1) Ego and emotion are driving decisions at reddit
or
2) Reddit's leadership has run the numbers and genuinely thinks it will benefit their profitability plans if the users reacting negatively to these changes all leave. This is well past the point of just killing 3rd party apps because the API changes alone would have accomplished that.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." What do you do when incompetence would be unbelievable in scope and malice would be unbelievably incompetent.
When the parts of their community with outsize influence start talking about abandoning the site to somewhere else it threatens both their hundreds of millions in free labour per year, and also the future of their site.
Reddit exists as it does today because Digg made a series of bad decisions that led to mass movement away from Digg. The same thing can happen to Reddit.
Anyway, for many, the competition is "nothing at all". I will never download the official Reddit app. It's that bad. The mobile experience is worse. I'll just find something more productive to do with my time.
Yes, this is what people miss about Twitter too. They scoff at Mastodon, for example, and of course Mastodon is unlikely to ever attract hundreds of millions of users, but the biggest "competition" to Twitter is simply disengaging from Twitter. Quitting, not switching. You don't have to be on any social media site; you can spend your time in other ways.
I like to consume text content in public transport. Unfortunately, Reddit is like the worst app possible with bad/interrupted connection. Even a real-time strategy game I'm playing that needs constant data exchange works better in the subway than reddit.
At least they stopped forcing you of the mobile version onto the app.
The official mobile app is just inexplicably bad. The other day I was browsing through the 'Popular' tab, and every time I clicked on the thumbnail for an article, it took me to the web page... of some other article. Completely unrelated as far as I could tell. Tap on a CNN article about Trump indictment, instead get an EW article about Gwen Stefani (or whatever, I don't remember what it was).
It was consistent, too. Every article went to a different article instead, but tapping on that article always gave you the same different article. Tapping onto the comment screen and then onto the article gave the correct article.
A few weeks ago, the problem was different; I would tap on an article, and it would load up some other article, and then also the article I was trying to read. I'd read it, close it, then have to close the other article, then I'd be back at the main list.
For the longest time, refreshing an article list would result in a bunch of broken-looking entries in the list view; entries without titles, titles overlapping images, entries that were too big, and so on. Refreshing again often fixed it, but then gave me a new set of articles as if I'd already read the messed up ones it had brokenly tried to show me. This used to happen every single time; then it was just sort of random, about 50% of the time. I haven't noticed it lately because I got out of the habit of refreshing lists and I just kill the app when I want to get newer content.
There's also a little hovering downwards-arrow symbol to skip to the next top-level comment. It's black, it's fairly large, and it hovers over the content. You can't get rid of it whether you want it or not. The best you can do is toggle a preference that says "I don't want this to be movable", and then it sits in the corner, over top of the content, forever (except when it bugs out and sits in the middle of the screen on the left side forever).
For the longest time, the comment box to type your comment into was a fixed size; if your comment didn't fit into two or three lines, then your text wrapped onto the fourth line or whatever, except the text box wouldn't scroll so you couldn't see what you were typing. I got in the habit of copying the text to Notes, writing my comment there, and then switching back to Reddit. 50% of the time, the Reddit app would reload and I would lose the comment that I was replying to, but the other 50% of the time I could paste my comment in and post it.
When creating a new post, you first put in the content you want (title, body, image, whatever), and then you hit 'Next' and choose a subreddit. It gives you a list of suggestions, based not on subreddits that you're subscribed to or post to regularly, but rather subreddits that you've engaged with lately. I saw a post from /r/doordash yesterday, so now the app is suggesting maybe I want to post there, or /r/Weddingattireapproval.
Note that some subreddits don't allow self posts, or don't allow image posts, but you have to create your post first before choosing a subreddit that maybe doesn't allow it, forcing you to go back and change your post type/content. This feature seems just generally really stupid.
It goes on and on. It's a genuinely horrible app which can rarely even get the basic functionality working, and bugs stick around indefinitely.
In all honesty I think Discord is the competitor. You can join dozens of communities under one login, lots of creators and studios set up their own server, set up a private server for friends, and there's more control over who can join and see content. I mostly use it to keep in contact with a couple of friends, so I bet there's even more that could be done.
<product review> site:reddit.com
There's a 90-9-1 rule of thumb ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ ) and a migration from reddit to discord will benefit the 9-1 portions and provide a net loss to the 90% (lurkers / people who find content via google).
