Comment by notaustinpowers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notaustinpowers | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

notaustinpowers

1. I think they don't want to get caught eating their own words when they're about to go public with an IPO. Backtracking because of third-party apps isn't going to go over well with potential investors.

2. I think it'll go down regardless. Mod tools is one thing, but I would really like to know the percentage of mods who use third-party Reddit apps like Apollo, RIF, etc. I wonder how many will leave the platform. If so we can expect more power-hungry mods, or Reddit having to pay for their own moderation.

3. Reddit says NSFW content is staying within the main app, but I can see it going away soon. A popular Reddit image hoster banned and deleted all NSFW content which already broke a lot of the posts in NSFW subreddits. And with Reddit now having investors and needing to attract more expensive advertisers, I can see them scrubbing NSFW content in full to become a more attractive ad platform. Especially since that's really going to be the way they make the bulk of their money.

That worked so well for tumblr. Reddit pulling a TwitterTumblr combo at once, let's see if they can survive this. 20-30% traffic drop?

The absolute traffic numbers immediately might not drop that big but the power function of participation - number of users is brutal for Reddit. There's a tiny, tiny fraction of users who were to leave the entire structure would fracture. The house doesn't collapse immediately but it's unsound so people begin to leave. First those in the know, then those who follow those in the know, and so on larger and larger waves until only a few people roam the ruins. It might just go on and on -- digg.com is still up. Even Slashdot is still there. Heck, I use lycos.com to force the login screen when logging in on public Internet.

This is the problem here: these people already started to delete their content and will withdraw their tools in three weeks. Time is up and the CEO doesn't even acknowledge the massive problems this change causes for moderation tools. His post should've been an about face but no.

So, no it won't be 20-30% immediately, might be so small it doesn't even register beyond normal day to day variance. But it will be 90%+ in a year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com