[rubinlinux]

Reddit was a co-op between a few groups of people.

General low effort content scrollers

Power users and mods who appreciate creating and contributing to make a community

Advertising interests

The deal was, the ad seeking was for the mainstream strollers, and the contributing power users and mods could opt out of the bs. The community builders get a nice environment for their community, the scrollers get content, and the ad people get to shiw thejir ads.

I always thought spez understood this. Its why the api existed. Its why old.reddit.com existed. It was the commercial machine's compromise to the content generators in exchange for the moderating and commenting.

But he seems to have forgot. I wonder why?

Without the compromise the whole thing falls apart. Reddit becomes digg.

[mostlysimilar]

This is also more or less my mental model of how Reddit operated. I thought their leadership understood this too. The only thing that makes sense to me is they've run the numbers and have decided the meme-consumption / infinite scroll users are more than enough to keep the lights on, and they believe they'll save money by kicking their power users off the platform.

[euroderf]

This sounds like a case study for biz school in the 2030s.

[red-iron-pine]

yeah but what's the lesson?

they may tell everyone to piss off and still maintain profitability, or even increase it, since the advertisers like what's happening and the people who are angry aren't angry enough to offset profits.

2030 B-school lesson is: fuck the user, get paid, c.r.e.a.m.

[Zigurd]

One lesson might be "We're mostly text and TikTok is video, therefore not directly competitive" might be wrong when evaluating how long Reddit will retain passive scrolling users.

[lotsofpulp]

> But he seems to have forgot. I wonder why?

Most likely scenario is spez’s boss wanted better numbers to maximize price at IPO.

I think they decided to cash out when things were very frothy in 2021, and they missed the window. It will be interesting to see if they even get to $10B. I would bet on less than $5B.

According to Wikipedia:

>In October 2014, Reddit raised $50 million in a funding round led by Sam Altman and including investors Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Snoop Dogg, and Jared Leto.[13] Their investment valued the company at $500 million at the time.[14][15] In July 2017, Reddit raised $200 million for a $1.8 billion valuation, with Advance Publications remaining the majority stakeholder.[16] In February 2019, a $300 million funding round led by Tencent brought the company's valuation to $3 billion.[17] In August 2021, a $700 million funding round led by Fidelity Investments raised that valuation to over $10 billion.[18] The company then reportedly filed for an IPO in December 2021 with a valuation of $15 billion.[19][20]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit

[codalan]

Its value seems to be rapidly declining. I was on lemmy.world and lemmy.ca yesterday and was a little shocked at how many people migrated over there. I don't see how this looks good to any potential investors pre-IPO. The fact that lemmy (the software) exists makes one question how much of a moat Reddit really has.

[shagie]

The ones that have moderately successfully migrated are the ones that are visible.

What is missing are the ones that aren't.

r/Boardgamedeals/ has a moderator that has tried to say "go to lemmy.world instead" ( https://lemmy.world/c/boardgamedeals ).

However, the community didn't follow.

r/boardgamedealz was spun up and has had more activity there.

r/soloboardgaming people are slowly moving back to r/boardgames now that one player board games are more socially acceptable within the community since that sub is also restricted.

Big subs that fork to lemmy often have enough people to make it active there.

Small ones that fork and the mod leading the move have more difficulty - especially if all the mod does is moderate and doesn't do any posts.

Many subs exist as part of a greater community. For board games, that's https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/wiki/related_subreddits

It may have been more successful to do what Star Trek did and stand up an instance and host all things related there.

I believe that small subs that don't have enough of a core posters moving or that lack discoverability once this all dies down won't be successful on Lemmy unless they are able to have a more closely affiliated instance to find all things {broader topic}.

While it's not much of a moat, the key thing that Reddit has is discoverability. Reddit occasionally informs you about domain adjacent subs. People on subs frequently suggest domain adjacent subs where the content would also be accepted.

While we often deplore it, tools to drive engagement is what keeps Reddit running. Without solving that, discoverability is a problem on the fediverse that will hinder all but the most dedicated small groups from establishing a lasting community there.

[stevenwliao]

That's not how network effects work. You can't win by cloning the software of an existing social network.

[hexnuts]

The problem I have with lemmy.world is I have yet to be able to login.

[4d66ba06]

I had to reset my password once for it to work. I wonder if my initial password was too long.

[stjohnswarts]

use kbin, they share stuff and I had zero problems getting a kbin account

[93po]

> Reddit becomes digg.

I don't think spez cares if this happens. 95% of the content people see on reddit is mindless garbage that is either a repost or from tiktok/some other site. I believe spez is confident that 95% of content will continue on just fine even if every single moderator quit at the same time. Automoderator setups are already very well fine tuned.

You'd lose the more curated subreddits, sure. But that's such a tiny amount of traffic compared to propaganda news posts, animal photos, and tiktok videos.

[throwaway292939]

spez will care, because, well who uses digg?

[TeMPOraL]

Finite vs. infinite iterated prisoners' dilemma?

Going by the various takes and stories I read over the last few days, I imagine the deal you describe worked because it was indefinite; however, IPO is not only putting pressure to juice up financial metrics - it's also setting an end date for the deal. Once the company goes public, the leadership can, like investors, just cash out and let the whole thing sink. Even if this was always the plan, as long as the "exit" was a non-specific "at some point in the future", everyone could kind of forget about it. Putting a specific timeframe on it completely changes everyone's perceptions - like with iterated prisoners' dilemma, even if the end is still far away, the game changes its nature the very moment that specific timeframe is set.

[mrguyorama]

>But he seems to have forgot. I wonder why?

Because as long as the public buys whatever he's selling, he still leaves rich. Nothing about reddit going forward actually has to be successful or functional as long as normal people buy the stock, people who don't know reddit, don't use it, don't understand it, don't CARE about it, etc.

[gardnr]

Reddit can automate the content generation with ml. They have the perfect dataset to continue generating successful posts and comments into the future. They have seeded conversations in the past. Spez is confident he no longer requires a core community of humans; humans that have feelings and stage protests.

[Macha]

The ad industry calls this kind of auto-generated content for ad placement "MFA" or "Made for Advertising". And they hate it. Ad platforms spend time categorising this content so they can either exclude it from all their users or just exclude it from those users who don't specifically opt into it.

Like many other metrics in the industry (viewability, brand safety, etc.) it's actually the largest brands who are the biggest spenders and the ones you'd think from outside would be the most ruthless about "money in, results out", that care about this stuff the most. The ones that don't are the no-name dropshippers or those "You won't believe this story about X" content mills, but those ones also are willing to pay the least for their ads.

[raxxorraxor]

I would love for advertisers paying a lot of money for bots pushing some bytes around. Budgetary capture as a spam filter technique.

[llampx]

Investors don't take kindly to being duped. Elizabeth Holmes can tell you more.

[malermeister]

Wonder if that'll work as well as autopilot...

[bfuller]

sounds out there, but I completely agree.

[cyanydeez]

M-m-m-oney

[perrohunter]

Didn't Digg had precisely a power-user problem on v3 thus the creation of v4 and it's unraveling? I'm seeing the same pattern here, users tripping on power and trying to host the platform hostage