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They are desperately trying to be TikTok. It will not work and has no chance of working. Look at their hilariously terrible acquisition of Dubsmash for $50 mill

They are desperately trying to be TikTok. It will not work and has no chance of working. Look at their hilariously terrible acquisition of Dubsmash for $50 million (they converted it to a subreddit with 1.5k subscribers when they had 200 million users at their peak and touted having 25% of black teens in their acquisition press release. Every post is people saying the Reddit app sucks and asking where Dubsmash went)

MarcoZavala 3y ago
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MattGaiser 3y ago
> they converted it to a subreddit with 1.5k subscribers. That definitely belongs in a textbook on absurd corporate decisions. I thought you must have been exaggerating somewhere, but nope, that is exactly how it went. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubsmash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubsmash https://old.reddit.com/r/dubsmash/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dubsmash/
- FormerBandmate 3y ago
  At one point Dubsmash had 200 million users (https://stackshare.io/dubsmash/dubsmash-scaling-to-200-million-users-with-3-engineers https://stackshare.io/dubsmash/dubsmash-scaling-to-200-milli...) and in the acquisition press release they tout how 25% of black teens were on the app (https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-welcomes-video-platform-dubsmash-to-team/ https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-welcomes-video-platfor...). They had fallen from their heyday by the time Reddit bought them but even still taking those numbers at face value it's probably the worst acquisition of all time
  - Nemo_bis 3y ago
    It [also](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dubsmash&oldid=1159741654#History https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dubsmash&oldid=11...) had suffered a data breach and went from competing with TikTok and musical.ly to being two orders of magnitude smaller than the combined TikTok. Probably Reddit thought they were just buying a mailing list and a development team. So the cost should be compared to Reddit marketing's acquisition costs and Reddit HR hiring costs.
- voytec 3y ago
  > That definitely belongs in a textbook on absurd corporate decisions. Maybe money had to be moved under whatever pretense.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  It's only absurd if you misunderstand the true intention. They didn't acquire Dubsmash to profit from its technology and users. They acquired Dubsmash to shut it down. Today's social media corporations are so fat with (venture) capital that they can, and do, spend that kind of money just to keep any potential competitors locked out. TikTok, the last social network that became truly big, was launched in 2016, seven years ago. Seven years without any new player entering the space. That's an eternity. I can promise you this wouldn't be happening without (very costly) interventions from above.
  - MattGaiser 3y ago
    I get buying it for that purpose, but why then kill it? Especially when it is a personal video platform, when Reddit is mostly an anonymous text platform?
    - klabb3 3y ago
      That only makes sense when there’s competition. Why maintain two apps when it’s cheaper to maintain one? Now, in this case it seems like an awful strategic choice, given what happened with TikTok. But I think the reason is nevertheless the same. Modern tech capitalism doesn’t want to compete in the “let the best product win”-space. It’s just not enough money and making stuff is hit or miss. They want to own access and rent-seek. At least that’s my interpretation.
      - bboygravity 3y ago
        That's not (modern) capitalism. That's simply -not- capitalism.
        losteric 3y ago
        Are you saying that rent seeking and anti-competitiveness are "not capitalist"? How do you figure?
        hkt 3y ago
        Alas, you're incorrect. It is the whole point of capitalism.
- AmplySmartly 3y ago
  Oh so that’s how Reddit acquired the video suite. It sucked so much it drove me to third party apps and now they’re killing them too. Amazing.
- bufferoverflow 3y ago
  It makes sense if it's a case of corruption. Like if some manager approves the acquisition in return for kickbacks.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  It's hilarious to me that Reddit is only relevant at all today because Digg 2.0's redesign was so hated that everyone from it flocked to Reddit. Then they buy a moderately successful app, completely destroy it and yet their execs are sitting there rapidly killing the ways people like to use their site and trying to force them into an objectively awful app and yet are seemingly completely oblivious to their history and why they're here in the first place. Reddit, you are replaceable. The moment you turn off old.reddit, I'm gone. I'd definitely admit I am addicted to reddit in it's current form but new reddit and the app are just too insufferable I'll happily give it all up and find somewhere else.
donny2018 3y ago
This is Silicon Valley (the show) level comical.
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
  This is Silicon Valley (the real life) level comical.
  - The_Blade 3y ago
    listen spez has to re-billionize, his children need wine
    - lowkeyokay 3y ago
      Tres commas
      - moffkalast 3y ago
        This guy fucks (up reddit's interface), amirite!
    - intelVISA 3y ago
      Don't speak ill of spez, they'll edit the DB directly to censor you!
- chaostheory 3y ago
  They ended that way too early. There is so much good content to write about now. I know it’s hard to transition, but do you really need (near) the full cast still?
  - kramerger 3y ago
    Don't know. The last 1-2 seasons started to get boring as the writers ran out of ideas.
Razengan 3y ago
Could this all be deliberate to tank Reddit stock as soon as it goes public to make money off shorting?
- aveao 3y ago
  that'd be insider trading, and FTC has generally has opinions about that
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    The FTC may have opinions about that, but the SEC files lawsuits about it.
- cityofdelusion 3y ago
  Its going to tank but for a different reason -- because like Coinbase, Robinhood, and other hyped stock listings, all the insiders are going to dump shares on the unsuspecting retail public. I imagine day 1 of trading will be the highest the stock ever gets.
  - greiskul 3y ago
    Lol, good luck doing that during a recession, and after pissing users off. They might have tricked me into buying it before this fiasco, but definitely they lost me now.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  You have to be kidding me.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  Execs (and most employees) aren’t allowed to short their own stock.
- rchaud 3y ago
  For Reddit to go public they have to submit a financial disclosure known as the S-1. This will give the public an idea of Reddit's finances and business model. There's a long way to go before shorting can happen. If anything, Reddit are shorting themselves.
