22 ms·
Great! There's a picket line I won't be crossing. Not just for those subs, of course, but for all of Reddit. The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs
by wpietri 3y ago
Great! There's a picket line I won't be crossing. Not just for those subs, of course, but for all of Reddit.
The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs making these (IMHO terrible) decisions. It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back.
- jcims 3y agoReddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.
- jimmySixDOF 3y agoReddit is proof of Internet Rule No.51 "the better the content, the worse the User Interface"
- memefrog 3y agoIt's the other way round from a cause & effect perspective: the worse the user interface, the more off-putting it is to the casual users that create and promote low-quality content.
- oska 3y agoThe old reddit user interface was/is remarkably good. Threaded, collapsible discussions with markdown for comments in a non-distracting (i.e. sparse) layout.
- devnullbrain 3y agoOnce you found the comments it was but the comment link was/is marginalised in favour of the link itself, making it easy to miss that they're 'the point'. Even before new.reddit it was a common complaint that it's confusing to new users. Obviously this is relative, it's a huge site! And there may even be value to gatekeeping users who can't figure it out.
- wpietri 3y agoTwitter too! When I worked there they jokingly referred to the head of product as the defense against the dark arts teacher, in that every year or so they'd disappear mysteriously and there'd be a new one. Most of Twitter's successes came from watching what users were actually doing and supporting that (e.g., at mentions, retweets, quote tweets). Many of their failures have been trying to graft on something irrelevant or actively contradictory to user needs. Or just flat out ignoring things users liked, as with them closing down Vine and letting TikTok come in to win as the short, fun video platform. But network effects businesses are really hard to kill. Sure, Musk has set $20-30 billion on fire and Twitter is rapidly decaying. But imagine taking a resilient business like a McDonald's franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of chaos. It would have been out of business long before, instead of merely shrinking significantly.
- TX81Z 3y agoVine shutting down may be one of the top ten stupid decisions in business history.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- GolfPopper 3y agoI think there's a fundamental conflict, in that these network effect businesses are terrible as for-profit businesses. They're of great value to those who use them, and indirectly to society as a whole. Yet there's no good way to monetize them (nor does there need to be monetization), and trying to do so damages the functionality of the network. Both Twitter and Reddit would likely be better off (from the POV of the users and the network as a whole) as something more along the lines of non-profit foundations.
- civilitty 3y agoIs Facebook not a network effect business? It’s not only wildly profitable but bigger than those two combined. Twitter and Reddit are just run by incompetents who can’t figure out how to advertise anything relevant.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jachee 3y agoIt’s popular despite itself… but It’s not successful. One of the things Spez is whining about is that they’re not profitable.
- littlestymaar 3y agoWikipedia manages to be extremely profitable, maybe reddit execs just suck at their job and should be fired…
- nomel 3y agoMostly through deception, and full pages ads, though. https://m.slashdot.org/story/275835 https://m.slashdot.org/story/275835
- littlestymaar 3y agoYes, but that's still orders of magnitude less bad that what Reddit has been doing.
- wpietri 3y agoI'm sure it isn't profitable the way he's running it. And honestly, I don't care about Reddit being profitable. I care about it being sustainable. A VC-driven push for profitability doesn't mean breaking even. It means making a shit-ton of money, yielding a very large return on their very large investment. And they are perfectly willing to destroy an adequate business if that means they are getting a chance at something larger and much more profitable. Without a lot of internal data, we'll never know the truth of it. But I suspect that there is a sustainable version of Reddit-the-company that would do everything Reddit-the-community needs without this sort of aggressive destruction of value in pursuit of high revenue numbers.
- rafark 3y agoOf course you as a user don’t care that is profitable. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not picking sides, but if you were the ceo/owner, you’d probably care about its profitability. If you were the owner of such a big site, wouldn’t you be thinking of ways to get yourself a -very comfortable- early retirement?
- HKH2 3y agoReddit is not going to change. It seems quite a few people don't mind being abused a bit to get the convenience they want. Nothing's going to happen.
