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Being profit-driven is a fine model for a business. However, it doesn't make business sense to alienate developers and users in service of that goal. Reddit h

Being profit-driven is a fine model for a business. However, it doesn't make business sense to alienate developers and users in service of that goal. Reddit has always struck me as a company with no creativity. They have this huge diverse community and can't seem to find a way to monetize it in any way other than the most basic advertising model. They always seem to do things in conflict with the community rather than in concert with them.

spondylosaurus 3y ago
They also try to monetize the whole thing with Reddit Gold or whatever where you can pay like five bucks to put a badge on someone else's post or comment. Although I wouldn't know a whole lot about it because after a decade-plus on Reddit I've still never bought any.
- spacemadness 3y ago
  I’m probably overly cynical about this, but the only people buying those seem to be fake accounts trying to prop up their other fake accounts.
  - janoc 3y ago
    I have never bought them but I have actually received a few silver and gold badges like that for some of my comments. So I guess that makes my account a fake then?
    - spacemadness 3y ago
      Nope, it makes me overly cynical and expecting the worst from Reddit.
    - hatsunearu 3y ago
      they used to give out reddit silver badge and other badges for free if you used the official app. I used that to give out a lot of badges to the community I moderate. Ironically all the badges are from memes that were born on reddit...
  - munificent 3y ago
    I pay for Reddit Gold. Reddit has brought a lot of value to my life, I don't like seeing ads, and I like the idea of supporting non-ad-based business models.
    - romanows 3y ago
      Same, been paying for it for years. I'll be canceling it when RIF dies though, this just feels too much like the beginning of the end.
    - atomicfiredoll 3y ago
      I've supported it on and off for years and currently have Reddit Gold. It's easy to justify the cost when considering the conversations over the years and the amazing resource it's been for making decisions or learning. I was already considering dropping Gold at the end of this payment cycle due to some of their advertising bedfellows, but this mess has really sealed the deal. Maybe Reddit doesn't have a breakout competitor for people to jump to atm, but I suspect blood is in the water and we're about to see an influx of alternatives.
      - munificent 3y ago
        People felt the same way about Elon Musk buying Twitter but after the temporary Mastodon bump, it seems like almost everyone is back on Twitter.
        _djo_ 3y ago
        Twitter engagement is definitely lower[0], though it’s difficult to know from the outside how much and we can’t trust their numbers. Anecdotally, the accounts I follow in various niche subject areas have both depleted in number, with I’d estimate around 20-25% having stopped posting altogether, and cut back on how often they post if they did stay. [0] https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/15/23683554/twitter-dying-elon-musk-x-company https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/15/23683554/twitter-dy...
        atomicfiredoll 3y ago
- TranquilMarmot 3y ago
  This was such a confusing feature to me. I just looked and my Reddit account is 13 years old, and I've also never bought any of these "rewards" because they seem so empty and useless. The person you're giving it to gets nothing other than some images above their post, so I _know_ that if I spend the money on one it's basically just a donation to Reddit which I'm not keen to do if I get nothing out of it. They also have their "premium" subscription which seems even more useless. Now, if they had implemented it in a way similar to how Brave did their rewards where people would get some share of the reward (say, 5% of the money?) then I would be way more likely to buy it and would probably also participate a lot more. Imagine if some people could make a living off of Reddit the same way they do off of YouTube or Twitch!
- Semaphor 3y ago
  I still think it was a missed opportunity to not just give API access for premium users only.
gtop3 3y ago
> Reddit has always struck me as a company with no creativity I thought reddit was really clever for the first ~7 years of operations. They replaced forums, fostered communities, gained a reputation as a place to get real people's takes, and attracted people willing to have interesting conversations. The upvote/downvote system that is now so common was made popular from reddit. They brought awareness to important political topics surrounding net neutrality. They were leaders in early Web2.0, where each user saw content that appealed to them, because everyone could choose which subreddits were in their homepage. It was highly social and highly engaging. After a certain point in 201X the dark patterns began to appear. I was almost fully disengaged by the start of 2013. I can't remember the details, but I remember being increasing disappointed with reddit every time I returned for a brief visit.
- wvenable 3y ago
  I remember when they fired Victoria Taylor who was the ambassador for their celebrity AMAs. At that exact time, AMAs were absolutely hopping with celebrities and even President Obama. Reddit was getting huge media coverage and that was likely lots of new traffic. ...and then they killed it... They still have celebrity AMAs but that was the peak and it immediately lost most relevance.
  - mustacheemperor 3y ago
