- losing it’s most passionate advocates and users;
How many users left? It also might be filtering some of the more obnoxious users. Once a brand hits a critical mass that doesn't always matter. Think of everyone valve and facebook "alienated" over the years. Did it matter at all?
Reddit quite literally wants it's users to be "alienated" like other social media sites, because it goes with the territory of making money.
It's not like the reddit utopian dreams are still alive. Don't moderate, and you get racists, molesters, etc., and they tell everyone to drink the poison... what's the point anymore?
- driving whole communities to its competitors (federated and discord specifically);
Are these anywhere close to viable options? I haven't heard of federated, and discord is pretty bad for organizing public forums. It excels at group chat, not news discussions with very large groups.
- just utterly shredding managements credibility with their users;
I'm shocked it had any left to begin with. I suppose these are teh "noob users"? If you started ~2008-2012, none of this is surprising at all, and you have limited respect remaining for the platform... this was clear after the redesign, at the very latest.
- and inspiring a generation of entrepreneurs to engage in building platforms to supplant replace them that definitely would not otherwise exist.
How many new social media platforms have you seen of late? I wouldn't be surprised either way, but don't count on it.
- So much winning. Gold star for everyone involved. Case study on how to manage community forthcoming.
Case study that you should not try to be the good guy. These types of unpopular decisions should be made earlier. Reddit lost out on a lot of money by delaying the inevitable. Now it's very likely that it will take a greater reputational hit, because it didn't give up it's college fantasies quickly enough.
We all know the least successful companies are the ones that make these unpopular decisions... you know like: Apple, Facebook, Valve, insta, twitter, etc., etc. Wouldn't want to be like those losers!
Counter-counter-counter point: Reddit reached its heyday under the leadership that allowed people to leave and come back to discuss. Its current leadership has intentionally driven away a decent percentage of users within the last year.
I do not think their decisions come from sound thinking but greed. They don't truly understand why they got big and now they're trying to squeeze all the money out of it they can before their luck runs out.
I think they did much better trying to give their users a good experience and they are in the process of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. It just takes a long time for a zombie social network to die.
At that point they didn't have any users worth keeping anyway. The community had degraded to the point of irrelevance a year or two before the redesign. If anything the shift to reddit just harmed reddit.
Reddit is on the way down. They may be gaining users, but the platform is a lot less interesting. The quality of content is way down, the spam and clickbait way up, and censorship by dictatorial moderators is out of control. Its a big echo chamber now.
You are seeing a huge demand for more free speech platforms. Youtube is outofcontrol, Google is editing search, twitter is peering over the abyss now that Jack is gone and Reddit is right along them. It may take a while, but in a few years they are going to face steep competition. It may very well be an open source decentralized project like Mastodon.
It definitely is, the demographic seems to completely have changed from when I began using Reddit a decade ago. It use to be fairly technical in nature similar to HN. That has completely changed as even the commentary is so poor compared to just a couple years ago that I can’t believe a company would be so hostile to the user base that initially built it in favor of becoming an application the market has little need for.
There’s plenty of social media companies out there already I don’t see why Reddit decided to become a worse version of Facebook when it could have charted a different path. I’m bitter I guess, as every other social media company is realizing they need to take a step back and add ways to make discussion more civil Reddit is doing the opposite and their karma system actively helps bad faith actors due to how much it affects the perception if a given post.
I’m completely done with Reddit, the last two times I’ve reinstalled it the UI has added improvements that I don’t want and I haven’t a productive conversation there in over a year.
I've been using the site for ~14 years and watching its decline has been quite difficult. I really like the premise, but it clearly hit the limits of its system many years ago. I recall reading some commentary from one of the founders near the beginning. They were working on research to exploit crowd-funded effort. Effectively incentivising users just enough to encourage them to work for free. They came up with the distributed moderation system. Give egoists just a little bit of power and they'll spend 12 hours a day moderating Reddit for free.
This worked fine with smaller communities and the ability for competition when moderators overstep their mandate and make their communities a bad place. Unfortunately, for many reasons, this is all failing.
1. Reddit management has made their political leanings clear: if you are conservative, you are unwelcome. When I say "conservative" I'm not referring to the far-right. I'm referring to mainstream conservatism about family values, hard work, religion, etc. No example could better encapsulate their position than their "Anti-Evil Operations" team, which bans people for any and all reasons, including unpalatable political positions. Admins/staff on this team have been quite candid about their desire to ban conservative views. This aligns well with Reddit's announced IPO. Sanitising discussion to be advertiser friendly will help their bottom line.
2. The user base leans heavily left. It seems certain large websites have a theme now. When one considers the kinds of discussion which happen on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, we all know which way those sites lean. Reddit is pretty hard left now. For example, the /r/Science subreddit is 24/7 "Study finds Trump voters have low IQ." The Joe Rogan fun subreddit is 24/7 "Does anyone else think Joe Rogan is Hitler?" There is zero space for nuanced discussion except in some very niche subreddits, and they are all inevitably taken over by a power mod who purges nuanced discussion.
3. The anonymous mod system is just not equipped to deal with tens of millions of users in a single subreddit. The top mod is the dictator, and they always end up enforcing their biases on the sub; overtly and subtly. This is exacerbated because of...
