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What Reddit Got Wrong

323 points by cryoz 3y ago

Slava_Propanei 3y ago
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a2tech 3y ago
Basically they forgot they built a site built on community and then tried to sell those communities like inanimate objects. No surprise it blew up in there face.
- edmundsauto 3y ago
  What evidence do we have that it blew up in their face? There is clearly a large backlash, but it's not at all clear how much that will impact their key metrics, which is probably all they care about moving into IPO. I agree they made awful decisions, my usage patterns will definitely be changing due to a re-enable /etc/hosts entry. However, what is the impact on a broader scale? This is like Twitter firing a ton of engineers - we can't really evaluate until much further down the road.
  - willis936 3y ago
    We don't have numbers, but if it hadn't blown up in their face then we wouldn't be talking about it. What is reddit's product? The users. What happens IPO valuation when the users leave?
    - nicce 3y ago
      Reddit, like any other social media platform is worthless without users. We will see in few months what is the situation and if someone manages to advertise an alternative for millions of people. Then, Reddit IPO is doomed. If there is no new significant alternative where people will go, then IPO will probably continue as planned and API change went well from the Reddit’s perspective.
      - willis936 3y ago
        Why does an alternative need to exist? The attention economy is saturated and users are likely happy to have one less feed.
        mattstir 3y ago
        > Why does an alternative need to exist? Because there are a great many people that have legitimately used Reddit as their "frontpage of the internet" for years and don't enjoy the form factor that other websites / apps provide. Places like Twitter and TikTok aren't everyone's cup of tea, especially if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content.
        willis936 3y ago
        >if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content My take is that this type of person is more likely to not need to replace their feed fix with another feed and is more likely to pursue fulfillment in other areas of life.
        andybak 3y ago
        I think several subreddit in my life would be irreplaceable. I don’t know another platform that would generate those kind of communities.
        nicce 3y ago
        If someone is using Reddit just for scrolling endless feeds, I would say that they have no strong ideological foundations to quit the platform based on the API changes. Unless they think that official app is really useless.
        wvenable 3y ago
        I spend 5 minutes today with some user CSS to reskin Lemmy to be more like Reddit with RES. Another half-hour of effort and at least the form-factor will be pretty similar.
    - edmundsauto 3y ago
      We're talking about it because some percentage of users are very pissed, not because it necessarily impacts the business. I agree there is a line where reddit would be worried for their IPO, but we have no idea if 1% of reddit traffic will drop (not a problem for them) or 50% (big problem). We (and reddit) also don't know whether users will return, ie: will this just blow over?
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  > We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor. From Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-... Nothing blew up in their face. It's almost as if the vast majority of users simply don't care about this kind of drama.
  - willsmith72 3y ago
    > We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor. This is the funniest because it shows how little they're actually able to generate from people using their product
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      Yeah users on Reddit are worth on average around 30 cents each. But this is also why they're pushing the official Reddit app, to increase their ARPU.
      - ilyt 3y ago
        They could just charge $2 for "API access with enough limits for power users" and pay both for missing ads and for API usage
        satvikpendem 3y ago
        That's exactly what they are doing with the API lol, but people still got outraged at that. The Apollo dev said that he would have to charge every user $2.50 a month to cover costs of the API, so even if the Apollo dev is exaggerating, $2.50 is not that high if people really want to user third party apps.
        mattstir 3y ago
        > That's exactly what they are doing with the API lol No, they're charging exorbitant rates for API access lol. I honestly can't understand how people can look at $2.50 / month per user for a few JSON responses and think "wow now that's reasonable." If their infrastructure is that bad that it costs even on the order of a dollar per month per user to serve API requests, then I'd be horrified to imagine how much it costs them to send entire HTML pages to the millions of people that use desktop exclusively.
dale_glass 3y ago
I think the idea put out by some people here that Reddit might be in the process of radically changing tracks is plausible. Reddit was always very hands-off. They had lots of very unpleasant and controversial content until their hand was forced. Overall they seem to want a site that runs itself as much as possible and over time content that required interaction and management (eg, AMAs, Secret Santa) got de-prioritized and dropped. Also, Reddit has quite a lot of mindless consumption content. Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. Such a site would require minimal care, and might even be possible to maintain with AI moderation. For moderating something like r/DebateReligion human brains are needed. But for deciding whether something is a cat or not, probably not.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  > Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal. The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect" has grown significantly within the past few years, though has been a problem for a number of years prior. Reddit won't come back from this stage of may-as-well-be-bots-posting.
  - greenpresident 3y ago
    There is already a large population of bots reposting formerly popular content, including the comments from the original thread. It’s eerie once you notice it.
    - transcriptase 3y ago
      I’ve seen entire (dozen reply long) comment chains on a repost (or similar content) that were re-created verbatim from an older post. Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process. Eerie was an understatement.
dsir 3y ago
> Unlike moderators on Reddit, who have no established way to seek support from the platform or its users The article brings up a good point regarding how Reddit relies a lot on free labor to work. The incentives for operating the communities are primarily built on good will. I've been working on a Reddit/Discord/Patreon style hybrid community platform that puts a focus on the community owner/admins getting paid. It feels like the people running the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do. https://sociables.com/community/Sports/home https://sociables.com/community/Sports/home
- deleted 3y ago
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shmatt 3y ago
