16 ms·

I have a 14yo reddit account, and was a Digg user for years prior to that. While there were scandals like the HDDVD code stuff, ultimately the user-hostile Digg

by boc 3y ago

I have a 14yo reddit account, and was a Digg user for years prior to that. While there were scandals like the HDDVD code stuff, ultimately the user-hostile Digg v4 redesign killed it for me- the day they forced it on everyone I never went back. Tonight watching all the subreddits go private is the first time I’ve ever felt like Reddit is the next to die. If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, understand that you’re playing with fire here. This week is critical to saving your platform.

scrame 3y ago
no,this is for that IPO. /s if needed
rapsey 3y ago
The problem is the business model is terrible. You need to sell ads to survive and the ads ruin the site.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  and when you try to rein in expenses to show less ads, the community begins to propose $10M buyouts and every refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls.
  - imauser 3y ago
    The developer has already clarified that Apollo was not the top user of the API. It was also confirmed by a Reddit employee.
  - nvy 3y ago
    It's patently obvious that they're just trying to drive up ad impression numbers on the app to inflate their financials before IPO/acquisition.
    - rapsey 3y ago
      Reddit is still not profitable.
      - libraryatnight 3y ago
        Maybe forums and digital commons shouldn't be.
        ako 3y ago
        How do you suggest they survive long term if the continue to lose money?
        Eisenstein 3y ago
        Stop spending so much money developing features that are useless for adding value to the site; stop hiring devs to create new 'resume' features like counter-productive reverse-blocking and hire devs to fix modding tools. Stop spending money hosting videos and multimedia when your core value is text conversations. Don't make stupid decisions like destroying your most popular features (the AMA subreddit, the secret santa) because you are stupid. Fire your CEO who is doing all of these things. There is no reason reddit can't be profitable if they did these things. They don't need 100,000,000 users watching videos to bring in ad revenue. They need 10,000,000 users generating good content that ends up as top google results and they can find clever ways to monetize product tie-ins, annual meetups (those were a thing in a lot of cities a while ago), events, merch, and subscriptions. It isn't rocket science. The top stockholders just have to be satisfied to be millionaires instead of billionaires.
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        It's not trying to be. They only care about the value of the equity, not about profitability. It'd pretty easy to be a profitable company with a $10 million turnover, but you're not going to be a unicorn this way. Founders and VC wants high return on their equity, and today being enormous without profitability is valued more than being reasonable and profitable.
  - mosen 3y ago
    Spez?
  - onli 3y ago
    This references the Apollo client discussion and is wrong on many levels. 1. They are not "reining in" expenses, they are purposely pricing out 3rd-party clients (which probably has the goal to show more ads, not less) 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie. 3. There were no suggestions for reasonable optimizations of API calls. Apollo claims they already optimized whenever possible and whenever they were asked for it, and that client was specifically not listed in an earlier discussion about ineffective API usage. Reported measurements confirm that, the official API uses more calls. Regardless, later Reddit made this accusation, showing that they are not truthful in this discussion. Your pro-reddit position is not reasonable.
    - miroljub 3y ago
      > 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie. If something loses me 20M$ per year and I have an option to buy it for 10M$ or kill it for 0$, I would choose the latter without much thinking. And that seems to be exactly what Reddit is doing. And that is something that any client using a third-party platform should expect that will happen eventually.
      - dgb23 3y ago
        The “without much thinking” part is likely the mistake here.
      - onli 3y ago
        That sounds completely reasonable - if you assume the users currently on Apollo 1) Can't be made to pay, directly with a price for the app or micropayments or indirectly via ads 2) Would move to the official app if Apollo shut down and 3) Don't bring in posts and comments with which other users engage, raising money that way. Sounds to me that shutting it down is the one sure way to lose money, but I also don't trust that the reddit team had made that calculation properly. This all seems like a short term profit or like a power play to me.
  - matkoniecz 3y ago
    > refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls [citation needed] (and not from someone known for lying and editing comments made by other people using their root access)
  - Mindwipe 3y ago
    The community is not proposing $10 million dollar buyouts. That is literally a joke that if the API has the value Reddit claims (which it doesn't) then they are defacto putting those sorts of valuations on the app. Reddit already bought a third party app with Alien Blue, and they ruined it so badly that they had to close it down and start again. Nobody wants Reddit in charge of the third party clients, they have awful UI designers and a user hostile UX team. The whole point of a third party client is that it has to actually design a UI that it's users like, or it dies.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  I personally don't find the ads at all objectionable on the old.reddit.com site. They blend in with the other content reasonably well (so you see a Jetbrains ad when on /r/programmerhumor), don't slow down the site, either fit the flow well or hang out on the side, etc. I find the targeting to be good enough that I look forward to the ads to a certain extent as I have found all sorts of fun products that way.
  - mr_mitm 3y ago
    Plus, they have the Reddit gold program. Not sure if that is enough, but does Reddit really need 2000 employees and hundreds of millions of CV money? I have a hard time estimating what it costs to run a site like Reddit.
    - dgb23 3y ago
      My guess is that many marketing based sites bloat their staff and expenses to a self perpetuating and useless degree.
    - Nux 3y ago
      Wow.. Didn't know this. It sounds like something has gone wrong there. Good old greed maybe?
    - primax 3y ago
      I'm a very attached reddit user and I have no idea what they could be doing with 2000 employees. I'm honestly shocked. The development they've done in the past 5 years could have been done with like 50-100 people, including keeping all the SRE going. Insane.
    - vxNsr 3y ago
      Reddit has been overwhelmed by a certain type of employee that spends more time worrying about the political opinions of their colleagues and less about excellence and productivity. Similar to twitter which turned out to be a finely tuned Rube-Goldberg machine that required hourly maintenance to keep online. Im not saying I’m smart enough to make things work well but that such people exist and they don’t/didn’t work at either twitter or Reddit.
- antupis 3y ago
  Current ads at Reddit are not that bad, it is nothing like youtube which is borderline unwatchable at the moment. But for Reddit general there is like lot of astroturfing currently and if Reddit could start capturing some value from that and same time show for regular user that this is commercial/pr account would be win-win for Reddit and regular users.
  - mike_d 3y ago
