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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Reddit has a right and a need to figure out monetization. This was part of that effort and it was likely painful but Reddit is dead anyway if it never figures out monetization.

I didn't participate in the blackout. I felt the mods were wrong to take that approach.

I did go to bat for blind mods. They need better mod tools than they have.

That comment is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36232441

Hopefully Reddit does figure out how to both foster attractive communities and make enough money.

I run a bunch of Reddits. One has 20k members and says "top 5 percent" and many have a few hundred and say "top 50 percent." There's a lot more to Reddit than the very big Reddits.

I think the relatively small number of very big Reddits get too much press. That's not all there is to Reddit and I hope they defy the expectations of people already pronouncing them "dead."

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They have a right yes, but they will also rightly suffer from their approach. I not only participated in the blackout, but because of the CEOs arrogant comments about how valuable my data is and how they deserve to sell it, while destroying the tools I value and use, I also deleted all of my valuable data from reddit and after handing off the one sub I moderated I left the platform forever.

I think reddit is a wonderful idea that needs different leadership, and the only way for that to happen at this point is for reddit to die and something new and preferably harder to buy out takes its place.

I'm a blogger and freelance writer. I've spent years saying that programmers make good money, then expect slave labor from writers and content developers.

If the only way people will "allow" a valuable service to live is as their bitch, the entire internet is welcome to go die in a fire while we dream up some new answer for the future of this world.

In that case Reddit should die.

Reddit’s decision changed it previous equation with mods, and redefined the limits of power.

Reddit, since inception, had never made specific hire fire decisions for mods, especially for purely monetary reasons.

This makes it less volunteer moderation, and purely unpaid labor.

NB: I would add return on investment to your cabinet of villains.

Reddit allows me to establish a community for free. I've established a number of them.

If people don't want to be unpaid mods, they don't have to be. No one forced them into that.

Do we need to address some things? Sure. But I have long advocated for the right of people to engage in unpaid labor or low paid labor if they choose to.

It's exactly how Founders of startups create the company that makes them millionaires. Saying no one is allowed to without first being rich creates a permanent social divide.

Would I like for there to be a means to get paid for moderating on reddit? Maybe. I certainly could use more money.

Do I want the burdens that typically accompany a paid day job? No. I'm handicapped and that's a disaster waiting to happen.

A lot of this was not intentional. And it's generally not as simple as people like to pretend it is for the sake of argument.

> I've spent years saying that programmers make good money, then expect slave labor from writers and content developers.

> If people don't want to be unpaid XXX, they don't have to be. No one forced them into that

Insert blogger/writer/mod for xxx.

Maybe it would help, if this contradiction is clarified.

There's no contradiction.

"I can choose to work for free on some things if I wish." does not contradict "Other folks are in the wrong to expect and demand that I work for free."

how is this relevant to Reddit (a tech site in SV) having the right to monetize off of other people's passion, though? And who is expecting and demanding what?

> blogger and freelance writer

Reddit’s writers and content producers, i.e. users, are still unpaid. They’re just also being used to train LLMs aimed at reducing the number of independent bloggers and writers.

>I've spent years saying that programmers make good money, then expect slave labor from writers and content developers.

I guess. They have very different histories and it's not like programmers are strangers to doing "free work" (i.e. the entire open source community until the Github era). the narrative would be flipped 30 years ago. I'm not quite sure how that is relevant.

>If the only way people will "allow" a valuable service to live is as their bitch, the entire internet is welcome to go die in a fire while we dream up some new answer for the future of this world.

sure. pay your labor. I don't think we disagree.

But the issue isn't that reddit doesn't make millions. It's that it's obsessed with spending 10's of millions in hopes of making hundreds of millions off of content provided via free labor. I just want to browse some news and discuss with people. HN doesn't cost millions in server costs and performs that perfectly for me.

If I had a nice cozy forum I wouldn't mind a subscription to it. I paid my 10 bux to SA back in the day and I donated to Tildes for a few years. But I do agree many would rather let the internet burn than pay for a site directly.

They did figure out monetization. Their revenue was skyrocketing over the last couple years before they decided to ruin the API.

Wikipedia indicates it's still a private company. My recollection is they are failing to hit figures that would make for an attractive buy out or IPO.

If profitability isn't enough for them, I have no sympathy.

And beyond that, how fast do they expect to grow after this many years? Be happy with a good thing! Their growth rate was very impressive!

They grew their employee count massively (400->2000) as their revenue grew over the past few years though. Part of that is, yeah, you have to spend money to make money. But I know for a fact not all of those employees were doing ad sales or direct monetization.

You can speculate as to why they hired so many people: pandemic tech hiring FOMO, looking more attractive to investors, empire building, not being willing to settle for a paltry 10-figure valuation and so trying to build out to hit 11-figures. But they don't need that many people and they could easily become profitable by doing a big layoff (just as money software companies could). At this point it's not a question of survival or existence for them, nor of IPO readiness, so much as it is IPO optimization.

Yeah, just fire most of the staff. It worked so well for Twitter.

I don't know the details. I didn't follow it that closely. I don't care that much.

I've read that the business decision that sparked the blackout had something to do with trying to make money. They're a business, not a charity.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. People want endless amounts of free shit. The people who don't want reddit unless it's both free and takes their orders are people I don't personally sympathize with.

I don't really expect to argue this further. I've already argued it way more than I really care to.

Since you run a few subs maybe you know: if modding has gotten harder since the API switch, why don’t mods just bring in more mods to help?

I work alone. I accepted the offer to join me on my largest forum once. They bailed within a day or three without so much as saying "bye, bitch!"

I'm not blind. I have no idea if it's gotten harder for blind mods.

Sorry.

Not the person you’re responding to, but team coordination is a very difficult task as you add people.

It’s difficult enough getting 8 developers on the exact same page when writing code, now imagine trying to moderate to a ruleset with a much greater degree of ambiguity.

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