You can't make a community go somewhere. The the place that it ends up is on discord (and irc in times before), then discoverability for the rest of the population that aren't participants in that community will suffer along with the companies that previously hosted that content and were able to monetize their eyeballs.
... but isn't that what people have been wanting? "Down with {big corp}!" be it google or reddit or Facebook?
The thing is that most users of reddit and discord don't care about older topics. Go to any large sub with lax moderation and watch how many times the same questions are posted.
For many communities, it doesn't matter if its a reddit replacement with the reddit functionality but rather that it is a place to host that community (that will adapt to and complain about the confines of their new home).
It only lacks real functionality as a reddit replacement for those people who are lurkers and want to consume a digest of past content (and maybe add a forgettable comment to the end of a too long comment tree).
Their standing agreements with Reddit inc. may prevent them from doing so however.
None of the backends are likely able to support the load that Apollo (and RIF) would do (see also what HN did to Lemmy the other day).
Many of the users of Apollo and RIF are using them and the APIs that reddit was providing for free before to avoid paying for things and seeing ads making monetization of those and supporting the backends even more difficult (not that Lemmy and friends want to pay for server costs with advertisements - they'd rather donations - but that isn't a reliable income stream).
Acquiring users is relatively easy. Retention is hard.
"The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets."
Then Elon bought it and it became a right wing platform for what I can only describe as fascism disguised as "free speech". I'd log in and see virtually no one over time. Granted my main account was very tech/developer heavy and those communities seem to skew left. But I decided it just made me sad to login and have to see how hollow it was.
Glad to have experienced it 2014-2016 though. That was peak Tech Twitter for me.
A lot of the mod community on the popular subreddits do that as their dayjob as social media consultants or whatever you call them.
If a significant portion of users (especially power users who are more likely to contribute to discussion and posting content) leave the platform then it could cause a lot of issues for the future of Reddit.
Most Internet forum mods are low lifes who moderate for the little sense of power it gives them. There are plenty of those to go around. The reality is Reddit can literally ban all their current mods and get a new set of mods pretty easily.
Banning and blocking posts isnt the powertrip ppl think. It's not like being a cop and stealing cash, cocaine, and raping hookers.
It's more "oh another bot is posting chat room ads in bad grammar.
Ive seen many interesting forums falter bc a mod gets a six month interest and never logs back in again, forgets their password to their alt, etc.
And reddit already has AI duh to delete spam. It'a just not 100% so ppl have to do it.
Also mods do more than just enforce rules. It'a more abt setting the tone through pinned comments, certain flair and CSS etc. Also, intelligent cross-posting. You know, all kinds of nurturing shit. That takes TLC and passion. Lots of people like my subs but no one ever wants to help mod them.
I have helped to build 100k plus subs and currently moderate smaller subs I have a personal interest in. Along the way, I got to know people and have asked enough questions to get a sense of it.
I am about to step away from it entirely due to the damage Reddit appears to be doing right now. I showed up for the original by users, for users vision Aaron was a part of.
Each Reddit sale has burdened it so people could turn future value into cash today and we are now at the point where making that equation work YET AGAIN just might not go as well.
Fact is a ton of the smaller high value communities are moderated by people who value the topic the sub is about and who have domain knowledge. These communities are great!
Now there are low lifes power tripping for sure. Don't get me wrong there. And they are replaceable too. I do not see the percentages being in line with your statements here, that's all.
Few moderators care about getting some compensation. But they really do care a lot about being able to do for their users.
Reddit is not by users for users anymore. Has not been for a long time.
Seems a line got crossed this time around.
Now is the time for someone to build out the original Reddit vision. It was workable, sustainable and all that too. It would even pay out a nice living for the owners.
What it won't do is generate bazillion of dollars.
And what the current vision won't do is garner trust and loyalty among users.
It's a real mess!
The worst are paid to do it.
Those are the extents of the moderator space. One conclusion I came to is to never promote anyone who asks to be a moderator. Always approach solid candidates.
But the mods running smaller subs might spend an average of a few minutes per day moderating and the rest enjoying their community.
At the rates of burnout I see, candidates who can train and learn are worth far more than your meager estimation.
Theres enough and more work that needs to be done.
Reddit knows that if all the malcontents (From their point of view) leave they will be replaced by newer content creators/community participants who either don't know the story or don't care.
The problem with the Digg comparision is that the internet is a vastly different place today both from a legislative and a payment processing point of view. I would venture a guess that the legal and financial barriers to entry are and will continue to prevent anyone from making the next Reddit; or the next Twitter, for that matter.
