If you can't run a business that brings in the money to keep the lights on, you can't maintain a vibrant community, either.

I think a lot of the issue is that lots of people are attached to conditions that are only made possible by the willingness of investors to tolerate Reddit's lack of profitability in the expectation that that will be turned around in the future, but that that willingness is not sustainable.

I don't. Reddit could be profitable of they wanted to. They make a ton of money through Reddit Gold and ads. The reason they are not is because they have hired way too many devs and other staff, presumably because they plan to do an IPO so founders.and execs can become rich and investors make a profit.

For whom? For people who uses it since the beginning it isn’t even the same place anymore. It’s UX (and I’m not talking about the aesthetics of the new design, I don’t mind those) is legitimately the worst I’ve ever experienced and the quality of discussion has went down the drain. Even if you find a tightly controlled community dedicated to a topic you’re interested in it’s either one extreme to another or doesn’t last long.

That doesn’t even get into the constant rolling out for Facebook-tier features that no Reddit user ever wanted. I stopped using Reddit last month after ~12 years and I’ve since realized I was getting nothing but regurgitated memes and anger from a dozen people replying to my every comment who aren’t even addressing what I was saying just arguing for arguments sake.

It’s basically what Facebook groups were in 2016 at this point. I’m sure it’s a great acquisition for those who bought it, but for the old power users it’s anything but.

That's by design. Reddit is just another data mining company. Of course they'd rather have you on the app than the browser. Apps can gather info about you even when you're not using them.

Seems like entirely through bad management. The choices made, from mostly serving links and text to hosting image and video which ballooned operating costs to expanding their workforce from 700 to 2000 while having no proyect worth putting that many people to work on.

> Reddit finally finds a way to possibly become profitable

Says who? Their API changes would not make them profitable. The changes, price and timeline show that the intent is to kill 3rd party ecosystem, not profitability.

> scumbags focused on profit?

Reddit is the only social media that has unpaid mods. Facebook pays people to keep conversation civil, reddit wants you to do that work for free while they release NFT profile pics.

people are not angry at reddit for wanting to be profitable, people are angry because there have been 10 years of mismanagement, 0 mod support, aggresive anti user choices and the few tools that people use to make the website not want to pluck your eyes out being pulled under them with 0 recourse

How did it come to control a cultural meeting point? Was it because they owned a server farm and employed people to create a website people wanted to use at the right time and the right place?

> Reddit provides some things, but not the actually-important things.

This will be easily proven by people moving from Reddit to an alternative. Or disproven by not moving to an alternative.

Yeah, and most recently we're seeing mostly one side. Reddit needs mods. But mods need Reddit. And both need users. Take any one of those three things away and the whole thing doesn't really work.

I’d say that Reddit used to be like that, but that they’ve been actively undermining that, because that’s not what they want to be any more. New Reddit (2018, I think) showed that they really don’t care about that aspect.

New Reddit forces post lists to be massive space-wasting and thumbnailed stuff. On my laptop’s screen, it tends to fit about one and a half items per screen, and is clearly oriented around doom scrolling: consuming content. When you view a post, you can see about six comments at once, mostly only top-level ones with occasional second-level ones. Actually, it seems they might have improved it recently: last time I tried it, I think you couldn’t get it to display beyond third-level, and it would only expand one level at a time, whereas now it seems to expand more at once (though it’s still way too aggressive in its collapsing) and go up to fourth-level before going deeper takes you to a single comment thread view with hopelessly bad history management that makes anything but always opening in new tabs just about completely broken. Anyway, they’ve severely hobbled the threaded comments system, because they’re optimising for massive subreddits where comments average vapid. Basically, anti-community.

By contrast, Old Reddit fit about a dozen items per screen, and required action to see an item at anything but a tiny size (70×70 or so), because it cared more about the comments thread. And it tends to fit about a dozen comments on my screen, and you can actually view nested comment threads meaningfully, and it all just works way better. Because it cared more about community.

Communities depend on a much better commenting system than New Reddit wants to let you have. HN and Old Reddit are both way better.

I’m fairly involved in r/rust. If Old Reddit ever disappears, so does my remaining use of Reddit, because I don’t think you can maintain a decent community without it.

Reddit are forsaking their link discovery and community discussion roots, and becoming just mass social media and memes, and they’re making major technical decisions which enforce this, even for the subreddits that want things the way they used to be.

So who gets fired? How many people are you willing to make unemployed? What services get removed? What improvements stop? Realistically, the reason they don't make a profit is they're aiming for growth and they're getting the growth.

I thought reddit was really clever for the first ~7 years of operations. They replaced forums, fostered communities, gained a reputation as a place to get real people's takes, and attracted people willing to have interesting conversations. The upvote/downvote system that is now so common was made popular from reddit. They brought awareness to important political topics surrounding net neutrality. They were leaders in early Web2.0, where each user saw content that appealed to them, because everyone could choose which subreddits were in their homepage. It was highly social and highly engaging.

