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It feels like the more a company tries to pump value for shareholders, the less value is left over for users. Reddit has been very obviously working towards an

It feels like the more a company tries to pump value for shareholders, the less value is left over for users. Reddit has been very obviously working towards an IPO for some time and you can see it in the worsening user experience and onerous (prudish) moderation policies pandering to advertisers. Shareholders are parasites on a company as their interests are one dimensional in favor of themselves. Gotta get that big IPO payout though.

prepend 3y ago
They keep changing to make the site worse and worse for users. On my iPhone, Reddit.com shows 5 articles when I’m logged in. Old.Reddit.com shows 15. The recently killed compact mode showed even more. To view the same articles I would spend more time scrolling, so I guess I like that. But instead I spend less time on the site.
- vanilla_nut 3y ago
  Compact mode still exists! Add the suffix `/.i` to any reddit URL and you'll get it back. They removed i.reddit.com and the `/i` suffix but I think the PMs forget to mention `/.i` in their "kill compact reddit" JIRA ticket.
  - SQueeeeeL 3y ago
    People really are bizarre addicts. Companies will literally blatantly say they hate you and your moderately healthy use patterns; and people will desperately try to use the site until they eventually get around to killing the service
    - misio 3y ago
      It took a long time, my account is 15 or 16 years old, but I've not visited the site in a couple of months now. Addict that I was, they managed to cure me with their latest changes, hallelujah.
    - vanilla_nut 3y ago
      I've been trying to cut Reddit usage since I first heard about their impending IPO a few months ago, actually. When they killed i.reddit.com and the /i suffix, it tripped my alarm bells and I realized I shouldn't keep relying on Reddit for much. I've successfully eliminated it from most of my recreational time, but Reddit posts are still often useful when I'm debugging an error or researching a purchase. When that happens, I'm glad I have the /.i suffix set up on my phone and old reddit redirect on my laptops. Quitting cold turkey is hard anyway, might as well use any hacks available that make the site easier to use while I cut down my use.
- DoesntMatter22 3y ago
  The thing I hate is that they constantly push you to use the app. Stop making me use the app! I like the web browser. It works better, it's faster and it's less for me to learn another app. I actually use reddit less because of this
bagacrap 3y ago
What are shareholders supposed to care about? They give a company capital in hopes of getting more back in the future. Are shareholders meant to be philanthropists?
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  They aren't always meant to exist. Why must everything be about the extraction if capital?
  - tasubotadas 3y ago
    It gets created, not extracted
    - asdgkasdngionio 3y ago
      In the case of Reddit, it's definitely extracted. Reddit is just a particularly poorly-run and particularly large forum. Reddit (and Digg before it) did not create new forms of communication, merely placed them under the control of capital.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      It gets created, then extracted.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Because that's what the owners of said capital want. Aka capitalists
- pixelatedindex 3y ago
  Do shareholders give capital? Maybe if you’re on the board or something? But even then it really feels like shares are the dissemination of capital, where if your company does well then the share goes up. Like me buying 5 shares of Apple isn’t really giving Apple any capital as the price is based on market cap. Happy to learn if I’m wrong though.
carlosjobim 3y ago
Shareholders are either those who made the company or people that the founders sold the company or shares of the company to. They are funding the company, something a whole lot different than being a parasite. Nothing stops you from making a reddit without external funding.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Nasrudith 3y ago
Paying back big loans when they come due is always painful but calling them parasitic would be incorrect. Fundamentally reddit like many other website business models was based upon borrowing from the future. That is infamously basically the digital start up business model: offer unsustainable goods to build a user base under the expectation that it will pay back later. Much goodwill was based upon the assumption that it will do so, goodwill which helped fuel the growth in the first place. With a structure like that there is hardly anywhere to go but down. Maybe it could establish its own market section when at a large enough scale but that is unlikely. Calling it parasitic is to operate under naive assumptions that free lunch is somehow the natural state of being in a fundamentally entropic and uncaring universe. The enshitification is the result of a devil's contract as that which livestock effectively enter: to be fed crops, and protected in the now in exchange for later certain doom. There were always the "wild" alternatives of free software and DIY but they aren't popular at all in comparison. Because to continue the metaphor, the wild can hardly feed itself. There is no salary paid for maintaining your own Mastodon or message board, hell it doesn't even pay for its own server bandwidth let alone salaries for the work involved. Traditional message boards are pretty much extinct, choked out by spammers and lack of interest.