We've gone from the Wild West to the Dust Bowl, lads
Do they?
What if the demographics of the malcontents and newer content creators is different?
I'm not completely sure, but I think that the malcontents are the people who are noticing what is going on; while the potential newer content creators are the people who lack such an insight. If this idea is correct, then the malcontents leaving is effectively a brain drain.
I'm not sure why inserting discussion of content creation here. Totally irrelevant. Nor is it about participation, its about moderating.
>The problem with the Digg comparision is that the internet is a vastly different place today both from a legislative and a payment processing point of view. I would venture a guess that the legal and financial barriers to entry are and will continue to prevent anyone from making the next Reddit; or the next Twitter, for that matter.
Funny I never gave digg or reddit any payment information.
And you never saw any ads because you used a third aprty app and ablock? This is why reddit doesn't give a shit if you leave. You were never anything but a cost center to them. They're more worried about making money than replacing moderators.
Want to drop PTO rates by 5%? Announce a 10% reduction, ignore the furor for a few days, then the CEO publishes the already-written "oops" letter and says that they listened to feedback from employees, looked at the "books" and decided they could compromise to 5%. Half the company thinks he's a great leader for listening and pushing back against the evil bitch running HR. If they wanted to just make more money off API calls, they would have announced the pricing, but then rolled it back part-way. Unfortunately, the Apollo dev recording his conversations with them, and their sheer incompetence/ego, seems to have taken all that off the table and instead they're just doubling down, which definitely does not work.
I know it's not you personally; not trying to shoot the messenger here. People need to understand that these tactics are bad for the company in the long term.
And yet it's a dumb mistake. It's considerably easier to become rich if you're trusted, than to become trusted if you're rich.
This is pretty much the story of the internet at this point, perhaps accelerated by the success of certain celebrities who proved that fame for fame's sake can become an indefinitely self-sustaining reaction, and there is no such thing as a downside as long as someone will stick a camera or a microphone or some kind of amplifier in front of you. Thus doubling down has become such a ubiquitous strategy.
This is a digression, but this saying has always frustrated me. It makes sense for a second, but then I wonder if whoever came up with it had any idea how much malice exists in the world. Many cases of "malice is at least as adequate an explanation as incompetence, given the facts or lack of them".
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"
Does it matter if it's incompetence or malice? If you care, are now forced into action, best just make a move and justify it after the fact.
Because people are often incompetent because they haven’t been taught/mentored. Also, people are often incompetent in one area of life but incredibly skilled in another, and because life is not just a series of transactions. Give someone coaching and you can change their life.
If I assume malice, it would not be worth continuing engagement.
> If this is a genuine question, I will happily share my belief.
> Because people are often incompetent because they haven’t been taught/mentored.
> If I assume malice, it would not be worth continuing engagement.
> Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence
If anything, an advanced malicious actor might even be counting on you thinking they're incompetent.
I am kind of curious about the perspective here. Is the argument that "eastern" (I assume, as opposed to "western") perspectives do not consider intent in evaluating actions?
But Chomsky is overrated anyway imo. Really smart, but an Ivory tower elite at the end of the day.
This would seem to support the hypothesis that not all cultures value intent as much.
A country like China would actually be in the middle on that scale, and it was also discussed how it's rapidly becoming more individualistic due to a number of policies, most notably the one-child policy.
All it really means is that when things go wrong, you shouldn't assume everyone involved is a giant arsehole trying to stick a spanner in the works.
Either way, your genius twist on that old phrase wins an upvote from me.
History proves otherwise. Colossuses have fallen. You can't rely on size to guarantee impunity for shitty actions.
Even if he brings in strikebreakers to moderate the closed subreddits the site will face a tidal wave of spam which isn’t going to make the causal users happy.
They've been doing that since the reddit redesign thing, trying to go more mainstream yet.
I think that's why they feel they can burn bridges
They can’t easily do that in the current financial environment. I suspect that they’re also seeing a plateau in year over year user growth. Bundle that up with everybody seeing advertising revenue decline and there’s no good story to sell to investors.
I think that they’re probably under tremendous pressure right now by their investors to at least get close to profitable so that they can IPO.
Missed opportunity due to... what? Desperation at Reddit?
I think the Apollo developer mentioned that in order to break even with the new fees, they’d have to have subscribers who are paying $5/mo. To make a profit, third party apps would need subscribers who pay within the $60-100/yr range that you mentioned.
