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This is classic shortermism. Reddit is, in the short term, driving more external users towards creating user accounts while in the long term removing one of th

This is classic shortermism. Reddit is, in the short term, driving more external users towards creating user accounts while in the long term removing one of the major value funnels for why they would (i.e. the quality of comments, particularly in certain niche communities/about niche topics). This will give them a short term "bump" at the cost of the site's long term relevance (as it falls down Google's search results rankings, due to loss of clicks as people stop looking to Reddit as a source of info). Most of the recent moves on Reddit are like this, it feels like the entire site is being turned into a pump and dump scheme.

sithlord 7y ago
same thing quora did, which made it hated by the masses.
- CheeseCookie 7y ago
  Oh yeah, I remember browsing it back in the day. A friend touted it as some platform where your questions get answered by experts in that particular field. For a time it was cool - had NASA astronauts, computer scientists, famous politicians. But later it got filled with random no names and their sob stories, motivational self-help nonsense and just embellished factoids from history. It turned into a glorified r/askreddit
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Cephalopterus 7y ago
  Quora is arguably worse, it actively incentivized people to post inane and unproductive questions reducing the overall quantity of the content. Language topics are littered which questions such as "What is the colour red in the language X" while topics like Math has stuff like "What is 1+1". I wish I was kidding about that last one, it's an actual question on Quora with 1,078 answers as of this comment. It's insane
  - justincredible 7y ago
    Most of the answers to that last question are inane and unproductive. The first answer is funny though: https://www.quora.com/What-is-1+1 https://www.quora.com/What-is-1+1
    - rurp 7y ago
      That was pretty great! I especially liked "We’ve now reduce the problem to a subproblem we can easily solve!"
AJ007 7y ago
Are they going to get away with keeping all of their google volume by cloaking the google bot and hiding the content from everyone else? Comments make up the vast majority of Reddit’s unique content. I would guess on a word basis it’s over 99%?
- Someone1234 7y ago
  That wouldn't help. A significant metric Google uses for ranking is relevance, meaning number of historic clicks for a given search term. As users learn that Reddit links aren't useful sources of information, they'll click less, which means the relevance between the search term and Reddit goes down. Ultimately reducing Reddit's ranking, regardless of if the Googlebot is allowed to index the content. People often mix up indexing and ranking. Indexing is if you're even in the results set, but ranking is where. Reddit might, technically, still be in the results set but if it isn't on page 1 for a given search it may have well not be.
  - hnaccy 7y ago
    Hasn't stopped Pinterest from flooding google image search results.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - linuxftw 7y ago
      Pinterest needs to be blacklisted from search engines. I'm never signing up for an account there, period.
      - WWLink 7y ago
        lol, reminds me of the image search I did last week to find some earrings for my mom. "celestial earrings threader -amazon -etsy -pinterest -aliexpress -alibaba -dhgate" The internet is becoming a friggin pain in the ass.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
WhompingWindows 7y ago
I wish Reddit had gone the way of VLC -- keep your core product, the thing people liked, and stop chasing profits. Why do so many of these companies fall to the profit motive and lose their "soul"?
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
  Greed?
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  Paying staff? Hosting costs? Recouping money for the time they spent on it?
  - MentallyRetired 7y ago
    Right? It's almost as if they have expenses to pay for. They provide value and they're entitled to earn a profit off of it. As a small business owner myself, I'm surprised by the amount of people who expect everything to be free.
    - ptero 7y ago
      The problem with this change is not that Reddit has costs that they are trying to recoup. The problem for me is that much of the user-generated quality content that Reddit is trying to monetize was created, by users, under certain assumptions. Then those assumptions were changed for a short-term monetization gain. If they initially said that they will be requiring sing-in to read comments, push app over browser, etc. it would be just fine (but then I suspect they would not have any quality content to monetize). Just my 2c.
    - stefan_ 7y ago
      reddit was once a small business in 2016 that turned plenty profit. Then someone got it into their head to turn it into a VC company, quintupled the headcount, took $150M investment from China, you know how it goes. So now you have a whole bunch of people doing a reenactment of Silicon Valley, only the actual site experience for users has basically not changed since 10 years now (except "corporate innovations" like nagging you to install their app so people playing startup have their hockeystick curve). It's a common phenomena. Look to Strava or Patreon, perfectly successful businesses that are instead exploding headcount and spending like a cancer, while never actually changing the core experience (except for worse).
jackcosgrove 7y ago
Nothing lasts forever. Reddit is 14 years old. They've had a good run. I think there is a general trend away from user-generated content as a business model, because that content can be a bit salty. Reddit might just be cashing out because the wave they rode has already crested.
- Cephalopterus 7y ago
  > because that content can be a bit salty. AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you want to get serious about monetization then you need to actively curtail any content that is not "advertiser friendly" which in most cases means alienating your core content generators, case in point, Tumblr.
  - dmix 7y ago
    I do believe Reddit admins heavily influence the culture of the hyper-modding but at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content because it doesn't fit their view of what the subreddit should be. They really aren't legitimately user-generated subreddits anymore and there's always this constant tension between users and what gets allowed to be 'frontpaged' or commented about. I know people can create spin-off subs but when it starts happening everywhere it becomes a serious problem.
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      I still am very upset about /r/politics becoming super partisan. Reddit as a whole has always had biases, but there was a time when /r/politics was fairly centrist and genuinely useful as an aggregator with intelligent commentary. It's now a reposting of vox/buzzfeed more or less.
      - trts 7y ago
        I don't remember this time at all. But I've never found much value in the big subreddits because of the incentives to game them for karma and traffic. The most interesting communities have always seemed like the small ones since there are more people interested in a conversation vs. a popularity contest.
golergka 7y ago
What else could you get when these decisions are made by employees who don't own significant amount of stock? The whole incentive model of employmen in modern world isn't built towards long-term thinking. The company you're working for is too big for you to make any impact on the long-term, but your own career depends entirely on the short-term. I don't think that a co-founder would ever make such a short-sighted decision.
mikojan 7y ago
This is just the next logical step in transforming reddit into some sort of not-racist 9gag. A stream of images and videos that encourage scrolling, not 2000s bulletin board discussions.
Mr_Erratic 7y ago
Agreed 100%. As a massive reddit fan, this makes me mad. I can't see how this won't kill their growth long-term. Several people I know (me included) refuse to use Pinterest because you can't browse without an account. #NotMyInternet
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
wool_gather 7y ago
Stack Overflow is currently engaged in the same kind of transformation. It's sad to see these giants of user participation turning away from what (I believe) made them so wonderful, and towards raw-numbers-growth at all cost. I suppose the folks with the money will be happy, but it diminishes our culture. The pursuit of quality content certainly supports sustainable growth, but it seems that it's just not big and fast enough [to pay the VC piper][0]. [0]:https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/340250 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/340250

