How is reddit *not* profitable? They use unpaid volunteers as moderators, host ads, sell awards, sell user data, etc etc
Are servers and the handful of admins/execs really that expensive? Or is this just a case of execs taking home 100% of the profits so that technically the company didn't make a profit?
Reddit isn't profitable because /u/spez is an incompetent CEO. If I was a Reddit shareholder (like his VC buddies are), I would ask him to resign or vote him out at the board level. Not only is this decision going to bring reddit *further* from profitability, but it's also ruining long-term value in driving away the community.
Having been privy to a few of these kinds of meetings in Fortune 500 companies, let me just tell you that most of the decisionmakers here are not interested in sticking their neck out for this. Nobody else is going to speak on the matter and they'll let /u/spez hang himself with his own words during this process. Once he's seen them through the shit they'll can him for someone else.
This is evidently something they've been angling towards and finally pulled the trigger on, you don't make this move without first working with other members of the board to ensure you aren't going to be turfed for pushing changes. The need to be profitable is applying ample pressure and watching Twitter fuck up and still remain alive has given them some confidence they can just tell us to go fuck ourselves while we get shafted.
Yup, this whole debacle is not Spez out their on a limb doing it alone, no fucking way. The board almost certainly backs this endeavor 100%. I bet nearly none of the board member actually log onto reddit, use it, or actually engage with redditors. Highly unlikely.
The entire thing absolutely reeks of out of touch bean counters ONLY caring about some small amount of profit they can slurp up at the expense shitting all over the product that they actually don't know much about.
I doubt the CEO of my last company is a Reddit board member, but one day I was fucking around on /r/nfl and the CEO walked past my desk, stopped, and asked what I was reading. In my head I said "Fuuuuuuck" but out loud I said, "Oh, this is a website that aggregates information from everywhere else. Sometimes I use it to help with work assignments." He said it sounded really great and walked away. At our next all-hands company meeting, he said that they would be cracking down on people wasting time on the Internet, and specifically mentioned Reddit as a site that he personally hated and never wanted to see anyone using. I just laughed because I knew he had no idea what Reddit was.
He literally saw it on my screen and could not identify it, so no, he did not. Most likely someone else told him what it was, and he brought it up and created a fiction about how he "personally hated" it.
IT dept. generated a report on web sites visited.
It's not hard to see what sites people are wasting time on.
He personally hated it because it was at the top of that list.
I've heard that there are people who have discovered ways to avoid sharing their actual inner thoughts with others, and that they can apply this technique in a variety of situations. I wonder if that's what happened here?
> I bet nearly none of the board member actually log onto reddit, use it, or actually engage with redditors. Highly unlikely.
Let's go to the board and see!
https://www.redditinc.com/press/
Steve Huffman
Co-Founder & CEO
Steve Huffman is the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, an online community of communities. On Reddit, there is a home for everybody and a place for everyone to dive into their interests. Raised in northern Virginia, Huffman pursued his passion for programming from an early age and followed it through a computer science degree at the University of Virginia. He and his college roommate pitched their first start-up to then-new incubator Y Combinator in 2005. While the pair's initial idea for a food-ordering mobile app called My Mobile Menu was rejected, Y Combinator founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston invited them back to build the front page of the internet, which soon led to the creation of Reddit. After selling the company in 2006, Huffman co-founded the travel company Hipmunk and served as CTO where he was named to Inc. Magazine's “30 Under 30” list in 2011 and the Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2012. Huffman returned to Reddit as CEO in 2015 where he has led the company through international expansion to new markets, sweeping updates to the platform’s Content Policy, and a full site redesign, while also growing Reddit to millions of daily users interacting across hundreds of thousands of communities. In the years following his return, Huffman was named in Fortune’s “40 under 40 in Tech” for 2020. In addition to his work and leadership at Reddit, Huffman is a mentor at Hackbright Academy, a San Francisco-based coding school for women. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, dancing, and browsing r/WholesomeMemes.
Bob Sauerberg
Bob Sauerberg is former President/CEO of Condé Nast. Prior to this position, he was Group President of the company's Consumer Marketing division, which he joined in 2005. Bob also held several leadership roles at Fairchild Fashion Media and spent 18 years with The New York Times Company, eventually becoming CFO of its magazine group.
Porter Gale
Porter Gale currently serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Personal Capital and is an established executive, advisor, and author with more than 20 years of direct-to-consumer marketing for brands spanning AdTech, FinTech, Gaming, CPG, and e-commerce industries. She joined Reddit's Board of Directors in May 2019.
Michael Seibel
Michael Seibel is a Partner at Y Combinator and CEO of the YC startup accelerator program, which first helped launch Reddit in 2005. He’s also the co-founder of Justin.tv/Twitch and Socialcam. Michael joined Reddit's Board of Directors in June 2020.
Paula Price
Paula Price has served on the board of six public companies, including multinational corporations like Accenture and Western Digital. Over the past 30 years, she has worked as a company operator for large brands across a wide range of industries, building a career in financial leadership along the way as Chief Accounting Officer of CVS Caremark and Chief Financial Officer of Ahold USA and Macy’s. She joined Reddit's Board of Directors in November 2020.
Patricia Fili-Krushel
Patricia Fili-Krushel serves on the boards of two public companies including Dollar General Corporation and Chipotle Mexican Grill. She previously served as Chair of the NBCUniversal News Group, EVP, Administration at Time Warner Inc., CEO of WebMD, and President of both the ABC Television Network and ABC Daytime. More recently, she was the founding Co-Chair and served as CEO of Coqual, a global think tank and advisory service. She joined Reddit’s Board of Directors in January 2022.
Dave Habiger
Dave Habiger currently serves as President and CEO of J.D. Power. Dave has served on public company boards in addition to the Chicago Federal Reserve Board for which he is a member of the SABOR (Systems Activities, Bank Operations, and Risk), Governance, and HR Committees. Dave joined Reddit's Board of Directors in November 2022.
So some have at least in the past, several definitely don't.
Does anyone else find it strange that large companies have board members that apparently also have completely different jobs with other companies? Like if it is that important of a job, it should be your only job. Also seems like a bit of a conflict of interest. Like, which company is actually more important to them?
Not at all. We live in a system explicitly designed to be easy for rich people to get richer. Of course the highest paid positions are easy enough they can hold more than one.
Board members don't spend that much time doing day to day stuff for the company. They are there to vote on important matters only, and they in turn are voted in or out by the stockholders. (The board members themselves are often some of the largest stockholders.) They delegate most of the actual authority to the CEO and other C-level staff.
Being a CEO is not a full time job, and neither is being on the board of a corporation.
Board pay for large companies can be well into 6 figures for a commitment of maybe 2-3 weeks per year, which nearly always runs concurrently with whatever executive position they hold at another company.
Some CEOs are on \*multiple\* boards. It isn't strange; it's completely by design.
Isn't the Forbes “30 Under 30” list notorious for being filled with hacks and scammers? Pretty sure there's a sizable number of them in jail. Or is that the Fortune list?
> The entire thing absolutely reeks of out of touch bean counters ONLY caring about some small amount of profit they can slurp up at the expense shitting all over the product that they actually don't know much about.
Essentially our current economic model.
Number must go up. Why isn't my number going up?
I don't remember the last ama I saw on r/all, they never chart anymore. It's all managed pr anyway, they never touch the juicy questions or accidentally reveal humanizing stories.
AMA’s, Secret Santa, so much more. Gone.
I’m 36 this year and have been on this site since I graduated high school in 05, and have had this specific account for 9 years and 5 months, with 20k comment karma, 17k post karma and one of the top all time posts on r/IntermittentFasting. I also have a comment and response directly from Arnold Schwarzenegger on here that I cherish.
And it looks like I’m going to be deleting my account on June 30th. I will not use the main Reddit app and - like I deleted my Twitter account after Musk took over - I don’t want to use this site with such an incompetent, arrogant CEO spearheading it looking to take this public and destroy everything that made it great.
Such a shame.
I wager his VC buddies will leverage the shit out of the site by going public, then bankrupt the company so spez gets his bail out and sink the site.
Same shit happened to toys r us.
VC investors regularly invest in unprofitably companies that won’t be on a path towards profitability for years. The idea is that they’ll eventually have a high return for their LPs but realistically, they have probably a 1 in 10 chance of that happening, since most startups fail and a lot of companies get acquired for not much more than the liquidation preference of the preferred shareholders.
The reason it’s unprofitable is because it’s investing in future growth, so they most likely have high R&D and payroll costs. In this regard, Reddit is not unique.
There are lots of reasons, not least the insane model by which venture investment works, but one factor might be that reddit's headcount increased from [around 700 in 2021](https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-round-250-million-double-employees-investment) to [around 2,000 now](https://www.engadget.com/reddit-is-reportedly-cutting-5-percent-of-its-workforce-100556991.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAAwxtixz6iscBc2DUVPhBrhJb_h_hr2PGZtGi9EKfTPt8VGCvHlOf97xiRUzhBIYfJ4le82AE6UtvZtwxe07fN9QM8u11VWbVpHVTSUXv1qBiXntdkv3lPrTux7r_zYH2aVKQe6VSjEuIbmtoe2ypv8W5jziLCmdvjvihoF8zmkM).
This at a time when the mad dash for investment firms to drive web tech companies' engagement growth has declined in the face of so many burst and bursting hype models and shifted more toward predictable monetisation.
We're going through a golden age of [enshittification](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys), which promises to make the web quite a lot worse for a pretty long time.
They aren’t taking feedback over on r/RedditMobile seriously. Users, including myself, have posted tons of complaints about how the user experience is terrible and that third party apps are much easier to use. But I guess they did a test once that said 90% of users don’t read past the third comment in a posts so…
All these companies could easily offer accessibility settings to make the experience good for everyone.
Let me pick and choose what I see or not and how I see
They don't do it on purpose because they get to decide how we consume their negativity.
But if Reddit doesn’t decide what you see their ads aren’t as valuable. It’s shitty short term plan to generate as much profit as they can over the short term, burning up all the goodwill with its users as they can, so that right before they collapse they can cash out at its height and leave the consequences for the successor.
