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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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It's crazy how reddit's run like it's a 1-2 year old startup still trying to figure out how guidelines, communication, consistent rule enforcement, etc. work.
It's becoming more and more apparent the site's success was despite the company running it, not because of it.
Well, whether Reddit likes it or not, mods were a department of specialists working on some unique aspects of their business.
That whole department got told to get bent, in essence fired, but they don't even have contracts in place preventing "disgruntled employee" stuff.
This is what happens.
They were actually told to get bent but not fired, which is even funnier. Imagine insulting and belittling a key department in your company but letting them continue to run things.
Hey! Some of us come here to get away from work!!
I am starting to realize it's not "work" I want to get away from, it's Wall Street.
I mean it's not my boss or their bosses who are saying that my work won't help cancer patients unless they pay a 100 bucks for something I can make for 3 bucks, it's the Wall Street investors who bought the company.
And it's not the corporate hierarchy at Reddit that tells me that they need to blast ads in my face and make me argue with bots, it's the Wall Street investor valuing its IPO.
Mods are the QC on the free product made by volunteers.
This is a great depiction of the reality, and I AM copying this comment to use it in the future.
If Reddit had just kept their mouth shut, 2 days after the blackout most subs would be back online and the others would eventually follow.
But no Spez had to open his mouth and take actions, forcing subs to open again, telling lies about the app creators.
Basically turning all of Reddit against him.
He's panicking. His biggest lie is that this protest doesn't matter and hasn't and won't impact Reddit financially. It already has and will continue to do so. You can tell that the people who actually post content worth viewing are here and not there, despite the smaller numbers over here.
I mean it's not just reddit. While investors probably don't care, the fact that he lied about easily disprovable things that did or did not happen doesn't bode well. I don't think it's going to hurt their bottom line any time soon, but that kind of spinelessness isn't exactly liked.
Yeah, the angry irrational reactions show that all the talk about the protests just being noise was a bluff. It might have blown over, but it hasn't exactly because it got a reaction.
He was right that Reddit is "too big to fail", but he's doing the equivalent of keying a car he's planning to sell every time he opens his mouth. He'll still get money for it, but he's completely unnecessarily lowering its value.
I'd say it's kinda like having a "10-second" car that everyone loves and wants, but then you start ripping out some of the best performance parts and installing inferior parts in their place.
Does the car still run? It does. Is it slowly imploding because you've upset the engine's balance to the point where it's becoming dysfunctional? Also yes.
It's only a matter of time before the pretty paint job no longer hides the garbage under the hood.
I think its going to end up a successful move for them.
They built a platform. The users built the site over the years with minimal interaction from reddit.
They now have a platform, millions of users, and full control of what they want on that platform.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now, they want the traffic but don't want the problems that come with mostly community driven content.
All the profile redesigns, ability to "follow" users, profile pics, awards, all that has been an indication of the direction over the last few years. The last few steps was to kick out the problem users and be left with those who don't really give a shit and just want to see memes on their phone while they take a shit. The people who hear about reddit and just grab the official app from the store. The people who don't care about APIs and protests and modding or accessibility tools. Just eyeballs to look at their ads.
Those people will stay. It doesn't matter if 25% of the community leaves, because the natural growth in the next few months from the eyeballs will claw it back over time.
Once they have an obedient user base who are strictly bound to what reddit want them to see, think TikTok or facebook users, that's when they will see off. And it will pay off handsomely.
But, you see, the biggest problem here is: these generic users do not post anything. They may repost from Instagram or Tik Tok, or whatever, but if the power users, the ones responsible for the good content that the casual access leaves, it's just a matter of months for it to die for good.
I think years instead of months, but the rest is spot on. 30M pics users and 50k voted on the Sexy John Oliver change. 0.16% engagement on one of the highest traffic subs. So much of the front page has become tiktok it just a matter of time before people get their content direct from the source. The rest are news stories with the same arguments over and over again (ChatGPT and comment repost bots are already driving those) and reposted videos and memes from the last decade.
I'm still convinced that Google is driving a great deal of traffic to the site due to the depth of problem solving in old posts. I got a comment or DM every week or two thanking me for a solution I'd posted 3, 5, even 7 years prior. Those are all deleted now, and I'm keeping my account to regularly purge any restored content. If the top 100k-200k posters deleted their content, many google searches would lead to a dead end. Eventually it will end up like pinterest - you'll put -site:reddit.* in your search (or add an extension to do so) just to avoid getting the useless results.
A site a large as reddit doesn't die overnight, any more than Digg, Twitter, Usenet, or any other platform that is past its prime. But it certainly doesn't bode well for the future value or IPO success.
I agree, memes are fun but they won't keep a site alive. Reddit had it all which is what made it so compelling. You could catch up on some news between the memes while still keeping tabs on the current meta for Hearthstone.
When I "left" Slashdot for Reddit it was the depth of the site that made it so interesting. Slashdot was just people who were commenting on articles vs Reddit that had whole communities based on just about everything.
