Well shucks, all they did was drive out their most active content makers and cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free moderation labor. Who could possibly have seen this coming?
Do you have any data to support that? My feeling is that not much changed after that. I feel like there is business as usual there. At least when I talk to my peers.
Subs I followed (and still rarely visit) became much harsher with moderation, to the point of being very difficult for new visitors to use; in a sub that is mostly for helping people adopt a very low carb diet
Some communities were unaffected. Some are still shut down. Some replaced mods who wouldn’t play by spez’s rules.
I’m not sure what the data would look like or how one would obtain it. Number of active moderators per day? Moderator satisfaction survey? Change in posting habits of top 1% posters?
I am speaking purely anecdotally from communities I know that shut down entirely and moderators who left. I have no way to estimate the scale of the exodus.
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Reddit’s value as a social media platform drops as it’s value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that’s was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.
Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.
In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.
Yes, I agree. In the end, Reddit lives off its reputation, just like every social media platform. Seriously, is there an effect that when you’re long enough the CEO of a company, you begin making decisions where it is obvious that they will negatively impact the user base and thus long-term survivability of a company? Is there a term for that?
I imagine your priorities become different.
You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.
Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.
Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.
Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”
I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. It’s even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.
I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.
You make some good points. I’d agree if it wasn’t for the API changes that fucked all the 3rd party apps and 3rd party tools like automod.
Even if it was priced well it still somehow filtered NSFW content out.
They clearly wanted more market share for the reddit app by any means necessary. It’s sad for all the mods that were ignored.
Sounds like Enshittification.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking. Examples of alleged enshittification have included Amazon, Bandcamp, Facebook, Google Search, Quora, Reddit, and Twitter.Thanks :)
You mean hubris?
Thanks, yes! Well, another word learned :)
More like stupris, amirite
When having a bacon and egg breakfast the hen participants the pig is committed.
as its* value to advertisers rises
Someone needs to redo this with the answer being “s p e z”
Is he Australian?
No idea
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I will say, though, anything that disincentives people to spam useless images and gifs in the comments, kind of like the next comment down, has its merits.
If there’s one thing I miss about Reddit, it’s that there was a lot less of this Discord-esc image spam over there than there is over here
Weren’t these assholes supposed to IPO like 6 months ago? lol
They were totally lined up to IPO. I think somebody told him to go all musk on it. I’m still not exactly sure how taking a big fat shit on the user communities face was supposed to impress the investors.
Well yeah, I’m probably not the only daily active user who stopped visiting all together… after 10+ years of daily active use. They brought this on themselves.
Same, but only a few years user. Sync for lemmy is so much better.
I loved Sync for Reddit as an app. But I already was seeing Reddit go downhill even before they killed the apps, that just sealed the deal for me. I was a digg refugee so sadly I’ve been through this before already.
Does your user name mean that you’re a lover of misspelling ready?
Anyone else posted this yet?
why does garfield have preposterously large bazongas
Does this represent some higher meaning or is it just Garfield fucking spez?
Yes
What a terrible day to have eyes
Fuck spez
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Critical hit to my self esteem.
Thank you for building up the community.
Let’s for a second take stock of what’s happening here.
The ad revenue is falling short of the projected prediction of what it was supposed to be. As in the profit from ad revenue did not reach that arbitrary number.
Reddit is still grossly profitable.
This is the same kind of headline that says Facebook lost 11 bagillion dollars but in reality they didn’t lose a dime they just didn’t make as much as they wanted to.
The difference with Facebook is that it is a public company, so it does have to grow every year to have value for investors.
Reddit doesn’t. It’s existing private investors can splot the profit and be just fine. They just want a huge payout that will only come from an IPO.
And the issue with consistent growth in billion dollar companies is that it’s not sustainable. We can’t just keep pilling on profits on top of profits to sate investors insecurities.
These morons will try though, their strategy invariably seems to be building the Jenga tower as high as possible, thinking they’ll be “quick” or “smart” enough to sell their shares before it tumbles.
