Why did Reddit even have an AMA for this? Everyone knew it would turn out exactly like it did. The most difficult questions went unanswered. The answers they did give were either just bland corporate speak or actively detrimental, giving their critics more ammunition including opening Reddit up to accusations of libel. The whole ordeal seems to leave them in a worse position than if they just never did the AMA.
1) Ego and emotion are driving decisions at reddit
or
2) Reddit's leadership has run the numbers and genuinely thinks it will benefit their profitability plans if the users reacting negatively to these changes all leave. This is well past the point of just killing 3rd party apps because the API changes alone would have accomplished that.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." What do you do when incompetence would be unbelievable in scope and malice would be unbelievably incompetent.
> "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence."
This is a digression, but this saying has always frustrated me. It makes sense for a second, but then I wonder if whoever came up with it had any idea how much malice exists in the world. Many cases of "malice is at least as adequate an explanation as incompetence, given the facts or lack of them".
My theory is desperation. Reddit isn’t profitable, which was fine in the past few years because they could just raise another round of funding by pointing at their user growth.
They can’t easily do that in the current financial environment. I suspect that they’re also seeing a plateau in year over year user growth. Bundle that up with everybody seeing advertising revenue decline and there’s no good story to sell to investors.
I think that they’re probably under tremendous pressure right now by their investors to at least get close to profitable so that they can IPO.
A bit under the radar, but Twitch is having a similar moment with new ad directives which would kill independent streamers. It caused an upset in the community. Twitch backtracks but the damage is already done.
reddit receives hundreds of millions of dollars per year of free moderating from their community. The community is the only valuable thing in reddit. The website is worth nothing, the eyeballs and free labour are everything.
When the parts of their community with outsize influence start talking about abandoning the site to somewhere else it threatens both their hundreds of millions in free labour per year, and also the future of their site.
Reddit exists as it does today because Digg made a series of bad decisions that led to mass movement away from Digg. The same thing can happen to Reddit.
I'm not defending Spez by no means, I've been a user of reddit since early 2010 and it has changed A LOT and I really don't like how it's now, I prefer the more anarchy reddit from that era, but 95% of the times data backs up decisions, even bad ones, and users don't know shit about them, and when something bad as the Apollo drama comes out, it becomes a hatred echo chamber. I really hope this is case because I use a 3rd party app for reddit (Relay, the best one obviously) and I would hate to see it die in favor of the mountain of shit the official app is, I don't know went through their minds when developing it, there were apps with literal a decade of experience to take example from and they did that crap.
I feel its something like #2. Correct me if I'm wrong: reddit userbase us say, a fraction of FB or TikTok. They've made the numbers and attracting and tailoring the site to the TikTok audience is way more profitable than what they have now.
They've been doing that since the reddit redesign thing, trying to go more mainstream yet.
I think that's why they feel they can burn bridges
People will leave Reddit as much as they have left Twitter, i.e. not much. The main problem is in the fact that lots of Reddit users seem to think that Reddit is some kind of “community” that “depends” on its users, when the truth is that Reddit is a company and the dependence relationship is the other way around. It’s hard to accept but Reddit is a dysfunctional colossus that is simply not feasible to replicate at this point, and as such the management can pretty much do as they please.
I think a simpler explanation is one that’s missing from a lot of the conversations on this. Huffman is singularly focused on pumping up the valuation for Reddit’s upcoming IPO. All other considerations are secondary. He doesn’t care about the users. He doesn’t care about third-party developers. He doesn’t care about the long-term survival of the platform. He’s just razor focused on his big payday.
IMO, the profitability plan involves moving everyone to official App. They expect backlash, but believe they could manage it with various tactics, which they are making it up as they go.
People want a free website where they can do whatever they want, but they can’t be required to pay, it has to be financed through ads but they have to be able to block these ads. Oh, and content advertisers don’t want to be associated with has to be freely accessible.
Unsurprisingly this is not sustainable, investors are paying for the site and ultimately they want to see a return. Money talks, bs walks.
>What do you do when incompetence would be unbelievable in scope and malice would be unbelievably incompetent.
Given that incompetence is more harmful than malice, you stay pessimistic, and still blame incompetence. Simply because, if you're pessimistic, the worst that can happen tells you that you were right.
A malicious but competent person will cause damage to a few, when it's desirable for him. While an incompetent but non-malicious person will cause damage to everyone, including himself, at random intervals, regardless of his own desires.
________________
On-topic. I think that Reddit is trying to capitalise on business customers, using its platform to train its AI models with. If that's correct, then even if the users reacting negatively leave, and this puts a dent on Reddit's profit, Reddit will still profit more from those business customers.
Even if that vapid saying was in any way a rule, we already know they are malicious -- this is the same person who silently edited the content of users' posts.
>Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
Why not both? This is the platform that literally built itself off of registering fake accounts and posting spam to make themselves look more active than they were, after all[0]. Reddit administration is a unique blend of malicious incompetence. I call it malicincompetence.
