.
To prove your point...
https://www.sitepoint.com/reddit-clone-react-firebase/
Yes, it's basically just a scaffold, but something like this could be iterated on. The challenges are around infrastructure and funding to function at scale.
I would personally rather see something that improves on the problems Reddit solves, but tries something completely new. Cloning a product is so uninteresting.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics. People forget that reddit was popular and succeeded during the digg migration because it was pro free speech and minimally moderated. It was one of the reasons people migrated to reddit instead of here. The first 10 years of reddit, the community and the company prided themselves on being a "free speech platform."…
> it was not censored like HN! I don't feel like HN is censored. Does anyone think HN is censored? dang steps in mostly with technical edits or to break up a particularly nasty fight once in a while, can this really be called censorship? of course, you can take a karma hit from other people, but reddit always had that as well.
Agreed, especially compared to modern Reddit, HN is a free speech haven.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's a fundamental conflict, in that these network effect businesses are terrible as for-profit businesses. They're of great value to those who use them, and indirectly to society as a whole. Yet there's no good way to monetize them (nor does there need to be monetization), and trying to do so damages the functionality of the network. Both Twitter and Reddit would likely be better off (from the POV of the…
Meh, Twitter and Reddit monetize just fine with ads. The problem comes in with VC expectations where everything must 1000x or die. These are not bad businesses, they're just small compared to Facebook or Google. What's needed is mature leadership that recognizes the value comes from the community, and following the private equity playbook of strip-mining the value is short-sighted.
> problem comes in with VC expectations where everything must 1000x or die
Is "VC" tech's catch-all for capitalism? Reddit is pining to go public and Twitter just LBO'd. Neither is having its chain yanked by venture capital.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t you remember the Reddit net neutrality blackout? That did… uh… raise… awareness… kinda?
Victoria Taylor blackout in 2015? also ... nothing.
That one was trickier because there were no demands that could be met. Victoria didn't want her job back after all this.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not Reddit's content, it's the community's. It's literally users wanting to access their own stuff in a different way. If Reddit thinks it's theirs, they will soon notice that nothing is left of their business when those communities have moved elsewhere. To even create this war against your own users is complete folly.
No it’s their content. You gave it to them in exchange for a platform on which people can find out about it. You also get from it the good feeling when people ‘upvote’ your content. It’s a pretty good deal in that you only pay for it by seeing some ads. You’re free to setup your own blog and send emails to your friends about the links you like.
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Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#338Great! There's a picket line I won't be crossing. Not just for those subs, of course, but for all of Reddit. The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs making these (IMHO terrible) decisions. It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back.
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Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#339Flashback to Digg.com... I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... it was the single most significant stroke of luck a fledgling Reddit could have possibly hoped for.
> I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... People have been saying this for 10+ years. No reddit alternative has proven to be viable. So the people at reddit know that "mass migration" is an empty threat. Where will you go instead? That's right. No where. Rather than quickly bleeding out like digg, reddit has simply achieved a stable stagnant equilibrium. It doesn't grow, it d…
This is different. Maybe you are referring to the Voat thing a few years ago when people were mad about the "fatpeoplehate" subreddits being banned. As it turns out, only a vocal minority opposed that move and left Reddit.
This is Reddit-wide, with several mainstream subreddits with millions of users going private, i.e. inaccessible.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#340I think a "down-vote everything" strike could be highly successful. As long as enough users participate, it could cripple subs whose moderators didn't choose to participate. And it is fitting. Reddit is trying to charge its users for content and data created for free by its users, so why shouldn't users make that data junk for awhile to make a statement?
I suspect Reddit already has protections in place against this type of coordinated attack, as it would look exactly like when a whole sub (or 4chan) decides to brigade another sub for some other reason. There’s probably a hidden limit somewhere that when you downvote too many things at once, those vote become shadow-votes that don’t really count anymore.
I remember reading that downvotes on the posts/comments page of a user's profile don't count for a similar reason, but no idea if that's actually true.