- rgbgraph 3y ago
  Financial engineering as a discipline is insane. Literally the definition of insane: seriously mentally ill and unable to live in normal society [0] -- so detached from the "normal" reality most people live in, and taken hold like a schizophrenic about things that only exist in one's own head. Shareholders are rent-seeking parasites. They have put down an initial investment to purchase some asset, and now consider themselves given the right to lord over those who labor for that asset, while providing little in value (no different than absentee/"hands-off" landlords). It would be one thing to actually loan a set amount of money, with a set payback period that ends sometime in the future. It is another to declare oneself a relative God Emperor, and shackle others for entirely one's own benefit, in perpetuity. To continue the metaphor, the wild can no longer feed itself, because of a set of people taken hold by delusions have irreparably destroyed the wild's ability to. No different than someone buying a cat, and keeping it locked up in a house all day. Yes, food and shelter is provided -- but a cat would be able to achieve those for itself, were it not for a chain of man-made events that landed it in such a predicament. The cat would've either not been born and never landed itself at the mercy of others, or would've been born in the wild, and lived without a sovereign ruling over it. [0] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/insane https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/ame...
ravenstine 3y ago
The worst thing about Reddit, IMO, besides the UI garbage, is that they condone warfare between communities by allowing moderators to ban people merely for being subbed to another community, and for reasons as simple as the other community being the wrong politics and no history of raids. That said, I actually think Fidelity's valuation is a bit harsh. Reddit's true utility today is in being a source of actual opinions and not corporate blogvomit. When I do searches today, I frequently use site:reddit.com, and I know many here on HN do at the very least. Reddit is, for better or worse, a centralized version of what the web used to be inside the web itself. For that reason alone, I think there's reason to believe that Reddit is not going anywhere, and that it still has opportunities to correct course. As far as I know, there are no serious competitors yet.
- egberts1 3y ago
  Reddit: how to be a dark web without being a dark web?
- asdgkasdngionio 3y ago
  >is that they condone warfare between communities by allowing moderators to ban people merely for being subbed to another community, and for reasons as simple as the other community being the wrong politics and no history of raids. Either these are communities or they aren't. If they are communities, they have the right to ban whomever they please for nearly any reason. The right to decide who is and who is not a member is about the most important right a community has. My buddies and I have no obligation to let you hang out with us if we don't like your politics. I certainly don't care for the way Reddit runs its "communities". They are, in practice, run by a variety of petty tyrants. The admins ban anything that might scare off the advertisers and the moderators rule by edict. The solution to that is not, in my opinion, to increase centralized control even more.
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    It's not really a question of whether communities have a "right" so much as that I don't think it's something that Reddit should support, but they provide moderator tools to do this. Worse yet, they bring this problem upon themselves by making it ridiculously easy to setup dummy Reddit accounts and can be active in a very short period of time, which practically encourages ban evasion. Instead of allowing innocent users to face guilt by association, Reddit should add a lot more friction to creating new accounts and add read-only period. > My buddies and I have no obligation to let you hang out with us if we don't like your politics. There's nothing wrong with this in principal, except the default behavior for subreddits is to allow literally anyone to "join" in a single click. Those people aren't all your "buddies". A community can become private, but this also means not being visible to anyone except members. This creates a weird dichotomy where either a community is full-blown open and is encouraged to use other people's subscriptions against them, or to be invite only but few want to join because they can't see the activity of the site. > I certainly don't care for the way Reddit runs its "communities". They are, in practice, run by a variety of petty tyrants. That's exactly why the guilt-by-association approach frequently goes overboard. > The solution to that is not, in my opinion, to increase centralized control even more. Agreed. Some better approaches would be to allow a middle-ground for communities to be more exclusive and for sock puppet accounts to no longer be piss easy to create.

