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Comment by edmundsauto | Hacker News Reader

What evidence do we have that it blew up in their face? There is clearly a large backlash, but it's not at all clear how much that will impact their key metrics, which is probably all they care about moving into IPO.

I agree they made awful decisions, my usage patterns will definitely be changing due to a re-enable /etc/hosts entry. However, what is the impact on a broader scale? This is like Twitter firing a ton of engineers - we can't really evaluate until much further down the road.

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We don't have numbers, but if it hadn't blown up in their face then we wouldn't be talking about it. What is reddit's product? The users. What happens IPO valuation when the users leave?

Reddit, like any other social media platform is worthless without users.

We will see in few months what is the situation and if someone manages to advertise an alternative for millions of people.

Then, Reddit IPO is doomed. If there is no new significant alternative where people will go, then IPO will probably continue as planned and API change went well from the Reddit’s perspective.

Why does an alternative need to exist? The attention economy is saturated and users are likely happy to have one less feed.

> Why does an alternative need to exist?

Because there are a great many people that have legitimately used Reddit as their "frontpage of the internet" for years and don't enjoy the form factor that other websites / apps provide. Places like Twitter and TikTok aren't everyone's cup of tea, especially if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content.

>if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content

My take is that this type of person is more likely to not need to replace their feed fix with another feed and is more likely to pursue fulfillment in other areas of life.

I think several subreddit in my life would be irreplaceable. I don’t know another platform that would generate those kind of communities.

If someone is using Reddit just for scrolling endless feeds, I would say that they have no strong ideological foundations to quit the platform based on the API changes. Unless they think that official app is really useless.

I spend 5 minutes today with some user CSS to reskin Lemmy to be more like Reddit with RES. Another half-hour of effort and at least the form-factor will be pretty similar.

The main thing Reddit has that is not available elsewhere is a massive relatively unbiased backlog of discussions and community wikis covering topics like what are the best delis/restaurants/bars in city X or car recommendations, or how to find good deals on menswear, or almost any other thing imaginable, this is truly valuable and worth having in society.

>Reddit, like any other social media platform is worthless without users.

Worthless under their current model. What if their new model is to simulate other users with ChatGPT? Many users don't engage with comments beyond voting/reading. How long would it take them to notice, and if they notice would they care?

Can Huffman coast to IPO, grab the money, then bail?

We're talking about it because some percentage of users are very pissed, not because it necessarily impacts the business. I agree there is a line where reddit would be worried for their IPO, but we have no idea if 1% of reddit traffic will drop (not a problem for them) or 50% (big problem).

We (and reddit) also don't know whether users will return, ie: will this just blow over?

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