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Comment by PhoenixReborn | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I worked at Reddit prior to when ads were a major revenue source and left in 2018

Prior to ads and the current dark patterns you see on the site, Reddit primarily tried to monetize through Reddit Gold. It didn't work, and users never purchased it in any meaningful volume to keep the site afloat. So while you wouldn't give them money for the decisions they've made recently, they weren't making enough money when they were (ostensibly) making better decisions.

How would you go about solving this problem? It's a genuine question without snark - if social media companies are unable to stay sustainable through direct user funding, then they're going to look to ads or other sources eventually.

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I remember 4chan did it by donate or die. They needed server money and they got it because it wasn’t working as long as they didn’t have a server. That was a much smaller scale though.

Can you talk about your work there? It’s cool if you don’t want to, how was it? You left obviously so I can guess.

I honestly don't have any hard feelings or ill will towards Reddit - I liked my coworkers and my time there was fun overall. I worked on mostly backend/data stuff during my time there, but over time it became painfully clear that there was no way Reddit would make it as a business without resorting to the kinds of shady tactics that you see today.

I sincerely believe that the leadership tried to avoid the ads revenue stream and all the ills that come with it for as long as possible, and searched for a lot of ways out (see things like Reddit Notes in the past). But I don't think I'll work in the social media domain again, because the experience really soured me on the sustainability model as a whole. People are generally unwilling to donate/pay for the content, and it's impossible to operate a site where there's no subscription revenue coming in.

What do you think of substack? I like it as decentralized news. Medium dropped off the face of a cliff but substack has freedom of speech, email lists that is controlled by the writer, and they made it a subscription based long form article model.

I don’t disagree with you though, if it’s given to you free it’s expected to be free forever. They’ll try to get money somehow but nobody will like it. I definitely liked it at first too, but it’s become so much different.

Substack is good, and certainly much better than Medium! But I think it serves a different purpose, since it lets content creators monetize their audience rather than managing P2P user interaction like most social media.

I'm not sure where the P2P interactions will go - it's possible that they stay centralized on the major platforms of today, or we see a return to smaller forums as we had back in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Interesting - I never knew that was the purpose of Reddit gold. I feel like a donation drive with direct acknowledgement that it would keep the site private and free of external financial interests would have provoked me to donate.

I thought Reddit gold was just some meaningless emoji thing.

Really? It was pretty obvious, my guilded comments and gold stats even says that donation paid for an amount of server time.

The meaningless emoji stuff was added later to boost sales (think of it similar to skins in video games). You used to not get any of that, and the clear thing you did get was no ads (IIRC, this is still the case and if you have Reddit gold you get no ads on the site).

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