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> Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software remains frozen in time Craigslist, sure, but Reddit has fallen o

by koch 3y ago

> Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software remains frozen in time Craigslist, sure, but Reddit has fallen off a cliff in terms of content quality since the whole API/3rd party apps debacle. More confirmation of the author's point, I suppose - valuing the marginal user and a broader base over what's already there.

mayormcmatt 3y ago
Also the UI redesign they pushed through and bad search that precipitated the flourishing of third-party clients.
dale_glass 3y ago
I think Reddit is a bit different. They're not a company that is finding that optimizing metrics leads to targeting Marl (as per article). They're a company that decided that the optimal way forward is to intentionally push out their former users and replace them with as much Marl as possible. And I think that makes sense. The original Reddit is full of technical people with ad blockers, weird hobbies, weird communities, and various undesirables. Keeping this herd of cats happy is extremely tricky, selling anything to them is extremely difficult, and there's all sorts of complex drama that needs managing. So it seems that Reddit decided that to make the site more profitable, manageable and attractive to advertisers, all this weirdness needs to be pushed out over time. Drive out the technical users and weird unprofitable communities, and replace with as much mindless scrolling as possible.
- wmichelin 3y ago
  Can you elaborate on why you think reddit is pushing out the weirdness? I don't think it's a zero sum game, you can have both normies and weirdos in entirely separate subreddits.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    Yeah, but what's the point of hosting them? Like what do you sell on r/dragonsfuckingcars? (no, I'm not joking) And what does the existence of such a place at all mean to a prospective advertiser? Imagine a viral picture of your ad next to one of those posts. But okay, let's ignore porn. How about subreddits that deal with subjects like depression, gender issues, politics, etc? What do you sell to those? Maybe a book or two but probably not very much. And they're also ripe for "hilarious" ad/content mismatches. It seems to me that from the advertising point of view, Reddit would be a lot more desirable to advertise on if it was nothing but endless cute cat pictures.
    - raisedbyninjas 3y ago
      They don't need to monetize every sub. Most subscribers to dragonsfuckingcars probably sub to several other subs that can be monetized. Keeping all the weird niche stuff around keeps users scrolling longer. Just keep them off /r/all.
    - username332211 3y ago
      How did advertisers become such puritans? Playboy magazine carried ads for normal products just fine. Every newspaper deals with "depression, gender issues, politics" and they somehow survived trough most of their history on advertising revenue. Surely there should be marketers that see "Imagine a viral picture of your ad next to one of those posts." and realize that everything apart from "Imagine a viral picture of your ad" is often irrelevant.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      The people who create the content (the reason people put reddit at the end of google searches) also like dragonsfuckingcars, and if you push them out they stop writing about their vacuum cleaners and the content becomes the default subreddits which are pretty much entirely people yelling political talking points at each other.
- ecshafer 3y ago
  Reddit seems to have easy sales. Specific subreddits can be targeted with specific ads really easily. So it should be easy to sell things there and easy to keep the users happy.
  - jacobn 3y ago
    I've tried buying reddit ads. Maybe I was selling the wrong thing, or my ads sucked or whatever, but boy those ads didn't just not perform, they were just completely useless.
  - intended 3y ago
    Reddit ads sadly didnt work well. They really tried all sorts of things. I feel that they may have been a media firm, and not a platform. When Victoria conducted AMAs, Reddit was a burgeoning cultural force. Maybe if they had gone that route they would be their “ideal” state. However that leads to no billionaire club IPO/Exit.
    - zmmmmm 3y ago
      it's an interesting counter narrative then to the currently in vogue idea that you can stop individual ad targeting and instead target people based on their high level interests. Reddit is like a distillation of that, the logical end point of it ... if that is a dead end, Google is in for a rough time with the pathway they are pursuing with Chrome.
      - ChefboyOG 3y ago
        My experience with Reddit ads (years ago now) wasn't that subreddit-level targeting was bad—there's a reason sponsored content is such a big marketing channel, after all—but rather that the ads platform just never worked very well. And by "never worked very well," I don't just mean "We ran ads without good results." The whole experience was just sort of confusing and underwhelming, especially when compared to other channels like FB or Google. We suspected that the majority of our clicks were bots, based on our own analytics. The targeting always felt unreliable. Support interactions were weird. In general, the platform always just felt kind of... janky. Don't know if that's still the case now, but at least as of a year or so ago, I knew a lot of people working in digital marketing who felt the same about the platform.
