Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO’s recent remarks

The really impressive thing is... if you follow a user profile link to a comment and vote, the vote doesn't count.

And it was really hard to see spez's comments without following them from his profile, because they were so downvoted.

So I don't even know how you get down to -1000 on comments.

So, does the heat matter?

Benefit of the doubt only stretches so far.

Now as they ramp up to an IPO, 3rd party clients are seen as a liability, not an asset.

They view anyone that complains as a vocal minority, the my don’t believe their MAU numbers will change in any meaningful way.

If anything, all the press around it just raises Reddits profile.

That’s my take on what’s going on, but I have no insider knowledge so I’m just guessing :-)

On the contrary, I really resonated with the top response to one of his replies:

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/comment/jnk...

People keep talking about an AMA session, but there was none. Not every self post on reddit is an AMA session, and I don't think it's fair to call his post one and attack it on that basis.

reddit got lucky - right place, right time, and locked in a strong enough network effect to stay alive despite the best efforts of their leadership. Look at their atrocious UI. The clumsy desperate attempts to drive users to an app. The boneheaded copycat features that never quite work, or are just downright baffling.

In an alternate world a smaller team would have focused on site reliability, mod tools, and a small set of features that made sense. Use third party ad tools until, or if, you get a better homegrown solution. With this route reddit would have been profitable and probably good. Instead...

Perhaps he's trying to pull a Nuclear Gandhi[1] and go 'deep' enough to underflow to being extremely positive?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

And then you "blame" the 3rd party apps?

Sounds like a basic failure of housekeeping. But, but let's blame "remote work" or something like that, yeah

Also pretty damning they can’t make a profit where others can off their data lol

Finally, it is nice. Back to the good old days where things have to at least pass the common sense test.

It is just a fun thought experiment. But I think Reddit the company has been more than just a landlord. They have made more than just rented out space to make Reddit what it is.

If they paid their mods, it might be a different conversation.

No one on Reddit asked investors to come over and invest. They did so because they thought they could get a return. Well, that’s the risk of being an investor, isn’t it?

Reddit brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year ($550m is what I recently heard). Let’s not pretend that the community is at all taking advantage of Reddit, right? I’m firstly skeptical that a site like Reddit can’t turn a profit on HALF A BILLION dollars a year, but fine. Let’s accept that’s the truth. They could have worked with the community on this. There are things they could’ve done. They could’ve:

- engaged the community on the changes

- given devs more than a mere 30 days to figure something out

- responded to repeated requests by the devs to work together

- provided options to the community on various methods of getting more revenue in

They did NONE of those things. The CEO lied and spat in their faces.

> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

> When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.

In fact, I’m always a little bemused at the level of shock from folks, especially here, when a company does what companies will inevitably do.

Reddit, doesn’t exist for the good of its users, outside of retaining significant numbers for the purposes of generating profit from selling their data and selling ad space.

Like every other social platform, the primary motive is profit, full stop.

It absolutely feels sleazy that billions of people freely contribute their time and talent to generate content and then get pushed aside when the companies business model changes. But everyone should absolutely expect that from day one.

Social platforms are a fun, but one sided relationship that will eventually turn sour.

The argument that it would not have happened without you is almost always wrong - it is almost always a mistake to assume success is simply because of your choices, and not lots of factors. This is one reason repeat success is very very very rare.

I'm not saying they have no legal right to try - of course they do. I'm just saying it doesn't work because nobody thinks they should be allowed to let it work.

How they run the site and whether they need to make a profit is of no consequence to users - they don't give a shit. You can't make them give a shit. It wasn't who they attracted. They don't have a 100 million users who want them to make a profit. They have 100 million users who don't give the slightest crap about whether they make any money at all.

Yes, trying to generate profit on value they don't create is freeloading. Quite literally, in fact. It is the literal definition of freeloading to try to extract value by taking advantage of what others do. You don't argue they create the value, but instead because they own the platform they are allowed to extract it.