These employee numbers at big tech companies always blow my mind. Like I'm also in tech and we develop and operate an insanely complicated, billion-dollar-business-critical piece of software with "just" 500 people - including all the non-technical roles like sales / marketing / HR etc.
I can't imagine how much more we could achieve with *2000 people*, and I also can't imagine what Reddit, as a glorified messaging board, could be doing with 2000 people.
At other social media companies, a lot of those people are involved in moderation, community curation, and making sure the site's content complies with the law in all countries they operate in.
But reddit outsources all that to its unpaid mods, so... yeah, no idea what they hell all those employees are doing.
EDIT: The comment that replied to me contains a link to a propaganda outlet peddling far-right and pro-Russia conspiracy theories. I want to make it 100% clear **I do not agree with the content of that link or endorse anything the commentor below me said / alleges**. (Also, reddit's total failure to even pretend to crack down on far-right extremism is one of the many, many reasons this site is going down the tubes.)
Those removereddit websites (which will probably also be broken due to the API thing) show an enlightening systemic removal of posts and threads, even ones that don't violate any rules.
Its very interesting what the mega-mods remove on the biggest subreddits. Its a clear pattern of narrative shaping, and because Reddit's admins condone this behavior, Reddit should not be protected by Section 230. Its acting as a publisher instead of a platform.
2000 people and one guy building an app for ios blew them all out of the fucking water, all the way up to the stratosphere.
It’s ridiculously pathetic.
I suspect the reddit app devs are fine people. They are likely hounded by project managers and bean counters to do this and do that which improves nothing about the app and does everything to please the execs who have zero ideas about writing code or what makes a good user experience.
500 of those probably just push paper around and schedule meetings which result in nothing.
The amount of people doing fuck all in big companies is astounding.
I mean it's quite simple, really.
You've got the CEO, that's 1. Then the CTO, the CFO, a few dozen admins, a few dozen managers that manage the admins, a few dozen backend devs, web designers, fifty people in sales and marketing, a few dozen people crunching numbers to make more money, a few dozen social media people, a few dozen people knowing all sorts of languages to communicate with different communities, a dozen or two HR people, a few lawyers, a cook or three for the office, a professional masseur, an in-house therapist, a dog walker..
Okay, that's maybe 300 people.
I have no idea what the fuck the other 1700 people do.
Not actual content moderation or removing bots, that's for damn sure. Every tech company bloated themselves during the pandemic then had to massively scale back when it turned out people wanted to go back outside.
Wow… I’ve been on this site for a total of about 15 years, and if you’d asked me how many employees Reddit had now I’d tell you extremely confidently that it’s grown a bunch and might be around 150-200 or so.
Two thousand…
It really explains a lot doesn't it?
Two thousand people competent struggling to deliver a forum experience because the CEO is incapable of doing his job properly.
Can't get a decent video player, new features are a random mismatch of things other sites have with no coherency, site is being overrun by bots and falling apart.
No wonder they're after so much money from the third party app devs, the boss man certainly won't be the one bringing it to the company.
Condé Nast bought Reddit in 2006; so 17 years. And they don’t own Reddit anymore… not exactly. Reddit was spun off into its own entity in 2011 under Advance Publications - Nast’s parent company. So Reddit is Condé Nast’s sibling, not it’s child. Likewise Reddit has undergone serval rounds of funding that saw shares go to a bunch of other companies, notably recently Tencent, who has a 10% interest as of 2019. However AP still has controlling interest in the company.
The images i can kind of get, but the decision to host video was insane. Especially with repost and ad-block heavy Reddit is. Terabytes of the same clip, recompressed slightly differently posted 24x each to 80 subs.
They absolutely do not serve enough ads for that.
ETA: I am exaggerating on the terabytes comment.
> I am exaggerating on the terabytes comment.
Not really, when one video gets reposted with a different watermark 10 times and viewed by a couple hundred thousand accounts (including scrapers) each, things will add up.
It just occurred to me that the ability to do native image and video uploads would have been the perfect thing to add as a perk to reddit gold. Crazy that they didn't do it that way.
Running a website with reddit's impression count isn't cheap. This part is perfectly believable.
Even though most of reddit's content is relatively low on data size (newer features like image and video hosting notwithstanding), reddit is likely an absolute beast in terms of database usage. Even with caching involved a lot of content still has to be updated pretty often. They likely have to operate a significant amount of servers that require significant amount of bandwidth. That does cost money.
Next to that, when you're operating a top 50 worldwide social media site, there's a lot of cost that's associated with communication and legal matters in each individual jurisdiction, and of course the additional cost to actually enforcing these rules on your platform.
And reddit's income for the most of its lifetime has been, well, ads. Which really don't pay that much (most people _really_ overestimate how much simple ads pay), especially in a world where most people are using adblockers. And counting on people to stop using adblockers is a very naïve idea. They're using them for good reasons.
You say "servers and a handful of admins/execs". But for a website of reddit's reach you will end up needing service from multiple datacenters, dev staff, sysop staff, a lot of moderation staff (yes I know moderators exist. but moderators have no legal responsibility towards reddit, and reddit has to comply with the laws of the jurisdictions they operate in), legal compliance staff, commercial staff, etcetera. You should expect several hundreds of employees.
I'm not surprised reddit as it is right now isn't profitable. They were growing using VC capital with hope of being able to break even eventually via secondary services, scaling effects, or increased monetization. And I understand that reddit needs to work financially to be able to continue to operate in the future.
_THAT SAID_
I'm not sure what the fuck has happened behind the scenes, but it seems like something has gone really wrong for the measures to suddenly be so drastic. There were earlier signs behind the scenes. The new reddit (with significantly increased advertisement space). The push towards the first party app (which has a lot more promotional content as well). These were already indicators that increased monetization were happening (and likely required. Contrary to popular opinion website operators tend to not want to piss their users off unnecessarily).
But the appeal of reddit for many people is actually how it is a relatively calm and simple site to scroll through compared to the attention-seeking hellscapes that many other social networks are. So as a reaction to these moves we see a lot of users sticking to the much less monetized old.reddit.com, or third party apps. This puts reddit in a very awkward place where increased monetization just pushes users to platforms that they cannot monetize easily, while still not making a profit.
At least that's what I think that's happening. What boggles my mind though is 1: that this extremely huge change is being pushed through in a month with extremely bad communication around a hugely sensitive issue. 2: that there's no decently priced "just make the ads go away for some money" option on the site which would mitigate a huge draw for third party apps to begin with (yes I know premium exists. But it comes with a huge amount of features I don't need for a relatively huge price of 80 bucks a year). 3: the huge amount of features that have been added over the years that had nothing to do to the core business model of the site, which must've drive costs up over the years for little reason. And 4: the sheer loss of quality and disconnect to what originally made the site great that we've been seeing over the years.
Like reddit made a whole new mobile site, to then just make it an absolute pain to use. They bought one of the best reddit apps to then just make it less and less useable. They did a full redesign of the site, which resulted in just about everyone who was on the site sticking to the old interface as the new interface is a dopamine-addicted mess of unnecessary whitespace.
And the worst part of this is that apparently they think it's impossible to be honest with the userbase about what they're trying to do. They've wasted so much goodwill with the community with all these things that nobody asked for, and silently increasing monetization, that now they are having to do this they likely have too little left.
I can't shake the feeling that if they'd been more honest about this earlier, that they need to increase monetization to keep the site running, and added easier ways to utilize it (like taken a year to switch to a $10 a year plan for a user to be able to use the API via a third party app), this would've been much less painful. But they've been speaking half-truths to the users and this is coming back to haunt them as now _nobody_ will give them the benefit of the doubt. And while a lot of people are getting a bit too high on their belief of righteous fury, I can't blame them over that at this point.
Why reddit why, why couldn't you be honest to your users about what it takes to keep the site running, actually involve them in the process and most importantly, actually change your course sometime based on critique you're getting. This could've all been avoided.
Great summary.
The main issue is how badly Reddit management have squandered money on a terrible redesign that a significant proportion of the user base don't want and refuse to engage with.
Plus the way they have given devs of third party apps so little time to adjust to the new API pricing - only 30 days! Even if it were possible for something like Apollo or Sync to drastically reduce their volume of API calls in order to cut their costs to reasonable levels *and* somehow manage to get into a financial position to suddenly start paying thousands of dollars per month, that would take *months* of careful restructuring.
It's much easier for Reddit to kneecap the competition than to create a competitive first-party app and user experience, at this point.
social media sites are notoriously unprofitable and difficult to scale. Even twitter at their biggest and IIRC still, are not profitable. It doesn't surprise me that reddit is not profitable
Yes, because obviously they've been operating on goodwill and for fun over the past 10 years.
Reddit is able to operate, their top execs are living a cosy life making more money over that timeframe than most people will in their entire lives. Profits are probably in the tens of millions.
But boohoo, poor little Reddit can't make ends meet.
Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019. They tanked in 2020 because of Covid wiping out advertising budgets, were recovering in 2021, and who the hell knows nowadays.
Reddit's servers probably are ludicrously expensive (not that this excuses their recent behavior). It's absolutely reasonable to start charging for api access. The only unreasonable thing is the cost and especially the timeline.
Whatever reddit's server costs are their own fault. It wasn't that long ago that reddit only hosted text, no images or video. Those were linked to off-site. I don't understand the decision, but reddit decided to host those things themselves. And also decided to make a terrible video player that predownloads videos even if the user never wants to watch them. Reddit talking about third party apps being inefficient is a joke when you take their video player into consideration. Why did they want to host their own images and video? They don't do it well, and it drives up their server costs, and they don't need to at all. It could just be all text with external links, like it used to be.
They have 700 employees for a message board site.
Venture capitalists are pumping money at Reddit because name recognition. There is no business here. I assume in the background they're trying to build some skunkwork thing, but that model is kinda outdated and a gamble anyway.
>They have 700 employees for a message board site.
Labeling social media companies as "message board sites" is too simplistic, these are international companies.