For example, spez in particular notably was caught editing the posts of /r/the_donald posters he was in a shouting match with. This is malicious, because the admins demonstrated that they're willing to fuck with historical records to defame their enemies. But it's also incompetent, because it turned a bunch of fascists[1] into martyrs. If he had just banned /r/TD then and there, or even just that poster, it would have been less malicious and less incompetent at the same time.
Going deeper, a lot of malicious behavior is itself inherently stupid. That's the idea behind the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: betrayal is advantageous only when you don't think more than a step ahead. Once you do, then tit-for-tat[2] becomes better, possibly with some kind of forgiveness term if random or accidental betrayal is possible. None of Reddit's CxO suite[3] thinks this way. They think their users are resources to be taken for granted, except they're also really bad at doing that. And Reddit users have just gotten used to shouting down these kinds of stupid changes until the admins fold, which they usually do, because Reddit doesn't have the kind of user lock-in to make people just stick with it.
[1] Ok, I don't have citations for the victim of Spez's tomfoolery being a fascist, but /r/TD was notorious back then for banning anyone who wasn't enthusiastically riding the Trump train that hard.
[2] Do what the opponent did last round.
[3] Except maybe Ellen Pao, only because she wasn't around long enough for Reddit to rub off on her.
The reality is that the Reddit users that actually care about this enough to show up and rage in the AMA are also the ones that are almost completely unmonetizable. So I doubt there was ever really any risk of major loss from this.
It's worthwhile pointing out his wasn't a genuine AMA - it was a "ask me anything we have a pre-written answer for" [1]. It's an obvious thing to do because the whole situation has been received badly by the community, so you'd expect some preparation of good answers to likely questions, but to copy and paste blindly the pre-written answers from the PR team is just pure laziness and a blatant disregard for the community you've built.
Almost EVERY question went unanswered. He spent approximately 35 minutes replying to 14 questions, essentially all of which were from Reddit "PowerMods" (that cadre of 6 moderators that control >118 of the Top 50 subreddits), and most of those answers were single paragraph rehashes of the same point: "We'll keep talking to developers", and multiple of those questions appear to have scripted, as noted when he answered a question: "A: blah blah blah", then rapidly edited out the "A:".
The whole idea had Bill Cosby "meme me" vibes right from the start and after he answered the blackmail question I think he'd have been better off talking about Rampart. Why would you even answer that question?
It's actually funny how exactly it went how everybody expected. It's like watching a movie that's setting up an incredibly obvious ending, and so the whole time you're waiting for a last minute plot twist to happen because it's just way too simplistic if they don't.
But no, it went exactly as anyone could've predicted, no notes.
1. they didn't budge an inch
2. spez is a fucking jerk as always
3. it was over after only a small handful of questions, some of which may have been preplanned
4. we learned nothing new.
It's exactly what everyone saw coming. gg.
This most definitely seems to me like it was more of a "how dare they question me" spur of the moment decision by spez than a legitimate PR effort. At the same time it just reinforces the obvious conclusion that third party app devs were lied to and set up to fail.
Just shouting this request into the ether, but if these reddit client developers teamed up to create a new alternate backend with a small API fee, the result could be amazing.
A combination of their power user base and a small monthly subscription fee for access could result in something that can retain a niche subreddit feel across the site.
With the possible exception of /r/science the larger subreddits are flooded in low effort posts and mostly unusable.
If they don't say anything, they're incommunicative. But if talk and say effectively nothing, they might get egg on their face for people watching. However they can convince people who don't pay much attention that it's just a disagreement.
You’re asking why do CEOs speak out? Do q&as? Fireside chats? Of course they all speak corporate speak
Most of the top questions were childish and useless, asking to get rid of the ads, go back to the original spirit of Reddit. Comparing the pressure and decision making process of a CEO who raised 1.3 BILLION dollars to some basement dweller who’s shutting down their app out of spite (pretty sure they could sell the app for $5M today no questions asked)
After so many rounds of raising, I’m being generous if I guess that spez owns 5% of Reddit stock. Reddit is being run right now by the biggest investment firms in SV. Rigjtfully looking for ROI. It would literally make them more money to shut down Reddit than to do what everyone in the AMA is asking them to do
In terms of accessibility, I understand they have a roadmap. I don’t understand how they don’t have 400 ADA lawsuits on court right now. Every corporation I worked for had been flooded by copy paste ADA lawsuits, and an app or 3rd party apps aren’t enough, the website has to be fully accessible
Too many sales. Too many dollars handed out today for expected value in the future.
The trouble is people showed up for what Reddit was. Let us call that the Aaron Reddit. That Reddit was sustainable and could be expressed as by users for users.
That vision picked up a ton of users who love threaded, frank, unfettered discussion. It was never going to make millions, but it would have endured for a very long time.
All that changed upon each sale. And this last one is brutal, leaving current owners holding the bag.
These changes to crank out big returns are toxic to a very high percentage of users. And they are where the content comes from too.
Someone else is going to reproduce the original Reddit vision and when they do, this one will dry up just like Digg did.
Really? "Rightfully"?? I guess someone owes me money, because I did a few investments where the ROI was $0, some of them intentionally bad (family > money).
