11 ms·

> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Very little, and almost none from a technical

> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Very little, and almost none from a technical POV. What value Reddit does provide is a side effect of 17 years of investments by users, their communities, and those communities' unpaid moderators. Yes, Reddit is free to attack the foundation of their value for short-term gain. However, the reality is that Reddit has never been easier to replace than it is right now. If even a relatively small percentage of users/communities/moderators take their toys and go elsewhere, it could trigger an irreversible decline.

soco 3y ago
"The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without."
mcv 3y ago
At the very least, Reddit provides the servers. That's not nothing.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Very little, and almost none from a technical POV I mean, I can sign up and log in. That's more than I can say for the federated competitors I tried so hard to use and finally gave up on. The fact that none of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok tried to go for Reddit's throat in this lull implies we might be missing something.
- nkjnlknlk 3y ago
  The thing you are missing is that Reddit is not (sufficiently) profitable. :)
  - kingofheroes 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    Reddit is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars and that number has been rapidly increasing. They would have easily reached profitability without doing this.
    - munk-a 3y ago
      Yes but would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy? Fast may seem good but it's actually slow when compared to the fastest horses. Every company must be a unicorn, so sayeth the investors.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models.
        tivert 3y ago
        >> would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy > Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models. Not exactly. The rest of the economy may run on "low-growth or steady-state business models," but the VC investors that control funding for technology businesses demand "30% YoY growth in perpetuity." It's a cultural problem.
        JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > the VC investors that control funding for technology businesses Reddit was held by a media company, Condé Naste. It chose to raise growth equity from VCs, among others. In summary,
  - Aaargh20318 3y ago
    It would probably be profitable if they didn’t employ 2000 people to run what is in essence a large but relatively basic forum system.
    - ryathal 3y ago
      It's still not an absurdly profitable venture even if you drop head count to 300-500 which is likely a reasonable number. A lot of people could have good careers in that smaller reddit, but it's not a multi-billion dollar unicorn.
      - Aaargh20318 3y ago
        That still seems high for what Reddit is. I would have expected them to have 50-100 employees at most.
- GabeIsko 3y ago
  Is it really that hard for someone who browses hackernews to get set up on a federated platform? I'm over here assuming that everyone on this forum that complains about how hard it is to run a startup should be able to run the docker compose and route a reverse proxy to their own instance, rather than take the 5 minutes to read about how the fediverse and activity pub works and find an instance they like offering free access. I get that it is not a ubiquitous solution, but after my experiences on mastodon.social and others, I'm really starting to wonder just how genuine the sentiment behind "it's hard to sign up" is. It's not that hard at all - I have found it a lot easier than doing something like creating a modern facebook or google account for instance.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hombre_fatal 3y ago
    Just because we might be tech-savvy doesn't mean we have an affinity for jumping through hoops that we don't think are worth it.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Agreed, but I'm also confused. I made a kbin and lemmy.world account about as easily as I would a reddit account. Are the servers still impacted for some? The new UI and general idea of federation takes some figuring out, but the high level experience of "see a post, click, read comments, comment" isn't any different from Hackernews.
Fyrezerk 3y ago
On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users. Reddit is a gold mine of information related to any topic you can imagine, and that information won't magically migrate to another platform without serious network traction by a large user base.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users. I said its "never been easier to replace", which is different than "easy to replace". If Reddit continues to drive its most invested users and moderators off the platfrom, it becomes significantly easier. But even with continued bad choices by leadership, Reddit will likely follow the Flickr path: Gently coasting into irrelevance, selling itself once or twice along the way. My prediction: Reddit will ultimately be bought for its corpse^H^H^H^H^H corpus of text content, and so will live forever through LLMs. People of 2073 will wonder why their bots occasionally reply, "Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!"
- Jarwain 3y ago
  It's a bit of both. The wealth of knowledge in Reddit would be extremely difficult to replace. But that history isn't exactly what keeps people on reddit or helps perpetuate the platform, it's just a valuable goldmine of information. That history doesn't keep the platform going though. People and networks will migrate to a new platform, start building a new knowledge base, and reddit will slowly rot
  - downrightmike 3y ago
    It's all already archived. The platform has severely harmed knowledge generation. That's why they are trying to take back the subreddits. But they are only pushing the small group of knowledge givers further away.
- D0TheMath 3y ago
  I used to use Reddit for this purpose, but many of the things I’d try to look up on Reddit, I can more readily ask ChatGPT about. This form of network effect of reddit will likely weaken over time. Edit: So in some sense all that information has magically migrated to a new platform through the mystical power of DL.
sandoze 3y ago
See you in Discord.. after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community.. then read through how to join.. which chat room do I type some obscure message into to prove I read the rules in order for a bot to approve me and wait 15 minutes before getting into a welcome chat room where I now need to introduce myself? How do I get access to what it was I was looking for? God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place. Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community never had to give them my phone number. Depends on the server, I suppose. And as someone used to exploring niche communities: TBH, it's not as out of the way to google as I thought. say I want to find the godot discord group (if they have one)... yup first entry, can find a public Godot discord. Maybe not official, but I wouldn't google for an official discord so much as find community link on a website. >God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place. TBH Reddit isn't exactly better off here, despite being searchable. People don't search so that's why you get subs asking the same questions every week.
- kelnos 3y ago
  The bigger issue, UX signup and discoverability issues aside, is that moving from Reddit to Discord is just trading one capricious corporate owner for another.
- wunderlotus 3y ago
  I’ve tried to use discord a million times and always fail because of this.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  This neatly summarizes why anybody should care. I found Reddit to be very like the glory days of Usenet. There were lots of bad places, but then the niche content was excellent. It would be a pity to lose Reddit. I don't know if that's what must happen: it's not up to me.
spac 3y ago
I am taking no side on this, as I don't have enough visibility in the topic. But do I think this answer is unfairly discounting the cost of running the company, both human and financial. Building and running a software company is not free.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  They should definitely be paid for that. But reddit was working just fine in 2017, when they had less than 200 employees (compared to their pandemic hiring from 700 up to 2000) and it was working fine at smaller numbers before then. Right now their revenue is about half a billion dollars. They take in more than enough money to run the site and have stupendous profits.
  - ryanwaggoner 3y ago
    Revenue in 2017 was $50mm. So in the last six years, their headcount has grown 10x, and their revenue has grown 10x. Hmm…
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      But the site has not changed. Are all those people sales? If no, then those workers seem like mostly a waste of money. If yes, and they're still not profitable, then turning the company into 90+% sales is not the path to profitability either. Do you have any non-sales explanation for what those people are doing that actually contributes to revenue? It's not like they opened more factories and need more workers. Though maybe they look at increased revenue and use that as the reason to hire more people because growth good, in which case any complaints about lack of profitability should be derisively laughed at.
KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
Users. Users produce the value, not Reddit. They create or share the content and submit comments to invoke discussion. This is what draws more users to the platform. Reddit is a grumpy office landlord that thinks that because it's glued some shitty plastic panels to the wall to "modernize" that it can rock up to the whiteboard and pretend it's one of the creatives. They are terrible at understanding the product because the real product was built around their mediocre foundations.
dsir 3y ago
I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them. One key aspect is we have non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owners. The monetization stuff is completely optional and disabled by default, however it feels like the people curating the communities should have the option to be rewarded for the work that they do. Here's an example of a community: https://sociables.com/community/VidSocial/board/trending https://sociables.com/community/VidSocial/board/trending

