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This breathless take that capitalists aren’t propagandists taking advantage of every step and spreading FUD at every other is shockingly naive. The CEO of Reddi

by nawgz 3y ago

This breathless take that capitalists aren’t propagandists taking advantage of every step and spreading FUD at every other is shockingly naive. The CEO of Reddit is trying to punish this guy for overstepping because capital naturally positions itself at the top and bullies all threats it perceives It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO I don’t even know how you think people will “lose trust in leadership”. They are stoked they’re about to make ridiculous stacks of cash, and the few that aren’t don’t matter.

kaba0 3y ago
> It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders It’s absolutely insane to call them freeloaders. Reddit’s business model is not “we serve pages with ads and advertisers pay us”, it is “those ‘freeloaders’ create content that is the whole value of the company, it is nothing without that — and this results in every traffic that hits the site”
- fullstop 3y ago
  From what I have read, a lot of moderators also use third party apps as moderation tools. They are not paid to do this job. Heck, most of the video content on Reddit is reposted from other sources.
  - seviu 3y ago
    The moderation tools offered by Reddit don’t have support for accessibility. If you are in r/blind for example… How are you gonna moderate that? And for those who don’t need those tools, third party apps save them a lot of time since the official app is so bad for such things.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    > They are not paid to do this job. plenty more people want to moderate, seriously, why should they pay them? hear me out: If you pay them "a livable wage" you'll get people in the chair who don't want the job, just the pay. If you pay them less, suddenly you'll run afoul of minimum wage laws, overhead of having employees, etc. you could auction off the job (mods pay reddit for the privilege, given that more people want to moderate than currently can) but that would encourage the mods to monetize their sub (the more successfully, the more subs would become part of ebaum's world) voluntary moderation actually is the happy medium, people who love the job and the sub are willing/want to do it. Like they say "everything can't be measured in money" (ok, I never say that, but there it is)
    - fullstop 3y ago
      I never asked for them to be paid. I'm saying that reddit can exist due to their generosity, and that these people use third party tools and the API to do this. That's being taken away.
- nawgz 3y ago
  I obviously don’t believe in capitalist philosophy but you’re joking if you think the market doesn’t consider ad-free users as a drain regardless of reality. Which is what I’m trying to say: you’re framing the actions of Reddit’s CSuite in terms or morals and long term outlooks, which is not how the market will look at their ipo. At all.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    If those ad-free users are over represented in content creatin then surely they are no drain. No one comes to reddit so they can browse ads.
    - nawgz 3y ago
      Seems like two big ifs - that they’re over represented, and that they wouldn’t switch to Reddit apps or web
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    I non-obviously do believe in the capitalist reality underpinning the universe (it's value-add all the way down) but you’re smoking if you think the market doesn't recognize ad-free users are relatively cost-less compared to their positive network externalities. that doesn't mean that some free-to-choose sites won't experiment with paywalls, etc. in an attempt to enhance cost-covering revenue.
  - wpietri 3y ago
    Sorry, but "the market" doesn't think anything. That's a category error. If by that you mean something like "VC investors", sure. They are people whose job is trying to turn money into more money while filling their own pockets to bursting. They are zero-sum people by nature and practice. If they really understood and cared about communities, they'd mostly have different jobs. But that doesn't make it true. And there's nothing wrong with framing Reddit's execs actions in terms of morals and long-term outlooks. We should generally not concede anything to the world-view of the greedy. Whether or not this will hurt Reddit's IPO is worth discussing, but we shouldn't confuse that with hurting Reddit the community, which it certainly will.
- wpietri 3y ago
  Exactly. I'd argue the true freeloaders at Reddit are the Reddit execs and the venture capitalists squeezing for profits. Everybody here developer here knows they could rebuild Reddit in short order; there's no technology moat. The valuable asset is the community. Beyond recovering enough money to pay for servers and some core staff, everything else is parasitic.
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  > They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO My take on this comment is that these people are considered freeloaders by Reddit. It’s not necessarily rational from an outsiders perspective, but that’s not the point. I don’t know much about reddit, but if they sell advertising, then advertisers are the customers, users are the product, and anyone else who extracts value from the ecosystem are parasites. It doesn’t matter if the parasites are an important part of the ecosystem. There is a remarkably deep bench of people willing to replace an any “parasites” that are removed, and if exfoliating the current layer will improve DAU and therefore IPO value then it will be done. In this context, “freeloader” is a nice way of putting it. To be clear - I don’t agree that any of this is OK, and I certainly don’t agree that moderators or third party apps are actually parasites - but that’s also the point I think the GP is making. If the only measure of success is money, that’s what they will optimise for. And an IPO is the shortest of short term goals - a single event which must be optimised at all costs.
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    All of these 3rd social media clients really are “freeloaders” though, I don’t get what’s so controversial about shutting them down. If I made my own Netflix client that bypasses their revenue stream, and implemented my own revenue stream on top of it, would anybody be upset or surprised if it was shut down?
    - kaba0 3y ago
      Shitty analogy — does your users produce the movies as well?
      - AmericanChopper 3y ago
        The users don’t belong to Apollo. Reddit provides a service to Reddit users, Apollo freeloads on that service, cuts off Reddit’s revenue stream, and replaces it with its own. Why would anybody think that Reddit has some obligation to allow this, or that Apollo has some right to do it?