Thank you for this. I know people thank you a lot, and maybe it gets old to hear it, but it’s genuinely nice to see someone who’s librarian-like in the midst of drama. Organizing all of these threads is just really nice, and something that you really didn’t have to do. (If you didn’t do it, it’s not like someone else would.)
Reddit cannot go public. Its product is volunteer work by moderators and users to produce value. There’s no way to take that work and guarantee its delivery on a quarterly cycle.
This is all a ridiculous self-delusion that Reddit management has engaged in that the platform is really the “value add”. It’s not. Reddit has become the shorthand for cut through ML spam and that’s based on users constantly posting up to the minute accurate data. There’s almost no historical value to that data.
I think a place like reddit should be a non-profit foundation rather than a business. The Archive Of Our Own community was able to do it, the reddit community can do it too.
I'd feel a lot more comfortable giving my time to "the community" under an arrangement like that, too. The fediverse has its place, for sure, but I think a centralised platform run by a non-profit has the best chance of unseating Reddit in the short term.
It could even connect to the fediverse, but with its own moderation hierarchy etc. so it has its own culture and doesn't _rely_ on the fediverse.
Thats actually the best structure for reddit because of its coopertive nature, and the difficulty of making money from it without compromising its essential nature.
It's not even profitable _now_ with all their monetization. But their overhead is millions of $/year. There is precedent for non-profit sites of that size but it won't be easy.
I think Archive Of Our Own (AO3) solves a much easier problem (hosting bbcode text), and even then, after many years, they are unable to get enough volunteers to implement a direct message system. It's not quite apples and oranges, but I still don't think the same model could possibly work for Reddit. Yes, Reddit users have made some amazing tools for moderation, but they are still fully dependent on preexisting, complex engineering work by the Reddit employees, including the API. Maybe a better comparison would be Wikipedia, but again, much simpler problem.
This would assume that spez is not doing exactly what the Board of directors want.
I think is he, I think they think this will be better for the long term, users will be upset for a little while, but will not actually leave.
He has already said 3rd party apps make up a small amount of "traffic" and "90% fall in to the free plan" anyway.
So they are betting this is a tempest in a tea pot...
Sadly they are probably right because people are sheep and creatures of habit, for me I am going to archive my data before the 30th and purge all of my accounts. I personally am done with reddit, but I am likely the minority
The Reddit board of directors don’t represent the founders, who have probably been long ago diluted to less than 10%
They represent investors who sunk 1.3 billion dollars into a company who was spending millions providing 3rd party apps a free api where users can’t be monetized. And is not currently profitable
If my previous experience means anything, the board wanted the price to be 100x higher or to shut down the api completely, and were talked down by spez
> This is all a ridiculous self-delusion that Reddit management has engaged in that the platform is really the “value add”. It’s not. Reddit has become the shorthand for…
I don’t understand how people can argue that Reddit is somehow not valuable and then go on to explain how Reddit is valuable.
The “work” that posters and moderators do isn’t a deliverable that investors care about in their quarterly reports. They only care about revenue, be it from ads or customers paying for features.
It's going to be a fun thought experiment at the bar for years now - how would you have brought reddit to profitability starting in Q1 2023?
Maybe there was a way to lever that value for ML training - and the constantly updated nature of the "training database" - into a profit model unlike any other social media app. Not the kind of innovation this team wanted to build, clearly.
She was talking about how, for example a wine forum could make money connecting wine sellers and buyers
do it
Instead of boring ads, make it possible for communities to engage with relevant businesses. Affiliate links, coupons and such. Meaningful dialogue. I am a former mod of /r/usbchardware and we were close to this a few times, with Sanho Hyper and SlimQ. Make yourself the "house brand" of the sub by engaging in good faith and you should be rewarded.
But even just affiliate links, as a former mod of /r/usbchardware, we very often recommend this and that and if we did that with affiliate links then everyone would be better off. And you can make a reputation system here which makes it much harder to just spam garbage.
This is an off-the-cuff idea which probably needs refinement but no way, no way you can't make good money from such hypertargeted communities. Just think outside of the box a little. Corporate spam gets you booted. A company offering insight, honest good advice gets you boosted. It's ... possible. There is a way making money for everyone involved which doesn't involve dirty play.
I help manage a few associated medium sized reddit communities. We share a mod team. We are joining the protest.
We talked to an admin who reviewed our logs and they were surprised by the fact that our community was modded as a team because most of the communities that they had seen and worked with were apparently modded almost exclusively by a single person.
I thought at first that this was a joke because our head mod does most of the work and because we get new mods every year and they always leave.
So when our head mod leaves the subs will die. We'll become /r/worldpolitics. And there's a good chance that he'll leave during the protest.
What I'm trying to say is that we often see moderators as interchangeable, one leaves and another joins and nothing changes, but the reality is that good mods are scarce. I don't expect an inexperienced mod to join a sub with half a million users and know what to do. Most of our team doesn't know how to use the automoderator. I'm the only one who knows how to use the custom automation bot that I wrote. And then there's the issue of understanding the culture.
So whether reddit lives or dies in my opinion won't be a matter of how fast reddit can replace moderators but a matter of how many moderators will stay and put up with the bullshit because it has become part of their lives.
You will run out of the people doing it remotely well very quickly though.
