Reddit continues to forget what made them successful: the collapse of Digg when they pulled the same shit that Reddit keeps trying on now.
I don't think they quite understand the ground they're losing to Discord.
I don't think they quite understand the ground they're losing to Discord.
Their motto "dive into anything" means go deep. Yet logged out viewers are only shown a depth of one or two levels of comments, and they recently toyed with dropping the maximum depth of comments from 10 to 5 on both the redesign and old reddit. Basically, they are copying other social media comment sections because they forgot their niche and they think the other model is more successful. I expect what will happen is existing users will leave, and nobody will come from other platforms to fill the gap.
One of their most popular draws has been AMAs from public figures, and they haven't done much else in this vein.
They could be hosting written debates from well known figures. Constrain their responses in length and number, say one comment per day, max 500 words, on controversial subjects like DEI [1].
Instead they want to lock it all down (to sanitize for advertisers? Or perceived popular viewpoints?). Meanwhile the only metric they consistently report, number of upvotes, is down 48% YoY! It was 46 billion in 2021 [2] and 24 billion in 2022 [3].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/elG_zyZya5g
- Reducing their reach, they admit to this
- Stealth editing comments by the CEO
- Upvote manipulation
- Admin bans on mods who don't follow opaque, shifting and clearly biased rules
- Outright handing over subreddits to mods who agree with reddit
Reddit is not anything even close to a place for debate, because there is no free speech. After all, the CEO just jumps into the database and edits comments on a whim from a petty political debate.
Less than two years ago Reddit hired a transgender admin who was known for defending pedophiles (they vehemently defended a rapist of a 10 year old girl), and censoring any criticism of this person until forced to back down by mass protest. These positions are extreme left, not even liberals could support them.
And this is frustrating to me as a user, because Discord is much more of a pain to try to search and navigate.