    I would bet money that Reddit has the highest percentage of ad blocking users. Either by way of browser extension or third party apps. They just don't have enough impressions to cover the outlandish costs associated with running the site. Combined with lax content moderation policies, advertisers see more value going with third parties that can push a viral story about a product to the homepage. There is no one problem with Reddit, and that is the problem. They have to reboot and build Facebook 2.0 (or whatever) without a highly fickle user base turning tail and running. Rock, meet hard place.
    - MattGaiser 3y ago
      Reddit hosts its own ads, so seems like it would be relatively trivial to overcome the adblockers and insert them directly into the feed server side. Sure, that will piss a few people off, but more than this?
      - xxs 3y ago
        They should not use any CSS b/c lots of blocking is just based on elements and their style.
        bobthepanda 3y ago
        IIRC doesn't the FCC and equivalent regulatory authorities require online ads to be clearly distinguished?
    - blitzar 3y ago
      > There is no one problem with Reddit, and that is the problem. Actually there is one singular problem ... money. They could accept that "reddit the product" is a 2-5bn market cap business with solid 0.5bn revenue; staff up on that basis, scale their infrastructure on that basis, M&A on that basis, set investor expectations on that basis.
- that_guy_iain 3y ago
  I would say the problem is that the user base are low value users. They're the sort of people who will do a mass protest because one for-profit company wants to charge another for-profit company money. Advertisers don't want to advertise to them, seriously. Any other company with a different user base with that amount of users and traffic would be making a billion a year easily. Probably multiple billions. But Reddit users are low value. There the sort of people if a company tries to engage with them with just be hostile. This means the amount of money Reddit can charge for ads isn't that high. Which means the companies advertising on Reddit are generally on the lower end of the scale or it's just a tiny part of a bigger ad campaign. So if ad revenue isn't going to do it. Then it needs to be a freemium model with subscriptions. They probably get 25% of their revenue from reddit premium. That also means, charging for the API. The problem for many of the third party apps is they've also been running a freemium model with very low overheads due to the fact Reddit has been largely funding their freemium model. They've been charging next to nothing for their premium options ($1.50 a month) and they have massive amount of very active users. They're so big that paying a reasonable per API request fee results in a massive bill. A bill they can't pay due to a freemium model and super low fees that don't pay for the freemium users. Third party apps directly compete with Reddit, therefore it's fair they pay Reddit for the resources they use as well as the lost potential of the users they did take. Those paying for premium on an app would probably pay premium on Reddit. Then comes in the low value users, who are outraged the free toy they have wants to make a profit. "It's too much money" - funny enough Reddit users think they're worthless - was one of the main cries. "This third party app IS REDDIT" - well if they're Reddit they shouldn't need Reddit access. A userbase who resists being monetised. Either they're monetisable or they're not. If they're not the company can't survive. What the Reddit users need/want is a non-profit.
  - barrkel 3y ago
    Thing is, high value users won't use a site that has no content. There's no there there any more without the userbase.
    - that_guy_iain 3y ago
      High value users are a completely different demographic. Realistically, there are a large amount of people who don't care about the protests. They're going to be creating content. I wouldn't be surprised if the people most outraged are the ones who don't even comment that often.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  They also sold awards / points / things, which seemed pretty popular for a while at least; I have no idea how much that earns them though. But there's plenty of avenues they have for generating revenue that doesn't involve shutting down 3rd party clients, e.g. commercial promotions, signal / post / comment boosting, subscriptions for advanced / exclusive features, etc.
ramraj07 3y ago
While I sincerely hope Reddit feels the pressure and goes back, they have taken a bet in a different landscape as Digg: 1. The vast majority of Reddit users (maybe not the contributors) use the native app. I myself do as well. So this api change doesn’t affect me immediately (of course it does indirectly by restricting moderation and bots). 2. I open Reddit today and it’s different but not inferior. I’d argue the real value of Reddit nowadays is in all the nice subreddits one subscribes to, and most of them are still alive and active. My friends who just started redditting last year have not even noticed the whole shebang. It’s very possible (in fact slightly more possible than not) that Reddit will survive this mostly unscathed. I’m not betting on it but I’m a poor speculator so don’t take my word for it for sure.
- nvy 3y ago
  >The vast majority of Reddit users (maybe not the contributors) use the native app. I myself do as well. The idea that you'd willingly use an app with baked-in ads is insane to me, to say nothing of the fact that the official app performs very poorly and could charitably be described as "dogshit UX".
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    It’s mostly inertia. I use the native app too, because I had no idea there was anything better till now. It just never came up for me.
  - jug 3y ago
    I’ve seen the same in comment threads outside of Reddit and I think many are simply not aware or care to try the third party apps and are quite used by ads in online services at this point, so this is not by itself a factor that have them questioning their choice.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    The problem is you don't have the mindset of Joe Average. It's something most of us lose as we become nerds, enthusiasts, professionals, etc. We become disconnected with the commons. As a Joe Average, computers are an appliance and the internet is merely a service like broadcast television. Reddit is merely a channel on broadcast television like CNN or BBC, and it's natural to use Reddit to use Reddit. Do you watch something other than BBC to watch BBC? I agree with the crowd saying that this subreddit privatisation strike will have limited effect at most. Most people don't care and aren't affected, and that's the cold reality. Reddit itself is far beyond the point of critical mass, if there are even whispers that this strike is insufficient that means it is insufficient in the grander scale. As another bit of anecdote, I remember when Digg died. It died overnight. Literally. One day everyone was talking about and on Digg, the next day everyone wasn't. When something on the internet dies, it dies. There are no rumors or murmurs of impending death, it just dies.
jwrallie 3y ago
There were times like this in the past (the changes when Pao became CEO and later the censorship through quarantining of multiple subreddits came to my mind, but there were others). I think the main reason there was no exodus similar to Digg's is not due to good policy on Reddit's side (it became increasingly worse over time) but the lack of a competitor that could quickly scale to receive a migration without going dark. The number of users migrating from Digg to Reddit and the number of users today is quite different, but if there is a better platform that could stand this migration, Reddit could be dead in a matter of hours.
- Gustomaximus 3y ago