The high quality modding of askhistory, anthropology and other science sub reddits are provided by actual domain experts working for free. You can find someone to replace them, but the quality will plummet and the users will leave.
All they have to do is keep the ship afloat until it goes public, once thats done they cash out with their millions/billions and then to hell with the site. They'll resign, get fired or whatever but they wont care because they'll have their money by then.
> ...calling out the developer, Christian Selig’s, “behavior and communications” as being “all over the place” and saying he couldn’t see Reddit working with the developer further.
Yes, there's only one problem spez, aside from your track record, we also have basically every other major API user voicing the exact same concerns. Maybe the somewhat erratic communications have something to do with breaking over a decade of trust and giving only a few weeks notice.
On another note, I definitely can't see myself working with or using Reddit in any way in the future.
Reddit is another notch. They got to where they were by building goodwill. It was open source, the APIs were openly accessible, they fought against censorship and they were relatively measured in their moderation. Now? It's just another fucking ad company. There's nothing left.
I was hoping that Spez would say something like "we're reviewing our decisions based on feedback" or similar, but no. The AMA clenched it for me, and I deleted the Apollo apps off my phone and iPad in solidarity with Selig.
Maybe keep the app around if you have a subscription; Selig is going to do refunds for Apollo subscriptions, and you will probably need to have the app installed to decline the refund (if you want to continue to support him rather than get your money back).
Christian also built the app out of college and is now thrust into C-level conversations? I would nominate him next CEO of Reddit if he wasn't a bit all over the place.
It’s extremely clear that Spez doesn’t know how to handle Christian.
Christian hasn’t been beaten down by years of corporate ladder climbing. He knows how to protect himself, but does it in ways that others don’t often see in the business world.
Even the whole “$10m extortion” thing feels overblown. Like I can’t believe a CEO would ever take a comment like that anymore seriously than a passing joke/jesting comment in that situation. Christian’s point is true. If Reddit is having such a hard time delivering a quality app, they can buy any third party app.
The fact that Spez seems so stuck on that seems to indicate the success of Apollo is really weighing on him.
Christian would be a much better CEO than Steve Huffman, despite his clear lack of negotiation skills. Reddit is phenomenally mismanaged, it's somehow worse than both incarnations of Twitter
Being profit-driven is a fine model for a business. However, it doesn't make business sense to alienate developers and users in service of that goal.
Reddit has always struck me as a company with no creativity. They have this huge diverse community and can't seem to find a way to monetize it in any way other than the most basic advertising model.
They always seem to do things in conflict with the community rather than in concert with them.
> Reddit has always struck me as a company with no creativity
I thought reddit was really clever for the first ~7 years of operations. They replaced forums, fostered communities, gained a reputation as a place to get real people's takes, and attracted people willing to have interesting conversations. The upvote/downvote system that is now so common was made popular from reddit. They brought awareness to important political topics surrounding net neutrality. They were leaders in early Web2.0, where each user saw content that appealed to them, because everyone could choose which subreddits were in their homepage. It was highly social and highly engaging.
After a certain point in 201X the dark patterns began to appear. I was almost fully disengaged by the start of 2013. I can't remember the details, but I remember being increasing disappointed with reddit every time I returned for a brief visit.
Nearly all businesses are profit-driven. My wife owned a medical practice, and while she chose the profession because she wanted to help people, she built a company around it to put food on our table. There's nothing wrong with that.
But optimizing for short-term profit over long-term revenue is just nuts. Apple didn't become a trillion dollar company by focusing on maximizing profit above all else every single quarter.
I’ve always thought this too. Especially because I believe (I have no data to back this up) a huge amount of their traffic is from search engine results.
As search results became gamed and sites became SEO machines, finding a Reddit thread discussing the thing you want to know about is a breath of fresh air.
Nobody else has that. Reddit has a ton of really niche content that people want to read, spread out over a large amount of time. Why are they focused on becoming a place where people infinite scroll reposts of TikToks?
Instead, they went the route of introducing features that at best cannibalized other features (chat and the regular message system - it’s confusing) and at worst just seem like hasty add ons or complete stabs in the dark.
Even Discord has a system to directly monetarily sponsor servers you want to support, why on earth doesn’t that exist for Reddit? Good lord. It’s such a simple thing to add. Instead they charge money to customize your avatar like it’s a Fortnite skin. It’s insane.
They also try to monetize the whole thing with Reddit Gold or whatever where you can pay like five bucks to put a badge on someone else's post or comment.
Although I wouldn't know a whole lot about it because after a decade-plus on Reddit I've still never bought any.
Right! My reddit comments are public and reflect my preferences and interests pretty well. Yet I’ve never ever felt like clicking a reddit ad. Instagram on the other hand had me clicking on ads occasionally
Maybe they need better ad tooling and promotion of it. Probably big improvements to be made just in getting enough ad inventory to show something remotely relevant to a user.
Maybe they should buy Apollo for $10m, at least it would be a revenue stream based on tangible user benefits rather than whatever cosmetic meme bullshit they think of next.
I installed their official app and just love how direct links from wrb, like this, or within app itself, just do not work at all. Otherwise, itstnot _that_ bad but compared to RIF (which I use/d) it's bad usability.