hiidrew 3y ago
Other Reddit enshittification is their pushiness to use the mobile app. Great UX case study here, this guy makes them very entertaining - https://builtformars.com/case-studies/reddit https://builtformars.com/case-studies/reddit Also related, Cory Doctorow's essay on this where he labeled it 'enshittification' - https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Night_Thastus 3y ago
Everyone here is completely missing the point. It wasn't the API change, the 'new reddit' UI change, or frankly any other individual change. Those are symptoms of a greater problem - Reddit is social media that succeeded. This exact same fall happens to any and all social media that succeeds, and is not in any way unique to Reddit. It grows, and with growth comes complexity and greater expenses to keep it all propped up. In order to pay for those expenses, advertising revenue must increase. To increase advertising revenue, the site must be more 'family friendly' and have stricter moderation. More users means that you can't be as personal and must be more automated. You don't want bad publicity because that can turn advertisers away. If you want more advertising revenue you need more users, which means you need to sand off any rough edges and unique appeal and instead appeal as broadly as possible, regardless of the original intent of the site. To appeal broadly you must add every feature that everyone else has and forget being unique. Broader appeal brings in people who reduce the quality of the content. The larger the site gets, the more appealing it becomes to bots and propoganda. In order to maximize impact for either personal (ego) or professional (money/political) reasons, you need to post content that hits people where they're vulnerable - cute, funny, infuriating, etc. So, the product experiences enshittification. It's just inevitable. It will always happen to social media if it grows. You can have a small, niche social media that is good but will never grow - or you can have a large, casually-used social media that is awful. There is no in-between. Anything in-between inevitably slides towards one or the other.
- dimal 3y ago
  It succeeded for a long time without becoming enshittified. It was the front page of the internet and it was great. Then they took VC funding. That changed everything. That was the driver for all the enshittification that followed. The VCs need to get a 10x return and they only have one playbook — the one you describe. But if they hadn't taken VC funding, maybe they could have found a different path.
  - intended 3y ago
    They were a YC team. They were always on VC funding - and they were not exactly a tale of profit and success. Essentially, Reddit always had to IPO.
cole-k 3y ago
I think the changes to Reddit suggest that we (the ones complaining about Reddit) are but a small minority. I really thought Reddit would revert their API changes after seeing the community response, but then... nothing happened. This was the event that made me realize how far I am disconnected from its average user. OP makes it seem like Reddit's users lose something when Reddit panders to a Marl. But I've observed that the majority of them don't care (enough). Some even like changes we view as invasive. I talked to someone once who told me "Aren't personalized ads so great? I was looking for new shoes, then I see an ad for the perfect shoes. A few clicks and now I have great shoes!" These people exist, and I suspect that they have to exist for ads to generate any revenue. I do think that it's wrong to paint those who (still) use Reddit/etc. as brainless scroll-zombies, though. They just care about different things.
- mminer237 3y ago
  I can't say what percentage of Reddit users cared, but I can definitely say that the majority of Reddit participants—the people actually posting the content Reddit is trying to sell—have left. Reddit activity has dropped off a cliff: https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
  - cole-k 3y ago
    Wow, I figured from hearsay that it was unchanged. Thanks for letting me know. I admit to being wrong about most people not caring, at least judging from the numbers you gave.
  - Panzer04 3y ago
    Geeze, I didn't realise there was such a precipitous drop - I wonder how bad it is for smaller subs.
  - broguinn 3y ago
    Are you sure this data is accurate? By the site you reference, r/nottheonion has ~30 comments a day: https://subredditstats.com/r/nottheonion https://subredditstats.com/r/nottheonion But if I actually visit the subreddit, I see many posts from within the last 24 hours with 300+ comments each. Is it possible subredditstats.com had some kind of regression in its counting around that time? It could be related to the API changes.
qingcharles 3y ago
Content quality seems to be inversely proportional to subreddit size. If you find a much finer-grained niche subreddit you will probably find the quality is still 2010 Reddit.