Reddit may recover to a degree but once the 3rd party apps fully die and people are forced to suffer the Reddit built app alone on mobile I think we will really start to see what kind of trends will emerge.
due to the way statistics works if you can get a truly random sample then a sample of 9600 voters can predict the US presidential election to an accuracy of 99%
The problem is getting a truly random sample though. The subset of users who voting on those polls probably includes a decent number of angry folks watching for news on such protests here on Lemmy or other platforms, and excludes a lot of people just scrolling for funny pictures
And the mods are the ones that fight the phishing scams, disinformation bots, t-shirt spammers, etc. If reddit were capable of automating those away, they wouldn't still be so prevalent.
I straight up don't believe reddit staff is as technically competent as those at Meta/IG or TikTok. They can't pull it off without a volunteer army filling in the capabilities gap.
I would have agreed with you if it had just been the API changes, but the recent behaviour from admins is extremely alienating. All they needed to do to fix this situation is strike a deal with app developers and say sorry. The protest would have been over in a day and things would have largely gone back to normal.
Instead, they dug in their heels and behaved like insecure little tyrants. They lie, they force mods out of their subs, they undelete comments, etc. There's no trust left between admins and community, and in the long run that's going to kill the website.
The thing that makes reddit great is the user created content. That content is provided by a tiny minority, while the vast majority just consumes.
Most of the people creating the content care about the platform, and they will leave if they are alienated enough. That's not even mentioning the thousands of hours of unpaid mod work. You might find some power-hungry replacements for the bigger subs, but the quality of mods will decrease, which will make the community worse in the long run.
If they continue on this path, reddit will end up like 9gag. There'll be content, but very little of it will be original, and it won't be all that interesting for targeted advertising like it currently is.
It won't disappear, but it certainly won't be a multi-billion dollar company.
So they basically want a 9gag?
It's an intentional tanking of the company :)
I'm more inclined to believe it's just incompetence.
Agreed. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence. Hanlon's razor
Why? By who? Wouldn't employees and particularly spez want the platform to succeed so they can cash out?
They got the wrong references. Spez thinks he is a Musk look alike but he did not realize Musk paid more for Twitter than the company will ever make for him, even if he does make it become profitable.
He's emulating a guy who is running his own company into the ground. They're both going to be left with empty shells of what they first inherited. I can at least give the slightest benefit of the doubt to spez's original intentions years ago, but it hardly matters now.
And if course there will be no consequences to either of them that affect them directly. They'll both still have more money than they know what to do with.
the '4D Chess defense'. we can't keep saying that mistakes are actually intentional when there are so many examples of the mistakes, being made for the same reasons, by the same types of people (out of touch CEOs with terrible judgment)
If you go by Spez (Hoffman) literally saying recently "We're 18 years old. It's time we grow up" and "It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company", it can give you insight into how he thinks of Reddit (and age, as he was a former /r/jailbait mod). The idea of 'age' in a company is such a man-childish way to think about it. The idea that after 18 years you, as a co-founder of a company, apparently have just such little thought into this is mind boggling and shows he's basically just coasted the entire time. He apparently hasn't:
This should evoke no confidence from any current or potential investor and while I initially hoped for this guy to be forced out, so I could come back. I don't think it will get rid of the issues of platform and community stagnation, toxicity, bots, or the push to make a profit. At this point with this whole Kbin/Lemmy/Threadiverse-era on the horizon, I'm actually excited. This is a great time to reflect on what worked, what didn't, and where we want to collectively go with these platforms and how make it work for us. I'm looking forward to the future and to shake off the malaise that clicking on Reddit basically everyday for the past 18 years has done to us.
Same. People always opine about how reddit was better X years ago, but it really was. Over the past dozen years, I've gradually unsubscribed from every default sub and most larger ones. They always turn into meme-factory shitholes full of puns, recycled one-liners, and totally irrational explanations why you're wrong (many of these seem to come from intentional contrarian accounts/bots). There's a demand for that stuff, sure, but it's gotten harder and harder to find sincere, thoughtful comments.
I'm planning to delete my reddit account next week, but already finding myself coming here more frequently because the quality of the interactions is better. I can't recall the last time I received a comment there with as much time/effort as the one I'm replying to right now.
Not gonna lie. I've gotten in a few arguments here and people are surprisingly polite. Like, for real. People respect and talk to you like you are a person with different opinions, and not the enemy. It's been great.
This is the mindset that's bothered me the most, seems to be growing over time, and is what I meant when I mentioned contrarian accounts/bots. Seems like it stemmed from political subreddits, but it's everywhere and about everything now. Even related to the api changes, I've had people reply to me with totally asinine things like defending forcing ads on users (even paid users) and how blind people don't need special consideration because their screen readers should be able to scrape the website, and it's their problem not reddit's if they can't.
So much ridiculous hostility and dehumanizing over such dumb shit.
I always found Reddit to be more enjoyable in the niche subculture stuff anyways, hopefully some of those communities move over here. You would think that the admins for Reddit would understand the "innovate or die" mentality, but that unfortunately does not seem to be the case. I too am looking forward to what Lemmy/KBin brings as a replacement.
Willfully forgetting how those things work. Like his hero over at twitter.