The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations.
The commons built in the 90s was turned into a playground in the 2000s and is now a oil well being mined by megacorps.
What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's ability to profit from this was a disguise created by free money.
With any luck twitter/reddit/facebook/et al. will disappear in favour of their "corresponding wikipedias" --- which is the model, I think, all the "platform creators" thought they were participating in.
There needs to be new alliances between volunteer-platform-creators and volunteer-content-creators
I can't agree with this enough. The internet today is a cesspit, it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums. I made a lot of real life friends from the forums I frequented.
On the one hand I feel exactly like you do, on the other hand I observe that my teenage daughter is making real friends on discord and game servers, just like I did on usenet and forums. So maybe it's you/me getting older rather than (just) the internet changing.
Oh the good old days :(
As do I, but I suspect much of what I miss is simply just being young and free and all that comes with that.
Honestly looking for information about hobbies is horrible nowadays.
It's all first and foremost subreddit, which has mostly memes and no info except maybe a sticky, THEN you find a discord link there, and finally all the knowledge is organized in google docs spreadsheet, that's in some random pinned post in some weirdly named channel.
I miss the days of the forum and wikis, it was vastly easier to search and lurk. and now you need a multiple accounts to even find that information.
I have been thinking about this too over the last couple of days. What would it take to replace Reddit?
In my opinion, the UI of social media has been deliberately designed to be a dopamine waterfall that discourages people to think or invest themselves in any one community. If you analyzed the top 1000 links on Reddit r/all at any given time, without checking it myself, I think you'd find that 950 of those links are memes, funny pictures, lousy opinions or some kind of a drama going on.
And back-end is a non-issue either. A phpBB forum hosted on a DigitalOcean $6 VPS can comfortably handle 100,000 community members. But perhaps the bigger issue is that people don't even want to participate in an actual community/forum, because for example - there are no downvote/upvote buttons in phpBB. There's also no instant image preview (gratification), and you actually have to click on a new thread to read it.
So, yes, cesspit is a good word for it. But more than that its people having become so comfortable with meaningless browsing, for many of them - Reddit being gone for a few days means they will browse more TikTok or whatever else people mindlessly scroll through.
I've been spending a lot of time thinking and talking about the decline of independent forums. And I think there's a lot to be said about the fundamental change in the legal environment today compared to the early 2000s.
Back then, sure, there was moderation, but there was also plenty of content that, while not egregious, by today's standard would certainly keep a small independent forum sysop up at night. Linking to pirated content, for instance, used to be generally a non-issue, and even if someone cared, the likelihood they were going to find it and bother targeting your forum was pretty slim. These days, that is very much not the case, with bots happy to scour the Internet for a rising number of possible content that could get your server targeted and pressured into oblivion by a pack of rabid attack lawyers.
I'm sort of hoping to see a move to the use of darknet services to alleviate some of that, perhaps with relays like tor2web or similar options for i2p that can make them clearnet accessible without the dread associated with running a server with user created content exposed to lawyers. That, or simple ephemerality of content (though say, IRC or similar protocols) seems to be the way around the reality of the legal environment brought on by web 2.0 (and beyond).
That's the thing I'm looking forward to with the evolution of the "Fediverse" and other efforts toward federation/decentralization. The problem with traditional forums was that they were all little silos disconnected from one another; now those forums can talk to each other via ActivityPub or what have you, offering a nicer balance between "isolated but tight-knit community" v. "expansive but highly-impersonal masses".
forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins.
I know what you mean. Although Discord is, in my opinion, WAY better than IRC, I do miss the interactions and friends I made there. I miss forums as well, which is kind of funny because they still exist - not sure why I don't use them more?
I keep thinking back to the Arab Spring. Everyone thought Twitter could bring down dictators. Now users can’t even effectively pressure management. It should be easy for users to take over a platform and dictate terms, but the instant dopamine of infinite scroll can’t be resisted.
This is true of every system we live in and yet it very rarely happen because most people just want to get on with their lives and not think about it, or don’t have the means to pressure (jobs where you’re just a cog making barely enough to survive and can’t afford to lose any of the income for instance)
> Now users can’t even effectively pressure management.
Is that what's happening though? My impression is that it's a vocal minority and powermods that made the decision about blackout. Similar to a lot of political topics in real life. I was never asked about this. There's a Twitch channel now brigading every sub that raises the question if they should continue or not. Look at the vocal people in /r/soccer and most have never posted in the sub before.
What's going on now is the dekulakization of the internet. Oh you are a prosperous farmer/reddit moderator who thought you owned something, well here we are going to take it from you and put it under government/corporate ownership and sell all your grain/userbase off to pay for imports/ next quarters earnings and starve you to death/flood you with awful ads and propaganda.
It's going on with real farmers in the Netherlands and in a similar fashion with other assets people thought they owned just about everywhere as we convert to the own nothing economy.
Its not just for farmers in the Netherlands, it happening to everyone who thinks they own anything. In some countries we are back to government telling what we can grow or not grow on our own fields.
No one was ever deceived with promises of monetary compensation for their moderation work. Moreover, moderators in particular are a very small subset of the site's total users, so they have even less claim on data ownership. Comparing voluntary message board moderators with farmers starving to death sounds like satire.
+1. However, I hope the reddits and twitters of the world continue to exist, perhaps in diminished form, if for no other reason than to provide a place for users who prefer the "outrage porn," shallow memes, flame wars, etc, so that they're less likely to intrude on the smaller, healthier communities that are forming elsewhere.
>The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations.
And the next 10 years will remove the volunteers entirely. AI will be the one creating the content for the corporations. That seems inevitable at this point. We have already been on that path for a while with the spread of algorithmic feeds. First we removed the humans from the recommendations and editorial decisions. The next step is to remove them from the creation.
Maybe if we are lucky we will get some of those "corresponding Wikipedias" too. Reddit seems to have made their choice that they don't value communities, creators, volunteers, or anything like that. They just want to serve up the lowest common denominator content to show you between ads. Volunteers complaining is just unnecessary "noise". AI won't complain.
> AI will be the one creating the content for the corporations.
AI can't create anything without a corpus of human-created online content from which to learn. And if humans aren't posting the results of their research in archives, or their photos, or anything else created through offline travails then AI won't create anything new.
But in the end, it is about users who pay directly or indirectly (ads).
And they won't pay, if the content is not interesting.
So if AI creates interesting content and the users are happy to consume that, well fine for them.
But I think most people want actually more. Or at least, enough people want genuine human interactions, so AI taking over of the corporate "social media" will just create social networks that do care about that human touch.
"With any luck twitter/reddit/facebook/et al. will disappear in favour of their "corresponding wikipedias" --- which is the model, I think, all the "platform creators" thought they were participating in."
This is a fantasy. All the money (and thus features and users) has been flowing in to ever more consolidated, corporate-controlled platforms for decades.
There's no serious alternative, as all the decentralized platforms lack the network effects of the big players.
If anything, the future is going to be ever more centralized and consolidated.
Meanwhile there is a corpse pile of proprietary social media companies, a bunch of dead platforms walking like tumblr, myspace, twitter. Meta is hemorrhaging cash, Discord's efforts to expand outside of the social media space failed.
But IRC persists. I still visit and post in a few web forums. Email is still a thing. The modern internet is a mess but open platforms aren't gone, if anything what's become more apparent is that centralized and consolidated platforms inevitably collapse on themselves.
Reddit was already consolidated prior to this, the moderators in question and the subs that are shut down are run by the same handful of moderators that run the entire site. Something like 20 people are the top mods of 80+% of the subreddits.
