Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

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I think Paul's right in the sense that reddit seems to thrive as a community when the smallest amount of effort is put into running it. The series of leadership horror shows that all mostly left the site alone demonstrates that.

The recent very active moves to clean the site up and prep for this IPO have had a detrimental community effect in the sense of disgruntlement, but I would wager have been excellent in making the site more palatable as a business.

Virtually none of the reddit-alternatives that all spun up in the wake of this mop job have taken off. So assuming our gut feeling is right that reddit engagement is down, then overall engagement on all reddits is down and users have entirely moved to other social media styles entirely.

There's the other angle on this, that engagement is down, but it was calculated to get rid of mostly users who cost reddit things, or are of an undesirable user population (troublesome, illegal, etc.) And what's left is mostly a user class that maximizes the monetary value that can be harvested.

There are huge and obvious areas where reddit can better monetize the site if they wished, and I would guess that it's going to happen. Reddit has a very long history of doing a bunch of different experiments with the site, and an influx of investment to properly analyze and then monetize the more successful ones is my guess as to what's going to happen. The recent drive to vacuum up and sell data to LLM companies is serendipitous icing right now.

There's also the huge opening that's happening right now with Twitter, where with a few chess moves, Reddit could very easily turn into or pick up the population of exTwitter users who find the current ownership trends so toxic they don't want to be associated with it any longer, but don't have a platform with a built in non-friends public sphere to turn to -- which is why Facebook hasn't been able to really tap into that market gap.

> And what's left is mostly a user class that maximizes the monetary value that can be harvested.

Yes, probably, but the user based changed dramatically before this. Since 2019 MAU more than doubled. I deleted my 11y old account after the last debacle. It was in the ~8th percentile of oldest accounts. That’s mind blowing, because I was by no means an early adopter.

The drop in signal-to-noise ratio has been dramatic over the years. The interesting, nerdy and quirky is drowned completely by memes, political rage bait, staged sob stories, etc. Which is fine for short term business, but also makes it replaceable. Attention brokerage is “daily fix” business, loyalty is near zero, and competition is fierce.

So every time someone argues a decision is good for business, it needs to be qualified by time and risk. If you sell your house to buy Nvidia calls, is that good for your personal finance?

>Virtually none of the reddit-alternatives that all spun up in the wake of this mop job have taken off.

You forgot about random discords, which is where they went.

Underrated observation. Discord has stayed in the shadows to the wider audience but in terms of quality content and community building, from my POV it’s already surpassed Reddit’s peak. I don’t like that it’s yet another proprietary platform, and the ownership/business side is shady to say the least. But man, the product is light years ahead in almost every respect, except (importantly) discoverability.

I've been seeing talk on a few servers I moved to about what their "next move" will be when Discord pulls more BS. So they're actively thinking and talking about how to keep the community going longer term. I hope they circle back to forums. They're so much better in virtually every way and can be setup to have livechat, reddit-style posts, you name it.

That and some moved to forums. I didn't get a complete 1 for 1 of all the subreddits I used to frequent, but most of the main ones I used have moved to one of those solutions.

> undesirable user population

Above all the examples you listed: tech-savvy redditors who know how to use adblock and Old Reddit.

Reddit gets its value from the users that were affected and pissed off by the recent events. Calling the moderators who created and continued to foster communities which exist to farm content for the company 'landed gentry' and telling them that their concerns over being able to work with a broken and incomplete toolset in their terrible app were not worthy of even a good faith conversation caused an irreconcilable awareness of exactly what they meant to in the reddit equation. You don't ever want to do that -- let people who work hard to create value for you live under the illusion (and often reality) that they are doing it for themselves and for their fellow community members, and they will happily break their backs for you and praise your platform. But if you make it obvious what you really want from them, they will realize how much energy it takes to deal with all of the moderation and cultivation and when they reach that point when one too many people called them a Nazi for removing a low effort post they look in the mirror and go 'why am I doing this' and you lose them.

Sure, it works to immediately cull a lot of the 'whiners who only cause you problems' but you end up bleeding the people who do irreplaceably valuable work for you for free, and your platform becomes a cesspool of low-effort crap and you can see that happening in real time.

They killed their golden goose.

But they got their IPO and spez is gonna cash out and wash his hands of all of it and get congrats from his silicon valley buddies and go to sleep at night thinking how much those ungrateful idiots used his platform for free and didn't understand reality and how people like him needed to be rewarded for their work. All the while ignoring the fact that he is actually just a terrible businessman who, if he hadn't met Paul Graham and given free money and an idea and hadn't gotten incredibly lucky that digg imploded at exactly the right time, he would be an upper middle class suburbanite making a living wage working as a salesman for a SaaS company or something.

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