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At this point my theories are 1) Ego and emotion are driving decisions at reddit or 2) Reddit's leadership has run the numbers and genuinely thinks it will b

At this point my theories are 1) Ego and emotion are driving decisions at reddit or 2) Reddit's leadership has run the numbers and genuinely thinks it will benefit their profitability plans if the users reacting negatively to these changes all leave. This is well past the point of just killing 3rd party apps because the API changes alone would have accomplished that. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." What do you do when incompetence would be unbelievable in scope and malice would be unbelievably incompetent.

LegitShady 3y ago
reddit receives hundreds of millions of dollars per year of free moderating from their community. The community is the only valuable thing in reddit. The website is worth nothing, the eyeballs and free labour are everything. When the parts of their community with outsize influence start talking about abandoning the site to somewhere else it threatens both their hundreds of millions in free labour per year, and also the future of their site. Reddit exists as it does today because Digg made a series of bad decisions that led to mass movement away from Digg. The same thing can happen to Reddit.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  As has been mentioned a few times: When Digg fucked up, reddit existed as a growing but small competitor. Reddit has no such competitor.
  - fphhotchips 3y ago
    That may be true in the US but it's not everywhere, and it certainly won't be for long. Anyway, for many, the competition is "nothing at all". I will never download the official Reddit app. It's that bad. The mobile experience is worse. I'll just find something more productive to do with my time.
    - danudey 3y ago
      I use the official mobile app, and also use Apollo (because I like having two separate apps for two separate accounts I use). The official mobile app is just inexplicably bad. The other day I was browsing through the 'Popular' tab, and every time I clicked on the thumbnail for an article, it took me to the web page... of some other article. Completely unrelated as far as I could tell. Tap on a CNN article about Trump indictment, instead get an EW article about Gwen Stefani (or whatever, I don't remember what it was). It was consistent, too. Every article went to a different article instead, but tapping on that article always gave you the same different article. Tapping onto the comment screen and then onto the article gave the correct article. A few weeks ago, the problem was different; I would tap on an article, and it would load up some other article, and then also the article I was trying to read. I'd read it, close it, then have to close the other article, then I'd be back at the main list. For the longest time, refreshing an article list would result in a bunch of broken-looking entries in the list view; entries without titles, titles overlapping images, entries that were too big, and so on. Refreshing again often fixed it, but then gave me a new set of articles as if I'd already read the messed up ones it had brokenly tried to show me. This used to happen every single time; then it was just sort of random, about 50% of the time. I haven't noticed it lately because I got out of the habit of refreshing lists and I just kill the app when I want to get newer content. There's also a little hovering downwards-arrow symbol to skip to the next top-level comment. It's black, it's fairly large, and it hovers over the content. You can't get rid of it whether you want it or not. The best you can do is toggle a preference that says "I don't want this to be movable", and then it sits in the corner, over top of the content, forever (except when it bugs out and sits in the middle of the screen on the left side forever). For the longest time, the comment box to type your comment into was a fixed size; if your comment didn't fit into two or three lines, then your text wrapped onto the fourth line or whatever, except the text box wouldn't scroll so you couldn't see what you were typing. I got in the habit of copying the text to Notes, writing my comment there, and then switching back to Reddit. 50% of the time, the Reddit app would reload and I would lose the comment that I was replying to, but the other 50% of the time I could paste my comment in and post it. When creating a new post, you first put in the content you want (title, body, image, whatever), and then you hit 'Next' and choose a subreddit. It gives you a list of suggestions, based not on subreddits that you're subscribed to or post to regularly, but rather subreddits that you've engaged with lately. I saw a post from /r/doordash yesterday, so now the app is suggesting maybe I want to post there, or /r/Weddingattireapproval. Note that some subreddits don't allow self posts, or don't allow image posts, but you have to create your post first before choosing a subreddit that maybe doesn't allow it, forcing you to go back and change your post type/content. This feature seems just generally really stupid. It goes on and on. It's a genuinely horrible app which can rarely even get the basic functionality working, and bugs stick around indefinitely.
  - LegitShady 3y ago
    now that its clear there's a need for an alternative they will show up. It's not that hard to spin up an old pre-shittification version of reddit.
    - slowmovintarget 3y ago
      It's hard to find a way to do it "for free" and not run into the exact same VC pressure nightmare Reddit is now visiting on its most engaged users.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        So don’t do it for free. Start with paid subscriptions to post or something and build that way. Similar things have been done before - the famous tenbux.
  - JamesLeonis 3y ago
    > As has been mentioned a few times: When Digg fucked up, reddit existed as a growing but small competitor. Reddit has no such competitor. In all honesty I think Discord is the competitor. You can join dozens of communities under one login, lots of creators and studios set up their own server, set up a private server for friends, and there's more control over who can join and see content. I mostly use it to keep in contact with a couple of friends, so I bet there's even more that could be done.
    - stocknoob 3y ago
      Unfortunately there’s no discord equivalent of <product review> site:reddit.com
      - acheron 3y ago
        How will I ever learn the opinion of 19 year old college students now?
        drumhead 3y ago
        Thats not true, the site is full of passionate, experienced users in all different interests and areas. I dont know what you've been looking at but it hasnt been my experience at all. You get a really good consensus on whats good, whats bad, where to start with so many different things. Its essentially an add on for google search now if you want good quality opinions.
      - shagie 3y ago
        I suspect that discord is the replacement for reddit. There's a 90-9-1 rule of thumb ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ ) and a migration from reddit to discord will benefit the 9-1 portions and provide a net loss to the 90% (lurkers / people who find content via google). You can't make a community go somewhere. The the place that it ends up is on discord (and irc in times before), then discoverability for the rest of the population that aren't participants in that community will suffer along with the companies that previously hosted that content and were able to monetize their eyeballs. ... but isn't that what people have been wanting? "Down with {big corp}!" be it google or reddit or Facebook?
  - Fricken 3y ago
    Reddit's competitor has until the 30th to get something off the ground
    - drumhead 3y ago
      Discord, its already there and ready to go.
      - mostlysimilar 3y ago
