Submitted 10 months ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Reddit’s value as a social media platform drops as it’s value to advertisers rises. The more mutilated it becomes, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.
Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.
In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.
Yes, I agree. In the end, Reddit lives off its reputation, just like every social media platform. Seriously, is there an effect that when you’re long enough the CEO of a company, you begin making decisions where it is obvious that they will negatively impact the user base and thus long-term survivability of a company? Is there a term for that?
I imagine your priorities become different.
You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.
Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.
Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.
Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”
I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. Nevermind the fact that, even if Spez is still a good person and an idealist, he might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.
I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.
When having a bacon and egg breakfast the hen participants the pig is committed.
You had me at bacon...
I deleted my reddit account and joined lemmy during the subreddit blackout, but there’s still a few authors I follow on reddit.
Most I’ve followed to other sites, and just recently one was suspended (for what sounds like a fuck up on reddit’s end) I can’t see the few remaining staying long term, and after that my reddit use will drop to zero.
as its* value to advertisers rises
I reached the same conclusion and posted it to reddit over a decade ago, asking people to try to come up with a better solution, long before I even knew open source software was a thing.
Well, took 15 years, but lemmy exists now so hooray!
Honestly feels like a scam for rich people. Spez just has to convince some suckers that Reddit would be profitable as he cashes out. Then they’re left with a dead platform as they kill it with ads and astroturfing.
This is honestly what I feel like most businesses are these days, just scams to convince other rich people to invest, so they can cash out early on. Basically the same stuff all the crypto currencies were doing.
It’s kinda funny on Reddit, you would have had to pay for your picture comment. I’m happy to donate to lemmy, but putting features like this behind paywalls is silly.
You have to pay to post pics? When did that happen?
I will say, though, anything that disincentives people to spam useless images and gifs in the comments, kind of like the next comment down, has its merits.
If there’s one thing I miss about Reddit, it’s that there was a lot less of this Discord-esc image spam over there than there is over here
Dear fucking god, THAT explains why I couldn’t do that.
Its always the same with online services/platforms looking to make money. Offer a free or cheap online service/platform, then advertisements, then more advertisements, then start removing features and hiding them behind paywalls, then more advertisements, then death.
Or, like Facebook and Insta, you get so big that the world itself warps around your platform because no one can remember the before times.
Sounds very familiar. I think I’ve heard pretty much the same thing before when discussing paying for streaming services as opposed to sailing the high seas.
Someone needs to redo this with the answer being “s p e z”
Is he Australian?
No idea
Anyone else posted this yet? https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/faadfea9-4ca3-4b18-8b6c-11411cc797ff.png
Nope and I really wish nobody had still.
This reminds me… we need an “I’m sorry Garfield” community on Lemmy.
You mean “I’m sorry John”?
Be the change you want to see in the world, TacoButtPlug.
He took one for the community with spez, I’m surprised there isn’t one yet. Guess you can have the honors, TacoButtPlug.
!imsorryjon@lemmy.world seems to exist
why does garfield have preposterously large bazongas
Does this represent some higher meaning or is it just Garfield fucking spez?
What a terrible day to have eyes
Looks like someone’s got a case of the Mondays
Looks like yours went up first lol, but as long as it’s up. 🫡
So many questions about this
Weren’t these assholes supposed to IPO like 6 months ago? lol
They were totally lined up to IPO. I think somebody told him to go all musk on it. I’m still not exactly sure how taking a big fat shit on the user communities face was supposed to impress the investors.
Well yeah, I’m probably not the only daily active user who stopped visiting all together… after 10+ years of daily active use. They brought them on themselves.
Same, but only a few years user. Sync for lemmy is so much better.
Came from using it daily to only going there only when google forces me to use it
Many of such cases I assume
Nothing to celebrate.
Reddit revenue is still up, just not as much as they had hoped.
That's still enough to tank an IPO.
Reddit, as a concept, can’t make more money without destroying it’s value. The more advertising is injected into it, the less useful it becomes, and the less people will want to use it.
So yes, it’s up, but they’ve hurt themselves drastically to get it up by hurting so much of Reddit’s usefulness. People who remained are already low on patience with it.
To drive it even higher, they will have to cripple it even more.
