This is all a ridiculous self-delusion that Reddit management has engaged in that the platform is really the “value add”. It’s not. Reddit has become the shorthand for cut through ML spam and that’s based on users constantly posting up to the minute accurate data. There’s almost no historical value to that data.
It could even connect to the fediverse, but with its own moderation hierarchy etc. so it has its own culture and doesn't _rely_ on the fediverse.
Or more precisely, it was great when the internet was small and people were mostly well behaved. And as forums and then platforms with easier access and better moderation tools took over, it became nothing but spam, only leaving alt.binaries, so much that many people saw USENET as just a network for piracy, like The Pirate Bay or Megaupload.
Plus the vast vast majority of reddit content consists of mindless nonsense, or even worse, so it's probably best that USENET didn't continue growing in popularity.
That's the vast majority of anything (aka Sturgeon's Law).
Soon to be "improved by AI".
But I'm just some guy on the internet who doesn't actually know anything about non-profits.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/1456...
While I am sad for the communities, I am excited at the opportunity to short this stock if it ever goes public with such poor leadership.
I think is he, I think they think this will be better for the long term, users will be upset for a little while, but will not actually leave.
He has already said 3rd party apps make up a small amount of "traffic" and "90% fall in to the free plan" anyway.
So they are betting this is a tempest in a tea pot...
Sadly they are probably right because people are sheep and creatures of habit, for me I am going to archive my data before the 30th and purge all of my accounts. I personally am done with reddit, but I am likely the minority
There's tremendous lack of tact about how this is being managed. Completely unnecessary and generally not good for business.
this is think is the disconnect, they do not believe that is what they are doing, and given my tech bubble I am not sure they are wrong.
they have the data, i dont. I am sure their "most passionate users" are the ones using the official apps, and new interfaces, posting, upvoting, and commenting on cat photos, and cute animal memes, which is where their ads are targeted.....
If all this negative press ends up driving attention in the broader stock market, it will probably work out come IPO.
So far, so good for preferred stockholders.
I also don't trust what they are saying with regards to 90% will fall into the free plan. Is that 90% by volume of requests, by api key, by user id? It seems like the data isn't being shared in a transparent way.
You can have 90% of Reddit oauth clients never hit the free tier limit, but that doesn't mean shit if 90% of those oauth clients aren't actually being used. The fact that Steve keeps getting called out with receipts doesn't give me confidence in their assertions, given the lack of data.
It might need a different governance structure.
Commercial and community interests can be in conflict.
What’s the leadership structure that recognizes this tension and delivers optimal outcomes in the long term?
and you're probably guaranteed those community reps are the most annoying powermods/etc who you really kinda want gone anyway. No, don't, stop, come back, etc.
Look, this is going to be a bit blunt but I've seen these crises in major social media before (see: the Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka story) and the reality is that people's estimations of the value of their posting is much higher than reality. Yes, it will be a big ding to have powerusers and powermods depart the site. Yes, they will get some shreddit and GDPR removal of valuable content. The vast majority will not GDPR, and will keep posting cat pictures and discussing the merits of Android phones and scrolling memes and jerking off to hentai and onlyfans models, and that's what Reddit apparently wants to optimize for.
The takeaway from the Q+A with spez today is that they get it, they understand where you're coming from and they understand the community frustration, and they don't care. They've set their course and they're going to ride through it and the traffic on new.reddit and the native app is more important than losing 20-30% of users. And you can debate whether that will have long-term negative impacts (probably!) but that may not even be something that spez cares about after he cashes out. Or he may view it as a critical long-term goal that is worth a substantial amount of short-term pain.
But when you're Twitter, or Reddit, or even Tumblr, you can ride it out. Hell even Facebook is still fine.
Nobody is going to put redditors on the board to keep powermods from leaving. If that's your metric for success, put powermods on the board or I'm Going Outside, just close the browser window and get started with the grass-touching.
If you do that on your ycombinator startup you probably won't be running a ycombinator startup anymore.
It’s a bit strange, on the one hand content is cheap, on the other hand it props up some very impressive tools (and valuations).
It feels like these two should be better coupled, but thats a problem I haven’t seen a solution to.