        Live chat is a different medium entirely. Valuable in its own way but not the same thing.
      - unsupp0rted 3y ago
        As a user, I get zero benefit from a firehouse of live chat in a closed community.
      - OoooooooO 3y ago
        Discord has no threads/comments/subcomments structure. It's nearly Impossible to find old information and every discussion has 50+ messages about other topics inbetween because it's a chat, not a forum. Unuseable as a reddit replacement.
        shagie 3y ago
        They added forums a bit ago - https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-... https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-conversation https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-... The thing is that most users of reddit and discord don't care about older topics. Go to any large sub with lax moderation and watch how many times the same questions are posted. For many communities, it doesn't matter if its a reddit replacement with the reddit functionality but rather that it is a place to host that community (that will adapt to and complain about the confines of their new home). It only lacks real functionality as a reddit replacement for those people who are lurkers and want to consume a digest of past content (and maybe add a forgettable comment to the end of a too long comment tree).
  - jtriangle 3y ago
    Honestly, if Apollo and RIF got together and pointed themselves at a different backend, they could basically be that competitor. They're already got the users, and the frontend code is good. Their standing agreements with Reddit inc. may prevent them from doing so however.
    - shagie 3y ago
      Switching APIs isn't seamless. Switching to a federated backend is even more of a hurdle. None of the backends are likely able to support the load that Apollo (and RIF) would do (see also what HN did to Lemmy the other day). Many of the users of Apollo and RIF are using them and the APIs that reddit was providing for free before to avoid paying for things and seeing ads making monetization of those and supporting the backends even more difficult (not that Lemmy and friends want to pay for server costs with advertisements - they'd rather donations - but that isn't a reliable income stream).
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  I'd go so far as to say the free moderation labor is the only thing worth anything. Acquiring users is relatively easy. Retention is hard.
- chrsstrm 3y ago
  You're not wrong, but that's a very one-sided view. The alternate outcome is that when the current mods abandon ship there's likely going to be many more people waiting in the wings to get their shot at modding their own sub. What other service is a perfect substitute for Reddit? The thought that most users will give up Reddit cold-turkey and stay away permanently is a bit naive. Internet use can be an addiction and addicts staying away under their own power and no alternative is unlikely. Ultimately a vacuum will be created, it will be filled with fresh bodies, and Reddit will continue along after a short period of unrest and uncertainty, with new mods running new subs. "The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets."
  - LegitShady 3y ago
    new untrained and inexperienced moderators will disrupt the site experience. The poweruse and mod community fleeing to another site will start it becoming more common among barely involved users. Its exactly what happened to digg. The site became (to quote huffman) "profit driven" and it quickly fell from grace.
    - trw55 3y ago
      Could also say it's happened at Twitter, too, outside of sports Twitter. When I had my main account with 2K followers for years engagement was pretty high and consistent. Then Twitter made sharing links to your own content impossible to drive engagement to your own content which, considering the amount of anger and virtue signaling on Twitter, caused me to use it less and less. Then Elon bought it and it became a right wing platform for what I can only describe as fascism disguised as "free speech". I'd log in and see virtually no one over time. Granted my main account was very tech/developer heavy and those communities seem to skew left. But I decided it just made me sad to login and have to see how hollow it was. Glad to have experienced it 2014-2016 though. That was peak Tech Twitter for me.
    - lamontcg 3y ago
      > The poweruse and mod community fleeing to another site A lot of the mod community on the popular subreddits do that as their dayjob as social media consultants or whatever you call them.
- jychang 3y ago
  $hundreds of millions in replaceable value Most Internet forum mods are low lifes who moderate for the little sense of power it gives them. There are plenty of those to go around. The reality is Reddit can literally ban all their current mods and get a new set of mods pretty easily.
  - junofan 3y ago
    Yeah there’s a shitton of people trying to mod stuff.
  - diydsp 3y ago
    That's a harsh accusation. I moderate bc i love the topic and want to encourage others. Banning and blocking posts isnt the powertrip ppl think. It's not like being a cop and stealing cash, cocaine, and raping hookers. It's more "oh another bot is posting chat room ads in bad grammar. Ive seen many interesting forums falter bc a mod gets a six month interest and never logs back in again, forgets their password to their alt, etc. And reddit already has AI duh to delete spam. It'a just not 100% so ppl have to do it. Also mods do more than just enforce rules. It'a more abt setting the tone through pinned comments, certain flair and CSS etc. Also, intelligent cross-posting. You know, all kinds of nurturing shit. That takes TLC and passion. Lots of people like my subs but no one ever wants to help mod them.
    - ddingus 3y ago
      Truth
  - ddingus 3y ago
    You are far off the mark. If I were you, I would get some real data and while that is in process, reconsider comments, until you know they have a solid basis. I have helped to build 100k plus subs and currently moderate smaller subs I have a personal interest in. Along the way, I got to know people and have asked enough questions to get a sense of it. I am about to step away from it entirely due to the damage Reddit appears to be doing right now. I showed up for the original by users, for users vision Aaron was a part of. Each Reddit sale has burdened it so people could turn future value into cash today and we are now at the point where making that equation work YET AGAIN just might not go as well. Fact is a ton of the smaller high value communities are moderated by people who value the topic the sub is about and who have domain knowledge. These communities are great! Now there are low lifes power tripping for sure. Don't get me wrong there. And they are replaceable too. I do not see the percentages being in line with your statements here, that's all. Few moderators care about getting some compensation. But they really do care a lot about being able to do for their users. Reddit is not by users for users anymore. Has not been for a long time. Seems a line got crossed this time around. Now is the time for someone to build out the original Reddit vision. It was workable, sustainable and all that too. It would even pay out a nice living for the owners. What it won't do is generate bazillion of dollars. And what the current vision won't do is garner trust and loyalty among users. It's a real mess!
- rnd0 3y ago
  Labour isn't necessarily influence, that is where things break down. Reddit knows that if all the malcontents (From their point of view) leave they will be replaced by newer content creators/community participants who either don't know the story or don't care. The problem with the Digg comparision is that the internet is a vastly different place today both from a legislative and a payment processing point of view. I would venture a guess that the legal and financial barriers to entry are and will continue to prevent anyone from making the next Reddit; or the next Twitter, for that matter. We've gone from the Wild West to the Dust Bowl, lads