- uw_rob 3y agoI am not so sure that I agree here. What's interesting about reddit is that it is one site with very different UIs. The official reddit app has a focus on video/images and looks to be in competition with TikTok. old.reddit.com and Apollo are very much text centric apps. From my understand, reddit has a traffic breakdown of 50/50 on the text centric vs. visual centric UIs. With the UIs like Apollo being killed, and old.reddit.com eventually going away as well[0], I think users will genuinely leave as they have killed the text based UIs. [0] Despite any promises, the writing is on the wall.
- skinnymuch 3y agoIs desktop new Reddit counting as text centric? From what others have said, 3rd party apps and old reddit have relatively low usage.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoOn the sub I mod, old and new reddit are basically neck and neck with ~10% of traffic. The bulk of traffic comes from apps, but I don't think there's a breakdown in the modtools of 1p vs 3p apps
- paradox460 3y agoThey killed compact a few months ago, in light of recent events probably to drive people to the "official" apps
- Somdubai 3y agoCompact was perfect for me and its death really has curtailed my usage of Reddit
- mattkevan 3y agoI have a theory, after working for one of the UK’s largest social networks, that no-one who runs a social network understands what made it work or why it continues to work. Therefore they are extremely reluctant to make changes in case they break it (e.g. old twitter), and because they don’t understand it, any large changes they do make are generally negative (new twitter, Reddit). Plus, in my experience , users will bitterly resist any changes at all because the site doesn’t belong to management, it belongs to them. It’s their space. Changing anything is like someone’s snuck into their house at night and remodelled their lounge. It’ll be interesting to see whether this is Reddit’s Digg moment or it’s more like the Facebook newsfeed where everyone kicked up a fuss for a bit and then carried on as before.
- AmericanOP 3y agoThey wasted half a decade not building promised moderation tools for the people who create value on Reddit. Instead they were busy running cost/benefit analyses on how aggressive the dark patterns to drive users to the maligned mobile app should be.
- wpietri 3y agoI still feel bad for whatever web developer had to check in the "this page looks better in the app" banner.
- Lapsa 3y agogreat levels of empathy. and I'm not sarcastic
- sdenton4 3y agoPull request description: "Does it really, though?"
- vkou 3y agoIt's a job. Some people are paid to shoot rockets into cities, some people are paid to deny healthcare coverage, some people are paid to lie on television, and some people are paid to lie on dark pattern banners.
- nologic01 3y agoWhat are the alternatives exactly? Until we get interoperating platforms where people can easily migrate and reward the places that treat them the best we are stuck with the few platforms that managed to create network lock-in. The social media as a prison operating model.
- Tao3300 3y agoI'm apparently in limbo waiting for beehaw to figure out I'm not Hitler.
- O1111OOO 3y agoI find myself spreading out. I created accounts with lemmy (app: jerboa) and mastodon (app: trunks). HN and RSS remain in the mix. Also using my mobile browser's option to create a shortcut/browserApp for a few news sites. There really is an awful lot out there - I'm just beginning to look (again). Interestingly... last year - with no effort on my part - reddit became an also-ran when I dived into TikTok. When I left TikTok, reddit re-entered the picture.
- oska 3y agoI'm waiting for big rooms support to be implemented in keet (which is already amazing)
- bookofjoe 3y agoMark Zuckerberg described Twitter as "A clown car that fell into a gold mine."
- throw_a_grenade 3y agoNow let us remember how Zuckerberg descibed his first batch of users...
- accoil 3y agoRight on both accounts?
- smeagull 3y agoThey lasted long enough for there to be no real competitors.
- 762236 3y agoI stopped visiting reddit after too many mods censored me and others that don't conform to the left's ideology. Twitter is where I get content now. And I'm a liberal.
- skinnymuch 3y agoI doubt the veracity of your story. As a liberal you’re complaining about how one of the most liberal capitalist sites has too much left ideology. What is left ideology to you?
- Gareth321 3y agoI’ve been banned on multiple subreddits because I wrote that I don’t think children should be medically altered for “sexual transition.” I’m fine with adults making that decision, but not kids. I was respectful, but firm. This is one of those “left ideology” issues, compounded by a new left ideology issue: authoritarian censorship.
