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Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

You also have to take into account the average reddit user.

The ones against any kind of monetization at all are already vocal enough, let alone the people who would balk at anything that monetizes user data.

If you look at their change where they introduced affiliate link rewriting it's really surprising. They did it in a way that made sure they wouldn't affect any 3rd party apps, they gave everyone 2 ways to opt out, and didn't rewrite links that already had an affiliate code. And yet even with all of that, there was a ton of outcry and anger at the change.

Reddit as we know it won't be massively profitable, because the vocal users of reddit are so completely against any form of monetization.

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But people are vocal against pretty much every significant change, aren't they? Think of all the times when Facebook iterated and change the format of the profile.

There will always be vocal minority which will never be pleased, no matter what you do. And later they forget it and move to other thing. Sometimes you just have to carry on with your plan knowing that you will lose some users, but aiming to do better overall in the long turn.

It's important to listen to the users. What's even more important is knowing when to say 'no'.

But reddit's "Vocal Minority" is much larger, and much more vocal than most. Almost to the point that it might actually approach the majority of active contributors.

Yeah, no matter what there will be naysayers, but the majority of comments in the announcement thread for the affiliate links thing were negative.

Combine that with the reddit demographic's love of a controversy (no matter how trumped up) and you have a ticking time bomb that makes mistakes hurt for much longer and much worse than most platforms.

Just look at their previous "algorithm change" fiasco. They changed the front page algo, and after about a week they changed it back because of outcry. For the next several months people continued to complain about how everything was worse now, and that they were lying about "reverting" the algorithm. It's insanity.

But aren't these horribly entitled and grumpy users... toxic?

I'd say so, but when they make up a not insignificant amount of your userbase, can you afford to just ignore them?

If 60% of your users don't want your company to make any money, maybe you need 60% fewer users.

I think that Reddit tends to have a bit higher level of users than the typical site. The mods of each group spend a lot of time curating the content - unpaid. Most users and Reddit itself know that pissing off the majority of this group that actually produces their product for free could have negative consequences, and they'd end up like Digg without much warning. It seems that Reddit's way forward is not with ads or affiliate links, but paid content in the form of up voted articles and comments. It's becoming quite noticeable.

Are they toxic if they are the primary reason the website exists?

Reddit was successful in the early days due to the quality of the comments of its userbase. It got diluted after the user base expanded.

However, qualifying it as toxic only means that if you were head of Reddit, you would probably run it into the ground like Digg.

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