[mduggles]

Reddit cannot go public. Its product is volunteer work by moderators and users to produce value. There’s no way to take that work and guarantee its delivery on a quarterly cycle.

This is all a ridiculous self-delusion that Reddit management has engaged in that the platform is really the “value add”. It’s not. Reddit has become the shorthand for cut through ML spam and that’s based on users constantly posting up to the minute accurate data. There’s almost no historical value to that data.

[hiccuphippo]

I think a place like reddit should be a non-profit foundation rather than a business. The Archive Of Our Own community was able to do it, the reddit community can do it too.

[jeffparsons]

I'd feel a lot more comfortable giving my time to "the community" under an arrangement like that, too. The fediverse has its place, for sure, but I think a centralised platform run by a non-profit has the best chance of unseating Reddit in the short term.

It could even connect to the fediverse, but with its own moderation hierarchy etc. so it has its own culture and doesn't _rely_ on the fediverse.

[kodah]

I'd suggest raising money to buy Reddit from their investors, but this point I don't want Steve making a profit. I think it is basically possible to build a new Reddit that's run by a non-profit and (hopefully) stays off of variable cost infrastructure for stability.

[bradleyjg]

We had something like that. It was called USENET. With the right reader and a decent ISP, it was great.

[GuB-42]

Not really.

Or more precisely, it was great when the internet was small and people were mostly well behaved. And as forums and then platforms with easier access and better moderation tools took over, it became nothing but spam, only leaving alt.binaries, so much that many people saw USENET as just a network for piracy, like The Pirate Bay or Megaupload.

[bradleyjg]

I don’t know about the better moderation part. With the right reader one could subscribe to a moderator of choice. That’s an elegant feature I’ve never seen anywhere since.

[MichaelZuo]

Usenet still exists though?

Plus the vast vast majority of reddit content consists of mindless nonsense, or even worse, so it's probably best that USENET didn't continue growing in popularity.

[phpisthebest]

Yes Usenet is still around, it mainly for the downloading "LinuxISO's™"

[B1FF_PSUVM]

> mindless nonsense

That's the vast majority of anything (aka Sturgeon's Law).

Soon to be "improved by AI".

[drumhead]

Thats actually the best structure for reddit because of its coopertive nature, and the difficulty of making money from it without compromising its essential nature.

[asah]

are there lessons from Wikipedia ?

[danudey]

Considering how much money Wikipedia makes, that would be pretty amazing.

[drumhead]

Yeah, that would definitely be close to the best model for reddit.

[rjh29]

It's not even profitable _now_ with all their monetization. But their overhead is millions of $/year. There is precedent for non-profit sites of that size but it won't be easy.

[scythmic_waves]

Honestly with the amount of charity fundraising that reddit does, I bet they could pull it off. Just recently someone accidentally gave $15k to charity and in response, a bunch of users raised an additional $55k [1]. If they did intentional, annual fundraising with clear goals I wouldn't be surprised if reddit the non-profit organization could be self-sustaining.

But I'm just some guy on the internet who doesn't actually know anything about non-profits.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/1456...

[bombcar]

I also suspect their tech stack is a huge ball of bloated inefficiencies that costs them much much much more than the bare metal and the bandwidth would.

[LtdJorge]

Python

[OoooooooO]

Yeah, that costs a lot on a scale of reddit.

[makin]

I think Archive Of Our Own (AO3) solves a much easier problem (hosting bbcode text), and even then, after many years, they are unable to get enough volunteers to implement a direct message system. It's not quite apples and oranges, but I still don't think the same model could possibly work for Reddit. Yes, Reddit users have made some amazing tools for moderation, but they are still fully dependent on preexisting, complex engineering work by the Reddit employees, including the API. Maybe a better comparison would be Wikipedia, but again, much simpler problem.

[protastus]

The Reddit board of directors should choose a CEO with better judgement because this doesn't look good.

While I am sad for the communities, I am excited at the opportunity to short this stock if it ever goes public with such poor leadership.

[phpisthebest]

This would assume that spez is not doing exactly what the Board of directors want.