I never understand why Reddit is credited to the "free community based moderation" idea Facebook does this at much larger scale (2B users active in FB Groups), with way more spam, and some FB groups are much larger than most big subreddits Its not about Facebook or Reddit, its about people being so power hungry they do these things for free. When subreddits post about bringing in more mods, thousands apply, maybe 2 get in. If Reddit deems locked subreddits abandoned, there is already a system to give the abandoned subreddit to anyone else that wants it (within reason). Subreddits also split pretty often due to mod infighting The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good. The infighting is because some mods love adding arbitrary rules like "no relationship posts" in AITA. Does everyone agree with that? Is that a perfect rule? Why? A new moderation team could be just as good or just as bad as the previous one
- Macha 3y ago
  > The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good. There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful community building that must have happened. Certainly Reddit's setup does incentivize name squatting, but there's been plenty of cases where the obvious name is run by a team so ineffective that it gets outcompeted (r/marijuana vs r/trees, r/lgbt vs r/ainbow, r/moddedmc vs r/feedthebeast are some examples). And plenty of communities get by with non-obvious names, like r/DestinyTheGame, r/Pathfinder_RPG, so it's not purely a name race.
  - patmorgan23 3y ago
    Don't forget the epic story of the fall of r/worldpolitics and the rise of r/anime_titties as its replacement.
    - UncleSlacky 3y ago
DantesKite 3y ago
It's not clear to me the Reddit users will be permanently gone either, unless there's some place like Reddit taking in a lot more users right now. But I haven't heard of any place like that so far. No real competitor for users to jump ship towards.
- georgeburdell 3y ago
  Or maybe people will realize they were not happy with the amount of time they were spending on Reddit and go habituate themselves to something completely different with that time.
  - ilikecakeandpie 3y ago
    Those folks are likely going back to Facebook/IG/Twitter/TikTok etc. If they're craving content and don't want to spend the time going to distinct sites, they're likely not going to all of a sudden pick up a new hobby. I hope I'm wrong.
  - clnq 3y ago
    That was always allowed. And yet, very many people are terminally online in one way or another. Even if the term "terminally online" has very strong stigma and most people would not consider to be a part of that group, they still spend hours every day on social media, and have no means of quitting it even knowing the harmful effects.
incomingpain 3y ago
There are a dozen better reasons to quit reddit. The only reason people are protesting api pricing is because they want to protest. The actual concern here isn't what they are protesting. They want to quit but they can't. They likely even realize they are addicted. They likely even realize the content they view is censored and curated to manipulate them. Just quit reddit already and be happy.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  I'm protesting API pricing because it means my favourite app isn't sustainable. Sorry if it's not as profound as you want it to be.
- techsupporter 3y ago
  > They want to quit but they can't. If you mean want to quit but can't in the sense that there is no other place on the Internet to have a like-minded community forum around fountain pens or a particular bank or third-tier game shows, yes, this is true. But if you mean in a broader sense, of "I just can't quit you!", then no. Reddit steamrolled all of the older forums--and, before that, Usenet and Echomail groups--I used to participate in. Much like how so many sellers of niche products have moved to Amazon, Reddit is where the quirky forums have moved to. I don't use Reddit as a general-purpose site. It's simply the place where the community that discusses the topics I want to gas on about live. And, yes, I object to what Reddit is doing so I will leave it if the changes come to pass.
- ebiester 3y ago
  It mostly wasn't the rank and file users making the most noise. It was the moderators who rely on the API for a series of tools (including third party tools like Apollo) to moderate the larger subreddits. For me, it absolutely was a sign to evaluate my usage. I may go back, I may not. The local city subreddit is a good counterpart to my local newspaper, but the real dangers for reddit are twofold: individuals will be less likely to provide free labor (on which Reddit depends both for content generation and moderation), and it gave its most passionate users a timeout on which they started evaluating alternatives.
- 3y ago
WalterBright 3y ago
> Reddit is transparent about the fact that the company is not profitable. There's the fundamental problem. The bills need to be paid.
- ProAm 3y ago
  Simple fix, if you use a third party app you need to have Reddit Gold. Problem solved.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    I'm really perplexed why that wasn't their go-to. Then they could just add bulk tier for data-sucking apps
    - jug6ernaut 3y ago
      Because they want user's off of 3rd party apps completely. Their API pricing is such that its not realistic for anyone to use it, that is entirely intentional. They want to completely control the experience, so they an extract as much user data as possible to drive ads. So long as user's are in 3rd party apps those 3rd parties control the relationship, which Reddit has deemed is unacceptable.
  - xeromal 3y ago
    I would've gotten reddit gold for sure to use Sync.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    And you are 100% sure that wouldn't have been a strike?
    - ProAm 3y ago
      Im not sure. I feel Reddit does deserve to be profitable. The bad choice they made was how they went about it. I feel there were a couple reasonable paths to profitability. But charging app makers for api access didnt seem like a good one. It might have stuck a chord with some users, but I think overall it would have been net positive for Reddit and the narrative from leadership much more palatable
cm2012 3y ago
At this point I hope Reddit kicks out mods from all major subreddits still set to private and places their own people. I'm tired of drama from 3% of the Reddit population (or less) impacting the other 97% negatively. I just don't think either side has the moral high ground. The mods like the convenience of 3rd party apps. I get it. It's not a real moral issue.
- cwkoss 3y ago
  Reddit literally will not function without the gargantuan amount of mod labor they get for free.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - CapstanRoller 3y ago
    Maybe they don't need to. Maybe Reddit realized they can make "dead Internet theory" a reality, for profit. Why not embrace the "subreddit simulator" meme and simply make users argue with GPT-X, trained on previous Reddit posts? No moderation required — every user is corralled into a tiny bubble, perhaps consisting of a single real person, all while consuming ads.
    - cwkoss 3y ago
      I wish that hypothetical was something that could be criminally prosecuted.
- skeaker 3y ago
  Regardless of your thoughts on the actual changes made, I think most would agree that Reddit is distinctly in the wrong thanks to the bald-faced lies that the CEO has tried to use to pin the blame for his decisions on innocent parties. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435
Gloomily3819 3y ago
"Reddit has an admirable record when it comes to defending an open and free internet." Had*. Ever since Aaron died, it's become a censorious bubble.
