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Tech's Reckoning
- bediger4000 3y ago> And much like Twitter, Reddit has remained valuable not because of any amount of venture investment, but because of millions of users that choose to post there for free. That's the money quote from the article. It's also true of stack overflow, and flickr and Tumblr. That's what Elon and spez miss. Why do they miss this? Is it arrogance or a genuine blind spot?
- x86x87 3y agoArrogance. They know better!
- bombadil44 3y agoAs long as they're getting enough user engagement, which drives ad revenue, they don't care. Apart from the Reddit protests (which they will just force an end to by replacing mods) has there been any objective evidence of engagement or number of active users going down on Twitter or Reddit so far?
- bediger4000 3y agoI thought Twitter user numbers had dropped at least some. I mean even Elon acknowledged that ad revenue was down and user numbers have to affect ad revenue.
- bombadil44 3y agoI'd heard that it was because certain advertising partners had pulled out of Twitter for various reasons. You're probably right that user numbers could be having an impact there as well, but I haven't seen any sources that are showing direct evidence that they have dropped
- jacooper 3y agoI mean it worked for twitter, mastodon didn't do anything to twitters reign, it just lost its users goodwill. Maybe the new Meta clone is the one to actually compete with Twitter.
- DayDollar 3y agoCause society never appears in the heroes tale of one man doing the impossible, besides as a choire invisible of doubters.
- tracerbulletx 3y agoYes, this is 100% the most accurate take on what's going on with Reddit and a number of other companies. It's common sense to many I'm sure, but this is well expressed.
- TX81Z 3y agoZitron is usually on the mark.
- wonderingyogi 3y agoEveryone looks like a sophisticated investor during a bull market. Now it looks like the emperor has no clothes. These investors are going to have a hard time justifying their dumb money investments.
- fireflash38 3y agoPersonally, I'm most concerned that index funds might hide bad behavior - both on the part of the investee (being overvalued), and non-index investors.
- camgunz 3y agoI get in conversations about this and I flail for examples of good things tech has built. Dear lazyweb: what good things has big tech built in the last 20 years? Let's stipulate that the smartphone was good and that I already know about it.
- bequanna 3y agoGood for who exactly? If you’re referring to investors, tech has done great things!
- jacooper 3y agoI'm just going to say it, the ai revolution is amazing, and Bing AI is crazy good when it comes to doing technical searches. Also for natural language questions "does this sound weird in X language?" Encryption and that we have zero knowledge day to day, wouldn't be ever possible without tech and precisely Whatsapp who made E2EE mainstream. (There are huge caveats though, like unencrypted backups and so forth) But i agree, the way the venture capitalists work in the U.S. is just ridiculous. If reddit didn't exist, forums would still out there, but by giving infinite money to one company, it can centralize everything, then kill the entire community trying to seek profit at any cost. Going back to the old times isn't easy, especially when users are used to these endless free centralized platforms, which no body can actually compete with, because they have Infinite money.
- rm445 3y agoThis is crazy. The electronics and telecommunications industries have just kept trucking on and improving hardware and connectivity by orders of magnitude. Meanwhile web technologies have provided the software complement to smartphones that let people manage their whole digital lives online, at the same time as hundreds of millions of people come online for the first time. Are you defining 'tech' as purely social media companies? Or demanding entirely new classes of product? There has been an incredible amount of iterative improvement.
- dvwobuq 3y ago2023, when a rocket landing backwards and being reused is blasé. :)
- dasil003 3y agoThis is a solid take, the only thing I'll quibble with is the idea that VC funding is going to dry up. Sure, it will be less for a while, and diligence will be much higher, but there's too much capital sloshing around that will continue looking for big returns, and where else can they get it? Theoretically you might find it in the developing world, but it's hard to make a convincing argument that the structural and corruption problems there are going to be fixed more readily than traditional VC funds who have far fewer stakeholders to wrangle when trying to recalibrate their structure and strategy.
- cloverich 3y agoRelatedly, i think about being overpaid. But everytime i end up watching folks work in non software roles, all i can think of is how badly want to automate everything they are doing. Ive built a lot of worthless stuff in my career, but every time i do build something useful, its automating some value producing activity that used to require a person. Now it can be done 10-1000x as fast, for free, indefinitely. Its easy to both under and oversell tech but i think ultimately when done well, tech produced value and experimentation is relatively cheap. Im not sure if we have passed our heyday but to me it feels there is still so much left to do and a lot of it is still pretty basic crud and workflow automation stuff.
