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Comment by flangola7 | Hacker News Reader

I know the popular sentiment is that Reddit is doing this to look good for IPO but won't investors google the business they're about to invest a lot of money in?

10 minutes of research makes it completely obvious they're endangering their core business.

Reddit doesn't work without functional moderation. Despite years of asking, the native mod tools are no where close to parity with 3rd party tools. This alienates good mods who are not generic gears you can just swap out, building a strong subreddit culture and rapport takes years of good faith effort. Then they're alienating a sizeable block of the most engaged users, and on top of everything they're shameless discriminating against the disabled.

Who looks at all that and thinks "yes this is definitely a stable venture ran by competent management and a reliable place to expect RoI."

Investors are soulless but they are not stupid.

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> Investors are soulless but they are not stupid.

To be honest, tons of investors are stupid, don't research anything, and/or just go with whatever sounds cool to them.

The idea that "investors" as a group are any more rational than other group is a myth dearly held by investors.

You're right, and I thought about that too. But even the average idiot can use google and see there is page after page of near-unanimous consensus on how bad of an idea this is.

I would guess that they'll sell it as "we were able to monetize our api and all it cost us were a small subset of users, which are more likely to use ad blockers anyway" and then try to hand it off to the public before the long term effects of those changes happens.

> 10 minutes of research makes it completely obvious they're endangering their core business.

It's not that obvious.

To me, at any rate, it's not at all obvious that reddit is in any danger of losing a significant number of their members.

Yup. It's just as "obvious" that this shows that management is willing to make the big necessary decisions to preserve revenue and take back full control of the user experience.

I'm not defending Reddit at all, but very often what annoys users is what's good for business (e.g. ads), and so users complaining isn't necessarily a bad sign to investors at all.

I would actually say nothing here is obvious yet. Reddit doesn't seem to be in any danger yet, but it really depends on whether user dissatisfaction snowballs or fizzles out, and that's one of those chaos-theory things that nobody knows, and different potential investors will have wildly different opinions on.

They don't have to lose that much for a problem to exist If we go by the 1% rule, their main value creators, which are more likely to be a Power user who could be affected by the degraded experience, you only need to affect Creators and Mods for the house of cards to start shaking

> They don't have to lose that much for a problem to exist If we go by the 1% rule, their main value creators, which are more likely to be a Power user who could be affected by the degraded experience,

I dunno. In my experience it's the power users who are the last to leave a platform. Whether we're talking OSes, Office suites, etc, it's always the power users who remain after everyone else gets fed up.

In this case, the 1% value their high karma account and name-recognition on the platform more than they dislike the reddit changes.

I am willing to bet a small amount of money that Reddit will continue being fine even with these most recent changes.

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