It’s possible to make money with Reddit while leaving it unmolested, but it’s not possible to make ALL the money that way. Investors want ALL the money.
Fuck spez
Let’s for a second take stock of what’s happening here.
The ad revenue is falling short of the projected prediction of what it was supposed to be. As in the profit from ad revenue did not reach that arbitrary number.
Reddit is still grossly profitable.
This is the same kind of headline that says Facebook lost 11 bagillion dollars but in reality they didn’t lose a dime they just didn’t make as much as they wanted to.
The difference with Facebook is that it is a public company, so it does have to grow every year to have value for investors.
Reddit doesn’t. It’s existing private investors can splot the profit and be just fine. They just want a huge payout that will only come from an IPO.
We did it, Lemmy!
Remember, the reason I ditched Reddit wasn’t the ads per se, it was the constant data selling, and the official app just getting worse and worse with unwanted “features” pushed on everyone. They kept getting greedier and greedier so when they disabled 3rd party apps I ditched Reddit.
Same
Reddit who?
If I can’t browse my way, I simply don’t use the site.
If reddit pops up in a search result on my browser, wellll best believe I have multiple adblockers making sure their ads don’t load.
I’m doing my part, fuck spez
It’s such bullshit, Reddit could have been so much more. Researching my latest purchase/obsession, and the only way to find anything that isn’t corporate sponsored reviews or AI content farming is to add the word “Reddit” to the end of the search.
As someone with an 11 year old account that I deleted during the TPA debacle, I fully recognise that there’s a huge problem here. Reddit created a place where people wanted to put their thoughts, ideas, and opinions, and now that they are cashing out TOO FUCKING BAD LAME EBD USER.
Fuck Zuckerberg, Fuck Spez!! 🖕🖕
Good, fuck spez.
As someone has had their accounts shadow banned across of wide swaths of reddit, despite being one of its first users… good fucking riddance.
The last time I have logged in to Reddit was the day they ended the apps, July 1 I think it was. I haven’t been back since. I thought I would miss it more than I do but honestly I never even think about it anymore and am much happier with my new Lemmy life.
Enough about my ex
I don’t know if reddit ads provide a good roas. We tried a few campaigns and gave up because it was so far off what we see on other platforms. The community is super anti-advertising, the targeting is really limited by community and geo.
People go to reddit to veg out, not to shop. I think the only times I’ve made purchases based on things I’ve seen are when there’s a discussion and numerous people make a recommendation for the same thing, or maybe a few cases when the op is showcasing something they had a personal part in creating.
So they did $800M when they wanted to do $1B. Okay that’s disappointing.
But the eye opener for me in this article is that they did $800M in 2023 up from $350M in 2021. That’s insane revenue growth. This is the first time I’ve seen any inkling that their IPO might have some chance.
Still, you’d have to believe they can get to multiple billions. I think it’s much more likely that they will fall flat and actually help kill whatever optimism there might be about IPOs in the market.
I don’t normally comment on reddit news, but… Lol.
Moved to Lemmy, best choice ever.
I’m doing my part! thanks ublock!
Reddit needs to go!
Deleted Reddit because they blocked me from fetching subreddit RSS feeds which was the only reasonable interface left
The users need to be the shareholders, and only users. A bunch of useless venture capitalist parasites should never agin be allowed to own and destroy our public spaces.
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well shucks, all they did was drive out their most active content makers and cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free moderation labor. Who could possibly have seen this coming?
ripcord@kbin.social 10 months ago
Don't be fooled. Most went back.
Nerii@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I was active nearly every day for 13 years, I didn’t. Granted, I don’t come here much either, but what Reddit did disgusted me too much.
Pips@lemmy.sdf.org 10 months ago
Did they? I had one of the top non-porn accounts actually run by a person (most high karma accounts use bots, I didn’t out of ironic laziness) and I haven’t posted or commented since whenever Day 0 was for rif is fun. I’ve been back a couple times for very specific things but not logged in or participating in any active way. Of course, I’m just one (high karma) data point, but I really don’t think I’m unique in this. I also have no real desire to contribute to Reddit again in the future. Getting off of it has been pretty nice.