- chimeracoder 3y ago
  > Had*. Ever since Aaron died, it's become a censorious bubble. Aaron Swartz had very little involvement with Reddit for several years before his death, and also some of Reddit's most notorious (at least at the time) "censorship" actions took place before his death. It's a little unfair to his memory to conflate the two things, especially given that he spent the last five years of his life doing things he deeply cared about (and which had nothing to do with Reddit corporate strategy or policy).
  - BudaDude 3y ago
    I agree with this. SOPA, PIPA, Net Neutrality (RIP), Bernie Sanders gaining national recognition, and so many other positive Reddit things happened after his death.
chaosjevil 3y ago
The main problem with this article is that it's only handling the current events, without taking into account that Reddit has a long-standing history of user-hostile decisions. For example... let's talk about The_Donald, shall we? (inb4: I'm not from USA, "Trump" and "Biden" for me are just "some leaders from some tacoland", so I'm not emotionally attached into this matter.) Some users were protesting that The_Donald should be banned on the grounds of hate speech. Some said that it should be allowed to exist, for the sake of free speech. What did Reddit do? Quarantined it, showing that it doesn't care about hate speech _nor_ free speech, while paying lip service to both. And using a bullshit reason to do so (a single post encouraging people to beat cops, or crap like that.) Why doesn't Reddit outright tell its users its values? Why is it always lying? Why does it put a CEO to disdain the community, with a "we snoos" (something redditors never use)? A: because it doesn't fucking care about its users. That issue predates the 3rd party apps killing, and it will postdate it. By the way: there are talks that Reddit might finally implement limits on how many subs a mod can moderate. An old request from people concerned about power mods. Why now? (A: because it happens to align with Reddit Inc.'s interests - userbase be damned.) I'm fucking glad that I've migrated. [[And the fediverse is nice, the fediverse is great, but if you're a Reddit user and can't stand the fediverse: migrate elsewhere. Don't stay in that sinking ship.]]
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Reddit Inc in my perception is amoral, tending towards immoral. In general they want to do as little policing as possible, and only do the least amount they can when their hand is forced. But there's also some signs of the higher ups actually being okay with things that are icky and of very doubtful appeal to advertisers, like r/jailbait I'd say overall the leadership is just not good. It neither has any sort of moral center, nor is even properly business oriented because their efforts on that regard seem very lacking as well. Eg, I think this API move makes little economical sense. If one were to be ruthlessly profit oriented I think an approach might be to introduce an API price and gradually raise it little by little. Milk the market for all it's worth. Rather than killing it from the start, either extract every dollar people are willing to pay, or kill it by squeezing all the profit that can be had from the maneuver by doing it slowly and gradually.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
It's not what Reddit got wrong, it's what we -- the public -- got wrong. Again. We can't expect profit motivated companies to provide a true public shared space with shared public values. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Google -- all of them naturally have their own interests at heart -- not yours -- and as Doctorow explained in the "Enshittification" article, they all go through it. Their shareholders will demand it. We evolved traditional state run postal services for a reason; but I won't enrage the libertarians here by suggesting we need the same for online forums and suffer the downvotes. I would submit that it's delusional to expect private corporations to provide these kinds of services on the terms we expect once they've gone beyond initial market capture. Somehow the message needs to get out to stop trusting and embracing these kinds of fake public spaces. The EFF article submits that "Content moderation doesn’t work at scale"; I'd take a stronger position: social networking does not "work" at scale. It degrades into "social media" and/or walled gardens and/or automated mob manipulation. I hope one of the results of the last year -- with Twitter and now Reddit going through this kind of crazy -- is the partial return of some smaller scale more intimate spaces to replace their use. Addendum: With LLMs and automated "content" production going seriously"webscale", I expect things to get worse before they get better
cwkoss 3y ago
Posted this a while back, but maybe someone will want to pick this up and run with it now: I specced out a decentralized spam-resistant reddit alternative a while ago, and posted it here a few months ago. Please build this, happy to sign away non-exclusive IP rights if you have an idea of how to monetize. --- I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone please take this and build it. Let me know if you try, would love to spectate and advise on development. The key is there shouldn't be a globally consistent front page. Sorting should be done on an individual basis. Upvotes boost signal signal to peers and downvotes squelch. By propagating content scores transitively through the network proportionally to trust scores, users can moderate their own feeds by voting and managing their friend list. Users have a peer list, containing a list of server/users on it. Each peer has a user-managed 'trust weighting'. Each user has a list of "good content" (ideally hash identified for content addressability), with each item having a score based on that user's votes and votes from peers, weighted by that users trust in that peer. Periodically, your server contacts all of your peers, and asks them for their good content list. The scores from peers are multiplied by your own trust weight for that peer, and you build a personal "good content" list that merges the lists from each of your peers together (and drops insufficient scores). You are presented with a score-descending-sorted page of content. Whenever you upvote something, it increases your score weight for that content as well as the trust weight for each peer who sent you the recommendation, and vice versa for downvotes. Votes are transmitted to peers as a crypto signature of the content hash, but when retransmitted to peer-of-peer, they only see the intermediary's aggregated and trust weighted merged scores. The specifics of the algorithms on how you calculate and adjust weights can be configurable by each individual user, the protocol only cares that peers are able to produce some kind of score list. Dividing content into topics is a bit trickier, could just label content with tags. I think it may be preferable for each user to have multiple topic focused 'personalities' that are basically distinct user accounts with unique peer lists and votes. In that way, I could follow Dave-gardening without having to follow Dave-sports. For this example I'm using 1 user per server for simplicity, though not required. All users could be on same server, which is probably best for MVP to avoid implementing p2p networking stuff until validated. Ex. Alice follows Bob with weight of 0.5, Dave with 0.1 Bob scores content A as 0.8, B as 0.2 Dave scored content A as 0.4, B as 0.9 Alice downloads both lists. Alice score content A as avg(0.8 * 0.5, 0.4 * 0.1) = 0.22 Alice scores content B as avg(0.2 * 0.5, 0.9 * 0.1) = 0.095 Content A gets sorted higher than B. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21011645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21011645 (previous discussion)