Reddit probably knew this would cull the number of third party apps out there, which is to their benefit since their mobile app would have fewer competitors. I bet they’re also banking on most people not caring, or eventually coming back to the platform after a short period of time.
I sincerely hope that they’re wrong and the user base doesn’t return.
Why not both? This is the platform that literally built itself off of registering fake accounts and posting spam to make themselves look more active than they were, after all[0]. Reddit administration is a unique blend of malicious incompetence. I call it malicincompetence.
For example, spez in particular notably was caught editing the posts of /r/the_donald posters he was in a shouting match with. This is malicious, because the admins demonstrated that they're willing to fuck with historical records to defame their enemies. But it's also incompetent, because it turned a bunch of fascists[1] into martyrs. If he had just banned /r/TD then and there, or even just that poster, it would have been less malicious and less incompetent at the same time.
Going deeper, a lot of malicious behavior is itself inherently stupid. That's the idea behind the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: betrayal is advantageous only when you don't think more than a step ahead. Once you do, then tit-for-tat[2] becomes better, possibly with some kind of forgiveness term if random or accidental betrayal is possible. None of Reddit's CxO suite[3] thinks this way. They think their users are resources to be taken for granted, except they're also really bad at doing that. And Reddit users have just gotten used to shouting down these kinds of stupid changes until the admins fold, which they usually do, because Reddit doesn't have the kind of user lock-in to make people just stick with it.
[0] Nobody noticed until the admins just outright admitted it a few years later. Although if /r/SRD and /r/de is to be believed, they're doing the same shit again in German: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red...
[1] Ok, I don't have citations for the victim of Spez's tomfoolery being a fascist, but /r/TD was notorious back then for banning anyone who wasn't enthusiastically riding the Trump train that hard.
[2] Do what the opponent did last round.
[3] Except maybe Ellen Pao, only because she wasn't around long enough for Reddit to rub off on her.
Given that incompetence is more harmful than malice, you stay pessimistic, and still blame incompetence. Simply because, if you're pessimistic, the worst that can happen tells you that you were right.
A malicious but competent person will cause damage to a few, when it's desirable for him. While an incompetent but non-malicious person will cause damage to everyone, including himself, at random intervals, regardless of his own desires.
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On-topic. I think that Reddit is trying to capitalise on business customers, using its platform to train its AI models with. If that's correct, then even if the users reacting negatively leave, and this puts a dent on Reddit's profit, Reddit will still profit more from those business customers.
Unsurprisingly this is not sustainable, investors are paying for the site and ultimately they want to see a return. Money talks, bs walks.
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
Almost EVERY question went unanswered. He spent approximately 35 minutes replying to 14 questions, essentially all of which were from Reddit "PowerMods" (that cadre of 6 moderators that control >118 of the Top 50 subreddits), and most of those answers were single paragraph rehashes of the same point: "We'll keep talking to developers", and multiple of those questions appear to have scripted, as noted when he answered a question: "A: blah blah blah", then rapidly edited out the "A:".
Not only is this provably untrue but your math is nonsensical.
EDIT: Provably untrue proof -- top 100 subreddit moderator list:
* https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be...
https://www.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/comments/gk0w4c/t...
You were saying? Even the Reddit admins didn't deny it, in that second post.
Moderators of the 100 top subreddits:
* https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be...
Your links from 3 years ago showing screenshots are not relevant to what I claimed.
Your rebuttal is ... a gist?
Funnily, I can prove this gist wrong in about 15 seconds:
> AutoModerator moderates 67 subreddits: ['mildlyinfuriating', 'AmItheAsshole', 'PublicFreakout', 'WhitePeopleTwitter', 'antiwork', 'interestingasfuck', 'funny', 'gaming', 'LivestreamFail', 'politics', 'worldnews', 'nba', 'pathofexile', 'leagueoflegends', 'nextfuckinglevel', 'todayilearned', 'NoStupidQuestions', 'MurderedByWords', 'Piracy', 'shitposting', 'OnePiece', 'buildapc', 'pcmasterrace', 'MadeMeSmile', 'Genshin_Impact', 'ukraine', 'DigitalCodeSELL', 'GlobalOffensive', 'soccer', 'wow', 'tifu', 'personalfinance', 'LoveIsBlindOnNetflix', 'Tinder', 'anime', 'europe', 'ffxiv', 'sysadmin', '2007scape', 'UkraineWarVideoReport', 'Eldenring', 'pcgaming', 'technology', 'CombatFootage', 'TwoXChromosomes', 'DnD', 'DestinyTheGame', 'aww', 'wallstreetbets', 'manga', 'Games', 'jobs', 'feedthebeast', 'dataisbeautiful', 'DotA2', 'unpopularopinion', 'FashionReps', 'maybemaybemaybe', 'LifeProTips', 'nfl', 'Fauxmoi', 'SteamDeck', 'CasualUK', 'television', 'Overwatch', 'Steam', 'canada']
And yet AutoModerator is a Mod of far more.
