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Reddit cannot go public. Its product is volunteer work by moderators and users to produce value. There’s no way to take that work and guarantee its delivery on
by mduggles 3y ago
Reddit cannot go public. Its product is volunteer work by moderators and users to produce value. There’s no way to take that work and guarantee its delivery on a quarterly cycle.
This is all a ridiculous self-delusion that Reddit management has engaged in that the platform is really the “value add”. It’s not. Reddit has become the shorthand for cut through ML spam and that’s based on users constantly posting up to the minute accurate data. There’s almost no historical value to that data.
- ftxbro 3y agoI disagree. To me this sounds like saying that a dairy farm can't go public because the ones producing the value are the cows not the farm managers.
- hiccuphippo 3y agoI think a place like reddit should be a non-profit foundation rather than a business. The Archive Of Our Own community was able to do it, the reddit community can do it too.
- bradleyjg 3y agoWe had something like that. It was called USENET. With the right reader and a decent ISP, it was great.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoUsenet still exists though? Plus the vast vast majority of reddit content consists of mindless nonsense, or even worse, so it's probably best that USENET didn't continue growing in popularity.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago> mindless nonsense That's the vast majority of anything (aka Sturgeon's Law). Soon to be "improved by AI".
- phpisthebest 3y agoYes Usenet is still around, it mainly for the downloading "LinuxISO's™"
- GuB-42 3y agoNot really. Or more precisely, it was great when the internet was small and people were mostly well behaved. And as forums and then platforms with easier access and better moderation tools took over, it became nothing but spam, only leaving alt.binaries, so much that many people saw USENET as just a network for piracy, like The Pirate Bay or Megaupload.
- bradleyjg 3y agoI don’t know about the better moderation part. With the right reader one could subscribe to a moderator of choice. That’s an elegant feature I’ve never seen anywhere since.
- rjh29 3y agoIt's not even profitable _now_ with all their monetization. But their overhead is millions of $/year. There is precedent for non-profit sites of that size but it won't be easy.
- scythmic_waves 3y agoHonestly with the amount of charity fundraising that reddit does, I bet they could pull it off. Just recently someone accidentally gave $15k to charity and in response, a bunch of users raised an additional $55k [1]. If they did intentional, annual fundraising with clear goals I wouldn't be surprised if reddit the non-profit organization could be self-sustaining. But I'm just some guy on the internet who doesn't actually know anything about non-profits. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/1456a9v/tifu_by_donating_15041_to_a_poor_community_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/1456...
- drumhead 3y agoThats actually the best structure for reddit because of its coopertive nature, and the difficulty of making money from it without compromising its essential nature.
- jeffparsons 3y agoI'd feel a lot more comfortable giving my time to "the community" under an arrangement like that, too. The fediverse has its place, for sure, but I think a centralised platform run by a non-profit has the best chance of unseating Reddit in the short term. It could even connect to the fediverse, but with its own moderation hierarchy etc. so it has its own culture and doesn't _rely_ on the fediverse.
- kodah 3y agoI'd suggest raising money to buy Reddit from their investors, but this point I don't want Steve making a profit. I think it is basically possible to build a new Reddit that's run by a non-profit and (hopefully) stays off of variable cost infrastructure for stability.
- makin 3y agoI think Archive Of Our Own (AO3) solves a much easier problem (hosting bbcode text), and even then, after many years, they are unable to get enough volunteers to implement a direct message system. It's not quite apples and oranges, but I still don't think the same model could possibly work for Reddit. Yes, Reddit users have made some amazing tools for moderation, but they are still fully dependent on preexisting, complex engineering work by the Reddit employees, including the API. Maybe a better comparison would be Wikipedia, but again, much simpler problem.
- jwie 3y agoThe time for Reddit to have gone public was with all that other spac mania during the pandemic. These days pesky investors are going to demand things like, a business model and a profit opportunity.
- bitshiftfaced 3y ago> Its product is volunteer work by moderators and users to produce value. The way the Reddit works, moderation is a free and limitless resource. You will never run out of people volunteering for the job.
- BEEdwards 3y agoYou will run out of the people doing it remotely well very quickly though. The high quality modding of askhistory, anthropology and other science sub reddits are provided by actual domain experts working for free. You can find someone to replace them, but the quality will plummet and the users will leave.
- bitshiftfaced 3y agoYou're assuming that the current mods are already doing it "remotely well." There are no shortage of cases where people have been banned from a subreddit for ridiculous reasons, myself included (e.g. talking about studies that support safe sleep practices for infants). When Ceddit still worked, it was eye-opening to see how much shadow-censorship was happening, and for the most petty reasons. The subreddits you mentioned are good examples where domain knowledge is a very desirable trait in a mod. But by and large, it's not necessary for a mod to have deep domain knowledge in order to be able to enforce rules consistently. There's a reason why it's called being a "glorified internet janitor."
