If the market for initial public offerings recovers in the new year, one company that aims to go public early on is Reddit. An IPO will put the spotlight on the prospects for Reddit’s advertising business, which has fallen short of ambitious growth targetsoutlined by executives two years ago. ...
Well shucks, all they did was drive out their most active content makers and cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free moderation labor. Who could possibly have seen this coming?
Don’t be fooled. Most went back.
Quantity is not quality.
More important is originality…
Lots of people/bots would just take an existing post from Reddit, and repost it. Sometimes to a different sub, sometimes to the same sub.
For most users, it was still “new” because they hadn’t seen it before.
Those accounts are still reposting. There’s more than few that do it here too.
But that OC has been drastically cut down, there’s just a delay in users noticing that there’s fewer and fewer “new” reposts going around.
So reddit doesn’t see a huge decrease in users immediately, but time on site and daily users will continue to decrease
Is it, though? I left Reddit for here, so don’t take this as being in their defense, but if originality and ad revenue were meaningfully correlated, Facebook and Instagram would be bastions of original content.
Hell, some of the most profitable YouTubers only post reaction content.
To me it is.
You’d have a point on any other platform. See, the unique thing about Reddit was that you could go there for OC. It’s basic business that you carve out a niche and you play that niche away from the competition. Reddit may not be doomed to fail but it is doomed to stagnate because it is competing closer with Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and news sites without decent ways to monetize and grow.
Investors like to see a unique market. Why is the platform retaining users? Moderation is on a downhill slide and these huge communities hardly feel organic.
Reddit is becoming Facebook + porn and the porn makes them no money. It’s actively unattractive to investors.
What sucks for them is that the users themselves cause this. OC is hard to make. Harder to highlight and celebrate. Reposts and news about politics and porn are 90% of the site. They get upvotes constantly. There’s an audience for that, but it has far less growth potential.
I would love to agree with you, and OC is certainly important to us, but the majority of the most upvoted content on Reddit hasn’t been OC for quite a few years now. I would guess Reddits serves most of its ads to people doom-scrolling the front page, and it probably likes it that way.
Yes but OC is what makes platforms unique and what makes them thrive. Facebook has the content of your friends and family. Twitter has the most recent words of celebrities and politicians. Instagram is similar.
Those platforms all have the same content as Reddit does. Reposts and news and memes aren’t unique to Reddit. So will Reddit fail and die? No. But Reddit isn’t as social. Why stay on Reddit if your friends aren’t on there to easily share content with? This is what TikTok does extremely well. It’s designed to share reposts and memes and news with friends easily even if few of them make OC. That’s the problem for Reddit. They’ve encouraged the wrong things with their platform and have not made it homogenous with the rest of the internet.
I was active nearly every day for 13 years, and I didn’t return. Granted, I don’t come here much either, but what Reddit did disgusted me too much.
My reddit account is 15 years old. I removed myself as a mod from the communities I took care of before signing out.
If they want to shit on the mods, they can handle the job themselves.
I already had inactive subs removed from me. Not like anyone would ever recreate them. It’s weird.
I was transitioning out, but it just felt disgusting to even open the site so I stopped doing it. I probably have a bunch of unread messages because of that.
As 10+ year vet, I still go back for certain things. Mostly communities that have not been recreated here yet in any meaningful sense, and there are a lot of those. There are people here, yes, but the niches, the non-general topics, are lacking a true community. That will come with time, but I still can’t substitute Lemmy for reddit 100% yet, much as I might want to. Unless I only want to talk technology, news, and politics all day.
But I will say Boost for Lemmy has taken the spot RIF once had on my mobile home screen. Lemmy is what I open reflexively now. I only go back to reddit when I need to see something specific, I’m not browsing there. Partially because it’s very tedious to navigate old.reddit on mobile, but partially because I just don’t want to spend too much time there anymore.
I had a reply to a four year ago comment I made. Up until that moment I had thought everything was archived.
For me it was a sub I participated in for years whose mod suddenly accused me of advocating for the abuse of children, told me I had mental health issues, and permanently banned and muted me. It was weird and I haven’t been back since.
16 years and agreed.
same here, since 2008. Pretty much every user of the site was on the same standard default subreddits. I don’t like what Reddit has become but I don’t blame them like a lot of people here.
Honestly they were a corporation from the get-go, out to make money once it became popular. They built something no one else did.
But going forward, the little reddit escapade from their corporate suite shows that freedom of speech can only thrive when there is no driving profit motive.
Spez wanted to be Zuck and just like Zuck, he allowed bad people to abuse the site in order to hurt others.
They weren’t a corporation from the get-go though? They were a Y-Combinator project that became successful, and were eventually bought by Conde Nast (when the “sell-out” began, btw).
I think profit was always the end goal, except for Aaron Swartz. They might not have been incorporated but the intent always seemed like profit.
I didn’t return either… to be fair, it’s because I was one of the ones who got a bullshit permaban
Same except I was at about 10 years. I don’t even find it useful to include “reddit” in my Google searches as many communities are locked down unless you sign in to an account. Can’t say I feel too bad for them.
A lot of search results still take me to Reddit. It is still a source of knowledge.
I tell myself that landing on Reddit, because of a search result is different than logging in on Reddit and subsequently browsing Reddit.
Using their app is on another level.
I’ll be honest. I want to believe in the Fediverse and Lemmy, really really hard.
It’s ideals (rather, the gestalt of the best of what everyone says is the best of Federation) appeals strongly.
But sometimes, it’s instance after instance of complaining about this or that. Double points when it’s all reddit complaining.
I dunno if being a heavy content creator necessitates an air of misguided superiority but there’s no more nuance here than anywhere else, and the content can’t seem to form precisely because everyone decides to take their toys away and do their own thing at the smallest provocation.
I don’t use them on my phone because fuck their app, but I’ve found no choice but to join up with an alias and as much extensions to make their job harder as Firefox allows, just to have genuine discussions on hyper specific topics from a PC.
Really? No choice?
Take control of your life, goddamn.
When I’ve gone back for a look I’ve found just the opposite. It’s just bots and trolls.
But after cementing lemmy as a viable alternative. I actually find fun content on lemmy. Reddit feed for me ends up turning into a left vs right garbage.
But they lost the best 10% of their posters and content. That’s devastating. Same thing as happened to Twitter, FB, and others before them.
What’s your basis for this statement? Any evidence to back it up?
I go back for a couple niche communities that haven’t escaped yet. And occasional search results for advice, but that tends to be 3-5+ years old on average.
Never going back.
?
Me, going back to that cesspool. I left quite the account behind as well.
This became an instant classic lol, do we know who the artist is?
That was one of the reasons they killed the api: to support ad growth. Unfortunately they failed to realize the combination of ad-blocking browsers and users just quitting the site from losing client access means they were never going to hit pre-IPO revenue targets.
Had they instead focused on affordable API pricing and driving subscriber revenues up, they would have exceeded revenue targets.
source: I was in a somewhat similar position (not quite the same, no third party client), but chose different and found myself making more subscription revenue than ad revenue thanks to a viewer base more than happy to pay more.