It's naive to believe they are just volunteers either given how many of them are active for 20+ hours a day, and how moderation on some of the big subs are done in such a way that is effectively consensus making. Almost certainly some, if not most of the biggest power moderators on the site are run by multiple people, potentially other corporations or government agencies.
The old/wild internet is dead and buried, and it was before this blackout too. The API changes certainly aren't good, but let's not kid ourselves that Reddit's main moderators organizing the blackout are anything like volunteer mods of old.
The data created by people should be owned by people. They should have right to decide if it can be distributed free or with charge through APIs, archrivals etc. I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create.
The reason they assume they own our data is that when social media platforms became popular, they put these rights in their terms and got away with it, because most of us don't read the legal fine print. But now more and more are waking up to the fact that we got a bad deal. Take a look at Reddit's ToS for example (HN has a similar clause btw):
>By submitting user content to reddit, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, or publicly display your user content in any medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.
By moving to self-hosting through protocols like IPFS or Arweave, and having social applications built on top, two problems can be solved at once.
1. Your data isn't locked in anymore. All your social media posts, images, etc can be shared with multiple platforms at the same time. If you quit one of them your data won't disappear because all you did is grant them access, it's still in your control. This completely eliminated the issue with moving apps and having to start anew each time.
2. You can be in control of all rights. You can grant the platforms non-exclusive licenses if you see a benefit in that, or you can restrict them from making money with your content without paying you royalties. It's all up to the user.
> I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create.
Suppose you are hosting a wordpress blog with a comments section. Some people leave occasional comments in your blog — god knows why. Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them? Can't you delete them? Can't you disable the comments any time you wish?
Suppose now you are hosting a bulletin board, where more people are posting their messages. Don't you own all that? After all, the texts are stored on your server. Can't you delete the board at any point, or run data analysis on the posts, or even send targeted messages to your users, etc.?
Now scale this mentally to reddit, etc. At which point do you start arguing that the service doesn't own the data that it stores?
I had really high hopes for the internet, that it will bring knowledge and wisdom to every corner of the world, but instead it just decreased our attention span, made us more angry and now even the fun things are going to be ruined because some old VC demands their money back. Internet built on VC money is inherently unsustainable and I would never ever join a website that can't demonstrate its sustainability.
Ad networks fudged the numbers for many years, free just isn't as viable as thought.
I don't mind paying - either for a service or for server costs of hosting my own instance or whatever - and I certainly don't mind paying reddit specifically. However the price point, putting it on developers and not regular users so they thought users wouldn't be bothered (I guess they assumed apps like Apollo would pass it on to their users and appear to be the bad guy? It's the only way I can make any sense of how they did it) is pretty shitty.
But the worst part is killing off all these tools that mods require - that second order effect will likely kill Reddit.
The only other time I could see a company make a decision that would so clearly kill a product was the facebook algorithmic feed, though admittedly that did take 10 years.
"What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's ability to profit from this was a disguise created by free money."
I don't think this is correct.
In the excellent book _The Master Switch_, Tim Wu[1] describes:
"... a long "cycle" whereby open information systems become consolidated and closed over time, reopening only after disruptive innovation."
... and my reading of his book suggests to me that the "natural point", as you say, is consolidation and closure.
Youtube is always becoming TV.
My own opinion is that the media is the message and that certain communications media - namely, pure text - can't "become TV". The real difference between reddit and HN is that you can't display a picture - of any kind - on HN.
This is a disanalogus analysis, because the value of these platforms it the labour of their volunteers --- they *are* the commons.
"Natural power" includes the collective action of these volunteers -- seen here, eg., with reddit.
My point is that the drive to profit from this labour will make the platforms extremely sensitive to their demands -- in ways that do not occur when there's no need to profit.
You can say "let them eat cake" if you have your own cake supplier. When the cake runs out, all those labourers turn out to be required.
I think these are unique dynamics -- much closer to the fall of serfdom than the development of TV networks
Volunteer doesn't equal volunteer though. Some are in it for the topic, some are in it for their own persona. Reddit was more attractive for some people because it wasn't as much focused on people and more around topics. That changed a bit and you cannot really draw a line too hard, but it is still the case to a large degree.
I doubt wikipedians are big on personalities either, although that demographic changed a lot too. It did have to change though because business was suddenly much more interested as well.
I can't agree more with you, unfortunately there's a real C check of our position and our history to do, us being technical people:
- we must stop assuming everyone is equal. Access to a computer, access to a smartphone, access to a stable internet connection, capability to read and use a mouse or a keyboard; our requirements are way too high to build an inclusive community. Not everyone is a white rich american english-speaking male
- we must stop assuming everyone is financially, socially, culturally at ease, and that everything is "just" a matter of individual will. The market always favors those who have more, in the pusuit of even more, and those who weren't so lucky must be supported.
Stop giving tools to companies. Stop using non-copyleft licenses. They're the number one reason Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter and countless others could be where they are today: leveraging the common goods without giving back at least as much. By design, a company maximizes the gap between what it takes and what it gives.
A simple analysis would defend the end of capitalism and the commons construction through a shared decision process, but it's still premature for HN
Before that happens they will try to lobby governments to "repair" their monopolies. EU is already trying hard to put major road blocks on open source AI, which is probably the biggest threat to most tech mega corps.
I feel one approach to a high quality internet, we can contact people we like the messages or posts of and invite them to contribute somewhere that is invite only to contribute.
it is amusing that people think Wikipedia is not a corporation, and is not subject to the same problems as reddit.
It is well documented that that Wikimedia CORPORATION that controls wikipedia has all kinds of the same problems, with the directors and management of that corporation at odds often with the users and the "mods" of wikipedia.
That is with out getting into the debate over the overt ideological capture of both the wiki and the corporation
No I dont think the wikipedia model is the one we should look at as an example
Reddit users and mods are not ´volunteers’. They’re consumers of a service.
If anything the ‘disguise of free money’ was only convincing consumers that internet platforms were a right and free to operate. Now the balance is shifting in the opposite way, operational profit.
It's a messageboard. The only people who need to think of users as "consumers" are Reddit execs hoping somebody will buy "reddit gold" or an NFT avatar. The mere fact that these e-trinkets are considered "products" should be indicative of how un-monetizable public messageboards are.
Nobody ever said internet platforms were free to operate. That's what the ads are for. Reddit is locking the doors because they had 10 years to build a competent ad product and failed.
It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one, he could compromise a bit by at least expanding the deadline on the pricing changes, but instead he decides to provoke and double down.
The leaked internal memo, which is obvious that would leak (after all it is a 2,000 person company) is a clear provocation:
> We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us.
> There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well.
> While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.
What is the term for when there's a worker strike and instead of engaging with organizers/union representatives, the company approaches some individual workers and teams, trying to convince them to get back to work (or at least make it seem like those workers are likely to break rank), in order to start an inner conflict between the workers and have the strike collapse on itself?
Because that is what they're doing here. Explicitly ignoring the "union reps", and driving a wedge between rank-and-file "workers", under a guise of caring for accessibility.
--
EDIT: and it's pretty clear to me this memo was meant to be leaked, and it was carefully written to address the subreddit moderators and users. It says, "meh, this is just a regular Tuesday nothingburger drama, it's pointless and will blow over - but hey, someone has a good point about accessibility, and we care and listen, so we're now actively working on it; we ain't talking with Apollo and RiF devs because they're being unreasonable drama queens, and for the love of $deity, don't be unreasonable like them; we're actually afraid some of you may rough up our employees - is that really who you want to be?".
> What is the term for when there's a worker strike and instead of engaging with organizers/union representatives, the company approaches some individual workers [...] to start an inner conflict between the workers and have the strike collapse on itself?