I think is he, I think they think this will be better for the long term, users will be upset for a little while, but will not actually leave.

He has already said 3rd party apps make up a small amount of "traffic" and "90% fall in to the free plan" anyway.

So they are betting this is a tempest in a tea pot...

Sadly they are probably right because people are sheep and creatures of habit, for me I am going to archive my data before the 30th and purge all of my accounts. I personally am done with reddit, but I am likely the minority

[protastus]

The board wants the CEO to instigate drama and inflame their most passionate users against the company?

There's tremendous lack of tact about how this is being managed. Completely unnecessary and generally not good for business.

[phpisthebest]

> inflame their most passionate users against the company

this is think is the disconnect, they do not believe that is what they are doing, and given my tech bubble I am not sure they are wrong.

they have the data, i dont. I am sure their "most passionate users" are the ones using the official apps, and new interfaces, posting, upvoting, and commenting on cat photos, and cute animal memes, which is where their ads are targeted.....

[quantumsequoia]

I think he's referring to poor judgement by the CEO in immature PR handling. Even if raising the API prices is the right business decision according to the data, publicly slandering the Apollo developer seems like an unambiguously childish move

[sirspacey]

The Reddit community has a reputation for bullying leadership. He’s a founder & willing to stand up to them.

If all this negative press ends up driving attention in the broader stock market, it will probably work out come IPO.

So far, so good for preferred stockholders.

[phpisthebest]

isn't this about like saying the peasants have a reputation for bullying the king, then applauding the king for standing up to the unwashed masses..

[intended]

Yes, discussions between content creators and platforms are very ungentle these days.

[shostack]

They have a timeline to IPO. Reddit took $50m almost 10 years ago. They believe this will blow over quickly so they'd rather rip off the band-aid.

[genmud]

I highly doubt this is what their board had in mind when they said, "we need you to be on track to being profitable by q4 of 2023 so an IPO can take place".

I also don't trust what they are saying with regards to 90% will fall into the free plan. Is that 90% by volume of requests, by api key, by user id? It seems like the data isn't being shared in a transparent way.

You can have 90% of Reddit oauth clients never hit the free tier limit, but that doesn't mean shit if 90% of those oauth clients aren't actually being used. The fact that Steve keeps getting called out with receipts doesn't give me confidence in their assertions, given the lack of data.

[Dwolb]

Reddit might not need a CEO per se.

It might need a different governance structure.

Commercial and community interests can be in conflict.

What’s the leadership structure that recognizes this tension and delivers optimal outcomes in the long term?

[paulmd]

haha, imagine any HN'er giving social-media users (sorry, "community reps") a position of power and governance in their startup. No. God no. Fuck no, nobody in their right mind is letting the redditors drive the bus and set strategic direction and monetization/profitability/ec ("governance").

and you're probably guaranteed those community reps are the most annoying powermods/etc who you really kinda want gone anyway. No, don't, stop, come back, etc.

Look, this is going to be a bit blunt but I've seen these crises in major social media before (see: the Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka story) and the reality is that people's estimations of the value of their posting is much higher than reality. Yes, it will be a big ding to have powerusers and powermods depart the site. Yes, they will get some shreddit and GDPR removal of valuable content. The vast majority will not GDPR, and will keep posting cat pictures and discussing the merits of Android phones and scrolling memes and jerking off to hentai and onlyfans models, and that's what Reddit apparently wants to optimize for.

The takeaway from the Q+A with spez today is that they get it, they understand where you're coming from and they understand the community frustration, and they don't care. They've set their course and they're going to ride through it and the traffic on new.reddit and the native app is more important than losing 20-30% of users. And you can debate whether that will have long-term negative impacts (probably!) but that may not even be something that spez cares about after he cashes out. Or he may view it as a critical long-term goal that is worth a substantial amount of short-term pain.

But when you're Twitter, or Reddit, or even Tumblr, you can ride it out. Hell even Facebook is still fine.