jarcoal 3y ago
What went wrong is that after being divested from Condé Nast, reddit went and raised a huge round that ensured they would have to go down the route of synthetic growth tactics. This whole operation could be wildly profitable with a team of 50-100 people and no major investors to appease. Instead they read the room wrong, or just didn't care, and now we're here.
- spencerhakim 3y ago
  Reddit should have stuck to the Craigslist model of simply just existing as-is, selling a reasonable amount of ads and premium subscriptions, and only having the minimum number of employees required to keep the site up. It never needed to be and shouldn't have been anything more than that.
  - dannersy 3y ago
    Yet another brand gone to shit in the name of "exponential growth" or some other term investors want to hear. No one considers whether their business should fit a model that prioritizes sustainability.
  - m463 3y ago
    I was thinking of craigslist too. They resisted ebay, and change for change's sake, and ... well lots of things: People tell us what they like about craigslist including: - Giving people a voice - A sense of trust and even intimacy - Consistency of down-to-earth values - Simplicity - No charges, except for job postings - Freshness of the material - No ads, particularly no banner ads https://www.craigslist.org/about/mission_and_history https://www.craigslist.org/about/mission_and_history
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  In hindsight it's easy to say, but I bet they would be extremely profitable if they had taken less VC funding and kept self-hosting of content to the minimum. Serve a few ads here and there, let companies do their guerilla marketing for a "small donation" and have people pay for their Reddit gold. But that probably wouldn't put them on track for a few billion dollar IPO, so of course you can't do it.
neilv 3y ago
> What Reddit Got Wrong If you saw that title a month ago, you might read "Reddit" there as "the people talking on Reddit". Whether it was people's emerging consensus/behavior on a noteworthy incident, a more general zeitgeist or Reddit Hive Mind exhibited over time there, or whatever. Reading "Reddit" in the title instead as "Reddit, the company" is less familiar to me.
- lstamour 3y ago
  Highlights how hands off Reddit generally was until now that while we say “Twitter” vs “on Twitter” or “YouTube” vs “YouTuber”, until now we rarely distinguished between “Reddit” and “on Reddit”. Reddit was an invisible benefactor until it wasn’t…
deleted 3y ago
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Slava_Propanei 3y ago
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nostrfanboi 3y ago
Nice article, but too much focus on federation as a potential solution. The problem with federated networks ("Fediverse"?) like Mastodon and Matrix is that you still rely on a (sub)domain and someone running a server. That someone could be yourself, but that's just an option for a small minority. That domain could be shut down. Nostr may solve this: instead of usernames the user has a private/public key. And instead of relying on a specific server your data can flow through many servers (relays).
thrwerr 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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nitwit005 3y ago
The takeaway for me, is that the moderation tools were neglected, despite the site being essentially dependent on them. Note the accessibility complaints from blind subreddits. They couldn't be bothered to make it work with a screen reader. Important to remember some of the people moderating this stuff have had to deal with spam/bot activity severe enough to make the news (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wallstreetbets-reddit-bot-activity https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wallstreetbets-reddit-bot-activ...). It's unsurprising some ended up dependent on external apps.
fencepost 3y ago
Whether they truly got it wrong depends on exactly what their (publicly unstated) goals really are. It's possible that this is driven by incompetence and ego as has been seen elsewhere in social media in the past year, but it's also possible that apps weren't a target and were just a bystander. A LOT of this depends on the question 'who are they wanting to have paying?' Personally, I think they got focused on one particular thing (AI firms and any other content vacuums) and lost sight of other options for making money. In that context, trying to do volume-based charging to the third party apps makes sense, because in a lot of ways you're just treating them like all the new customers you're targeting. I think this completely misses the potential for monetizing their users beyond ad impressions, but maybe they did analysis and decided it just couldn't happen - or maybe they just dismissed it because they had different customers in mind. It still seems to me that they could (now could have?) converted a significant percentage of mobile app users into paying customers - perhaps not at the Premium price point of $50+/year, but likely at a lower price point of $18/year (still way more than they were getting from ads) they'd have taken a ton of free users and turned them into paying customers, and they'd have done it while keeping the lion's share of the money themselves instead of having app devs and app stores thrown into the mix. In addition, once you've got them paying you have plenty of options to try to steer them to higher plans - someone wants to have multiple accounts for family or privacy reasons? That's only available with Premium, or with a Family plan. Want higher API limits? We can sell you that. Spending time moderating a popular subreddit? Thanks, would a free subscription make that easier for you? But maybe potential investors don't actually care about having paying clients.
dom96 3y ago
> Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated All have definitely not been reinstated. They banned my 13 year old account without warning because I dared to make an alternative API for Reddit[1]. Even after agreeing to suspend the service they are still yet to unban my account. I wouldn't be surprised if there are others in the same boat. 1 - https://api.reddiw.com https://api.reddiw.com
- mdrzn 3y ago
  "The goal of this project is to offer a fallback in case Reddit does continue with its plan to charge app developers fees" So you created an API to bypass the official APIs, promoted it on Reddit itself, and wonder why you got banned? Color me surprised.
  - tvink 3y ago
    Yeah, honestly, this is not in the same basked as discussing reddit alternatives. This is just oblivious.
fnord77 3y ago
Their claim that reddit got it right by using community/volunteer moderation really doesn't take into account the fact that the moderators in some communities are actually employees of some interest group who want to influence things. The moderators of some of the political subs work for certain parties or political groups and it is blatantly obvious.
OscarMitchell5 3y ago
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butler4906756 3y ago
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323 points by cryoz 3y ago

