Is it possible they want to change that? I'm sure the board is aware of how the site works and how important all the unpaid labor is to keeping it alive. But maybe they don't like that? It seems like the most profitable thing for a social media platform is to make it appeal to everyone, and not just "reddit people", for lack of a better term.
My normie friends who all have instagrams and tiktoks are not on reddit because it's full of "reddit people", and those people are... weird to them. They still make fun of me for being a "reddit guy" despite having deleted my account years ago. Reddit wants to go public, and I think they know that they have to shed that reputation if they're going to be successful with that. They must have known what a shitstorm these API changes would cause, so maybe it's all already priced in, and they're ok with a mass exodus and they have some horrible plan to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Of course, that would completely ruin reddit, but the point is to make money above all else.
How old are you? Because I feel like Gen Z makes jokes about “Reddit guys” and “Discord mods” but they all absolutely do use those platforms. They’re basically unavoidable.
I’ve seen more than one tiktok with 100k+ likes joking about how they add “reddit.com” to their Google search queries to get real results instead of SEO/sales funnel optimized shit
I'm a millennial, so I can't really speak for zoomers. But to speculate, I'd say that a lot of people are on discord because if you play video games, you're probably on discord to socialize and/or to use the audio/video chatroom stuff when actually gaming. But the reddit thing seems more like a "lifehack" content thing than anything else. I doubt many people saw that tiktok and created a reddit account because of it, which is what I consider "using reddit". And 100k seems like a lot, but couldn't that just be all the reddit users who also use tiktok?
When you go to college, the only anonymous forum you can use is your college's subreddit, when you apply for internships the only forum for somewhat actionable career advice is cscareerquestions, and when applying to Law School or BSchool all the relevant information/tips/guidelines/strategies are all hosted on LawSchoolAdmissions and MBA.
We all know Reddit is a toxic piece of garbage but where else can you find actionable advice at scale?
I haven't seen as much hate for Discord, but Discord has a discovery problem and is still kind of niche.
They could ditch all the moderators by choosing to ditch them. But what would they replace them with?
Mods do useful work that needs to be done, and anything Reddit could do to replace them is going to cost so, so much more. The alternative is a site overrun with trash.
My normie friends who all have instagrams and tiktoks are not on reddit because it's full of "reddit people", and those people are... weird to them. They still make fun of me for being a "reddit guy" despite having deleted my account years ago. Reddit wants to go public, and I think they know that they have to shed that reputation if they're going to be successful with that. They must have known what a shitstorm these API changes would cause, so maybe it's all already priced in, and they're ok with a mass exodus and they have some horrible plan to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Of course, that would completely ruin reddit, but the point is to make money above all else.