This article looks at Reddit as a “comment economy.” Beneath the rhetoric of community and information sharing, the platform’s economic incentives favor conformity, reaction, endless engagement, and compulsive commenting over independent thought, meaningful discourse, and the exchange of knowledge.
Reddit’s revenue ultimately depends upon the creation of, extended attention to and the scrolling through of massive amounts of comments. This produces advertising opportunities, data value, repeat visits and valuable user engagement metrics.
I’m surprised that reddit has leaned so hard into the act of perma-bans and site-wide bans. These are high intent users. Only a finite proportion of the internet wants to use reddit over say, TikTok, Instagram, Discord, etc. These bans are costing them a resource that is unlikely to renew itself, as users go elsewhere and do different things with their lives.
If all bans were capped at thirty days, that would still suck sometimes, but accounts I’ve had since the late 2000’s could be revived. I had one account with 100k karma before it got burned down for my political views + ban evasion. Subreddit mods could even have a bot that re-bans users after 30 days, that’s still preferable to reddit itself causing a mass extinction of old accounts that were valuable to the people who created them.
Yep, what they are doing is crazy. I was actually a member of the “front page” club - meaning I once posted something that received over 3 million views (an article about an ex-prostitute in Vietnam who had dramatically escaped from sex-traffickers and was now running a free program for orphans to keep them away from traffickers, but she was dying of cancer etc., etc.,). I think I helped that lady raise money because commentors were sharing her website and ways to send donations to her.
I received so many views for that article (from a Vietnamese-American website) in TIL that my article was literally on the front page of Reddit and I was entered into the ‘front page club’ that allowed me to post in the ‘front page’ subreddit with other front pagers and a few other benefits. And they permanently banned me! A front pager! :P I have no idea why. I am guessing that I posted too many articles and did not make enough comments. Who knows.
I’m convinced that the owners of Reddit really don’t know their butts from holes in the ground and I am also convinced that once advertisers realize that people are just scrolling past their ads without looking, Reddit will tank. Let it tank.
The good news is that reddit’s growth in the US has slowed, while growth globally has climbed. That’s good because US traffic is the most valuable, while overseas traffic, is often effectively worthless, like you can’t sell anything to a lot of global traffic. This means reddits operating costs are increasing due to that higher overall site usage, while the rates of monetizable English speaking users is going flat.
I’ve seen some mention that reddit is embracing non English speaking users to acquire more users and content, but I can tell you as an Internet marketer, this move in general, among all who do it, is like trying to squeeze blood from a turnip, both because they’re not valuable to advertisers, and users in places like Japan, Thailand, East Europe have already established usage patterns with LINE, Facebook, WhatsApp, Wykop, etc. The same network effect that keeps people like us stuck to reddit, keeps what little valuable international traffic there is, stuck to whatever they were already using.
The article I posted actually documents how corrupt Reddit is. For example, the two founders faked profiles and postings on a massive scale to make the site seem viable when it first started. It’s a site with no integrity and social vison. I think other countries should just do what China did - major American sites are blocked so that Chinese sites can dominate in China. Why should the Japanese or Koreans use American sites? They can create their own and generate wealth for their own economy. Google and Zuckerberg and the rest do not care about Japan or Thailand or China…
Anyway, thanks for the feedback. The guys who run Reddit are such screw-ups I have no doubt they will destroy the site.
The article I posted actually documents how corrupt Reddit is. For example, the two founders faked profiles and postings on a massive scale to make the site seem viable when it first started.
That’s pretty standard for an internet startup for that time. That’s a “we’ll worry about the consequences later” SOP that has only become stronger in the current climate.
It’s a site with no integrity and social vison
They still allow some disgusting shit in the name of free speech, on the adult content side of things. As a public company, a lot of that is likely to be done away with in the coming few years.
Why should the Japanese or Koreans use American sites? They can create their own and generate wealth for their own economy. Google and Zuckerberg and the rest do not care about Japan or Thailand or China…
No idea, but the nature of reddit makes it hard to monetize. I don’t think there’s a financial case for all those countries to have their own link aggregation type social media sites.
I’ve been recently sitewide banned for alleged ban evasion, the ban in question being a 3-day ban from r/youll_be_banned. Why on earth I’d ever evade that ban, it’s beyond me. Obviously I didn’t do that, but the automated system didn’t like me I guess
I mean I WAS always more of a poster than a commentor, so if this article is true then maybe it does make sense why I got unlucky
I would agree with the article as well. Reddit spent too many years not making a profit and now they are trying to optimize everything. I have no doubt that if you are more of a poster than a commenter they feel they need to get you out of their system. They can only make money from comments - they are not a social-discourse-can-better-humanity site, they are a we-need-to-squeeze-the-users-for-every-penny site.
Good, fuck reddit.
i got banned fall 2023 in r/worldnews for suggesting that conflicts in the middle east are perpetuated for profit.
Everyone who ever used Reddit got banned from some subreddit for foolish reasons, but I think the article is talking about the latest surge of permanent site-wide bans due to Reddit’s AI filter which is wiping out bots and normal users at the same time. If you go on ‘you’ ‘tube’ there are all kinds of tutorials on what not to do to get your account nuked.
Can we talk about the unnecessary death of the Oxford comma?
Fuck all headlines that don’t use it.
