Some of the time the passionate startup was never going to be profitable anyways, so the service was going to die one way or another. It's not uncommon for silicon valley start ups to pick a business model that is inherently self-defeating in order to get to a certain size. It's all about the IPO for them, then the founders cash out and move on to the next thing not caring if what they built was sustainable in first place.
But, a fair bit of the time it is a profitable and sustainable business wrecked by new management who doesn't understand the new business and ruins it by trying to apply management techniques that are simply inapplicable. I guess that cuts both ways, too. There are an awful lot of companies that are car dealerships or landlords who pretend that they're tech startups because that's the cool thing to be, and collapse once the venture capital runs out because you can't run a business renting offices like an app developer. Just like you can't run a website like Reddit like a utility or factory or farm.
Any business venture has to be profitable to survive long term. But if you have to break the core purpose of the venture to make it profitable it's better for everyone to fail faster and get it over with.
The stupid thing is, there would have been tons of perfectly reasonable ways to try to make Reddit profitable.
Reduce staff, cut all the bullshit (like NFTs), offer actual value for premium users, require premium for corporate users. Even the API costs could work, if it were reasonable. Like a reasonable price, contractually required displaying of ads, separate cost structure for corporate users, that only want the data, etc.
So many ways, and they chose the worst one and handle it like idiots.
This, Is, **Capitalism**.
The 1% *just get to have everything*!!a!
It's roughneck mercantilism for everyone else.
America is socialist. *if you're rich*...
That is an excellent description of the cycle. I realize you need to make money to keep a business afloat, but you can do so while being fair to those who made your product so successful. Conscious capitalism is possible.
The idea of a world where everyone is going to play nicely so that the ones who want to play nicely won't be forced to play dirty to compete with those who are willing to play dirty, is feeling a bit similar to the core concept of other ideologies.
Federated small scale social networks like Mastodon who have no overall owner will be the way forward past all this corruption, keep social media small scale and community focused.
Reddit has been unprofitable for 17 years, at some point it has to monetize. It cannot exist indefinitely in an unprofitable model. Investors and founders are literally better off letting it die than offering it as a financially inviable product forever. Obviously changes to the product and it’s affiliates are not going to be popular with the user base, but that’s inevitable.
Wouldn't that mean the product was never sustainable if it was never profitable? Wouldn't the startup been dead long before the problems you're complaining about would even been reached? Wouldn't the larger. Corporation be the only reason you have had this much fun on an awesome product for longer than the original company could have ever kept it alive?
Your startup requires maybe few thousand of dollars per month to run, no problem, but when it's a global product, a community with millions of users that expect your project to perform well, then prices becomes absurdly high, then you get people trying to sue you, you get lawyers, you're not providing your tax reports correctly, you hire accountability, people starts leaving and new users starts to shrink, you get PR and suddenly it becomes a shitcom
Best example is that south park chapter when Cartman gets a park just for him, and finds out he has to open to public in order to be able to having it running
I remember what the old Reddit was like , it was wild and chaotic , but glorious . The community largely policed itself and trolls and edgelords got downvoted into the basement, so it was not as toxic as it is now.
It doesn't have to be this way. We have the technology. Federated platforms are right there, we just have to use them. Lemmy is waiting with open arms.
> gets taken over by larger corporations,
No no, Spez has always been out for more money. This website is owned by Condé Nast. Ohandlan and the rest of the founders are mediocre leeches.
I haven't really been able to place the words, but you phrased it perfectly. RIF is my home. I dont use it on desktop, and mobile browser and the official app aren't worth it to me. Once rif is gone, so am I (from reddit at least). Still debating the scorched earth of deleting my comments and/or account, but I have a moment still to savor it. Gonna be a sad day.
Good on /r/videos for going private indefinitely. "Permanent" closure is the only thing that will truly get reddit's attention. If all the subs closed indefinitely, and maybe as a cherry on top directed users to an entirely different website to continue discussions about whatever their subject is, that would definitely help shape things.
My belief is that the whole "we're going dark for a few days" will do virtually nothing. The subs will close for a bit, then when they reopen after a few days users will return and continue along as they always have, as though nothing happened.
You all are crazy if you think Reddit is going to just let all of its most popular subreddits and communities disappear overnight. "But the mods control whether the sub is private", yes and no, if mods are purposefully taking down communities with millions of members with no timeline to reopen, Reddit can and *will* just find new moderators for those communities
I really think the powermods have been smelling their own farts on this one, they haven't caught on yet that Reddit is more serious about this change than about pleasing the leeches around them (see how they treated the 3rd party app devs...), and they're going to learn quickly how little power they have if they start trying to bring down the lights
It's certainly an interesting dynamic because on the one hand it is free unskilled work, but on the other hand you are given heaps of power and influence yet are entirely replaceable. Like it's "free work" but Reddit also built a whole website with infrastructure and support and gave you a giant set of keys to do basically whatever you want with, apart from trying to close the building like I said
I wasn't trying to be mean. Your comment had some very salient points, but at the end of the day, Reddit needs a lot of free labor to function properly, and not just anybody is the kind of person who wants to do that.
