Reddit’s value as a social media platform drops as it’s value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that’s was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.
Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.
In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.
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Yes, I agree. In the end, Reddit lives off its reputation, just like every social media platform. Seriously, is there an effect that when you’re long enough the CEO of a company, you begin making decisions where it is obvious that they will negatively impact the user base and thus long-term survivability of a company? Is there a term for that?
I imagine your priorities become different.
You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.
Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.
Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.
Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”
I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. It’s even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.
I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.
You make some good points. I’d agree if it wasn’t for the API changes that fucked all the 3rd party apps and 3rd party tools like automod.
Even if it was priced well it still somehow filtered NSFW content out.
They clearly wanted more market share for the reddit app by any means necessary. It’s sad for all the mods that were ignored.
You’re describing the Cory Doctorow enshittification process.
Sounds like Enshittification.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking. Examples of alleged enshittification have included Amazon, Bandcamp, Facebook, Google Search, Quora, Reddit, and Twitter.Thanks :)
You mean hubris?
Thanks, yes! Well, another word learned :)
More like stupris, amirite
When having a bacon and egg breakfast the hen participants the pig is committed.
You had me at bacon…
I deleted my reddit account and joined lemmy during the subreddit blackout, but there’s still a few authors I follow on reddit. Most I’ve followed to other sites, and just recently one was suspended for what sounds like a fuck up on reddit’s end.
Reddit lost most of their quality content creators and I can’t see the few remaining staying long term.
I reached the same conclusion and posted it to reddit over a decade ago, asking people to try to come up with a better solution, long before I even knew open source software was a thing.
Well, took 15 years, but lemmy exists now so hooray!
Honestly feels like a scam for rich people. Spez just has to convince some suckers that Reddit would be profitable as he cashes out. Then they’re left with a dead platform as they kill it with ads and astroturfing.
This is honestly what I feel like most businesses are these days, just scams to convince other rich people to invest, so they can cash out early on. Basically the same stuff all the crypto currencies were doing.
as its* value to advertisers rises
Weren’t these assholes supposed to IPO like 6 months ago? lol
They were totally lined up to IPO. I think somebody told him to go all musk on it. I’m still not exactly sure how taking a big fat shit on the user communities face was supposed to impress the investors.
Well yeah, I’m probably not the only daily active user who stopped visiting all together… after 10+ years of daily active use. They brought this on themselves.
Same, but only a few years user. Sync for lemmy is so much better.
I loved Sync for Reddit as an app. But I already was seeing Reddit go downhill even before they killed the apps, that just sealed the deal for me. I was a digg refugee so sadly I’ve been through this before already.
Does your user name mean that you’re a lover of misspelling ready?
Came from using it daily to only going there only when google forces me to use it
Many of such cases I assume
Me too. It was the constant popups making me download their app that did it for me.
tHiS cOmmUnIty MiGhT hAvE sEnSiTiVe CONTENT, dOwNlOaD OuR ApP pLeAsE!
Just give me my porn, you fucks
Didn’t it die together with all other 3rd party clients?
No, instead of using the official (now paid and ridiculously priced) API, Libreddit uses web scraping. This leads to some instances getting temporarily blocked, but it should work most of the time. That caused some admins to shut down their instances, which is really dumb, because we need more instances, not less. Maybe they can implement IP address rotation like Invidious https://docs.invidious.io/ipv6-rotator/, that would definitely get around the IP blocks.
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Critical hit to my self esteem.
Thank you for building up the community.
Ya do realize that internet access is pretty much universal, dudes well within the acceptable posting amout id expect. It aint 20010 no more, everyone has a pocket computer and can do it damn near everywhere. Fuck the mountains near me are now scattershot on signal rather than completely worthless like they were back in 2014.
Fuck spez
Let’s for a second take stock of what’s happening here.
The ad revenue is falling short of the projected prediction of what it was supposed to be. As in the profit from ad revenue did not reach that arbitrary number.
Reddit is still grossly profitable.
This is the same kind of headline that says Facebook lost 11 bagillion dollars but in reality they didn’t lose a dime they just didn’t make as much as they wanted to.
The difference with Facebook is that it is a public company, so it does have to grow every year to have value for investors.
Reddit doesn’t. It’s existing private investors can splot the profit and be just fine. They just want a huge payout that will only come from an IPO.