  I think this lack of competitor is the key. When. people talk about Digg dying, that was during the Reddit vs Digg period. Now it's Reddit vs what? Many people love a drama so will beef this event up, but I suspect they will be back to usual soon enough. At the same time I feel Reddit should respond to this with something positive for general goodwill as there is value in that for the day there is an alternative. While never going to actually happen, I'd find it funny if people flooded to communities.win, the forum Trump supporters setup when they were pushed off Reddit. Would be great irony.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    > Now it's Reddit vs what? For tech news, you are looking at it. For everything else there is YouTube + comment section, stack exchange, Discord channels, … People don’t necessarily need a “clone” replacement. Edit: OK. What exactly is so offensive about this post? People use Reddit in different ways. Those others site may be perfectly good substitutes for them. If you want a “feed” you can comment on, YouTube can do that. You want questions answered, Stack Exchange. If you only visit small specialised tightly moderated subreddits, Discord channels will probably work just fine. Reddit is a means to an end. There are others ways to communicate on the internet.
    - dgb23 3y ago
      There’s a niche of medium lived discussions that are paced slowly and contextualized that the model of hn and reddit serve. The examples you gave don’t seem to fit.
SilkRoadie 3y ago
Twitter killed a lot of third party apps and it just grew and grew. I suspect there is a vocal minority complaining about these changes. Most sub’s are going dark for 2 days. Time will pass and Reddit will continue to have a highly active user base.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  But it kept and incorporated Tweetdeck, for the "pro" users Their mobile app also incorporated a lot of features and it is not a POS like the Reddit app
- sveme 3y ago
  Reddit is relying heavily on the voluntary work of moderators. Without them and power users that indirectly curate the content of subreddits, the site is toast. Reddit is not dying by alienating its user base; it might be if they are alienating their power users.
  - unglaublich 3y ago
    They probably used all that nice volunteering work to train a moderation model by now.
    - lionkor 3y ago
      Pretty sure that would kill the platform
    - astrange 3y ago
      That won't work, moderation is human-complete.
  - yanderekko 3y ago
    This boycott will not leave Reddit bereft of moderators or powerusers.
- shusaku 3y ago
  The problem is a lack of alternatives. At least with Twitter there was mastodon, but that was always going to fail outside of techie circles. What is the alternative to Reddit? Years ago the idea of starting a successful social network was a venture capitalist’s dream, but I wonder if they’ve woken up to the challenges of actually managing one.
blitzar 3y ago
If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, understand that its over. This week is critical to save your personal narrative. No matter what really happened; always tell people you are the person who invented the like button at facebook, not the one who decided to band porn on tumblr.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- eastern 3y ago
  If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, ignore every carping user and stay laser-focused on that IPO. Being well-liked and poor is waaay worse than being rich and hated. Stay strong
  - malermeister 3y ago
    > Being well-liked and poor is waaay worse than being rich and hated. Only if you're an egotistical sellout.
    - nik282000 3y ago
      Why yes, I am an average human being!
      - malermeister 3y ago
        If this applies to you, I'm sorry to tell you that you're a worse-than-average human being.
  - user_named 3y ago
    Are you sure?
  - blitzar 3y ago
    Anyone who is actually rich knows; mo' money, mo' probelms
dacryn 3y ago
at this point, there is only 1 way to save reddit, and it's so drastic that they wont do it because the ones who need to do it are too blind or too far away * fire spez * promise a clear committed roadmap of mod tools * promise to review 3rd party API pricing, and delay the current rollout It's literally the only way that will be accepted by the 1% that keep the site running (read the Ennui engine principle)
- perryh2 3y ago
  you missed the big one: kill the IPO
- matsemann 3y ago
  Or they can continue their failed attempts at using chatgpt to astroturf a counter-movement, lol: https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg Edit, some context: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/146wn9s/comment/jnsfcfi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/146wn9s/commen... (spez / reddit ceo is a mod on r/programming, hence it still being up)
  - nikau 3y ago
    How Do You Do Fellow Kids, that allegation is clearly false.
  - MortimerDukePhD 3y ago
    > spez / reddit ceo is a mod on r/programming How is it possible that these companies are still run like an immature dorm room shitshow? Are there no separation of duties? The CEO should not have admin access to anything (the very least for security purposes).
    - alexruf 3y ago
      I guess you brought it right to the point: Reddit has never grown to a company it’s „dorm room shitshow“
zouhair 3y ago
Lemmy and its instances could be it.
- gdubya 3y ago
  Like Mastodon to Twitter? I like the idea, but it's not really taking off, is it?
  - zouhair 3y ago
    As long as Reddit's powerusers are still hoping for a retraction it won't, but if Reddit keep at it, I can see the move happening, especially for the big (over 500K) subreddits.
    - goykasi 3y ago
      Lemmy is falling over with less than 100k users. How are they magically going to handle 5x, 10x, 100x? The platform is maybe interesting, but the devs need to own up to the fact that they dont have a scaling story -- written in rust is not a valid answer. Instances are already deciding not to federate, theres no network-wide search, signup flows sound ridiculous (pick server and write an essay? yah no), how do i move servers and what happens when an instance disappears? In the one of the first big Apollo threads, one of the devs was spamming Lemmy throughout the discussion as the next great reddit replacement: easy, federated, more performant than reddit. I guess he almost got 1 out of 3 correct.
      - slumberlust 3y ago
        This take seems short sided, at best. Because we don't have a perfect solution with zero friction to swap to, we shouldn't try? Most new tech goes through growing pains, including reddit back in the day. It's fine to be critical, but it's important to foster an environment that encourages growth and competition. Have electric cars sucked for the last decade? Yes, but we should still invest and promote them as they offer a better future.
- Sander_Marechal 3y ago
mrtksn 3y ago
As much as I would like to believe that boycotts can work, I'm just too cynical after seeing all those boycotts doing nothing. My old.reddit.com homepage hasn't change much. Missing is r/ProgrammerHumor but r/Programming is there, alongside with r/darksky, r/wallstreetbets etc. All the porn seems to be there too, which might actually move some numbers if gone dark. The only sub which I care and it's gone is r/StableDiffusion Which leads me to believe that the boycott will remove only a subset of reddit users and we are about to see how much reddit cares about that subset. Redesigns on the other hand can kill a site. That's the only thing I've seen many times killing a website.
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  Don't forget the international dateline :) The 12th of June is a poorly specified target. But I know that /r/programming has two Reddit administrators as part of the mods, so I'm not surprised they're not going dark.
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    > But I know that /r/programming has two Reddit administrators as part of the mods, so I'm not surprised they're not going dark. Is there anything stopping Reddit from making the CEO a mod in every major sub though?
    - BadBadJellyBean 3y ago
      No but they still need mods. Otherwise the quality will quickly go so far downhill that no one wants to see use it anymore.
      - mrtksn 3y ago
        Is finding mods something hard to do?