paganel 3y ago
> 25% of black teens in their acquisition press release Not necessarily illegal, but I had thought that, for sure, one shouldn't boast about heavily discriminatory race-related factoids, even if they thought that it would be for a "good" cause. Didn't they think what would have happened had they replaced the "black teens" in their press release with "white teens"?
- klooney 3y ago
  That's how Americans say "lots of the cool kids use the app".
  - motoxpro 3y ago
    Yeah, GP, this is not so much race thing as it is a cultural "where the cool kids are" thing.
    - jojobas 3y ago
      Is that as cool for investors? I would imagine, for better or worse, being black correlated with being poor, and therefore black userbase is less valuable then white for ad serving purposes.
      - motoxpro 3y ago
        You're missing why this would be important. It's cool for investors because the black user base draws in a bunch of other people along with them. It's also not about people saying "omg black people, I must be there!" Culturally, historically, in the USA, black culture has set a bunch of trends. See NBA, NFL, hip-hop/music, comedians, dance, etc. Same as when a "cool" person goes anywhere, you don't monetize them, you monetize all the people they bring into the club, bar, theater, etc. An example. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1011899328/black-tiktok-creators-are-on-strike-to-protest-a-lack-of-credit-for-their-work https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1011899328/black-tiktok-creat... Please don't focus on whether on not they should or should get credit or any political statements, focus on the fact that they are the ones that made the "cool" dances that the most followed two girls on TikTok used, which then went viral, which in turn made TikTok a bunch of money because those millions of views had ads played against them.
jojobas 3y ago
Where did you get the $50 million from? The actual amount seems to not have been disclosed and it sounds a bit low for the time and 200 million user base.
tiew9Vii 3y ago
It's interesting everything trying to be TikTok. As a user, if I wanted TikTok i'd use TikTok. I don't want TikTok, so I don't use TikTok. I use Facebook mainly for hobby/owners groups these days as that's where a lot of them are. I sometimes use the market place. My feed is mainly my interests, motorbikes, local events, local cafes/restaurants etc etc. Then there's reels i never interact with which get forced on me every other week after clicking hide. The Reels are all short thumbnails of young girls of questionable age wearing little clothing in provocative poses/dances! They don't fit my usual browsing habbits, I don't interact with them but they force them on me as likely they'll gain lots of clicks from mid-thirty year old male demographic! I'm no prude but I don't want to see what look like children in my feed. We know why they do it though, they all likely get high clicks. Youtube is the same except content more relevant to me feed. I use Youtube for longer form videos, travel, motor vehicles, tech. They still insist on forcing shorts in my feed. Mobile has got particularly bad as they mix shorts in the feed timeline as regular videos. AndroidTV Youbtube isn't so bad but they are slowly promoting shorts there to. Not shorts but similar is I used Spotify for many years then it started forcing Podcasts on me as Podcasts where the hot thing. On my homepage where I had music which was relevant to me I had to hunt around to find my music as my homepage was full of podcasts I had no interest in so eventually cancelled my membership. It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
- GabeIsko 3y ago
  This just seems to be the strategy they teach at business school, and it never works. I remember in the 2000s, all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer". Um, no, people who play WoW already play WoW, and you are really trying to convince everyone who doesn't want to play WoW to play a game that is designed to be very similar. It never made any sense. But I guess if you are a business exec, and you are risk averse, and lazy, you don't mind any of that. You just say "WoW makes money please make me one if those." That is not how creativity and innovation work though.
  - mtgx 3y ago
    [dead]
killerstorm 3y ago
I don't understand... Why does it have to be one app? Can't they make a TikTok-like app with a subreddit as a backend? So ppl get same content but with a different front-end?
- Gasp0de 3y ago
  Because they want to force the content on you. It's not the goal that you can choose to enjoy TikTok-like short videos. You can already do that. They want to mix the videos into your feed so that you get caught in the net, like they already do on their app.
- smole 3y ago
  It’s likely that very few Reddit actually users want short form video. And that the acquisition was mostly for the user base which they then tried desperately to hold on to. So the obvious answer is to create a standalone service… which it was before they acquired it.
- criddell 3y ago
  I don’t understand why it has to be an app at all. Why do they want people in an app rather than in a browser?
  - enkid 3y ago
    Because you can get more data to sell through an app.
    - cshimmin 3y ago
      And it's harder to block ads/sponsored content. And they can send annoying push notifications that lots of people don't know how to disable. Dark patterns all the way down.
      - Zak 3y ago
        I tried to official app recently, and while I did figure out how to remove ads using ReVanced, I don't think I managed to get the notifications I wanted (replies) without notifications I didn't want.
Randomizer42 3y ago
That was the whole point.
klrants 3y ago
Yes, everyone has TikTok envy since Musk started to augment Twitter to a video publishing platform. This model does not fit for Reddit with its poor execution (old.reddit.com is still the best) and its user base. More sites will split off and use the old.reddit.com code base.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  Musk doesn't have the intellectual capacity to do anything but turn Twitter into a furnace for his own capital at this point.
- jeltz 3y ago
  TikTok envy existed long before Musk bought Twitter.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  > More sites will split off and use the old.reddit.com code base. How? Its not open source. And its just a frontend. How would people split it off?
  - post-it 3y ago
    The whole old frontend + backend is a Python app: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/wiki/Install-guide https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/wiki/Install-guide
mattmcknight 3y ago
Using tiktok without the app is also an interesting experience. I was perfectly happy with the mobile website, but they recently started limiting how many results you can see and putting more "install the app" banners up.
weaksauce 3y ago
> Look at their hilariously terrible acquisition of Dubsmash for $50 million gah that's frustrating. they could have bought apollo for 10 million probably. (in his own words that would have been life changing money) but instead they go down a darker path.