- noelherrick 3y agoI would push back on this, because left ideology hasn't really changed since the term was invented, and they weren't talking about transition surgery in the 1700s. It's always about removing current power structures and institutions that harm the weak to enrich and empower the few. It started with the monarchy, and today it's about corporations and the rich buying politicians, academics, reporters, artists, and religious leaders to allow and promote the subjugation of workers and the destruction of the environment for profit. The reason the trans people are an issue is that conservatives lost big on trying to suppress homosexuals, which in turn is just a distraction from the economic inequality and general disempowerment that regular Americans face. There is a vast right-wing conspiracy that wants to keep the conversation around culture war issues instead of, you know, making sure all people have food, clean water, shelter, healthcare, and education regardless of their economic value to the market. Claiming authoritarian censorship displays a kind of persecution complex, especially considering you're able to claim censorship and I, a rando, am able to read it. The top articles shared on Facebook feature mostly conservative voices. Reddit is different in that it has a downvote option, available to users without HN's karma threshold. You're not getting censored, you're just espousing unpopular views. Just like with abortion, for trans kids, the doctor's office is not big enough for the kid, the doctor, and the government. People know themselves better than we think. Kara Swisher, the tech reporter, has said she knew she was a lesbian when she was 4 (or 5). Guess what, she's still a lesbian. No kid is going to choose the difficult, scary prospect of surgery or invasive meds without a strong motivation. And kids are not getting surgery that often - it's mostly puberty blockers which are not permanent. And to be clear, I couldn't find any story about a person younger than 17 getting a surgery done. These are folks just about to leave minority age. Also, no child is getting this without parental or guardian's consent. The idea that some liberal parent is twiddling their fingers, Mr. Burn's style, to get their child to believe they are trans is ludicrous. You have to believe there's a large group of parents who are cartoon villains attacking their own kids for clout. But deeper than that, I know that conservatives don't actually care about children because so many of them won't have a conversation around guns which actually kill children, often mutilating their bodies so much an open casket funeral is out of the question unless it's for shock value. It is the leading cause of death for kids in the US. The Utah law against trans athletes applied to 4 people. Malnutrition deaths in Utah were 1,044 for 2022. WTF.
- courseofaction 3y agoIt rode that beautiful wave of techno-optimism. An undeserving beneficiary of Aaron Swartz's work.
- andrewfelix 3y agoCapitalism destroys the best.
- roflyear 3y agoHappens all the time, really!
- jacurtis 3y agoThere's a term for this "market effect". See also Twitter and Facebook and many other social networks that are objectively terrible platforms now (they all had periods of greatness that they fell from). Despite continually getting worse, the majority of people (tech and early adopters aside) will continue to use these sites no matter what because that is where their friends are, so they put up with it. There's an app I have on my phone called Marco Polo. I hate every fucking thing about this app, the fact that it asks me to pay them $120 per year basically every morning as a full screen popup, the fact that it completely wrecks my battery life, the fact that they continue to block more (previously free) features behind paywalls, the fact that video records at like 8 fps (and still manages to destroy my battery by some miracle), the fact that they consume all of your friends contact lists and automatically befriends you with ex-girlfriends and people you would rather not talk to, and the worst sin of all, it completely resets your phone's audio now-playing whenever you open it up. So if i am listening to a podcast or music and I get a marco polo and listen to it, I can't just pick up listening to my previous audio when I am done. I have to re-open Spotify or Overcast to start playing again. But why do I use this monstrosity of an app? Because all my friends use it. We bitch about it everyday, but we are all on it and we all use it to talk multiple times a day between eachother. It has market effect. I want nothing more than for this app to die, but market effect keeps it around.
- technick 3y agoIf you build it, they will come...
- PaulHoule 3y agoNot weird at all. This is the problem of the modern internet. There has always been a controversy over the relationship between success and competence. Two-sided markets are so powerful that you can run one very poorly (e.g. craiglist…) or even actively try to run one into the ground (Musk and Twitter) and they will persist anyway, so the good luck of being in the right place at the right time can mask incompetence, particularly when that incompetence develops over time (see the Peter Principle) If there wasn’t a powerful force keeping people into bad platforms there wouldn’t be an “enshittification” problem, because people would vote with their feet and bad platforms would immediately feel the consequences of their actions.