        yurishimo 3y ago
Karrot_Kream 3y ago
Here's my question: Can HN recover from this? It was already getting choppy with the election and cryptocurrency generating huge emotional hellthreads. Then came Musk and Mastodon. Now it's Reddit. HN is just turning into another hub of tech outrage. This site is giving me pain to read now. Want to see a contrast? Look at the comments on this Reddit drama and compare it against the original Digg redesign drama on HN a decade ago. There's a sharp difference in comment quality.
- bertman 3y ago
  You forgot AI. Also: >Want to see a contrast? The new Digg (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4321773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4321773 What difference in comment quality do you mean exactly?
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    > You forgot AI. You're right, but the reason I didn't include it is that the coverage around AI isn't all emotional. There's a lot of hype behind it yes, but at it's core it's based on new products that people are excited about. But maybe I should have. A lot of them devolve into the same type of hellthread. > What difference in comment quality do you mean exactly? Discussion about CSS and web design features, discussions about web accessibility, and how there were just very few flippant comments. These big Reddit threads have a lot of pithy "f** Reddit" comments and lots and lots of silly (angry) jokes that make me feel like I'm on Reddit and not on HN.
    - lopis 3y ago
      On one hand, it doesn't make sense to be talking about CSS and web design when we are talking about _policy_ changes. I'm sure if you go back to when Reddit first released the new frontend, you would fine all the CSS discussions you look for. On the other hand, lots of discussions are also happening around design and accessibility. Reddit's official app has bad design, including many dark patterns and terrible accessibility and performance. This has been discussion alongside the policy changes from day one.
mariusor 3y ago
I think the demographics of present day reddit are very different from the ones of the ones of Digg (pre exhodus) or Slashdot (pre Digg). Most of the people will probably never care about any drama Reddit the company inflicts on some of its power users.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  For sure. I don't remember Fark, but when Digg went from being a tech-centric site to a despicable spam bucket I do remember everyone fleeing to Reddit. Now that Reddit is trash, I guess all the serious tech people are already here... ?
  - lrem 3y ago
    Here being HN? IMHO it’s not competing with Reddit, at most with a sub or five. It’s also different to the point of just not being a replacement. Redditors are currently mostly looking at Lemmy. Not sure it’s ready for prime time either.
    - mariusor 3y ago
      Yeah, I have a direct competitor to lemmy, and I feel like it's even less ready for an influx of users of the magnitude the reddit exodus will be.
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      I wasn't familiar with Reddit when Digg sold out; I just remember the exodus, and the topics on Reddit seemed tech-centric enough. Then over time there were more and more posts showing up on the front page with titles like, "This little guy followed me home," about puppies and whatnot. I didn't even know what subReddits were; but now that I do, I'm baffled as to where the former Digg people were posting and why I managed to see mostly their traffic for days or weeks on Reddit without making any effort to go into a tech sub. That was the old Reddit design, so maybe there was something fundamentally different about it.
that_guy_iain 3y ago
Realistically, I would say Reddit users are playing with fire. Reddit is owned and controlled by VCS who have been finding out playground in the hopes of future profits. We all know and understand the game. They hoped they built a website where the users were assets. The Reddit users think they are assets. However, it Reddit can’t make a profit off of them. They aren’t assets they are liabilities. Any site wanting to replace Reddit would need either someone with a sizeable amount of cash to fund it or VC money. Realistically, this is the week where we find out if Reddit users are assets or liabilities. If they’re liabilities who wants to fund a replacement? What happens is they can’t make money off the API? I would presume cancel the IPO and make mass layoffs, cut everything to the barebones and make money that way. VCS will make their money while the site burns. However, what will Redditors do? Go to a bunch of small communities where the group knowledge is smaller and not as good.
- MagnumOpus 3y ago
  > Reddit users are playing with fire The users have nothing to lose. Worst case Huffman and his owners go ahead with smashing and burning the 3rd party moderation and commenting infrastructure - they would have done that even without protests. Would Huffman ban the people who contribute and moderate the discussions and police spam for free, and hire paid mods instead? A week ago I'd have said that not even he is that boneheaded...
  - that_guy_iain 3y ago
    > The users have nothing to lose Reddit users have Reddit to lose. A site that gives them hours of entertainment, allows them to access support groups, find out tips and tricks, get advice, and much more. It'll cost tens of millions a month to host another. Who has that? VCs will get their money one way or another. Either they get their way with this and monetise users who previously were not monetised. Or they make profit other ways. > and burning the 3rd party moderation This here shows how out of touch you are with the reality of things. Third party moderation tools are staying. They're beneficial to Reddit, of course they're going to keep giving them free access.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Mindwipe 3y ago
> If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, understand that you’re playing with fire here. This week is critical to saving your platform. I'm actually quite surprised we've not had a Verge/Techcrunch/The Information story with views from the inside yet. Reddit was always a quite leaky ship that treats staff badly. Internally there has to be some people side-eyeing and thinking that Huffman has lost the plot, especially with his AMA making the blackout worse. Morale is probably not high. Those hanging around for any kind of IPO payout probably know this is going to hit the financials of that quite badly. If your role is anything to do with community outreach you have to know you will not be able to do your job for the next year at least - even if Reddit were to somehow tough this out, it's most engaged users and moderators now hate your guts. Maybe journalists are waiting for the strikes to really hit and we'll see it today.
wwmiller3 3y ago
I deleted my 12-yr old Reddit account this past weekend. I, too, went through the Digg redesign debacle which prompted my complete shift from Digg to Reddit so many years. What I have learned is there always is an alternative and clinging to a platform that is headed in the opposite direction you are going is not worth it. I’ll miss Reddit in the short term, but I’m done with it and have moved on.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
> If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, understand that you’re playing with fire here. This week is critical to saving your platform. They understand. They know, but it seems they're not budging. And it's because of money; if Reddit goes public, they and all investors will instantly become multi-millionaires; if the site then goes to shit, they won't care anymore. But they pulled this too early, and it'll affect the IPO, even whether it'll go through or not.
ForHackernews 3y ago
They don't care about saving their platform, they care about cashing out in the IPO. The incentives are all wrong, and show why every link-aggregator site ultimately kills itself trying to become Facebook.

