What Reddit Got Wrong

Whether they truly got it wrong depends on exactly what their (publicly unstated) goals really are. It's possible that this is driven by incompetence and ego as has been seen elsewhere in social media in the past year, but it's also possible that apps weren't a target and were just a bystander. A LOT of this depends on the question 'who are they wanting to have paying?'

Personally, I think they got focused on one particular thing (AI firms and any other content vacuums) and lost sight of other options for making money. In that context, trying to do volume-based charging to the third party apps makes sense, because in a lot of ways you're just treating them like all the new customers you're targeting.

I think this completely misses the potential for monetizing their users beyond ad impressions, but maybe they did analysis and decided it just couldn't happen - or maybe they just dismissed it because they had different customers in mind.

It still seems to me that they could (now could have?) converted a significant percentage of mobile app users into paying customers - perhaps not at the Premium price point of $50+/year, but likely at a lower price point of $18/year (still way more than they were getting from ads) they'd have taken a ton of free users and turned them into paying customers, and they'd have done it while keeping the lion's share of the money themselves instead of having app devs and app stores thrown into the mix. In addition, once you've got them paying you have plenty of options to try to steer them to higher plans - someone wants to have multiple accounts for family or privacy reasons? That's only available with Premium, or with a Family plan. Want higher API limits? We can sell you that. Spending time moderating a popular subreddit? Thanks, would a free subscription make that easier for you?

But maybe potential investors don't actually care about having paying clients.

No, because we're talking about a phenomenon that indisputably exists.

there are definitely browser extensions that will call the API to check account age and highlight suspicious accounts, that's how "checking" generally happens except in egregious cases.

Except on April 1st, of course.

multiple threads discussing different topics, or different aspects of a topic. Instead of "HUB 4090 review" where people are discussing everything about the 4090 in a single giant comment tree, you create a thread asking about the 4090's efficiency and people can discuss that one aspect.

the reason we do the "one big omnithread" for everything nowadays is because we have moved to a fundamentally reactive model, where youtube opinion leaders or news articles say a thing and people react to it, most people are the metaphorical AIs who don't have any independent thoughts until prompted by an external stimulus.

Actually in practice any internally-generated questions tend to be smashed down on reddit. Self-posts end up downvoted heavily. Some of that is that they're often low-quality content asking dumb shit that should have been a comment on some other related post rather than a full thread, so it's the "stupid newbie" downvote. But they also don't have anything to consume, and again, the 90-9-1 model applies. 90% of your users are readers, 10% are commenters. And actually beyond being a reader, they usually are not reading the comments either, they're reading the articles. While in fact the commenters often are the exact opposite, they don't read the article/watch the video because they're there to talk.

But the fact that 90% are not there to talk, and actually they don't even care about the comments at all - that's why Reddit is pivoting. Forums discussion is a smaller niche than content drips.

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when you do a single megathread and content is moving super fast within a single thread (eg - politics debate-night threads), you have to resign yourself to not seeing every single comment in a thread, because it's literally going faster than you can read. And that's also true of reddit - you're not seeing every comments, you're seeing the top 50 comments. And if you sort by "new" it's a similarly torrential feed, and you stand no real chance of reading everything let alone replying to everything - but the "top" and "hot" and "best" sorts do a good job of surfacing the content that readers want to see, and it feels stable, so it cures that FOMO.

Technically there's no reason that's not a feature you couldn't build into a forum though. Surface me a view of a thread that's only comments above 10 karma, or with more than a certain number of replies, and show me a "top threads" view of a given forum. And reply notifications are not a novel feature.

but anyway, your question gets at another tangential point, which is that reddit and reddit-style models have become so dominant over the last 15 years that people literally don't know the ways to interact efficiently on web-1.0 forums anymore. People know how to work reddit, they know how to work twitter, they know how to work discord... does the average user know how to work phpBB anymore? probably not really!