And the issue with consistent growth in billion dollar companies is that it’s not sustainable. We can’t just keep pilling on profits on top of profits to sate investors insecurities.
These morons will try though, their strategy invariably seems to be building the Jenga tower as high as possible, thinking they’ll be “quick” or “smart” enough to sell their shares before it tumbles.
It’s gambling, but with people’s livelihoods.
I can’t wait for all the news articles about the massive layoffs at Reddit, though it will be sad to see the massive droves of employees shuffling out the door with their personal effects like they did when the Enron scandal broke.
I can’t wait for all the news articles about the massive layoffs at Reddit, though it will be sad to see the massive droves of employees shuffling out the door with their personal effects like they did when the Enron scandal broke.
Are you not aware that public companies split the profits too? They do not need to grow to have value for investors.
Not all of them do that. There are growth stocks and dividend stocks. Growth stocks typically don’t pay dividends, but instead reinvest the dividend back into the company. Amazon, Alphabet and Berkshire Hathaway don’t pay dividends.
Of course not. But they can, whenever they choose to. Parent comment said they have to grow since they are public, unlike private companies like Reddit.
Yeah tell it to the shareholders
so it does have to grow every year to have value for investors
This gets said a lot but it is not true for a couple reasons.
1: With an IPO you’re not as dependent upon individual investors, and as your value grows - which often has nothing to do with your company’s performance, you obtain additional funding.
2: private or large-scale investors will literally have you sign contracts stating X% return on investment is what you owe them - once you surpass your return on investment, unless you seek additional funding, significant growth pressure is gone. Most companies immediately seek additional funding, which is how this gets interpreted as “requires perpetual growth.”
If this includes % of revenue, then yeah, your investor will want you to make wise choices, but they own that percentage in perpetuity, so there is generally not the pressure related to seeking new investment - they’re already priced in and getting their returns.
You can literally find examples of these contracts online by searching for “investor agreement sample.”
People usually only care about your growth as a function of how it correlates to a rise in your value. Most stock growth is entirely based on feels - it’s closer to social media than it is to any sort of accounting.
Remember, the reason I ditched Reddit wasn’t the ads per se, it was the constant data selling, and the official app just getting worse and worse with unwanted “features” pushed on everyone. They kept getting greedier and greedier so when they disabled 3rd party apps I ditched Reddit.
It seems they also recently started requiring you to login if it notices you are on VPN. At least for me it’s being doing that recently. And it seems they use browser fingerprinting, which tracks with the data selling.
Yep. I tried to lookup something on it yesterday and I had my VPN on. Wouldn’t let me onto the site unless I logged in, when I turned the VPN off it let me onto the site ok. So glad I don’t use it often. The only times I check Reddit is for info for Kodi add-ons and old stuff, in the case of yesterday it was about a TV.
Not on old thankfully. Although who knows how much longer it’ll be around
Same
fatbird still exists
I mainly lurked on the art and fanfic forums, and considered getting an account when I had the time/had created something worth sharing on there. But when I learned about the disabling of apps to improve accessibility…I started looking for alternatives.
Plus, I don’t like the idea of the karma system on there. Supposedly, it reduces the number of trolls and low effort posts, but I’ve seen it cause people to post ragebait to karma farm on subreddits that reward you with upvotes for making up outrageous stories. I’ve also seen “debate” subreddits where people downvote people who make good points, but disagree with. Then those people leave, not wanting to be punished on other subreddits that require a high amount of karma to post, leading to “debate” subreddits that are laughably one-sided.
I actively participated in Reddit before the killing of the Third Party Apps, because I really liked the content and the platform was a superb experience on a third party app.
eh ill still oen their stock
It’s such bullshit, Reddit could have been so much more. Researching my latest purchase/obsession, and the only way to find anything that isn’t corporate sponsored reviews or AI content farming is to add the word “Reddit” to the end of the search.
As someone with an 11 year old account that I deleted during the TPA debacle, I fully recognise that there’s a huge problem here. Reddit created a place where people wanted to put their thoughts, ideas, and opinions, and now that they are cashing out TOO FUCKING BAD LAME EBD USER.
Edit: /oblig fuck you spez. Slimy little arsehole sold everyone out and thinks he deserves to be rich because his shitty site isn’t absolutely irredeemable.