After a certain point in 201X the dark patterns began to appear. I was almost fully disengaged by the start of 2013. I can't remember the details, but I remember being increasing disappointed with reddit every time I returned for a brief visit.

Oh absolutely. I'm not disputing that. Of course they are doing all of this in pursuit of profit (or at least in pursuit of pleasing their board). The trouble is that, in my view, there is a conflict between the goal of pleasing the reddit board and the goal of creating a vibrant community.

Yes, specifically because of Reddit's actions. Specifically because Reddit made decisions that made them no longer want to contribute to the site's success and (incidentally) also because Reddit offers no way at all for people to opt-out of furthering the company's commercial interests and no way at all for people to refuse to reinforce the network effect keeping the site afloat without also damaging the community.

the inevitable move, maybe. The only move (for profits), yes. But they are executing this absolutely horribly. Reddit has never been an overly formal site, and I guess that is built into the culture of the admins as well.

>they owed it to their communities to hand over the keys when they ‘quit’ in protest

Historically speaking, they never did. We have seen mods run a sub to the ground several times and the result was users jumping ship to a new community.

So while inevitable, it is inherently hypocritical for Reddit to suddenly care now as if they ever cared about users.

>> I don’t know. I’m trying to think about your question.

>Is there something recent that you’re thinking of?

>> I can’t remember the specific instances right now, but there was a bunch of press about things that were going on on Reddit and Discord, and they both reacted and banned the subreddit.

>> I’ve got a lot of advice for start-ups, and it’s not very fucking complicated. It’s just: Think about the impact that you want to have on your users and on the people consuming your content and do the right thing. They know what the right thing is.

Sounds like this guy has a lot of vague complaints but not much in the way of concrete solutions, other than "do the right thing" which in his mind is extremely obvious and yet undefined.

Cutting off and/or driving up the cost of third-party apps through which users access Reddit is changing Reddit. The impression I get is that third-party apps are disproportionately used by the kinds of users that supply content more than average, so even if they are less efficiently monetized as eyeballs, they are large indirect contributors to Reddit’s revenue. Making their experience worse will, it seems near certain, cost content that brings the users that are purer eyeballs to monetize with ads, and thereby cost ad revenue. How much is, of course, unclear.

> Don’t forget that Reddit can and already did close a bunch of subreddits that they didn’t like, so it’s their community, not yours.

Sure, and they can take over the moderations, and the content creation, and the viewing for ads from the users that they chase off. Not sure how that will work out for them as a business plan, though.

Ironically it's often a business opportunity to do the opposite of this, i.e. incumbents are implementing user-hostile features that increase some KPI but that users actually hate, so if you do the opposite then you get the users.

Attracting and retaining users is the most important thing, because without that you're out of business. It's far more profitable to make a dollar each from a billion people than a thousand dollars each from a hundred.

Vote manipulation on reddit in 2018 is way worse than vote manipulation on Digg ever was. Due to the centralized categories of Digg, the userbase was unable to hide away from content they didn't like and that brought the community together to collectively take part in rejecting the influencers. On reddit, there isn't that same sense of a cohesive single community. In the past, there might have been a sort of collective identity of "redditors", but that's gone away as the site has grown. Nobody says, "Oh yeah, I go on reddit" anymore, they say that they are are active on a particular sub.

I wonder if reddit could have done anything differently to maintain that "redditor" identity among their userbase, is it just a function of their growth? I think it's mostly just their growth, but they accelerated it by not being more careful with what subreddits were defaults and their responsibility to curate them. I remember when the frontpage of reddit transitioned from generally being longform content, to generally being shitty image-macro memes. I also remember when /r/politics used to be a relatively balanced source of news.

If you do something that makes your happy and heavy users rescind from being globally active to just being active in their tiny niche subreddit, you can't expect your global sense of community to be maintained.

Casual participation doesn't get the job done.

The idea that reddit would benefit without these users is just a complete misunderstanding of what reddit is and what creates reddit's value.

Not quite, the downsides simply have to outweight the benefits. Value is relative, but even before this drama I've simply started valuing reddit less and less. It's harder for me to find actual conversation and I need to filter out more and more noise, toxicity, and outright spam to do it. It's become too much work, and that says a lot given that I browse Youtube and 4chan comments as well.

>If it's a bad business, then all of that value it provides for all of those people wouldn't be worth whatever Reddit asked in return.

Given recent valuations from places like Fidelity, that may in fact be the case. And that's who Reddit is trying to appeal to, not the actual users beneitting from the value of community.

>Much of the turmoil was about API fees. I'm happy to pay their fee to do more good for people.

And I'm sure others do too. However Reddit made it clear next month that they don't want 3rd party devs to divert costs to the users. Which sends a message that they do not want to work with 3rd party devs on their terms.

I don't want to swing this back to that drama, but that example is very endemic of how Reddit has operated for at least 7 years. There are compromises users would like to make but reddit doesn't allow nor make time to make becasuse the focus isn't on user satisfaction.

Maybe others will continue asking. But I'm simply done. The time I spent trying to improve reddit could have honestly been spent finding and fostering a new community who will listen.