MarcoZavala 3y ago

[dead]

MattGaiser 3y ago

> they converted it to a subreddit with 1.5k subscribers. That definitely belongs in a textbook on absurd corporate decisions. I thought you must have been exaggerating somewhere, but nope, that is exactly how it went. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubsmash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubsmash https://old.reddit.com/r/dubsmash/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dubsmash/

FormerBandmate 3y ago
At one point Dubsmash had 200 million users (https://stackshare.io/dubsmash/dubsmash-scaling-to-200-million-users-with-3-engineers https://stackshare.io/dubsmash/dubsmash-scaling-to-200-milli...) and in the acquisition press release they tout how 25% of black teens were on the app (https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-welcomes-video-platform-dubsmash-to-team/ https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-welcomes-video-platfor...). They had fallen from their heyday by the time Reddit bought them but even still taking those numbers at face value it's probably the worst acquisition of all time
- Nemo_bis 3y ago
  It [also](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dubsmash&oldid=1159741654#History https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dubsmash&oldid=11...) had suffered a data breach and went from competing with TikTok and musical.ly to being two orders of magnitude smaller than the combined TikTok. Probably Reddit thought they were just buying a mailing list and a development team. So the cost should be compared to Reddit marketing's acquisition costs and Reddit HR hiring costs.
voytec 3y ago
> That definitely belongs in a textbook on absurd corporate decisions. Maybe money had to be moved under whatever pretense.
p-e-w 3y ago
It's only absurd if you misunderstand the true intention. They didn't acquire Dubsmash to profit from its technology and users. They acquired Dubsmash to shut it down. Today's social media corporations are so fat with (venture) capital that they can, and do, spend that kind of money just to keep any potential competitors locked out. TikTok, the last social network that became truly big, was launched in 2016, seven years ago. Seven years without any new player entering the space. That's an eternity. I can promise you this wouldn't be happening without (very costly) interventions from above.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  I get buying it for that purpose, but why then kill it? Especially when it is a personal video platform, when Reddit is mostly an anonymous text platform?
  - klabb3 3y ago
    That only makes sense when there’s competition. Why maintain two apps when it’s cheaper to maintain one? Now, in this case it seems like an awful strategic choice, given what happened with TikTok. But I think the reason is nevertheless the same. Modern tech capitalism doesn’t want to compete in the “let the best product win”-space. It’s just not enough money and making stuff is hit or miss. They want to own access and rent-seek. At least that’s my interpretation.
    - bboygravity 3y ago
      That's not (modern) capitalism. That's simply -not- capitalism.
      - losteric 3y ago
        Are you saying that rent seeking and anti-competitiveness are "not capitalist"? How do you figure?
      - hkt 3y ago
        Alas, you're incorrect. It is the whole point of capitalism.
AmplySmartly 3y ago
Oh so that’s how Reddit acquired the video suite. It sucked so much it drove me to third party apps and now they’re killing them too. Amazing.
bufferoverflow 3y ago
It makes sense if it's a case of corruption. Like if some manager approves the acquisition in return for kickbacks.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
It's hilarious to me that Reddit is only relevant at all today because Digg 2.0's redesign was so hated that everyone from it flocked to Reddit. Then they buy a moderately successful app, completely destroy it and yet their execs are sitting there rapidly killing the ways people like to use their site and trying to force them into an objectively awful app and yet are seemingly completely oblivious to their history and why they're here in the first place. Reddit, you are replaceable. The moment you turn off old.reddit, I'm gone. I'd definitely admit I am addicted to reddit in it's current form but new reddit and the app are just too insufferable I'll happily give it all up and find somewhere else.

