I'm sure reddit would be super tore up if the fat haters, racists, and jailbait traders left :rolleyes:
The company wants to grow and become more profitable, the community wants to preserve what it has.
I don't know if a site like this can really be run as a for profit company, at least not a growth oriented one. The obvious monetization schemes will be met with resistance. Even though its attracted a lot of users, can it really ever make money?
And this is the part about Reddit that I just don't get. A few years ago their users were a rather homogeneous group of nerds that had a lot of trust in the reddit management. Why on earth didn't they capitalize on that?
By doing all the latest actions that aim at getting rid of people that are now unwanted they try to get once again a somewhat homogeneous (albeit different) group of people. So maybe soon they are structurally exactly where they were some years ago except for the huge lost of trust of their users.
How is this going to help increasing their profit?
The possibilities should be endless. One thing I could have imagined would be cooperations with companies that have products which reddit user value and use heavily. Take Valve's Steam, for instance. Reddit could have offered those companies a service to buy a sub that is especially tailored for the company's needs so that they could turn their sub into a tailor-made r&d lab (with special features as required...). Those who love their products would be thrilled to develop ideas and share their user knowledge with their favorite company.
As long as they would've selected companies carefully and resist from interfering with other parts of reddit no one would run away. If anything, those "special sub" could be a gateway drug for new users.
I would start with rewarding administrators with payment (akin to youtube, somewhat proportionally to views -- this creates a strong incentive towards fidelity), revamp post priority algorithms, and add some basic functionality that you need to install an add on (!), RES, to get (what other top 100 website needs this?).
If this happened, Internet would explode from all the rage.
I'm aware it was invested in at a 1/2 billion valuation, and good luck to them, but I stand by my analysis.
Reddit is growing and would continue to grow really quickly. There's no competition in sight. Owning the discussion backbone of the internet is massively valuable, comparable at least to WhatsApp I'd say.
Can it die out due to massive exodus? Sure, but something similar will replace it. And for each iteration (slashdot,digg,etc), those websites have become larger and more consolidated. It's fair to assume at some point it will reach long term stability (particularly if it's properly managed).
As far as reddit growing, is the plan to lose money on each pv but make it up in volume?
Even stack overflow seems to have trouble monetizing, and that's both brand safe and targeted to a valuable audience.