Legally, yes. But that's sort of irrelevant. Socially, no.

The crux of your argument is basically "if my ideology is right than investors are dumb and this is a bad investment" I would agree with that. It was always a bad investment. It still is!

Precisely because freeloading of the kind they are doing always generates enough ire over time to ruin the community. Usually before you can extract enough profit to be worth it.

You can feel sorry for platforms, and for me, that's okay. But you still haven't shown that i'm actually wrong, and in fact, what i've said is backed up by the consistent failure of things that operate the way you seem to think is okay.

I mostly feel sad for you. You seem to have forgotten somewhere along the line that corporations as a kind of entity were created to serve society (not investors), and not the other way around.

I'm not saying all things this large should be non-profit, mind you, just that the kind of skimming that reddit is trying to do, where they think they can make a few bucks in profit per user through freeloading, while providing nothing in return, is neither helpful to society, and doesn't work anyway!

There are more symbiotic for-profits that realize they need their communities to want them to succeed, and do okay.

Put another way - for profits running hosting like Reddit where they think their profit is more important than the communities, and that they are the reason for the success of those communities, basically always fail. Those smart enough to realize neither of these are true sometimes can make a go of it.

Usenet.

While not a message board, the Wikimedia Foundation does well financially, hosts lots of content, receives massive traffic, and has an open API.

> So the really difficult part, the one where the value ultimately comes from, does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users.

Federated authentication and open protocols are a thing. Imagine the internet of old with countless message boards, but under a single sign on.

As far as content moderation, folks talk a lot about AI and the spam it will bring, however, there is also the opportunity for AI moderation.

Your logic is: there has never been a not-for-profit large online community, therefore the value comes from the specific for-profit company that currently exists.

That is unconvincing because it is overly specific in who it is attributing value to. Is Facebook responsible for most of the value of its community? No, because if Facebook didn't exist, Myspace would still exist and do the same thing that Facebook is doing. Therefore, Facebook (and Myspace) are both not creating the value, because if they didn't exist, someone else would exist that does the same thing. The main reason there's one behemoth is because of network effects, which makes it nearly impossible for competition to start, which gives the illusion that that behemoth is doing something unique and exceptionally skilful. But they are not. One valid interpretation is that they're free-riding off the community that they've captured.

Reddit replaced Digg. Some other startup will replace Reddit.

It’s the users and the content they produce that’s irreplaceable.

Maybe sites like this will only be able to function in the long run if there is some profit sharing involved. Every user gets X ads in their feed every month, and for every 5X posts or 50X comments one ad disappears.

What?

Sure there have been. Somethingawful? 4chan? Wikipedia? Usenet? etc

They each commanded a significant portion of the attention of the community on the internet at the time.

If you don't limit it to hundreds of millions, i belong to mid-sized successful communities (woodworking, electrical, DIY, etc) that are maybe 100k-1 million users, doing fine, have been doing fine for decades, and don't have for-profit entities behind them.

In fact, almost all meaningful communities i have belonged to online were not run by for-profit entities. Some later got taken over by for-profit entities, but then failed ;)

"does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users. If that wasn't so immensely difficult and expensive, everyone would be doing it."

This is not at all related to the for-profit piece. The difficulty is in becoming popular, which seems to be, maybe mostly luck? Because unlike what you say, everyone is doing it. Is there any evidence at all that the for-profit was a pre-req to being popular?

In a world where reddit was not for-profit from the start, i don't think it would have changed anything.

It was a place that most Digg users were willing to go to. That was dumb luck. If Digg had not been so stupid, Reddit would not be popular, for-profit or not.

The good apps are (a) free, and (b) don't show any ads. Pretty much by definition they can't compete with that and make money.

I guess they can't and they won't unless they become a NGO.