by boc 3y ago

scrame 3y ago

no,this is for that IPO. /s if needed

rapsey 3y ago

The problem is the business model is terrible. You need to sell ads to survive and the ads ruin the site.

hackernewds 3y ago
and when you try to rein in expenses to show less ads, the community begins to propose $10M buyouts and every refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls.
- imauser 3y ago
  The developer has already clarified that Apollo was not the top user of the API. It was also confirmed by a Reddit employee.
- nvy 3y ago
  It's patently obvious that they're just trying to drive up ad impression numbers on the app to inflate their financials before IPO/acquisition.
  - rapsey 3y ago
    Reddit is still not profitable.
    - libraryatnight 3y ago
      Maybe forums and digital commons shouldn't be.
      - ako 3y ago
        How do you suggest they survive long term if the continue to lose money?
        Eisenstein 3y ago
        Stop spending so much money developing features that are useless for adding value to the site; stop hiring devs to create new 'resume' features like counter-productive reverse-blocking and hire devs to fix modding tools. Stop spending money hosting videos and multimedia when your core value is text conversations. Don't make stupid decisions like destroying your most popular features (the AMA subreddit, the secret santa) because you are stupid. Fire your CEO who is doing all of these things. There is no reason reddit can't be profitable if they did these things. They don't need 100,000,000 users watching videos to bring in ad revenue. They need 10,000,000 users generating good content that ends up as top google results and they can find clever ways to monetize product tie-ins, annual meetups (those were a thing in a lot of cities a while ago), events, merch, and subscriptions. It isn't rocket science. The top stockholders just have to be satisfied to be millionaires instead of billionaires.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      It's not trying to be. They only care about the value of the equity, not about profitability. It'd pretty easy to be a profitable company with a $10 million turnover, but you're not going to be a unicorn this way. Founders and VC wants high return on their equity, and today being enormous without profitability is valued more than being reasonable and profitable.
- mosen 3y ago
  Spez?
- onli 3y ago
  This references the Apollo client discussion and is wrong on many levels. 1. They are not "reining in" expenses, they are purposely pricing out 3rd-party clients (which probably has the goal to show more ads, not less) 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie. 3. There were no suggestions for reasonable optimizations of API calls. Apollo claims they already optimized whenever possible and whenever they were asked for it, and that client was specifically not listed in an earlier discussion about ineffective API usage. Reported measurements confirm that, the official API uses more calls. Regardless, later Reddit made this accusation, showing that they are not truthful in this discussion. Your pro-reddit position is not reasonable.
  - miroljub 3y ago
    > 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie. If something loses me 20M$ per year and I have an option to buy it for 10M$ or kill it for 0$, I would choose the latter without much thinking. And that seems to be exactly what Reddit is doing. And that is something that any client using a third-party platform should expect that will happen eventually.
    - dgb23 3y ago
      The “without much thinking” part is likely the mistake here.
    - onli 3y ago
      That sounds completely reasonable - if you assume the users currently on Apollo 1) Can't be made to pay, directly with a price for the app or micropayments or indirectly via ads 2) Would move to the official app if Apollo shut down and 3) Don't bring in posts and comments with which other users engage, raising money that way. Sounds to me that shutting it down is the one sure way to lose money, but I also don't trust that the reddit team had made that calculation properly. This all seems like a short term profit or like a power play to me.
- matkoniecz 3y ago
  > refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls [citation needed] (and not from someone known for lying and editing comments made by other people using their root access)
- Mindwipe 3y ago
  The community is not proposing $10 million dollar buyouts. That is literally a joke that if the API has the value Reddit claims (which it doesn't) then they are defacto putting those sorts of valuations on the app. Reddit already bought a third party app with Alien Blue, and they ruined it so badly that they had to close it down and start again. Nobody wants Reddit in charge of the third party clients, they have awful UI designers and a user hostile UX team. The whole point of a third party client is that it has to actually design a UI that it's users like, or it dies.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
MattGaiser 3y ago
I personally don't find the ads at all objectionable on the old.reddit.com site. They blend in with the other content reasonably well (so you see a Jetbrains ad when on /r/programmerhumor), don't slow down the site, either fit the flow well or hang out on the side, etc. I find the targeting to be good enough that I look forward to the ads to a certain extent as I have found all sorts of fun products that way.
- mr_mitm 3y ago
  Plus, they have the Reddit gold program. Not sure if that is enough, but does Reddit really need 2000 employees and hundreds of millions of CV money? I have a hard time estimating what it costs to run a site like Reddit.
  - dgb23 3y ago
    My guess is that many marketing based sites bloat their staff and expenses to a self perpetuating and useless degree.
  - Nux 3y ago
    Wow.. Didn't know this. It sounds like something has gone wrong there. Good old greed maybe?
  - primax 3y ago
    I'm a very attached reddit user and I have no idea what they could be doing with 2000 employees. I'm honestly shocked. The development they've done in the past 5 years could have been done with like 50-100 people, including keeping all the SRE going. Insane.
  - vxNsr 3y ago
    Reddit has been overwhelmed by a certain type of employee that spends more time worrying about the political opinions of their colleagues and less about excellence and productivity. Similar to twitter which turned out to be a finely tuned Rube-Goldberg machine that required hourly maintenance to keep online. Im not saying I’m smart enough to make things work well but that such people exist and they don’t/didn’t work at either twitter or Reddit.
antupis 3y ago
Current ads at Reddit are not that bad, it is nothing like youtube which is borderline unwatchable at the moment. But for Reddit general there is like lot of astroturfing currently and if Reddit could start capturing some value from that and same time show for regular user that this is commercial/pr account would be win-win for Reddit and regular users.
- mike_d 3y ago
  I would bet money that Reddit has the highest percentage of ad blocking users. Either by way of browser extension or third party apps. They just don't have enough impressions to cover the outlandish costs associated with running the site. Combined with lax content moderation policies, advertisers see more value going with third parties that can push a viral story about a product to the homepage. There is no one problem with Reddit, and that is the problem. They have to reboot and build Facebook 2.0 (or whatever) without a highly fickle user base turning tail and running. Rock, meet hard place.
  - MattGaiser 3y ago
    Reddit hosts its own ads, so seems like it would be relatively trivial to overcome the adblockers and insert them directly into the feed server side. Sure, that will piss a few people off, but more than this?
    - xxs 3y ago
      They should not use any CSS b/c lots of blocking is just based on elements and their style.
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        IIRC doesn't the FCC and equivalent regulatory authorities require online ads to be clearly distinguished?
  - blitzar 3y ago
    > There is no one problem with Reddit, and that is the problem. Actually there is one singular problem ... money. They could accept that "reddit the product" is a 2-5bn market cap business with solid 0.5bn revenue; staff up on that basis, scale their infrastructure on that basis, M&A on that basis, set investor expectations on that basis.
that_guy_iain 3y ago
I would say the problem is that the user base are low value users. They're the sort of people who will do a mass protest because one for-profit company wants to charge another for-profit company money. Advertisers don't want to advertise to them, seriously. Any other company with a different user base with that amount of users and traffic would be making a billion a year easily. Probably multiple billions. But Reddit users are low value. There the sort of people if a company tries to engage with them with just be hostile. This means the amount of money Reddit can charge for ads isn't that high. Which means the companies advertising on Reddit are generally on the lower end of the scale or it's just a tiny part of a bigger ad campaign. So if ad revenue isn't going to do it. Then it needs to be a freemium model with subscriptions. They probably get 25% of their revenue from reddit premium. That also means, charging for the API. The problem for many of the third party apps is they've also been running a freemium model with very low overheads due to the fact Reddit has been largely funding their freemium model. They've been charging next to nothing for their premium options ($1.50 a month) and they have massive amount of very active users. They're so big that paying a reasonable per API request fee results in a massive bill. A bill they can't pay due to a freemium model and super low fees that don't pay for the freemium users. Third party apps directly compete with Reddit, therefore it's fair they pay Reddit for the resources they use as well as the lost potential of the users they did take. Those paying for premium on an app would probably pay premium on Reddit. Then comes in the low value users, who are outraged the free toy they have wants to make a profit. "It's too much money" - funny enough Reddit users think they're worthless - was one of the main cries. "This third party app IS REDDIT" - well if they're Reddit they shouldn't need Reddit access. A userbase who resists being monetised. Either they're monetisable or they're not. If they're not the company can't survive. What the Reddit users need/want is a non-profit.
- barrkel 3y ago
  Thing is, high value users won't use a site that has no content. There's no there there any more without the userbase.
  - that_guy_iain 3y ago
    High value users are a completely different demographic. Realistically, there are a large amount of people who don't care about the protests. They're going to be creating content. I wouldn't be surprised if the people most outraged are the ones who don't even comment that often.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
They also sold awards / points / things, which seemed pretty popular for a while at least; I have no idea how much that earns them though. But there's plenty of avenues they have for generating revenue that doesn't involve shutting down 3rd party clients, e.g. commercial promotions, signal / post / comment boosting, subscriptions for advanced / exclusive features, etc.