- bottlepalm 3y agoReddit wanted 2.50/month/app which is like $30 ARPU, Facebook is $200 ARPU in the US. The app they’re burning down Reddit over is already charging $1/month and was ready to sell out and shut down for $10 million. Correct me if I’m wrong, but we usually don’t give out API keys to allow users to wholesale reproduce, redistribute, resell our data for free.
- wilg 3y ago> Reddit wanted 2.50/month/app which is like $30 ARPU And they couldn't figure out how to transition to it without causing a shitstorm.
- wpietri 3y agoI'd also point out it's not Reddit who wanted a $30 ARPU. It's a small number of Reddit execs and venture capitalists. Reddit, by which I mean its vast user community, does not give a shit about ARPU as long as the site stays up and things get modestly better over time. And I've seen no evidence that Reddit needs a massive bump in revenue to meet those goals.
- numpad0 3y agoIf they can’t make $30 ARPU stick, what could ever be profitable on Web, other than by deceptively recovering damages through ads? Is the only value prop of Web that it’s free-beer?(my mental answer is nothing and yes)
- Blackthorn 3y ago> our content Tech people ought to think long and hard about whose content it actually is.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BaseballPhysics 3y agoI like that they went back and edited their comment to change that wording. Of course, given the edit, one must wonder who's data they think it is given who they're collecting it from...
- vjk800 3y agoIt's the classic network effect. People use it because other people use it.
- TX81Z 3y ago…until people stop using it because other people stopped using it. They are playing with fire.
- dryanau 3y agoReddit of all platforms should know this, having risen to prominence on the heels of Digg v4
- nomel 3y agoThere’s no viable alternative, at the moment (especially Lemmy). I fully assume this will blow over. Digg users had somewhere very obvious, already established, to go.
- TX81Z 3y agoI mean, the web is big right? There are plenty of forums people still use, maybe some big subreddit just go back that route.
- GravityisaHoax 3y agoThat's my plan. Most of the subs I visit on Reddit still have large and active forum alternatives that I'll just return to. There's only a few niche subs that will be hard to replace for me, but they're talking about moving.
- nomel 3y ago> mean, the web is big right? That’s the entire problem and why Reddit is so successful. People don’t like jumping around between topic specific websites. Discoverability is too hard.
- 3y ago
- yanderekko 3y ago>It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back. You go there for the user content, not the mods. You can say mods cultivate communities, but to say that they deserve credit but not the admins or platform itself seems untenable. Furthermore, insinuations that the API changes will lead to a substantial decline in community quality via its impact on moderation seem to be broadly unsupported. It's unclear that there's a monotonic relationship between moderator power and community quality, similar to how most people would be skeptical of an argument that said that there's a monotonic relationship between state power (irl) community quality. For example, one thing that moderators have wanted to do in the past is create cross-subreddit blacklists. The admins pushed back on this with some success, which was probably healthy for the site as a whole.
- arnorhs 3y agoFair enough. Usually this is the stance I would take in these sorts of discussions, since usually power users misunderstand how much they represent the majority of users. But in this case I would expect that a substantial part of active users use Reddit with a 3rd party app so I'm inclined to say a lot of people will stop using it because of the passive way it is used. I could be wrong and that is why I'm commenting. I can go back to this comment in 2-3 years. My feeling is that Reddit will have shrunk by that time
- wpietri 3y agoOh? Thanks so much for telling me what goes on in my head, bub. The average bit of user-generated content is of very low quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform, this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the good stuff to the top. And any social context is prone to vicious circles where dark triad find somewhere successful and ruin it. Preventing that requires active weeding. All of that is labor I value. The platform deserves some credit. But as all the developers here know, Reddit is not succeeding on the strength of its software. Reddit doesn't have a technology moat. It's a pretty standard web forum. They didn't invent it, they didn't perfect it, and not only could it be replicated, it has been many times. So should the platform get paid? Definitely. Reddit-the-corporation should have enough cashflow to cover the bills and support the necessary staff. But right now the tail is trying to wag the dog, and Reddit-the-community is not having it.