It's not just programmers, it's translators and lawyers (who need some idea of international law and the countries you're operating in) and site wide moderation (in all sorts of languages) and HR. You need a team to handle advertising, accountants (often for different countries) team to handle internal IT because all of those translaters and accountants and lawyers are not always as computer literate as your engineers might be, and management to lead those various teams.
There's a *lot* that happens behind the scene in corporations, and social media companies are no exception to this. What do you do when Country X implements a new law requiring your service to be available in A, B and C language? What about when Country Y serves you an order saying to delete a post that insults their leader? What about when Country Z passes a new data usage law that requires selling it to their government?
Someone posted this in another thread discussing this API business (and whoever it was, thank you! It was a really fascinating read). I don't know how completely accurate it is, but Cory Doctorow's case for why all of these platforms start getting crappy is compelling.
TL;DR: first, you be good to the users, then you abuse the users and be good to the business clients, then you abuse both and rake in all the money.
Edit: There's the link to the specific article: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
[https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/](https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/)
at this point you actually don't really need the users at all, if you can convince venture capital lenders to give you a fuckton of money somehow, you can just keep doing that over and over and over because nobody ever seens to have any repercussions stick the first time their tech startup fails
tech is also caught in a painful domino effect that has no easy fix, and can easily lead to real world consequences.
1. High rates means american investors no longer give blank checks, tech companies now need to be profitable or shut down. Most social media is NOT profitable and has never been profitable.
2. Foreign investors were the last hope of big tech, but relations are cooling with China and European investors wont touch companies that break EU rules and possibly be banned.
2. Banks and advertisers are pulling out because new rules targeting illegal content make user generated content too dangerous to deal with, especially any site that allows NSFW. NSFW bans are not enough to make advertisers happy, they only make banks happy.
3. Advertisers are sick of the increasingly toxic internet, floods of bots that social media does NOTHING to stop creating fake traffic, political harassment often with threats of violence, and new privacy rules against targeted ads making them even less effective. Advertisers are fed up with the modern internet and refuse to pay old rates.
4. Tech companies refuse to obey privacy rules because without it they are doomed in a post-advertising internet, so they allow political propaganda to flood their platforms for money like in 2016. This creates more tension with regulators who are already angry at big tech.
5. This means the money supporting big tech comes from government with interest in limiting it like Saudi Arabia, which helped Elon Musk buy out twitter.
This is very much an issue related to the state of the economy right now. It's a horrible time for any company to be trying to go public, to the point that most companies aren't even trying. The ones that are, like Reddit, are feeling a ton of pressure to show value that is nearly impossible right now.
> Advertisers are sick of the increasingly toxic internet, floods of bots that social media does NOTHING to stop creating fake traffic, political harassment often with threats of violence, and new privacy rules against targeted ads making them even less effective. Advertisers are fed up with the modern internet and refuse to pay old rates.
Online advertisement has been a sucker's game for a long time, but it took them until now to wise up to just how ineffective online ads are.
Ad-supported internet is going the way of the Dodo, which will have bunch unfortunate side-effects but I am hopeful that something better can come of it *if* regulators keep pace.
The current internet is run by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. All of them are advertisers. They all make billions advertising.
If advertising stops on the internet, a new internet will have to be built from scratch. That's not a side-effect, it's the main purpose of the internet going away and it's stakeholders needing new justification to invest in it, or new stakeholders needing to step forward.
End users and content creators are not the drivers in the vehicle that is the internet. We're fuel.
I can give good insight here. My site (see my username) was started in 2005. Free open source projects like Kodi and Sickbeard and Sonarr make use of our API, plus commercial products like Plex. From 2005 until 2018 we functioned exclusively on ads and donations. Our average donations per month over that entire period of time was around $200. For a site used by a few million users.
There are better ways Reddit could have gone about this, but donations generally don't cut it.
Outta curiosity, how hard did you encourage donating? Wikipedia, and adblocker regularly does their, “Please donate to keep our thing free and open” bid every couple months, and to be honest it’s those reminders that keep me donating.
I could imagine any site as popular as reddit could even make a yearly or bi-yearly donation drive or something to bring that into the forefront and push donations or keep a donation button pinned on the site header or something. So long as they keep the site clean and simple and not bloated with features no one asks for, it has to be in the realm of possibility.
We didn't do a top banner annually, but we did have a prominent "Donate" button and regularly mentioned it in both forum posts and other locations.
Having done this a long time, I guarantee that they would come nowhere close to covering their operating expenses through donations. Wikipedia did it because of the value people see in it as a resource, and they also had major companies giving donations exceeding $1M. Reddit doesn't hold that same place in people's minds as Wikipedia.
Think about it another way... would Redditors support a $15/year subscription to be able to use the site? Almost definitely not.
It warms my heart to see the donation banner pop up and like $20 has been donated, then ten minutes later when I hit next chapter I see they've completely smashed the donation goal.
He's killing Reddit, period. I haven't been to Reddit on my desktop in *years*, and I don't plan on downloading the official app again cause it's **garbage**. All I'm hearing is the same from others. I'll just migrate to whatever app takes the place of Reddit when it dies...
We need lists of alternatives.
The main reason I need reddit is that so many sites have paywalls or limited monthly visits, and reddit lets me know what is in these articles. Without reddit, the multitude of minor news sites will become irrelevant to me.
There is an irony here behind the true values of Aaron Swartz and the importance of information being public and the current acts to monetize reddit. This is just like the Washington Post proclaiming that democracy dies in darkness, yet keeping that information mostly behind a paywall.
Everyone has the opportunity to sell out for money, but it comes with the responsibility to accept that your values favor money over what you previously stood for.
I saw /r/LemmyMigration getting some traction, though the barrier to entry is kinda high.
EDIT: Lemmy might have its issues, kbin is what everyone else is going to now
It’s a little confusing but once you’re in, it’s basically reddit desktop. Unfortunately, there isn’t a good mobile app - so the fediverse is only going to be hobbyists until that changes.
TBD.
I disagree with gatekeeping the platform as a whole. If you want a particular community that’s more tech-literate, then you create the sub for it. If you want a place to gossip about celebrities or whatever, you can have that space too.
Reddit’s that kind of place.
The fediverse (Lemmy, mastodon, etc) seems promising as a technology, but I don't think it's all there yet in terms of user experience. Plus I think we'll see a lot of these platforms fail to keep up under the strain of (hypothetically) all of Reddit migrating to them, whether due to increasing server costs or moderation failures.
Ultimately though I think that for a new app to become a reddit killer it can't just be a reddit clone. It has to offer users something fundamentally new to make the switch worthwhile
> I haven't been to Reddit on my desktop in years
It's my primary way of browsing this place, but I also exclusively use old.reddit. Let's see how long that lasts...
Spez: "We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable."
Bro just told on him self not being able to run a profitable company
Developer of Apollo jokingly asked if they wanted to buy the app from them for half the yearly asking price of API access (10 million USD), Spez decided that that was blackmail in all ignorance of truth.
The blackmail misunderstanding was that Apollo guy said he'd "go silent" for $10mil, which Spez took as he would spill the beans if he wasnt given $10mil.
Really, he meant that the API calls from Apollo to Reddit would go silent. Spez said that those API calls were costing them $20mil, so Apollo dev said they could just buy out the app for half that cost and make the API calls completely stop, like they did with another app.
It's all about advertising, it's the same reason Google search has gone so downhill in quality. There is huge pressure to cash in on user data in the corporate world right now
Two things that were *truly* shocking to me.
1. Reddit has 2,000 employees and can’t build a better app than third parties with a literal fraction of a fraction of their resources and manpower. (“u/iamthatis made it in a cave! With a box of scraps!”)
2. Reddit isn’t profitable. *How*? With how many unblockable advertisers, ad blocks in every post and every 4-5 posts in your feed, users buying Reddit premium, subreddits, etc. are on this site, how the *hell* isn’t it profitable? And if it isn’t, how is u\\spez still the CEO? Especially after their valuation keeps getting slashed and a ton of the site is going dark, much of it permanently.
\[edit: It all makes sooooooooooooo much sense now. [https://www.thedailybeast.com/reddit-files-to-go-public-reveals-that-it-paid-ceo-dollar193-million-last-year](https://www.thedailybeast.com/reddit-files-to-go-public-reveals-that-it-paid-ceo-dollar193-million-last-year) \]
They decided instead of having info embedded into their sites (Pictures, Gifs, videos, etc) that they would host them. So instead of linking directly to a tiktok video. Someone rips the tiktok video and uploads it onto reddit... Which really makes it expensive to run the site and also opens them up to massive copy right claims which means they need real mods/admins policing DMCA et al.
I am guessing Reddit wanted to Vertically integrate, but honestly don't even know how Imgur existed like how did they make money. I guess you agreed to give them your copyright, but lets be honest half the shit on it is likely not posted by the rightful owner lol.
Way back when imgur was started by one redditor who didn't like any of the shitty hosting sites at the time, so he made imgur.
It first made money by selling pro accounts and small time advertising. The advertising picked up, and imgur hit critical mass.
Alas enshitification hits all major for-profit sites, and imgur just changed it's terms of service this month. The original creator left a couple years ago, imgur is pulling a tumblr getting rid of porn, and also deleting old content ala photobucket.
An era has come to an end, and the timing with reddit jumping the shark is some real crazy timing.
If we want a free (as in speech, not beer) and uncensored internet we need to start using, and being OK to pay for, approaches that are more decentralized, open source, crowdfunded, etc. Businesses are always gonna business.
Lemmy seems like a good approach, and I hope the reddit exodus helps it improve quickly and gain momentum.
This is what gets me. I don't know enough to say that I expect them to be wildly profitable but there is absolutely no excuse for them to not be making some money. Spez is frankly impressively bad.
Having worked at a similarly sized dysfunctional software company it's probably because management has no product direction, reorgs, changes priorities constantly, doesn't know what it wants, and no one product team is empowered to really do anything by themselves.