sithlord 7y ago

same thing quora did, which made it hated by the masses.

CheeseCookie 7y ago
Oh yeah, I remember browsing it back in the day. A friend touted it as some platform where your questions get answered by experts in that particular field. For a time it was cool - had NASA astronauts, computer scientists, famous politicians. But later it got filled with random no names and their sob stories, motivational self-help nonsense and just embellished factoids from history. It turned into a glorified r/askreddit
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Cephalopterus 7y ago
Quora is arguably worse, it actively incentivized people to post inane and unproductive questions reducing the overall quantity of the content. Language topics are littered which questions such as "What is the colour red in the language X" while topics like Math has stuff like "What is 1+1". I wish I was kidding about that last one, it's an actual question on Quora with 1,078 answers as of this comment. It's insane
- justincredible 7y ago
  Most of the answers to that last question are inane and unproductive. The first answer is funny though: https://www.quora.com/What-is-1+1 https://www.quora.com/What-is-1+1
  - rurp 7y ago
    That was pretty great! I especially liked "We’ve now reduce the problem to a subproblem we can easily solve!"

AJ007 7y ago

Are they going to get away with keeping all of their google volume by cloaking the google bot and hiding the content from everyone else? Comments make up the vast majority of Reddit’s unique content. I would guess on a word basis it’s over 99%?