soco 3y ago

"The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without."

mcv 3y ago

At the very least, Reddit provides the servers. That's not nothing.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> Very little, and almost none from a technical POV I mean, I can sign up and log in. That's more than I can say for the federated competitors I tried so hard to use and finally gave up on. The fact that none of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok tried to go for Reddit's throat in this lull implies we might be missing something.

nkjnlknlk 3y ago
The thing you are missing is that Reddit is not (sufficiently) profitable. :)
- kingofheroes 3y ago
  [flagged]
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  Reddit is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars and that number has been rapidly increasing. They would have easily reached profitability without doing this.
  - munk-a 3y ago
    Yes but would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy? Fast may seem good but it's actually slow when compared to the fastest horses. Every company must be a unicorn, so sayeth the investors.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models.
      - tivert 3y ago
        >> would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy > Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models. Not exactly. The rest of the economy may run on "low-growth or steady-state business models," but the VC investors that control funding for technology businesses demand "30% YoY growth in perpetuity." It's a cultural problem.
        JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > the VC investors that control funding for technology businesses Reddit was held by a media company, Condé Naste. It chose to raise growth equity from VCs, among others. In summary,
- Aaargh20318 3y ago
  It would probably be profitable if they didn’t employ 2000 people to run what is in essence a large but relatively basic forum system.
  - ryathal 3y ago
    It's still not an absurdly profitable venture even if you drop head count to 300-500 which is likely a reasonable number. A lot of people could have good careers in that smaller reddit, but it's not a multi-billion dollar unicorn.
    - Aaargh20318 3y ago
      That still seems high for what Reddit is. I would have expected them to have 50-100 employees at most.
GabeIsko 3y ago
Is it really that hard for someone who browses hackernews to get set up on a federated platform? I'm over here assuming that everyone on this forum that complains about how hard it is to run a startup should be able to run the docker compose and route a reverse proxy to their own instance, rather than take the 5 minutes to read about how the fediverse and activity pub works and find an instance they like offering free access. I get that it is not a ubiquitous solution, but after my experiences on mastodon.social and others, I'm really starting to wonder just how genuine the sentiment behind "it's hard to sign up" is. It's not that hard at all - I have found it a lot easier than doing something like creating a modern facebook or google account for instance.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  Just because we might be tech-savvy doesn't mean we have an affinity for jumping through hoops that we don't think are worth it.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Agreed, but I'm also confused. I made a kbin and lemmy.world account about as easily as I would a reddit account. Are the servers still impacted for some? The new UI and general idea of federation takes some figuring out, but the high level experience of "see a post, click, read comments, comment" isn't any different from Hackernews.