ramraj07 3y ago

While I sincerely hope Reddit feels the pressure and goes back, they have taken a bet in a different landscape as Digg: 1. The vast majority of Reddit users (maybe not the contributors) use the native app. I myself do as well. So this api change doesn’t affect me immediately (of course it does indirectly by restricting moderation and bots). 2. I open Reddit today and it’s different but not inferior. I’d argue the real value of Reddit nowadays is in all the nice subreddits one subscribes to, and most of them are still alive and active. My friends who just started redditting last year have not even noticed the whole shebang. It’s very possible (in fact slightly more possible than not) that Reddit will survive this mostly unscathed. I’m not betting on it but I’m a poor speculator so don’t take my word for it for sure.

nvy 3y ago
>The vast majority of Reddit users (maybe not the contributors) use the native app. I myself do as well. The idea that you'd willingly use an app with baked-in ads is insane to me, to say nothing of the fact that the official app performs very poorly and could charitably be described as "dogshit UX".
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  It’s mostly inertia. I use the native app too, because I had no idea there was anything better till now. It just never came up for me.
- jug 3y ago
  I’ve seen the same in comment threads outside of Reddit and I think many are simply not aware or care to try the third party apps and are quite used by ads in online services at this point, so this is not by itself a factor that have them questioning their choice.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  The problem is you don't have the mindset of Joe Average. It's something most of us lose as we become nerds, enthusiasts, professionals, etc. We become disconnected with the commons. As a Joe Average, computers are an appliance and the internet is merely a service like broadcast television. Reddit is merely a channel on broadcast television like CNN or BBC, and it's natural to use Reddit to use Reddit. Do you watch something other than BBC to watch BBC? I agree with the crowd saying that this subreddit privatisation strike will have limited effect at most. Most people don't care and aren't affected, and that's the cold reality. Reddit itself is far beyond the point of critical mass, if there are even whispers that this strike is insufficient that means it is insufficient in the grander scale. As another bit of anecdote, I remember when Digg died. It died overnight. Literally. One day everyone was talking about and on Digg, the next day everyone wasn't. When something on the internet dies, it dies. There are no rumors or murmurs of impending death, it just dies.

jwrallie 3y ago

There were times like this in the past (the changes when Pao became CEO and later the censorship through quarantining of multiple subreddits came to my mind, but there were others). I think the main reason there was no exodus similar to Digg's is not due to good policy on Reddit's side (it became increasingly worse over time) but the lack of a competitor that could quickly scale to receive a migration without going dark. The number of users migrating from Digg to Reddit and the number of users today is quite different, but if there is a better platform that could stand this migration, Reddit could be dead in a matter of hours.

