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Comment by anon3_ | Hacker News Reader

The irony is reddit is a community website, the content is there thanks to the users, not just the moderators.

Pao has so far shown herself to be deeply out of touch with core values of reddit, I could elaborate.

However, Pao or not - how can you make a community-based site like reddit profitable without betraying the fact your users are doing the heavy lifting? I could elaborate here too.

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FB is an example of a system where all content is there due to users, but it's profitable. On the other hand, at least from what I could see, FB never really promoted any kind of special culture or community ethos.

based on that, at least two good ways to make a community-based site profitable would be to use it as a platform for this party profit - allow others to embed profitable apps/games/... and take a percentage of their income, and sell ads based on people's interests.

FB is actively changing how you see the world through it by removing the content you do not like to see. This is how it yields to more divided society.

http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizatio...

why is this related to the question of making community sites profitable? community-driven isn't the same as a non-divided society, lots of communities form around various division lines.

Removing the content you don't like comes in different shapes. Reducing diversity is bad in the context of people and culture, why is it different online? I know why, we need profit. Profit over people, profit over diversity. Anyways, as some of the guys pointed out, Reddit had some good years.

Reddit isn't much better. Majority opinion of the viewers of a sub will decide what's important for you to see.

At least pre-Pao times you could create a sub to your liking. I don't agree with many of the subs and their content there but I think that my liking should not be forced on others, and we should definitely not sacrifice diversity and community values for profit.

Then please stop teasing, and elaborate.

"Making a profit" may not be a realistic goal. I'm a huge fan of Goodreads.com and I totally understand why Amazon bought it. A small section of the population reads several books a year, but they represent 80% of all book sales. Creating a community where book readers go to find more books is a huge benefit to Amazon.

Pao's mistake (and one she continues to make) is forgetting that without contributors there is no reddit. I was around to see the center of gravity shift from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit. The one thing I'm certain of: it is overdue for another shift.

That "Slashdot to Digg" shift was not the exodus that was detrimental to the site. It was more like siphoning whatever the opposite is cream is off the bottom. Slashdot got a little better when that happened, in my opinion.

Slashdot has been terrible and out of touch for so long I can't even remember when the decline started. It was well before the departure of CowboyNeil. It's a pit of old 90s M$ memes, RMS lovefests, and fear of new technology.

Well, I switched from Slashdot to Reddit eight years ago, so I'm calling it then.

I think profit must be driven out from communication channels if we would like to have a non-dividing, truly open community. There are proofs that profit oriented social sites do not serve the community and yields to a highly divided society[1]. Corporate interest is against community values, since there is only one dimension to take care of, increasing the profit. The Reddit situation shows this, there is much damage done already, and we are going to see a lot more.

[1] http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizatio...

1) Elaborate.

2) Who do you think is doing the heavy lifting at Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, any other social network?

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