Look, it’s not that people aren’t still posting, the site obviously still has content, but it really is just “content.” The quality of discussion I’ve seen has gone down pretty steep. I think a lot of contributors who treated Reddit like old school forums have left and it’s slowly turning into a weird combo of Facebook and 4chan if that makes sense. If that’s what the userbase wants, go for it, I guess. But that’s not my jam.
WHYAREWEALLCAPS@kbin.social 10 months ago
A lot of search results still take me to Reddit. It is still a source of knowledge.
Promethiel@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’ll be honest. I want to believe in the Fediverse and Lemmy, really really hard.
It’s ideals (rather, the gestalt of the best of what everyone says is the best of Federation) appeals strongly.
But sometimes, it’s instance after instance of complaining about this or that. Double points when it’s all reddit complaining.
I dunno if being a heavy content creator necessitates an air of misguided superiority but there’s no more nuance here than anywhere else, and the content can’t seem to form precisely because everyone decides to take their toys away and do their own thing at the smallest provocation.
I don’t use them on my phone because fuck their app, but I’ve found no choice but to join up with an alias and as much extensions to make their job harder as Firefox allows, just to have genuine discussions on hyper specific topics from a PC.
stevehobbes@lemy.lol 10 months ago
As much as I hate to admit it, I’m considering it too - not instead, but also. I haven’t been back since Apollo died but Lemmy just doesn’t have the diversity of interests and niche communities yet. It feels really one dimensional sometimes.
lustyargonian@lemm.ee 10 months ago
But after cementing lemmy as a viable alternative. I actually find fun content on lemmy. Reddit feed for me ends up turning into a left vs right garbage.
original_reader@lemm.ee 10 months ago
What’s your basis for this statement? Any evidence to back it up?
nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
I go back for a couple nice communities that haven’t escaped yet. And occasional search results for advice, but that tends to be 3-5+ years old on average.
andxz@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Will never happen.
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
What I’ve noticed is it became way more toxic over there since the API changes
I still scurry over occasionally (a lot of communities didn’t move over) but not nearly as much as I used to
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Same. It runs so badly now, and enough moderators left or cut back that it is not the same site it was at all. Some communities are still intact, but I’ve begun to see lemmy and even Mastodon results in searches alongside reddit. It’s going to take a while to see if reddit can recover (it’ll take some humility and leadership from the top which seems unlikely) or die slowly then all at once. Remember digg, etc? The internet is fickle and for every Facebook there are a hundred friendsters.
stackPeek@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Ironically way more bot now
psud@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The only sub I still go there for is /r/zerocarb (a low carb diet sub), and that’s now mostly deleted comments and posts. With the moderation tools unavailable on mobile the mods have made automod very strict. Heaven help a person new to the diet, they’ll have a hard time asking their questions
sirboozebum@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I still occasionally browse the smaller subs when I need help on things like /r/unraid.
AtariDump@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Image
kratoz29@lemm.ee 10 months ago
This became an instant classic lol, do we know who the artist is?
eek2121@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That was one of the reasons they killed the api: to support ad growth. Unfortunately they failed to realize the combination of ad-blocking browsers and users just quitting the site from losing client access means they were never going to hit pre-IPO revenue targets.
Had they instead focused on affordable API pricing and driving subscriber revenues up, they would have exceeded revenue targets.
source: I was in a somewhat similar position (not quite the same, no third party client), but chose different and found myself making more subscription revenue than ad revenue thanks to a viewer base more than happy to pay more.
mrks@programming.dev 10 months ago
Do you have any data to support that? My feeling is that not much changed after that. I feel like there is business as usual there. At least when I talk to my peers.
psud@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Subs I followed (and still rarely visit) became much harsher with moderation, to the point of being very difficult for new visitors to use; in a sub that is mostly for helping people adopt a very low carb diet
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Some communities were unaffected. Some are still shut down. Some replaced mods who wouldn’t play by spez’s rules.
I’m not sure what the data would look like or how one would obtain it. Number of active moderators per day? Moderator satisfaction survey? Change in posting habits of top 1% posters?
I am speaking purely anecdotally from communities I know that shut down entirely and moderators who left. I have no way to estimate the scale of the exodus.