| That is exactly what many (including the people working at Reddit [1]) just don't seem to understand. Reddit is, first and foremost, content driven. The content itself comes entirely from the communities. To be more precise: from a very small group of people inside those communities. Most reddit users just read, include users that only occasionaly comment in threads and you get a bucket that represents like what, 4/5 of the whole userbase? This means that you do not have to make many people angry to render the site useless for the overwhelming majority of people that go to the site. Reddit rests upon the labor of a small number of people: Users that post and/or create useful content and moderators. Now a site like youtube is very similar but has one [2] very significant difference: The people producing the content have a monetary incentive, making it very unlikely that a majority of them will stop or move away. Reddit, as a company, however brings almost nothing to the table, it's just that it used to be frictionless and now everyone happens to be there. And they are working hard to kill the "frictionless" part. [1]: The recent AMA with spez was a nice demonstration of how out of touch they are with reddit users [2]: Actually it's two, hosting video content on a large scale is actually hard |