  - chaosjevil 3y ago
    >Reddit knows that if all the malcontents (From their point of view) leave they will be replaced by newer content creators/community participants who either don't know the story or don't care. Do they? What if the demographics of the malcontents and newer content creators is different? I'm not completely sure, but I think that the malcontents are the people who are noticing what is going on; while the potential newer content creators are the people who lack such an insight. If this idea is correct, then the malcontents leaving is effectively a brain drain.
  - LegitShady 3y ago
    >hey will be replaced by newer content creators/community participants I'm not sure why inserting discussion of content creation here. Totally irrelevant. Nor is it about participation, its about moderating. >The problem with the Digg comparision is that the internet is a vastly different place today both from a legislative and a payment processing point of view. I would venture a guess that the legal and financial barriers to entry are and will continue to prevent anyone from making the next Reddit; or the next Twitter, for that matter. Funny I never gave digg or reddit any payment information.
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      > Funny I never gave digg or reddit any payment information And you never saw any ads because you used a third aprty app and ablock? This is why reddit doesn't give a shit if you leave. You were never anything but a cost center to them. They're more worried about making money than replacing moderators.
VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
The reality is that the Reddit users that actually care about this enough to show up and rage in the AMA are also the ones that are almost completely unmonetizable. So I doubt there was ever really any risk of major loss from this.
- ascar 3y ago
  they might be unmonetizable. But they're the people who maintain the communities that bring in the mass of people that are monetizeable.
  - VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
    I guess so. But I also suspect that their value isn't as much as they think it is. Some will actually leave, but most will stay and just continue to grumble about it. And keep working for free.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      Everyone gets to find out in a few weeks. Who wants to be the bookie?
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  But the markets have never ever judged websites by "monetizable user count", just "user count". Click-through rate is about the closest thing to the metric and that itself is highly context specific.
prox 3y ago
A bit under the radar, but Twitch is having a similar moment with new ad directives which would kill independent streamers. It caused an upset in the community. Twitch backtracks but the damage is already done.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  Making wildly unpopular changes and then "rolling them back" to something "more reasonable" is a very commonly employed corporate management strategy for implementing unpopular policy changes with both customers and employees. Want to drop PTO rates by 5%? Announce a 10% reduction, ignore the furor for a few days, then the CEO publishes the already-written "oops" letter and says that they listened to feedback from employees, looked at the "books" and decided they could compromise to 5%. Half the company thinks he's a great leader for listening and pushing back against the evil bitch running HR. If they wanted to just make more money off API calls, they would have announced the pricing, but then rolled it back part-way. Unfortunately, the Apollo dev recording his conversations with them, and their sheer incompetence/ego, seems to have taken all that off the table and instead they're just doubling down, which definitely does not work.
  - KerrAvon 3y ago
    Yeah, but the thing is, you've broken a lot of trust with your employees once you pull shit like this. Places like Apple and Google, who have been shitty in different ways with their RTO plans, are never getting back that trust, not fully. If they go full-blown cynical like this they'd see really serious attrition in places they didn't want it to happen, and no amount of stock would bring those people back. I know it's not you personally; not trying to shoot the messenger here. People need to understand that these tactics are bad for the company in the long term.
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      Trading trust for money seems to be very in-vogue in the past decade.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
I think he knows that he will never be as respected as aaron swartz and he is an imposter.
- ddingus 3y ago
  Lucid comment. I agree.
maybelsyrup 3y ago
> "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." This is a digression, but this saying has always frustrated me. It makes sense for a second, but then I wonder if whoever came up with it had any idea how much malice exists in the world. Many cases of "malice is at least as adequate an explanation as incompetence, given the facts or lack of them".
- rnd0 3y ago
  It is an attitude that has given a lot of cover to very malicious people over the years. Bush is a great example of that. Many people thought he was a moron and during his administration a lot of the things that happened on his watch (no-bid contracts to Halliburton and Abu Ghraib spring to mind) were often brushed off by people citing Hanlon's Razor.
  - Kye 3y ago
    I thought the general consensus was that they were both malicious, but Cheney was the brains behind the operation. Sometimes someone is malicious and incompetent, but self-aware enough to delegate.
- lioeters 3y ago
  Likely a malicious person said this to present plausible deniability for their crimes and conspiracies.
  - imbnwa 3y ago
    Literally the person I first heard this from nearly 10 years ago was precisely one of the most manipulative, bullying charismatics I've ever known.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- r00fus 3y ago
  I prefer the less epistemological version of this (gray's law) "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice" Does it matter if it's incompetence or malice? If you care, are now forced into action, best just make a move and justify it after the fact.
wolpoli 3y ago
IMO, the profitability plan involves moving everyone to official App. They expect backlash, but believe they could manage it with various tactics, which they are making it up as they go.
bravura 3y ago
“Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”
- blooalien 3y ago
  I think maybe the "vice versa" version works equally well, too. As long as you can convincingly appear incompetent enough, you can often get away with supervillain levels of malice these days. Either way, your genius twist on that old phrase wins an upvote from me.
low_tech_love 3y ago
People will leave Reddit as much as they have left Twitter, i.e. not much. The main problem is in the fact that lots of Reddit users seem to think that Reddit is some kind of “community” that “depends” on its users, when the truth is that Reddit is a company and the dependence relationship is the other way around. It’s hard to accept but Reddit is a dysfunctional colossus that is simply not feasible to replicate at this point, and as such the management can pretty much do as they please.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > It’s hard to accept but Reddit is a dysfunctional colossus that is simply not feasible to replicate at this point, and as such the management can pretty much do as they please. History proves otherwise. Colossuses have fallen. You can't rely on size to guarantee impunity for shitty actions.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    History has been short on the internet. I don't think one or two examples proves much of anything.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      It absolutely proves something: that you can't rely on size to grant you impunity for shitty actions -- like I said.