- mkl95 3y agoUntil 2021 or so, even a really crappy startup could raise 8 digits with relative ease. Then all of a sudden those investors realized that the economy was bad enough that those companies may never make it big enough to justify the investment. I don't think this recession will mean the end of crappy tech at scale, but it will make it really hard to justify certain strategies such as burning mountains of cash to build a (micro)blogging app, to name an example.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rationalfaith 3y ago[dead]
- rdlecler1 3y agoI have trouble taking people seriously who don’t understand basic economic constraints. The company loses about $170m/year. Without VC money it would have either been dead, sold, or a shadow of what it is.
- Tuna-Fish 3y ago> or a shadow of what it is. To be clear, this would have been an improvement. Reddit absolutely does not need the headcount it has. It provides no value to either users or to the company. It should have never grown above 50 people.
- _hypx 3y ago50 is probably too few. Because it has an international reach, something closer to 200 people is probably necessary. Of course, having 2,000 workers is far too many.
- mwint 3y agoIt’s user-content and user-moderated. Why does the international bit matter? (Honest question)
- disgruntledphd2 3y agoSelling ads scales with n where n is your number of salespeople. Edit: content moderation scales similarly, but you can maybe contract most of that out.
- cjs_ac 3y agoAmongst the UK-oriented subreddits, there is a phenomenon called the Forbidden Meatball Problem. There is a dish associated with the West Country of England that you can't discuss on Reddit because Americans don't know that its name can mean something other than a homophobic slur. The moderators of those subreddits have raised the issue of banning people for discussing food and received no adequate response. Reddit enforces its own moderation policies on subreddits, regardless of the wishes of the moderators or communities, which can only be done effectively if the company has awareness of more social and cultural issues than the ones in Silicon Valley.
- richard___ 3y agoTruly spoken like someone who has never run a company
- michaelcampbell 3y agoI'd reckon a vast majority of people have not, and some major subset of those don't want to; why do you say this like it's bad? People opine about things they don't have firsthand experience in all the time.
- loup-vaillant 3y agoIt’s an ad hominem attack: Richard here asserts the author is incompetent, instead of putting forth an actual counter argument. It’s lazy at best.
- gymbeaux 3y agoWould it be alright with you if an economist weighed in on the Fed’s decision to hold interest rates, or are they not qualified to do so because they’ve never sat on the Fed’s board of governors?
- TX81Z 3y agoAs somebody who has run a company, I actually agree fully with it.
- mikewarot 3y agoIt was the zero interest money that effectively removed price as a signal from capitalism. Capitalism relies on negative feedback to correct errant behavior, usually in the form of lower stock prices, or bankruptcy. Combine the end of zero interest money with the retirement of the baby boomers, AND the people Long Covid took out of the work force, and we're looking at a decade or more of 10% interest rates. Fiscal Discipline is coming back, the physical economy (an odd, but precise, phrase used by Lyndon LaRouche) always lurked in the background, masked by the free money.
- kazen44 3y agoalso, i hope this is a good thing. Hopefully people will spend their resources on actual tangible problems compared to the massive, absolutely insane money burning machine that is the VC based startup environment.
- michaelcampbell 3y agoI agree with your larger point, but do you have any #'s of "long covid" workforce removals? My gut says it's in the 1/10'th of a %, but I don't know either.
- mikewarot 3y agoI found this estimate of 2.4% of the working population[1], 4 Million full time equivalent workers. [1] https://www.npr.org/2022/07/31/1114375163/long-covid-longhaulers-disability-labor-ada https://www.npr.org/2022/07/31/1114375163/long-covid-longhau...
- michaelcampbell 3y agoInteresting, thanks.
- godzillabrennus 3y agoThis is amazing. Especially this: "In Huffman’s eyes — just like Elon Musk — apps should pay Reddit to give Reddit traffic and make Reddit more money, because said apps make a profit themselves." They fundamentally do not understand the myriad of reasons Reddit wants to end third party apps. Reddit is not a protocol, it is a company.
- michaelcampbell 3y ago> They fundamentally do not understand the myriad of reasons Reddit wants to end third party apps. Evidently I don't either; if not for more money, what is it? And "myriad"...? Can you enlighten me with, say, 10 reasons?
- jart 3y agoReddit isn't a tech company. They sold themselves to Conde Nast back in 2006, which is a news company. Would you call NYTimes a tech company? News people hate tech. They don't want to be part of the tech culture that seeded Reddit's community. Their primary interest is to extract rent and manipulate public opinion. So don't tell me that's tech.
- alephnerd 3y agoFinally someone has mentioned this in the entire Reddit saga. Reddit has basically been PE-owned for more than a decade now (technically a family office but Advance Publications operates like a PE).