by koch 3y ago

mayormcmatt 3y ago

Also the UI redesign they pushed through and bad search that precipitated the flourishing of third-party clients.

dale_glass 3y ago

I think Reddit is a bit different. They're not a company that is finding that optimizing metrics leads to targeting Marl (as per article). They're a company that decided that the optimal way forward is to intentionally push out their former users and replace them with as much Marl as possible. And I think that makes sense. The original Reddit is full of technical people with ad blockers, weird hobbies, weird communities, and various undesirables. Keeping this herd of cats happy is extremely tricky, selling anything to them is extremely difficult, and there's all sorts of complex drama that needs managing. So it seems that Reddit decided that to make the site more profitable, manageable and attractive to advertisers, all this weirdness needs to be pushed out over time. Drive out the technical users and weird unprofitable communities, and replace with as much mindless scrolling as possible.

wmichelin 3y ago
Can you elaborate on why you think reddit is pushing out the weirdness? I don't think it's a zero sum game, you can have both normies and weirdos in entirely separate subreddits.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Yeah, but what's the point of hosting them? Like what do you sell on r/dragonsfuckingcars? (no, I'm not joking) And what does the existence of such a place at all mean to a prospective advertiser? Imagine a viral picture of your ad next to one of those posts. But okay, let's ignore porn. How about subreddits that deal with subjects like depression, gender issues, politics, etc? What do you sell to those? Maybe a book or two but probably not very much. And they're also ripe for "hilarious" ad/content mismatches. It seems to me that from the advertising point of view, Reddit would be a lot more desirable to advertise on if it was nothing but endless cute cat pictures.
  - raisedbyninjas 3y ago
    They don't need to monetize every sub. Most subscribers to dragonsfuckingcars probably sub to several other subs that can be monetized. Keeping all the weird niche stuff around keeps users scrolling longer. Just keep them off /r/all.
  - username332211 3y ago
    How did advertisers become such puritans? Playboy magazine carried ads for normal products just fine. Every newspaper deals with "depression, gender issues, politics" and they somehow survived trough most of their history on advertising revenue. Surely there should be marketers that see "Imagine a viral picture of your ad next to one of those posts." and realize that everything apart from "Imagine a viral picture of your ad" is often irrelevant.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    The people who create the content (the reason people put reddit at the end of google searches) also like dragonsfuckingcars, and if you push them out they stop writing about their vacuum cleaners and the content becomes the default subreddits which are pretty much entirely people yelling political talking points at each other.
ecshafer 3y ago
Reddit seems to have easy sales. Specific subreddits can be targeted with specific ads really easily. So it should be easy to sell things there and easy to keep the users happy.
- jacobn 3y ago
  I've tried buying reddit ads. Maybe I was selling the wrong thing, or my ads sucked or whatever, but boy those ads didn't just not perform, they were just completely useless.
- intended 3y ago
  Reddit ads sadly didnt work well. They really tried all sorts of things. I feel that they may have been a media firm, and not a platform. When Victoria conducted AMAs, Reddit was a burgeoning cultural force. Maybe if they had gone that route they would be their “ideal” state. However that leads to no billionaire club IPO/Exit.
  - zmmmmm 3y ago
    it's an interesting counter narrative then to the currently in vogue idea that you can stop individual ad targeting and instead target people based on their high level interests. Reddit is like a distillation of that, the logical end point of it ... if that is a dead end, Google is in for a rough time with the pathway they are pursuing with Chrome.
    - ChefboyOG 3y ago
      My experience with Reddit ads (years ago now) wasn't that subreddit-level targeting was bad—there's a reason sponsored content is such a big marketing channel, after all—but rather that the ads platform just never worked very well. And by "never worked very well," I don't just mean "We ran ads without good results." The whole experience was just sort of confusing and underwhelming, especially when compared to other channels like FB or Google. We suspected that the majority of our clicks were bots, based on our own analytics. The targeting always felt unreliable. Support interactions were weird. In general, the platform always just felt kind of... janky. Don't know if that's still the case now, but at least as of a year or so ago, I knew a lot of people working in digital marketing who felt the same about the platform.