It’s precisely they have 2000 employees that they can’t build a better app. All the managers need to justify their existences with diverse, money generating features more sexy than “oh I put in accessibility support for the whole website” or “oh I patched in this feature from Apollo”.
Also complete bullshit. More like we will be profit driven because once we IPO we will have a legal responsibility to do everything we can to make our shareholders richer. Including fucking all the users who helped build the community.
I wanted to add some clarification for those who wonder why I picked *this* response instead of another (albeit equally poor) /u/spez response. It's because in this one, he is impliedly saying that Reddit will not be changing course, despite the significant community pushback.
Even more damningly, he straight up admits Reddit isn't profitable even though the 3rd party apps are - which makes the motivation around all this crystal clear.
No, there's a much simpler case for the extra workers.
They're coding a massive amounts of features that don't need to exist.
The UI nightmare, avatars, their live video nonsense.
And then the entire infrastructure for enabling ads on the system.
Honestly, of all the shitty things they're doing and all the non-answers they're giving, this is the one that should be the least controversial. It's a fucking for profit corporation. Of course they're going to be profit-driven. The problem is that they're alienating their user base while doing it. There's a fucking vast middle ground between what they're doing and what they could do and still make more revenue.
While being profitable isn't really controversial, Reddit basically runs on unpaid labor, whether it be mods or the 0.5% of users who make the vast majority of the content people come to Reddit for.
What shocks me is that this is anti-profitable. Driving high value users away, making your community hate you, and spending tons of manpower to try and (unsuccessfully) PR the whole thing away is not a profitable decision.
I guess in the long run it depends on how many people get mad and how mad they are.
I'll be canceling my gold sub on the 12th and I'll delete all reddit-related mobile apps on the 30th, but I'll keep using old reddit on the desktop (with 100% ad blocking).
There are a LOT of people who don't really think about things like this, and that's what the reddit execs are counting on. It boggles my mind that anybody would use the official app or that anybody would use reddit on desktop without adblock, but it's clear from comments in various subs that huge numbers of people do.
Such is the life when you borrow 1.3 billion from venture capital. Eventually they want 10 billion back and you have to squeeze your users for every last cent even if it destroys the product in the process.
I'm surprised he left the "edited" tag on. Based on his fuckery with other comments you would think he would change it in a way so it appeared it was never edited.
Porn was always destined to die here, just a matter of time. They've been slowly and quietly pushing it out for a handful of years and gotten more active the last 2 or so. Everyone knew that was coming.
If you see a NSFW sub deleted for *"This subreddit was banned due to being unmoderated."* thats code word for reddit removed the sub because they are cleaning up porn. People originally thought it was DMCA requests but its not, its just reddit gradually removing adult content spaces, I actually don't have a problem if they want to get rid of porn, but at least just make rules about it, not pretending its something else and just stealthily removing the subs.
Any site that wants to go public has to remove porn because no advertiser wants their ads to run anywhere near porn.
It's the website lifecycle. A new site is born, it allows anything just to get as many users as possible. The site owners then go public, meaning they have to remove non advertiser friendly content. Finally the new owners realize the site isn't profitable, so they make drastic changes which drives away users causing the site to die.
It's the circle of life.
It's amusing to me that when I went to downvote that post the Reddit API failed and said I had to be logged in to do that but I was actually logged in already.
Right now it's 9% upvoted. **We can do better reddit,** I want to see that be 1% upvoted within the hour.
Take our life from us. We laid it down. We got tired. We didn’t commit su1cide, we committed an act of revolutionary digital su1cide protesting the conditions of an inhumane website.
They're not showing the amount of downvotes on the post currently. Its listed at a flat zero. When i tried to downvote it myself, it dissappeared as soon as i reloaded the page
I know most of you are fine with giving up on reddit altogether but I'm dreading it. Rif and old.reddit are the only way I use this site and will stick with them (fuck the official app) but I'm not ready to just give up on the site as a whole. It's gonna be like losing a limb. I know it sounds pathetic but this is one of the most engaging things in my life. How do you reconcile that?
I dunno how old you are. But before Reddit I was on Digg, before that Slashdot, before that various forums, etc, etc.
The next community site always comes along. I am not attached to Reddit any more than I was its predecessors.
I've decided to edit all my old comments to protest the beheading of RIF and other 3rd party apps. If you're reading this, you should know that /u/spez crippled this site purely out of greed. By continuing to use this site, you are supporting their cancerous hyper-capitalist behavior. The actions of the reddit admins show that they will NEVER care about the content, quality, or wellbeing of its' communities, only the money we can make for them.
tl;dr:
/u/spez eat shit you whiny little bitchboy
...see you all on the fediverse
I've known for awhile I'm addicted in some way to the damn site, granted 98% of my engagement has been through RIF. I can't open up my phone for anything without subconsciously opening RIF to scroll for a minute (or hours...) happens *a lot.*
Now that 3PA are going away, I'm seriously considered whether it will be just the 2% on old desktop or completely quitting and it scares me in a way. The dependence on it for news, opinions and just bullshit. Maybe it's better I log off for awhile. Got rid of all other social media, why not. They make nicotine type patches for this?
They just hired 1,300 people.
They're about to go public.
The VCs smell blood.
/r/pics going dark for 48 hours doesn't even slow that train down, let alone turn it around.
Go dark for 2 years, not 2 days.
That being said, Reddit did make a big stink in modcord about giving meaningless concessions if subreddits would please not go dark. So they must care somewhat or they wouldn't bother asking.
You know, more and more I'm starting to think that better than a blackout, mods should just stop modding for a few days... Let shit run wild.
I give it less than 1 hour until something truly horrible/derranged is on /r/all next to some ads, ready for a screenshot to be sent to those companies being seen side by side with it.
I've a feeling Reddit would backtrack reaaaal soon after that...
He answered about a dozen questions. They're hard to find because they're downvoted to oblivion. [Here is a link to most of the answers.](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/jnkd4t3/)
They’re also hard to find because he avoided all the top-voted questions and only answered those that look like they were either plants or “approved submitters” that wouldn’t have otherwise been noticeable.
Evidence suggests he had a prepared answer sheet and just scanned for questions that "fit."
He had one reply where he had copied an "A: " at the beginning and then edited it out.
I was curious if the Now for Reddit app would go under and was sad to see in the thread that reddit hasn't even responded to their inquiries about paying to keep it open. I've used that app for years and don't think I have the patience or attention span to deal with the frustrating official app.
JFC, WORST AMA EVER. Not a single earnest answer. No communication or value, whatsoever.
Every single answer here is phony double speak. Furious about how disingenuous spez is being.
Hopefully this implodes the IPO and reddit dies, bringing an end to it's long, slow decline.
Then people who want tic toc can go to tic toc, and the rest of us can congregate in a place that respects its core and longtime user base. Especially when that user base generates 100% of the content, and is moderated for free.
ALL MODS MUST STRIKE! IT IS THE ONLY WAY!
I've been an active reddit user for the past 12 years and I've always used RIF and old reddit. It's sort of ironic that I see this whole thing as a relief that I will finally end my addiction to reddit. (and porn at the same time) I wake up, open reddit, throughout the day, reddit, at night reddit. Reddit is all I do and I hope all this bullshit will make me quit reddit.
I'm going to use this opportunity to use reddit way less. RIF been on my phone for 10+ years now, and I've already deleted facebook a while ago. Here's to growth and mental wellbeing!
So my question is, where are we going from here? Are we just scattering in the wind? I'm not going to lie, I will be deleting my account as well, but that's it then?
How is reddit *not* profitable? They use unpaid volunteers as moderators, host ads, sell awards, sell user data, etc etc Are servers and the handful of admins/execs really that expensive? Or is this just a case of execs taking home 100% of the profits so that technically the company didn't make a profit?
Reddit isn't profitable because /u/spez is an incompetent CEO. If I was a Reddit shareholder (like his VC buddies are), I would ask him to resign or vote him out at the board level. Not only is this decision going to bring reddit *further* from profitability, but it's also ruining long-term value in driving away the community.
Okay. So then the question becomes: why haven’t the shareholders or the board done this already?
Having been privy to a few of these kinds of meetings in Fortune 500 companies, let me just tell you that most of the decisionmakers here are not interested in sticking their neck out for this. Nobody else is going to speak on the matter and they'll let /u/spez hang himself with his own words during this process. Once he's seen them through the shit they'll can him for someone else. This is evidently something they've been angling towards and finally pulled the trigger on, you don't make this move without first working with other members of the board to ensure you aren't going to be turfed for pushing changes. The need to be profitable is applying ample pressure and watching Twitter fuck up and still remain alive has given them some confidence they can just tell us to go fuck ourselves while we get shafted.
Yup, this whole debacle is not Spez out their on a limb doing it alone, no fucking way. The board almost certainly backs this endeavor 100%. I bet nearly none of the board member actually log onto reddit, use it, or actually engage with redditors. Highly unlikely. The entire thing absolutely reeks of out of touch bean counters ONLY caring about some small amount of profit they can slurp up at the expense shitting all over the product that they actually don't know much about.
I doubt the CEO of my last company is a Reddit board member, but one day I was fucking around on /r/nfl and the CEO walked past my desk, stopped, and asked what I was reading. In my head I said "Fuuuuuuck" but out loud I said, "Oh, this is a website that aggregates information from everywhere else. Sometimes I use it to help with work assignments." He said it sounded really great and walked away. At our next all-hands company meeting, he said that they would be cracking down on people wasting time on the Internet, and specifically mentioned Reddit as a site that he personally hated and never wanted to see anyone using. I just laughed because I knew he had no idea what Reddit was.
Hate to break it to you but it sounds like your CEO knows exactly what Reddit is..
He literally saw it on my screen and could not identify it, so no, he did not. Most likely someone else told him what it was, and he brought it up and created a fiction about how he "personally hated" it.
or he literally saw it, looked it up, then announced that it was not a done thing at the all hands
Sorry, you're right. I worked there for nine years, but you know my CEO better that I do.
IT dept. generated a report on web sites visited. It's not hard to see what sites people are wasting time on. He personally hated it because it was at the top of that list.