Oh boy. First, this already happened once, that's why Reddit exists. Second, it wasn't happening because it wasn't enough of a problem. Once they generate enough ire it will happen. Will this be enough? Maybe. If not, something else will. It always happens.

always

When for-profits are involed.

You make the same mistake they do - to believe that the success they have is deliberate, and not just mostly dumb luck. Had Digg not failed, nobody would give the slightest shit about reddit. But right up until that point, what you said here could have been said about Digg. In fact, it was said. By lots of people. Yet they moved to Reddit.

In the end, these communities don't exist because of reddit. They exist because people have shared interests. The only thing reddit enables is for them to find each other. If reddit disappears, they will find each other again. I've watched the end of similar sites. I had friends on them. We found each other again on other sites.

> But I definitely can say that there will be lasting consequences. This is a negative inflection point for Reddit as a community and as a community, especially if they forcibly remod communities that go dark.

No, there won't be lasting (negative) consequences. I've been a reddit user for a long time, almost since they started. There have been any number of controversies, from jailbait, to fatpeoplehate, to watchpeopledie, to incels, to the fappening, to thedonald, to finding the Boston bomber, to Ellen Pao, to the firing of Victoria, to gamergate, to wallstreetbets, and so on.

They had all been covered in the media but to the average user, they simply don't know nor care about these incidents. So many power users don't understand that the average user simply does not care about any of this. They just want to browse Reddit on their phone for the next 5 minutes.

It appears that the eng at reddit is so incompetent that they have newer, better, more efficient internal APIs available only to their house apps.

So basically, the public APIs in question have both serious compute and eng costs that -- per a mod comment I can't find again -- are costing more than $10m annually. They can't amortize those costs across their first party apps as well, because those apps are on different APIs. They're looking -- again per a mod comment -- to make money on both the compute and eng costs for these APIs.

Add to this some incredible stupidity, as they continue to underinvest in mod tools and appear not to realize -- though I really can't understand how they could not, since it's been a point of incredible contention with their mod community for many years -- how many mods, particularly those of the biggest forums, are using tools reliant on the current apis to effectively moderate.

tl;dr: it's a big mess. They want to kill 3rd party front ends, and are unwilling to just say so; they continue to not build the tools mods need; they've lost trust with the mod community because of 10 years of lying about investing in mod tools; and they don't want to get everyone onto their internal APIs for reasons they haven't shared.

Oh, and meanwhile, they're launching a new dev platform because... they think someone smart would want to build a business with them after this? I don't know.

The economics are basically the same. Apollo could charge their users $0.25 per thousand requests and continue to operate. They don't want to do so.

It is a burden for the app developers to implement payment processing. And one month was not enough notice. But fundamentally, this is killing apps because most users won't be willing to pay.

(Also, 1000 API requests isn't that little. For example, getting the top 25 posts of a subreddit is just 1 API request. Posting a comment is 1 request.)

Unpaid users are important to these apps because it's what drives adoption. You can release a new paid app to browse Reddit and get maybe 1000 users, or release a free app and get 1 million users, of which 1% convert to paying customers (i.e. 10,000 customers. These numbers are just made up for illustrative purposes).

Subscriptions are high-friction, low uptake, and you're always battling churn. Ads are low-friction and everybody gets them. Plus they can goose the ad revenue whenever they want by just showing more of them.

They might grumble about AI training, but its not really affecting their bottom line. I doubt they'll care much until they start selling their own AI sizzle to investors.

Edit: Oh, and I doubt they care about the hardware needed to serve posts. Guarentee they're using 10-to-100x that for the ads. Ad bidding is complex and has tight timing requirements. Tracking ad/user view data is a big firehose. If they host any of the ads themselves that will absolutely dwarf the text or even video posts. And even then, if they have any kind of a compentent backend engineering team, all those costs will be a smallish fraction of total costs.