Standard operating procedure/business as usual.
Edit: If the company was interested in engaging with organisers/union reps, the strike would probably have been avoided in the first place.
If they bored people with "we listened" PR waffling while just being more sneaky about user-hostile changes, they could have gotten away with anything. I mean, that's the playbook, isn't it?
But blatantly giving your unhappy users the finger is a great way to keep them angry and thus motivated. Steve Huffman has set millions of dollars of value on fire and damaged Reddit's brand for no apparent reason (except maybe a bizarre personal vendetta against certain third-party app developers). Strange times.
> just being more sneaky about user-hostile changes, they could have gotten away with anything. I mean, that's the playbook, isn't it?
Isn't that pretty much what Reddit was doing before spez came back as CEO, though? (Where being "sneaky" about user-hostile changes also included de-facto exempting the users they rely on most from them - their volunteer mods and, to some extent, their 'power' content contributors.) This screwup has all played out within a month or two - there were smaller controversies before, but nothing compares to this.
Does it really have 2000 employees? I remember when they were owned by Conde Nast and had something like 5-10 people. I know they have a lot more users now, and have added features like image and photo hosting, but to go from that to 2000 employees is quite the blowup.
People started this blackout without any alternatives. Twitter users had Instagram, Facebook (even though that’s a worse shitshow and IG is owned by Meta), tiktok, Mastodon, and probably a couple others I’m forgetting. There’s nothing equivalent to reddit with half as much daily activity as even the worst Twitter-alternative, so they’d never catch on. People append “reddit” to google searches now, that’s how integral this site has become to the internet. The strikers should have waited a few days to a couple weeks before this strike instead of reacting immediately.
Every sub is pointing to their own discord server. That’s absolutely not an alternative and a chatroom will never replace a global forum.
The Denver Nuggets sub didn’t even shut down because they were so excited about their potential win. That’s literally the best time to show solidarity and they fucked that up because they cared more about posting 1 sentence meme or hype comments to a game thread.
Yeah this is really impressive, this time around the discontent feels different. There from my point of view there was a decline for a long time for the usefulness of reddit for me. I thought it was only me getting older but now that I see this happening is that it isn't just me.
They have consistently worsened the conditions for quality contribution with their default interfaces. I didn't realize it until now how important it is until now, because of this protest. I've already left and if my little anecdote is anything to go by, other might feel the same and do the same as me.
> he could compromise a bit by at least expanding the deadline on the pricing changes
There are only so many days until bankruptcy. Investors are done funnelling in more and more to keep the lights on. While that would be reasonable under normal circumstances, in this panic situation there won't be a Reddit left by the time third-party developers are given reasonable time.
> It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one
You don't negotiate with blackmailers, because this is what this is now, blackmail. If things continue like this I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods.
I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods
The impact of this would be to make lots of subreddit unmoderated, leading to a huge amount of spam, adult content in sfw subreddit, cross-posting, etc. The impact would be to let everyone know just how much free work the mods do to keep Reddit tidy and valuable.
I don't think you're wrong (except maybe on the timescale) but I do think the strategy would shoot the CEO in the foot again.
Yeah it’s now “oh and maybe we’ll do ‘touch grass tuesdays’ in perpetuity”. That’s an incredibly unsympathetic message imo.
Get real. If anyone thinks a business is going to tolerate a clique of powermods choosing to randomly shut things down according to their own schedule… they’re gonna be disappointed.
Let alone I’ve seen some people thinking they can demand a hand in the corporate governance? Yeah fuck no powermods are not ever getting a seat on the board, lol, lmao. No company in the world would ever agree to that. Especially not after all of this.
Yeah, they’re gonna pry the mods off and reopen things, sooner or later. Unless something changes mods are going to leave things permanently closed after the 30th and walk away, and Reddit is absolutely not going to tolerate that. But there’s no reason to wait that long really.
The 5 mods running an average of 18 top-100 subs each are not going to be as tough to replace as people think they are, the reality is at that scale you’re not managing anything operationally on a day to day level, you’re setting up a script.
It’s the lower-level jannies that will be the trouble, because they’re the ones doing the actual work, not the person claiming to mod 200 million subscribers worth of content. And at the end of the day you can find some people willing to click “delete” on spam while they’re scrolling. That’s plausible if they can get over the bump gracefully. And truth is there’s always people willing to do it for the prestige, even as pitiful as that is.
The Reddit play here is obviously to pry the powermods off, get the frontpage subs back open, and get moderation back to some kind of a semi functional level (automated or otherwise) until it blows over and organic moderation can resume. And that’s a reasonably achievable goal.
But the powermod squad needs to consider what their own exit strategy is too… nobody is going to let powermods randomly shut things down on an ongoing basis. If they’re disruptive then they put Reddit in a position of being forced to remove them, it is what it is, Reddit can’t operate with a cabal of a half dozen users able to shut down the front page at will either. If Reddit doesn’t have a fundamental belief in the powermods being good-faith players they are gone regardless of the consequences, because the alternative is unacceptable. They will deal with the consequences and move forward, most likely successfully.
People act like Spez is somehow out of line and they can just get him tossed out, like the board is going to sign off on letting a bunch of agitators disrupt operations on an ongoing and indefinite basis.
They don't have the resources to take on that much moderation at scale. Maybe given two years and a big tech budget or six months and a big moderator budget.
He needs to publish a hard hitting memo that chastises third party app developers for not creating more sustainable businesses. If Reddit cannot meet it’s revenue goals it will shut down, period.
Assuming you're serious, I'm curious why you think Reddit's CEO shouldn't be chastised under that same category. Selling ads next to user-generated content, rent seeking with demands of extortionate API fees to serve that content, relying on unpaid volunteers to operate the site, proudly shipping terrible first-party UX, all while providing zero additional value sure doesn’t sound like a sustainable business. But maybe it’s the `hard hitting memo` obstinacy of a CEO that seems the biggest feature here?
I think a different approach would work better at this point.
They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version.
The key in a negotiation is to have a crystal clear, realistic picture of the other party's constraints, motivations and ethical framework. In this case, it's clear Huffman has hard constraints around making Reddit profitable. He could easily do it by reducing headcount but that itself would defeat the purpose because it would devalue the IPO (who wants to buy a shrinking company?). He clearly has no moral or ethical compulsion here. So there isn't another option than to threaten what really matters to him: it has to be made real for Huffman that he's going to lose this if he doesn't budge. The only thing that will convince him is actually seeing users permanently leave.
If my favorites subreddits go to Discord, I'll simply not go there. Discord has nothing to do like a forum, it is almost impossible to search for valuable information, and is really hard to use when dozens and dozens of people are talking simultaneously.
I really don't get why so many people want their sub to go to Discord tbh.
same here, totally mystified. One of my favorite subreddits went over to Discord and apart from the UI/UX being horrific, it doesn't seem to replicate much of the Reddit experience. It's just a giant chat session with a few subtopics it's a cesspool of animated emojis etc.
I like Discord but I get that it's not for everybody. Jumping into a very active wide Discord community (with many channels) can be an incredibly jarring sensory assault, and if you don't have a narrower community (e.g. a private server for just your friend group, or honestly just a server with very few channels to keep track of) to figure out things, it can be very off-putting.
That said, the reason why so many people want to go to Discord is pretty hard to miss: out of all the alternatives, it's the one with critical mass now. Even if everyone is distributed across different servers (to be clear to those less familiar, a server is not a physical/virtual host) and cannot directly interact with one another, the network effects are readily apparent.
"They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version."
