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What Reddit Got Wrong

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Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#51

Post by jerf »

satvikpendem wrote: post #10
a2tech wrote: post #2

Basically 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.

The CEO's message has no information content, because regardless of what was actually going on that is what he would say.

I'm not even saying he's lying. He could be telling the absolute truth. However, that post would not constitute evidence for him telling the truth, because it is what he would say if it was the truth, and it is what he would say if traffic dropped 98%.

This sort of thing is true of a lot of corporate and political communications. The only thing that carries information content is things they didn't have to say and couldn't be predicted in advance.

In this case, the only tidbit of information in that post is that they still intend to ignore the community(/communities).

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#52

Post by madars »

satvikpendem wrote: post #34
tomstockmail wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if participation rates are disparate across those apps, i.e. maybe official app is popular for lurking, but all content posted from mobile actually comes from better third-party apps. (In general, a small number of people produce overwhelming fraction of content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule?useskin=monobook )

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#53

Post by dfxm12 »

dale_glass wrote: post #3

I 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…

Talking about human brains, issues come up when someone claims their rights are being trampled on when an AI or human (correctly or not) removes their post for not being a cat.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#54

Post by ilyt »

Macha wrote: post #14
shmatt wrote: post #8

I never understand why Reddit is credited to the "free community based moderation" idea Facebook does this at much larger scale (2B users active in FB Groups), with way more spam, and some FB groups are much larger than most big subreddits Its not about Facebook or Reddit, its about people being so power hungry they do these things for free. When subreddits post about bringing in more mods, thousands apply, maybe 2 g…

> The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good. There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful co…

>There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful community building that must have happened.

Yeah but they need to be BAD. "Mediocre enough that users don't want to migrate elsewhere" (like /r/games) seems to be enough to keep it running and gaining subs just fine

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#55

Post by dale_glass »

chaosjevil wrote: post #33

The 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…

Reddit Inc in my perception is amoral, tending towards immoral.

In general they want to do as little policing as possible, and only do the least amount they can when their hand is forced. But there's also some signs of the higher ups actually being okay with things that are icky and of very doubtful appeal to advertisers, like r/jailbait

I'd say overall the leadership is just not good. It neither has any sort of moral center, nor is even properly business oriented because their efforts on that regard seem very lacking as well.

Eg, I think this API move makes little economical sense. If one were to be ruthlessly profit oriented I think an approach might be to introduce an API price and gradually raise it little by little. Milk the market for all it's worth. Rather than killing it from the start, either extract every dollar people are willing to pay, or kill it by squeezing all the profit that can be had from the maneuver by doing it slowly and gradually.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#56

Post by satvikpendem »

wasyl wrote: post #43
satvikpendem wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the other hand, if you count downloads of all the 3rd party Reddit apps on Google Play, it'll sum up to at least 10m. So 3rd party apps users might actually be in range of 10%-20% of users, which is far from negligible

That's only on Android, on iOS it's likely another 100 million or likely more (Reddit has around 500 million to 1.5 billion monthly active users, the vast majority of which are mobile, based on their stats). Apollo is around 10 million, so 20 million total / 200 million is 10%, which is high but not that high compared to overall.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#57

Post by Euphorbium »

dale_glass wrote: post #3

I 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…

Next up, getting rid of comment trees.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#58

Post by willis936 »

nicce wrote: post #24
willis936 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have numbers, but if it hadn't blown up in their face then we wouldn't be talking about it. What is reddit's product? The users. What happens IPO valuation when the users leave?

Reddit, like any other social media platform is worthless without users. We will see in few months what is the situation and if someone manages to advertise an alternative for millions of people. Then, Reddit IPO is doomed. If there is no new significant alternative where people will go, then IPO will probably continue as planned and API change went well from the Reddit’s perspective.

Why does an alternative need to exist? The attention economy is saturated and users are likely happy to have one less feed.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#59

Post by hirako2000 »

shmatt wrote: post #17
dale_glass wrote: post #3

I 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…

My bet is that investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are pulling their hairs out, seeing Reddit lose money at the end of the month, after Open AI and others are raising trillions by scraping their data

Not reddit data, users data.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#60

Post by dale_glass »

b112 wrote: post #45
shmatt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is that investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are pulling their hairs out, seeing Reddit lose money at the end of the month, after Open AI and others are raising trillions by scraping their data

Wait, you're saying openai was trained on reddit posts?! No wonder people are scared of AI.

It is well known, yes. This was discussed a way back during the whole glitch tokens deal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO2X3oZEJOA

A bunch of those, like " SolidGoldMagikarp" are Reddit users.

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