3 ms·

I wonder if it's an example of "MBA capture" of the organization. I agree with you, the thing that made Reddit interesting to me is that it stands apart from m

by skohan 6y ago

I wonder if it's an example of "MBA capture" of the organization. I agree with you, the thing that made Reddit interesting to me is that it stands apart from most social media platforms. Most social media platforms thrive on "look at me" cultures, and drive engagement by making the user themself feel like the object of attention. Due to pseudo-anonymity, Reddit has always lived and died by the quality of the content itself. Based on that understanding of the platform, adding features like following users, or having profile pictures, don't make a lot of sense in terms of Reddit's USPs. But I can imagine how a shift like this might happen. Reddit has a board of directors, and they might look at KPI's like revenue per user, and notice that Reddit is underperforming by a wide margin compared to other players in the space like Facebook, Instagram and twitter. Then managers get tasked with improving this KPI, and through a lack of creativity, they end up copying features from more well monetized social networks. I think this type of thinking - that all businesses can essentially be treated as black boxes and optimized in the same way - is essentially what led to Dig's emulation of Facebook and eventual downfall.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> Reddit has a board of directors, and they might look at KPI's like revenue per user, and notice that Reddit is underperforming by a wide margin compared to other players in the space like Facebook, Instagram and twitter. Ironically it's often a business opportunity to do the opposite of this, i.e. incumbents are implementing user-hostile features that increase some KPI but that users actually hate, so if you do the opposite then you get the users. Attracting and retaining users is the most important thing, because without that you're out of business. It's far more profitable to make a dollar each from a billion people than a thousand dollars each from a hundred.
- skohan 6y ago
  > It's far more profitable to make a dollar each from a billion people than a thousand dollars each from a hundred. While this is true, it's also a hard to make this argument in product discussions, especially when similar products like Facebook and Instagram also have much larger user-bases. I can imagine the logic would probably be: - Reddit has X users who produce Y revenue per user - Facebook has 100*X users who produce 21*Y revenue per user -> therefore Reddit can potentially increase revenue by a factor of 21 with its current user base! Probably the argument should be that Reddit has X users, and not 1/100 X users because it operates in a different niche than Facebook, but this type of nuance can be very difficult to sell, especially if you have already used Facebook as a point of comparison when discussing future potential when convincing investors to give you millions of dollars. It's very hard to quantify how much something you are not doing is contributing to user acquisition and retention. It might come out of qualitative research, but users doing an interview or a survey might not even be aware how the lack of a certain feature is contributing to their enjoyment of the site. Probably you would also be measuring user-acquisition and retention as KPI's, and if a single feature caused a dip, the organization would certainly take notice, but if the introduction of new features gradually slows the growth rate from 8% to 6.5% over the course of months, this is much harder to attribute to a specific strategic decision.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > especially when similar products like Facebook and Instagram also have much larger user-bases. But this is exactly the point. You're smaller than them, so they can get away with more than you because of the network effect. If you want to grow, or even stay where you are, you have to be better than them. If you're just the same, who wants the platform which is no better and has fewer users? You never unseat the incumbent by cloning them.

by skohan 6y ago

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> Reddit has a board of directors, and they might look at KPI's like revenue per user, and notice that Reddit is underperforming by a wide margin compared to other players in the space like Facebook, Instagram and twitter. Ironically it's often a business opportunity to do the opposite of this, i.e. incumbents are implementing user-hostile features that increase some KPI but that users actually hate, so if you do the opposite then you get the users. Attracting and retaining users is the most important thing, because without that you're out of business. It's far more profitable to make a dollar each from a billion people than a thousand dollars each from a hundred.

skohan 6y ago
> It's far more profitable to make a dollar each from a billion people than a thousand dollars each from a hundred. While this is true, it's also a hard to make this argument in product discussions, especially when similar products like Facebook and Instagram also have much larger user-bases. I can imagine the logic would probably be: - Reddit has X users who produce Y revenue per user - Facebook has 100*X users who produce 21*Y revenue per user -> therefore Reddit can potentially increase revenue by a factor of 21 with its current user base! Probably the argument should be that Reddit has X users, and not 1/100 X users because it operates in a different niche than Facebook, but this type of nuance can be very difficult to sell, especially if you have already used Facebook as a point of comparison when discussing future potential when convincing investors to give you millions of dollars. It's very hard to quantify how much something you are not doing is contributing to user acquisition and retention. It might come out of qualitative research, but users doing an interview or a survey might not even be aware how the lack of a certain feature is contributing to their enjoyment of the site. Probably you would also be measuring user-acquisition and retention as KPI's, and if a single feature caused a dip, the organization would certainly take notice, but if the introduction of new features gradually slows the growth rate from 8% to 6.5% over the course of months, this is much harder to attribute to a specific strategic decision.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > especially when similar products like Facebook and Instagram also have much larger user-bases. But this is exactly the point. You're smaller than them, so they can get away with more than you because of the network effect. If you want to grow, or even stay where you are, you have to be better than them. If you're just the same, who wants the platform which is no better and has fewer users? You never unseat the incumbent by cloning them.