That takes way more determination and organization than the vast majority of Reddit users are capable of. A couple day blackout is really just about what they can manage, and just about what most Reddit users will tolerate.
I would be absolutely shocked if this whole thing doesn't blow over in a couple of weeks, though I also wouldn't be surprised if Reddit's owners didn't compromise in some way either.
Interesting. But I'd say it still fits with the narrative. 5% is a good "we practice fiscal constraint" message. To get back to a reasonable cost basis, they need to lay off 50%, which would send a totally different message.
>They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community.
I have to wonder if this would be allowed, in the past this has only been tried for subreddits that feared being banned in an imminent fashion. On the other hand, you have rules against mods purposefully destroying their own communities, and trying to force an off-site migration in a heavy-handed fashion (eg. stopping user contributions/participation) may be seen as running afoul of these rules.
Is there something counter-intuitive about reddit that makes it hard to monetize? That's the core issue. Reddit still makes barely $1/user/month while instagram makes $35. Cutting off the 3rd party apps is a cost-cutting move, not a revenue-generating move. Why haven't they managed to find more revenue?
I'm loath to say it but Huffman has had a decade to solve this and hasn't. Might be time for new leadership with new ideas.
Cutting off 3rd party apps isn't a cost cutting move. It has two clear benefits - firstly they can push users into the officially supported apps where ads can be shown in a more controlled fashion and metrics on those ads can be gathered. Second, it removes the ability for other companies to programmatically gather Reddit's data - this is important in the context of large language models where investors are convinced that the data sets to train the models will be valuable.
The reason reddit is hard to monetize is actually quite simple, they don't know much about their users so they can't do the high value targeting other companies do, and they have a site where it's very difficult to insert adverts in what looks like an organic way. It's easy to scroll past an advert on instagram and not realise it's an advert, it's visually consistent, on reddit it sticks out like a sore thumb so they get CPS rates of a 90s banner ad - because that's what they're selling.
I disagree with you, but especially the second part. Users advertise their interests by the subs they subscribe to, it would be very easy to target them. You could even go so far and let users up and downvote ads they think are relevant to them. The problem is more with the whole way reddit inc goes about how they interact with their users and power users. You shouldn't be openly hostile against your own users (except if you are the mods of askmen).
Their ads in the iOS app are formatted exactly like normal reddit posts. I’ve tapped on them by accident quite a few times in the last week. I’m going to assume the New Reddit experience is largely the same, but I’m not about to turn off my adblocker on PC to test that.
The biggest problem with Reddit is that their only source of revenue basically demands you to create a completely new ad for ONLY that platform. For everything else you can just make an iframe, drop whatever malicious blinking crap you want, send it to the wild and let ad networks sell and resell space and sometimes drop your ad in it, pay pennies for clicks and even less pennies for each time it's been served.
They haven't tried to enter any ad ecosystem, haven't tried to monetize the massive amount of creativity or anything on the platform. Granted, it's really hard to say "Hey, we've shown your news article to 10 million people, pls pay us" when the news site itself is struggling to get any revenue from those millions of clicks. Not to mention the site might have a question reddit reeeeallly doesn't want to answer "So, was it in a neo-nazi subforum or a porn subforum?"
Yeah, there's just been nothing in ten years. An IPO at this point is nothing but a cash grab awaiting the death of the platform.
What's interesting about the "they should go programmatic" argument is that programmatic ads are increasingly less lucrative thanks to low-quality traffic and the perceived ineffectiveness of cookie-based retargeting. (Yes, please, show me a hundred banner ads for that pair of pants I literally just purchased!) Programmatic ads also tend to generate more profit for the middlemen who broker transactions than they do for the publishers who display ads; once all of the ad platforms involved in the transaction have taken their cut, there's not much left.
In response to this, some people have been driving a push back to traditional/contextual ads, similar to what Reddit is currently doing. So, in theory, if Reddit is selling Guaranteed High Quality ad space, and selling it to brands with whom they have a direct partnership,[2] and not getting skimmed off the top by middlemen, they should be raking in the advertising dollars. Right?
But they're clearly not! Or not nearly enough to be profitable.
The efforts against third-party apps are clearly an attempt to drive more ad impressions (because you can't drive impressions if users aren't in an environment where you can serve impressions), but I somehow doubt that that's gonna make a big difference, even if third-party-app-users all threw up their hands and migrated, without protest, to official channels.
[1] The real cash cow among programmatic ads is video advertising, since those placements are more valuable and fetch a higher price, but I also see that as a trap for Reddit—their decision to start natively hosting video seems pretty short-sighted for a company that's already not breaking even. If they wanted to go hard on video ads, they'd have to start prioritizing more video content, which means hosting more video content....
[2] Perhaps not for nothing that half the ads on Reddit these days are for that vaguely evangelistic "He Gets Us" campaign. The buyers clearly have money to throw around, but the relative lack of other ads mixed in has to say something about the (lack of) demand for Reddit's inventory.
Reddit has a ton of revenue - $500 million per year. Considering the work of actually running the site is done by volunteers, what is baffling is that they cannot be profitable with this amount of money.
There is profitability and then there is VC-profitability. One of them normal people can understand and the other is absurd IMHO.
VC forces you to staff up, spend like there is no tomorrow, and have a huge return or GTFO.
$500M a year should absolutely support a company like Reddit (even giving the API away for free) but that’s not a 10-100-1000x return so it’s essentially $0 to VCs.
When Reddit says they aren’t profitable they really mean they aren’t profitable /enough/ coupled with their high headcount.
Working at a small startup (or a side project) will show you what can be accomplished with 1-10 or <50 people who are all committed.
I'm surprised reddit can't run with that amount of profit per user per month but more surprised by the Instagram number.
Surely spending there is overinflated? I know whales with bad impulse control are a thing but there's no way the average user there justifies $35 in ad spending.
Interesting perspective. But it does beg the obvious question: how effective are comment sections? How many casual redditors in this case actually read the comments and aren't just scrolling through titles?
Either way, the experiment is very cheap and honestly we're dreaming if these were the rates they paid. It's probably more like $2/hour to people in 2nd/3rd world countries.
I'd just like to point out, that I run a side business selling vinyls/cassettes in a very niche genre. I looked into advertising on reddit, as there were two or three communities that I was already active in with collectors of this type of music.
I thought it'd be better to advertise than self promote. However, Reddit's ad management is a complete cluster. It is confusing, frustrating to set up, and difficult to analyze.
The reason I really wanted to advertise on Reddit rather than Facebook/Instagram is that Facebook's "profiles" of people aren't specific enough for what I am selling. But with Reddit, I literally just want to target anyone who is a member of or visits these specific subreddits.
For me, it is perfect targeted advertising without any invasive tracking of users!
But Reddit wouldn't let me. Those subreddits aren't on their very limited list of approved subreddits. Instead my only choice was to be able to target a really, really big subreddit (/r/Music) which 99.99% of the people there would have no interest in my product, or to use their profiles, which are not nearly as complete as Facebook's.
So, I gave up, and decided I wasn't getting my return on advertising on Reddit.
They haven't tried. Perhaps there's some things I don't see that they thought would work, but it really doesn't look like it.
It looks like they've been mostly user friendly. They were relatively late forcing users to the app, and the app doesn't seem as bad as competition (in terms of privacy, nagging, ect., not quality).
As far as I can tell they've resisted the use of a ton of user hostile forms of advertising. They don't allow software, so no malware. The ads don't intrude on the users. (although they have blended it with normal content, which isn't great).
Do they even sell data. At this point, it seems guarantied that they're selling some data, but they haven't been successful. Haven't heard much on them building detailed profiles on specific people.