4. Subreddit squatting. A perfect example of this are the country name subreddits. Everyone from said country new to Reddit subscribes to these subs. They are all cheerleaders for a particular political party within each country. If you don't like that political party, you're marginalised and usually banned. It's not as simple as creating a competing country subreddit because few people will ever find it. No one thinks to search for "TrueCanada" if they're looking for "Canada." Of course, the the original subreddit automatically removes any mention of the competing sub, and bans anyone discussing it.
There are just too many issues to discuss them all, or in much detail. IMHO, Reddit is ready for a Digg-style exodus. People are just waiting for a clear alternative.
People will leave Reddit as much as they have left Twitter, i.e. not much. The main problem is in the fact that lots of Reddit users seem to think that Reddit is some kind of “community” that “depends” on its users, when the truth is that Reddit is a company and the dependence relationship is the other way around. It’s hard to accept but Reddit is a dysfunctional colossus that is simply not feasible to replicate at this point, and as such the management can pretty much do as they please.
That sounds about right. Reddit just isn’t a fun place to be, and hasn’t been for years. I’m not sure what the value proposition is for Reddit anymore, other than for the owners of Reddit.
I don't think it is a suicide but a pivot into a new phase of their business. A phase that is focused more on mainstream content, increased monetisation etc. The rushed API change and poor communication appeared to be incompetent but possibly they are happy to endure some negative publicity and subscriber loss to restructure the business around promoting products to granny while she looks at reposts of cat pics.
I don't think I will be returning to reddit. Just deleted a decade and thousands of comments. There are clearly many other ways to build online communities and I think a lot of people are more motivated than ever to develop those alternatives now. Eventually one of those alternatives will possibly kill reddit but I don't think the current exodus and subreddit protests will.
I honestly think this was a finishing blow to reddit, which had already started declining in ~2019 due to TikTok and (anecdotally) an aggressive user acquisition strategy that had led to a big decline in content/discussion quality. Or even earlier, as mobile users replaced desktop and so things like long-form replies with links died off.
The biggest problem from the blackout and API drama isn't that some clients had to shut down. It's that, as a new user or a user that only uses the platform a little, it's much harder to discover good content organically now that most subreddits are NSFW or not on the /r/all feed. Even as someone who used reddit way more than any human ever should, I find the site a lot harder to use because I have to expend a lot more effort manually curating my subreddits when previously I could exhaust my personal feed and then just switch to /r/all - and I don't think I could ever discover some niche or zany community I didn't know about beforehand since I'd have to know to look for it to find it.
Since I doubt I'm alone in this, I think it's the beginning of the end for Reddit. It'll be a lot harder for new communities to form, existing small/medium/focused communities will struggle to gain members, and new users will probably think the site is empty and leave.
Reddit drove away lots of users via that change, although I expect Reddit's MAU still grew overall due to the continued worldwide penetration of the internet. In addition, while in the short-term it almost certainly lost users, it drove the remaining users towards frontends that were more profitable to Reddit (i.e. away from the website and towards the app), so I expect the company still sees that as a win, at least as far as the IPO is concerned.
However, the deleterious effect on Reddit's overall culture cannot be understated. The people who were most driven away by the API changes were power users, and Reddit has become far more bland and repetitive as a result (to anyone familiar with the tenor of Reddit it may seem hard to believe that it could lower the bar any further, but I assure you, it has). The difference in trending subreddits from immediately before the blackout to immediately after was dramatic; whereas before you could expect the site-wide trending posts to have the nutritional content of cardboard (with the occasional gem from e.g. AskHistorians), it has been replaced with a flood of celebrity drama, ragebait from "unpopular opinion" clones, and ragebait creative writing exercises via dozens of similar "am I the asshole" clones. This is normalizing somewhat as the clones compete with each other and coalesce (Reddit's algorithm tries to limit trending posts to one per subreddit), but it's still a regression.
That said, it's still not the worst that Reddit has ever been; that title still belongs to back to 2016 when TheDonald popularized how to game the trending algorithm via brigading their own stickied posts. But I'm using Reddit less and less as they keep making the experience even worse, especially on mobile, which is more hostile to the Oldreddit interface than ever. After the IPO I expect them to jettison Oldreddit entirely, at which point the site will be beyond useless for anyone who actually wants to use it as a place to read comments rather than as a poor TikTok imitation.
Monetization without restraint. (Gold sub was one thing, the awards are just out of fucking control.)
Growth at the expense of usability.
Redesigning to appeal to Social Media/Web 2.5 types.
Hijacking the status quo to provide inadequate me-too integration. (Reddit self hosted images and video over Imgur and Youtube, for example)
Add that to the existing problems that Reddit has always had that were never addressed, such as the powermod system... and you basically have a toxic environment that caters to the lowest common denominator.
They lost all their users that provided value for reddit as a platform. Reddit will surely continue to flourish as a way to show ads to children and astroturf Google search results for product reviews. But I've noticed a ginormous drop in posting quality since they neutered their API. Even small subreddits that were fairly active are now filled with spam and engagement farming, moderators aren't interested in cleaning anything up because their app to do so is trash, users don't want to post because the subreddit is shit up with garbage. It's gotten bad.
