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Comment by randerson | Hacker News Reader

The best Reddit is the Reddit with no ads or selling of data or manipulating users into more clicks. The only way they can grow the business from here is to make the product worse, which I fear will lead to its self-destruction.

Reddit ideally should be a non-profit org funded with a generous endowment, like with Signal.

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Or something like Kagi. Nobody will pay for it now because of what spez has done during his most recent tenure, but there was a point in time where I truly think turning it into a paid service was viable.

I've been on the site since 2005 and turned down the ability to buy the stock early, and intend on throwing a couple thousand dollars at shorting it. I don't trust the c-suite, admins, or devs at all anymore. Spez directly edited a user's comment in the database. Admins directly manipulated the /r/place database.

I'm still there because...the fediverse sucks, and I can still use my hacked up Reddit is Fun client and old.reddit.com, but if that set of circumstances changes, I don't anticipate sticking around.

Wait, I knew about the comment stuff. They edited the /r/place DB as well?

> I'm still there because...the fediverse sucks, and I can still use my hacked up Reddit is Fun client and old.reddit.com, but if that set of circumstances changes, I don't anticipate sticking around.

Same exact scenario (but with Reddit Sync) for myself.

> Wait, I knew about the comment stuff. They edited the /r/place DB as well?

Yeah. At risk of making a drama/flame thread...

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/tv2lmx/redd...

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/marsey-the-cat

Please have mercy dang.

The orange cat on the orange site at last!

Just to add to the sample size, I abandoned Reddit as it got increasingly user-hostile, and I have been enjoying the fediverse. There's a lot of cool hackers on there, and I feel like I have a really good signal:noise ratio. Sorry to hear it wasn't a good experience for you tho.

> ...the fediverse sucks

Aside from a larger population or migration of communities that are important to you, what would improve it for you?

Not sure how reddit exists without ads either though. Running huge websites with user video hosting is a non trivial expense that's hard to entice enough users to cough up money for to make viable.

GenAI training data licensing. Forum participants get, at no cost, a curated venue that continues to operate in return. Chat amongst yourselves while the robot learns.

This. And HN greatly underestimates the public's tolerance for advertising.

The content isn't worth nearly enough to cover costs, even if they could somehow prevent scraping. Look around at how much people pay for text data, it's not a lot.

Don’t host media, just host text like they used to.

Image and video posts get way more activity than text posts constantly. People don't just want text posts and no one wants to be reddit's free image host like imgur used to be.

Who cares what gets most activity? Arguably the text/conversation content on Reddit is massively more valuable than the images shown there. (Not in the sense of market value, in the sense of value.)

Let the image host show ads to cover their costs.

Reddit cares as a business, more activity means more chances to make money whatever scheme they choose to use. Users also want more activity because that gives them more to do on the site.

Not sure that's the case. Sounds like a very shortsighted view.

Welcome to capitalism it's structurally allergic to long term plans when you're publicly traded or trying to be.

there are plenty of ads on reddit

Yes... and the person I was replying to was saying the best reddit is one without ads. If the best version of something can't exist because it would bleed itself dry paying for hosting it's not a real option to judge against.

> a non trivial expense that's hard to entice enough users to cough up money for to make viable

Yet the site's operators got rid of one of the most popular mechs for monetization: Awards.

reddit gold worked fine to cover infrastructure and administration costs.

of course it all went to hell when they went from a small dedicated team to a startup raising millions to add hundreds of employees doing god knows what

Ruining a good website takes a lot of manpower.

Seems more inversely correlated if we go by how Reddit has changed.

Reddit was good before that "manpower".

Infrastructure costs were covered by reddit gold. This was displayed on each community, some accrued years worth of server time.

Instead of organic stuff like the first IAMA's what that "manpower got you were promotional flybys by actors releasing a new movie or book or something, who didn't even understand what they were doing.

Was it though? I thought reddit was the standard VC money pit and never really had a profitable quarter under gold. Did they ever release numbers showing their cost vs gold revenue?

Did they even host video and image content originally though? Vaguely remember such content was only available through external links. I think that would be a good compromise. Make it free/paid by donations/subscriptions and only host cheap text.

Imgur for example was created by a reddit user specifically for hosting content posted on reddit.

The move to reddit itself hosting content came much later

Do you happen to know why they started hosting content themselves?

I don't have any inside knowledge, but I believe it was a mix of wanting to simplify things for users, and to keep users within their system.

I suspect that the rise of imgur as it's own community was seen as a threat, or at least competition, and the question "why are we basically helping our competitors" was asked at least once.

That was my impression from having lived through it as well. Imgur built it's own little community and figured they could make a go of it on their own instead of being purely a reddit image host. They still do host a fair amount of content but gone are the days when you could got to imgur.com/r/aww and see all the cute animal pics because imgur was the default host of all of reddit so they had the integration to show subreddit specific albums.

When you share an image or video with someone its now a Reddit link so it drives new users. Even if you Copy Image, you'll see a Reddit overlay when you paste it.

I mean this is what Lemmy is. It's funded by NLnet. https://nlnet.nl/

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