To Apollo and RIF guys, if you read this. You got some technical chops, you got some ux skills, you got some clout and, after all, you have some cash.. why not join forces and deploy reddit's clone to be used as a backend for both of your apps? You can hijack userbase, and keep growing on top of it, just like imgur did. (Follow me for more business advice)
The amazing thing to me was finding out how much the data the official app was using. Granted it has been a few years since I switched to Apollo but I was using in the 10-20 GB/month from the Reddit app.
> How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
Had he a modicum of awareness regarding the question, he would have also addressed the community engagement part of the question - to users, the most important part of the question.
"The community built our platform and we'll never forget that or make engagement unpleasant. We need your engagement." Had he said that, and then segued to profit, he at least would not have been betrayed by his predetermined inflexibility.
I think Reddit probably had a path to making a modest profit, but investors don't want the 2x dog. Now they're probably going to do the social media equivalent of selling the copper wiring from the walls.
It is wild that a company that is nearly two decades old and seemingly has never been profitable is doing an IPO. Who is going to buy their stock? What would make someone think that Reddit will suddenly turn things around in year 19 and actually become profitable?
anyone who wants to train an AI model on relatively authentic data and natural (for certain definitions of "normal") human interactions, I would assume
like IDK what the comps are, what is another large corpus with authentic interactions and scoring? internet archive is probably the closest (although substantially more valuable), maybe the google library project is semi analogous in scale and value (although obviously very different in nature).
I know this is repeated over and over but in the case of Reddit I think it’s pretty true. They should never have taken VC money. I don’t think technically they are doing anything that is very tricky. They have surely innovated on their tech stack but even the things they have tried to do seem pretty miserable. Their media player is horrendous and while they do have scale problems, I don’t see much happening on the product side. They have not done much to make admin’s life easier. Beyond the new UI they got years back, I am not sure what they have done to improve the product.
Maybe I have not paid close enough attention but Reddit feels mostly the same since forever.
They have tried all kinds of new offerings that have all fallen flat on their face since they keep ignoring their core product and power users. A few examples are: user profiles and following users directly instead of communities like Instagram, live chat rooms like Discord, live video streaming like Twitch, and a bunch of NFT nonsense like Trump.
It feels like there have been some desperate attempts at monetization over the past few years, with their "Coins" that you can use to "reward" comments/posts, NFTs, and paid avatar personalization. I imagine not very many users buy these, and they aren't really something that even a "whale" would end up buying a lot of because they are largely useless and don't enhance the experience of the site at all.
At this point, I think he should back up his claim that Selig has acted disingenuously by saying one thing in public and another in private. I'm not sure it's legally defamatory, but it's definitely a bad look for a nominal leader. The only example I'm aware of him providing (the 'threat') was pretty soundly debunked by the audio recording. Ignoring the merits of their individual cases, Selig has been transparent, and so is capturing the public sympathy, while Huffman looks like a sweaty Joseph McCarthy, claiming to have a briefcase full of evidence he won't show anybody.
Selig's response to that private/public claim was "Please feel free to give examples where I said something differently in public versus what I said to you. I give you full permission." He's doing very well at making Reddit look like a lying bully.
Funny was that he seems to have gotten his responses from a shared document with answers that his team prepared for him. At one point he copied "A: ...", which users noticed so he removed the "A:" afterwards.
To be fair to all parties, it doesn't seem unreasonable to have the CEO workshopping answers in a shared document with other team members and counsel during such an event.
To also be fair to all parties, it seems unbelievable such oversight would still result in him making the comments he did.
What'll really bake your noodle is that the question he was answering was almost certainly a plant. Extremely common "town hall" technique (see: the scandal where Clinton was fed "town hall" questions in advance by the DNC chairwoman.)
Any time you see an AMA run by a major corp or media property, it's all just a dog and pony show. Listen to some interviews the same person is giving media personalities and you'll see the same topics and talking points.
Thinking about it your theory makes absolute sense. Realistically such a shared document would otherwise just have a reference to the question and the answer without the necessity of describing the answer using "A:". Wow.
Readit News
1) Ego and emotion are driving decisions at reddit
or
2) Reddit's leadership has run the numbers and genuinely thinks it will benefit their profitability plans if the users reacting negatively to these changes all leave. This is well past the point of just killing 3rd party apps because the API changes alone would have accomplished that.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." What do you do when incompetence would be unbelievable in scope and malice would be unbelievably incompetent.
This is a digression, but this saying has always frustrated me. It makes sense for a second, but then I wonder if whoever came up with it had any idea how much malice exists in the world. Many cases of "malice is at least as adequate an explanation as incompetence, given the facts or lack of them".
They can’t easily do that in the current financial environment. I suspect that they’re also seeing a plateau in year over year user growth. Bundle that up with everybody seeing advertising revenue decline and there’s no good story to sell to investors.
I think that they’re probably under tremendous pressure right now by their investors to at least get close to profitable so that they can IPO.
When the parts of their community with outsize influence start talking about abandoning the site to somewhere else it threatens both their hundreds of millions in free labour per year, and also the future of their site.