prepend 3y ago

They keep changing to make the site worse and worse for users. On my iPhone, Reddit.com shows 5 articles when I’m logged in. Old.Reddit.com shows 15. The recently killed compact mode showed even more. To view the same articles I would spend more time scrolling, so I guess I like that. But instead I spend less time on the site.

vanilla_nut 3y ago
Compact mode still exists! Add the suffix `/.i` to any reddit URL and you'll get it back. They removed i.reddit.com and the `/i` suffix but I think the PMs forget to mention `/.i` in their "kill compact reddit" JIRA ticket.
- SQueeeeeL 3y ago
  People really are bizarre addicts. Companies will literally blatantly say they hate you and your moderately healthy use patterns; and people will desperately try to use the site until they eventually get around to killing the service
  - misio 3y ago
    It took a long time, my account is 15 or 16 years old, but I've not visited the site in a couple of months now. Addict that I was, they managed to cure me with their latest changes, hallelujah.
  - vanilla_nut 3y ago
    I've been trying to cut Reddit usage since I first heard about their impending IPO a few months ago, actually. When they killed i.reddit.com and the /i suffix, it tripped my alarm bells and I realized I shouldn't keep relying on Reddit for much. I've successfully eliminated it from most of my recreational time, but Reddit posts are still often useful when I'm debugging an error or researching a purchase. When that happens, I'm glad I have the /.i suffix set up on my phone and old reddit redirect on my laptops. Quitting cold turkey is hard anyway, might as well use any hacks available that make the site easier to use while I cut down my use.
DoesntMatter22 3y ago
The thing I hate is that they constantly push you to use the app. Stop making me use the app! I like the web browser. It works better, it's faster and it's less for me to learn another app. I actually use reddit less because of this

bagacrap 3y ago

What are shareholders supposed to care about? They give a company capital in hopes of getting more back in the future. Are shareholders meant to be philanthropists?

unethical_ban 3y ago
They aren't always meant to exist. Why must everything be about the extraction if capital?
- tasubotadas 3y ago
  It gets created, not extracted
  - asdgkasdngionio 3y ago
    In the case of Reddit, it's definitely extracted. Reddit is just a particularly poorly-run and particularly large forum. Reddit (and Digg before it) did not create new forms of communication, merely placed them under the control of capital.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    It gets created, then extracted.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Because that's what the owners of said capital want. Aka capitalists
pixelatedindex 3y ago
Do shareholders give capital? Maybe if you’re on the board or something? But even then it really feels like shares are the dissemination of capital, where if your company does well then the share goes up. Like me buying 5 shares of Apple isn’t really giving Apple any capital as the price is based on market cap. Happy to learn if I’m wrong though.

carlosjobim 3y ago

Shareholders are either those who made the company or people that the founders sold the company or shares of the company to. They are funding the company, something a whole lot different than being a parasite. Nothing stops you from making a reddit without external funding.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Nasrudith 3y ago

Paying back big loans when they come due is always painful but calling them parasitic would be incorrect. Fundamentally reddit like many other website business models was based upon borrowing from the future. That is infamously basically the digital start up business model: offer unsustainable goods to build a user base under the expectation that it will pay back later. Much goodwill was based upon the assumption that it will do so, goodwill which helped fuel the growth in the first place. With a structure like that there is hardly anywhere to go but down. Maybe it could establish its own market section when at a large enough scale but that is unlikely. Calling it parasitic is to operate under naive assumptions that free lunch is somehow the natural state of being in a fundamentally entropic and uncaring universe. The enshitification is the result of a devil's contract as that which livestock effectively enter: to be fed crops, and protected in the now in exchange for later certain doom. There were always the "wild" alternatives of free software and DIY but they aren't popular at all in comparison. Because to continue the metaphor, the wild can hardly feed itself. There is no salary paid for maintaining your own Mastodon or message board, hell it doesn't even pay for its own server bandwidth let alone salaries for the work involved. Traditional message boards are pretty much extinct, choked out by spammers and lack of interest.