- BoxOfRain 3y ago
  I still think Huffman’s decisions might yet end up a cautionary tale. Even if he brings in strikebreakers to moderate the closed subreddits the site will face a tidal wave of spam which isn’t going to make the causal users happy.
- vGPU 3y ago
  Tumblr found otherwise. So did digg. So did many other media titans of years past.
xtracto 3y ago
I feel its something like #2. Correct me if I'm wrong: reddit userbase us say, a fraction of FB or TikTok. They've made the numbers and attracting and tailoring the site to the TikTok audience is way more profitable than what they have now. They've been doing that since the reddit redesign thing, trying to go more mainstream yet. I think that's why they feel they can burn bridges
AbraKdabra 3y ago
I'm not defending Spez by no means, I've been a user of reddit since early 2010 and it has changed A LOT and I really don't like how it's now, I prefer the more anarchy reddit from that era, but 95% of the times data backs up decisions, even bad ones, and users don't know shit about them, and when something bad as the Apollo drama comes out, it becomes a hatred echo chamber. I really hope this is case because I use a 3rd party app for reddit (Relay, the best one obviously) and I would hate to see it die in favor of the mountain of shit the official app is, I don't know went through their minds when developing it, there were apps with literal a decade of experience to take example from and they did that crap.
BlackjackCF 3y ago
My theory is desperation. Reddit isn’t profitable, which was fine in the past few years because they could just raise another round of funding by pointing at their user growth. They can’t easily do that in the current financial environment. I suspect that they’re also seeing a plateau in year over year user growth. Bundle that up with everybody seeing advertising revenue decline and there’s no good story to sell to investors. I think that they’re probably under tremendous pressure right now by their investors to at least get close to profitable so that they can IPO.
- sleight42 3y ago
  Ironic given many third party app users would likely pay $60-100/year to continue to use their third party app. Now, we'll just stop using reddit and be sad about it. Missed opportunity due to... what? Desperation at Reddit?
  - BlackjackCF 3y ago
    That’s the end goal already with their API fees. They just handled the entire execution and messaging poorly. I think the Apollo developer mentioned that in order to break even with the new fees, they’d have to have subscribers who are paying $5/mo. To make a profit, third party apps would need subscribers who pay within the $60-100/yr range that you mentioned. Reddit probably knew this would cull the number of third party apps out there, which is to their benefit since their mobile app would have fewer competitors. I bet they’re also banking on most people not caring, or eventually coming back to the platform after a short period of time. I sincerely hope that they’re wrong and the user base doesn’t return.
- vincentkriek 3y ago
  I fully agree. Money is not free anymore, and investors want to see a path-to-profitablity. No one wants to dump millions into a possible profitable idea.
kmeisthax 3y ago
>Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. Why not both? This is the platform that literally built itself off of registering fake accounts and posting spam to make themselves look more active than they were, after all[0]. Reddit administration is a unique blend of malicious incompetence. I call it malicincompetence. For example, spez in particular notably was caught editing the posts of /r/the_donald posters he was in a shouting match with. This is malicious, because the admins demonstrated that they're willing to fuck with historical records to defame their enemies. But it's also incompetent, because it turned a bunch of fascists[1] into martyrs. If he had just banned /r/TD then and there, or even just that poster, it would have been less malicious and less incompetent at the same time. Going deeper, a lot of malicious behavior is itself inherently stupid. That's the idea behind the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: betrayal is advantageous only when you don't think more than a step ahead. Once you do, then tit-for-tat[2] becomes better, possibly with some kind of forgiveness term if random or accidental betrayal is possible. None of Reddit's CxO suite[3] thinks this way. They think their users are resources to be taken for granted, except they're also really bad at doing that. And Reddit users have just gotten used to shouting down these kinds of stupid changes until the admins fold, which they usually do, because Reddit doesn't have the kind of user lock-in to make people just stick with it. [0] Nobody noticed until the admins just outright admitted it a few years later. Although if /r/SRD and /r/de is to be believed, they're doing the same shit again in German: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/reddit_admins_were_just_caught_using_bots_or_fake/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red... [1] Ok, I don't have citations for the victim of Spez's tomfoolery being a fascist, but /r/TD was notorious back then for banning anyone who wasn't enthusiastically riding the Trump train that hard. [2] Do what the opponent did last round. [3] Except maybe Ellen Pao, only because she wasn't around long enough for Reddit to rub off on her.
chaosjevil 3y ago
>What do you do when incompetence would be unbelievable in scope and malice would be unbelievably incompetent. Given that incompetence is more harmful than malice, you stay pessimistic, and still blame incompetence. Simply because, if you're pessimistic, the worst that can happen tells you that you were right. A malicious but competent person will cause damage to a few, when it's desirable for him. While an incompetent but non-malicious person will cause damage to everyone, including himself, at random intervals, regardless of his own desires. ________________ On-topic. I think that Reddit is trying to capitalise on business customers, using its platform to train its AI models with. If that's correct, then even if the users reacting negatively leave, and this puts a dent on Reddit's profit, Reddit will still profit more from those business customers.
throwawaylinux 3y ago
Even if that vapid saying was in any way a rule, we already know they are malicious -- this is the same person who silently edited the content of users' posts.
tinus_hn 3y ago
People want a free website where they can do whatever they want, but they can’t be required to pay, it has to be financed through ads but they have to be able to block these ads. Oh, and content advertisers don’t want to be associated with has to be freely accessible. Unsurprisingly this is not sustainable, investors are paying for the site and ultimately they want to see a return. Money talks, bs walks.
- rahidz 3y ago
  Serious question then, how do all the Chan sites exist?
  - tinus_hn 3y ago
    Reddit gets over 4 billion visits a month. That’s really not comparable to the Chans. And they surely have a lot of trouble staying afloat because nobody wants to advertise there. Moot let it go for a reason.
freediverx 3y ago
I think a simpler explanation is one that’s missing from a lot of the conversations on this. Huffman is singularly focused on pumping up the valuation for Reddit’s upcoming IPO. All other considerations are secondary. He doesn’t care about the users. He doesn’t care about third-party developers. He doesn’t care about the long-term survival of the platform. He’s just razor focused on his big payday.