Reddit exists as it does today because Digg made a series of bad decisions that led to mass movement away from Digg. The same thing can happen to Reddit.
They've been doing that since the reddit redesign thing, trying to go more mainstream yet.
I think that's why they feel they can burn bridges
Unsurprisingly this is not sustainable, investors are paying for the site and ultimately they want to see a return. Money talks, bs walks.
Given that incompetence is more harmful than malice, you stay pessimistic, and still blame incompetence. Simply because, if you're pessimistic, the worst that can happen tells you that you were right.
A malicious but competent person will cause damage to a few, when it's desirable for him. While an incompetent but non-malicious person will cause damage to everyone, including himself, at random intervals, regardless of his own desires.________________
On-topic. I think that Reddit is trying to capitalise on business customers, using its platform to train its AI models with. If that's correct, then even if the users reacting negatively leave, and this puts a dent on Reddit's profit, Reddit will still profit more from those business customers.
Why not both? This is the platform that literally built itself off of registering fake accounts and posting spam to make themselves look more active than they were, after all[0]. Reddit administration is a unique blend of malicious incompetence. I call it malicincompetence.
For example, spez in particular notably was caught editing the posts of /r/the_donald posters he was in a shouting match with. This is malicious, because the admins demonstrated that they're willing to fuck with historical records to defame their enemies. But it's also incompetent, because it turned a bunch of fascists[1] into martyrs. If he had just banned /r/TD then and there, or even just that poster, it would have been less malicious and less incompetent at the same time.
Going deeper, a lot of malicious behavior is itself inherently stupid. That's the idea behind the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: betrayal is advantageous only when you don't think more than a step ahead. Once you do, then tit-for-tat[2] becomes better, possibly with some kind of forgiveness term if random or accidental betrayal is possible. None of Reddit's CxO suite[3] thinks this way. They think their users are resources to be taken for granted, except they're also really bad at doing that. And Reddit users have just gotten used to shouting down these kinds of stupid changes until the admins fold, which they usually do, because Reddit doesn't have the kind of user lock-in to make people just stick with it.
[0] Nobody noticed until the admins just outright admitted it a few years later. Although if /r/SRD and /r/de is to be believed, they're doing the same shit again in German: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red...
[1] Ok, I don't have citations for the victim of Spez's tomfoolery being a fascist, but /r/TD was notorious back then for banning anyone who wasn't enthusiastically riding the Trump train that hard.
[2] Do what the opponent did last round.
[3] Except maybe Ellen Pao, only because she wasn't around long enough for Reddit to rub off on her.
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
Almost EVERY question went unanswered. He spent approximately 35 minutes replying to 14 questions, essentially all of which were from Reddit "PowerMods" (that cadre of 6 moderators that control >118 of the Top 50 subreddits), and most of those answers were single paragraph rehashes of the same point: "We'll keep talking to developers", and multiple of those questions appear to have scripted, as noted when he answered a question: "A: blah blah blah", then rapidly edited out the "A:".
Not only is this provably untrue but your math is nonsensical.
EDIT: Provably untrue proof -- top 100 subreddit moderator list:
* https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be...
But no, it went exactly as anyone could've predicted, no notes.
1. they didn't budge an inch
2. spez is a fucking jerk as always
3. it was over after only a small handful of questions, some of which may have been preplanned
4. we learned nothing new.
It's exactly what everyone saw coming. gg.
This most definitely seems to me like it was more of a "how dare they question me" spur of the moment decision by spez than a legitimate PR effort. At the same time it just reinforces the obvious conclusion that third party app devs were lied to and set up to fail.
>> How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
> We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.
Self burn. Those are rare.
A combination of their power user base and a small monthly subscription fee for access could result in something that can retain a niche subreddit feel across the site.
With the possible exception of /r/science the larger subreddits are flooded in low effort posts and mostly unusable.
Their messaging is probably to get all of the other apps ect to sell out to the big boys or essentially get fired from their own company.
The language model war is in full swing now the moats are starting to form.
They're betting big on continued engagement or they actually want it to fail. Time will tell.
Sell out to whom? The offer of API access is a lie -- everyone who has asked to setup a billing situation has been ignored.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/5emsq3/reddit_reacts...
Most of the top questions were childish and useless, asking to get rid of the ads, go back to the original spirit of Reddit. Comparing the pressure and decision making process of a CEO who raised 1.3 BILLION dollars to some basement dweller who’s shutting down their app out of spite (pretty sure they could sell the app for $5M today no questions asked)
After so many rounds of raising, I’m being generous if I guess that spez owns 5% of Reddit stock. Reddit is being run right now by the biggest investment firms in SV. Rigjtfully looking for ROI. It would literally make them more money to shut down Reddit than to do what everyone in the AMA is asking them to do
In terms of accessibility, I understand they have a roadmap. I don’t understand how they don’t have 400 ADA lawsuits on court right now. Every corporation I worked for had been flooded by copy paste ADA lawsuits, and an app or 3rd party apps aren’t enough, the website has to be fully accessible
The trouble is people showed up for what Reddit was. Let us call that the Aaron Reddit. That Reddit was sustainable and could be expressed as by users for users.
