Being profit-driven is a fine model for a business. However, it doesn't make business sense to alienate developers and users in service of that goal.
Reddit has always struck me as a company with no creativity. They have this huge diverse community and can't seem to find a way to monetize it in any way other than the most basic advertising model.
They always seem to do things in conflict with the community rather than in concert with them.
> Reddit has always struck me as a company with no creativity
I thought reddit was really clever for the first ~7 years of operations. They replaced forums, fostered communities, gained a reputation as a place to get real people's takes, and attracted people willing to have interesting conversations. The upvote/downvote system that is now so common was made popular from reddit. They brought awareness to important political topics surrounding net neutrality. They were leaders in early Web2.0, where each user saw content that appealed to them, because everyone could choose which subreddits were in their homepage. It was highly social and highly engaging.
After a certain point in 201X the dark patterns began to appear. I was almost fully disengaged by the start of 2013. I can't remember the details, but I remember being increasing disappointed with reddit every time I returned for a brief visit.
I remember when they fired Victoria Taylor who was the ambassador for their celebrity AMAs. At that exact time, AMAs were absolutely hopping with celebrities and even President Obama. Reddit was getting huge media coverage and that was likely lots of new traffic.
...and then they killed it...
They still have celebrity AMAs but that was the peak and it immediately lost most relevance.
Victoria getting the boot really was a major turning point for a lot of users I think, certainly for me. The site hasn't felt the same since.
I still have some pretty negative feelings about that whole situation, and am confused every time I'm reminded of it. Why wasn't there more explanation? Why didn't they at least replace her with someone who played a similar role in a similar way? Did they not realize that people really liked her approach, or did they just not care? A lot of goodwill was burned that day.
I'm kind of vaguely intrigued by the current situation, but I'm realizing I mostly stopped actually caring much a long time ago. It feels like there's been a vast & growing chasm between the better parts of the community and the site's management for quite a while. They did not in fact "remember the human".
Yeah I feel the same way. Reddit was this organic thing and IAMA being created out of nothing and growing into something unique and interesting is just one example. It was fun and interesting and Victoria was part of the Reddit organization that was in on that.
When they let her go, it was a signal that Reddit corporate doesn't want to be a part of the fun. They just want to do their own thing that nobody likes while the rest of us do our own thing. Reddit the site started being hostile to Reddit the community instead of embracing it.
Hey, whenever someone is building a very strong reputation that could survive outside of Reddit, they get shutdown. Maybe there's a pattern? I'm genuinely asking.
There was a dedicated AMA app and it was poised to become an independent revenue stream. The leadership's outright destruction of the AMA platform in their attempt to monetize it looks like a microcosm of what they're doing to the entire site today. If they start booting moderators during the blackout, that will complete the congruence.
None of that was all that original... Slashdot had the links & stories with votes and a thriving, nested comment section (although it was curated), and link aggregators were a dime a dozen. And I mean, there was Digg. They put it all together in an effective way, though.
Nearly all businesses are profit-driven. My wife owned a medical practice, and while she chose the profession because she wanted to help people, she built a company around it to put food on our table. There's nothing wrong with that.
But optimizing for short-term profit over long-term revenue is just nuts. Apple didn't become a trillion dollar company by focusing on maximizing profit above all else every single quarter.
Why do you assume Redditors won’t just use the mainline mobile app? Honest question and I don’t mean personally why you won’t, but the average user that looks and clicks on ads on Reddit?
The long and repeated history of social media platforms shutting down 3rd party apps, despite lots of outrage, is not the best track record to bet on some mods closing down subs for weekend making a difference.
People might say Reddit is different because they like to get stirred up fighting authority like net neutrality but the next question is where will they go instead?
Betting against the network effect is a losing battle.
Whether Reddit should have acted differently and reformed their bottom feeding design/web/mobile teams long ago is a different question.
> Why do you assume Redditors won’t just use the mainline mobile app? Honest question and I don’t mean personally why you won’t, but the average user that looks and clicks on ads on Reddit?
I'm sure that's what reddit is counting on, and it's probably true.
The issue is that subreddit moderators are not normal users, and work entirely for free. They don't get paid, and are vital to maintaining the health and tone of each subreddit.
And unlike e.g. content creators on twitter, they have nothing tying them to the platform. They don't benefit financially, even indirectly, from the arrangement. They're working for some combination of a sense of (altruism/community responsibility) and (satisfaction/egotism). That's a setup that practically encourages them to jump ship in this situation.
I'm sure that won't immediately hurt the extremely large, general subs which reddit would actively support regardless, but it could do a lot of damage to everything else. In a vacuum the remaining platform (a small percentage of valuable subs) might be exactly what reddit wants! But if a competing network of forums starts up, it might be able to eat reddit in exactly the same way reddit ate digg.
I’ve always thought this too. Especially because I believe (I have no data to back this up) a huge amount of their traffic is from search engine results.
As search results became gamed and sites became SEO machines, finding a Reddit thread discussing the thing you want to know about is a breath of fresh air.
Nobody else has that. Reddit has a ton of really niche content that people want to read, spread out over a large amount of time. Why are they focused on becoming a place where people infinite scroll reposts of TikToks?
