Hacker News Reader

Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

I don't pay a lot of attention to things like revenue and the amount of active users, but I think that by those metrics Huffman has been a pretty successful CEO. It looks like he regrets selling Reddit so cheap the first time, and has had growth as his main objective since returning as CEO. I guess taking in a lot of venture capital pretty much forced him to do that as well. New Reddit and the official apps has brought in a lot of new users, while changing what the site is. I don't think they value their old users particularly high, there's probably not a lot of them compared to the whole user base, and getting rid of them is a calculated move.

View on HN

I think you're right on the mark. Reddit doesn't want the old users who used it like an internet forum. Reddit wants to be another Instagram, TikTok, etc. As a business it's the "right" choice and the only way to make their investors money.

It's a shame we're losing the biggest internet forum, but it's been on this trajectory for a long time anyway.

> It's a shame we're losing the biggest internet forum, but it's been on this trajectory for a long time anyway.

But that's what so great about reddit compared to the other big social media platforms: hard delineation by interest groups (subreddits).

Instagram, and any others (AFAIK) do not have anything like this feature. It's all just a jumbled mess of user-to-user connections.

I wouldn't say we're "losing the biggest internet forum" there. They can still make reddit more mainstream without old communities having to change much, right?

Not really - the official clients constantly push content in which I (for one) have no interest, in the name of “engagement”.

I won’t stand for it, and have just stopped using Reddit - mostly passively, but occasionally posting. Without a user-respective native client that follows system conventions and does not push garbage, the service is just not worth using.

> Not really - the official clients constantly push content in which I (for one) have no interest, in the name of “engagement”.

Where are you getting that on reddit? I don't think I've ever seen content that's not normal posts in my subreddits. [Maybe it's been there the whole time but ad blocked away or something so I'm just never seeing it?]

I don't use r/popular, r/news, r/all, etc much if they're doing something different there.

If you don't follow a lot of subreddits, then they regularly pester you to follow some, or a stupid live stream of something or the other, or other similar stuff designed to increase "engagement".

I hate engagement.

Isn't explicit subreddit-level engagement and information organization incredibly valuable for targeting/monetization?

imo, it like they're disorganizing the site to undermine and eventually cut out independent moderators, to avoid the business risk that is actively playing out.

>It's a shame we're losing the biggest internet forum

I'm looking forward to that. back in the day it was "normal" to have topic related forums/communities. walled-garden-groups on social media and centralized solutions like reddit killed those, because they were easier to set up and manage. but the community was no longer really owned by someone from that community.

> ... has had growth as his main objective since returning as CEO. I guess taking in a lot of venture capital pretty much forced him to do that as well.

Venture capital is a hell of a drug.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com