Someone1234 7y ago
That wouldn't help. A significant metric Google uses for ranking is relevance, meaning number of historic clicks for a given search term. As users learn that Reddit links aren't useful sources of information, they'll click less, which means the relevance between the search term and Reddit goes down. Ultimately reducing Reddit's ranking, regardless of if the Googlebot is allowed to index the content. People often mix up indexing and ranking. Indexing is if you're even in the results set, but ranking is where. Reddit might, technically, still be in the results set but if it isn't on page 1 for a given search it may have well not be.
- hnaccy 7y ago
  Hasn't stopped Pinterest from flooding google image search results.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    Pinterest needs to be blacklisted from search engines. I'm never signing up for an account there, period.
    - WWLink 7y ago
      lol, reminds me of the image search I did last week to find some earrings for my mom. "celestial earrings threader -amazon -etsy -pinterest -aliexpress -alibaba -dhgate" The internet is becoming a friggin pain in the ass.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

WhompingWindows 7y ago

I wish Reddit had gone the way of VLC -- keep your core product, the thing people liked, and stop chasing profits. Why do so many of these companies fall to the profit motive and lose their "soul"?

Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
Greed?
jermaustin1 7y ago
Paying staff? Hosting costs? Recouping money for the time they spent on it?
- MentallyRetired 7y ago
  Right? It's almost as if they have expenses to pay for. They provide value and they're entitled to earn a profit off of it. As a small business owner myself, I'm surprised by the amount of people who expect everything to be free.
  - ptero 7y ago
    The problem with this change is not that Reddit has costs that they are trying to recoup. The problem for me is that much of the user-generated quality content that Reddit is trying to monetize was created, by users, under certain assumptions. Then those assumptions were changed for a short-term monetization gain. If they initially said that they will be requiring sing-in to read comments, push app over browser, etc. it would be just fine (but then I suspect they would not have any quality content to monetize). Just my 2c.
  - stefan_ 7y ago
    reddit was once a small business in 2016 that turned plenty profit. Then someone got it into their head to turn it into a VC company, quintupled the headcount, took $150M investment from China, you know how it goes. So now you have a whole bunch of people doing a reenactment of Silicon Valley, only the actual site experience for users has basically not changed since 10 years now (except "corporate innovations" like nagging you to install their app so people playing startup have their hockeystick curve). It's a common phenomena. Look to Strava or Patreon, perfectly successful businesses that are instead exploding headcount and spending like a cancer, while never actually changing the core experience (except for worse).

jackcosgrove 7y ago

Nothing lasts forever. Reddit is 14 years old. They've had a good run. I think there is a general trend away from user-generated content as a business model, because that content can be a bit salty. Reddit might just be cashing out because the wave they rode has already crested.

Cephalopterus 7y ago
> because that content can be a bit salty. AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you want to get serious about monetization then you need to actively curtail any content that is not "advertiser friendly" which in most cases means alienating your core content generators, case in point, Tumblr.
- dmix 7y ago
  I do believe Reddit admins heavily influence the culture of the hyper-modding but at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content because it doesn't fit their view of what the subreddit should be. They really aren't legitimately user-generated subreddits anymore and there's always this constant tension between users and what gets allowed to be 'frontpaged' or commented about. I know people can create spin-off subs but when it starts happening everywhere it becomes a serious problem.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    I still am very upset about /r/politics becoming super partisan. Reddit as a whole has always had biases, but there was a time when /r/politics was fairly centrist and genuinely useful as an aggregator with intelligent commentary. It's now a reposting of vox/buzzfeed more or less.
    - trts 7y ago
      I don't remember this time at all. But I've never found much value in the big subreddits because of the incentives to game them for karma and traffic. The most interesting communities have always seemed like the small ones since there are more people interested in a conversation vs. a popularity contest.

golergka 7y ago

What else could you get when these decisions are made by employees who don't own significant amount of stock? The whole incentive model of employmen in modern world isn't built towards long-term thinking. The company you're working for is too big for you to make any impact on the long-term, but your own career depends entirely on the short-term. I don't think that a co-founder would ever make such a short-sighted decision.

mikojan 7y ago

This is just the next logical step in transforming reddit into some sort of not-racist 9gag. A stream of images and videos that encourage scrolling, not 2000s bulletin board discussions.

Mr_Erratic 7y ago

Agreed 100%. As a massive reddit fan, this makes me mad. I can't see how this won't kill their growth long-term. Several people I know (me included) refuse to use Pinterest because you can't browse without an account. #NotMyInternet

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

wool_gather 7y ago

Stack Overflow is currently engaged in the same kind of transformation. It's sad to see these giants of user participation turning away from what (I believe) made them so wonderful, and towards raw-numbers-growth at all cost. I suppose the folks with the money will be happy, but it diminishes our culture. The pursuit of quality content certainly supports sustainable growth, but it seems that it's just not big and fast enough [to pay the VC piper][0]. [0]:https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/340250 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/340250