by nawgz 3y ago

kaba0 3y ago

> It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders It’s absolutely insane to call them freeloaders. Reddit’s business model is not “we serve pages with ads and advertisers pay us”, it is “those ‘freeloaders’ create content that is the whole value of the company, it is nothing without that — and this results in every traffic that hits the site”

fullstop 3y ago
From what I have read, a lot of moderators also use third party apps as moderation tools. They are not paid to do this job. Heck, most of the video content on Reddit is reposted from other sources.
- seviu 3y ago
  The moderation tools offered by Reddit don’t have support for accessibility. If you are in r/blind for example… How are you gonna moderate that? And for those who don’t need those tools, third party apps save them a lot of time since the official app is so bad for such things.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  > They are not paid to do this job. plenty more people want to moderate, seriously, why should they pay them? hear me out: If you pay them "a livable wage" you'll get people in the chair who don't want the job, just the pay. If you pay them less, suddenly you'll run afoul of minimum wage laws, overhead of having employees, etc. you could auction off the job (mods pay reddit for the privilege, given that more people want to moderate than currently can) but that would encourage the mods to monetize their sub (the more successfully, the more subs would become part of ebaum's world) voluntary moderation actually is the happy medium, people who love the job and the sub are willing/want to do it. Like they say "everything can't be measured in money" (ok, I never say that, but there it is)
  - fullstop 3y ago
    I never asked for them to be paid. I'm saying that reddit can exist due to their generosity, and that these people use third party tools and the API to do this. That's being taken away.
nawgz 3y ago
I obviously don’t believe in capitalist philosophy but you’re joking if you think the market doesn’t consider ad-free users as a drain regardless of reality. Which is what I’m trying to say: you’re framing the actions of Reddit’s CSuite in terms or morals and long term outlooks, which is not how the market will look at their ipo. At all.
- kaba0 3y ago
  If those ad-free users are over represented in content creatin then surely they are no drain. No one comes to reddit so they can browse ads.
  - nawgz 3y ago
    Seems like two big ifs - that they’re over represented, and that they wouldn’t switch to Reddit apps or web
- fsckboy 3y ago
  I non-obviously do believe in the capitalist reality underpinning the universe (it's value-add all the way down) but you’re smoking if you think the market doesn't recognize ad-free users are relatively cost-less compared to their positive network externalities. that doesn't mean that some free-to-choose sites won't experiment with paywalls, etc. in an attempt to enhance cost-covering revenue.
- wpietri 3y ago
  Sorry, but "the market" doesn't think anything. That's a category error. If by that you mean something like "VC investors", sure. They are people whose job is trying to turn money into more money while filling their own pockets to bursting. They are zero-sum people by nature and practice. If they really understood and cared about communities, they'd mostly have different jobs. But that doesn't make it true. And there's nothing wrong with framing Reddit's execs actions in terms of morals and long-term outlooks. We should generally not concede anything to the world-view of the greedy. Whether or not this will hurt Reddit's IPO is worth discussing, but we shouldn't confuse that with hurting Reddit the community, which it certainly will.
wpietri 3y ago
Exactly. I'd argue the true freeloaders at Reddit are the Reddit execs and the venture capitalists squeezing for profits. Everybody here developer here knows they could rebuild Reddit in short order; there's no technology moat. The valuable asset is the community. Beyond recovering enough money to pay for servers and some core staff, everything else is parasitic.
doctor_eval 3y ago
> They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO My take on this comment is that these people are considered freeloaders by Reddit. It’s not necessarily rational from an outsiders perspective, but that’s not the point. I don’t know much about reddit, but if they sell advertising, then advertisers are the customers, users are the product, and anyone else who extracts value from the ecosystem are parasites. It doesn’t matter if the parasites are an important part of the ecosystem. There is a remarkably deep bench of people willing to replace an any “parasites” that are removed, and if exfoliating the current layer will improve DAU and therefore IPO value then it will be done. In this context, “freeloader” is a nice way of putting it. To be clear - I don’t agree that any of this is OK, and I certainly don’t agree that moderators or third party apps are actually parasites - but that’s also the point I think the GP is making. If the only measure of success is money, that’s what they will optimise for. And an IPO is the shortest of short term goals - a single event which must be optimised at all costs.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  All of these 3rd social media clients really are “freeloaders” though, I don’t get what’s so controversial about shutting them down. If I made my own Netflix client that bypasses their revenue stream, and implemented my own revenue stream on top of it, would anybody be upset or surprised if it was shut down?
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Shitty analogy — does your users produce the movies as well?
    - AmericanChopper 3y ago
      The users don’t belong to Apollo. Reddit provides a service to Reddit users, Apollo freeloads on that service, cuts off Reddit’s revenue stream, and replaces it with its own. Why would anybody think that Reddit has some obligation to allow this, or that Apollo has some right to do it?