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Comment by SilkRoadie | Hacker News Reader

Twitter killed a lot of third party apps and it just grew and grew. I suspect there is a vocal minority complaining about these changes. Most sub’s are going dark for 2 days. Time will pass and Reddit will continue to have a highly active user base.

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Reddit is relying heavily on the voluntary work of moderators. Without them and power users that indirectly curate the content of subreddits, the site is toast. Reddit is not dying by alienating its user base; it might be if they are alienating their power users.

They probably used all that nice volunteering work to train a moderation model by now.

Pretty sure that would kill the platform

That won't work, moderation is human-complete.

This boycott will not leave Reddit bereft of moderators or powerusers.

That vocal minority also skews heavily towards those who contribute via moderation, posting and commenting.

Twitter has a payrolled moderation team and while 3rd party apps had benefits an house app without major feature gaps.

Twitter also hasn't grown since making the change - usage has dropped (depending on measurement / estimate) 8-15% and is still dropping.

Techy/young people think that they are the intended audience of Reddit.

You're not anymore. The intended audience is _bigger_. It's like how Facebook shifted from young college folks to kids, moms, grandpas, and mainly companies.

The original users of Facebook left, but Facebook still grew.

Now it's Reddit's turn to swap its original user base with a bigger target audience.

And do you think that new demographic will be willing to put in the same unpaid hours to moderate the site?

Nope. They'll just outsource this to underpaid contractors like Facebook does.

Even better, if they could leverage LLMs, they could maybe automate a large part of the initial moderation. They have already acknowledged that these models were likely trained on their data. Why not feed new posts back into it and determine about relevance (on vs off topic), attitude (compassion vs hate) or quality (written by a bot)?

There's arguably more unpaid moderators on Facebook inside groups than reddit. FB claims 10million groups while reddit says 3.4 subreddits

reddit is an order or magnitude smaller so in actually surprised the group numbers are so close which only proves the communities is a core feature of reddit

Twitter's official app and interfaces were never as user-hostile and borderline unusable as Reddit's app and redesigned web interface.

And twitter never tried to pivot its core product and kick out most of its users to chase last year's hype and be more attractive to markets that are already happy with other apps.

But it kept and incorporated Tweetdeck, for the "pro" users

Their mobile app also incorporated a lot of features and it is not a POS like the Reddit app

Twitter is not that comparable to be fair.

It is not so anonymous and real people actually depend on it. Politicans, official organisatons for communication and so on. It is harder to leave it.

Not to mention moderators.

Any source that it is growing?

The problem is a lack of alternatives. At least with Twitter there was mastodon, but that was always going to fail outside of techie circles. What is the alternative to Reddit? Years ago the idea of starting a successful social network was a venture capitalist’s dream, but I wonder if they’ve woken up to the challenges of actually managing one.

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