- istillwritecode 3y agoI will continue to use reddit.
- GenerWork 3y agoSame. One thing that I've noticed is that this seems to be a rebellion of power users and not the average Joe, which is why this has gotten so much traction on HN. To the Average Joe, if Apollo shuts down, they'll just download the Reddit app. However, HN users look at the Apollo dev and see themselves, so they're jumping on this out of solidarity. I personally think this will last a few days and then all the default subs will either open by mod decisions or be forced open by Reddit admins. If it's the latter, I expect all existing mods to get the boot and replaced with people who are friendlier with Reddit admins. I also expect that usage of the official app will jump and there won't be any major disruptions to Reddit usage.
- xenophonf 3y ago> If it's the latter, I expect all existing mods to get the boot and replaced with people who are friendlier with Reddit admins. I'm not crossing the picket line, but I think that's a likely outcome, too. That's why I'm preparing to archive what little content I'm personally interested in and am leaving the platform permanently.
- JaumeGreen 3y agoThe decisions that reddit has taken were not affecting me for now. The new ui was horrible for my use case (text subreddits and focusing on the debate) so I was a old.reddit user. But the way the direction is going, and some experiences in some subs have made me take a decision, and my 12+ year account is no more. It won't matter, and probably reddit will survive, be it as strong as it is now or in a diminished state. But I'm tired of this kind of directives in these kinds of companies. I hope that leaving that, and not having Instagram or Facebook on the phone, might give me a little push on being more productive. Wish me luck.
- Lapsa 3y ago
- moneyaside 3y ago[dead]
- bardfinn 3y ago[flagged]
- choudharism 3y agoThis is so many layers of unhinged rhetoric, picking out individual points to break them down and debate them will be fruitless. One thing though... Moderator is most certainly a noun, and can be an adjective when placed in front of a "candidate". What are you even on, man. https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/moderator https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/moderator
- rjh29 3y ago> moderators are supposed to be the people who actually take actions to steward a community, not people who claim a title and never take action, not people who abuse the privileges to push an agenda, not people who do things that aren’t in the interest of the communities they serve. Not absentee founders. I'm not the OP but that context makes it pretty obvious the OP is being figurative.
- choudharism 3y agoYes, and poorly. Like the rest of the post is an argument, but a poor one.
- fknorangesite 3y agoIt's a clear play on another old pithy saying: "Love is a verb, not a noun." Maybe you just missed the reference. The rest of the comment describes things that did, in fact, happen. So what's the problem?
- davemp 3y ago> Not even if it had a better UI and better mod tools. It’s still theft, even if the aesthetics were clean. Except reddit is mostly just a link aggregator and host of other stolen content.
- JJMcJ 3y agoThe joke definition of Web 2.0: You make the content, we make the money. Well, don't piss off the content makers, or the content consumers.
- WellThenGood 3y agoUh doesn't Reddit owe its community 10% per sama's Series B article https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit ? "So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time." Whatever happened to this? Will we end up getting it before or after sama gives us UBI, open AI, and fusion completely altruistically?
- keyle 3y agoTo be fair I think Reddit predates "web 2.0" by a big gap. Which is probably why they were successful; they did it before everyone else.
- detaro 3y agothey didn't predate it. Reddit was founded when "web 2.0" was the hot new buzzword.
- 3y ago
- hax0ron3 3y ago[flagged]
- drumhead 3y agoIts community knowledge, just like wikipedia right now. Infact someone mentioned in another thread that maybe thats the ownership structure Reddit should have had.
- BearTiger913 3y agoI'll just be here for tech news, and other sites for my niche interests. Nothing of true value will be lost to me.
- cyanydeez 3y agoMake sure to logout though
- aceazzameen 3y agoSame here. I just blacklisted Reddit on my pihole. Just in case I forget and accidentally visit it.
- MichaelMoser123 3y agoIs it possible that reddit tried to pull of the same monetization trick as twitter, however they forgot to check with the target audience. And that public is really stretched financially, it does not consist of establishment figures who have an extra five dollars to spare for their hobby. But how is it possible that the reddit bosses don't know who their users are?