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Basically they forgot they built a site built on community and then tried to sell those communities like inanimate objects. No surprise it blew up in there face.

edmundsauto 3y ago
What evidence do we have that it blew up in their face? There is clearly a large backlash, but it's not at all clear how much that will impact their key metrics, which is probably all they care about moving into IPO. I agree they made awful decisions, my usage patterns will definitely be changing due to a re-enable /etc/hosts entry. However, what is the impact on a broader scale? This is like Twitter firing a ton of engineers - we can't really evaluate until much further down the road.
- willis936 3y ago
  We don't have numbers, but if it hadn't blown up in their face then we wouldn't be talking about it. What is reddit's product? The users. What happens IPO valuation when the users leave?
  - nicce 3y ago
    Reddit, like any other social media platform is worthless without users. We will see in few months what is the situation and if someone manages to advertise an alternative for millions of people. Then, Reddit IPO is doomed. If there is no new significant alternative where people will go, then IPO will probably continue as planned and API change went well from the Reddit’s perspective.
    - willis936 3y ago
      Why does an alternative need to exist? The attention economy is saturated and users are likely happy to have one less feed.
      - mattstir 3y ago
        > Why does an alternative need to exist? Because there are a great many people that have legitimately used Reddit as their "frontpage of the internet" for years and don't enjoy the form factor that other websites / apps provide. Places like Twitter and TikTok aren't everyone's cup of tea, especially if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content.
        willis936 3y ago
        >if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content My take is that this type of person is more likely to not need to replace their feed fix with another feed and is more likely to pursue fulfillment in other areas of life.
        andybak 3y ago
        I think several subreddit in my life would be irreplaceable. I don’t know another platform that would generate those kind of communities.
        nicce 3y ago
        If someone is using Reddit just for scrolling endless feeds, I would say that they have no strong ideological foundations to quit the platform based on the API changes. Unless they think that official app is really useless.
        wvenable 3y ago
        I spend 5 minutes today with some user CSS to reskin Lemmy to be more like Reddit with RES. Another half-hour of effort and at least the form-factor will be pretty similar.
  - edmundsauto 3y ago
    We're talking about it because some percentage of users are very pissed, not because it necessarily impacts the business. I agree there is a line where reddit would be worried for their IPO, but we have no idea if 1% of reddit traffic will drop (not a problem for them) or 50% (big problem). We (and reddit) also don't know whether users will return, ie: will this just blow over?
satvikpendem 3y ago
> We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor. From Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-... Nothing blew up in their face. It's almost as if the vast majority of users simply don't care about this kind of drama.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  > We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor. This is the funniest because it shows how little they're actually able to generate from people using their product
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Yeah users on Reddit are worth on average around 30 cents each. But this is also why they're pushing the official Reddit app, to increase their ARPU.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      They could just charge $2 for "API access with enough limits for power users" and pay both for missing ads and for API usage
      - satvikpendem 3y ago
        That's exactly what they are doing with the API lol, but people still got outraged at that. The Apollo dev said that he would have to charge every user $2.50 a month to cover costs of the API, so even if the Apollo dev is exaggerating, $2.50 is not that high if people really want to user third party apps.
        mattstir 3y ago
        > That's exactly what they are doing with the API lol No, they're charging exorbitant rates for API access lol. I honestly can't understand how people can look at $2.50 / month per user for a few JSON responses and think "wow now that's reasonable." If their infrastructure is that bad that it costs even on the order of a dollar per month per user to serve API requests, then I'd be horrified to imagine how much it costs them to send entire HTML pages to the millions of people that use desktop exclusively.

dale_glass 3y ago

I think the idea put out by some people here that Reddit might be in the process of radically changing tracks is plausible. Reddit was always very hands-off. They had lots of very unpleasant and controversial content until their hand was forced. Overall they seem to want a site that runs itself as much as possible and over time content that required interaction and management (eg, AMAs, Secret Santa) got de-prioritized and dropped. Also, Reddit has quite a lot of mindless consumption content. Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. Such a site would require minimal care, and might even be possible to maintain with AI moderation. For moderating something like r/DebateReligion human brains are needed. But for deciding whether something is a cat or not, probably not.

nullindividual 3y ago
> Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal. The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect" has grown significantly within the past few years, though has been a problem for a number of years prior. Reddit won't come back from this stage of may-as-well-be-bots-posting.
- greenpresident 3y ago
  There is already a large population of bots reposting formerly popular content, including the comments from the original thread. It’s eerie once you notice it.
  - transcriptase 3y ago
    I’ve seen entire (dozen reply long) comment chains on a repost (or similar content) that were re-created verbatim from an older post. Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process. Eerie was an understatement.

dsir 3y ago

> Unlike moderators on Reddit, who have no established way to seek support from the platform or its users The article brings up a good point regarding how Reddit relies a lot on free labor to work. The incentives for operating the communities are primarily built on good will. I've been working on a Reddit/Discord/Patreon style hybrid community platform that puts a focus on the community owner/admins getting paid. It feels like the people running the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do. https://sociables.com/community/Sports/home https://sociables.com/community/Sports/home

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shmatt 3y ago

I never understand why Reddit is credited to the "free community based moderation" idea Facebook does this at much larger scale (2B users active in FB Groups), with way more spam, and some FB groups are much larger than most big subreddits Its not about Facebook or Reddit, its about people being so power hungry they do these things for free. When subreddits post about bringing in more mods, thousands apply, maybe 2 get in. If Reddit deems locked subreddits abandoned, there is already a system to give the abandoned subreddit to anyone else that wants it (within reason). Subreddits also split pretty often due to mod infighting The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good. The infighting is because some mods love adding arbitrary rules like "no relationship posts" in AITA. Does everyone agree with that? Is that a perfect rule? Why? A new moderation team could be just as good or just as bad as the previous one

