Reddit faces new reality after cashing in on its IPO
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
Not a single mention in the article about how Reddit earned its valuation on the back of content creation by the community (including being open source at one point!) only to rug-pull and then act like we should feel special that they “invited” to buy a share of our content back from them.
Fuck that. And fuck /u/spez.
Fuck that. And fuck /u/spez.
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Money already started changing the place, long before the IPO was issued. The APIcalypse last year was proof enough of that.
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When the third party app drama started, I canceled my account on Reddit and stopped using it. Not that anyone at Reddit cared, but I let them know why their policies and actions led me to cancel my account. I most likely wasted my time sharing the reasons why. Spez does not care.
Since then, I occasionally find something of interest in a web search and will consume what I was looking for. I'm waiting for Reddit to require an account to read all of the post in the future.
I also have found that I have more time. I likely spent a good 60 minutes of day on Reddit going down "rabbit holes". I also actively posted in the tech communities I subscribed to - by no means was I an expert, but I did share information I learned from other people or figured out myself.
As others have stated, I miss usenet of the past.
Since then, I occasionally find something of interest in a web search and will consume what I was looking for. I'm waiting for Reddit to require an account to read all of the post in the future.
I also have found that I have more time. I likely spent a good 60 minutes of day on Reddit going down "rabbit holes". I also actively posted in the tech communities I subscribed to - by no means was I an expert, but I did share information I learned from other people or figured out myself.
As others have stated, I miss usenet of the past.
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Things were sort of OK when the Sacred Shareholder interests were dead last - after customers and employees.
And since we are in late-stage capitalism, the incentives are ass-backwards. No one wants to build a company over 10 years - you need to think of how to do 3x next quarter so the Sacred Shareholder is delighted at getting so much money for doing nothing.
Which is to say - let the Enshitification BEGIN!
And since we are in late-stage capitalism, the incentives are ass-backwards. No one wants to build a company over 10 years - you need to think of how to do 3x next quarter so the Sacred Shareholder is delighted at getting so much money for doing nothing.
Which is to say - let the Enshitification BEGIN!
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There always seems to be this fundamental shift in the life of any social media platform. Once they get to a certain size or become publicly traded, the vampires take over and all effort goes into sucking money out of it. Slowly there's more and more ads. Slowly the algorithm favors clickbait. Etc. etc. It doesn't necessarily happen overnight, but it is inevitable. The enshittification will commence. Or rather, will continue. The shareholders must be served above all others. It's a stupid system and I wish we would make a better one.
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Found the alt-right/Nazi engaging in classic right-wing projection lol
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The banal
line spectacularly undersells the depth and strength of the bad faith efforts Reddit has undertaken in spiting its user base in pursuit of dressing up its shambolic business model in a cheap suit in time for an IPO and the personal enrichment of a few. Businesses can make money, and in fact a healthy Reddit is a valuable thing. But what it is, and what Reddit leadership has done, has made it less valuable than before they squeezed it.
I only ever use it for whatever turns up in a web search, and even I'm angry at their malicious API pricing scheme, effectively disabling community solutions to first party failures. And then spez said "hold my beer" to grab a shovel to dig an even deeper hole, being an absolutely condescending fuck to everyone except dumb investors. Smart investors should realize that the burning the goodwill of a community on a community driven site is not a recipe for success. Dumb investors are only happy that line goes up, which of course it will always and must always do.
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(roughly) It opened at 55, ended at 50 the first day, now it's at 46.
It's above 34 so a few people made money but I can't see it rocketing up.
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They didn't say they were obligated to do anything, just that it was a disservice which I very much agree with. People can do what they want, and in the end it's on Reddit and not the user deleting the stuff, but it sucks for sure. And the decades worth of general knowledge isn't going to pop up anywhere else. Maybe Discord, but that isn't indexable and I've been burnt before*.
*Asking in the modding channel "Is it possible to do X with modding?" and the only replies I would get were basically multiple steps of "Download the source code, learn C# and find out".
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I love Reddit and have since almost its inception. If they kept all the great things about it great, then it could keep going and return a moderate profit to them year after year after year for a long, long time.
More likely they will make changes that make it more lucrative while gradually eroding what’s special about it, get 5-6 highly profitable years from it, then hit the inflection point on the J-curve of users leaving and throw their hands in the air and wonder what happened to the platform they invested in
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Been enjoying a daily visit to r/dataisbeautiful for a long time. Often something is worth clicking into. Previously after clicking into a topic and then clicking on the image (if there is one), the image would open in a new tab, higher-rez, with a zoom function. Very necessary as a lot of presentations are dense and one cannot read the text. A little while ago I think Reddit changed this and when one clicks on the image it simply goes full screen without any rez increase, and no zoom function. Can't believe they made this change as it hampers usability a lot. Might be missing something (Mac, Brave). If so please advise. If not, then Corey D. can carve another notch in his E-belt.
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But it’s “worth” $10B.
The irony of Sam Altman owning $600m in stock and the rest of the shareholders trying to leverage reddit users free content for licensed LLM would be an amusing future id like to see.
What else is possibly worth $10B?
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But the ones for incels and Nazi's will get full support and investment.
