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What Reddit Got Wrong

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Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#81

Post by bluescrn »

incomingpain wrote: post #11

There are a dozen better reasons to quit reddit. The only reason people are protesting api pricing is because they want to protest. The actual concern here isn't what they are protesting. They want to quit but they can't. They likely even realize they are addicted. They likely even realize the content they view is censored and curated to manipulate them. Just quit reddit already and be happy.

If people didn't quit Reddit during Covid times, when things were more bleak, angry, and divided than ever, they probably never will.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#82

Post by paulddraper »

ProAm wrote: post #31
WalterBright wrote: post #21

> 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.

And you are 100% sure that wouldn't have been a strike?

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#83

Post by INGSOCIALITE »

ProAm wrote: post #31
WalterBright wrote: post #21

> 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.

But then they don’t get the sweet sweet tracking metrics from their app. Once you pay for Reddit , you don’t see ads in the OEM app either, they can squeeze more value out of people by forcing their app and sucking as much data and analytics about you as possible. They’ve already begun A/B trials of disallowing mobile browsers to access their website, and forcing the app download.

This is less about ad revenue than it is jealousy over closed communities like Instagram and tiktok where you are locked into their app.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#84

Post by paulddraper »

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…

> And using a bullshit reason to do so (a single post encouraging people to beat cops, or crap like that.)

Was almost assuredly a false flag, given the other content in T_D.

And ironic, given the contemporary ACAB fervor in the others.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#85

Post by sekai »

hirako2000 wrote: post #59
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

Not reddit data, users data.

Exactly, when users start migrating, Reddit is dead in the water.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#86

Post by chimeracoder »

Gloomily3819 wrote: post #29

"Reddit has an admirable record when it comes to defending an open and free internet." Had*. Ever since Aaron died, it's become a censorious bubble.

> Had*. Ever since Aaron died, it's become a censorious bubble.

Aaron Swartz had very little involvement with Reddit for several years before his death, and also some of Reddit's most notorious (at least at the time) "censorship" actions took place before his death.

It's a little unfair to his memory to conflate the two things, especially given that he spent the last five years of his life doing things he deeply cared about (and which had nothing to do with Reddit corporate strategy or policy).

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#87

Post by mvdtnz »

nullindividual wrote: post #6
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…

> 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"…

> The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect"

This is what gets me about all the people lately claiming that the only way to get good Google results is to append site:reddit.com - I have spent enough time looking at Reddit threads to know I would never trust them for important information. People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years. New users read the confidently wrong information, take it as gospel and spread it to other new users.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#88

Post by swarnie »

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…

Reddit hasn't been hands off for about 6-7 years.... A lot of the hate, racism and legally ambiguous stuff left years ago for better or worse. Kind of unhappy they left a lot of the degen fetish stuff though, that's the thing stopping me admitting to using the service in public.

Now they have the lowest value user data of any social media company and are firing people from jobs they do for free (lol) to get the site working again.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#89

Post by ProAm »

paulddraper wrote: post #82
ProAm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple fix, if you use a third party app you need to have Reddit Gold. Problem solved.

And you are 100% sure that wouldn't have been a strike?

Im not sure. I feel Reddit does deserve to be profitable. The bad choice they made was how they went about it. I feel there were a couple reasonable paths to profitability. But charging app makers for api access didnt seem like a good one.

It might have stuck a chord with some users, but I think overall it would have been net positive for Reddit and the narrative from leadership much more palatable

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#90

Post by JohnClark1337 »

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…

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