Nobody is going to put redditors on the board to keep powermods from leaving. If that's your metric for success, put powermods on the board or I'm Going Outside, just close the browser window and get started with the grass-touching.

If you do that on your ycombinator startup you probably won't be running a ycombinator startup anymore.

[intended]

Apparently the value of all that shit posting is in powering LLMs. Something Stackoverflow, Reddit, Twitter are all upset about. Most likely all the image/art hosting sites and forums as well.

It’s a bit strange, on the one hand content is cheap, on the other hand it props up some very impressive tools (and valuations).

It feels like these two should be better coupled, but thats a problem I haven’t seen a solution to.

[mrandish]

They've probably tried recruiting a good CEO. The problem is no one remotely competent wants the job.

[bombcar]

I’m remotely incompetent and I’ll take the job for the right pay.

Heck, I’ll even be in/person incompetent.

[shmatt]

The Reddit board of directors don’t represent the founders, who have probably been long ago diluted to less than 10%

They represent investors who sunk 1.3 billion dollars into a company who was spending millions providing 3rd party apps a free api where users can’t be monetized. And is not currently profitable

If my previous experience means anything, the board wanted the price to be 100x higher or to shut down the api completely, and were talked down by spez

[jwie]

The time for Reddit to have gone public was with all that other spac mania during the pandemic.

These days pesky investors are going to demand things like, a business model and a profit opportunity.

[PragmaticPulp]

> This is all a ridiculous self-delusion that Reddit management has engaged in that the platform is really the “value add”. It’s not. Reddit has become the shorthand for…

I don’t understand how people can argue that Reddit is somehow not valuable and then go on to explain how Reddit is valuable.

The “work” that posters and moderators do isn’t a deliverable that investors care about in their quarterly reports. They only care about revenue, be it from ads or customers paying for features.

[mustacheemperor]

It's going to be a fun thought experiment at the bar for years now - how would you have brought reddit to profitability starting in Q1 2023?

Maybe there was a way to lever that value for ML training - and the constantly updated nature of the "training database" - into a profit model unlike any other social media app. Not the kind of innovation this team wanted to build, clearly.

[chx]

I am old

I remember Esther Dyson: Release 2.0

She was talking about how, for example a wine forum could make money connecting wine sellers and buyers

do it

Instead of boring ads, make it possible for communities to engage with relevant businesses. Affiliate links, coupons and such. Meaningful dialogue. I am a former mod of /r/usbchardware and we were close to this a few times, with Sanho Hyper and SlimQ. Make yourself the "house brand" of the sub by engaging in good faith and you should be rewarded.

But even just affiliate links, as a former mod of /r/usbchardware, we very often recommend this and that and if we did that with affiliate links then everyone would be better off. And you can make a reputation system here which makes it much harder to just spam garbage.

This is an off-the-cuff idea which probably needs refinement but no way, no way you can't make good money from such hypertargeted communities. Just think outside of the box a little. Corporate spam gets you booted. A company offering insight, honest good advice gets you boosted. It's ... possible. There is a way making money for everyone involved which doesn't involve dirty play.

[danudey]

...or charge users $x/mo if they want to use third-party clients.

None of reddit's monetization so far has been even remotely appealing to me. I don't click on the ads (except by accident), I don't buy the NFTs, I don't pay for gold or get the coins or whatever. It's all stupid, asinine bullshit as far as I'm concerned.

Just like Twitter, the monetization plan is "a bunch of stuff that doesn't make the core experience better". A blue check mark? A stupid-looking avatar hat? Give me something tangible and I'll pay for it.

An MMO selling cosmetics makes sense. A social media site selling cosmetics... not so much.

[sroussey]

Having actually done this, it is a loosing direction (sadly). The idea is great, but people just don’t participate in that way. The closest I got was a Watch community that linked to eBay and I would add affiliate links if there were none. But that was one forum out of a million.

[Semaphor]

I work for a photography site. While money is tight thanks to less money being in the industry, most of the money we make is still with direct contacts, be it the major companies advertising their products, or smaller merchants advertising their stock. All context targeted, not user profiled.

