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What Reddit Got Wrong

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Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#91
post #39
post #23

At 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.

[deleted]

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#92
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apollo doesn't show ads, right? In fact getting users away from Apollo and onto the main Reddit app would be net revenue positive.

Indeed, the fact that Apollo can use the API for free then turn around and charge users for a premium version all while giving nothing back to Reddit is simply insane, you would never see Facebook, Instagram or other services allowing the same thing. And before one says that third party app users drive user driven content, what kind of content do you think Facebook and Instagram have?

Umm, isn't that exactly what Facebook apps like FarmVille were? I don't think Facebook charges app developers to publish apps on their platform, and the app was monetized.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#93
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Why does an alternative need to exist?

Because there are a great many people that have legitimately used Reddit as their "frontpage of the internet" for years and don't enjoy the form factor that other websites / apps provide. Places like Twitter and TikTok aren't everyone's cup of tea, especially if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#94
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.

Regardless of how high-quality the replacements might be under ideal conditions, I think it would be very surprising if average quality didn't suffer when trying to replace hundreds or thousands of them very quickly, versus the slower, incremental growth that resulted in the original bunch.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#95
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.

Doesn't Reddit own the data now? That's the unfortunate truth of these platforms. They offer your a platform and pay for hosting and you give them your attention and content.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#96
> What Reddit Got Wrong

If you saw that title a month ago, you might read "Reddit" there as "the people talking on Reddit".

Whether it was people's emerging consensus/behavior on a noteworthy incident, a more general zeitgeist or Reddit Hive Mind exhibited over time there, or whatever.

Reading "Reddit" in the title instead as "Reddit, the company" is less familiar to me.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#97
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.

Not your keys, not your coins

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#98
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.

In fact it is well known that current Reddit moderators are often very bad and contribute to the worst parts of Reddit culture. It has been discussed here, and on Reddit, how big of a problem current moderator practices are. Yet due to this protest we seem to have developed a collective amnesia and now we're all pretending that the current set of moderators are the heroes of the Reddit story. Baffling. Most of Reddit would be improved by a large-scale shake-up of moderators.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#99
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I agree this is why they are doing it, but they cant be blind to how bad their app is in comparison to what their power users are using? Is an exodus worth it if you keep 25% of the people in the app and the remainder move on? I think you can get metrics via the api, maybe not apples to apples but it can be addressed in the future.

Right now they are sticking their head in the sand, middle finger in the air and daring people to leave. Poor community relations and messaging for a community based website.

They made their bed by accepting VC money. There is more than one way to skin a cat and I think they choose poorly.

Re: What Reddit Got Wrong

#100
post #87

Earlier 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"…

> 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 b…

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