The first dozen posts on its user page are for subreddits not listed on here, all of which it moderates: randominterface, aistuff21, genkicourses_com, genkicourses_cheapest, I could go on and on and on.
So I have no idea what this random snippet is meant to disprove. It's certainly not reliable or complete.
Did you forget that you wrote 'top 50 subreddits?' That is the list of the mods for the top 100 subreddits and which top 100 subs they mod in. I am not sure how you think that makes it a 'gist'. I suggest you expand your ability to parse datasets properly.
But no, it went exactly as anyone could've predicted, no notes.
1. they didn't budge an inch
2. spez is a fucking jerk as always
3. it was over after only a small handful of questions, some of which may have been preplanned
4. we learned nothing new.
It's exactly what everyone saw coming. gg.
This most definitely seems to me like it was more of a "how dare they question me" spur of the moment decision by spez than a legitimate PR effort. At the same time it just reinforces the obvious conclusion that third party app devs were lied to and set up to fail.
>> How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
> We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.
Self burn. Those are rare.
A combination of their power user base and a small monthly subscription fee for access could result in something that can retain a niche subreddit feel across the site.
With the possible exception of /r/science the larger subreddits are flooded in low effort posts and mostly unusable.
Their messaging is probably to get all of the other apps ect to sell out to the big boys or essentially get fired from their own company.
The language model war is in full swing now the moats are starting to form.
They're betting big on continued engagement or they actually want it to fail. Time will tell.
Sell out to whom? The offer of API access is a lie -- everyone who has asked to setup a billing situation has been ignored.
>everyone who has asked to setup a billing situation has been ignored.
Well that's kinda messed up.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/5emsq3/reddit_reacts...
Most of the top questions were childish and useless, asking to get rid of the ads, go back to the original spirit of Reddit. Comparing the pressure and decision making process of a CEO who raised 1.3 BILLION dollars to some basement dweller who’s shutting down their app out of spite (pretty sure they could sell the app for $5M today no questions asked)
After so many rounds of raising, I’m being generous if I guess that spez owns 5% of Reddit stock. Reddit is being run right now by the biggest investment firms in SV. Rigjtfully looking for ROI. It would literally make them more money to shut down Reddit than to do what everyone in the AMA is asking them to do
In terms of accessibility, I understand they have a roadmap. I don’t understand how they don’t have 400 ADA lawsuits on court right now. Every corporation I worked for had been flooded by copy paste ADA lawsuits, and an app or 3rd party apps aren’t enough, the website has to be fully accessible
The trouble is people showed up for what Reddit was. Let us call that the Aaron Reddit. That Reddit was sustainable and could be expressed as by users for users.
That vision picked up a ton of users who love threaded, frank, unfettered discussion. It was never going to make millions, but it would have endured for a very long time.
All that changed upon each sale. And this last one is brutal, leaving current owners holding the bag.
These changes to crank out big returns are toxic to a very high percentage of users. And they are where the content comes from too.
Someone else is going to reproduce the original Reddit vision and when they do, this one will dry up just like Digg did.
Edit: “Oasis” sounds like a fine name for a non profit alternative to what Reddit coalesced.
Really? "Rightfully"?? I guess someone owes me money, because I did a few investments where the ROI was $0, some of them intentionally bad (family > money).
Do people really prefer Reddit shut down or be owned by Meta, just because of an app made by a single dev, that someone could buy and keep alive, or 10 companies could recreate tomorrow?
Reddit isn’t going to be turned into a foundation
In the startup world 90% of companies are shut down because their ideas are not viable. If reddit still isn't viable after 18 years it might be time to pull the plug and move back to something sustainable.
> or be owned by Meta
I voted for kodos
> or 10 companies
Would that be the total number of companies that could pay the money reddit wants for API access?
That isn't the issue. Even those who applied for access willing to pay have been ignored -- it was never about paying for access, it is about shutting down apps they don't control.