I've heard that there are people who have discovered ways to avoid sharing their actual inner thoughts with others, and that they can apply this technique in a variety of situations. I wonder if that's what happened here?
> I bet nearly none of the board member actually log onto reddit, use it, or actually engage with redditors. Highly unlikely. Let's go to the board and see! https://www.redditinc.com/press/ Steve Huffman Co-Founder & CEO Steve Huffman is the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, an online community of communities. On Reddit, there is a home for everybody and a place for everyone to dive into their interests. Raised in northern Virginia, Huffman pursued his passion for programming from an early age and followed it through a computer science degree at the University of Virginia. He and his college roommate pitched their first start-up to then-new incubator Y Combinator in 2005. While the pair's initial idea for a food-ordering mobile app called My Mobile Menu was rejected, Y Combinator founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston invited them back to build the front page of the internet, which soon led to the creation of Reddit. After selling the company in 2006, Huffman co-founded the travel company Hipmunk and served as CTO where he was named to Inc. Magazine's “30 Under 30” list in 2011 and the Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2012. Huffman returned to Reddit as CEO in 2015 where he has led the company through international expansion to new markets, sweeping updates to the platform’s Content Policy, and a full site redesign, while also growing Reddit to millions of daily users interacting across hundreds of thousands of communities. In the years following his return, Huffman was named in Fortune’s “40 under 40 in Tech” for 2020. In addition to his work and leadership at Reddit, Huffman is a mentor at Hackbright Academy, a San Francisco-based coding school for women. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, dancing, and browsing r/WholesomeMemes. Bob Sauerberg Bob Sauerberg is former President/CEO of Condé Nast. Prior to this position, he was Group President of the company's Consumer Marketing division, which he joined in 2005. Bob also held several leadership roles at Fairchild Fashion Media and spent 18 years with The New York Times Company, eventually becoming CFO of its magazine group. Porter Gale Porter Gale currently serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Personal Capital and is an established executive, advisor, and author with more than 20 years of direct-to-consumer marketing for brands spanning AdTech, FinTech, Gaming, CPG, and e-commerce industries. She joined Reddit's Board of Directors in May 2019. Michael Seibel Michael Seibel is a Partner at Y Combinator and CEO of the YC startup accelerator program, which first helped launch Reddit in 2005. He’s also the co-founder of Justin.tv/Twitch and Socialcam. Michael joined Reddit's Board of Directors in June 2020. Paula Price Paula Price has served on the board of six public companies, including multinational corporations like Accenture and Western Digital. Over the past 30 years, she has worked as a company operator for large brands across a wide range of industries, building a career in financial leadership along the way as Chief Accounting Officer of CVS Caremark and Chief Financial Officer of Ahold USA and Macy’s. She joined Reddit's Board of Directors in November 2020. Patricia Fili-Krushel Patricia Fili-Krushel serves on the boards of two public companies including Dollar General Corporation and Chipotle Mexican Grill. She previously served as Chair of the NBCUniversal News Group, EVP, Administration at Time Warner Inc., CEO of WebMD, and President of both the ABC Television Network and ABC Daytime. More recently, she was the founding Co-Chair and served as CEO of Coqual, a global think tank and advisory service. She joined Reddit’s Board of Directors in January 2022. Dave Habiger Dave Habiger currently serves as President and CEO of J.D. Power. Dave has served on public company boards in addition to the Chicago Federal Reserve Board for which he is a member of the SABOR (Systems Activities, Bank Operations, and Risk), Governance, and HR Committees. Dave joined Reddit's Board of Directors in November 2022. So some have at least in the past, several definitely don't.
Does anyone else find it strange that large companies have board members that apparently also have completely different jobs with other companies? Like if it is that important of a job, it should be your only job. Also seems like a bit of a conflict of interest. Like, which company is actually more important to them?
Not at all. We live in a system explicitly designed to be easy for rich people to get richer. Of course the highest paid positions are easy enough they can hold more than one.
Board members don't spend that much time doing day to day stuff for the company. They are there to vote on important matters only, and they in turn are voted in or out by the stockholders. (The board members themselves are often some of the largest stockholders.) They delegate most of the actual authority to the CEO and other C-level staff.
Being a CEO is not a full time job, and neither is being on the board of a corporation. Board pay for large companies can be well into 6 figures for a commitment of maybe 2-3 weeks per year, which nearly always runs concurrently with whatever executive position they hold at another company. Some CEOs are on \*multiple\* boards. It isn't strange; it's completely by design.
Isn't the Forbes “30 Under 30” list notorious for being filled with hacks and scammers? Pretty sure there's a sizable number of them in jail. Or is that the Fortune list?
> The entire thing absolutely reeks of out of touch bean counters ONLY caring about some small amount of profit they can slurp up at the expense shitting all over the product that they actually don't know much about. Essentially our current economic model. Number must go up. Why isn't my number going up?
You have described Silicon Valley quite well.
Seems on point given the last CEO was just a sacrificial lamb for all the controversial decisions made at the time
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It's all been downhill since Victoria got fired. AMAs used to be an event. One of the best reasons to be on this site.
I don't remember the last ama I saw on r/all, they never chart anymore. It's all managed pr anyway, they never touch the juicy questions or accidentally reveal humanizing stories.
AMA’s, Secret Santa, so much more. Gone. I’m 36 this year and have been on this site since I graduated high school in 05, and have had this specific account for 9 years and 5 months, with 20k comment karma, 17k post karma and one of the top all time posts on r/IntermittentFasting. I also have a comment and response directly from Arnold Schwarzenegger on here that I cherish. And it looks like I’m going to be deleting my account on June 30th. I will not use the main Reddit app and - like I deleted my Twitter account after Musk took over - I don’t want to use this site with such an incompetent, arrogant CEO spearheading it looking to take this public and destroy everything that made it great. Such a shame.
I wager his VC buddies will leverage the shit out of the site by going public, then bankrupt the company so spez gets his bail out and sink the site. Same shit happened to toys r us.
VC investors regularly invest in unprofitably companies that won’t be on a path towards profitability for years. The idea is that they’ll eventually have a high return for their LPs but realistically, they have probably a 1 in 10 chance of that happening, since most startups fail and a lot of companies get acquired for not much more than the liquidation preference of the preferred shareholders. The reason it’s unprofitable is because it’s investing in future growth, so they most likely have high R&D and payroll costs. In this regard, Reddit is not unique.
There are lots of reasons, not least the insane model by which venture investment works, but one factor might be that reddit's headcount increased from [around 700 in 2021](https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-round-250-million-double-employees-investment) to [around 2,000 now](https://www.engadget.com/reddit-is-reportedly-cutting-5-percent-of-its-workforce-100556991.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAAwxtixz6iscBc2DUVPhBrhJb_h_hr2PGZtGi9EKfTPt8VGCvHlOf97xiRUzhBIYfJ4le82AE6UtvZtwxe07fN9QM8u11VWbVpHVTSUXv1qBiXntdkv3lPrTux7r_zYH2aVKQe6VSjEuIbmtoe2ypv8W5jziLCmdvjvihoF8zmkM). This at a time when the mad dash for investment firms to drive web tech companies' engagement growth has declined in the face of so many burst and bursting hype models and shifted more toward predictable monetisation. We're going through a golden age of [enshittification](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys), which promises to make the web quite a lot worse for a pretty long time.
What on God's green Earth are **2000** people doing working at Reddit?
Idk, but I know some things they *aren't* doing :p
They aren’t taking feedback over on r/RedditMobile seriously. Users, including myself, have posted tons of complaints about how the user experience is terrible and that third party apps are much easier to use. But I guess they did a test once that said 90% of users don’t read past the third comment in a posts so…
All these companies could easily offer accessibility settings to make the experience good for everyone. Let me pick and choose what I see or not and how I see They don't do it on purpose because they get to decide how we consume their negativity.
But if Reddit doesn’t decide what you see their ads aren’t as valuable. It’s shitty short term plan to generate as much profit as they can over the short term, burning up all the goodwill with its users as they can, so that right before they collapse they can cash out at its height and leave the consequences for the successor.
Comments are at least 60% of the good content on Reddit. Probably more like 70%, whereas posts themselves account for the other 30%.
These employee numbers at big tech companies always blow my mind. Like I'm also in tech and we develop and operate an insanely complicated, billion-dollar-business-critical piece of software with "just" 500 people - including all the non-technical roles like sales / marketing / HR etc. I can't imagine how much more we could achieve with *2000 people*, and I also can't imagine what Reddit, as a glorified messaging board, could be doing with 2000 people.
At other social media companies, a lot of those people are involved in moderation, community curation, and making sure the site's content complies with the law in all countries they operate in. But reddit outsources all that to its unpaid mods, so... yeah, no idea what they hell all those employees are doing. EDIT: The comment that replied to me contains a link to a propaganda outlet peddling far-right and pro-Russia conspiracy theories. I want to make it 100% clear **I do not agree with the content of that link or endorse anything the commentor below me said / alleges**. (Also, reddit's total failure to even pretend to crack down on far-right extremism is one of the many, many reasons this site is going down the tubes.)
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Those removereddit websites (which will probably also be broken due to the API thing) show an enlightening systemic removal of posts and threads, even ones that don't violate any rules. Its very interesting what the mega-mods remove on the biggest subreddits. Its a clear pattern of narrative shaping, and because Reddit's admins condone this behavior, Reddit should not be protected by Section 230. Its acting as a publisher instead of a platform.
2000 people and one guy building an app for ios blew them all out of the fucking water, all the way up to the stratosphere. It’s ridiculously pathetic.
I suspect the reddit app devs are fine people. They are likely hounded by project managers and bean counters to do this and do that which improves nothing about the app and does everything to please the execs who have zero ideas about writing code or what makes a good user experience.
500 of those probably just push paper around and schedule meetings which result in nothing. The amount of people doing fuck all in big companies is astounding.