Instead, they went the route of introducing features that at best cannibalized other features (chat and the regular message system - it’s confusing) and at worst just seem like hasty add ons or complete stabs in the dark.
Even Discord has a system to directly monetarily sponsor servers you want to support, why on earth doesn’t that exist for Reddit? Good lord. It’s such a simple thing to add. Instead they charge money to customize your avatar like it’s a Fortnite skin. It’s insane.
They also try to monetize the whole thing with Reddit Gold or whatever where you can pay like five bucks to put a badge on someone else's post or comment.
Although I wouldn't know a whole lot about it because after a decade-plus on Reddit I've still never bought any.
This was such a confusing feature to me. I just looked and my Reddit account is 13 years old, and I've also never bought any of these "rewards" because they seem so empty and useless. The person you're giving it to gets nothing other than some images above their post, so I _know_ that if I spend the money on one it's basically just a donation to Reddit which I'm not keen to do if I get nothing out of it. They also have their "premium" subscription which seems even more useless.
Now, if they had implemented it in a way similar to how Brave did their rewards where people would get some share of the reward (say, 5% of the money?) then I would be way more likely to buy it and would probably also participate a lot more. Imagine if some people could make a living off of Reddit the same way they do off of YouTube or Twitch!
I pay for Reddit Gold. Reddit has brought a lot of value to my life, I don't like seeing ads, and I like the idea of supporting non-ad-based business models.
I've supported it on and off for years and currently have Reddit Gold. It's easy to justify the cost when considering the conversations over the years and the amazing resource it's been for making decisions or learning.
I was already considering dropping Gold at the end of this payment cycle due to some of their advertising bedfellows, but this mess has really sealed the deal.
Maybe Reddit doesn't have a breakout competitor for people to jump to atm, but I suspect blood is in the water and we're about to see an influx of alternatives.
Twitter engagement is definitely lower[0], though it’s difficult to know from the outside how much and we can’t trust their numbers.
Anecdotally, the accounts I follow in various niche subject areas have both depleted in number, with I’d estimate around 20-25% having stopped posting altogether, and cut back on how often they post if they did stay.
My personal impression of post-purchase Twitter is that the quality has declined significantly as paid accounts crowd the top responses. But, I don't have a good sense of it, since I removed multiple accounts and haven't been back.
I'm serious about not participating in or contributing to products and platforms It could be bias, but I don't think I'm alone. Maybe new people will take my place, but this whole thing obviously puts a damper on the word of mouth marketing they were getting out of me.
I have never bought them but I have actually received a few silver and gold badges like that for some of my comments. So I guess that makes my account a fake then?
they used to give out reddit silver badge and other badges for free if you used the official app. I used that to give out a lot of badges to the community I moderate.
Ironically all the badges are from memes that were born on reddit...
Right! My reddit comments are public and reflect my preferences and interests pretty well. Yet I’ve never ever felt like clicking a reddit ad. Instagram on the other hand had me clicking on ads occasionally
Maybe they need better ad tooling and promotion of it. Probably big improvements to be made just in getting enough ad inventory to show something remotely relevant to a user.
Ads are Reddit are a notoriously poor investments compared to other social media sites. Maybe it's an intractable problem given the nature of the site or again maybe they just aren't engaging enough with the communities to target ads more specifically.
Maybe they should buy Apollo for $10m, at least it would be a revenue stream based on tangible user benefits rather than whatever cosmetic meme bullshit they think of next.
I installed their official app and just love how direct links from wrb, like this, or within app itself, just do not work at all. Otherwise, itstnot _that_ bad but compared to RIF (which I use/d) it's bad usability.
To Apollo and RIF guys, if you read this. You got some technical chops, you got some ux skills, you got some clout and, after all, you have some cash.. why not join forces and deploy reddit's clone to be used as a backend for both of your apps? You can hijack userbase, and keep growing on top of it, just like imgur did. (Follow me for more business advice)
The amazing thing to me was finding out how much the data the official app was using. Granted it has been a few years since I switched to Apollo but I was using in the 10-20 GB/month from the Reddit app.
> How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
Had he a modicum of awareness regarding the question, he would have also addressed the community engagement part of the question - to users, the most important part of the question.
"The community built our platform and we'll never forget that or make engagement unpleasant. We need your engagement." Had he said that, and then segued to profit, he at least would not have been betrayed by his predetermined inflexibility.
I think Reddit probably had a path to making a modest profit, but investors don't want the 2x dog. Now they're probably going to do the social media equivalent of selling the copper wiring from the walls.
It is wild that a company that is nearly two decades old and seemingly has never been profitable is doing an IPO. Who is going to buy their stock? What would make someone think that Reddit will suddenly turn things around in year 19 and actually become profitable?
anyone who wants to train an AI model on relatively authentic data and natural (for certain definitions of "normal") human interactions, I would assume
like IDK what the comps are, what is another large corpus with authentic interactions and scoring? internet archive is probably the closest (although substantially more valuable), maybe the google library project is semi analogous in scale and value (although obviously very different in nature).
It appears he has confused the reddit AMA for an IPO prep call.
What a tone deaf farce...
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/comment/jnk...