It’s gambling, but with people’s livelihoods.
I can’t wait for all the news articles about the massive layoffs at Reddit, though it will be sad to see the massive droves of employees shuffling out the door with their personal effects like they did when the Enron scandal broke.
I can’t wait for all the news articles about the massive layoffs at Reddit, though it will be sad to see the massive droves of employees shuffling out the door with their personal effects like they did when the Enron scandal broke.
Are you not aware that public companies split the profits too? They do not need to grow to have value for investors.
Not all of them do that. There are growth stocks and dividend stocks. Growth stocks typically don’t pay dividends, but instead reinvest the dividend back into the company. Amazon, Alphabet and Berkshire Hathaway don’t pay dividends.
Of course not. But they can, whenever they choose to. Parent comment said they have to grow since they are public, unlike private companies like Reddit.
Yeah tell it to the shareholders
so it does have to grow every year to have value for investors
This gets said a lot but it is not true for a couple reasons.
1: With an IPO you’re not as dependent upon individual investors, and as your value grows - which often has nothing to do with your company’s performance, you obtain additional funding.
2: private or large-scale investors will literally have you sign contracts stating X% return on investment is what you owe them - once you surpass your return on investment, unless you seek additional funding, significant growth pressure is gone. Most companies immediately seek additional funding, which is how this gets interpreted as “requires perpetual growth.”
If this includes % of revenue, then yeah, your investor will want you to make wise choices, but they own that percentage in perpetuity, so there is generally not the pressure related to seeking new investment - they’re already priced in and getting their returns.
You can literally find examples of these contracts online by searching for “investor agreement sample.”
People usually only care about your growth as a function of how it correlates to a rise in your value. Most stock growth is entirely based on feels - it’s closer to social media than it is to any sort of accounting.
Nothing says you care to advertisers like single handedly blowing up your website by cutting off 25% or more of its userbase.
They feel like they get shorted because many of those users don’t contribute to ad revenue from 3rd party apps but instead of improving their app to lure users in they instead tell those users to fuck off.
A user is a user, even if they don’t contribute directly to ad revenue they contribute content to make the site more alluring for those who will contribute to ad revenue. As well they help spread the word about reddit to those who don’t use it regularly yet by sharing that content outside of reddit.
They were pretty short sighted by doing what they did.
I would have been happy to pay to get API access for 3rd party apps on my account. Maybe 1 or 2 dollars per account and month would have been reasonable to cover the costs without ad revenue. Double it to please greedy shareholders.
Instead they asked for such ludicrous amounts from 3rd party developers, basically telling them to fuck off.
Either they were mad for control or got greedy over their „golden data“ for AI training. Or both. In any case, they never were interested in finding a user friendly solution so fuck them.
Do you have a citation on that 25% figure?
It’s such bullshit, Reddit could have been so much more. Researching my latest purchase/obsession, and the only way to find anything that isn’t corporate sponsored reviews or AI content farming is to add the word “Reddit” to the end of the search.
As someone with an 11 year old account that I deleted during the TPA debacle, I fully recognise that there’s a huge problem here. Reddit created a place where people wanted to put their thoughts, ideas, and opinions, and now that they are cashing out TOO FUCKING BAD LAME EBD USER.
Edit: /oblig fuck you spez. Slimy little arsehole sold everyone out and thinks he deserves to be rich because his shitty site isn’t absolutely irredeemable.
Reddit was like the StackOverflow for life
…sometimes coding too We’re like regressing to friend’s or known in person people’s opinions, because Internet will be full of bot and sponsored content and opinions. Either way, double money for corporations, sponsored content ->more sales; people not trusting reviews and trying out stuff just to find out it’s rubbish ->more sales
11 year old account on Reddit too and I left it during TPA too. Had nearly 2 million karma. Same username as this one.
We did it, Lemmy!
Good, fuck spez.
Enough about my ex