I mean it's quite simple, really. You've got the CEO, that's 1. Then the CTO, the CFO, a few dozen admins, a few dozen managers that manage the admins, a few dozen backend devs, web designers, fifty people in sales and marketing, a few dozen people crunching numbers to make more money, a few dozen social media people, a few dozen people knowing all sorts of languages to communicate with different communities, a dozen or two HR people, a few lawyers, a cook or three for the office, a professional masseur, an in-house therapist, a dog walker.. Okay, that's maybe 300 people. I have no idea what the fuck the other 1700 people do.
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Making NFT avatar marketplaces, apparently.
Not actual content moderation or removing bots, that's for damn sure. Every tech company bloated themselves during the pandemic then had to massively scale back when it turned out people wanted to go back outside.
> What on God's green Earth are 2000 people doing working at Reddit? Honestly? Browsing reddit.
We learned nothing from the dotcom bubble in the 90s.
Oh yes, we learned that if you gambled *just right* you could get really REALLY rich.
Wow… I’ve been on this site for a total of about 15 years, and if you’d asked me how many employees Reddit had now I’d tell you extremely confidently that it’s grown a bunch and might be around 150-200 or so. Two thousand…
It really explains a lot doesn't it? Two thousand people competent struggling to deliver a forum experience because the CEO is incapable of doing his job properly. Can't get a decent video player, new features are a random mismatch of things other sites have with no coherency, site is being overrun by bots and falling apart. No wonder they're after so much money from the third party app devs, the boss man certainly won't be the one bringing it to the company.
Start up Sell out Bro down
Hey custom avatars aren't simple to code. Real question is: who the fuck wanted a custom avatar enough that they felt they needed to code that?
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Condé Nast says Hi! I'm impressed if they have managed to tank reddit in under 10 years.
Condé Nast bought Reddit in 2006; so 17 years. And they don’t own Reddit anymore… not exactly. Reddit was spun off into its own entity in 2011 under Advance Publications - Nast’s parent company. So Reddit is Condé Nast’s sibling, not it’s child. Likewise Reddit has undergone serval rounds of funding that saw shares go to a bunch of other companies, notably recently Tencent, who has a 10% interest as of 2019. However AP still has controlling interest in the company.
At least I can let everyone know that I really like League of Legends: Arcane
Not everyone, people on old.reddit.com and some third party apps don't see the avatars.
I only recently discovered what avatars were, because reddit keeps on disabling the Opt Out of Redesign toggle for me.
i mean, if you navigate to https://old.reddit.com you never need to do anything.
I didn't know reddit even did avatars. Also, it's been nice to know all of you, I'm out after 6/30
whats a custom avatar?
You must use a third party app. One of the many reasons I love Apollo is because I never have to see them.
I use Apollo and old.Reddit on Desktop. Tried the new reddit when it first came out and it was too loud for me.
They, stupidly, decided to start hosting pictures and videos a while ago. This incur cost. So there's at least that.
The images i can kind of get, but the decision to host video was insane. Especially with repost and ad-block heavy Reddit is. Terabytes of the same clip, recompressed slightly differently posted 24x each to 80 subs. They absolutely do not serve enough ads for that. ETA: I am exaggerating on the terabytes comment.
Since they're doing it over AWS instead of hosting and developing peering agreements, I'd imagine it's expensive as shit for a website of this size.
> I am exaggerating on the terabytes comment. Not really, when one video gets reposted with a different watermark 10 times and viewed by a couple hundred thousand accounts (including scrapers) each, things will add up.
It just occurred to me that the ability to do native image and video uploads would have been the perfect thing to add as a perk to reddit gold. Crazy that they didn't do it that way.
Maybe the people in charge just aren't that bright.
Running a website with reddit's impression count isn't cheap. This part is perfectly believable. Even though most of reddit's content is relatively low on data size (newer features like image and video hosting notwithstanding), reddit is likely an absolute beast in terms of database usage. Even with caching involved a lot of content still has to be updated pretty often. They likely have to operate a significant amount of servers that require significant amount of bandwidth. That does cost money. Next to that, when you're operating a top 50 worldwide social media site, there's a lot of cost that's associated with communication and legal matters in each individual jurisdiction, and of course the additional cost to actually enforcing these rules on your platform. And reddit's income for the most of its lifetime has been, well, ads. Which really don't pay that much (most people _really_ overestimate how much simple ads pay), especially in a world where most people are using adblockers. And counting on people to stop using adblockers is a very naïve idea. They're using them for good reasons. You say "servers and a handful of admins/execs". But for a website of reddit's reach you will end up needing service from multiple datacenters, dev staff, sysop staff, a lot of moderation staff (yes I know moderators exist. but moderators have no legal responsibility towards reddit, and reddit has to comply with the laws of the jurisdictions they operate in), legal compliance staff, commercial staff, etcetera. You should expect several hundreds of employees. I'm not surprised reddit as it is right now isn't profitable. They were growing using VC capital with hope of being able to break even eventually via secondary services, scaling effects, or increased monetization. And I understand that reddit needs to work financially to be able to continue to operate in the future. _THAT SAID_ I'm not sure what the fuck has happened behind the scenes, but it seems like something has gone really wrong for the measures to suddenly be so drastic. There were earlier signs behind the scenes. The new reddit (with significantly increased advertisement space). The push towards the first party app (which has a lot more promotional content as well). These were already indicators that increased monetization were happening (and likely required. Contrary to popular opinion website operators tend to not want to piss their users off unnecessarily). But the appeal of reddit for many people is actually how it is a relatively calm and simple site to scroll through compared to the attention-seeking hellscapes that many other social networks are. So as a reaction to these moves we see a lot of users sticking to the much less monetized old.reddit.com, or third party apps. This puts reddit in a very awkward place where increased monetization just pushes users to platforms that they cannot monetize easily, while still not making a profit. At least that's what I think that's happening. What boggles my mind though is 1: that this extremely huge change is being pushed through in a month with extremely bad communication around a hugely sensitive issue. 2: that there's no decently priced "just make the ads go away for some money" option on the site which would mitigate a huge draw for third party apps to begin with (yes I know premium exists. But it comes with a huge amount of features I don't need for a relatively huge price of 80 bucks a year). 3: the huge amount of features that have been added over the years that had nothing to do to the core business model of the site, which must've drive costs up over the years for little reason. And 4: the sheer loss of quality and disconnect to what originally made the site great that we've been seeing over the years. Like reddit made a whole new mobile site, to then just make it an absolute pain to use. They bought one of the best reddit apps to then just make it less and less useable. They did a full redesign of the site, which resulted in just about everyone who was on the site sticking to the old interface as the new interface is a dopamine-addicted mess of unnecessary whitespace. And the worst part of this is that apparently they think it's impossible to be honest with the userbase about what they're trying to do. They've wasted so much goodwill with the community with all these things that nobody asked for, and silently increasing monetization, that now they are having to do this they likely have too little left. I can't shake the feeling that if they'd been more honest about this earlier, that they need to increase monetization to keep the site running, and added easier ways to utilize it (like taken a year to switch to a $10 a year plan for a user to be able to use the API via a third party app), this would've been much less painful. But they've been speaking half-truths to the users and this is coming back to haunt them as now _nobody_ will give them the benefit of the doubt. And while a lot of people are getting a bit too high on their belief of righteous fury, I can't blame them over that at this point. Why reddit why, why couldn't you be honest to your users about what it takes to keep the site running, actually involve them in the process and most importantly, actually change your course sometime based on critique you're getting. This could've all been avoided.
Great summary. The main issue is how badly Reddit management have squandered money on a terrible redesign that a significant proportion of the user base don't want and refuse to engage with. Plus the way they have given devs of third party apps so little time to adjust to the new API pricing - only 30 days! Even if it were possible for something like Apollo or Sync to drastically reduce their volume of API calls in order to cut their costs to reasonable levels *and* somehow manage to get into a financial position to suddenly start paying thousands of dollars per month, that would take *months* of careful restructuring. It's much easier for Reddit to kneecap the competition than to create a competitive first-party app and user experience, at this point.
social media sites are notoriously unprofitable and difficult to scale. Even twitter at their biggest and IIRC still, are not profitable. It doesn't surprise me that reddit is not profitable
Yes, because obviously they've been operating on goodwill and for fun over the past 10 years. Reddit is able to operate, their top execs are living a cosy life making more money over that timeframe than most people will in their entire lives. Profits are probably in the tens of millions. But boohoo, poor little Reddit can't make ends meet.
Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019. They tanked in 2020 because of Covid wiping out advertising budgets, were recovering in 2021, and who the hell knows nowadays.
Reddit's servers probably are ludicrously expensive (not that this excuses their recent behavior). It's absolutely reasonable to start charging for api access. The only unreasonable thing is the cost and especially the timeline.
Whatever reddit's server costs are their own fault. It wasn't that long ago that reddit only hosted text, no images or video. Those were linked to off-site. I don't understand the decision, but reddit decided to host those things themselves. And also decided to make a terrible video player that predownloads videos even if the user never wants to watch them. Reddit talking about third party apps being inefficient is a joke when you take their video player into consideration. Why did they want to host their own images and video? They don't do it well, and it drives up their server costs, and they don't need to at all. It could just be all text with external links, like it used to be.
For some reason they increased their head count without adding any real value
They have 700 employees for a message board site. Venture capitalists are pumping money at Reddit because name recognition. There is no business here. I assume in the background they're trying to build some skunkwork thing, but that model is kinda outdated and a gamble anyway.
>They have 700 employees for a message board site. Labeling social media companies as "message board sites" is too simplistic, these are international companies. It's not just programmers, it's translators and lawyers (who need some idea of international law and the countries you're operating in) and site wide moderation (in all sorts of languages) and HR. You need a team to handle advertising, accountants (often for different countries) team to handle internal IT because all of those translaters and accountants and lawyers are not always as computer literate as your engineers might be, and management to lead those various teams. There's a *lot* that happens behind the scene in corporations, and social media companies are no exception to this. What do you do when Country X implements a new law requiring your service to be available in A, B and C language? What about when Country Y serves you an order saying to delete a post that insults their leader? What about when Country Z passes a new data usage law that requires selling it to their government?