That vision picked up a ton of users who love threaded, frank, unfettered discussion. It was never going to make millions, but it would have endured for a very long time.
All that changed upon each sale. And this last one is brutal, leaving current owners holding the bag.
These changes to crank out big returns are toxic to a very high percentage of users. And they are where the content comes from too.
Someone else is going to reproduce the original Reddit vision and when they do, this one will dry up just like Digg did.
Really? "Rightfully"?? I guess someone owes me money, because I did a few investments where the ROI was $0, some of them intentionally bad (family > money).
Addressing the community about changes to our API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36261369 - June 2023 (320 comments)
Archive your Reddit data before it's too late - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36259930 - June 2023 (341 comments)
Shreddit is a Python program to remove all your Reddit comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257981 - June 2023 (221 comments)
Ask HN: Anyone else disinterested in Reddit API drama? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256545 - June 2023 (26 comments)
Apollo Back end just made public - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256167 - June 2023 (229 comments)
Ask HN: You are given 100M to launch a new Reddit competitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36255767 - June 2023 (23 comments)
ArchiveTeam has saved over 11.2B Reddit links - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254172 - June 2023 (150 comments)
Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254086 - June 2023 (352 comments)
Using unmodified third-party Reddit apps with a custom server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36252061 - June 2023 (20 comments)
Power Delete Suite for Reddit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36250785 - June 2023 (31 comments)
Apollo will close down on June 30th - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435 - June 2023 (1568 comments)
Continuation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36251707
https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit
This is all a ridiculous self-delusion that Reddit management has engaged in that the platform is really the “value add”. It’s not. Reddit has become the shorthand for cut through ML spam and that’s based on users constantly posting up to the minute accurate data. There’s almost no historical value to that data.
It could even connect to the fediverse, but with its own moderation hierarchy etc. so it has its own culture and doesn't _rely_ on the fediverse.
While I am sad for the communities, I am excited at the opportunity to short this stock if it ever goes public with such poor leadership.
I think is he, I think they think this will be better for the long term, users will be upset for a little while, but will not actually leave.
He has already said 3rd party apps make up a small amount of "traffic" and "90% fall in to the free plan" anyway.
So they are betting this is a tempest in a tea pot...
Sadly they are probably right because people are sheep and creatures of habit, for me I am going to archive my data before the 30th and purge all of my accounts. I personally am done with reddit, but I am likely the minority
It might need a different governance structure.
Commercial and community interests can be in conflict.
What’s the leadership structure that recognizes this tension and delivers optimal outcomes in the long term?
They represent investors who sunk 1.3 billion dollars into a company who was spending millions providing 3rd party apps a free api where users can’t be monetized. And is not currently profitable
If my previous experience means anything, the board wanted the price to be 100x higher or to shut down the api completely, and were talked down by spez
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These days pesky investors are going to demand things like, a business model and a profit opportunity.
I don’t understand how people can argue that Reddit is somehow not valuable and then go on to explain how Reddit is valuable.
The “work” that posters and moderators do isn’t a deliverable that investors care about in their quarterly reports. They only care about revenue, be it from ads or customers paying for features.
Maybe there was a way to lever that value for ML training - and the constantly updated nature of the "training database" - into a profit model unlike any other social media app. Not the kind of innovation this team wanted to build, clearly.
I remember Esther Dyson: Release 2.0
She was talking about how, for example a wine forum could make money connecting wine sellers and buyers
do it
Instead of boring ads, make it possible for communities to engage with relevant businesses. Affiliate links, coupons and such. Meaningful dialogue. I am a former mod of /r/usbchardware and we were close to this a few times, with Sanho Hyper and SlimQ. Make yourself the "house brand" of the sub by engaging in good faith and you should be rewarded.
But even just affiliate links, as a former mod of /r/usbchardware, we very often recommend this and that and if we did that with affiliate links then everyone would be better off. And you can make a reputation system here which makes it much harder to just spam garbage.
This is an off-the-cuff idea which probably needs refinement but no way, no way you can't make good money from such hypertargeted communities. Just think outside of the box a little. Corporate spam gets you booted. A company offering insight, honest good advice gets you boosted. It's ... possible. There is a way making money for everyone involved which doesn't involve dirty play.
Reddit feels like /was 3 firms.
A forum, hosting firm.
A sort of platform? Ads, compliance, support
A media firm - What they had with the old AMA and an employee helping guests.
I dont see any of these hitting Platform numbers. I do see it being a titan in popular culture.
The way the Reddit works, moderation is a free and limitless resource. You will never run out of people volunteering for the job.
We talked to an admin who reviewed our logs and they were surprised by the fact that our community was modded as a team because most of the communities that they had seen and worked with were apparently modded almost exclusively by a single person.
I thought at first that this was a joke because our head mod does most of the work and because we get new mods every year and they always leave.
So when our head mod leaves the subs will die. We'll become /r/worldpolitics. And there's a good chance that he'll leave during the protest.
