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Comment by anonymouswacker | Hacker News Reader

It's just a victim of the times we live in. Reddit, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, simply grew too much outside of its original intention. It was a place to form anonymous communities around niche interests, but these interests started to spread into the dark elements of hate speech, child pornography, etc. When profitability comes into question, as any company wants to strive for, it has to appease.

Reddit was a nice idea, but it just got too big. Either it has to take responsibility for its users' content, and act as an editor/publisher, or it has to find a revenue stream outside of pursuing advertising revenue.

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"Reddit, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter," ... "It was a place to form anonymous communities around niche interests"

Huh?

None of these platforms got established as primarily long tail platforms. They were meant to be potentially big with lowest common denominators (news, aggregation, social connection in education communities) and grow into niches.

Niche are topical forums and topical social networks.

Facebook was for students, specifically one or two campuses to begin with. YouTube is in the name, it was a video platform for users to start personal channels of tubing themselves and idk wtf twitter was ever supposed to be.

Twitter was started as any easy way to send group texts via SMS, before phones would widely support group texting.

Reddit was a link aggregator for the lowest common denominator. But with the introduction of comments and subreddits they stumbled into the role of an aggregator of niche communities and mostly pivoted to fulfill that role better, until fairly recently (with the redesign, community containment and bans etc. in an effort to increase mass appeal)

>or it has to find a revenue stream outside of pursuing advertising revenue

hey what do we pay gold for then :(

As far as I understand, the gold revenue is not really meaningful compared to advertising, it's something like a few percent of their total revenue.

The four horsemen have always been on reddit, hence my reference to the AACS key.

The only things that have changed is that the payment processors have decided to leverage their business in a play to control speech, and that there is a good contingent of users cheering on the resulting censorship push in a shortsighted fantasy of making people better.

The latter is what I take issue with. Sure, it's really just that ignorant pop(ulist) culture has usurped the Internet. And yes that itself was unfortunately inevitable. But it's not Internet culture and there should be more uniform condemnation and outrage from the traditionally marginalized communities who took to the Internet earlier, rather than mental gymnastics justifying how censorship is great when it's deployed against today's undesirables.

ah yes 4chan lite was supposed to turn out completely differently.

You mean canv.as?

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