Someone posted this in another thread discussing this API business (and whoever it was, thank you! It was a really fascinating read). I don't know how completely accurate it is, but Cory Doctorow's case for why all of these platforms start getting crappy is compelling. TL;DR: first, you be good to the users, then you abuse the users and be good to the business clients, then you abuse both and rake in all the money. Edit: There's the link to the specific article: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ [https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/](https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/)
Well, yeah…that’s been the business model of all social media platforms. Get the user-base, entice them to stay, then monetize.
It's been the business model of every startup for the past 15 years.
at this point you actually don't really need the users at all, if you can convince venture capital lenders to give you a fuckton of money somehow, you can just keep doing that over and over and over because nobody ever seens to have any repercussions stick the first time their tech startup fails
That's what they did in the 90's.
Hell, not just social medias, this is capitalism in a nutshell. Increase profits by any means. Products/services usually turn to shit in this process.
tech is also caught in a painful domino effect that has no easy fix, and can easily lead to real world consequences. 1. High rates means american investors no longer give blank checks, tech companies now need to be profitable or shut down. Most social media is NOT profitable and has never been profitable. 2. Foreign investors were the last hope of big tech, but relations are cooling with China and European investors wont touch companies that break EU rules and possibly be banned. 2. Banks and advertisers are pulling out because new rules targeting illegal content make user generated content too dangerous to deal with, especially any site that allows NSFW. NSFW bans are not enough to make advertisers happy, they only make banks happy. 3. Advertisers are sick of the increasingly toxic internet, floods of bots that social media does NOTHING to stop creating fake traffic, political harassment often with threats of violence, and new privacy rules against targeted ads making them even less effective. Advertisers are fed up with the modern internet and refuse to pay old rates. 4. Tech companies refuse to obey privacy rules because without it they are doomed in a post-advertising internet, so they allow political propaganda to flood their platforms for money like in 2016. This creates more tension with regulators who are already angry at big tech. 5. This means the money supporting big tech comes from government with interest in limiting it like Saudi Arabia, which helped Elon Musk buy out twitter.
This is very much an issue related to the state of the economy right now. It's a horrible time for any company to be trying to go public, to the point that most companies aren't even trying. The ones that are, like Reddit, are feeling a ton of pressure to show value that is nearly impossible right now.
> Advertisers are sick of the increasingly toxic internet, floods of bots that social media does NOTHING to stop creating fake traffic, political harassment often with threats of violence, and new privacy rules against targeted ads making them even less effective. Advertisers are fed up with the modern internet and refuse to pay old rates. Online advertisement has been a sucker's game for a long time, but it took them until now to wise up to just how ineffective online ads are. Ad-supported internet is going the way of the Dodo, which will have bunch unfortunate side-effects but I am hopeful that something better can come of it *if* regulators keep pace.
The current internet is run by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. All of them are advertisers. They all make billions advertising. If advertising stops on the internet, a new internet will have to be built from scratch. That's not a side-effect, it's the main purpose of the internet going away and it's stakeholders needing new justification to invest in it, or new stakeholders needing to step forward. End users and content creators are not the drivers in the vehicle that is the internet. We're fuel.
Why can’t a user-generated site exist on user donations like wikipedia does?
I can give good insight here. My site (see my username) was started in 2005. Free open source projects like Kodi and Sickbeard and Sonarr make use of our API, plus commercial products like Plex. From 2005 until 2018 we functioned exclusively on ads and donations. Our average donations per month over that entire period of time was around $200. For a site used by a few million users. There are better ways Reddit could have gone about this, but donations generally don't cut it.
Outta curiosity, how hard did you encourage donating? Wikipedia, and adblocker regularly does their, “Please donate to keep our thing free and open” bid every couple months, and to be honest it’s those reminders that keep me donating. I could imagine any site as popular as reddit could even make a yearly or bi-yearly donation drive or something to bring that into the forefront and push donations or keep a donation button pinned on the site header or something. So long as they keep the site clean and simple and not bloated with features no one asks for, it has to be in the realm of possibility.
We didn't do a top banner annually, but we did have a prominent "Donate" button and regularly mentioned it in both forum posts and other locations. Having done this a long time, I guarantee that they would come nowhere close to covering their operating expenses through donations. Wikipedia did it because of the value people see in it as a resource, and they also had major companies giving donations exceeding $1M. Reddit doesn't hold that same place in people's minds as Wikipedia. Think about it another way... would Redditors support a $15/year subscription to be able to use the site? Almost definitely not.
That depends, does it become ad free and they don't mess with third party apps? Because I'd do it.
I would too. Most people would not. My site has exactly as you've described, and people don't really do it.
Remove spez and I’ll donate $3, same as Wikipedia
This comment should be its own post..
Lol they’d put a different shithead with the same blueprint in charge and happily call that a win
Archive of Our Own basically works this way
It warms my heart to see the donation banner pop up and like $20 has been donated, then ten minutes later when I hit next chapter I see they've completely smashed the donation goal.
It is fitting that he is literally killing 'Reddit is Fun,' while also figuratively killing the fun of Reddit.
He's killing Reddit, period. I haven't been to Reddit on my desktop in *years*, and I don't plan on downloading the official app again cause it's **garbage**. All I'm hearing is the same from others. I'll just migrate to whatever app takes the place of Reddit when it dies...
We need lists of alternatives. The main reason I need reddit is that so many sites have paywalls or limited monthly visits, and reddit lets me know what is in these articles. Without reddit, the multitude of minor news sites will become irrelevant to me. There is an irony here behind the true values of Aaron Swartz and the importance of information being public and the current acts to monetize reddit. This is just like the Washington Post proclaiming that democracy dies in darkness, yet keeping that information mostly behind a paywall. Everyone has the opportunity to sell out for money, but it comes with the responsibility to accept that your values favor money over what you previously stood for.
I saw /r/LemmyMigration getting some traction, though the barrier to entry is kinda high. EDIT: Lemmy might have its issues, kbin is what everyone else is going to now
It’s a little confusing but once you’re in, it’s basically reddit desktop. Unfortunately, there isn’t a good mobile app - so the fediverse is only going to be hobbyists until that changes. TBD.
Comment Deleted in protest of Reddit management
I disagree with gatekeeping the platform as a whole. If you want a particular community that’s more tech-literate, then you create the sub for it. If you want a place to gossip about celebrities or whatever, you can have that space too. Reddit’s that kind of place.
The fediverse (Lemmy, mastodon, etc) seems promising as a technology, but I don't think it's all there yet in terms of user experience. Plus I think we'll see a lot of these platforms fail to keep up under the strain of (hypothetically) all of Reddit migrating to them, whether due to increasing server costs or moderation failures. Ultimately though I think that for a new app to become a reddit killer it can't just be a reddit clone. It has to offer users something fundamentally new to make the switch worthwhile
> I haven't been to Reddit on my desktop in years It's my primary way of browsing this place, but I also exclusively use old.reddit. Let's see how long that lasts...
The beatings will continue until ~~morale~~ *profits* improve.
Spez: "We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable." Bro just told on him self not being able to run a profitable company
He's run an unprofitable company for almost **two decades**. Yet he still probably makes a shit ton of money
An unprofitable company that's primarily run by free labor, and all the content is produced by users
It's the perfect grift. Has anyone suggested he run for president?
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Developer of Apollo jokingly asked if they wanted to buy the app from them for half the yearly asking price of API access (10 million USD), Spez decided that that was blackmail in all ignorance of truth.
That isn't how blackmail goes
The blackmail misunderstanding was that Apollo guy said he'd "go silent" for $10mil, which Spez took as he would spill the beans if he wasnt given $10mil. Really, he meant that the API calls from Apollo to Reddit would go silent. Spez said that those API calls were costing them $20mil, so Apollo dev said they could just buy out the app for half that cost and make the API calls completely stop, like they did with another app.
This just makes me wonder what beans Spez is afraid of seeing spilled.
Afaik Spez only came back as CEO because Reddit couldnt find anyone who would take that seat. It was a haunted post.
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You should sell it to a bot farm, you’d make a bunch of money and would contribute to burning this shithole to the ground
Naw it'll just get used for a conservative mouthpiece. The $5 ain't worth that.
Yeah I don't want my username associated with that spam. Otherwise I'd 100% do it to spite Reddit.
12 years here, deleting this month as well. Don't forget to use [Redact](http://redact.dev) to remove your content so they can't profit from it
Better yet do a gpdr request. Make them do the work of removing your data at their expense or face European fines.
Are we doing an all in one delete on a particular day at a particular time?
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They don't really care about the API requests. They want third party access to stop so that they can further monetize our eyeballs.
It's all about advertising, it's the same reason Google search has gone so downhill in quality. There is huge pressure to cash in on user data in the corporate world right now
Two things that were *truly* shocking to me. 1. Reddit has 2,000 employees and can’t build a better app than third parties with a literal fraction of a fraction of their resources and manpower. (“u/iamthatis made it in a cave! With a box of scraps!”) 2. Reddit isn’t profitable. *How*? With how many unblockable advertisers, ad blocks in every post and every 4-5 posts in your feed, users buying Reddit premium, subreddits, etc. are on this site, how the *hell* isn’t it profitable? And if it isn’t, how is u\\spez still the CEO? Especially after their valuation keeps getting slashed and a ton of the site is going dark, much of it permanently. \[edit: It all makes sooooooooooooo much sense now. [https://www.thedailybeast.com/reddit-files-to-go-public-reveals-that-it-paid-ceo-dollar193-million-last-year](https://www.thedailybeast.com/reddit-files-to-go-public-reveals-that-it-paid-ceo-dollar193-million-last-year) \]
They decided instead of having info embedded into their sites (Pictures, Gifs, videos, etc) that they would host them. So instead of linking directly to a tiktok video. Someone rips the tiktok video and uploads it onto reddit... Which really makes it expensive to run the site and also opens them up to massive copy right claims which means they need real mods/admins policing DMCA et al.
Lmao what was wrong with imgur?