Gustomaximus 3y ago
I think this lack of competitor is the key. When. people talk about Digg dying, that was during the Reddit vs Digg period. Now it's Reddit vs what? Many people love a drama so will beef this event up, but I suspect they will be back to usual soon enough. At the same time I feel Reddit should respond to this with something positive for general goodwill as there is value in that for the day there is an alternative. While never going to actually happen, I'd find it funny if people flooded to communities.win, the forum Trump supporters setup when they were pushed off Reddit. Would be great irony.
- worrycue 3y ago
  > Now it's Reddit vs what? For tech news, you are looking at it. For everything else there is YouTube + comment section, stack exchange, Discord channels, … People don’t necessarily need a “clone” replacement. Edit: OK. What exactly is so offensive about this post? People use Reddit in different ways. Those others site may be perfectly good substitutes for them. If you want a “feed” you can comment on, YouTube can do that. You want questions answered, Stack Exchange. If you only visit small specialised tightly moderated subreddits, Discord channels will probably work just fine. Reddit is a means to an end. There are others ways to communicate on the internet.
  - dgb23 3y ago
    There’s a niche of medium lived discussions that are paced slowly and contextualized that the model of hn and reddit serve. The examples you gave don’t seem to fit.

SilkRoadie 3y ago

Twitter killed a lot of third party apps and it just grew and grew. I suspect there is a vocal minority complaining about these changes. Most sub’s are going dark for 2 days. Time will pass and Reddit will continue to have a highly active user base.

raverbashing 3y ago
But it kept and incorporated Tweetdeck, for the "pro" users Their mobile app also incorporated a lot of features and it is not a POS like the Reddit app
sveme 3y ago
Reddit is relying heavily on the voluntary work of moderators. Without them and power users that indirectly curate the content of subreddits, the site is toast. Reddit is not dying by alienating its user base; it might be if they are alienating their power users.
- unglaublich 3y ago
  They probably used all that nice volunteering work to train a moderation model by now.
  - lionkor 3y ago
    Pretty sure that would kill the platform
  - astrange 3y ago
    That won't work, moderation is human-complete.
- yanderekko 3y ago
  This boycott will not leave Reddit bereft of moderators or powerusers.
shusaku 3y ago
The problem is a lack of alternatives. At least with Twitter there was mastodon, but that was always going to fail outside of techie circles. What is the alternative to Reddit? Years ago the idea of starting a successful social network was a venture capitalist’s dream, but I wonder if they’ve woken up to the challenges of actually managing one.

blitzar 3y ago

If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, understand that its over. This week is critical to save your personal narrative. No matter what really happened; always tell people you are the person who invented the like button at facebook, not the one who decided to band porn on tumblr.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
eastern 3y ago
If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, ignore every carping user and stay laser-focused on that IPO. Being well-liked and poor is waaay worse than being rich and hated. Stay strong
- malermeister 3y ago
  > Being well-liked and poor is waaay worse than being rich and hated. Only if you're an egotistical sellout.
  - nik282000 3y ago
    Why yes, I am an average human being!
    - malermeister 3y ago
      If this applies to you, I'm sorry to tell you that you're a worse-than-average human being.
- user_named 3y ago
  Are you sure?
- blitzar 3y ago
  Anyone who is actually rich knows; mo' money, mo' probelms

dacryn 3y ago

at this point, there is only 1 way to save reddit, and it's so drastic that they wont do it because the ones who need to do it are too blind or too far away * fire spez * promise a clear committed roadmap of mod tools * promise to review 3rd party API pricing, and delay the current rollout It's literally the only way that will be accepted by the 1% that keep the site running (read the Ennui engine principle)

perryh2 3y ago
you missed the big one: kill the IPO
matsemann 3y ago
Or they can continue their failed attempts at using chatgpt to astroturf a counter-movement, lol: https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg Edit, some context: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/146wn9s/comment/jnsfcfi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/146wn9s/commen... (spez / reddit ceo is a mod on r/programming, hence it still being up)
- nikau 3y ago
  How Do You Do Fellow Kids, that allegation is clearly false.
- MortimerDukePhD 3y ago
  > spez / reddit ceo is a mod on r/programming How is it possible that these companies are still run like an immature dorm room shitshow? Are there no separation of duties? The CEO should not have admin access to anything (the very least for security purposes).
  - alexruf 3y ago
    I guess you brought it right to the point: Reddit has never grown to a company it’s „dorm room shitshow“

zouhair 3y ago

Lemmy and its instances could be it.

gdubya 3y ago
Like Mastodon to Twitter? I like the idea, but it's not really taking off, is it?
- zouhair 3y ago
  As long as Reddit's powerusers are still hoping for a retraction it won't, but if Reddit keep at it, I can see the move happening, especially for the big (over 500K) subreddits.
  - goykasi 3y ago
    Lemmy is falling over with less than 100k users. How are they magically going to handle 5x, 10x, 100x? The platform is maybe interesting, but the devs need to own up to the fact that they dont have a scaling story -- written in rust is not a valid answer. Instances are already deciding not to federate, theres no network-wide search, signup flows sound ridiculous (pick server and write an essay? yah no), how do i move servers and what happens when an instance disappears? In the one of the first big Apollo threads, one of the devs was spamming Lemmy throughout the discussion as the next great reddit replacement: easy, federated, more performant than reddit. I guess he almost got 1 out of 3 correct.
    - slumberlust 3y ago
      This take seems short sided, at best. Because we don't have a perfect solution with zero friction to swap to, we shouldn't try? Most new tech goes through growing pains, including reddit back in the day. It's fine to be critical, but it's important to foster an environment that encourages growth and competition. Have electric cars sucked for the last decade? Yes, but we should still invest and promote them as they offer a better future.
Sander_Marechal 3y ago

mrtksn 3y ago

As much as I would like to believe that boycotts can work, I'm just too cynical after seeing all those boycotts doing nothing. My old.reddit.com homepage hasn't change much. Missing is r/ProgrammerHumor but r/Programming is there, alongside with r/darksky, r/wallstreetbets etc. All the porn seems to be there too, which might actually move some numbers if gone dark. The only sub which I care and it's gone is r/StableDiffusion Which leads me to believe that the boycott will remove only a subset of reddit users and we are about to see how much reddit cares about that subset. Redesigns on the other hand can kill a site. That's the only thing I've seen many times killing a website.

