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Comment by Timpy | Hacker News Reader

If I understand this correctly, these third party apps are drawing tons of ad money away from Reddit while at the same time increasing their hosting costs and dev costs for maintaining the API, right? How is this not a win-win for Reddit? They lower the traffic that was costing them money. I know it's user-hostile and that's the crux of the complaints, but it seems a little naive that these communities are basically boycotting and asking "keeping wasting a lot of money so we can hang out here for free". Am I missing something?

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Imagine you own a store. Every week 2 people come in. They talk and shop for a long time. You spend a lot of money showing them all the products and answering their questions. One of the two spends always buys a ton of stuff and the other one never buys anything. You realize you can save a lot of time and money by banning the other person since they never buy anything. Next week, neither of them come in.

Thats reddit. The people that use the first party app and click ads and make money do it because of the content created by both the first party and third party app users.

Thank you, this is the first explanation I've heard that clicked with me.

Reddit is built on free labor from mods. Without the mods they would have to pay people to moderate thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities. Most mods use old reddit on desktop or third party apps on mobile because their app and new site suck for modding. Alienating the mods means their subreddits go to shit, and reddit exists for content. Doesn't sounds like a 'win' to me.

It seems inevitable that Reddit is going to need to start hiring professional moderators. But given the difficulties in making that work economically, it would only be for the very largest subreddits. And perhaps even then, it would just be a professional lead moderator, with some volunteer help.

As it is, the only people who really want to be moderators, especially of a large subreddit, tend to be motivated by reasons other than "build a thriving community of diverse, good faith discussion."

Every big subreddit needs a dang.

> As it is, the only people who really want to be moderators, especially of a large subreddit, tend to be motivated by reasons other than "build a thriving community of diverse, good faith discussion."

People say this, but I find it completely untrue. Many people do a lot of things for good reasons, or else we wouldn't have charities. This cynical outlook is toxic and it is a reason why a lot of the people with 'good motives' get burned out. When no one gives you the benefit of consideration that you actually care about your community and want to see it thrive then you lose those motives. This is coming from someone who moderates many (>15) subreddits, with the largest one having 674,038 subscribers as of this posting.

For an easy example -- how many of the largest [non-political] subreddits are openly political? By that I mean they either have participation rules or auto-moderators that explicitly tell you that you will be banned for non-conformance? You think only moderators are getting burned out?

I'd suggest that Reddit is devolving into a place where the users and moderators willing to stick around completely deserve one another. On neither side do normal, sane people want to participate.

> how many of the largest [non-political] subreddits are openly political?

No idea.

> I'd suggest that Reddit is devolving into a place where the users and moderators willing to stick around completely deserve one another.

The specialist interest subs are mostly still worth it.

Reddit moderation isn't some altruistic effort. It's people shaping the discussion of their subreddit. They are participants as much as any other user.

Sure. And if you piss them off they will leave.

Reddit is a user-generated content app, and many users in the comments have already expressed their plan to stop using reddit if they can't use their favorite third-party app.

There are better ways to handle this without just saying "give us millions of dollars". Something like requiring that users pay a subscription to reddit to use it, for example.

I think most of those threats are hollow though as there are not really any good alternatives to reddit. Users will complain and threaten to leave, but in the end most will likely stick around and just adjust.

You forgot the alternatives of "going outside" and "advancing in your career"

> there are not really any good alternatives to reddit.

Sure there is, you can simply stop using reddit. You don't have to replace it with something new. Take whatever other hobbies and activities you already have and extend the time you devote to them into the time-slot formerly occupied by reddit.

Reddit is the communities.

For Reddit to be user-hostile is for Reddit to be Reddit-hostile.

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