    There was a dedicated AMA app and it was poised to become an independent revenue stream. The leadership's outright destruction of the AMA platform in their attempt to monetize it looks like a microcosm of what they're doing to the entire site today. If they start booting moderators during the blackout, that will complete the congruence.
  - slfnflctd 3y ago
    Victoria getting the boot really was a major turning point for a lot of users I think, certainly for me. The site hasn't felt the same since. I still have some pretty negative feelings about that whole situation, and am confused every time I'm reminded of it. Why wasn't there more explanation? Why didn't they at least replace her with someone who played a similar role in a similar way? Did they not realize that people really liked her approach, or did they just not care? A lot of goodwill was burned that day. I'm kind of vaguely intrigued by the current situation, but I'm realizing I mostly stopped actually caring much a long time ago. It feels like there's been a vast & growing chasm between the better parts of the community and the site's management for quite a while. They did not in fact "remember the human".
Havoc 3y ago
> Being profit-driven is a fine model for a business. A fine business model but a bizarre damage control statement
kstrauser 3y ago
Nearly all businesses are profit-driven. My wife owned a medical practice, and while she chose the profession because she wanted to help people, she built a company around it to put food on our table. There's nothing wrong with that. But optimizing for short-term profit over long-term revenue is just nuts. Apple didn't become a trillion dollar company by focusing on maximizing profit above all else every single quarter.
- dmix 3y ago
  Why do you assume Redditors won’t just use the mainline mobile app? Honest question and I don’t mean personally why you won’t, but the average user that looks and clicks on ads on Reddit? The long and repeated history of social media platforms shutting down 3rd party apps, despite lots of outrage, is not the best track record to bet on some mods closing down subs for weekend making a difference. People might say Reddit is different because they like to get stirred up fighting authority like net neutrality but the next question is where will they go instead? Betting against the network effect is a losing battle. Whether Reddit should have acted differently and reformed their bottom feeding design/web/mobile teams long ago is a different question.
  - rdtthrow165 3y ago
    > Why do you assume Redditors won’t just use the mainline mobile app? Honest question and I don’t mean personally why you won’t, but the average user that looks and clicks on ads on Reddit? I'm sure that's what reddit is counting on, and it's probably true. The issue is that subreddit moderators are not normal users, and work entirely for free. They don't get paid, and are vital to maintaining the health and tone of each subreddit. And unlike e.g. content creators on twitter, they have nothing tying them to the platform. They don't benefit financially, even indirectly, from the arrangement. They're working for some combination of a sense of (altruism/community responsibility) and (satisfaction/egotism). That's a setup that practically encourages them to jump ship in this situation. I'm sure that won't immediately hurt the extremely large, general subs which reddit would actively support regardless, but it could do a lot of damage to everything else. In a vacuum the remaining platform (a small percentage of valuable subs) might be exactly what reddit wants! But if a competing network of forums starts up, it might be able to eat reddit in exactly the same way reddit ate digg.
robryan 3y ago
Maybe they need better ad tooling and promotion of it. Probably big improvements to be made just in getting enough ad inventory to show something remotely relevant to a user.
- wvenable 3y ago
  Ads are Reddit are a notoriously poor investments compared to other social media sites. Maybe it's an intractable problem given the nature of the site or again maybe they just aren't engaging enough with the communities to target ads more specifically.
dimmke 3y ago
I’ve always thought this too. Especially because I believe (I have no data to back this up) a huge amount of their traffic is from search engine results. As search results became gamed and sites became SEO machines, finding a Reddit thread discussing the thing you want to know about is a breath of fresh air. Nobody else has that. Reddit has a ton of really niche content that people want to read, spread out over a large amount of time. Why are they focused on becoming a place where people infinite scroll reposts of TikToks? Instead, they went the route of introducing features that at best cannibalized other features (chat and the regular message system - it’s confusing) and at worst just seem like hasty add ons or complete stabs in the dark. Even Discord has a system to directly monetarily sponsor servers you want to support, why on earth doesn’t that exist for Reddit? Good lord. It’s such a simple thing to add. Instead they charge money to customize your avatar like it’s a Fortnite skin. It’s insane.
_thisdot 3y ago
Right! My reddit comments are public and reflect my preferences and interests pretty well. Yet I’ve never ever felt like clicking a reddit ad. Instagram on the other hand had me clicking on ads occasionally

spondylosaurus 3y ago

They also try to monetize the whole thing with Reddit Gold or whatever where you can pay like five bucks to put a badge on someone else's post or comment. Although I wouldn't know a whole lot about it because after a decade-plus on Reddit I've still never bought any.