donny2018 3y ago

This is Silicon Valley (the show) level comical.

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
This is Silicon Valley (the real life) level comical.
- The_Blade 3y ago
  listen spez has to re-billionize, his children need wine
  - lowkeyokay 3y ago
    Tres commas
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      This guy fucks (up reddit's interface), amirite!
  - intelVISA 3y ago
    Don't speak ill of spez, they'll edit the DB directly to censor you!
chaostheory 3y ago
They ended that way too early. There is so much good content to write about now. I know it’s hard to transition, but do you really need (near) the full cast still?
- kramerger 3y ago
  Don't know. The last 1-2 seasons started to get boring as the writers ran out of ideas.

Razengan 3y ago

Could this all be deliberate to tank Reddit stock as soon as it goes public to make money off shorting?

aveao 3y ago
that'd be insider trading, and FTC has generally has opinions about that
- HWR_14 3y ago
  The FTC may have opinions about that, but the SEC files lawsuits about it.
cityofdelusion 3y ago
Its going to tank but for a different reason -- because like Coinbase, Robinhood, and other hyped stock listings, all the insiders are going to dump shares on the unsuspecting retail public. I imagine day 1 of trading will be the highest the stock ever gets.
- greiskul 3y ago
  Lol, good luck doing that during a recession, and after pissing users off. They might have tricked me into buying it before this fiasco, but definitely they lost me now.
nonethewiser 3y ago
You have to be kidding me.
UncleMeat 3y ago
Execs (and most employees) aren’t allowed to short their own stock.
rchaud 3y ago
For Reddit to go public they have to submit a financial disclosure known as the S-1. This will give the public an idea of Reddit's finances and business model. There's a long way to go before shorting can happen. If anything, Reddit are shorting themselves.

paganel 3y ago

> 25% of black teens in their acquisition press release Not necessarily illegal, but I had thought that, for sure, one shouldn't boast about heavily discriminatory race-related factoids, even if they thought that it would be for a "good" cause. Didn't they think what would have happened had they replaced the "black teens" in their press release with "white teens"?

klooney 3y ago
That's how Americans say "lots of the cool kids use the app".
- motoxpro 3y ago
  Yeah, GP, this is not so much race thing as it is a cultural "where the cool kids are" thing.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    Is that as cool for investors? I would imagine, for better or worse, being black correlated with being poor, and therefore black userbase is less valuable then white for ad serving purposes.
    - motoxpro 3y ago
      You're missing why this would be important. It's cool for investors because the black user base draws in a bunch of other people along with them. It's also not about people saying "omg black people, I must be there!" Culturally, historically, in the USA, black culture has set a bunch of trends. See NBA, NFL, hip-hop/music, comedians, dance, etc. Same as when a "cool" person goes anywhere, you don't monetize them, you monetize all the people they bring into the club, bar, theater, etc. An example. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1011899328/black-tiktok-creators-are-on-strike-to-protest-a-lack-of-credit-for-their-work https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1011899328/black-tiktok-creat... Please don't focus on whether on not they should or should get credit or any political statements, focus on the fact that they are the ones that made the "cool" dances that the most followed two girls on TikTok used, which then went viral, which in turn made TikTok a bunch of money because those millions of views had ads played against them.