Reddit was like the StackOverflow for life
…sometimes coding too We’re like regressing to friend’s or known in person people’s opinions, because Internet will be full of bot and sponsored content and opinions. Either way, double money for corporations, sponsored content ->more sales; people not trusting reviews and trying out stuff just to find out it’s rubbish ->more sales
11 year old account on Reddit too and I left it during TPA too. Had nearly 2 million karma. Same username as this one.
I wish Elon would scare away Reddit’s advertisers instead of twitter’s.
Fuck Zuckerberg, Fuck Spez!! 🖕🖕
Nothing says you care to advertisers like single handedly blowing up your website by cutting off 25% or more of its userbase.
They feel like they get shorted because many of those users don’t contribute to ad revenue from 3rd party apps but instead of improving their app to lure users in they instead tell those users to fuck off.
A user is a user, even if they don’t contribute directly to ad revenue they contribute content to make the site more alluring for those who will contribute to ad revenue. As well they help spread the word about reddit to those who don’t use it regularly yet by sharing that content outside of reddit.
They were pretty short sighted by doing what they did.
It’s just many power users and mods were power users and mods thanks to tools in these apps, and Reddit still didn’t provide anything comparable. Many small communities I still care about have a lot less posts if they don’t have bots. It’s not like Fediverse won Reddit, but something changed in them. NSFW OC subs are still good, but idk if they make the image spez wants from that platfom. The only thing we def should do is to stay online and be welcome for stray redditors to join.
A bunch of subs that I like and that are niche had the mods say “fuck it bye” and they are no more. Some migrated here, some on discord, but the fragmentation means less users overall, so less content. It’s a shitty situation.
I would have been happy to pay to get API access for 3rd party apps on my account. Maybe 1 or 2 dollars per account and month would have been reasonable to cover the costs without ad revenue. Double it to please greedy shareholders.
Instead they asked for such ludicrous amounts from 3rd party developers, basically telling them to fuck off.
Either they were mad for control or got greedy over their „golden data“ for AI training. Or both. In any case, they never were interested in finding a user friendly solution so fuck them.
The phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face” comes to mind.
I believe it’s “spider-face.”
Edit: lol, guess we don’t have a lot of fans of The Office around here.
Some app dev mentioned they wanted to work with them to introduce ads that Reddit would have made profit from in the free version of the app and it’s Reddit that said “Nah it’s ok”…
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Do you have a citation on that 25% figure?
Source: my bias
As someone has had their accounts shadow banned across of wide swaths of reddit, despite being one of its first users… good fucking riddance.
“Thanks for years of feeding our site, now fuck off without any appeal.”
Your fault for having an opinion slightly deviating from one of the mods :/
Fuck man, I’ve had this happen to me multiple times:
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I make a relatively long and detailed comment.
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Someone replies with a vehement argument against a /misreading/ of many of the things I said in my comment.
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I point out that the replier is misunderstanding or misreading my original comment
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My original comment /is then edited not by myself/ to make it seem like the replier was correct the whole time, and then the same or other repliers dogpile on the thread claiming I am insane.
It is truly unfortunate that so many reddit mods seemingly have no problem using alt accounts and abusing their powers exist governing very interesting niche subject matter communities that you will just never realistically find a group of like minded people in the real, not online.
People used to think the internet could be used to the mass benefit of humanity by sharing information and having lively discussions about it.
It is now clear that the vast majority of people basically just use it to consume mediocre entertainment content and basically have one kind or another of popularity contest.
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That isn’t really a flex, even though you think it is.
Not a flex indeed, but I still wouldn’t be too proud if I was the poster the guy you replied to replied to.
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The last time I have logged in to Reddit was the day they ended the apps, July 1 I think it was. I haven’t been back since. I thought I would miss it more than I do but honestly I never even think about it anymore and am much happier with my new Lemmy life.
Me too! It’s bizzare how big it was in my life and now nothing. I miss the old reddit, but it hasn’t been that for a long time.
Yeah I just moved over this week because a recent change started shoveling recommend stuff that just cluttered the feed and broke my browsing setup with ad block and no script. This feels nicer, definitely a cleaner ui. They are just trashing the experience over there
Enough about my ex
the S part of the DENNIS system: Separate entirely