hiidrew 3y ago

Other Reddit enshittification is their pushiness to use the mobile app. Great UX case study here, this guy makes them very entertaining - https://builtformars.com/case-studies/reddit https://builtformars.com/case-studies/reddit Also related, Cory Doctorow's essay on this where he labeled it 'enshittification' - https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Night_Thastus 3y ago

Everyone here is completely missing the point. It wasn't the API change, the 'new reddit' UI change, or frankly any other individual change. Those are symptoms of a greater problem - Reddit is social media that succeeded. This exact same fall happens to any and all social media that succeeds, and is not in any way unique to Reddit. It grows, and with growth comes complexity and greater expenses to keep it all propped up. In order to pay for those expenses, advertising revenue must increase. To increase advertising revenue, the site must be more 'family friendly' and have stricter moderation. More users means that you can't be as personal and must be more automated. You don't want bad publicity because that can turn advertisers away. If you want more advertising revenue you need more users, which means you need to sand off any rough edges and unique appeal and instead appeal as broadly as possible, regardless of the original intent of the site. To appeal broadly you must add every feature that everyone else has and forget being unique. Broader appeal brings in people who reduce the quality of the content. The larger the site gets, the more appealing it becomes to bots and propoganda. In order to maximize impact for either personal (ego) or professional (money/political) reasons, you need to post content that hits people where they're vulnerable - cute, funny, infuriating, etc. So, the product experiences enshittification. It's just inevitable. It will always happen to social media if it grows. You can have a small, niche social media that is good but will never grow - or you can have a large, casually-used social media that is awful. There is no in-between. Anything in-between inevitably slides towards one or the other.

dimal 3y ago
It succeeded for a long time without becoming enshittified. It was the front page of the internet and it was great. Then they took VC funding. That changed everything. That was the driver for all the enshittification that followed. The VCs need to get a 10x return and they only have one playbook — the one you describe. But if they hadn't taken VC funding, maybe they could have found a different path.
- intended 3y ago
  They were a YC team. They were always on VC funding - and they were not exactly a tale of profit and success. Essentially, Reddit always had to IPO.

cole-k 3y ago

I think the changes to Reddit suggest that we (the ones complaining about Reddit) are but a small minority. I really thought Reddit would revert their API changes after seeing the community response, but then... nothing happened. This was the event that made me realize how far I am disconnected from its average user. OP makes it seem like Reddit's users lose something when Reddit panders to a Marl. But I've observed that the majority of them don't care (enough). Some even like changes we view as invasive. I talked to someone once who told me "Aren't personalized ads so great? I was looking for new shoes, then I see an ad for the perfect shoes. A few clicks and now I have great shoes!" These people exist, and I suspect that they have to exist for ads to generate any revenue. I do think that it's wrong to paint those who (still) use Reddit/etc. as brainless scroll-zombies, though. They just care about different things.

mminer237 3y ago
I can't say what percentage of Reddit users cared, but I can definitely say that the majority of Reddit participants—the people actually posting the content Reddit is trying to sell—have left. Reddit activity has dropped off a cliff: https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
- cole-k 3y ago
  Wow, I figured from hearsay that it was unchanged. Thanks for letting me know. I admit to being wrong about most people not caring, at least judging from the numbers you gave.
- Panzer04 3y ago
  Geeze, I didn't realise there was such a precipitous drop - I wonder how bad it is for smaller subs.
- broguinn 3y ago
  Are you sure this data is accurate? By the site you reference, r/nottheonion has ~30 comments a day: https://subredditstats.com/r/nottheonion https://subredditstats.com/r/nottheonion But if I actually visit the subreddit, I see many posts from within the last 24 hours with 300+ comments each. Is it possible subredditstats.com had some kind of regression in its counting around that time? It could be related to the API changes.

qingcharles 3y ago

Content quality seems to be inversely proportional to subreddit size. If you find a much finer-grained niche subreddit you will probably find the quality is still 2010 Reddit.