LegitShady 3y ago

reddit receives hundreds of millions of dollars per year of free moderating from their community. The community is the only valuable thing in reddit. The website is worth nothing, the eyeballs and free labour are everything. When the parts of their community with outsize influence start talking about abandoning the site to somewhere else it threatens both their hundreds of millions in free labour per year, and also the future of their site. Reddit exists as it does today because Digg made a series of bad decisions that led to mass movement away from Digg. The same thing can happen to Reddit.

Semaphor 3y ago
As has been mentioned a few times: When Digg fucked up, reddit existed as a growing but small competitor. Reddit has no such competitor.
- fphhotchips 3y ago
  That may be true in the US but it's not everywhere, and it certainly won't be for long. Anyway, for many, the competition is "nothing at all". I will never download the official Reddit app. It's that bad. The mobile experience is worse. I'll just find something more productive to do with my time.
  - danudey 3y ago
    I use the official mobile app, and also use Apollo (because I like having two separate apps for two separate accounts I use). The official mobile app is just inexplicably bad. The other day I was browsing through the 'Popular' tab, and every time I clicked on the thumbnail for an article, it took me to the web page... of some other article. Completely unrelated as far as I could tell. Tap on a CNN article about Trump indictment, instead get an EW article about Gwen Stefani (or whatever, I don't remember what it was). It was consistent, too. Every article went to a different article instead, but tapping on that article always gave you the same different article. Tapping onto the comment screen and then onto the article gave the correct article. A few weeks ago, the problem was different; I would tap on an article, and it would load up some other article, and then also the article I was trying to read. I'd read it, close it, then have to close the other article, then I'd be back at the main list. For the longest time, refreshing an article list would result in a bunch of broken-looking entries in the list view; entries without titles, titles overlapping images, entries that were too big, and so on. Refreshing again often fixed it, but then gave me a new set of articles as if I'd already read the messed up ones it had brokenly tried to show me. This used to happen every single time; then it was just sort of random, about 50% of the time. I haven't noticed it lately because I got out of the habit of refreshing lists and I just kill the app when I want to get newer content. There's also a little hovering downwards-arrow symbol to skip to the next top-level comment. It's black, it's fairly large, and it hovers over the content. You can't get rid of it whether you want it or not. The best you can do is toggle a preference that says "I don't want this to be movable", and then it sits in the corner, over top of the content, forever (except when it bugs out and sits in the middle of the screen on the left side forever). For the longest time, the comment box to type your comment into was a fixed size; if your comment didn't fit into two or three lines, then your text wrapped onto the fourth line or whatever, except the text box wouldn't scroll so you couldn't see what you were typing. I got in the habit of copying the text to Notes, writing my comment there, and then switching back to Reddit. 50% of the time, the Reddit app would reload and I would lose the comment that I was replying to, but the other 50% of the time I could paste my comment in and post it. When creating a new post, you first put in the content you want (title, body, image, whatever), and then you hit 'Next' and choose a subreddit. It gives you a list of suggestions, based not on subreddits that you're subscribed to or post to regularly, but rather subreddits that you've engaged with lately. I saw a post from /r/doordash yesterday, so now the app is suggesting maybe I want to post there, or /r/Weddingattireapproval. Note that some subreddits don't allow self posts, or don't allow image posts, but you have to create your post first before choosing a subreddit that maybe doesn't allow it, forcing you to go back and change your post type/content. This feature seems just generally really stupid. It goes on and on. It's a genuinely horrible app which can rarely even get the basic functionality working, and bugs stick around indefinitely.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  now that its clear there's a need for an alternative they will show up. It's not that hard to spin up an old pre-shittification version of reddit.
  - slowmovintarget 3y ago
    It's hard to find a way to do it "for free" and not run into the exact same VC pressure nightmare Reddit is now visiting on its most engaged users.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      So don’t do it for free. Start with paid subscriptions to post or something and build that way. Similar things have been done before - the famous tenbux.
- JamesLeonis 3y ago
  > As has been mentioned a few times: When Digg fucked up, reddit existed as a growing but small competitor. Reddit has no such competitor. In all honesty I think Discord is the competitor. You can join dozens of communities under one login, lots of creators and studios set up their own server, set up a private server for friends, and there's more control over who can join and see content. I mostly use it to keep in contact with a couple of friends, so I bet there's even more that could be done.
  - stocknoob 3y ago
    Unfortunately there’s no discord equivalent of <product review> site:reddit.com
    - acheron 3y ago
      How will I ever learn the opinion of 19 year old college students now?
      - drumhead 3y ago
        Thats not true, the site is full of passionate, experienced users in all different interests and areas. I dont know what you've been looking at but it hasnt been my experience at all. You get a really good consensus on whats good, whats bad, where to start with so many different things. Its essentially an add on for google search now if you want good quality opinions.
    - shagie 3y ago
      I suspect that discord is the replacement for reddit. There's a 90-9-1 rule of thumb ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ ) and a migration from reddit to discord will benefit the 9-1 portions and provide a net loss to the 90% (lurkers / people who find content via google). You can't make a community go somewhere. The the place that it ends up is on discord (and irc in times before), then discoverability for the rest of the population that aren't participants in that community will suffer along with the companies that previously hosted that content and were able to monetize their eyeballs. ... but isn't that what people have been wanting? "Down with {big corp}!" be it google or reddit or Facebook?
- Fricken 3y ago
  Reddit's competitor has until the 30th to get something off the ground
  - drumhead 3y ago
    Discord, its already there and ready to go.
    - mostlysimilar 3y ago
      Live chat is a different medium entirely. Valuable in its own way but not the same thing.
    - unsupp0rted 3y ago
      As a user, I get zero benefit from a firehouse of live chat in a closed community.
    - OoooooooO 3y ago
      Discord has no threads/comments/subcomments structure. It's nearly Impossible to find old information and every discussion has 50+ messages about other topics inbetween because it's a chat, not a forum. Unuseable as a reddit replacement.
      - shagie 3y ago
        They added forums a bit ago - https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-... https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-conversation https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-... The thing is that most users of reddit and discord don't care about older topics. Go to any large sub with lax moderation and watch how many times the same questions are posted. For many communities, it doesn't matter if its a reddit replacement with the reddit functionality but rather that it is a place to host that community (that will adapt to and complain about the confines of their new home). It only lacks real functionality as a reddit replacement for those people who are lurkers and want to consume a digest of past content (and maybe add a forgettable comment to the end of a too long comment tree).
