>We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive.
It appears he has confused the reddit AMA for an IPO prep call.
What a tone deaf farce...
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/comment/jnk...
It appears he has confused the reddit AMA for an IPO prep call.
What a tone deaf farce...
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/comment/jnk...
Reddit has always struck me as a company with no creativity. They have this huge diverse community and can't seem to find a way to monetize it in any way other than the most basic advertising model.
They always seem to do things in conflict with the community rather than in concert with them.
I thought reddit was really clever for the first ~7 years of operations. They replaced forums, fostered communities, gained a reputation as a place to get real people's takes, and attracted people willing to have interesting conversations. The upvote/downvote system that is now so common was made popular from reddit. They brought awareness to important political topics surrounding net neutrality. They were leaders in early Web2.0, where each user saw content that appealed to them, because everyone could choose which subreddits were in their homepage. It was highly social and highly engaging.
After a certain point in 201X the dark patterns began to appear. I was almost fully disengaged by the start of 2013. I can't remember the details, but I remember being increasing disappointed with reddit every time I returned for a brief visit.
...and then they killed it...
They still have celebrity AMAs but that was the peak and it immediately lost most relevance.
I still have some pretty negative feelings about that whole situation, and am confused every time I'm reminded of it. Why wasn't there more explanation? Why didn't they at least replace her with someone who played a similar role in a similar way? Did they not realize that people really liked her approach, or did they just not care? A lot of goodwill was burned that day.
I'm kind of vaguely intrigued by the current situation, but I'm realizing I mostly stopped actually caring much a long time ago. It feels like there's been a vast & growing chasm between the better parts of the community and the site's management for quite a while. They did not in fact "remember the human".
When they let her go, it was a signal that Reddit corporate doesn't want to be a part of the fun. They just want to do their own thing that nobody likes while the rest of us do our own thing. Reddit the site started being hostile to Reddit the community instead of embracing it.
But optimizing for short-term profit over long-term revenue is just nuts. Apple didn't become a trillion dollar company by focusing on maximizing profit above all else every single quarter.
The long and repeated history of social media platforms shutting down 3rd party apps, despite lots of outrage, is not the best track record to bet on some mods closing down subs for weekend making a difference.
People might say Reddit is different because they like to get stirred up fighting authority like net neutrality but the next question is where will they go instead?
Betting against the network effect is a losing battle.
Whether Reddit should have acted differently and reformed their bottom feeding design/web/mobile teams long ago is a different question.
I'm sure that's what reddit is counting on, and it's probably true.
The issue is that subreddit moderators are not normal users, and work entirely for free. They don't get paid, and are vital to maintaining the health and tone of each subreddit.
And unlike e.g. content creators on twitter, they have nothing tying them to the platform. They don't benefit financially, even indirectly, from the arrangement. They're working for some combination of a sense of (altruism/community responsibility) and (satisfaction/egotism). That's a setup that practically encourages them to jump ship in this situation.
I'm sure that won't immediately hurt the extremely large, general subs which reddit would actively support regardless, but it could do a lot of damage to everything else. In a vacuum the remaining platform (a small percentage of valuable subs) might be exactly what reddit wants! But if a competing network of forums starts up, it might be able to eat reddit in exactly the same way reddit ate digg.
As search results became gamed and sites became SEO machines, finding a Reddit thread discussing the thing you want to know about is a breath of fresh air.
Nobody else has that. Reddit has a ton of really niche content that people want to read, spread out over a large amount of time. Why are they focused on becoming a place where people infinite scroll reposts of TikToks?
Instead, they went the route of introducing features that at best cannibalized other features (chat and the regular message system - it’s confusing) and at worst just seem like hasty add ons or complete stabs in the dark.
Even Discord has a system to directly monetarily sponsor servers you want to support, why on earth doesn’t that exist for Reddit? Good lord. It’s such a simple thing to add. Instead they charge money to customize your avatar like it’s a Fortnite skin. It’s insane.
Although I wouldn't know a whole lot about it because after a decade-plus on Reddit I've still never bought any.
Now, if they had implemented it in a way similar to how Brave did their rewards where people would get some share of the reward (say, 5% of the money?) then I would be way more likely to buy it and would probably also participate a lot more. Imagine if some people could make a living off of Reddit the same way they do off of YouTube or Twitch!
I was already considering dropping Gold at the end of this payment cycle due to some of their advertising bedfellows, but this mess has really sealed the deal.
Maybe Reddit doesn't have a breakout competitor for people to jump to atm, but I suspect blood is in the water and we're about to see an influx of alternatives.
Anecdotally, the accounts I follow in various niche subject areas have both depleted in number, with I’d estimate around 20-25% having stopped posting altogether, and cut back on how often they post if they did stay.
[0] https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/15/23683554/twitter-dy...
I'm serious about not participating in or contributing to products and platforms It could be bias, but I don't think I'm alone. Maybe new people will take my place, but this whole thing obviously puts a damper on the word of mouth marketing they were getting out of me.
Ironically all the badges are from memes that were born on reddit...
A fine business model but a bizarre damage control statement
Full quote of a CEO stating that a bunch of independent developers are able to make a good profit while the pre-IPO company he's running is not.
Can you short an IPO? Not sure how these financial shenanigans work.
To Apollo and RIF guys, if you read this. You got some technical chops, you got some ux skills, you got some clout and, after all, you have some cash.. why not join forces and deploy reddit's clone to be used as a backend for both of your apps? You can hijack userbase, and keep growing on top of it, just like imgur did. (Follow me for more business advice)
> How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
Reddit is a company. It's profit driven. I don't think that's surprising or shameful.
Had he a modicum of awareness regarding the question, he would have also addressed the community engagement part of the question - to users, the most important part of the question.
"The community built our platform and we'll never forget that or make engagement unpleasant. We need your engagement." Had he said that, and then segued to profit, he at least would not have been betrayed by his predetermined inflexibility.
like IDK what the comps are, what is another large corpus with authentic interactions and scoring? internet archive is probably the closest (although substantially more valuable), maybe the google library project is semi analogous in scale and value (although obviously very different in nature).
Nope it’s actually what the CEO said.