What I'm trying to say is that we often see moderators as interchangeable, one leaves and another joins and nothing changes, but the reality is that good mods are scarce. I don't expect an inexperienced mod to join a sub with half a million users and know what to do. Most of our team doesn't know how to use the automoderator. I'm the only one who knows how to use the custom automation bot that I wrote. And then there's the issue of understanding the culture.
So whether reddit lives or dies in my opinion won't be a matter of how fast reddit can replace moderators but a matter of how many moderators will stay and put up with the bullshit because it has become part of their lives.
The high quality modding of askhistory, anthropology and other science sub reddits are provided by actual domain experts working for free. You can find someone to replace them, but the quality will plummet and the users will leave.
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Dead Comment
Yes, there's only one problem spez, aside from your track record, we also have basically every other major API user voicing the exact same concerns. Maybe the somewhat erratic communications have something to do with breaking over a decade of trust and giving only a few weeks notice.
On another note, I definitely can't see myself working with or using Reddit in any way in the future.
Reddit is another notch. They got to where they were by building goodwill. It was open source, the APIs were openly accessible, they fought against censorship and they were relatively measured in their moderation. Now? It's just another fucking ad company. There's nothing left.
It was fun, Reddit. Best of luck. I'm outta here.
Christian hasn’t been beaten down by years of corporate ladder climbing. He knows how to protect himself, but does it in ways that others don’t often see in the business world.
Even the whole “$10m extortion” thing feels overblown. Like I can’t believe a CEO would ever take a comment like that anymore seriously than a passing joke/jesting comment in that situation. Christian’s point is true. If Reddit is having such a hard time delivering a quality app, they can buy any third party app.
The fact that Spez seems so stuck on that seems to indicate the success of Apollo is really weighing on him.
Good ol' enshittification.
It appears he has confused the reddit AMA for an IPO prep call.
What a tone deaf farce...
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/comment/jnk...
Reddit has always struck me as a company with no creativity. They have this huge diverse community and can't seem to find a way to monetize it in any way other than the most basic advertising model.
They always seem to do things in conflict with the community rather than in concert with them.
I thought reddit was really clever for the first ~7 years of operations. They replaced forums, fostered communities, gained a reputation as a place to get real people's takes, and attracted people willing to have interesting conversations. The upvote/downvote system that is now so common was made popular from reddit. They brought awareness to important political topics surrounding net neutrality. They were leaders in early Web2.0, where each user saw content that appealed to them, because everyone could choose which subreddits were in their homepage. It was highly social and highly engaging.
After a certain point in 201X the dark patterns began to appear. I was almost fully disengaged by the start of 2013. I can't remember the details, but I remember being increasing disappointed with reddit every time I returned for a brief visit.
But optimizing for short-term profit over long-term revenue is just nuts. Apple didn't become a trillion dollar company by focusing on maximizing profit above all else every single quarter.
As search results became gamed and sites became SEO machines, finding a Reddit thread discussing the thing you want to know about is a breath of fresh air.
Nobody else has that. Reddit has a ton of really niche content that people want to read, spread out over a large amount of time. Why are they focused on becoming a place where people infinite scroll reposts of TikToks?
Instead, they went the route of introducing features that at best cannibalized other features (chat and the regular message system - it’s confusing) and at worst just seem like hasty add ons or complete stabs in the dark.
Even Discord has a system to directly monetarily sponsor servers you want to support, why on earth doesn’t that exist for Reddit? Good lord. It’s such a simple thing to add. Instead they charge money to customize your avatar like it’s a Fortnite skin. It’s insane.
Although I wouldn't know a whole lot about it because after a decade-plus on Reddit I've still never bought any.
A fine business model but a bizarre damage control statement
Full quote of a CEO stating that a bunch of independent developers are able to make a good profit while the pre-IPO company he's running is not.
Can you short an IPO? Not sure how these financial shenanigans work.
To Apollo and RIF guys, if you read this. You got some technical chops, you got some ux skills, you got some clout and, after all, you have some cash.. why not join forces and deploy reddit's clone to be used as a backend for both of your apps? You can hijack userbase, and keep growing on top of it, just like imgur did. (Follow me for more business advice)
> How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
Reddit is a company. It's profit driven. I don't think that's surprising or shameful.
Had he a modicum of awareness regarding the question, he would have also addressed the community engagement part of the question - to users, the most important part of the question.
"The community built our platform and we'll never forget that or make engagement unpleasant. We need your engagement." Had he said that, and then segued to profit, he at least would not have been betrayed by his predetermined inflexibility.
like IDK what the comps are, what is another large corpus with authentic interactions and scoring? internet archive is probably the closest (although substantially more valuable), maybe the google library project is semi analogous in scale and value (although obviously very different in nature).
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Nope it’s actually what the CEO said.
Maybe I have not paid close enough attention but Reddit feels mostly the same since forever.
https://kickstartsidehustle.com/how-reddit-got-its-first-use...
Context (the article mentions spez's comment doubling-down, but doesn't mention Selig's immediate reply): https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
To also be fair to all parties, it seems unbelievable such oversight would still result in him making the comments he did.
Any time you see an AMA run by a major corp or media property, it's all just a dog and pony show. Listen to some interviews the same person is giving media personalities and you'll see the same topics and talking points.