> reddit has a lot of cash. Monetization isn't a short-term concern of ours. Yes, we will continue to experiment with different efforts so that when time is right we know what works and what does not.
So it was always about money. Guess their "experiments" have concluded that pissing off your entire user base is a strategy which works.
To be fair, we're not in the short-term horizon of 2015.
Did something change about ads since 2015 (likely) ?
Did their cloud costs go way up ? (possibly, since the redesign seems extremely slow and resource heavy, compared to the old site)
They have 2000 employees now. They had fewer than 200 in 2015.
This makes Wikipedia seem prescient. It also has basically all user-contributed content, and user moderation
You can point out a lot of its flaws, for sure, but at the end of the day, the product actually works
Reddit for me is barely functional, I still used old.reddit.com
Of course that was the intention all along -- to drive users to mobile -- which is just sad. Destroying value on purpose
In a bubble, the business is ultimately a failure and it deserves to die. It's just sad given the quality of the content is so high in contrast to the platform and the lack of an outstanding of alternative for people to congregate around, as Reddit once was for digg users.
But it hasn't enshittified
I would be really happy if Reddit ended up like Wikipedia. You can argue that Wikipedia could make better use of their funds (you can always argue that), but look at what Reddit did with their funds
They basically dug a big hole and are ruining the product to get out of it. I'd rather Wikipedia have extra cash than be in the hole, and desperate
I'm more surprised that anyone thought it wasn't about money.
Reddit is a business. An unprofitable business. They have to do something to turn a profit eventually.
A car company could maximize short-term profits by reducing quality. Reddit could sell your location data to the highest bidder. Apple could threaten to delete all your pictures unless you buy a super-pro account.
And generally companies don't do this, because the backlash. The backlash is good. Often the backlash is even good for the long-term health of the company/world.
I think to say that short-term-profit-oriented behavior from companies is inevitable isn't true, the backlash often wins, and long-term strategic thinking is actually the norm.
Like KIA cheaping out on basic anti-theft measures (at least in the United States where the regulations don't demand it).
I’m just baffled at their pitiful attempts at doing that the past few years. And how it’s now culminated into where we are this week.
2,000 employees. What are they even doing?
You probably won't get incredibly rich, though.
Reddit is not profitable, though.
They're burning through investment cash just to keep the lights on. That can't last forever, so they have to do something.
If they operated like archive.org, they could sustain themselves. They don't want to do that, because it doesn't result in big returns for investors.
they wasted, and continue to waste, bunches of money, for nothing
They may be wasting money, or maybe not. If they chase away all the people like you, and end up with a userbase of vapid morons who just watch idiotic TikTok-style videos on it, and this makes the company billions in profit, then that money wouldn't be "wasted".
I mean, it sucks (IMO) if running a discussion board service for people to have intelligent conversations about various niche topics is financially undesirable compared to running a social media site for people to share and make moronic comments about moronic 1-minute videos, but that seems to be just how humans are.
On a more "suave" note, they are a Dodo but this is the XXI century.
they certainly cannot say, “hey board, we decided we’d like to just be a modest profit company”. spez would be out of a job.
the other option would be not taking funding and building a business organically. would reddit have been able to become reddit if they hadn’t taken all that vc money? i’d say probably not but i don’t know anything about anything.
And people clearly want to do it, and care enough to do it for free. Up to a point, at least.
The mods mainly were protesting because they relied on these tools. Reddit responded by making exceptions for these tools, and threw in exceptions for accessibility-focused tools to boot. (Taking the "think of the blind and deaf people" argument off the table.)
The only people that are still upset are the people who just want to continue to use ad-free readers, without paying money.
Reddit is a digital drug dealer that just raised prices on its addicts. The power users you describe are the least likely to delete their accounts and leave. Their rage over something relatively trivial is just a testament to their addiction.
I am definitely in the minority, but I am upset that Reddit plans to monetize my writing by selling it to LLM companies (without an opt-out).