spacemadness 3y ago
I’m probably overly cynical about this, but the only people buying those seem to be fake accounts trying to prop up their other fake accounts.
- janoc 3y ago
  I have never bought them but I have actually received a few silver and gold badges like that for some of my comments. So I guess that makes my account a fake then?
  - spacemadness 3y ago
    Nope, it makes me overly cynical and expecting the worst from Reddit.
  - hatsunearu 3y ago
    they used to give out reddit silver badge and other badges for free if you used the official app. I used that to give out a lot of badges to the community I moderate. Ironically all the badges are from memes that were born on reddit...
- munificent 3y ago
  I pay for Reddit Gold. Reddit has brought a lot of value to my life, I don't like seeing ads, and I like the idea of supporting non-ad-based business models.
  - romanows 3y ago
    Same, been paying for it for years. I'll be canceling it when RIF dies though, this just feels too much like the beginning of the end.
  - atomicfiredoll 3y ago
    I've supported it on and off for years and currently have Reddit Gold. It's easy to justify the cost when considering the conversations over the years and the amazing resource it's been for making decisions or learning. I was already considering dropping Gold at the end of this payment cycle due to some of their advertising bedfellows, but this mess has really sealed the deal. Maybe Reddit doesn't have a breakout competitor for people to jump to atm, but I suspect blood is in the water and we're about to see an influx of alternatives.
    - munificent 3y ago
      People felt the same way about Elon Musk buying Twitter but after the temporary Mastodon bump, it seems like almost everyone is back on Twitter.
      - _djo_ 3y ago
        Twitter engagement is definitely lower[0], though it’s difficult to know from the outside how much and we can’t trust their numbers. Anecdotally, the accounts I follow in various niche subject areas have both depleted in number, with I’d estimate around 20-25% having stopped posting altogether, and cut back on how often they post if they did stay. [0] https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/15/23683554/twitter-dying-elon-musk-x-company https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/15/23683554/twitter-dy...
      - atomicfiredoll 3y ago
TranquilMarmot 3y ago
This was such a confusing feature to me. I just looked and my Reddit account is 13 years old, and I've also never bought any of these "rewards" because they seem so empty and useless. The person you're giving it to gets nothing other than some images above their post, so I _know_ that if I spend the money on one it's basically just a donation to Reddit which I'm not keen to do if I get nothing out of it. They also have their "premium" subscription which seems even more useless. Now, if they had implemented it in a way similar to how Brave did their rewards where people would get some share of the reward (say, 5% of the money?) then I would be way more likely to buy it and would probably also participate a lot more. Imagine if some people could make a living off of Reddit the same way they do off of YouTube or Twitch!
Semaphor 3y ago
I still think it was a missed opportunity to not just give API access for premium users only.

gtop3 3y ago

> Reddit has always struck me as a company with no creativity I thought reddit was really clever for the first ~7 years of operations. They replaced forums, fostered communities, gained a reputation as a place to get real people's takes, and attracted people willing to have interesting conversations. The upvote/downvote system that is now so common was made popular from reddit. They brought awareness to important political topics surrounding net neutrality. They were leaders in early Web2.0, where each user saw content that appealed to them, because everyone could choose which subreddits were in their homepage. It was highly social and highly engaging. After a certain point in 201X the dark patterns began to appear. I was almost fully disengaged by the start of 2013. I can't remember the details, but I remember being increasing disappointed with reddit every time I returned for a brief visit.