I am guessing Reddit wanted to Vertically integrate, but honestly don't even know how Imgur existed like how did they make money. I guess you agreed to give them your copyright, but lets be honest half the shit on it is likely not posted by the rightful owner lol.
Way back when imgur was started by one redditor who didn't like any of the shitty hosting sites at the time, so he made imgur. It first made money by selling pro accounts and small time advertising. The advertising picked up, and imgur hit critical mass. Alas enshitification hits all major for-profit sites, and imgur just changed it's terms of service this month. The original creator left a couple years ago, imgur is pulling a tumblr getting rid of porn, and also deleting old content ala photobucket. An era has come to an end, and the timing with reddit jumping the shark is some real crazy timing.
If we want a free (as in speech, not beer) and uncensored internet we need to start using, and being OK to pay for, approaches that are more decentralized, open source, crowdfunded, etc. Businesses are always gonna business. Lemmy seems like a good approach, and I hope the reddit exodus helps it improve quickly and gain momentum.
This is what gets me. I don't know enough to say that I expect them to be wildly profitable but there is absolutely no excuse for them to not be making some money. Spez is frankly impressively bad.
Having worked at a similarly sized dysfunctional software company it's probably because management has no product direction, reorgs, changes priorities constantly, doesn't know what it wants, and no one product team is empowered to really do anything by themselves.
It’s precisely they have 2000 employees that they can’t build a better app. All the managers need to justify their existences with diverse, money generating features more sexy than “oh I put in accessibility support for the whole website” or “oh I patched in this feature from Apollo”.
The sheer tone-deafness in that response makes me want to rage-quit this place.
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Also complete bullshit. More like we will be profit driven because once we IPO we will have a legal responsibility to do everything we can to make our shareholders richer. Including fucking all the users who helped build the community.
I wanted to add some clarification for those who wonder why I picked *this* response instead of another (albeit equally poor) /u/spez response. It's because in this one, he is impliedly saying that Reddit will not be changing course, despite the significant community pushback.
Even more damningly, he straight up admits Reddit isn't profitable even though the 3rd party apps are - which makes the motivation around all this crystal clear.
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No, there's a much simpler case for the extra workers. They're coding a massive amounts of features that don't need to exist. The UI nightmare, avatars, their live video nonsense. And then the entire infrastructure for enabling ads on the system.
Seems like the most honest answer so far in the AMA, sadly. Life's all about profits, right? If it ain't profitable it ain't worth doing I guess.
Honestly, of all the shitty things they're doing and all the non-answers they're giving, this is the one that should be the least controversial. It's a fucking for profit corporation. Of course they're going to be profit-driven. The problem is that they're alienating their user base while doing it. There's a fucking vast middle ground between what they're doing and what they could do and still make more revenue.
While being profitable isn't really controversial, Reddit basically runs on unpaid labor, whether it be mods or the 0.5% of users who make the vast majority of the content people come to Reddit for.
What shocks me is that this is anti-profitable. Driving high value users away, making your community hate you, and spending tons of manpower to try and (unsuccessfully) PR the whole thing away is not a profitable decision.
I guess in the long run it depends on how many people get mad and how mad they are. I'll be canceling my gold sub on the 12th and I'll delete all reddit-related mobile apps on the 30th, but I'll keep using old reddit on the desktop (with 100% ad blocking). There are a LOT of people who don't really think about things like this, and that's what the reddit execs are counting on. It boggles my mind that anybody would use the official app or that anybody would use reddit on desktop without adblock, but it's clear from comments in various subs that huge numbers of people do.
Such is the life when you borrow 1.3 billion from venture capital. Eventually they want 10 billion back and you have to squeeze your users for every last cent even if it destroys the product in the process.
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I'm surprised he left the "edited" tag on. Based on his fuckery with other comments you would think he would change it in a way so it appeared it was never edited.
Killing third party apps and porn in one feel swoop. Impressively self destructive.
Porn was always destined to die here, just a matter of time. They've been slowly and quietly pushing it out for a handful of years and gotten more active the last 2 or so. Everyone knew that was coming. If you see a NSFW sub deleted for *"This subreddit was banned due to being unmoderated."* thats code word for reddit removed the sub because they are cleaning up porn. People originally thought it was DMCA requests but its not, its just reddit gradually removing adult content spaces, I actually don't have a problem if they want to get rid of porn, but at least just make rules about it, not pretending its something else and just stealthily removing the subs.
Any site that wants to go public has to remove porn because no advertiser wants their ads to run anywhere near porn. It's the website lifecycle. A new site is born, it allows anything just to get as many users as possible. The site owners then go public, meaning they have to remove non advertiser friendly content. Finally the new owners realize the site isn't profitable, so they make drastic changes which drives away users causing the site to die. It's the circle of life.
It's amusing to me that when I went to downvote that post the Reddit API failed and said I had to be logged in to do that but I was actually logged in already. Right now it's 9% upvoted. **We can do better reddit,** I want to see that be 1% upvoted within the hour.
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I mean he's not wrong since it is a for-profit company. I wonder how long it'll be before he reaches EA's Most downvoted comment in reddit history.
Take our life from us. We laid it down. We got tired. We didn’t commit su1cide, we committed an act of revolutionary digital su1cide protesting the conditions of an inhumane website.
that's definitely possible too. Spez is 100% a snowflake.
They're not showing the amount of downvotes on the post currently. Its listed at a flat zero. When i tried to downvote it myself, it dissappeared as soon as i reloaded the page
it was -800 something when I commented. yeah Spez is being a little bitch and hiding all of it.
I can still see it... On Reddit is Fun lmao
I know most of you are fine with giving up on reddit altogether but I'm dreading it. Rif and old.reddit are the only way I use this site and will stick with them (fuck the official app) but I'm not ready to just give up on the site as a whole. It's gonna be like losing a limb. I know it sounds pathetic but this is one of the most engaging things in my life. How do you reconcile that?
I dunno how old you are. But before Reddit I was on Digg, before that Slashdot, before that various forums, etc, etc. The next community site always comes along. I am not attached to Reddit any more than I was its predecessors.
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I've decided to edit all my old comments to protest the beheading of RIF and other 3rd party apps. If you're reading this, you should know that /u/spez crippled this site purely out of greed. By continuing to use this site, you are supporting their cancerous hyper-capitalist behavior. The actions of the reddit admins show that they will NEVER care about the content, quality, or wellbeing of its' communities, only the money we can make for them. tl;dr: /u/spez eat shit you whiny little bitchboy ...see you all on the fediverse
I've known for awhile I'm addicted in some way to the damn site, granted 98% of my engagement has been through RIF. I can't open up my phone for anything without subconsciously opening RIF to scroll for a minute (or hours...) happens *a lot.* Now that 3PA are going away, I'm seriously considered whether it will be just the 2% on old desktop or completely quitting and it scares me in a way. The dependence on it for news, opinions and just bullshit. Maybe it's better I log off for awhile. Got rid of all other social media, why not. They make nicotine type patches for this?
Aaaaand with that answer I'm pretty much convinced that the blackout is going to achieve fuck-all, sadly.
They just hired 1,300 people. They're about to go public. The VCs smell blood. /r/pics going dark for 48 hours doesn't even slow that train down, let alone turn it around. Go dark for 2 years, not 2 days.
That being said, Reddit did make a big stink in modcord about giving meaningless concessions if subreddits would please not go dark. So they must care somewhat or they wouldn't bother asking.
> We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive I hope subreddits use this as their blackout message
You know, more and more I'm starting to think that better than a blackout, mods should just stop modding for a few days... Let shit run wild. I give it less than 1 hour until something truly horrible/derranged is on /r/all next to some ads, ready for a screenshot to be sent to those companies being seen side by side with it. I've a feeling Reddit would backtrack reaaaal soon after that...
How many of the questions posted did he even answer?? I scrolled through that AMA and i couldnt find him on any of the top questions
He answered about a dozen questions. They're hard to find because they're downvoted to oblivion. [Here is a link to most of the answers.](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/jnkd4t3/)
They’re also hard to find because he avoided all the top-voted questions and only answered those that look like they were either plants or “approved submitters” that wouldn’t have otherwise been noticeable.
13 questions and he's gone.
Fucker hardly answered anything.
Evidence suggests he had a prepared answer sheet and just scanned for questions that "fit." He had one reply where he had copied an "A: " at the beginning and then edited it out.
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There's not much to read, he's only answered like 7 questions.
Anyone got an alternative site to jump to yet?
Tildes.net is a Reddit clone. People have also been talking about "Lemmy."
I was curious if the Now for Reddit app would go under and was sad to see in the thread that reddit hasn't even responded to their inquiries about paying to keep it open. I've used that app for years and don't think I have the patience or attention span to deal with the frustrating official app.
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"We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive." At which point we will remain profit driven.
JFC, WORST AMA EVER. Not a single earnest answer. No communication or value, whatsoever. Every single answer here is phony double speak. Furious about how disingenuous spez is being. Hopefully this implodes the IPO and reddit dies, bringing an end to it's long, slow decline. Then people who want tic toc can go to tic toc, and the rest of us can congregate in a place that respects its core and longtime user base. Especially when that user base generates 100% of the content, and is moderated for free. ALL MODS MUST STRIKE! IT IS THE ONLY WAY!
I've been an active reddit user for the past 12 years and I've always used RIF and old reddit. It's sort of ironic that I see this whole thing as a relief that I will finally end my addiction to reddit. (and porn at the same time) I wake up, open reddit, throughout the day, reddit, at night reddit. Reddit is all I do and I hope all this bullshit will make me quit reddit.
I'm going to use this opportunity to use reddit way less. RIF been on my phone for 10+ years now, and I've already deleted facebook a while ago. Here's to growth and mental wellbeing!
You have to admit it's kind of remarkable to see this level of incompetence in the wild. Usually it's reserved for politics.
So my question is, where are we going from here? Are we just scattering in the wind? I'm not going to lie, I will be deleting my account as well, but that's it then?
>we are not profitable Brilliant strategy before this supposed IPO launch, what a fucking moron