- jtriangle 3y ago
  Honestly, if Apollo and RIF got together and pointed themselves at a different backend, they could basically be that competitor. They're already got the users, and the frontend code is good. Their standing agreements with Reddit inc. may prevent them from doing so however.
  - shagie 3y ago
    Switching APIs isn't seamless. Switching to a federated backend is even more of a hurdle. None of the backends are likely able to support the load that Apollo (and RIF) would do (see also what HN did to Lemmy the other day). Many of the users of Apollo and RIF are using them and the APIs that reddit was providing for free before to avoid paying for things and seeing ads making monetization of those and supporting the backends even more difficult (not that Lemmy and friends want to pay for server costs with advertisements - they'd rather donations - but that isn't a reliable income stream).
KennyBlanken 3y ago
I'd go so far as to say the free moderation labor is the only thing worth anything. Acquiring users is relatively easy. Retention is hard.
chrsstrm 3y ago
You're not wrong, but that's a very one-sided view. The alternate outcome is that when the current mods abandon ship there's likely going to be many more people waiting in the wings to get their shot at modding their own sub. What other service is a perfect substitute for Reddit? The thought that most users will give up Reddit cold-turkey and stay away permanently is a bit naive. Internet use can be an addiction and addicts staying away under their own power and no alternative is unlikely. Ultimately a vacuum will be created, it will be filled with fresh bodies, and Reddit will continue along after a short period of unrest and uncertainty, with new mods running new subs. "The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets."
- LegitShady 3y ago
  new untrained and inexperienced moderators will disrupt the site experience. The poweruse and mod community fleeing to another site will start it becoming more common among barely involved users. Its exactly what happened to digg. The site became (to quote huffman) "profit driven" and it quickly fell from grace.
  - trw55 3y ago
    Could also say it's happened at Twitter, too, outside of sports Twitter. When I had my main account with 2K followers for years engagement was pretty high and consistent. Then Twitter made sharing links to your own content impossible to drive engagement to your own content which, considering the amount of anger and virtue signaling on Twitter, caused me to use it less and less. Then Elon bought it and it became a right wing platform for what I can only describe as fascism disguised as "free speech". I'd log in and see virtually no one over time. Granted my main account was very tech/developer heavy and those communities seem to skew left. But I decided it just made me sad to login and have to see how hollow it was. Glad to have experienced it 2014-2016 though. That was peak Tech Twitter for me.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    > The poweruse and mod community fleeing to another site A lot of the mod community on the popular subreddits do that as their dayjob as social media consultants or whatever you call them.
jychang 3y ago
$hundreds of millions in replaceable value Most Internet forum mods are low lifes who moderate for the little sense of power it gives them. There are plenty of those to go around. The reality is Reddit can literally ban all their current mods and get a new set of mods pretty easily.
- junofan 3y ago
  Yeah there’s a shitton of people trying to mod stuff.
- diydsp 3y ago
  That's a harsh accusation. I moderate bc i love the topic and want to encourage others. Banning and blocking posts isnt the powertrip ppl think. It's not like being a cop and stealing cash, cocaine, and raping hookers. It's more "oh another bot is posting chat room ads in bad grammar. Ive seen many interesting forums falter bc a mod gets a six month interest and never logs back in again, forgets their password to their alt, etc. And reddit already has AI duh to delete spam. It'a just not 100% so ppl have to do it. Also mods do more than just enforce rules. It'a more abt setting the tone through pinned comments, certain flair and CSS etc. Also, intelligent cross-posting. You know, all kinds of nurturing shit. That takes TLC and passion. Lots of people like my subs but no one ever wants to help mod them.
  - ddingus 3y ago
    Truth
- ddingus 3y ago
  You are far off the mark. If I were you, I would get some real data and while that is in process, reconsider comments, until you know they have a solid basis. I have helped to build 100k plus subs and currently moderate smaller subs I have a personal interest in. Along the way, I got to know people and have asked enough questions to get a sense of it. I am about to step away from it entirely due to the damage Reddit appears to be doing right now. I showed up for the original by users, for users vision Aaron was a part of. Each Reddit sale has burdened it so people could turn future value into cash today and we are now at the point where making that equation work YET AGAIN just might not go as well. Fact is a ton of the smaller high value communities are moderated by people who value the topic the sub is about and who have domain knowledge. These communities are great! Now there are low lifes power tripping for sure. Don't get me wrong there. And they are replaceable too. I do not see the percentages being in line with your statements here, that's all. Few moderators care about getting some compensation. But they really do care a lot about being able to do for their users. Reddit is not by users for users anymore. Has not been for a long time. Seems a line got crossed this time around. Now is the time for someone to build out the original Reddit vision. It was workable, sustainable and all that too. It would even pay out a nice living for the owners. What it won't do is generate bazillion of dollars. And what the current vision won't do is garner trust and loyalty among users. It's a real mess!
rnd0 3y ago
Labour isn't necessarily influence, that is where things break down. Reddit knows that if all the malcontents (From their point of view) leave they will be replaced by newer content creators/community participants who either don't know the story or don't care. The problem with the Digg comparision is that the internet is a vastly different place today both from a legislative and a payment processing point of view. I would venture a guess that the legal and financial barriers to entry are and will continue to prevent anyone from making the next Reddit; or the next Twitter, for that matter. We've gone from the Wild West to the Dust Bowl, lads
- chaosjevil 3y ago
  >Reddit knows that if all the malcontents (From their point of view) leave they will be replaced by newer content creators/community participants who either don't know the story or don't care. Do they? What if the demographics of the malcontents and newer content creators is different? I'm not completely sure, but I think that the malcontents are the people who are noticing what is going on; while the potential newer content creators are the people who lack such an insight. If this idea is correct, then the malcontents leaving is effectively a brain drain.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  >hey will be replaced by newer content creators/community participants I'm not sure why inserting discussion of content creation here. Totally irrelevant. Nor is it about participation, its about moderating. >The problem with the Digg comparision is that the internet is a vastly different place today both from a legislative and a payment processing point of view. I would venture a guess that the legal and financial barriers to entry are and will continue to prevent anyone from making the next Reddit; or the next Twitter, for that matter. Funny I never gave digg or reddit any payment information.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    > Funny I never gave digg or reddit any payment information And you never saw any ads because you used a third aprty app and ablock? This is why reddit doesn't give a shit if you leave. You were never anything but a cost center to them. They're more worried about making money than replacing moderators.