- bombcar 3y ago99% of the unpaid jannies job is sweeping up the spam and crap. It’s the 1% remaining that gets people pissed, and you can NEVER please everyone.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adolfojp 3y agoI help manage a few associated medium sized reddit communities. We share a mod team. We are joining the protest. We talked to an admin who reviewed our logs and they were surprised by the fact that our community was modded as a team because most of the communities that they had seen and worked with were apparently modded almost exclusively by a single person. I thought at first that this was a joke because our head mod does most of the work and because we get new mods every year and they always leave. So when our head mod leaves the subs will die. We'll become /r/worldpolitics. And there's a good chance that he'll leave during the protest. What I'm trying to say is that we often see moderators as interchangeable, one leaves and another joins and nothing changes, but the reality is that good mods are scarce. I don't expect an inexperienced mod to join a sub with half a million users and know what to do. Most of our team doesn't know how to use the automoderator. I'm the only one who knows how to use the custom automation bot that I wrote. And then there's the issue of understanding the culture. So whether reddit lives or dies in my opinion won't be a matter of how fast reddit can replace moderators but a matter of how many moderators will stay and put up with the bullshit because it has become part of their lives.
- protastus 3y agoThe Reddit board of directors should choose a CEO with better judgement because this doesn't look good. While I am sad for the communities, I am excited at the opportunity to short this stock if it ever goes public with such poor leadership.
- mrandish 3y agoThey've probably tried recruiting a good CEO. The problem is no one remotely competent wants the job.
- bombcar 3y agoI’m remotely incompetent and I’ll take the job for the right pay. Heck, I’ll even be in/person incompetent.
- phpisthebest 3y agoThis would assume that spez is not doing exactly what the Board of directors want. I think is he, I think they think this will be better for the long term, users will be upset for a little while, but will not actually leave. He has already said 3rd party apps make up a small amount of "traffic" and "90% fall in to the free plan" anyway. So they are betting this is a tempest in a tea pot... Sadly they are probably right because people are sheep and creatures of habit, for me I am going to archive my data before the 30th and purge all of my accounts. I personally am done with reddit, but I am likely the minority
- protastus 3y agoThe board wants the CEO to instigate drama and inflame their most passionate users against the company? There's tremendous lack of tact about how this is being managed. Completely unnecessary and generally not good for business.
- phpisthebest 3y ago> inflame their most passionate users against the company this is think is the disconnect, they do not believe that is what they are doing, and given my tech bubble I am not sure they are wrong. they have the data, i dont. I am sure their "most passionate users" are the ones using the official apps, and new interfaces, posting, upvoting, and commenting on cat photos, and cute animal memes, which is where their ads are targeted.....
- drumhead 3y agoAll they have to do is keep the ship afloat until it goes public, once thats done they cash out with their millions/billions and then to hell with the site. They'll resign, get fired or whatever but they wont care because they'll have their money by then.
- riku_iki 3y agosomehow facebook made it through..
- mustacheemperor 3y agoIt's going to be a fun thought experiment at the bar for years now - how would you have brought reddit to profitability starting in Q1 2023? Maybe there was a way to lever that value for ML training - and the constantly updated nature of the "training database" - into a profit model unlike any other social media app. Not the kind of innovation this team wanted to build, clearly.
- chx 3y agoI am old I remember Esther Dyson: Release 2.0 She was talking about how, for example a wine forum could make money connecting wine sellers and buyers do it Instead of boring ads, make it possible for communities to engage with relevant businesses. Affiliate links, coupons and such. Meaningful dialogue. I am a former mod of /r/usbchardware and we were close to this a few times, with Sanho Hyper and SlimQ. Make yourself the "house brand" of the sub by engaging in good faith and you should be rewarded. But even just affiliate links, as a former mod of /r/usbchardware, we very often recommend this and that and if we did that with affiliate links then everyone would be better off. And you can make a reputation system here which makes it much harder to just spam garbage. This is an off-the-cuff idea which probably needs refinement but no way, no way you can't make good money from such hypertargeted communities. Just think outside of the box a little. Corporate spam gets you booted. A company offering insight, honest good advice gets you boosted. It's ... possible. There is a way making money for everyone involved which doesn't involve dirty play.
- sroussey 3y agoHaving actually done this, it is a loosing direction (sadly). The idea is great, but people just don’t participate in that way. The closest I got was a Watch community that linked to eBay and I would add affiliate links if there were none. But that was one forum out of a million.
- Semaphor 3y agoI work for a photography site. While money is tight thanks to less money being in the industry, most of the money we make is still with direct contacts, be it the major companies advertising their products, or smaller merchants advertising their stock. All context targeted, not user profiled.
- PragmaticPulp 3y ago> This is all a ridiculous self-delusion that Reddit management has engaged in that the platform is really the “value add”. It’s not. Reddit has become the shorthand for… I don’t understand how people can argue that Reddit is somehow not valuable and then go on to explain how Reddit is valuable. The “work” that posters and moderators do isn’t a deliverable that investors care about in their quarterly reports. They only care about revenue, be it from ads or customers paying for features.
- BrotherBisquick 3y ago[flagged]