Macha 3y ago
> The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good. There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful community building that must have happened. Certainly Reddit's setup does incentivize name squatting, but there's been plenty of cases where the obvious name is run by a team so ineffective that it gets outcompeted (r/marijuana vs r/trees, r/lgbt vs r/ainbow, r/moddedmc vs r/feedthebeast are some examples). And plenty of communities get by with non-obvious names, like r/DestinyTheGame, r/Pathfinder_RPG, so it's not purely a name race.
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  Don't forget the epic story of the fall of r/worldpolitics and the rise of r/anime_titties as its replacement.
  - UncleSlacky 3y ago

DantesKite 3y ago

It's not clear to me the Reddit users will be permanently gone either, unless there's some place like Reddit taking in a lot more users right now. But I haven't heard of any place like that so far. No real competitor for users to jump ship towards.

georgeburdell 3y ago
Or maybe people will realize they were not happy with the amount of time they were spending on Reddit and go habituate themselves to something completely different with that time.
- ilikecakeandpie 3y ago
  Those folks are likely going back to Facebook/IG/Twitter/TikTok etc. If they're craving content and don't want to spend the time going to distinct sites, they're likely not going to all of a sudden pick up a new hobby. I hope I'm wrong.
- clnq 3y ago
  That was always allowed. And yet, very many people are terminally online in one way or another. Even if the term "terminally online" has very strong stigma and most people would not consider to be a part of that group, they still spend hours every day on social media, and have no means of quitting it even knowing the harmful effects.

incomingpain 3y ago

There are a dozen better reasons to quit reddit. The only reason people are protesting api pricing is because they want to protest. The actual concern here isn't what they are protesting. They want to quit but they can't. They likely even realize they are addicted. They likely even realize the content they view is censored and curated to manipulate them. Just quit reddit already and be happy.

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
I'm protesting API pricing because it means my favourite app isn't sustainable. Sorry if it's not as profound as you want it to be.
techsupporter 3y ago
> They want to quit but they can't. If you mean want to quit but can't in the sense that there is no other place on the Internet to have a like-minded community forum around fountain pens or a particular bank or third-tier game shows, yes, this is true. But if you mean in a broader sense, of "I just can't quit you!", then no. Reddit steamrolled all of the older forums--and, before that, Usenet and Echomail groups--I used to participate in. Much like how so many sellers of niche products have moved to Amazon, Reddit is where the quirky forums have moved to. I don't use Reddit as a general-purpose site. It's simply the place where the community that discusses the topics I want to gas on about live. And, yes, I object to what Reddit is doing so I will leave it if the changes come to pass.
ebiester 3y ago
It mostly wasn't the rank and file users making the most noise. It was the moderators who rely on the API for a series of tools (including third party tools like Apollo) to moderate the larger subreddits. For me, it absolutely was a sign to evaluate my usage. I may go back, I may not. The local city subreddit is a good counterpart to my local newspaper, but the real dangers for reddit are twofold: individuals will be less likely to provide free labor (on which Reddit depends both for content generation and moderation), and it gave its most passionate users a timeout on which they started evaluating alternatives.
3y ago

WalterBright 3y ago

> Reddit is transparent about the fact that the company is not profitable. There's the fundamental problem. The bills need to be paid.

ProAm 3y ago
Simple fix, if you use a third party app you need to have Reddit Gold. Problem solved.
- ilyt 3y ago
  I'm really perplexed why that wasn't their go-to. Then they could just add bulk tier for data-sucking apps
  - jug6ernaut 3y ago
    Because they want user's off of 3rd party apps completely. Their API pricing is such that its not realistic for anyone to use it, that is entirely intentional. They want to completely control the experience, so they an extract as much user data as possible to drive ads. So long as user's are in 3rd party apps those 3rd parties control the relationship, which Reddit has deemed is unacceptable.
- xeromal 3y ago
  I would've gotten reddit gold for sure to use Sync.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  And you are 100% sure that wouldn't have been a strike?
  - ProAm 3y ago
    Im not sure. I feel Reddit does deserve to be profitable. The bad choice they made was how they went about it. I feel there were a couple reasonable paths to profitability. But charging app makers for api access didnt seem like a good one. It might have stuck a chord with some users, but I think overall it would have been net positive for Reddit and the narrative from leadership much more palatable

cm2012 3y ago

At this point I hope Reddit kicks out mods from all major subreddits still set to private and places their own people. I'm tired of drama from 3% of the Reddit population (or less) impacting the other 97% negatively. I just don't think either side has the moral high ground. The mods like the convenience of 3rd party apps. I get it. It's not a real moral issue.

cwkoss 3y ago
Reddit literally will not function without the gargantuan amount of mod labor they get for free.
- deleted 3y ago
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- CapstanRoller 3y ago
  Maybe they don't need to. Maybe Reddit realized they can make "dead Internet theory" a reality, for profit. Why not embrace the "subreddit simulator" meme and simply make users argue with GPT-X, trained on previous Reddit posts? No moderation required — every user is corralled into a tiny bubble, perhaps consisting of a single real person, all while consuming ads.
  - cwkoss 3y ago
    I wish that hypothetical was something that could be criminally prosecuted.
skeaker 3y ago
Regardless of your thoughts on the actual changes made, I think most would agree that Reddit is distinctly in the wrong thanks to the bald-faced lies that the CEO has tried to use to pin the blame for his decisions on innocent parties. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435

Gloomily3819 3y ago

"Reddit has an admirable record when it comes to defending an open and free internet." Had*. Ever since Aaron died, it's become a censorious bubble.