EdwardDiego 3y ago
Don't forget the international dateline :) The 12th of June is a poorly specified target. But I know that /r/programming has two Reddit administrators as part of the mods, so I'm not surprised they're not going dark.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  > But I know that /r/programming has two Reddit administrators as part of the mods, so I'm not surprised they're not going dark. Is there anything stopping Reddit from making the CEO a mod in every major sub though?
  - BadBadJellyBean 3y ago
    No but they still need mods. Otherwise the quality will quickly go so far downhill that no one wants to see use it anymore.
    - mrtksn 3y ago
      Is finding mods something hard to do?
      - yurishimo 3y ago

Karrot_Kream 3y ago

Here's my question: Can HN recover from this? It was already getting choppy with the election and cryptocurrency generating huge emotional hellthreads. Then came Musk and Mastodon. Now it's Reddit. HN is just turning into another hub of tech outrage. This site is giving me pain to read now. Want to see a contrast? Look at the comments on this Reddit drama and compare it against the original Digg redesign drama on HN a decade ago. There's a sharp difference in comment quality.

bertman 3y ago
You forgot AI. Also: >Want to see a contrast? The new Digg (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4321773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4321773 What difference in comment quality do you mean exactly?
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  > You forgot AI. You're right, but the reason I didn't include it is that the coverage around AI isn't all emotional. There's a lot of hype behind it yes, but at it's core it's based on new products that people are excited about. But maybe I should have. A lot of them devolve into the same type of hellthread. > What difference in comment quality do you mean exactly? Discussion about CSS and web design features, discussions about web accessibility, and how there were just very few flippant comments. These big Reddit threads have a lot of pithy "f** Reddit" comments and lots and lots of silly (angry) jokes that make me feel like I'm on Reddit and not on HN.
  - lopis 3y ago
    On one hand, it doesn't make sense to be talking about CSS and web design when we are talking about _policy_ changes. I'm sure if you go back to when Reddit first released the new frontend, you would fine all the CSS discussions you look for. On the other hand, lots of discussions are also happening around design and accessibility. Reddit's official app has bad design, including many dark patterns and terrible accessibility and performance. This has been discussion alongside the policy changes from day one.

mariusor 3y ago

I think the demographics of present day reddit are very different from the ones of the ones of Digg (pre exhodus) or Slashdot (pre Digg). Most of the people will probably never care about any drama Reddit the company inflicts on some of its power users.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
For sure. I don't remember Fark, but when Digg went from being a tech-centric site to a despicable spam bucket I do remember everyone fleeing to Reddit. Now that Reddit is trash, I guess all the serious tech people are already here... ?
- lrem 3y ago
  Here being HN? IMHO it’s not competing with Reddit, at most with a sub or five. It’s also different to the point of just not being a replacement. Redditors are currently mostly looking at Lemmy. Not sure it’s ready for prime time either.
  - mariusor 3y ago
    Yeah, I have a direct competitor to lemmy, and I feel like it's even less ready for an influx of users of the magnitude the reddit exodus will be.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    I wasn't familiar with Reddit when Digg sold out; I just remember the exodus, and the topics on Reddit seemed tech-centric enough. Then over time there were more and more posts showing up on the front page with titles like, "This little guy followed me home," about puppies and whatnot. I didn't even know what subReddits were; but now that I do, I'm baffled as to where the former Digg people were posting and why I managed to see mostly their traffic for days or weeks on Reddit without making any effort to go into a tech sub. That was the old Reddit design, so maybe there was something fundamentally different about it.

that_guy_iain 3y ago

Realistically, I would say Reddit users are playing with fire. Reddit is owned and controlled by VCS who have been finding out playground in the hopes of future profits. We all know and understand the game. They hoped they built a website where the users were assets. The Reddit users think they are assets. However, it Reddit can’t make a profit off of them. They aren’t assets they are liabilities. Any site wanting to replace Reddit would need either someone with a sizeable amount of cash to fund it or VC money. Realistically, this is the week where we find out if Reddit users are assets or liabilities. If they’re liabilities who wants to fund a replacement? What happens is they can’t make money off the API? I would presume cancel the IPO and make mass layoffs, cut everything to the barebones and make money that way. VCS will make their money while the site burns. However, what will Redditors do? Go to a bunch of small communities where the group knowledge is smaller and not as good.

MagnumOpus 3y ago
> Reddit users are playing with fire The users have nothing to lose. Worst case Huffman and his owners go ahead with smashing and burning the 3rd party moderation and commenting infrastructure - they would have done that even without protests. Would Huffman ban the people who contribute and moderate the discussions and police spam for free, and hire paid mods instead? A week ago I'd have said that not even he is that boneheaded...
- that_guy_iain 3y ago
  > The users have nothing to lose Reddit users have Reddit to lose. A site that gives them hours of entertainment, allows them to access support groups, find out tips and tricks, get advice, and much more. It'll cost tens of millions a month to host another. Who has that? VCs will get their money one way or another. Either they get their way with this and monetise users who previously were not monetised. Or they make profit other ways. > and burning the 3rd party moderation This here shows how out of touch you are with the reality of things. Third party moderation tools are staying. They're beneficial to Reddit, of course they're going to keep giving them free access.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Mindwipe 3y ago

> If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, understand that you’re playing with fire here. This week is critical to saving your platform. I'm actually quite surprised we've not had a Verge/Techcrunch/The Information story with views from the inside yet. Reddit was always a quite leaky ship that treats staff badly. Internally there has to be some people side-eyeing and thinking that Huffman has lost the plot, especially with his AMA making the blackout worse. Morale is probably not high. Those hanging around for any kind of IPO payout probably know this is going to hit the financials of that quite badly. If your role is anything to do with community outreach you have to know you will not be able to do your job for the next year at least - even if Reddit were to somehow tough this out, it's most engaged users and moderators now hate your guts. Maybe journalists are waiting for the strikes to really hit and we'll see it today.

wwmiller3 3y ago

I deleted my 12-yr old Reddit account this past weekend. I, too, went through the Digg redesign debacle which prompted my complete shift from Digg to Reddit so many years. What I have learned is there always is an alternative and clinging to a platform that is headed in the opposite direction you are going is not worth it. I’ll miss Reddit in the short term, but I’m done with it and have moved on.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

> If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, understand that you’re playing with fire here. This week is critical to saving your platform. They understand. They know, but it seems they're not budging. And it's because of money; if Reddit goes public, they and all investors will instantly become multi-millionaires; if the site then goes to shit, they won't care anymore. But they pulled this too early, and it'll affect the IPO, even whether it'll go through or not.

ForHackernews 3y ago

They don't care about saving their platform, they care about cashing out in the IPO. The incentives are all wrong, and show why every link-aggregator site ultimately kills itself trying to become Facebook.