Comment by RedditModerator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RedditModerator | Hacker News Reader

RedditModerator

As a very early user of Reddit and a founder and long-time moderator of a popular subreddit, it seems to me that Reddit is cruising towards an iceberg, and it's hard to envisage them turning the ship around at this point. There's so much momentum behind the toxic nature of Reddit now and many of the good moderators are getting fed up and either jumping ship or preparing to, leaving subreddits to be managed by more self-interested and less competent people.

Over the years I've created a list of suggestions that I would have made if I had the ear of somebody in authority at Reddit. But that's one thing they've never really done - made it easy for mods, who effectively do a large part of running their website 24/7, without pay, to provide feedback and have real discussions and input with the admins. And it is to the detriment of the website, its owners and its users. I believe that Reddit will fail in the next few years, unless it undergoes radical changes soon. And by fail I mean, it will probably still exist, possibly have more users, but it will be so toxic that anyone with any sense will not go there anymore. The garden is in very real danger of being completely overtaken by weeds.

And it's a shame. I really loved Reddit, it helped me on occasions and I also saw it help many other people.

But the only reason I personally still use Reddit is because I feel an affinity for the subreddit I created and have moderated for years, and the community I have managed to create, which I am proud to say is in stark contrast to the toxicity of many other popular subreddits.

I think the "everything should be free and no one should make money" mentality that is popular on the internet is very harmful in the long term. Moderators should be paid for doing a good job and content creators should be paid for good content. Making ads the only way to do this ends up forcing content to essentially become an ad. This is happening everywhere on the internet.

I agree. I think that the revenue model for websites like Reddit was what set them up for failure. In the beginning, focused on growth, it probably made sense to get as many users as possible, as quickly as possible. But Reddit doesn't need more users. It stopped needing more users a long, long time ago. It needs better users and healthier communities. And less incentive for mods to collect hundreds of subreddits and use them for self-interest.

Sidenote: Look at the growth of r/WallStreetBets https://subredditstats.com/r/wallstreetbets from January (less than 2 million users) to the beginning of February (almost 9 million users). There is no way the mod team could handle that, given the resources and tools they have available (I'm not affiliated with WSB).

It is the essential flaw of the VC growth model based on advertising. Not just for communities like reddit but for all companies. They take on more investors and more control goes to people who really don't care too much about it.

I think we're at the stage now where a solo indie founder (or 2) could start a site like Reddit that could run very cheaply and then get monetized by paid subscribers.

Even just 0.5%-1% paid subscribers could support a site like that with the right infra.

Of course, you'd have to start out in one small niche and then gradually grow outward.

Would you have any suggestions for attracting people that can build communities around them on a platform similar with reddit (and HN) but built to federate using ActivityPub ? I'm building such a thing and I am interested in how to actually get people to use it. :D

They said they are doubling their staff. Maybe you should be the change you want to see in the world and apply. It's an opportunity to have a highly leveraged impact, because even though reddit is one of the world's big social media sites, the staff is small.

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