chimeracoder 3y ago
> Had*. Ever since Aaron died, it's become a censorious bubble. Aaron Swartz had very little involvement with Reddit for several years before his death, and also some of Reddit's most notorious (at least at the time) "censorship" actions took place before his death. It's a little unfair to his memory to conflate the two things, especially given that he spent the last five years of his life doing things he deeply cared about (and which had nothing to do with Reddit corporate strategy or policy).
- BudaDude 3y ago
  I agree with this. SOPA, PIPA, Net Neutrality (RIP), Bernie Sanders gaining national recognition, and so many other positive Reddit things happened after his death.

chaosjevil 3y ago

The main problem with this article is that it's only handling the current events, without taking into account that Reddit has a long-standing history of user-hostile decisions. For example... let's talk about The_Donald, shall we? (inb4: I'm not from USA, "Trump" and "Biden" for me are just "some leaders from some tacoland", so I'm not emotionally attached into this matter.) Some users were protesting that The_Donald should be banned on the grounds of hate speech. Some said that it should be allowed to exist, for the sake of free speech. What did Reddit do? Quarantined it, showing that it doesn't care about hate speech _nor_ free speech, while paying lip service to both. And using a bullshit reason to do so (a single post encouraging people to beat cops, or crap like that.) Why doesn't Reddit outright tell its users its values? Why is it always lying? Why does it put a CEO to disdain the community, with a "we snoos" (something redditors never use)? A: because it doesn't fucking care about its users. That issue predates the 3rd party apps killing, and it will postdate it. By the way: there are talks that Reddit might finally implement limits on how many subs a mod can moderate. An old request from people concerned about power mods. Why now? (A: because it happens to align with Reddit Inc.'s interests - userbase be damned.) I'm fucking glad that I've migrated. [[And the fediverse is nice, the fediverse is great, but if you're a Reddit user and can't stand the fediverse: migrate elsewhere. Don't stay in that sinking ship.]]

dale_glass 3y ago
Reddit Inc in my perception is amoral, tending towards immoral. In general they want to do as little policing as possible, and only do the least amount they can when their hand is forced. But there's also some signs of the higher ups actually being okay with things that are icky and of very doubtful appeal to advertisers, like r/jailbait I'd say overall the leadership is just not good. It neither has any sort of moral center, nor is even properly business oriented because their efforts on that regard seem very lacking as well. Eg, I think this API move makes little economical sense. If one were to be ruthlessly profit oriented I think an approach might be to introduce an API price and gradually raise it little by little. Milk the market for all it's worth. Rather than killing it from the start, either extract every dollar people are willing to pay, or kill it by squeezing all the profit that can be had from the maneuver by doing it slowly and gradually.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

It's not what Reddit got wrong, it's what we -- the public -- got wrong. Again. We can't expect profit motivated companies to provide a true public shared space with shared public values. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Google -- all of them naturally have their own interests at heart -- not yours -- and as Doctorow explained in the "Enshittification" article, they all go through it. Their shareholders will demand it. We evolved traditional state run postal services for a reason; but I won't enrage the libertarians here by suggesting we need the same for online forums and suffer the downvotes. I would submit that it's delusional to expect private corporations to provide these kinds of services on the terms we expect once they've gone beyond initial market capture. Somehow the message needs to get out to stop trusting and embracing these kinds of fake public spaces. The EFF article submits that "Content moderation doesn’t work at scale"; I'd take a stronger position: social networking does not "work" at scale. It degrades into "social media" and/or walled gardens and/or automated mob manipulation. I hope one of the results of the last year -- with Twitter and now Reddit going through this kind of crazy -- is the partial return of some smaller scale more intimate spaces to replace their use. Addendum: With LLMs and automated "content" production going seriously"webscale", I expect things to get worse before they get better

cwkoss 3y ago

Posted this a while back, but maybe someone will want to pick this up and run with it now: I specced out a decentralized spam-resistant reddit alternative a while ago, and posted it here a few months ago. Please build this, happy to sign away non-exclusive IP rights if you have an idea of how to monetize. --- I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone please take this and build it. Let me know if you try, would love to spectate and advise on development. The key is there shouldn't be a globally consistent front page. Sorting should be done on an individual basis. Upvotes boost signal signal to peers and downvotes squelch. By propagating content scores transitively through the network proportionally to trust scores, users can moderate their own feeds by voting and managing their friend list. Users have a peer list, containing a list of server/users on it. Each peer has a user-managed 'trust weighting'. Each user has a list of "good content" (ideally hash identified for content addressability), with each item having a score based on that user's votes and votes from peers, weighted by that users trust in that peer. Periodically, your server contacts all of your peers, and asks them for their good content list. The scores from peers are multiplied by your own trust weight for that peer, and you build a personal "good content" list that merges the lists from each of your peers together (and drops insufficient scores). You are presented with a score-descending-sorted page of content. Whenever you upvote something, it increases your score weight for that content as well as the trust weight for each peer who sent you the recommendation, and vice versa for downvotes. Votes are transmitted to peers as a crypto signature of the content hash, but when retransmitted to peer-of-peer, they only see the intermediary's aggregated and trust weighted merged scores. The specifics of the algorithms on how you calculate and adjust weights can be configurable by each individual user, the protocol only cares that peers are able to produce some kind of score list. Dividing content into topics is a bit trickier, could just label content with tags. I think it may be preferable for each user to have multiple topic focused 'personalities' that are basically distinct user accounts with unique peer lists and votes. In that way, I could follow Dave-gardening without having to follow Dave-sports. For this example I'm using 1 user per server for simplicity, though not required. All users could be on same server, which is probably best for MVP to avoid implementing p2p networking stuff until validated. Ex. Alice follows Bob with weight of 0.5, Dave with 0.1 Bob scores content A as 0.8, B as 0.2 Dave scored content A as 0.4, B as 0.9 Alice downloads both lists. Alice score content A as avg(0.8 * 0.5, 0.4 * 0.1) = 0.22 Alice scores content B as avg(0.2 * 0.5, 0.9 * 0.1) = 0.095 Content A gets sorted higher than B. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21011645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21011645 (previous discussion)

jarcoal 3y ago

What went wrong is that after being divested from Condé Nast, reddit went and raised a huge round that ensured they would have to go down the route of synthetic growth tactics. This whole operation could be wildly profitable with a team of 50-100 people and no major investors to appease. Instead they read the room wrong, or just didn't care, and now we're here.

