> Reddit is transparent about the fact that the company is not profitable. There's the fundamental problem. The bills need to be paid.
Simple fix, if you use a third party app you need to have Reddit Gold. Problem solved.
What Reddit Got Wrong
31–40 of 284 posts
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor. From Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-... Nothing blew up in their face. It's almost as if the vast majority of users simply don't care about this kind of drama.
> We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor. This is the funniest because it shows how little they're actually able to generate from people using their product
Yeah users on Reddit are worth on average around 30 cents each. But this is also why they're pushing the official Reddit app, to increase their ARPU.
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#33The main problem with this article is that it's only handling the current events, without taking into account that Reddit has a long-standing history of user-hostile decisions.
For example... let's talk about The_Donald, shall we? (inb4: I'm not from USA, "Trump" and "Biden" for me are just "some leaders from some tacoland", so I'm not emotionally attached into this matter.)
Some users were protesting that The_Donald should be banned on the grounds of hate speech. Some said that it should be allowed to exist, for the sake of free speech.
What did Reddit do? Quarantined it, showing that it doesn't care about hate speech _nor_ free speech, while paying lip service to both. And using a bullshit reason to do so (a single post encouraging people to beat cops, or crap like that.)
Why doesn't Reddit outright tell its users its values? Why is it always lying? Why does it put a CEO to disdain the community, with a "we snoos" (something redditors never use)? A: because it doesn't fucking care about its users. That issue predates the 3rd party apps killing, and it will postdate it.
By the way: there are talks that Reddit might finally implement limits on how many subs a mod can moderate. An old request from people concerned about power mods. Why now? (A: because it happens to align with Reddit Inc.'s interests - userbase be damned.)
I'm fucking glad that I've migrated.
[[And the fediverse is nice, the fediverse is great, but if you're a Reddit user and can't stand the fediverse: migrate elsewhere. Don't stay in that sinking ship.]]
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor. From Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-... Nothing blew up in their face. It's almost as if the vast majority of users simply don't care about this kind of drama.
Alternatively: https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-redd... Of course the CEO during an IPO year is going to downplay the shutdown. That said, there's no way the shutdown is going to change reddit in this case. They will replace the mods on the bigger subs.
They may downplay it but it is likely true. On the Google Play Store alone, the Reddit app has 100 million+ downloads, third party apps have And yes, due to these kinds of numbers, the shutdown will do nothing. Hell, many subs opened up today and r/all is back to normal.
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal. The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect"…
There is already a large population of bots reposting formerly popular content, including the comments from the original thread. It’s eerie once you notice it.
I’ve seen entire (dozen reply long) comment chains on a repost (or similar content) that were re-created verbatim from an older post.
Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process.
Eerie was an understatement.
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#36I think the idea put out by some people here that Reddit might be in the process of radically changing tracks is plausible. Reddit was always very hands-off. They had lots of very unpleasant and controversial content until their hand was forced. Overall they seem to want a site that runs itself as much as possible and over time content that required interaction and management (eg, AMAs, Secret Santa) got de-prioritiz…
>Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in.
What the current decision makers within Reddit Inc. want is to make the site look profitable until the IPO, and then they don't care about what happens with it. Be it discussion site with cats, or cats feed with discussion, it doesn't really matter for them, as long as it looks profitable.
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#37Basically they forgot they built a site built on community and then tried to sell those communities like inanimate objects. No surprise it blew up in there face.
> We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor. From Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-... Nothing blew up in their face. It's almost as if the vast majority of users simply don't care about this kind of drama.
For one, it's a message from Reddit — of course they'll want to pretend like it's a no big deal, and one could expect such memo would leak.
But what I'm more curious about is that this memo went out not even a day after the protests started. Both revenue indicators and impact itself might be delayed, especially now that many subreddits chose to extend the protest indefinitely
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#38It's not what Reddit got wrong, it's what we -- the public -- got wrong. Again.
We can't expect profit motivated companies to provide a true public shared space with shared public values. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Google -- all of them naturally have their own interests at heart -- not yours -- and as Doctorow explained in the "Enshittification" article, they all go through it. Their shareholders will demand it.
We evolved traditional state run postal services for a reason; but I won't enrage the libertarians here by suggesting we need the same for online forums and suffer the downvotes. I would submit that it's delusional to expect private corporations to provide these kinds of services on the terms we expect once they've gone beyond initial market capture.
Somehow the message needs to get out to stop trusting and embracing these kinds of fake public spaces.
The EFF article submits that "Content moderation doesn’t work at scale"; I'd take a stronger position: social networking does not "work" at scale. It degrades into "social media" and/or walled gardens and/or automated mob manipulation. I hope one of the results of the last year -- with Twitter and now Reddit going through this kind of crazy -- is the partial return of some smaller scale more intimate spaces to replace their use.
Addendum: With LLMs and automated "content" production going seriously"webscale", I expect things to get worse before they get better
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#39At this point I hope Reddit kicks out mods from all major subreddits still set to private and places their own people. I'm tired of drama from 3% of the Reddit population (or less) impacting the other 97% negatively. I just don't think either side has the moral high ground. The mods like the convenience of 3rd party apps. I get it. It's not a real moral issue.
Reddit literally will not function without the gargantuan amount of mod labor they get for free.
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#40Basically they forgot they built a site built on community and then tried to sell those communities like inanimate objects. No surprise it blew up in there face.
> We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor. From Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-... Nothing blew up in their face. It's almost as if the vast majority of users simply don't care about this kind of drama.
I don't think of "going black" as a shutdown but as a PR move from the moderators.
It was all about getting the message out.
Real "shutdown" comes when the good moderators decides they had enough and stops being active, so reddit becomes run by shitty mods.
Only then will the users leave. So it will take many months before the effect is visible in user count.