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Comment by pygar | Hacker News Reader

The fable of the "The Scorpion and the Frog" comes to mind every time I consider the current reddit problems. It's simply the nature of the beast, we all knew this was coming at some point. A lot of reddit user seems to be under the misapprehension that reddit is a co-op.

I was part of a forum based community in ~2010 that constantly debated moving to reddit. It boiled down to "no one joins forums anymore vs we lose control". These events were not unpredictable.

Reddit wants users to use their app so they can accidently click on ads. Like most of the economy they've switched from prioritising growth to prioritising value.

Reddit will be fine. They will add moderation tools to their app. The mods who leave will be replaced.

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> A lot of reddit user seems to be under the misapprehension that reddit is a co-op.

Yeah, people tend to listen to others in charge of companies too much. In this case, Huffman previously stated things like:

> GQ: One of the big turning points in Reddit’s history was Digg’s collapse. It was your biggest competitor and imploded almost overnight. Is there anything about Reddit that makes you worry something like that could happen to you?

> Huffman: I think the problem Digg had is that it was a company that was built to be a company, and you could feel it in the product. The way you could criticize Reddit is that we weren't a company – we were all heart and no head for a long time. So I think it'd be really hard for me and for the team to kill Reddit in that way.

And people ate it up, bait and everything.

> Reddit wants users to use their app so they can accidently click on ads

It's about more than just that, otherwise reddit would just force 3rd party apps to serve ads, just like the official client. Instead they seem hellbent on removing 3rd party apps fully.

This is true, a lot of people do seem to me laboring under the misapprehension that Reddit is a coop. Probably more than any other factor, that explains 95% of the current controversy (the other 5% mostly being that spez thinks he’s Elon Musk but, well, he ain’t Elon Musk).

But on the flip side, I don’t think it’s at all clear yet that Reddit is a viable profit-making company that isn’t reliant on unpaid labor to maintain usage at current levels. A couple months from now, I think we’ll have a much better idea.

My guess is that Reddit will be “fine” (in that private or public markets will continue to value it as a multi-billion dollar business) but I’m not highly confident in this prediction. It could also become a poorly moderated cesspool that still has thousands of employees and no equity value, and if it needs to be restructured, I’m not really sure that the network effects are so great that it’ll continue to fill the same role that it currently does.

For me, Twitter has become basically unusable since the buyout, and I mean that purely in a technical sense (i.e., no reflection on content, bans, unbans, blue checks, etc.) I just mean that probably half the time I click on a Twitter link, the page doesn’t load. Video works for me maybe a third of the time. If Reddit becomes similarly unreliable due to cost cutting, I don’t know it’ll be that much fun to hang out there.

Anecdotally, it seems like most of my acquaintances have stopped using Twitter as a social network. Not out of principle, but because their feeds just stopped having interesting conversations and the bad parts got worse. They still follow creators and news feeds, but their use seems passive and read-only.

I was never the biggest Twitter user, but I wouldn't be surprised at a similar kind of outcome for Reddit. I've already noticed a nose-dive in the quality of my feed - it's mostly dominated by the smaller subreddits that didn't join the blackout, overall activity seems to have dropped off in an absolute sense, and when a larger subreddit makes it in my feed the conversation is just...nastier than it was a few days ago. I had to come out of HN-retirement to find a decent conversation about tech.

> They will add moderation tools to their app.

Reddit has been promising this for about a decade with near zero to show for it.

> The mods who leave will be replaced.

The replacements will become annoyed for the same reasons the current mods are.

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