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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Enshittification is the answer. Old Reddit doesn’t make any money. Users block what few ads there are and it’s free so there’s no subscription revenue otherwise.

New Reddit is full of ads plus social media engagement-bait garbage. New Reddit makes money. Reddit the company wants people to use New Reddit.

So why does Old Reddit still exist? Because that’s where the content creators live! Old Reddit is a cost centre but a necessary one to keep the old guard of high-effort posters around. Alienate them and the New Reddit users won’t have any new content to engage with.

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I wonder how new Reddit users manage to post nowadays, given that many default subreddits have karma restrictions. You need esoteric knowledge, like knowing that /r/askreddit allows you to build initial karma via comments, to be able to do that.

Why couldn't old reddit make money? Just going by my napkin math, serving 125M DAU compute and storage shouldn't cost more much than $2M/mo in cloud hosting.

If I serve a single adsense banner at the top of each page at a low ($2) RPM, I should pull between $15-30M/mo off those 125M daily users depending on engagement. Realistically this type of lazy ad integration could be much higher.

Given the maturity of the platform, salary spend shouldn't be more than another $5M/mo (realistically this could be even lower). That would net me a cool $8M/mo minimum.

I really don't understand how old reddit couldn't make money.

Infinite scrolling + algorithmic ads. That's how Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok all make their money. You get way more ad impressions per hour than from people who click on links and read / participate in discussions (which is what Old Reddit is all about). Young social media addicts can scroll hundreds of ads per hour because they scroll so fast.

Except that Facebook has a rather nasty problem where friend-based social media is a soft monopoly (which they try very hard to enforce https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433) and its CEO already has a bad reputation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 and the product does not work on top of that (people miss messages, message requests, and posts, all the time)

"Addictive business model" is one thing. It's annoying, we should highly discourage it, but - some are worse than others

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