Why is this an issue? 3rd party apps exist to solve a problem for users running into limitations of the web interface or Reddits own abomination of an app. So this will just drive existing users into premium accounts and provides a better UX for them with barely any extra cost for Reddit. If the need exists and the opportunity exists in the form of an API someone will build that app and could still collect money on that on top of Reddit premium fee. Just keep the two separated.

How is that thing ever supposed to scale?

Ideally, there will be more of a P2P structure for social media if everything moves forward. It doesn't solve for the problem where large companies can solve for doing the really large aggregation and drive engagement algorithmically. But even if 3-4 aggregators that are independent from each other emerge plus there being a relatively low barrier of entry to create your own, I think it could be sustainable and a major win. Privately funded social spaces are dying a quick death in the age of high interest rates.

If anything this has given reddit more visibility, and more engagement within its website too. All publicity is good publicity

However I think that it’s still valuable to look a level deeper at the specific decision making that’s going on at the management level, and how that’s affecting the overall dynamic which has caused Reddit to be popular for so long.

Specifically, these changes disproportionately affect power users and mods, two groups of people who are largely responsible for creating the content that most Reddit users come to the site for in the first place as well as moderating that content to ensure the quality is high (all unpaid!)

In any case, time will tell if these decisions help or hinder the IPO. My personal gut feeling is that reddit will be around in 5-10 years time, and possibly even growing in terms of popularity but we’ll probably see a decrease in quality of content and moderation and potentially a few competing sites existing on the fringes.

Basically it feels like all the things YC advises are bs when you look at their “success stories”. Other than connections to investors what they say and what they do so entirely opposite.

I'm sure spez knows at least the first set of numbers, and they find the amount of expected loss to be an acceptable risk.

It may be an OK business decision (though I personally think they didn't think it through), but he handled the aftermath in an extraordinarily bad way.

Either he doesn't have good lieutenants around him to advise and support him, or he is too stubborn to listen to them.

Whether you believe this is the case or not, you have to agree that all nuance goes out the window and the mob is only satisfied when it gets what it asks for, not what is in its best interests.

Reddit makes money from ads having reach and they're hoping that only a small percentage get premium so that they can continue to make money off of ads.

Why would they reduce the reach their ads are having by making it easy for people to opt-out?

Their API pricing probably reflects the money they are losing by not getting the users on their own platform and showing them ads.

Their hope is that people would switch over to the main app so that their advertisers can pay them more.

Everyone says this about reddit and Twitter and yet it's still not true that twitter has been replaced in spite of the shit show going on there.

Arguably they care too much, and a bit of humbling will be good for Reddit. If the powermods had their way Aimee Challenor would still be working for the site.

ofcourse nobody can guarantee that they will execute well, that the outcome will not be a disaster even if well executed or that there will be a willing market at the end :-)

but that plan will go ahead irrespective of user action.

I doubt enough people care enough to stay off Reddit because Apollo is shut down. (I aways think about how the "nudie scanner" revolts fizzled to a whimper in the end--and how people now just put up with doing the perp stance and being mm wave scanned.)

One way out would be for Reddit to enforce certain restrictions on 3rd party app, similar to Apple's App Store. "You must show ads", for example.

The pricing is actually reasonable. 1/4the of Twitters price.

The paid tier is reasonable, $12k for 50 million requests (1/4th of twitter api) means Opollo will be paying $1.68 million a month. Thats entirely reasonable for such a popular Reddit app.

This gets us back to the original point, users got used to subsidised pricing (free) so Reddit was inevitably gonna get blowback no matter how they spliced this. To put it in perspective, $1.68m is 168k users paying $10/m a month. They have 1.5m active monthly users. Thats means they only need 10% of their active users to be paying customers.

P.S. Its not just a need to generate revenue, if they don't become profitable soon its game over for the current investors and management team. The IPO markets have dried up and nobody is touching anything series A and above.

SV's darling Stripe had to cut their valuation by 50% to get some money, Reddit wont be able to get anything near that. The best they'll get is some private equity type deal (FATAL).