[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.