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Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

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Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#121

Post by Exuma »

cragfar wrote: post #97
Exuma wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very stupid question - but can someone explain what the "interest rates" and "no more free money" replies mean? Is it because reddit isn't profitable so relies on constant money supply from investors? Or is it something else

3 month T-Bills are 5.2% (was .04%). 2 years are 4.7% (was .15%). Hypothetical future profit for companies that have been around for 10+ years is no longer good enough.

I see, so reddit being around for quite some time, people are just going with high interest treasury bills to put their money. Thanks

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#122

Post by yazaddaruvala »

Exuma wrote: post #56
iameli wrote: post #19

The biggest Reddit communities are in open rebellion. Twitter is, charitably, a mess. Twitch started taking a full 50% of the revenue of their top creators, who are furious. What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to go so user-hostile?

This is a very stupid question - but can someone explain what the "interest rates" and "no more free money" replies mean? Is it because reddit isn't profitable so relies on constant money supply from investors? Or is it something else

> Is it because reddit isn't profitable so relies on constant money supply from investors? Or is it something else

Roughly.. but more accurately even if they are profitable they are not profitable enough.

Its not just that Reddit (Twitter, Twitch[0], etc) needs the money, the investors likely also have loans that need to be repaid sooner-than-later (or just other places with better returns). As such there is a large push for higher short term profit, to get higher short term share price, to "diversify" some of their Reddit stock.

The reality is none of these people care about the long term of Reddit. They have effectively "pumped it", they now need a good way to quickly "dump it". I'm sure none of them have any explicit motivation to destroy Reddit's future cash flows in the process, but that long term health is definitely not their focus.

[0] Twitch as an Amazon subsidiary doesn't exactly fit this model. However, the execs within Amazon do have Profit targets to meet for their orgs. This directly reflects in their bonuses, size of orgs, etc. So likely a similar enough analog.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#123

Post by probably_wrong »

bluetidepro wrote: post #24

@mods can we update this link to the real article and not just going to reddit? https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/reddit-blackout-date-end-...

FYI, The Independent redirects based on location. I am not surprised to learn that Bill Cosby has been sued by 9 women in Nevada, but that's probably not what you wanted me to read about.

If the link is changed, it would be better to do it to an archive version. Here's one: https://archive.is/NcsuT

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#124

Post by ahahahahah »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #44

major subreddits keeping reddit alive basically: r/politics r/worldnews r/movies r/tech r/television r/news r/technology r/gadgets r/sports minor ones i've noticed: r/indieheads r/boxing It's a pretty serious blackout, but it'd be even more serious if those went dark too (and stayed dark).

The "major" subreddits you listed are ranked #74, #76, #77, #4020, #946, #165, #875, #2324, and #1584 by posts per day. The claim that they are "keeping reddit alive basically" is rather generous.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#125

Post by darknavi »

bena wrote: post #43

All reddit has to do is remove the ability for subreddits to be private. Or put the ability to make subreddits private behind a paywall. Much like how Github treated private repos. End of the day, reddit is going to have to figure out how many users are willing to boycott. Moderators are one thing. They are a minority. But if they remove the ability for /r/funny to be private, would users honor the protest? The subs…

GitHub private repos are free now by the way.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#126

Post by dawnerd »

gman83 wrote: post #117
jurassicfoxy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I just saw the r/StarTrek migration, and visited Lemmy for the 3rd time or so this week, and quite frankly, I could drop reddit entirely now, if I knew how to find communities. I feel some real hacker/dev excitement for the future of Lemmy.

On the communities page of your instance, select "All" instead of "Local" to search for communities on all servers, for example: https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1

If anyone is wondering it’s still not quite perfect as some instances have inadvertently blocked federation while they deal with growth. It should work itself out once the dust settles

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#127

Post by HelloMcFly »

chongli wrote: post #37

I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting…

I cannot for the life of me login to lemmy.world even after creating an account today. Is this due to increased traffic today or something else I don't understand about the platform?

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#128

Post by isykt »

organsnyder wrote: post #60
isykt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. Yes, this is exactly the same as the Netflix account sharing controversy. People who aren’t generating the company any profit are shouting the loudest. I don’t think there’s much of a loss here. The era of free money was always going to end and now it’s over.

But those people are also generating a large amount of the content that is being used to monetize users.

It’s not clear there’s anything “unique” about the set of users that both generate the content and will leave the site because of the API changes. From an investor standpoint, content is content and monetizeable users are monetizable users. Both are replaceable, and it’s better to have monetizable users that generate content than non-monentizeable users who generate content.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#129

Post by ayemel »

ahahahahah wrote: post #90
iameli wrote: post #19

The biggest Reddit communities are in open rebellion. Twitter is, charitably, a mess. Twitch started taking a full 50% of the revenue of their top creators, who are furious. What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to go so user-hostile?

> The biggest Reddit communities are in open rebellion No, the __mods__ of __some__ of the biggest Reddit communities are in rebellion. Of the top 20 subreddits by subscribers, only 6 are currently closed. For the most part, the users of those subreddits dgaf about this issue, and even if the mods hold these subreddits hostage forever, the users will just move on to some similar subreddit that will take its place. Th…

Plenty of users are in rebellion too, you are glossing over the reality to fit your narrative.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#130

Post by crystalmeph »

Exuma wrote: post #56
iameli wrote: post #19

The biggest Reddit communities are in open rebellion. Twitter is, charitably, a mess. Twitch started taking a full 50% of the revenue of their top creators, who are furious. What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to go so user-hostile?

This is a very stupid question - but can someone explain what the "interest rates" and "no more free money" replies mean? Is it because reddit isn't profitable so relies on constant money supply from investors? Or is it something else

The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, has been raising interest rates very aggressively for the past year and a half to fight inflation. This has ended a very long-lived policy of near-zero interest rates which has been in place since 2009, the Great Financial Crisis.

When you borrow money from the bank, i.e. to fund the operations of a money-losing site like Reddit, ultimately the interest rate you pay on that loan is affected by the interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.

While interest rates were near zero, investors in money-losing companies like Reddit could justify just borrowing more money to keep the companies going, as the money was cheap.

But now with higher interest rates, the investors in Reddit, and other money-losing ventures, can no longer afford to just borrow more money to make up for the money they lost last year, they actually have to show a return or at least cut the losses to a level that the investor will tolerate. That means monetizing everything they can.

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