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by chongli
1984 days ago
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It’s interesting how Reddit‘s failure to effectively monetize and cut their most important users in on the action, the way YouTube and Twitch have done, seems to have led to a grey market. This hurts Reddit (obviously, since they’re cut out of the market) but it also hurts users due to a lack of transparency. This exposes users to all kinds of astroturfing, shilling, and other misinformation. In a way, it’s quite similar to the issue of Amazon product reviews. Amazon tried to push off a core cost centre from their business onto the backs of volunteers. Now the system is totally corrupted by manufacturers and their paid shills. |
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This is absolutely not true.
Customer reviews were conceived of as a barrier to entry that could not be trivially recreated by competitors. They were also conceived (naively, as it turned out) as inherently more trustworthy than anything created by company editorial/review staff.
There was never any question of "well, we could do reviews ourselves, but ... nah, let the customer do it". The goal was to harness a subtle kind of network effort to do both of (1) improve the usefulness of the site for users (2) create barriers to entry.
[ EDIT; s/others/users/ ] (#2 amzn employee)