VWWHFSfQ 3y ago

The reality is that the Reddit users that actually care about this enough to show up and rage in the AMA are also the ones that are almost completely unmonetizable. So I doubt there was ever really any risk of major loss from this.

ascar 3y ago
they might be unmonetizable. But they're the people who maintain the communities that bring in the mass of people that are monetizeable.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
  I guess so. But I also suspect that their value isn't as much as they think it is. Some will actually leave, but most will stay and just continue to grumble about it. And keep working for free.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    Everyone gets to find out in a few weeks. Who wants to be the bookie?
Nasrudith 3y ago
But the markets have never ever judged websites by "monetizable user count", just "user count". Click-through rate is about the closest thing to the metric and that itself is highly context specific.

prox 3y ago

A bit under the radar, but Twitch is having a similar moment with new ad directives which would kill independent streamers. It caused an upset in the community. Twitch backtracks but the damage is already done.

KennyBlanken 3y ago
Making wildly unpopular changes and then "rolling them back" to something "more reasonable" is a very commonly employed corporate management strategy for implementing unpopular policy changes with both customers and employees. Want to drop PTO rates by 5%? Announce a 10% reduction, ignore the furor for a few days, then the CEO publishes the already-written "oops" letter and says that they listened to feedback from employees, looked at the "books" and decided they could compromise to 5%. Half the company thinks he's a great leader for listening and pushing back against the evil bitch running HR. If they wanted to just make more money off API calls, they would have announced the pricing, but then rolled it back part-way. Unfortunately, the Apollo dev recording his conversations with them, and their sheer incompetence/ego, seems to have taken all that off the table and instead they're just doubling down, which definitely does not work.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  Yeah, but the thing is, you've broken a lot of trust with your employees once you pull shit like this. Places like Apple and Google, who have been shitty in different ways with their RTO plans, are never getting back that trust, not fully. If they go full-blown cynical like this they'd see really serious attrition in places they didn't want it to happen, and no amount of stock would bring those people back. I know it's not you personally; not trying to shoot the messenger here. People need to understand that these tactics are bad for the company in the long term.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    Trading trust for money seems to be very in-vogue in the past decade.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

I think he knows that he will never be as respected as aaron swartz and he is an imposter.

ddingus 3y ago
Lucid comment. I agree.

maybelsyrup 3y ago

> "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." This is a digression, but this saying has always frustrated me. It makes sense for a second, but then I wonder if whoever came up with it had any idea how much malice exists in the world. Many cases of "malice is at least as adequate an explanation as incompetence, given the facts or lack of them".

rnd0 3y ago
It is an attitude that has given a lot of cover to very malicious people over the years. Bush is a great example of that. Many people thought he was a moron and during his administration a lot of the things that happened on his watch (no-bid contracts to Halliburton and Abu Ghraib spring to mind) were often brushed off by people citing Hanlon's Razor.
- Kye 3y ago
  I thought the general consensus was that they were both malicious, but Cheney was the brains behind the operation. Sometimes someone is malicious and incompetent, but self-aware enough to delegate.
lioeters 3y ago
Likely a malicious person said this to present plausible deniability for their crimes and conspiracies.
- imbnwa 3y ago
  Literally the person I first heard this from nearly 10 years ago was precisely one of the most manipulative, bullying charismatics I've ever known.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
r00fus 3y ago
I prefer the less epistemological version of this (gray's law) "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice" Does it matter if it's incompetence or malice? If you care, are now forced into action, best just make a move and justify it after the fact.

wolpoli 3y ago

IMO, the profitability plan involves moving everyone to official App. They expect backlash, but believe they could manage it with various tactics, which they are making it up as they go.

bravura 3y ago

“Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”

blooalien 3y ago
I think maybe the "vice versa" version works equally well, too. As long as you can convincingly appear incompetent enough, you can often get away with supervillain levels of malice these days. Either way, your genius twist on that old phrase wins an upvote from me.

low_tech_love 3y ago

People will leave Reddit as much as they have left Twitter, i.e. not much. The main problem is in the fact that lots of Reddit users seem to think that Reddit is some kind of “community” that “depends” on its users, when the truth is that Reddit is a company and the dependence relationship is the other way around. It’s hard to accept but Reddit is a dysfunctional colossus that is simply not feasible to replicate at this point, and as such the management can pretty much do as they please.

