> Reddit traffic is down and management blames AI search not referring users to Reddit.
Couldn't have anything to do with management's decision to require logins to access the site.
Couldn't have anything to do with management's decision to require logins to access the site.
It's a very typical failure mode for publicly-traded companies. For a CEO to have the incentive to do something that will kill their company, in a few quarters' time—in exchange for a one-off windfall that will boost the stock price, CEO compensation, &c. Short-termism at the "eating the golden goose" level.
> [May 2024] "In its IPO prospectus, Reddit revealed that it has contractual agreements to license its data to customers including Google worth a combined over $200 million. And, in its first earnings report as a public company, Reddit reported a 450% year-over-year increase in non-ad revenue, attributable mainly to those agreements."
> "Reddit stock was up 11% in extended trading following the announcement of the OpenAI deal."
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/16/openai-inks-deal-to-train-...
If it makes the major shareholders money, then in our system, it is, by default, not a failure mode, but a feature.
The C-suite has a contract that guarantees them generational wealth under most circumstances. They're incentivized by stock options granted to them by the board, which is elected by shareholders. Most shareholders in major companies are institutional investors who are paid to do nothing but make sure that a company going out-of-business is a non-issue (if not even a boon) for their returns. It makes no real difference to the institutional investor if Reddit goes down in price; the people who were gaining in their holdings from Reddit are diversified. The people actively drawing off of their holdings are doing so from asset classes less volatile than equities.
In other words, there's no incentive to keep companies running as a going concern.
It's a failure of the board of the company to allow the CEO to make a quick buck while trashing the future, and can lead to law suits.
The real problem is that the CEO might just have been incompetent enough to think reddit can get away with anything.
On a side note, I stopped commenting on reddit when they got rid of 3rd party apps and stopped lurking after they forced log in. Lemmy has been a decent alternative, but could still use more users.
Given the numbers I see here [0], I wouldn't count on the lawsuits to cause a meaningful change in the Jack Welch tactics being used.
Most lawsuits are either dismissed or settled out-of-court.
[0] https://securities.stanford.edu/research-reports/1996-2019/C...
EDIT:
I'll also add, the average shareholder doesn't know that they do, in fact, hold shares. If you asked someone with a 401(k) or Roth IRA which equities their investments are held in, they're going to say "Uhhh... Ameriprise?" or something about the company that manages the portfolio, not the actual contents of the portfolio itself. We've abstracted the living hell out of equities ownership.
This has actually been a time saver, and I haven’t missed it even for research. In fact it’s made me realize just how bad Reddit was as a source for research, these days. It’s all bots and activists with an axe to grind.
Even now, there are people running SMM account networks that simply take top or trending content on one platform, reformat it with AI, and post it in the same conversation on a separate platform-- effectively recreating the partial utility of a front page of the internet but only at the cost of inserting themselves as middle men who over time accrue gatekeeping power that is completely opaque from the outside. Not a new idea. Arguably an inevitable idea. It still sucks, though.
As someone who spends way too much time on reddit, before that I was someone who spent way too much time on twitter. And before that it was usenet.
Each time there may have been a rough patch when I didn't have a ready replacement, but eventually something grew to take its place in my heart.
I think there may no longer be such a place as “the front page of the internet” given the divergence in ideologies over the years and the overall decrease in civility. You have to pick a tribe. Even within the Lemmyverse different instances defederate with each other over differences in opinion and policy.
I probably use Reddit 1/10 as much as I used to as well. Kind of sad seeing Reddit going down the enshitification path that seems like most software and apps tend to do.
I find it hard to stay away from a voyeuristic perspective, but I wish someone would take the damn site offline.
I think Reddit is a cesspool of idiocy and propaganda too, but I don’t think it needs to be “taken offline”.
“I wish someone would” is not the same as “it needs to be”. Racism, misogyny and antisemitism are not “idiocy and propaganda”. The fact you don’t think Reddit “needs to be ‘taken offline’” has no bearing on 9gag.
But anyway, I don’t really much of a difference between idle wishes and advocacy. Both empower the people who want to “sanitize” the internet.
I myself do way more searches in "<question> on Reddit" and then just look at the AI generated response from Google Gemini.
Zero clicks.
Wrong dates and times, confusing things associated with a person with things about a person, etc.
My personal experience is that this is now getting worse for each week. Typically in non-English replies, Gemini has even started mixing in a surprising amount of non-sensical neologisms and weird word-contractions in a completely different language than the rest of the sentence.
I’m only one user, but that essentially quit my heavy usage of Reddit all together after using them since 2009ish. Feels like they follow Pinterests model where everything requires a login or app, making search results useless if I refuse to sign in or download something.
Obligatory fuck u/spez.
Bluesky is small and lame.
Mastodon/Lemmy are fragmented fiefdoms.
X/Twitter is full of dark patterns, bots, and invasive of privacy.
Basically everything sucks.
But those aren’t the biggest things that killed it. The biggest thing was losing the attention war to doom scrolling. That’s where everyone is now, at least online. They are scrolling.
TikTok, YouTube (esp shorts but increasingly all of it), Instagram, and so on.
Kinda annoyed me because I am more aligned with the normie take and was just steel-manning in good faith – which was clear from my comment and made clear again in my appeal.
To be fair though, apparently there are topics which are not allowed to be discussed on Reddit and I naively didn't realise this.