[Aardwolf]

"We made the difficult decision to shut down Reddit Gifts and put more focus on enhancing the user experience on Reddit"

Oh, enhancing user experience sounds good: so they'll reinstate the old reddit UI back as the default, the one that doesn't block viewing threads in a mobile browser half the time?

[bob1029]

Stories like reddit are why I keep telling our executive staff that I am completely against a buyout. We have one angel investor and all the control we could ever hope for. Our customers love us. Why the fuck do people screw these things up? Are they that hooked on other people's money? I feel like reddit was managing to pay the bills before the series of sellouts and poor product choices...

[mattalex]

You can only do that if you can afford it: I'm pretty sure reddit never made money and was bleeding it quite profusely. At some point you have to start making money, but reddit (and most other internet/digital companies) valued growth at all cost. Now they are probably billions in the hole and they have to look for outside investment.

You also make the strong assumption that executive staff/founders actually care about the survival of the company or the product: If they cash out at some point, they still win in the transaction.

The cycle is always predictably the same:

1. Found the company

2. Get an initial round of investment

3. make it seem valuable (i.e. growth at all cost)

4. Second investment round (people now have FOMO "this could be the next Facebook!")

5. Continue growing (by now initial investors and founders have cashed out with profit)

6. Another investment round/sell/go public.

7. After going public, people notice that you don't make any money and have no way of ever making money (think WeWork)

8. Company's stock tanks/Company goes bankrupt.

At no point in that process has the product or the company ever mattered: As long as you can make it seem like it works, you can make a profit.

This is why venture capital is almost always a red flag: The investors make money not through quality product, but through growth. They can sell a great product that nobody knows about or they can sell well marketed crap that grows fast and makes them billions. By chance one or two of these companies will survive despite this and have a lasting impact, which breeds even more hype for the next round.

[ginko]

I wonder if a community-owned project similar to a food cooperative could work with sites like Reddit.

Have people pay a membership fee for a share in the project. Non-members still have access but with basic ads.

[prepend]

I’ve been through a few online communities that tried this (netslaves, plastic) and co-op ended up being “pay me what I would like to run it.”

I remember the shutdown thread on netslaves where the owner asked for money and multiple community members offered to run it or chip in and the owner said no. They wanted the amount they wanted because they also wanted to run their other projects.

I don’t fault them as it’s their site and they can run it as they wish. But just to point out the difficulty of community projects that require money.

Even with food co-ops, there is frequently drama.

Maybe the closest would be to have some sort of online kibbutz.

[mywacaday]

I fear you are the minority, the vast majority of startups are founded and funded with the hope that there will be a large cash out for the founders and investors at some point.

[bob1029]

Yeah but to me the fuck up is when priorities went from this:

  1. Innovate and make nice things
  2. Get paid tons of money

to this:

  1. Get paid tons of money
  2. Innovate and make nice things

In my opinion, you will grow wealthy faster if you focus on product over money.

[pasabagi]

The thing I find weird is that they essentially paid money to degrade the user experience to the extent that large parts of previously OK functionality don't work anymore, and subreddit mods typically advise people to use the 'old' UI.

I mean, the new UI is not to my taste, but it is also just really buggy, slow, and full of things that straightforwardly don't work (videos, search, etc).

Now, I'm not an MBA, but I don't really get how you make money by paying developers to degrade your service.

[koheripbal]

Reddit is actively trying to reduce the average age of their userbase. The mobile app, and forcing kids to install the mobile app, is a big part of that effort.

Getting teenagers in high school addicted to Reddit is a huge part of their strategy, and it's very evident in the way the front page content has shifted in the last decade.

The bigger issue is that while a lot of older users remain in the niche subs, I find that there aren't great alternatives to Reddit for threaded sub-specific commentary.

[uDontKnowMe]

There are actually a fair number if you go looking, in my opinion Lemmy seems to be the best alternative these days and seems to get at least a bit of traffic.

[ValentinPearce]

My guess would be that newer users that decide to stay move to the app on mobile where they can't have an ad blocker

[soylentcola]

My system-wide adblocker works fine on the mobile app. I just hate having a dedicated app with related permissions/notifications to manage just to access a website.

[ValentinPearce]

A bit late but what do you use as an adblocker and does it require rooting your device ?

That's the trouble I've encountered when trying to install one.

[Black101]

But when they add a new feature to the new Reddit, they don't backport it to old/ns.reddit.com (surveys being one example and there was at least another one other that I can't think of right now).

[felipemesquita]

Replace www with old: https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/nw2hs6/sunse...

[dkarras]

Yes, but they will probably sunset it one day with an announcement like this one.

[flanbiscuit]

I wonder what their analytics are on the amount of people who use old.reddit.com vs not. My guess is that once it hits a certain low threshold they'll decide to get rid of it. That will be a sad day.

I also fear they will pull what Twitter did and severely limit their API which will essentially kill third party apps and everyone will have to use their official apps.

[koheripbal]

Older users all use old.reddit, which isn't the audience they want to see growth with, but acknowledge that it's a lot of tech/niche sub mods that use it - so I suspect they'll leave it for a very long time.

[bombcar]

Reddit has access to the stats - and I’m sure they know just exactly how much of the content is posted from old.reddit - and they know if they cut it off they lose that content.

[jccalhoun]

I don't mind the new UY but what I don't understand is how after all this time basic functionality of the site still doesn't work. Like, at least once a week you get logged out and can't log in or you click on a subreddit or a post and it won't load the content. I just don't understand how this is still going on and they are putting resources into avatar microtransactions and the live streaming. Does anyone use the live streaming stuff on reddit?