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Comment by lobochrome | Hacker News Reader

It's a private company. What else was it supposed to be about? Distributing VC money to users?

You could run a company that sustains itself and its employees, maybe makes a modest profit. You could just make something valuable that people like and want to use, and have that mostly be the end goal.

You probably won't get incredibly rich, though.

That sounds great, but I feel like the VC firms that would allow you to start up in the first place aren't going to go for it.

Yeah. If you want to build a lifestyle business then you can't take VC money. The grassroots approach is not an easy one and can take a very long time to grow! But in the end you retain complete control over the business.

Reddit has a fiduciary duty to it's shareholders. Spez is an employee, Reddit is mostly owned by a cable/magazine company lol

> You could run a company that sustains itself and its employees, maybe makes a modest profit.

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.

They're not profitable because they choose to not be profitable, because they have too many employees and are trying to be the next TikTok.

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.

old reddit was fine

they wasted, and continue to waste, bunches of money, for nothing

It was "fine" in your opinion, for doing the kinds of things you liked to do with it. But that wasn't leading to TikTok-level profits.

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.

Then fire all the management team, the board, the VC's and everybody related to that site. That company is almost 20 years old, they aren't profitable because Silicon Valley reasons, either way if they can't make that god damn site break even they are not just incompetent but a complete waste of space.

On a more "suave" note, they are a Dodo but this is the XXI century.

what you’re describing isn’t all that compatible with vc funding. reddit is what, 10 rounds and $1.3b deep?

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.

Yes, in fact the most successful social media companies do just that. Reddit doesn't seem to be aligning its interests with the interest of power users unlike other social media companies. Reddit is really putting itself in a position of getting what it pays for, which it doesn't pay for moderators while at the same time is taking their tools away and also seems to be insulting them too. Treating major contributors as slaves hasn't exactly been shown to be the key to social media riches but the alternative has. Different solutions work for different companies, but one way or the other you have to align your interests with your users - especially power users - or else you'll just limp along, which this would seem especially true for social media companies.

I suspect they see "you get the be the moderator in a community!" as a user feature, and not as an internal job.

And people clearly want to do it, and care enough to do it for free. Up to a point, at least.

If there's a bunch of openings for moderators as a result of this blackout, I'm thinking I might like to try it out, especially on a high-traffic sub if I can. Of course, as an unpaid volunteer with so much power, I'm not going to use it the way they want me to. Instead, I'll just randomly ban people I don't like, and then get them banned sitewide whenever they question my ban. (This seems to be normal behavior in many subs already...) Then I'll continue banning people, targeting the most productive users on that sub, until the sub is nothing more than a wasteland. This probably wouldn't be good for Reddit, but they'll be getting what they paid for.

> it doesn't pay for moderators while at the same time is taking their tools away

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.

>The only people that are still upset are the people who just want to continue to use ad-free readers, without paying money.

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).

They have given us no reason to believe that their half-assed, last second, poorly defined exceptions will be honored in any meaningful and reasonable way.

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