Counter-intuitive? Perhaps not. But there are some obvious reasons why it is comparatively harder for Reddit to attract ad spend:
1. Instagram encourages business users to use the service for free. This gives a taste for the platform and reduces the friction in spending money later on. Reddit, on the other hand, discourages free business use.
2. Instagram generally gives the impression that it has real users, with real names and real photos attached. Reddit generally gives the impression of being a fantasy world with anonymous characters. While the latter may be attractive to certain niche products that fit into that fantasy, the average business operating in the real world feels more at home when it thinks it is marketing to real people.
What is Reddit’s plan? They seem to simultaneously hold two conflicting ideas:
1. Third party app users represent significant enough lost revenue to make it worth making the API prohibitively expensive for third party apps to run, forcing those users back to the official app.
2. Third party apps users are few enough that Reddit can afford to not compromise and lose those users just to kill off third party apps.
Are they expecting the third party app users will come crawling back to the official app? As far as I’m concerned the official app is borderline unusable compared to Apollo, for example, and I’d expect most users who have seen the light to find the official app completely intolerable.
Perhaps the presence of unofficial, basically un-monetized third party apps was flagged as a risk for their IPO by some investor types. Still, they could have found a better route to monetize those users than just killing off the apps altogether.
The plan is to turn Reddit into TikTok. The site is being pivoted away from being a social message board to being a scrolling content dripfeed. Get the eyes in the native app and get the ads going. That’s the value that’s being lost via third-party apps.
The only subs that really matter in this context are the frontpage top-100 subs, and it’s not like there’s any real intensive discussion over some cat pic or earthporn.
The hobby subs are fine and generally adds value, it’s not like they’re going to remove them, but it’s not where the site’s primary engagement is going to be in another year or two.
If they lose 25% of users and quadruple the revenue from the remaining users - that’s a massive win for them. And this is where the 90-9-1 rule works against you, because most users are going to stay, because they’re just scrolling cat pics anyway, and none of this really affects them. That’s the calculation. Most will stay, and they’ll make a lot more revenue per user that way.
And in the grand scheme of things… there will be enough content in a month or two to keep people busy. This too shall pass.
They'll come back. They'll all come back. If creating official communities for pedophiles to swap (legal) pictures isn't enough to get you to leave nothing will.
(there have been notable other controversies, but I thought I'd mention a "classic")
Since I only use reddit logged in and having the user preference set to the old UI, the most effective way for me to go cold turkey is to logout. Any twitch response to back to reddit presents the newer layout and I'm instantly compelled to close the browser tab again.
Can anyone explain how much pressure and where it comes from for the “raise revenue at all costs” pre-IPO. Is it common for other companies to shoot themselves in the foot by layoffs and policy changes that alienate users? Just feels like no one was smart enough to say “we can try and raise revenue by doing this, but we could lose everything” - maybe companies just constantly forget how defiant and fickle the internet can be.
It's purely a numbers game. If the amount of revenue you'll achieve from less users gives you a more positive multi year outlook financially then losing the users is "worth it", especially if those users fall into cohorts that are less financially valuable. Unfortunately that includes people who take part in blackouts as they correlate highly with people who e.g. run adblockers, use third party apps, etc.
They went from a few dozen people in 2015 to 400 in 2019 to 2000 today, and also started hosting images and videos in 2016-17. The result of all this is that they spend way more money than they did a decade ago and despite now making an estimated $600M/yr and 50M daily active users, they are apparently still losing money.
A company that's 15 years old, never turned a profit really or made much profit if it ever did, and is still losing money is not in a good place to IPO, which existing investors want to recoup some of their investment.
The product is the stock price, not "revenue" or "users". If this increase their stock valuation at IPO and destroy the company in a month time, they'll go for it. This is the free market at play, you are welcome.
Spez assumes he has more power than Reddit users. He is likely right. Sadly. I wish people would just stop using that site and go back to web forums, but that is never happening. The average person enjoys the convenience of consolidation under one corporate overlord.
I assume the ipo will allow him to eventually join the (multi-millionaire?) billionaire class. One would assume he would fight tooth and nail to make this happen. Considering his past unethical behavior, I don’t see him playing nice to get what he wants.
> The average person enjoys the convenience of consolidation under one corporate overlord.
I think the average person likes
1) only logging in once (even using an FB or Google login more than once, sign up etc, is too much friction)
2) a consistent interface
3) while being able to jump to another "forum" easily, which internal links obviously do.
Solve those 3 things for decentralised forums (or whatever, seeing that Discord is touted as an alternative) and it breaks the hold of Reddit and FB etc.
I checked, and my pre-Reddit Internet experience is still there. The networks are small, on-topic, you recognize people, (we're all 40 now), (all their user databases are on haveibeenpwned). These are all things "subreddit snobs" exalt about their lil' <100k user subreddits. I'm not seeing a super compelling reason not to go back to this mode of Internetting.
> Spez assumes he has more power than Reddit users. He is likely right.
There is a chance the protest wins. The interesting twist here is the moderators, which currently have unusual power. The sad part is that this power might go away down the line, as a result of this protest and irrespective of its outcome.
If the protest fails, there was nothing of value left to lose. Reddit has had ample opportunity to make things right in a way amenable to the people complaining. Instead, they've consistently signalled that they want to keep dumping the value that long time users see in the site down the drain. Personally, I have no interest in continuing as steward of the trash heap. Sad to mourn the loss of niche communities, but enough is enough.
> I wish people would just stop using that site and go back to web forums, but that is never happening.
I can tell you that a bunch of the technical Reddits have just shut down. I suspect that's going to put a big dent in things because site:reddit.com is going to be dead in Google. And that's the only thing holding people on Reddit.
Unfortunately, those technical sub-Reddits are almost always moving to Discord. :(
Once "site:discord.com" becomes a thing, Reddit is cooked.
On reddit you can get banned from a bunch of subs, just because you post in a sub that their mods don't like. It's apparently against the reddit's rules, but nobody seems to give a shit.
It'even easier to do that in the fediverse and it isn't against any rules.
So there will be problems with interoperability, because of this.
Readit News
The commons built in the 90s was turned into a playground in the 2000s and is now a oil well being mined by megacorps.
What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's ability to profit from this was a disguise created by free money.
With any luck twitter/reddit/facebook/et al. will disappear in favour of their "corresponding wikipedias" --- which is the model, I think, all the "platform creators" thought they were participating in.
There needs to be new alliances between volunteer-platform-creators and volunteer-content-creators
Oh the good old days :(
Oh the good old days :(
As do I, but I suspect much of what I miss is simply just being young and free and all that comes with that.
I miss the days of the forum and wikis, it was vastly easier to search and lurk. and now you need a multiple accounts to even find that information.
In my opinion, the UI of social media has been deliberately designed to be a dopamine waterfall that discourages people to think or invest themselves in any one community. If you analyzed the top 1000 links on Reddit r/all at any given time, without checking it myself, I think you'd find that 950 of those links are memes, funny pictures, lousy opinions or some kind of a drama going on.
And back-end is a non-issue either. A phpBB forum hosted on a DigitalOcean $6 VPS can comfortably handle 100,000 community members. But perhaps the bigger issue is that people don't even want to participate in an actual community/forum, because for example - there are no downvote/upvote buttons in phpBB. There's also no instant image preview (gratification), and you actually have to click on a new thread to read it.
So, yes, cesspit is a good word for it. But more than that its people having become so comfortable with meaningless browsing, for many of them - Reddit being gone for a few days means they will browse more TikTok or whatever else people mindlessly scroll through.