Fyrezerk 3y ago

On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users. Reddit is a gold mine of information related to any topic you can imagine, and that information won't magically migrate to another platform without serious network traction by a large user base.

CharlesW 3y ago
> On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users. I said its "never been easier to replace", which is different than "easy to replace". If Reddit continues to drive its most invested users and moderators off the platfrom, it becomes significantly easier. But even with continued bad choices by leadership, Reddit will likely follow the Flickr path: Gently coasting into irrelevance, selling itself once or twice along the way. My prediction: Reddit will ultimately be bought for its corpse^H^H^H^H^H corpus of text content, and so will live forever through LLMs. People of 2073 will wonder why their bots occasionally reply, "Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!"
Jarwain 3y ago
It's a bit of both. The wealth of knowledge in Reddit would be extremely difficult to replace. But that history isn't exactly what keeps people on reddit or helps perpetuate the platform, it's just a valuable goldmine of information. That history doesn't keep the platform going though. People and networks will migrate to a new platform, start building a new knowledge base, and reddit will slowly rot
- downrightmike 3y ago
  It's all already archived. The platform has severely harmed knowledge generation. That's why they are trying to take back the subreddits. But they are only pushing the small group of knowledge givers further away.
D0TheMath 3y ago
I used to use Reddit for this purpose, but many of the things I’d try to look up on Reddit, I can more readily ask ChatGPT about. This form of network effect of reddit will likely weaken over time. Edit: So in some sense all that information has magically migrated to a new platform through the mystical power of DL.

sandoze 3y ago

See you in Discord.. after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community.. then read through how to join.. which chat room do I type some obscure message into to prove I read the rules in order for a bot to approve me and wait 15 minutes before getting into a welcome chat room where I now need to introduce myself? How do I get access to what it was I was looking for? God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place. Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community never had to give them my phone number. Depends on the server, I suppose. And as someone used to exploring niche communities: TBH, it's not as out of the way to google as I thought. say I want to find the godot discord group (if they have one)... yup first entry, can find a public Godot discord. Maybe not official, but I wouldn't google for an official discord so much as find community link on a website. >God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place. TBH Reddit isn't exactly better off here, despite being searchable. People don't search so that's why you get subs asking the same questions every week.
kelnos 3y ago
The bigger issue, UX signup and discoverability issues aside, is that moving from Reddit to Discord is just trading one capricious corporate owner for another.
wunderlotus 3y ago
I’ve tried to use discord a million times and always fail because of this.
Applejinx 3y ago
This neatly summarizes why anybody should care. I found Reddit to be very like the glory days of Usenet. There were lots of bad places, but then the niche content was excellent. It would be a pity to lose Reddit. I don't know if that's what must happen: it's not up to me.

spac 3y ago

I am taking no side on this, as I don't have enough visibility in the topic. But do I think this answer is unfairly discounting the cost of running the company, both human and financial. Building and running a software company is not free.

Dylan16807 3y ago
They should definitely be paid for that. But reddit was working just fine in 2017, when they had less than 200 employees (compared to their pandemic hiring from 700 up to 2000) and it was working fine at smaller numbers before then. Right now their revenue is about half a billion dollars. They take in more than enough money to run the site and have stupendous profits.
- ryanwaggoner 3y ago
  Revenue in 2017 was $50mm. So in the last six years, their headcount has grown 10x, and their revenue has grown 10x. Hmm…
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    But the site has not changed. Are all those people sales? If no, then those workers seem like mostly a waste of money. If yes, and they're still not profitable, then turning the company into 90+% sales is not the path to profitability either. Do you have any non-sales explanation for what those people are doing that actually contributes to revenue? It's not like they opened more factories and need more workers. Though maybe they look at increased revenue and use that as the reason to hire more people because growth good, in which case any complaints about lack of profitability should be derisively laughed at.

KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago

Users. Users produce the value, not Reddit. They create or share the content and submit comments to invoke discussion. This is what draws more users to the platform. Reddit is a grumpy office landlord that thinks that because it's glued some shitty plastic panels to the wall to "modernize" that it can rock up to the whiteboard and pretend it's one of the creatives. They are terrible at understanding the product because the real product was built around their mediocre foundations.

dsir 3y ago

I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them. One key aspect is we have non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owners. The monetization stuff is completely optional and disabled by default, however it feels like the people curating the communities should have the option to be rewarded for the work that they do. Here's an example of a community: https://sociables.com/community/VidSocial/board/trending https://sociables.com/community/VidSocial/board/trending