[sroussey]

Photography is great as items to sell into that market can be quite expensive.

[intended]

Not sure if it could be done. Definitely not like their competitors.

Reddit feels like /was 3 firms.

A forum, hosting firm.

A sort of platform? Ads, compliance, support

A media firm - What they had with the old AMA and an employee helping guests.

I dont see any of these hitting Platform numbers. I do see it being a titan in popular culture.

[jstarfish]

Easy. Sell user data to the Chinese, and sell access to (pre-moderation) ingestion streams to domestic intelligence agencies. Win-win.

[nathanaldensr]

A great business plan, if you can keep it.

[bitshiftfaced]

> Its product is volunteer work by moderators and users to produce value.

The way the Reddit works, moderation is a free and limitless resource. You will never run out of people volunteering for the job.

[adolfojp]

I help manage a few associated medium sized reddit communities. We share a mod team. We are joining the protest.

We talked to an admin who reviewed our logs and they were surprised by the fact that our community was modded as a team because most of the communities that they had seen and worked with were apparently modded almost exclusively by a single person.

I thought at first that this was a joke because our head mod does most of the work and because we get new mods every year and they always leave.

So when our head mod leaves the subs will die. We'll become /r/worldpolitics. And there's a good chance that he'll leave during the protest.

What I'm trying to say is that we often see moderators as interchangeable, one leaves and another joins and nothing changes, but the reality is that good mods are scarce. I don't expect an inexperienced mod to join a sub with half a million users and know what to do. Most of our team doesn't know how to use the automoderator. I'm the only one who knows how to use the custom automation bot that I wrote. And then there's the issue of understanding the culture.

So whether reddit lives or dies in my opinion won't be a matter of how fast reddit can replace moderators but a matter of how many moderators will stay and put up with the bullshit because it has become part of their lives.

[8note]

Yeah, my experience was that there's like 20-100 people total that spend all day every day actively modding for the whole of reddit, then a ton of people who do next to nothing

[danudey]

This is the issue that it feels like Reddit doesn't get. Maybe those people are 0.0001% of the user base, but if they leave then everything they were managing goes straight to hell, subreddits become choked with off-topic posts, spam, porn, and toxic behavior. The 99% of users who only ever lurk, and only rarely if ever comment, will stop having a reason to come around, and they'll just dwindle away.

It feels very much like every story of the toxic boss who says "my way or the highway" and then is all surprised pikachu when the only person who knows how things work chooses "the highway" and everything falls apart in their absence. I guess we'll see how it actually plays out.

[fastily]

A lot of community run websites are like this. On Wikipedia, ~200 volunteers do 80% of the admin/moderation work. And yes, it’s totally unsustainable.

[BEEdwards]

You will run out of the people doing it remotely well very quickly though.

The high quality modding of askhistory, anthropology and other science sub reddits are provided by actual domain experts working for free. You can find someone to replace them, but the quality will plummet and the users will leave.

[bitshiftfaced]

You're assuming that the current mods are already doing it "remotely well." There are no shortage of cases where people have been banned from a subreddit for ridiculous reasons, myself included (e.g. talking about studies that support safe sleep practices for infants). When Ceddit still worked, it was eye-opening to see how much shadow-censorship was happening, and for the most petty reasons.

The subreddits you mentioned are good examples where domain knowledge is a very desirable trait in a mod. But by and large, it's not necessary for a mod to have deep domain knowledge in order to be able to enforce rules consistently. There's a reason why it's called being a "glorified internet janitor."

[bombcar]

99% of the unpaid jannies job is sweeping up the spam and crap.

It’s the 1% remaining that gets people pissed, and you can NEVER please everyone.

[drumhead]

All they have to do is keep the ship afloat until it goes public, once thats done they cash out with their millions/billions and then to hell with the site. They'll resign, get fired or whatever but they wont care because they'll have their money by then.

[riku_iki]

somehow facebook made it through..

[ftxbro]

I disagree. To me this sounds like saying that a dairy farm can't go public because the ones producing the value are the cows not the farm managers.