rgbgraph 3y ago
Financial engineering as a discipline is insane. Literally the definition of insane: seriously mentally ill and unable to live in normal society [0] -- so detached from the "normal" reality most people live in, and taken hold like a schizophrenic about things that only exist in one's own head. Shareholders are rent-seeking parasites. They have put down an initial investment to purchase some asset, and now consider themselves given the right to lord over those who labor for that asset, while providing little in value (no different than absentee/"hands-off" landlords). It would be one thing to actually loan a set amount of money, with a set payback period that ends sometime in the future. It is another to declare oneself a relative God Emperor, and shackle others for entirely one's own benefit, in perpetuity. To continue the metaphor, the wild can no longer feed itself, because of a set of people taken hold by delusions have irreparably destroyed the wild's ability to. No different than someone buying a cat, and keeping it locked up in a house all day. Yes, food and shelter is provided -- but a cat would be able to achieve those for itself, were it not for a chain of man-made events that landed it in such a predicament. The cat would've either not been born and never landed itself at the mercy of others, or would've been born in the wild, and lived without a sovereign ruling over it. [0] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/insane https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/ame...

ravenstine 3y ago

The worst thing about Reddit, IMO, besides the UI garbage, is that they condone warfare between communities by allowing moderators to ban people merely for being subbed to another community, and for reasons as simple as the other community being the wrong politics and no history of raids. That said, I actually think Fidelity's valuation is a bit harsh. Reddit's true utility today is in being a source of actual opinions and not corporate blogvomit. When I do searches today, I frequently use site:reddit.com, and I know many here on HN do at the very least. Reddit is, for better or worse, a centralized version of what the web used to be inside the web itself. For that reason alone, I think there's reason to believe that Reddit is not going anywhere, and that it still has opportunities to correct course. As far as I know, there are no serious competitors yet.

egberts1 3y ago
Reddit: how to be a dark web without being a dark web?
asdgkasdngionio 3y ago
>is that they condone warfare between communities by allowing moderators to ban people merely for being subbed to another community, and for reasons as simple as the other community being the wrong politics and no history of raids. Either these are communities or they aren't. If they are communities, they have the right to ban whomever they please for nearly any reason. The right to decide who is and who is not a member is about the most important right a community has. My buddies and I have no obligation to let you hang out with us if we don't like your politics. I certainly don't care for the way Reddit runs its "communities". They are, in practice, run by a variety of petty tyrants. The admins ban anything that might scare off the advertisers and the moderators rule by edict. The solution to that is not, in my opinion, to increase centralized control even more.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  It's not really a question of whether communities have a "right" so much as that I don't think it's something that Reddit should support, but they provide moderator tools to do this. Worse yet, they bring this problem upon themselves by making it ridiculously easy to setup dummy Reddit accounts and can be active in a very short period of time, which practically encourages ban evasion. Instead of allowing innocent users to face guilt by association, Reddit should add a lot more friction to creating new accounts and add read-only period. > My buddies and I have no obligation to let you hang out with us if we don't like your politics. There's nothing wrong with this in principal, except the default behavior for subreddits is to allow literally anyone to "join" in a single click. Those people aren't all your "buddies". A community can become private, but this also means not being visible to anyone except members. This creates a weird dichotomy where either a community is full-blown open and is encouraged to use other people's subscriptions against them, or to be invite only but few want to join because they can't see the activity of the site. > I certainly don't care for the way Reddit runs its "communities". They are, in practice, run by a variety of petty tyrants. That's exactly why the guilt-by-association approach frequently goes overboard. > The solution to that is not, in my opinion, to increase centralized control even more. Agreed. Some better approaches would be to allow a middle-ground for communities to be more exclusive and for sock puppet accounts to no longer be piss easy to create.