Reddit in the last 2-3 years was ruined by itself. The homepage became more and more polarized and I'm sure it's by tweaking the algorithm to create more traffic and clicks.
The killing of Secret Santa and Reddit gifts showed that the company doesn't care about the community at all, but it's focused on maximizing revenue for the future IPO.
Really sad about this as the site was being able to stay out of the toxic environment of the social media giants for a long time.
Any service that achieves a certain level of network effect will inevitably use that position against its users, knowing very few of them will change their behavior and abandon the network.
The biggest networks have become too big to be disrupted on a short enough time scale that execs worry about. I don't know if a Digg to Reddit type migration is possible anymore. But Reddit and Twitter are well into their phase where we know we don't like using them anymore. We've just established these patterns and no one serves them well anymore. It will take a decade for these services to really die, but the die is cast.
Between Twitter, Reddit, and now Uber it seems like the pretense of preserving a good user experience has suddenly been found to be unnecessary.
I agree. I think that this is a turning point for Reddit but not towards failure: they’re ditching the hardcore nerd audience that made them. But they’ve long since outgrown that audience and will likely (as a company) do just fine without them. As a community there will be a notable loss.
The Problem is that, as reddit grows as a company it has been starting to put more of it's corporate influence onto the community it is so famous for. Reddit has always been a play of internet culture and freedom and though some of these changes have been, arguably, good a lot of it has been bad with communication errors between the company and the community leading to the problems we are seeing now. Reddit Corporate is learning a lesson in not biting the hand that feeds it. For so long they thought that they were the hand but it seems that it was the other way around.
I'm permabanned from Reddit, as in all my accounts (yes, I let it get so bad I had multiple accounts) and any new accounts (yep... tried making more) are banned based on previous logins and IPs (they're actually pretty thorough with it).
Some mods are power tripping, but also the value of a user is now near-zero. As long as you don't piss off too many, your subreddit will be fine. Especially for popular keywords - it's like owning "startrek.com", people will find it.
Subreddit owners can't actually make money in most traditional ways (so yeah, they may be paid behind the scenes), and there's a strong anti-monetization culture among Redditors, which is hilarious given that it's a for profit company that makes money off everyone's content. They still see it as an underdog online community. Newsflash, Facebook users also think they're enlightened on an exclusive platform/group.
Setting up a forum has never been easier - even security wise. Yet even that is too hard for people, so centralization is what we get. Hell, it's too much of a pain even for companies (for different reasons) - I still can't believe they shut down NotebookReview Forums - I was a long time active contributor. Surely no one in their right mind does that? Surely the decent Google traffic is worth something? Apparently not! Now I look suspiciously at TechPowerUp and Level1techs Forums...
I hope Reddit's asinine Facebook inspired user acquisition strategies will lead to its downfall, but I don't know... too many people have/make accounts. Hell, people make Facebook/Instagram and even Pinterest accounts, so clearly gating works. Maybe once they decide to disallow indexing by search engines? But then again Facebook is doing fine...
Discord is even worse - contributing unique information publicly (apparently that's what users believe, that it's "public"!) on chat platforms? I don't even know why people started doing that.
Reddit today is the opposite of what it was in the beginning. Unsurprising that they’d write out Swartz in their quest to be a friendly corporate face.
Alas, a new competitor will replace it soon. Virtually no one has brand loyalty to Reddit and their audience is becoming narrower and narrower.
How many users left? It also might be filtering some of the more obnoxious users. Once a brand hits a critical mass that doesn't always matter. Think of everyone valve and facebook "alienated" over the years. Did it matter at all?
Reddit quite literally wants it's users to be "alienated" like other social media sites, because it goes with the territory of making money.
It's not like the reddit utopian dreams are still alive. Don't moderate, and you get racists, molesters, etc., and they tell everyone to drink the poison... what's the point anymore?
- driving whole communities to its competitors (federated and discord specifically);
Are these anywhere close to viable options? I haven't heard of federated, and discord is pretty bad for organizing public forums. It excels at group chat, not news discussions with very large groups.
- just utterly shredding managements credibility with their users;
I'm shocked it had any left to begin with. I suppose these are teh "noob users"? If you started ~2008-2012, none of this is surprising at all, and you have limited respect remaining for the platform... this was clear after the redesign, at the very latest.
- and inspiring a generation of entrepreneurs to engage in building platforms to supplant replace them that definitely would not otherwise exist.
How many new social media platforms have you seen of late? I wouldn't be surprised either way, but don't count on it.
- So much winning. Gold star for everyone involved. Case study on how to manage community forthcoming.
Case study that you should not try to be the good guy. These types of unpopular decisions should be made earlier. Reddit lost out on a lot of money by delaying the inevitable. Now it's very likely that it will take a greater reputational hit, because it didn't give up it's college fantasies quickly enough.
We all know the least successful companies are the ones that make these unpopular decisions... you know like: Apple, Facebook, Valve, insta, twitter, etc., etc. Wouldn't want to be like those losers!
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