Heck, I’ll even be in/person incompetent.
They represent investors who sunk 1.3 billion dollars into a company who was spending millions providing 3rd party apps a free api where users can’t be monetized. And is not currently profitable
If my previous experience means anything, the board wanted the price to be 100x higher or to shut down the api completely, and were talked down by spez
These days pesky investors are going to demand things like, a business model and a profit opportunity.
I don’t understand how people can argue that Reddit is somehow not valuable and then go on to explain how Reddit is valuable.
The “work” that posters and moderators do isn’t a deliverable that investors care about in their quarterly reports. They only care about revenue, be it from ads or customers paying for features.
Maybe there was a way to lever that value for ML training - and the constantly updated nature of the "training database" - into a profit model unlike any other social media app. Not the kind of innovation this team wanted to build, clearly.
I remember Esther Dyson: Release 2.0
She was talking about how, for example a wine forum could make money connecting wine sellers and buyers
do it
Instead of boring ads, make it possible for communities to engage with relevant businesses. Affiliate links, coupons and such. Meaningful dialogue. I am a former mod of /r/usbchardware and we were close to this a few times, with Sanho Hyper and SlimQ. Make yourself the "house brand" of the sub by engaging in good faith and you should be rewarded.
But even just affiliate links, as a former mod of /r/usbchardware, we very often recommend this and that and if we did that with affiliate links then everyone would be better off. And you can make a reputation system here which makes it much harder to just spam garbage.
This is an off-the-cuff idea which probably needs refinement but no way, no way you can't make good money from such hypertargeted communities. Just think outside of the box a little. Corporate spam gets you booted. A company offering insight, honest good advice gets you boosted. It's ... possible. There is a way making money for everyone involved which doesn't involve dirty play.
None of reddit's monetization so far has been even remotely appealing to me. I don't click on the ads (except by accident), I don't buy the NFTs, I don't pay for gold or get the coins or whatever. It's all stupid, asinine bullshit as far as I'm concerned.
Just like Twitter, the monetization plan is "a bunch of stuff that doesn't make the core experience better". A blue check mark? A stupid-looking avatar hat? Give me something tangible and I'll pay for it.
An MMO selling cosmetics makes sense. A social media site selling cosmetics... not so much.
Reddit feels like /was 3 firms.
A forum, hosting firm.
A sort of platform? Ads, compliance, support
A media firm - What they had with the old AMA and an employee helping guests.
I dont see any of these hitting Platform numbers. I do see it being a titan in popular culture.
The way the Reddit works, moderation is a free and limitless resource. You will never run out of people volunteering for the job.
We talked to an admin who reviewed our logs and they were surprised by the fact that our community was modded as a team because most of the communities that they had seen and worked with were apparently modded almost exclusively by a single person.
I thought at first that this was a joke because our head mod does most of the work and because we get new mods every year and they always leave.
So when our head mod leaves the subs will die. We'll become /r/worldpolitics. And there's a good chance that he'll leave during the protest.
What I'm trying to say is that we often see moderators as interchangeable, one leaves and another joins and nothing changes, but the reality is that good mods are scarce. I don't expect an inexperienced mod to join a sub with half a million users and know what to do. Most of our team doesn't know how to use the automoderator. I'm the only one who knows how to use the custom automation bot that I wrote. And then there's the issue of understanding the culture.
So whether reddit lives or dies in my opinion won't be a matter of how fast reddit can replace moderators but a matter of how many moderators will stay and put up with the bullshit because it has become part of their lives.
It feels very much like every story of the toxic boss who says "my way or the highway" and then is all surprised pikachu when the only person who knows how things work chooses "the highway" and everything falls apart in their absence. I guess we'll see how it actually plays out.
The high quality modding of askhistory, anthropology and other science sub reddits are provided by actual domain experts working for free. You can find someone to replace them, but the quality will plummet and the users will leave.
The subreddits you mentioned are good examples where domain knowledge is a very desirable trait in a mod. But by and large, it's not necessary for a mod to have deep domain knowledge in order to be able to enforce rules consistently. There's a reason why it's called being a "glorified internet janitor."
It’s the 1% remaining that gets people pissed, and you can NEVER please everyone.