jojobas 3y ago

Where did you get the $50 million from? The actual amount seems to not have been disclosed and it sounds a bit low for the time and 200 million user base.

tiew9Vii 3y ago

It's interesting everything trying to be TikTok. As a user, if I wanted TikTok i'd use TikTok. I don't want TikTok, so I don't use TikTok. I use Facebook mainly for hobby/owners groups these days as that's where a lot of them are. I sometimes use the market place. My feed is mainly my interests, motorbikes, local events, local cafes/restaurants etc etc. Then there's reels i never interact with which get forced on me every other week after clicking hide. The Reels are all short thumbnails of young girls of questionable age wearing little clothing in provocative poses/dances! They don't fit my usual browsing habbits, I don't interact with them but they force them on me as likely they'll gain lots of clicks from mid-thirty year old male demographic! I'm no prude but I don't want to see what look like children in my feed. We know why they do it though, they all likely get high clicks. Youtube is the same except content more relevant to me feed. I use Youtube for longer form videos, travel, motor vehicles, tech. They still insist on forcing shorts in my feed. Mobile has got particularly bad as they mix shorts in the feed timeline as regular videos. AndroidTV Youbtube isn't so bad but they are slowly promoting shorts there to. Not shorts but similar is I used Spotify for many years then it started forcing Podcasts on me as Podcasts where the hot thing. On my homepage where I had music which was relevant to me I had to hunt around to find my music as my homepage was full of podcasts I had no interest in so eventually cancelled my membership. It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.

GabeIsko 3y ago
This just seems to be the strategy they teach at business school, and it never works. I remember in the 2000s, all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer". Um, no, people who play WoW already play WoW, and you are really trying to convince everyone who doesn't want to play WoW to play a game that is designed to be very similar. It never made any sense. But I guess if you are a business exec, and you are risk averse, and lazy, you don't mind any of that. You just say "WoW makes money please make me one if those." That is not how creativity and innovation work though.
- mtgx 3y ago
  [dead]

killerstorm 3y ago

I don't understand... Why does it have to be one app? Can't they make a TikTok-like app with a subreddit as a backend? So ppl get same content but with a different front-end?

Gasp0de 3y ago
Because they want to force the content on you. It's not the goal that you can choose to enjoy TikTok-like short videos. You can already do that. They want to mix the videos into your feed so that you get caught in the net, like they already do on their app.
smole 3y ago
It’s likely that very few Reddit actually users want short form video. And that the acquisition was mostly for the user base which they then tried desperately to hold on to. So the obvious answer is to create a standalone service… which it was before they acquired it.
criddell 3y ago
I don’t understand why it has to be an app at all. Why do they want people in an app rather than in a browser?
- enkid 3y ago
  Because you can get more data to sell through an app.
  - cshimmin 3y ago
    And it's harder to block ads/sponsored content. And they can send annoying push notifications that lots of people don't know how to disable. Dark patterns all the way down.
    - Zak 3y ago
      I tried to official app recently, and while I did figure out how to remove ads using ReVanced, I don't think I managed to get the notifications I wanted (replies) without notifications I didn't want.

Randomizer42 3y ago

That was the whole point.

klrants 3y ago

Yes, everyone has TikTok envy since Musk started to augment Twitter to a video publishing platform. This model does not fit for Reddit with its poor execution (old.reddit.com is still the best) and its user base. More sites will split off and use the old.reddit.com code base.

MisterBastahrd 3y ago
Musk doesn't have the intellectual capacity to do anything but turn Twitter into a furnace for his own capital at this point.
jeltz 3y ago
TikTok envy existed long before Musk bought Twitter.
nonethewiser 3y ago
> More sites will split off and use the old.reddit.com code base. How? Its not open source. And its just a frontend. How would people split it off?
- post-it 3y ago
  The whole old frontend + backend is a Python app: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/wiki/Install-guide https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/wiki/Install-guide

mattmcknight 3y ago

Using tiktok without the app is also an interesting experience. I was perfectly happy with the mobile website, but they recently started limiting how many results you can see and putting more "install the app" banners up.

weaksauce 3y ago

> Look at their hilariously terrible acquisition of Dubsmash for $50 million gah that's frustrating. they could have bought apollo for 10 million probably. (in his own words that would have been life changing money) but instead they go down a darker path.