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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

While I sincerely hope Reddit feels the pressure and goes back, they have taken a bet in a different landscape as Digg:

1. The vast majority of Reddit users (maybe not the contributors) use the native app. I myself do as well. So this api change doesn’t affect me immediately (of course it does indirectly by restricting moderation and bots).

2. I open Reddit today and it’s different but not inferior. I’d argue the real value of Reddit nowadays is in all the nice subreddits one subscribes to, and most of them are still alive and active. My friends who just started redditting last year have not even noticed the whole shebang.

It’s very possible (in fact slightly more possible than not) that Reddit will survive this mostly unscathed. I’m not betting on it but I’m a poor speculator so don’t take my word for it for sure.

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>The vast majority of Reddit users (maybe not the contributors) use the native app. I myself do as well.

The idea that you'd willingly use an app with baked-in ads is insane to me, to say nothing of the fact that the official app performs very poorly and could charitably be described as "dogshit UX".

It’s mostly inertia. I use the native app too, because I had no idea there was anything better till now. It just never came up for me.

I’ve seen the same in comment threads outside of Reddit and I think many are simply not aware or care to try the third party apps and are quite used by ads in online services at this point, so this is not by itself a factor that have them questioning their choice.

The problem is you don't have the mindset of Joe Average. It's something most of us lose as we become nerds, enthusiasts, professionals, etc. We become disconnected with the commons.

As a Joe Average, computers are an appliance and the internet is merely a service like broadcast television. Reddit is merely a channel on broadcast television like CNN or BBC, and it's natural to use Reddit to use Reddit. Do you watch something other than BBC to watch BBC?

I agree with the crowd saying that this subreddit privatisation strike will have limited effect at most. Most people don't care and aren't affected, and that's the cold reality. Reddit itself is far beyond the point of critical mass, if there are even whispers that this strike is insufficient that means it is insufficient in the grander scale.

As another bit of anecdote, I remember when Digg died. It died overnight. Literally. One day everyone was talking about and on Digg, the next day everyone wasn't. When something on the internet dies, it dies. There are no rumors or murmurs of impending death, it just dies.

>The problem is you don't have the mindset of Joe Average. It's something most of us lose as we become nerds, enthusiasts, professionals, etc. We become disconnected with the commons.

Oh please, becoming a principled free rider is not some sort of enlightened stance. This is just a dressed-up version of the person who pirates whatever media they feel like because, like, capitalism sucks man.

You must not have been part of the Digg exodus then. Because those of us on Digg that left, we knew the change was coming. Kevin Rose had talked about it. He gave some inklings of what was coming. The user base did protest. We did threaten. When they went ahead and went through with it, we left en masse for Reddit. Kevin sold the company, and gave information about what changes were coming. The community knew, and it was pissed. The only thing holding Reddit up right now, is lack of competition. If there was another site similar out there right now, a mass exodus would be underway right now. Mastodon, lemmy, all that stuff, doesn't count. It's not a real competitor, and neither is discord.

I wasn't part of the death of Digg, no. I don't really partake in social media much, so I was merely a witness to it as I noticed the noise coming down the grapevine via avenues like Slashdot.

You also kind of backed up my point; Reddit is way above critical mass right now and unlike with Digg that mass doesn't seem to be moving out anywhere. If these strikes and demonstrations want to make a difference the actions taken need to be far more drastic.

Real world worker strikes have a potential to work because the workers are willing to put their employment on the line, an ultimatum. What's happening on Reddit right now isn't an ultimatum; users aren't putting their Redditing on the line. Two days to a few weeks of privatisation is something Reddit can weather just fine, even moreso if the subreddit itself is still readable as in the case of some.

>The idea that you'd willingly use an app with baked-in ads is insane to me

Do you also boycott all movies with product placement in them?

Geez, no wonder Reddit is trying to kill third party apps..

> The idea that you'd willingly use an app with baked-in ads is insane to me

Do you have any friends outside tech circles?

Any time I see friends from non-tech industry browse web on their computers I wince so hard. I can't understand how they stand it but it's normal for them. It's also normal for them to wait few secons until pages/apps load because all the crap. Those people make up 99,9% of users everywhere except select sites like HN.

I never realized how fast the web is today with no ads, esp. on mobile! I am never going back, ads are cancer for me, this is not how I roll

Ads and websites in general have been expanding to fill available space for years, so it's hard to notice how large that space has gotten. Browsing without ads is like unclipping a ball and chain.

> 2. I open Reddit today and it’s different but not inferior. I’d argue the real value of Reddit nowadays is in all the nice subreddits one subscribes to, and most of them are still alive and active. My friends who just started redditting last year have not even noticed the whole shebang.

Most of these subreddits are driven by content creators and moderators who are fully dependent on third-party apps and moderation frameworks. The consumers might not personally care about those features, but if the core members of these small communities give up, all the content will dry up.

I wish pg would call up Huffman and try to convince him that this is a bad bet regardless of whether they win.

They’ll survive. But no one will love them anymore. I was still a fan of Reddit as a platform till the moment Huffman lied about Apollo’s developer for no reason whatsoever.

That goodwill is hard to earn. And although goodwill isn’t convertible to dollars directly, it tends to affect trajectory over the long term. See freenode’s dramatic decline, among many other examples.

I thought tildes was supposedly a Reddit alternative. I guess they never caught on.

pg would tell him to push through this, get the IPO, cash out, and then leave Reddit to become an angel investor.

Plus, pg would make money off the IPO. It’s a YC company after all.

pg has enough money. It’s not his primary motive.

Oh, my sweet summer child. Rich people never have enough money and power.

That's the thing about endless ambition - it comes with eternal discontent.

Capitalist's only motive is money, everything else be damned.

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