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Comment by eugeniub | Hacker News Reader

Reddit used to have pretty low overhead. You couldn't upload/host videos directly on Reddit, you could only share links or create self-posts. They didn't have all these superfluous features that they have now like live chat, push notifications, cryptocurrency wallets, first-party mobile apps, etc. A "classical" version of Reddit would be a fraction of the development and hosting cost compared to modern Reddit, especially if you can continue to keep moderation the responsibility of individual subreddits.

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Think this all the way through - why did Reddit do these things? To attract more users and to generate revenue. As the OP said, what are you going to do to solve Reddit's income problem? This isn't a technical issue, the technical piece is straightforward and well-known.

They can't really push for advertising until they eliminate 3rd party API access to the content. That or they have to start charging a usage fee.

Which is interesting. One option they do have is to charge the user for using Reddit via an API, not the apps using the API. If you want to access Reddit via a 3rd party app then you'll have to pay for it - say something on the order of $1.99 per month or $19.99 for the year. I imagine they must have explored that option, so it makes me wonder why they abandoned it.

"Think this all the way through - why did Reddit do these things? To attract more users and to generate revenue."

I'd love to see the numbers of how these features actually amplified the experience. My gut tells me not much at all. Tech companies have huge misses all the time trying to make more money and often at the cost of the long-term success of the product.

They're never satisfied with the status quo, are they? Always have to grow, grow, grow!

I’m pretty convinced that given the userbase, there exists a small team of exceptional marketers, engineers, and product designers who could come up with a “classic” reddit which could operate at a profit. A combination of ads, API limiting, and a monthly premium charge for some super turbo user features.

The product itself is _done_. The code has been _written_, one can host their own open source reddit this very moment. Image/video storage has long been a problem for reddit, so perhaps users will have to get used to YouTube and Imgur again.

I think people are making too many excuses for Reddit when they act as if the product itself is unmonetizable. It’s not, they largely just hired too aggressively and made some design decisions which have been broadly poorly received.

They’ve effectively owned the space since 2008. I think in another world with different leadership Reddit could be in a much healthier position than it is right now.

Because the suits want more money, while we just want a functional reddit alternative. I know this is difficult for you MBA types but not everything exists to maximize profits.

The replacement of external links with inferior in-house versions (the reddit video player is particularly egregious) makes sense if you're trying to maximize profit-per-user.

I think there's an alternate timeline where reddit just kept on being a low profit-per-user site, and didn't do the 'monetization-degradation-decline' cycle we've seen so often with other sites over the years. There's no reason why you have to make all the money at once, especially if it's a tried and true method of trashing your platform, just so whoever absorbs all your fleeing users can repeat your mistakes in a few years time.

Why not just stick with what works?

> what are you going to do to solve Reddit's income problem?

Spend way less, in almost every category.

Not every business needs to do a billion dollars, or a billion users, or a billion x.

This is absolutely possible but your numbers are off by a factor of 10, which means it'll be prohibitively expensive for many folks. I worked in advertising once upon a time; do you know the demographic that advertisers are most interested in reaching? It's not women 35-60. It's not men 18-15. It's not college educated minorities in Alabama. It's not any of these. The folks advertisers are dying to reach -- the reason they spend all that sweet, sweet ad money in the first place is to reach people who have the discretionary income to throw away $5/mo on a free website. People who spend money on the internet -- for a site that is free no less -- are going to be a gold-mine. The average ad revenue per user of this demographic is easily 10x higher than the overall per-user ad revenue site-wide; and if you take away these users advertisers will pull back spending and you'll actually get a bigger loss. You need to charge way more in subscription fees to make up for this ad spend loss.

That version of reddit was created in 2005. The world has changed a lot since, and users are expecting certain features. If you don't have them, you are going to struggle to grow nowadays. For instance, the majority of users are on mobile now, so you need to offer them a proper UX.

Considering how many people use Old.Reddit I doubt that you're right in this case.

I'm a mod at a >100k subscribers subreddit, and old reddit represents 2% of pageviews and 6% of uniques.

It isn't that simple, for example I don't use old.reddit as a URL, but I use RES or another program to force it into the old configuration regardless of the URL.

What source do you have for this metric?

The vast majority of reddit users would pay extra to strip away all of the features and have a barebones 2005 version of reddit.

The vast majority of reddit users have no idea what the 2005 version looked like and have only ever used the mobile app

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