What Reddit Got Wrong
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What Reddit Got Wrong
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Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#2Basically 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.
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#3I 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-prioritized and dropped.
Also, Reddit has quite a lot of mindless consumption content.
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.
Such a site would require minimal care, and might even be possible to maintain with AI moderation. For moderating something like r/DebateReligion human brains are needed. But for deciding whether something is a cat or not, probably not.
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#4Basically 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.
What evidence do we have that it blew up in their face? There is clearly a large backlash, but it's not at all clear how much that will impact their key metrics, which is probably all they care about moving into IPO.
I agree they made awful decisions, my usage patterns will definitely be changing due to a re-enable /etc/hosts entry. However, what is the impact on a broader scale? This is like Twitter firing a ton of engineers - we can't really evaluate until much further down the road.
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#5Basically 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.
What evidence do we have that it blew up in their face? There is clearly a large backlash, but it's not at all clear how much that will impact their key metrics, which is probably all they care about moving into IPO. I agree they made awful decisions, my usage patterns will definitely be changing due to a re-enable /etc/hosts entry. However, what is the impact on a broader scale? This is like Twitter firing a ton of…
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?
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#6I 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" has grown significantly within the past few years, though has been a problem for a number of years prior.
Reddit won't come back from this stage of may-as-well-be-bots-posting.
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#7> Unlike moderators on Reddit, who have no established way to seek support from the platform or its users
The article brings up a good point regarding how Reddit relies a lot on free labor to work. The incentives for operating the communities are primarily built on good will.
I've been working on a Reddit/Discord/Patreon style hybrid community platform that puts a focus on the community owner/admins getting paid. It feels like the people running the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#8I 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 get in. If Reddit deems locked subreddits abandoned, there is already a system to give the abandoned subreddit to anyone else that wants it (within reason). Subreddits also split pretty often due to mod infighting
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. The infighting is because some mods love adding arbitrary rules like "no relationship posts" in AITA. Does everyone agree with that? Is that a perfect rule? Why? A new moderation team could be just as good or just as bad as the previous one
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#9It's not clear to me the Reddit users will be permanently gone either, unless there's some place like Reddit taking in a lot more users right now.
But I haven't heard of any place like that so far. No real competitor for users to jump ship towards.
Re: What Reddit Got Wrong
#10Basically 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.