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This is sometimes called enshitification. It doesn't just apply to social media sites. The examples on that link include Amazon, Google search, and Uber.
(Edit: hadn't noticed that you used that word. Left the post anyway for the link.)
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Get ready for the ad-free Reddit Plus tier, followed shortly by several price hikes, and the re-introduction of ads at lower tiers.
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Anton Longshot
Ars Praetorian
OMG super creepy article picture - great choice. 
10 billion bucks wouldn't suffice if the money also turned me into Spez.
I happily prefer to remain poor and Anton Longshot thank you very much.
10 billion bucks wouldn't suffice if the money also turned me into Spez.
I happily prefer to remain poor and Anton Longshot thank you very much.
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"Free speech oriented" lol. Reddit is a lot of things and I use it often, but a free speech zone it is not in a great many subreddits.
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What’s an alternative though? Discord isn’t it. Reddit is one of the last community led open forums out there as far as I’m aware. I’m not a fan of the trend moving the internet to private discord servers.
Thats probably why Reddit thinks it can get away with a lot of the changes they’ve made. There aren’t any real alternatives (as far as I’m aware) at the scale they operate at. I can google a topic and usually the top hits are Reddit posts. It used to be open forums but now it’s all pretty much Reddit.
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It sucks, but the alternatives didn't work out. Some of the reddit communities I joined tried to start up companion boards that could be accessed via like Lemmy but users didn't migrate in enough numbers for those boards to keep momentum. This is despite users voting overwhelmingly in favor of temporarily closing the boards during the API change protests!
I'm not sure if the issue was the boards not advertising the alternatives enough or what. Maybe people are really creatures of habit...
I'm not sure if the issue was the boards not advertising the alternatives enough or what. Maybe people are really creatures of habit...
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Given the fact that Ars didn't have its own article about Reddit and instead reposted a writeup from the Financial Times two days after the IPO, I'm guessing that there was probably some nontrivial editorial pressure from Conde Nast.
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Well, as a consumer of the product it’s always sad to see an icon like this go into what’s likely going to be a drastic overhaul.
But, I hope some of the people that have passionately worked there for a long time are reaping some rewards at least.
But, I hope some of the people that have passionately worked there for a long time are reaping some rewards at least.
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I was going to say this is the beginning of the end for Reddit, but it's more like the middle of the end.
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"Smart investors" are also telling you that Zuckerberg is an idiot and that Facebook will collapse any day now even though they're at an all time high of >$500/share, most often it's vitriol from end users who feel they've been wronged or deprived but actually aren't as essential to the business as they believe. Particularly there's a very vocal segment coming out saying "I quit social media" even though there's zero indications that any sizable fraction does that, some platforms fall in and out of favor but the total market is rock solid.
Spez knows that there's a ton of momentum in social media, killing off third party APIs is first and foremost a problem for moderators and power users. The casual users will install the first party app to keep up with the subreddits they already know giving him a lot of extra eyeballs to sell at IPO, while any migration away is a very slow bleed-out that would take many years if it even happens at all. Even Elon's having trouble chasing his users away with 77% still there after he took over, and he's going at it much, much harder than spez did...
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If you just can’t get enough of The Financial Times’ completely clueless money-grubbing content there is now a bot who will make up answers from the FT’s trove of made-up stories!
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/23/24106296/ask-ft-generative-ai-chatbot-answers-tool
PS This particular article is even more tone-deaf and ignorant than the usual FT article. It was former Reddit ceo Ellen Pao who was fired for trying to get rid of the hate-crimes on Reddit, and the current CEO who fired moderators! Who decided to publish this Wall Street Journal-style garbage on Ars Technica?
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/23/24106296/ask-ft-generative-ai-chatbot-answers-tool
PS This particular article is even more tone-deaf and ignorant than the usual FT article. It was former Reddit ceo Ellen Pao who was fired for trying to get rid of the hate-crimes on Reddit, and the current CEO who fired moderators! Who decided to publish this Wall Street Journal-style garbage on Ars Technica?
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Some reader push-back is required. Perhaps the editors can show these comments to the absentee management. Anna Wintour has no idea how to cultivate an audience who wants more than fashion spreads and celebrities — Ars may be the next victim. Conglomerates being allowed to buy up dozens of media properties and drive them into the ground is evidence of an extremely weak government happy to exist only for billionaires.
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Before looking at the comments, I expected that this exact wording would be the first post.
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It's not simple nostalgia speaking to say that the culture and communities of the pre-social media internet were better. They really were. Consolidating online life into a shrinking handful of walled-off silos run by mega corporations has made the internet feel more empty, lifeless, and isolating, in spite of the massive growth in the raw numbers of people using it.
We had it right in the mid to late 2000s: Smaller, slower paced, and more personal communities developed around a large number of decentralized websites, forums, blogs. Plus a couple of basic "social" platforms like early Facebook or Myspace that let you keep up with what your real life friends and family were doing, without algorithms dangling rage-bait and "influencers" (gag) in your face.
There seems to be a growing sense of discontent with the current state of online life that's been developing over the past couple of years. I don't know how widespread that sentiment is outside of certain demographics of extremely online tech nerds, but surely we're overdue for a cultural shift from the existing social media landscape, right?
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