Eisenstein 3y ago
> It’s hard to accept but Reddit is a dysfunctional colossus that is simply not feasible to replicate at this point, and as such the management can pretty much do as they please. History proves otherwise. Colossuses have fallen. You can't rely on size to guarantee impunity for shitty actions.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  History has been short on the internet. I don't think one or two examples proves much of anything.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    It absolutely proves something: that you can't rely on size to grant you impunity for shitty actions -- like I said.
BoxOfRain 3y ago
I still think Huffman’s decisions might yet end up a cautionary tale. Even if he brings in strikebreakers to moderate the closed subreddits the site will face a tidal wave of spam which isn’t going to make the causal users happy.
vGPU 3y ago
Tumblr found otherwise. So did digg. So did many other media titans of years past.

xtracto 3y ago

I feel its something like #2. Correct me if I'm wrong: reddit userbase us say, a fraction of FB or TikTok. They've made the numbers and attracting and tailoring the site to the TikTok audience is way more profitable than what they have now. They've been doing that since the reddit redesign thing, trying to go more mainstream yet. I think that's why they feel they can burn bridges

AbraKdabra 3y ago

I'm not defending Spez by no means, I've been a user of reddit since early 2010 and it has changed A LOT and I really don't like how it's now, I prefer the more anarchy reddit from that era, but 95% of the times data backs up decisions, even bad ones, and users don't know shit about them, and when something bad as the Apollo drama comes out, it becomes a hatred echo chamber. I really hope this is case because I use a 3rd party app for reddit (Relay, the best one obviously) and I would hate to see it die in favor of the mountain of shit the official app is, I don't know went through their minds when developing it, there were apps with literal a decade of experience to take example from and they did that crap.

BlackjackCF 3y ago

My theory is desperation. Reddit isn’t profitable, which was fine in the past few years because they could just raise another round of funding by pointing at their user growth. They can’t easily do that in the current financial environment. I suspect that they’re also seeing a plateau in year over year user growth. Bundle that up with everybody seeing advertising revenue decline and there’s no good story to sell to investors. I think that they’re probably under tremendous pressure right now by their investors to at least get close to profitable so that they can IPO.

sleight42 3y ago
Ironic given many third party app users would likely pay $60-100/year to continue to use their third party app. Now, we'll just stop using reddit and be sad about it. Missed opportunity due to... what? Desperation at Reddit?
- BlackjackCF 3y ago
  That’s the end goal already with their API fees. They just handled the entire execution and messaging poorly. I think the Apollo developer mentioned that in order to break even with the new fees, they’d have to have subscribers who are paying $5/mo. To make a profit, third party apps would need subscribers who pay within the $60-100/yr range that you mentioned. Reddit probably knew this would cull the number of third party apps out there, which is to their benefit since their mobile app would have fewer competitors. I bet they’re also banking on most people not caring, or eventually coming back to the platform after a short period of time. I sincerely hope that they’re wrong and the user base doesn’t return.
vincentkriek 3y ago
I fully agree. Money is not free anymore, and investors want to see a path-to-profitablity. No one wants to dump millions into a possible profitable idea.

kmeisthax 3y ago

>Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. Why not both? This is the platform that literally built itself off of registering fake accounts and posting spam to make themselves look more active than they were, after all[0]. Reddit administration is a unique blend of malicious incompetence. I call it malicincompetence. For example, spez in particular notably was caught editing the posts of /r/the_donald posters he was in a shouting match with. This is malicious, because the admins demonstrated that they're willing to fuck with historical records to defame their enemies. But it's also incompetent, because it turned a bunch of fascists[1] into martyrs. If he had just banned /r/TD then and there, or even just that poster, it would have been less malicious and less incompetent at the same time. Going deeper, a lot of malicious behavior is itself inherently stupid. That's the idea behind the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: betrayal is advantageous only when you don't think more than a step ahead. Once you do, then tit-for-tat[2] becomes better, possibly with some kind of forgiveness term if random or accidental betrayal is possible. None of Reddit's CxO suite[3] thinks this way. They think their users are resources to be taken for granted, except they're also really bad at doing that. And Reddit users have just gotten used to shouting down these kinds of stupid changes until the admins fold, which they usually do, because Reddit doesn't have the kind of user lock-in to make people just stick with it. [0] Nobody noticed until the admins just outright admitted it a few years later. Although if /r/SRD and /r/de is to be believed, they're doing the same shit again in German: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/reddit_admins_were_just_caught_using_bots_or_fake/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red... [1] Ok, I don't have citations for the victim of Spez's tomfoolery being a fascist, but /r/TD was notorious back then for banning anyone who wasn't enthusiastically riding the Trump train that hard. [2] Do what the opponent did last round. [3] Except maybe Ellen Pao, only because she wasn't around long enough for Reddit to rub off on her.

chaosjevil 3y ago

>What do you do when incompetence would be unbelievable in scope and malice would be unbelievably incompetent. Given that incompetence is more harmful than malice, you stay pessimistic, and still blame incompetence. Simply because, if you're pessimistic, the worst that can happen tells you that you were right. A malicious but competent person will cause damage to a few, when it's desirable for him. While an incompetent but non-malicious person will cause damage to everyone, including himself, at random intervals, regardless of his own desires. ________________ On-topic. I think that Reddit is trying to capitalise on business customers, using its platform to train its AI models with. If that's correct, then even if the users reacting negatively leave, and this puts a dent on Reddit's profit, Reddit will still profit more from those business customers.

throwawaylinux 3y ago

Even if that vapid saying was in any way a rule, we already know they are malicious -- this is the same person who silently edited the content of users' posts.

tinus_hn 3y ago

People want a free website where they can do whatever they want, but they can’t be required to pay, it has to be financed through ads but they have to be able to block these ads. Oh, and content advertisers don’t want to be associated with has to be freely accessible. Unsurprisingly this is not sustainable, investors are paying for the site and ultimately they want to see a return. Money talks, bs walks.

rahidz 3y ago
Serious question then, how do all the Chan sites exist?
- tinus_hn 3y ago
  Reddit gets over 4 billion visits a month. That’s really not comparable to the Chans. And they surely have a lot of trouble staying afloat because nobody wants to advertise there. Moot let it go for a reason.

freediverx 3y ago

I think a simpler explanation is one that’s missing from a lot of the conversations on this. Huffman is singularly focused on pumping up the valuation for Reddit’s upcoming IPO. All other considerations are secondary. He doesn’t care about the users. He doesn’t care about third-party developers. He doesn’t care about the long-term survival of the platform. He’s just razor focused on his big payday.