spencerhakim 3y ago
Reddit should have stuck to the Craigslist model of simply just existing as-is, selling a reasonable amount of ads and premium subscriptions, and only having the minimum number of employees required to keep the site up. It never needed to be and shouldn't have been anything more than that.
- dannersy 3y ago
  Yet another brand gone to shit in the name of "exponential growth" or some other term investors want to hear. No one considers whether their business should fit a model that prioritizes sustainability.
- m463 3y ago
  I was thinking of craigslist too. They resisted ebay, and change for change's sake, and ... well lots of things: People tell us what they like about craigslist including: - Giving people a voice - A sense of trust and even intimacy - Consistency of down-to-earth values - Simplicity - No charges, except for job postings - Freshness of the material - No ads, particularly no banner ads https://www.craigslist.org/about/mission_and_history https://www.craigslist.org/about/mission_and_history
karmakurtisaani 3y ago
In hindsight it's easy to say, but I bet they would be extremely profitable if they had taken less VC funding and kept self-hosting of content to the minimum. Serve a few ads here and there, let companies do their guerilla marketing for a "small donation" and have people pay for their Reddit gold. But that probably wouldn't put them on track for a few billion dollar IPO, so of course you can't do it.

neilv 3y ago

> What Reddit Got Wrong If you saw that title a month ago, you might read "Reddit" there as "the people talking on Reddit". Whether it was people's emerging consensus/behavior on a noteworthy incident, a more general zeitgeist or Reddit Hive Mind exhibited over time there, or whatever. Reading "Reddit" in the title instead as "Reddit, the company" is less familiar to me.

lstamour 3y ago
Highlights how hands off Reddit generally was until now that while we say “Twitter” vs “on Twitter” or “YouTube” vs “YouTuber”, until now we rarely distinguished between “Reddit” and “on Reddit”. Reddit was an invisible benefactor until it wasn’t…

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Slava_Propanei 3y ago

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nostrfanboi 3y ago

Nice article, but too much focus on federation as a potential solution. The problem with federated networks ("Fediverse"?) like Mastodon and Matrix is that you still rely on a (sub)domain and someone running a server. That someone could be yourself, but that's just an option for a small minority. That domain could be shut down. Nostr may solve this: instead of usernames the user has a private/public key. And instead of relying on a specific server your data can flow through many servers (relays).

thrwerr 3y ago

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nitwit005 3y ago

The takeaway for me, is that the moderation tools were neglected, despite the site being essentially dependent on them. Note the accessibility complaints from blind subreddits. They couldn't be bothered to make it work with a screen reader. Important to remember some of the people moderating this stuff have had to deal with spam/bot activity severe enough to make the news (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wallstreetbets-reddit-bot-activity https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wallstreetbets-reddit-bot-activ...). It's unsurprising some ended up dependent on external apps.

fencepost 3y ago

Whether they truly got it wrong depends on exactly what their (publicly unstated) goals really are. It's possible that this is driven by incompetence and ego as has been seen elsewhere in social media in the past year, but it's also possible that apps weren't a target and were just a bystander. A LOT of this depends on the question 'who are they wanting to have paying?' Personally, I think they got focused on one particular thing (AI firms and any other content vacuums) and lost sight of other options for making money. In that context, trying to do volume-based charging to the third party apps makes sense, because in a lot of ways you're just treating them like all the new customers you're targeting. I think this completely misses the potential for monetizing their users beyond ad impressions, but maybe they did analysis and decided it just couldn't happen - or maybe they just dismissed it because they had different customers in mind. It still seems to me that they could (now could have?) converted a significant percentage of mobile app users into paying customers - perhaps not at the Premium price point of $50+/year, but likely at a lower price point of $18/year (still way more than they were getting from ads) they'd have taken a ton of free users and turned them into paying customers, and they'd have done it while keeping the lion's share of the money themselves instead of having app devs and app stores thrown into the mix. In addition, once you've got them paying you have plenty of options to try to steer them to higher plans - someone wants to have multiple accounts for family or privacy reasons? That's only available with Premium, or with a Family plan. Want higher API limits? We can sell you that. Spending time moderating a popular subreddit? Thanks, would a free subscription make that easier for you? But maybe potential investors don't actually care about having paying clients.

dom96 3y ago

> Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated All have definitely not been reinstated. They banned my 13 year old account without warning because I dared to make an alternative API for Reddit[1]. Even after agreeing to suspend the service they are still yet to unban my account. I wouldn't be surprised if there are others in the same boat. 1 - https://api.reddiw.com https://api.reddiw.com

mdrzn 3y ago
"The goal of this project is to offer a fallback in case Reddit does continue with its plan to charge app developers fees" So you created an API to bypass the official APIs, promoted it on Reddit itself, and wonder why you got banned? Color me surprised.
- tvink 3y ago
  Yeah, honestly, this is not in the same basked as discussing reddit alternatives. This is just oblivious.

fnord77 3y ago

Their claim that reddit got it right by using community/volunteer moderation really doesn't take into account the fact that the moderators in some communities are actually employees of some interest group who want to influence things. The moderators of some of the political subs work for certain parties or political groups and it is blatantly obvious.

OscarMitchell5 3y ago

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butler4906756 3y ago

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