this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Reddit Was Fun
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Memorial to "rif is fun for Reddit" Android app, aka "reddit is fun", shut down after June 30, 2023
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So... I have some harsh feelings about Reddit. It's bittersweet. A reflection of humanity with both good and bad and corruption of power and so forth. Like many I spent a lot of time on there. Learned a lot; challenged my views; and threw my voice out into the void for whatever it's worth. 10 years and a lot of server time given from gildings handed out and received. Oh well.
Whether Reddit persists is contingent namely on 2 things:
1) Will they revert some of the biggest grievances?
I find this to be highly unlikely. When Spez is quoting Elon Musk as doing good work at Twitter, you know that's a bad sign. Spez was not the genius behind Reddit — Aaron Swartz was. Spez just wants to cash out and leave Reddit behind. They need to find a way to make an inherently unprofitable concept profitable — and so of course the users suffer. It's little different to what happened to Digg, and what happened to Facebook when it navigated away from its original UI that was so elegant and simple. So I'm happy Reddit's devaluation is continuing.
2) Is there a substitute to seize on this moment?
When Digg collapsed under similar circumstances, Reddit was already there. Of course Lemmy is here; Tildes is in progress; and now Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia is spinning up Truth Cafe (WT Social 2.0). All three have significant hurdles to overcome that don't quite match Reddit 1:1... So we'll see.
My estimation is that Reddit will "survive," but with diminished value, reputation, and significantly-lower average monthly users no differently than how Digg has "survived." My view is to not fix what isn't broke — and to disrupt applications like Push Shift / RiF / Apollo and so forth that are cornerstones to Reddit's success, along with a variety of other administrative choices — is shooting themselves in the foot. It's the end of Reddit for me even as a lurker since I can't use RiF anymore, and I'm excited for something new to take its place.
I'll leave a Medium article I wrote going into detail further for those interested, along with a terrible experience with both Admin and Moderator incompetency and inconsistency.
Reddit will survive. I hope it does- we (Lemmy) need it to.
Fact is, not every Reddit user is a good fit for Lemmy / is someone we want to bring over to Lemmy. Reddit has been intentionally courting a demographic that just wants quick content scrolling, like TikTok. I think that's a big part of why Reddit has gotten so much more hostile in the last few years- such people don't generally have open minds.
I want to migrate the people who are respectful, open-minded, who want a discussion and a debate. I don't want to migrate the people who just want to endlessly scroll through shiny videos and never produce an intelligent thought.
So I say let Reddit have those people- if Spez can monetize them, do it with my compliments. The site/company won't be nearly as valuable, but who cares.
In a way I wholly see your point. Who wouldn't want to surround themselves with more mature individuals with worldly perspectives whose first inclination at disagreement isn't "winning the argument" but rather the mutual pursuit of truth and a gentle "shifting" of views towards it in kind?
The only reason I'd disagree on this to some extent is it reproduces what is already a key problem with the internet / social media: Echo-chambers. Unfortunately for society to improve, we need to drag along the ignorant and inform them whatever way we can. The nice thing with Reddit is that you'd get a lot of overlap with "reasonable people," and those... Not so reasonable. I attribute this exposure to changing my views massively over the years (coming from a rural christian conservative background turned progressive non-religious). In my view somehow you need to court these folks so they can be exposed to a variety of outside opinions but also ensure they don't get... Unruly either.
Based.
I'm sorry, not trying to argue but this is incorrect. It's not inherently unprofitable, it's chronically mismanaged. Reddit generated $485mm in revenue in 2021 and $670mm in 2022.
For a relatively feature-complete and mature website, development costs should be a small percentage of that (especially considering in hindsight that Reddit didn't really ship anything of value. Avatars. 🤮).
You don't have to be an MBA to see they're blowing all their money on too many middle managers and too much expensive real estate.
They pissed away their best chance to develop a new revenue stream when they fired Chooter and ruined AMA. At that moment, a competent board would've reigned in spending. Not halted, just acknowledge that future growth just got stunted.
Rip Aaron. Truly a legend among men.
He would hate this.