wvenable 3y ago
I remember when they fired Victoria Taylor who was the ambassador for their celebrity AMAs. At that exact time, AMAs were absolutely hopping with celebrities and even President Obama. Reddit was getting huge media coverage and that was likely lots of new traffic. ...and then they killed it... They still have celebrity AMAs but that was the peak and it immediately lost most relevance.
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
  There was a dedicated AMA app and it was poised to become an independent revenue stream. The leadership's outright destruction of the AMA platform in their attempt to monetize it looks like a microcosm of what they're doing to the entire site today. If they start booting moderators during the blackout, that will complete the congruence.
- slfnflctd 3y ago
  Victoria getting the boot really was a major turning point for a lot of users I think, certainly for me. The site hasn't felt the same since. I still have some pretty negative feelings about that whole situation, and am confused every time I'm reminded of it. Why wasn't there more explanation? Why didn't they at least replace her with someone who played a similar role in a similar way? Did they not realize that people really liked her approach, or did they just not care? A lot of goodwill was burned that day. I'm kind of vaguely intrigued by the current situation, but I'm realizing I mostly stopped actually caring much a long time ago. It feels like there's been a vast & growing chasm between the better parts of the community and the site's management for quite a while. They did not in fact "remember the human".

Havoc 3y ago

> Being profit-driven is a fine model for a business. A fine business model but a bizarre damage control statement

kstrauser 3y ago

Nearly all businesses are profit-driven. My wife owned a medical practice, and while she chose the profession because she wanted to help people, she built a company around it to put food on our table. There's nothing wrong with that. But optimizing for short-term profit over long-term revenue is just nuts. Apple didn't become a trillion dollar company by focusing on maximizing profit above all else every single quarter.

dmix 3y ago
Why do you assume Redditors won’t just use the mainline mobile app? Honest question and I don’t mean personally why you won’t, but the average user that looks and clicks on ads on Reddit? The long and repeated history of social media platforms shutting down 3rd party apps, despite lots of outrage, is not the best track record to bet on some mods closing down subs for weekend making a difference. People might say Reddit is different because they like to get stirred up fighting authority like net neutrality but the next question is where will they go instead? Betting against the network effect is a losing battle. Whether Reddit should have acted differently and reformed their bottom feeding design/web/mobile teams long ago is a different question.
- rdtthrow165 3y ago
  > Why do you assume Redditors won’t just use the mainline mobile app? Honest question and I don’t mean personally why you won’t, but the average user that looks and clicks on ads on Reddit? I'm sure that's what reddit is counting on, and it's probably true. The issue is that subreddit moderators are not normal users, and work entirely for free. They don't get paid, and are vital to maintaining the health and tone of each subreddit. And unlike e.g. content creators on twitter, they have nothing tying them to the platform. They don't benefit financially, even indirectly, from the arrangement. They're working for some combination of a sense of (altruism/community responsibility) and (satisfaction/egotism). That's a setup that practically encourages them to jump ship in this situation. I'm sure that won't immediately hurt the extremely large, general subs which reddit would actively support regardless, but it could do a lot of damage to everything else. In a vacuum the remaining platform (a small percentage of valuable subs) might be exactly what reddit wants! But if a competing network of forums starts up, it might be able to eat reddit in exactly the same way reddit ate digg.

robryan 3y ago

Maybe they need better ad tooling and promotion of it. Probably big improvements to be made just in getting enough ad inventory to show something remotely relevant to a user.

wvenable 3y ago
Ads are Reddit are a notoriously poor investments compared to other social media sites. Maybe it's an intractable problem given the nature of the site or again maybe they just aren't engaging enough with the communities to target ads more specifically.

dimmke 3y ago

I’ve always thought this too. Especially because I believe (I have no data to back this up) a huge amount of their traffic is from search engine results. As search results became gamed and sites became SEO machines, finding a Reddit thread discussing the thing you want to know about is a breath of fresh air. Nobody else has that. Reddit has a ton of really niche content that people want to read, spread out over a large amount of time. Why are they focused on becoming a place where people infinite scroll reposts of TikToks? Instead, they went the route of introducing features that at best cannibalized other features (chat and the regular message system - it’s confusing) and at worst just seem like hasty add ons or complete stabs in the dark. Even Discord has a system to directly monetarily sponsor servers you want to support, why on earth doesn’t that exist for Reddit? Good lord. It’s such a simple thing to add. Instead they charge money to customize your avatar like it’s a Fortnite skin. It’s insane.

_thisdot 3y ago

Right! My reddit comments are public and reflect my preferences and interests pretty well. Yet I’ve never ever felt like clicking a reddit ad. Instagram on the other hand had me clicking on ads occasionally