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Comment by returnInfinity | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is worth 27 billion right now. What could have been.

It might get acquired by Elon. :)

*quietly checks the status of phpBB

A decent number of redditors moved to Lemmy instances after reddit pulled that move with the API/unofficial apps a few summers ago

It felt like the Lemmy instances really died off in a month or two.

Some did, others are thriving. Still a small community though.

I've moved our forums to Xenforo a few years ago, by the creators of vBulletin. It's alright if you liked vB but it doesn't seem to get much updates, but that might be because it's "finished" software.

I also tried some years ago to install Discourse but you need all kinds of server setup for that, too complicated to be an alternative to "old fashioned" PHP forum software. And that's before going into the UX, which is more webapp than old fashioned forums. I'm glad I didn't push through with that migration.

> it doesn't seem to get much updates, but that might be because it's "finished" software.

Thank the gods.

https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB might be worth checking out

The founders sold Reddit for how much was it $10M or $20M?

To be fair, that was followed by like 5-6 years being a thing that Conde Nast had probably forgotten they owned and going between making a loss and barely breaking even with a skeleton crew.

Now it's got a very large team, all the investor pandering and user hostile activity, and instead it's making a large loss, which of course for investors means it's more valuable.

I still don't understand how one of the most popular website with free content and moderation and extremely cacheable content was never profitable.

Unrelated but they removed the <subreddit>.reddit.com shortcut some months ago.

Most people aren't willing to pay for content, and it's harder to target ads, or you're not showing ads at the right time.

Condé practically forgetting about reddit was one of the best things that happened to it. There was pressure to scale the side up, but they didn't have time to chase engagement metrics to the detriment of the experience. It's probably the only $10B+ tech company I can think of that ran so lean for so long.

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