Back then, sure, there was moderation, but there was also plenty of content that, while not egregious, by today's standard would certainly keep a small independent forum sysop up at night. Linking to pirated content, for instance, used to be generally a non-issue, and even if someone cared, the likelihood they were going to find it and bother targeting your forum was pretty slim. These days, that is very much not the case, with bots happy to scour the Internet for a rising number of possible content that could get your server targeted and pressured into oblivion by a pack of rabid attack lawyers.
I'm sort of hoping to see a move to the use of darknet services to alleviate some of that, perhaps with relays like tor2web or similar options for i2p that can make them clearnet accessible without the dread associated with running a server with user created content exposed to lawyers. That, or simple ephemerality of content (though say, IRC or similar protocols) seems to be the way around the reality of the legal environment brought on by web 2.0 (and beyond).
forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins.
oh, the good old days.
What's stopping anyone today to have a community around a forum? phpBB still exists...
Is that what's happening though? My impression is that it's a vocal minority and powermods that made the decision about blackout. Similar to a lot of political topics in real life. I was never asked about this. There's a Twitch channel now brigading every sub that raises the question if they should continue or not. Look at the vocal people in /r/soccer and most have never posted in the sub before.
It's going on with real farmers in the Netherlands and in a similar fashion with other assets people thought they owned just about everywhere as we convert to the own nothing economy.
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And the next 10 years will remove the volunteers entirely. AI will be the one creating the content for the corporations. That seems inevitable at this point. We have already been on that path for a while with the spread of algorithmic feeds. First we removed the humans from the recommendations and editorial decisions. The next step is to remove them from the creation.
Maybe if we are lucky we will get some of those "corresponding Wikipedias" too. Reddit seems to have made their choice that they don't value communities, creators, volunteers, or anything like that. They just want to serve up the lowest common denominator content to show you between ads. Volunteers complaining is just unnecessary "noise". AI won't complain.
AI can't create anything without a corpus of human-created online content from which to learn. And if humans aren't posting the results of their research in archives, or their photos, or anything else created through offline travails then AI won't create anything new.
And they won't pay, if the content is not interesting.
So if AI creates interesting content and the users are happy to consume that, well fine for them.
But I think most people want actually more. Or at least, enough people want genuine human interactions, so AI taking over of the corporate "social media" will just create social networks that do care about that human touch.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36260037
Reddit is still relying on volunteers human mods but I don't see Reddit needed them for long.
This is a fantasy. All the money (and thus features and users) has been flowing in to ever more consolidated, corporate-controlled platforms for decades.
There's no serious alternative, as all the decentralized platforms lack the network effects of the big players.
If anything, the future is going to be ever more centralized and consolidated.
The old, wild and free internet is gone for good.
But IRC persists. I still visit and post in a few web forums. Email is still a thing. The modern internet is a mess but open platforms aren't gone, if anything what's become more apparent is that centralized and consolidated platforms inevitably collapse on themselves.
It's naive to believe they are just volunteers either given how many of them are active for 20+ hours a day, and how moderation on some of the big subs are done in such a way that is effectively consensus making. Almost certainly some, if not most of the biggest power moderators on the site are run by multiple people, potentially other corporations or government agencies.
The old/wild internet is dead and buried, and it was before this blackout too. The API changes certainly aren't good, but let's not kid ourselves that Reddit's main moderators organizing the blackout are anything like volunteer mods of old.
>By submitting user content to reddit, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, or publicly display your user content in any medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.
By moving to self-hosting through protocols like IPFS or Arweave, and having social applications built on top, two problems can be solved at once.
1. Your data isn't locked in anymore. All your social media posts, images, etc can be shared with multiple platforms at the same time. If you quit one of them your data won't disappear because all you did is grant them access, it's still in your control. This completely eliminated the issue with moving apps and having to start anew each time.
2. You can be in control of all rights. You can grant the platforms non-exclusive licenses if you see a benefit in that, or you can restrict them from making money with your content without paying you royalties. It's all up to the user.
Suppose you are hosting a wordpress blog with a comments section. Some people leave occasional comments in your blog — god knows why. Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them? Can't you delete them? Can't you disable the comments any time you wish?
Suppose now you are hosting a bulletin board, where more people are posting their messages. Don't you own all that? After all, the texts are stored on your server. Can't you delete the board at any point, or run data analysis on the posts, or even send targeted messages to your users, etc.?
Now scale this mentally to reddit, etc. At which point do you start arguing that the service doesn't own the data that it stores?
I don't mind paying - either for a service or for server costs of hosting my own instance or whatever - and I certainly don't mind paying reddit specifically. However the price point, putting it on developers and not regular users so they thought users wouldn't be bothered (I guess they assumed apps like Apollo would pass it on to their users and appear to be the bad guy? It's the only way I can make any sense of how they did it) is pretty shitty.
But the worst part is killing off all these tools that mods require - that second order effect will likely kill Reddit.
The only other time I could see a company make a decision that would so clearly kill a product was the facebook algorithmic feed, though admittedly that did take 10 years.
I don't think this is correct.
In the excellent book _The Master Switch_, Tim Wu[1] describes:
"... a long "cycle" whereby open information systems become consolidated and closed over time, reopening only after disruptive innovation."
... and my reading of his book suggests to me that the "natural point", as you say, is consolidation and closure.
Youtube is always becoming TV.
My own opinion is that the media is the message and that certain communications media - namely, pure text - can't "become TV". The real difference between reddit and HN is that you can't display a picture - of any kind - on HN.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu#The_Master_Switch
"Natural power" includes the collective action of these volunteers -- seen here, eg., with reddit.
My point is that the drive to profit from this labour will make the platforms extremely sensitive to their demands -- in ways that do not occur when there's no need to profit.
You can say "let them eat cake" if you have your own cake supplier. When the cake runs out, all those labourers turn out to be required.
I think these are unique dynamics -- much closer to the fall of serfdom than the development of TV networks
I doubt wikipedians are big on personalities either, although that demographic changed a lot too. It did have to change though because business was suddenly much more interested as well.
- we must stop assuming everyone is equal. Access to a computer, access to a smartphone, access to a stable internet connection, capability to read and use a mouse or a keyboard; our requirements are way too high to build an inclusive community. Not everyone is a white rich american english-speaking male
- we must stop assuming everyone is financially, socially, culturally at ease, and that everything is "just" a matter of individual will. The market always favors those who have more, in the pusuit of even more, and those who weren't so lucky must be supported.
Stop giving tools to companies. Stop using non-copyleft licenses. They're the number one reason Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter and countless others could be where they are today: leveraging the common goods without giving back at least as much. By design, a company maximizes the gap between what it takes and what it gives.
A simple analysis would defend the end of capitalism and the commons construction through a shared decision process, but it's still premature for HN
That way we can curate high quality content.
It is well documented that that Wikimedia CORPORATION that controls wikipedia has all kinds of the same problems, with the directors and management of that corporation at odds often with the users and the "mods" of wikipedia.
That is with out getting into the debate over the overt ideological capture of both the wiki and the corporation
No I dont think the wikipedia model is the one we should look at as an example
That's what the fediverse is all about.
Exactly what all those volunteer labourers do not want you to do. What now? They're the cash cow.
The disalignment of interests between Corp and (free) Labour was not an issue whilst Corp could burn cash.
If anything the ‘disguise of free money’ was only convincing consumers that internet platforms were a right and free to operate. Now the balance is shifting in the opposite way, operational profit.
Nobody ever said internet platforms were free to operate. That's what the ads are for. Reddit is locking the doors because they had 10 years to build a competent ad product and failed.
The leaked internal memo, which is obvious that would leak (after all it is a 2,000 person company) is a clear provocation:
> We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us.
> There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
> While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.
What is the term for when there's a worker strike and instead of engaging with organizers/union representatives, the company approaches some individual workers and teams, trying to convince them to get back to work (or at least make it seem like those workers are likely to break rank), in order to start an inner conflict between the workers and have the strike collapse on itself?
Because that is what they're doing here. Explicitly ignoring the "union reps", and driving a wedge between rank-and-file "workers", under a guise of caring for accessibility.
--
EDIT: and it's pretty clear to me this memo was meant to be leaked, and it was carefully written to address the subreddit moderators and users. It says, "meh, this is just a regular Tuesday nothingburger drama, it's pointless and will blow over - but hey, someone has a good point about accessibility, and we care and listen, so we're now actively working on it; we ain't talking with Apollo and RiF devs because they're being unreasonable drama queens, and for the love of $deity, don't be unreasonable like them; we're actually afraid some of you may rough up our employees - is that really who you want to be?".
Standard operating procedure/business as usual.
Edit: If the company was interested in engaging with organisers/union reps, the strike would probably have been avoided in the first place.
But blatantly giving your unhappy users the finger is a great way to keep them angry and thus motivated. Steve Huffman has set millions of dollars of value on fire and damaged Reddit's brand for no apparent reason (except maybe a bizarre personal vendetta against certain third-party app developers). Strange times.
Isn't that pretty much what Reddit was doing before spez came back as CEO, though? (Where being "sneaky" about user-hostile changes also included de-facto exempting the users they rely on most from them - their volunteer mods and, to some extent, their 'power' content contributors.) This screwup has all played out within a month or two - there were smaller controversies before, but nothing compares to this.
Most of the sports related subs I follow are indeed back after a 48 hour hiatus.
Every sub is pointing to their own discord server. That’s absolutely not an alternative and a chatroom will never replace a global forum.
The Denver Nuggets sub didn’t even shut down because they were so excited about their potential win. That’s literally the best time to show solidarity and they fucked that up because they cared more about posting 1 sentence meme or hype comments to a game thread.
They have consistently worsened the conditions for quality contribution with their default interfaces. I didn't realize it until now how important it is until now, because of this protest. I've already left and if my little anecdote is anything to go by, other might feel the same and do the same as me.
There are only so many days until bankruptcy. Investors are done funnelling in more and more to keep the lights on. While that would be reasonable under normal circumstances, in this panic situation there won't be a Reddit left by the time third-party developers are given reasonable time.
You don't negotiate with blackmailers, because this is what this is now, blackmail. If things continue like this I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods.
The impact of this would be to make lots of subreddit unmoderated, leading to a huge amount of spam, adult content in sfw subreddit, cross-posting, etc. The impact would be to let everyone know just how much free work the mods do to keep Reddit tidy and valuable.
I don't think you're wrong (except maybe on the timescale) but I do think the strategy would shoot the CEO in the foot again.
Get real. If anyone thinks a business is going to tolerate a clique of powermods choosing to randomly shut things down according to their own schedule… they’re gonna be disappointed.
Let alone I’ve seen some people thinking they can demand a hand in the corporate governance? Yeah fuck no powermods are not ever getting a seat on the board, lol, lmao. No company in the world would ever agree to that. Especially not after all of this.
Yeah, they’re gonna pry the mods off and reopen things, sooner or later. Unless something changes mods are going to leave things permanently closed after the 30th and walk away, and Reddit is absolutely not going to tolerate that. But there’s no reason to wait that long really.
The 5 mods running an average of 18 top-100 subs each are not going to be as tough to replace as people think they are, the reality is at that scale you’re not managing anything operationally on a day to day level, you’re setting up a script.
It’s the lower-level jannies that will be the trouble, because they’re the ones doing the actual work, not the person claiming to mod 200 million subscribers worth of content. And at the end of the day you can find some people willing to click “delete” on spam while they’re scrolling. That’s plausible if they can get over the bump gracefully. And truth is there’s always people willing to do it for the prestige, even as pitiful as that is.
The Reddit play here is obviously to pry the powermods off, get the frontpage subs back open, and get moderation back to some kind of a semi functional level (automated or otherwise) until it blows over and organic moderation can resume. And that’s a reasonably achievable goal.
But the powermod squad needs to consider what their own exit strategy is too… nobody is going to let powermods randomly shut things down on an ongoing basis. If they’re disruptive then they put Reddit in a position of being forced to remove them, it is what it is, Reddit can’t operate with a cabal of a half dozen users able to shut down the front page at will either. If Reddit doesn’t have a fundamental belief in the powermods being good-faith players they are gone regardless of the consequences, because the alternative is unacceptable. They will deal with the consequences and move forward, most likely successfully.
People act like Spez is somehow out of line and they can just get him tossed out, like the board is going to sign off on letting a bunch of agitators disrupt operations on an ongoing and indefinite basis.
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You don’t negotiate with exporters either, yet here we are.
I think you meant to say extortion, not blackmail. But it isn't that either.
As goes politics, go corporations.
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He needs to publish a hard hitting memo that chastises third party app developers for not creating more sustainable businesses. If Reddit cannot meet it’s revenue goals it will shut down, period.
No one is throwing away the kind of audience reddit has.
Now the CEO might lose his job, but let's not get that twisted up with Reddit's survival.
They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version.
The key in a negotiation is to have a crystal clear, realistic picture of the other party's constraints, motivations and ethical framework. In this case, it's clear Huffman has hard constraints around making Reddit profitable. He could easily do it by reducing headcount but that itself would defeat the purpose because it would devalue the IPO (who wants to buy a shrinking company?). He clearly has no moral or ethical compulsion here. So there isn't another option than to threaten what really matters to him: it has to be made real for Huffman that he's going to lose this if he doesn't budge. The only thing that will convince him is actually seeing users permanently leave.
I really don't get why so many people want their sub to go to Discord tbh.
That said, the reason why so many people want to go to Discord is pretty hard to miss: out of all the alternatives, it's the one with critical mass now. Even if everyone is distributed across different servers (to be clear to those less familiar, a server is not a physical/virtual host) and cannot directly interact with one another, the network effects are readily apparent.
I view it as more of an addition to Reddit, rather than a replacement.
Now Discourse https://www.discourse.org/ would be a much better choice.
That takes way more determination and organization than the vast majority of Reddit users are capable of. A couple day blackout is really just about what they can manage, and just about what most Reddit users will tolerate.
I would be absolutely shocked if this whole thing doesn't blow over in a couple of weeks, though I also wouldn't be surprised if Reddit's owners didn't compromise in some way either.
It really is an indictment on the movement that we weren’t able to find better leadership that had real practical organizing experience and a plan.
I have to wonder if this would be allowed, in the past this has only been tried for subreddits that feared being banned in an imminent fashion. On the other hand, you have rules against mods purposefully destroying their own communities, and trying to force an off-site migration in a heavy-handed fashion (eg. stopping user contributions/participation) may be seen as running afoul of these rules.
I'm loath to say it but Huffman has had a decade to solve this and hasn't. Might be time for new leadership with new ideas.
The reason reddit is hard to monetize is actually quite simple, they don't know much about their users so they can't do the high value targeting other companies do, and they have a site where it's very difficult to insert adverts in what looks like an organic way. It's easy to scroll past an advert on instagram and not realise it's an advert, it's visually consistent, on reddit it sticks out like a sore thumb so they get CPS rates of a 90s banner ad - because that's what they're selling.
They haven't tried to enter any ad ecosystem, haven't tried to monetize the massive amount of creativity or anything on the platform. Granted, it's really hard to say "Hey, we've shown your news article to 10 million people, pls pay us" when the news site itself is struggling to get any revenue from those millions of clicks. Not to mention the site might have a question reddit reeeeallly doesn't want to answer "So, was it in a neo-nazi subforum or a porn subforum?"
Yeah, there's just been nothing in ten years. An IPO at this point is nothing but a cash grab awaiting the death of the platform.
In response to this, some people have been driving a push back to traditional/contextual ads, similar to what Reddit is currently doing. So, in theory, if Reddit is selling Guaranteed High Quality ad space, and selling it to brands with whom they have a direct partnership,[2] and not getting skimmed off the top by middlemen, they should be raking in the advertising dollars. Right?
But they're clearly not! Or not nearly enough to be profitable.
The efforts against third-party apps are clearly an attempt to drive more ad impressions (because you can't drive impressions if users aren't in an environment where you can serve impressions), but I somehow doubt that that's gonna make a big difference, even if third-party-app-users all threw up their hands and migrated, without protest, to official channels.
[1] The real cash cow among programmatic ads is video advertising, since those placements are more valuable and fetch a higher price, but I also see that as a trap for Reddit—their decision to start natively hosting video seems pretty short-sighted for a company that's already not breaking even. If they wanted to go hard on video ads, they'd have to start prioritizing more video content, which means hosting more video content....
[2] Perhaps not for nothing that half the ads on Reddit these days are for that vaguely evangelistic "He Gets Us" campaign. The buyers clearly have money to throw around, but the relative lack of other ads mixed in has to say something about the (lack of) demand for Reddit's inventory.
VC forces you to staff up, spend like there is no tomorrow, and have a huge return or GTFO.
$500M a year should absolutely support a company like Reddit (even giving the API away for free) but that’s not a 10-100-1000x return so it’s essentially $0 to VCs.
When Reddit says they aren’t profitable they really mean they aren’t profitable /enough/ coupled with their high headcount.
Working at a small startup (or a side project) will show you what can be accomplished with 1-10 or <50 people who are all committed.
That and instagram ads are said to be better.
reddit's gone so mainstream I'm not sure if this is true anymore.
i constantly find good restaurants via ads. out of my top 5 fav restaurants, 3 i found via ads.
Surely spending there is overinflated? I know whales with bad impulse control are a thing but there's no way the average user there justifies $35 in ad spending.
There is - it makes little sense to buy ads, when you can buy comments.
https://xkcd.com/1019/
Either way, the experiment is very cheap and honestly we're dreaming if these were the rates they paid. It's probably more like $2/hour to people in 2nd/3rd world countries.
I thought it'd be better to advertise than self promote. However, Reddit's ad management is a complete cluster. It is confusing, frustrating to set up, and difficult to analyze.
The reason I really wanted to advertise on Reddit rather than Facebook/Instagram is that Facebook's "profiles" of people aren't specific enough for what I am selling. But with Reddit, I literally just want to target anyone who is a member of or visits these specific subreddits.
For me, it is perfect targeted advertising without any invasive tracking of users!
But Reddit wouldn't let me. Those subreddits aren't on their very limited list of approved subreddits. Instead my only choice was to be able to target a really, really big subreddit (/r/Music) which 99.99% of the people there would have no interest in my product, or to use their profiles, which are not nearly as complete as Facebook's.
So, I gave up, and decided I wasn't getting my return on advertising on Reddit.
It looks like they've been mostly user friendly. They were relatively late forcing users to the app, and the app doesn't seem as bad as competition (in terms of privacy, nagging, ect., not quality).
As far as I can tell they've resisted the use of a ton of user hostile forms of advertising. They don't allow software, so no malware. The ads don't intrude on the users. (although they have blended it with normal content, which isn't great).
Do they even sell data. At this point, it seems guarantied that they're selling some data, but they haven't been successful. Haven't heard much on them building detailed profiles on specific people.
1. Instagram encourages business users to use the service for free. This gives a taste for the platform and reduces the friction in spending money later on. Reddit, on the other hand, discourages free business use.
2. Instagram generally gives the impression that it has real users, with real names and real photos attached. Reddit generally gives the impression of being a fantasy world with anonymous characters. While the latter may be attractive to certain niche products that fit into that fantasy, the average business operating in the real world feels more at home when it thinks it is marketing to real people.
1. Third party app users represent significant enough lost revenue to make it worth making the API prohibitively expensive for third party apps to run, forcing those users back to the official app.
2. Third party apps users are few enough that Reddit can afford to not compromise and lose those users just to kill off third party apps.
Are they expecting the third party app users will come crawling back to the official app? As far as I’m concerned the official app is borderline unusable compared to Apollo, for example, and I’d expect most users who have seen the light to find the official app completely intolerable.
Perhaps the presence of unofficial, basically un-monetized third party apps was flagged as a risk for their IPO by some investor types. Still, they could have found a better route to monetize those users than just killing off the apps altogether.
The only subs that really matter in this context are the frontpage top-100 subs, and it’s not like there’s any real intensive discussion over some cat pic or earthporn.
The hobby subs are fine and generally adds value, it’s not like they’re going to remove them, but it’s not where the site’s primary engagement is going to be in another year or two.
If they lose 25% of users and quadruple the revenue from the remaining users - that’s a massive win for them. And this is where the 90-9-1 rule works against you, because most users are going to stay, because they’re just scrolling cat pics anyway, and none of this really affects them. That’s the calculation. Most will stay, and they’ll make a lot more revenue per user that way.
And in the grand scheme of things… there will be enough content in a month or two to keep people busy. This too shall pass.
(there have been notable other controversies, but I thought I'd mention a "classic")
Even better is adding it to Pi-hole so you get everything at once (including blackout-oblivious house guests!).
Maybe, but my guess is they also produce the majority of the content that other users come to Reddit to consume. So it's a dangerous game.
Don’t think the moderators who moderate your forums everyday for free should be included in that category …
A company that's 15 years old, never turned a profit really or made much profit if it ever did, and is still losing money is not in a good place to IPO, which existing investors want to recoup some of their investment.
Couldn't be more relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM
I assume the ipo will allow him to eventually join the (multi-millionaire?) billionaire class. One would assume he would fight tooth and nail to make this happen. Considering his past unethical behavior, I don’t see him playing nice to get what he wants.
I think the average person likes
1) only logging in once (even using an FB or Google login more than once, sign up etc, is too much friction)
2) a consistent interface
3) while being able to jump to another "forum" easily, which internal links obviously do.
Solve those 3 things for decentralised forums (or whatever, seeing that Discord is touted as an alternative) and it breaks the hold of Reddit and FB etc.
It's not that. Reddit is where much of the community is today, much like Usenet was where the community was in the 90's.
People are going to go where most people are. Unless something can replace those network effects, nothing's going to change.
There is a chance the protest wins. The interesting twist here is the moderators, which currently have unusual power. The sad part is that this power might go away down the line, as a result of this protest and irrespective of its outcome.
I can tell you that a bunch of the technical Reddits have just shut down. I suspect that's going to put a big dent in things because site:reddit.com is going to be dead in Google. And that's the only thing holding people on Reddit.
Unfortunately, those technical sub-Reddits are almost always moving to Discord. :(
Once "site:discord.com" becomes a thing, Reddit is cooked.
Centralization is an easy way to do content aggregation, you can't compete if you lack good aggregation.
It'even easier to do that in the fediverse and it isn't against any rules. So there will be problems with interoperability, because of this.
I would be pretty surprised if that happens. Digg sold for $500k. I'm expecting something similar.