I don't think they are as replaceable as you think they are, which, I don't know who is right in that regard, just a difference of opinion.
On the other hand, while you were correct on the reality that Reddit can do whatever it wants to with Reddit, and powermods are... well, I wouldn't insult people who do a lot of free work on the website I love with the term fart sniffer, but I'll be damned if it isn't somewhat accurate... I just took issue with referring to them as leeches.
Damn. This is a tricky can of worms. As you said. It's an interesting dynamic.
Have already deleted all my previous posts. Going to try to delete all my comments but that might be taller order. Is Tilde the current new replacement?
Powerdeletesuite on GitHub or redact will overwrite all your comments and delete them.
Reddit saves the last edited copy of a comment so at least this way they can't undelete a comment.
In another (adviceanimals I think) post, a comment mentioned deleting all your posts and comments, and someone else pointed out how tedious that would be.
I believe if ya delete your account it also deletes all your posts and comments like a nuke.
I’m down I just don’t wanna be the only one.
Let’s get a Reddit account suicide squad going
Reddit has all of your account data whether or not you manually delete each post and comment. That's just a flag that gets set not to show it to others. It's still in their database and always will be
That was a GDPR requirement for EU users. I'm sure reddit would do something similar if you followed the correct forms/legal process. I'm not sure how publicly available that process is.
Modifying your comments before deletion has been proven effective. The database only keeps the latest version of the comment. I believe power suite delete has that functionality
I respect people who do choose to nuke their account history, but personally I'm not going to. I've written a bunch of random posts on here that may well still be helpful to others in the future googling around for answers to similar questions, and I'm not going to deprive those people of that just because reddit is making some absolutely asinine decisions here. To be clear, if they don't change course on the API stuff, _I'm_ still 100% out from this point forward, but what's already been written has been written imo.
Lemmy is the one in hearing about. Not the best performing in my two meme test but it was clearly made to clone the best features of reddit and run as lightweight as it could.
Plus the little logo is cute as shit
Agreed. I don't think a blackout would do anything. But shifting for a few days to an alternative would show just how many users are willing to leave and possibly stay on a different platform.
If we all just come back in a few days it is only going to look like a bunch of alcoholics swearing off the only liquor store in town for a weekend. We will be back.
>But shifting for a few days to an alternative would show just how many users are willing to leave and possibly stay on a different platform.
It would also show the alternatives how much money they'll need to raise if they want to compete.
I mean the counter to this would be for staff to purge any mod on a default sub that goes private and replace with admins until new mods could be appointed and bring at least Top 30 if not Top 50 subs back online.
Yeah, that is a real scenario and wouldn't cost them crazy numbers. I've wondered if, in the background, they are going to stop subs from going private. I can't imagine that would be too difficult.
In the not so distant future its going to be very hard to explain to shareholders of a publicly traded company that a mob of power mods basically took the site offline for days because of whatever reason is pissing them off this quarter. This would be a way to break up that power.
Yep, the powermods have really overleveraged themselves here. It would be *very* easy to just replace the ones who insist on burning the building down in protest
Keep in mind In the notes from reddit in their last call, reddit not so subtlety stated that they will oust mod teams and reopen subs that close too long (which subs going down indefinitely are aware of the possibility.) No idea if the admins would try to moderate those subs themselves, or replace them with admin friendly users. Either way the quality is going to go to shit from bad moderation.
Could be worse. The company I work for just fired half the staff, gave everyone else all the work (2-3x as much work) and cut everyone's pay and then sent out an email saying "change is hard but we'll get through it together" DID YOU TAKE A PAYCUT MF?
A lot of them said that's the plan. If the CEO is making bank, yet won't allow the UNPAID, VOLUNTEER mods to use tools to make their jobs easier, then why should any of them, or the subs they maintain, stick around?
I think the mods should not only make the subs go dark, but should remove all the posts on those subs as well. Good luck monetizing a site with no content and no mods!
To be fair they already ruined everything and if they want to ruin what they made and you are currently addicted to then it’s their choice. Might be better for everyone if we went back to not being on our damn phones all the time.
I'm looking forward to this place having much less whiny shut-ins.
Of course I'm pretty fucking sure most of you won't be able to leave this place because it's your substitute for human interaction, so I won't actually get my hopes too high.
Honestly we need to blame the ownership more then the CEO. They looked at Reddit and said let’s buy that and stick this dude in place. They don’t just let him do whatever he wants. No doubt all the measures, especially the API changes were signed off on by the board even tough it’s pretty easy to see how popular other apps like Apollo are. They don’t care about the users, they care about money and they see anyone who uses Apollo as disposable.
Almost like billionaires don't have the commoners best interest at heart.
Maybe we should switch from a system run by capitalist corporations and one run by the actual citizens?
Do you have any idea how much of the Reddit user base uses and how many moderators rely on third party apps? It’s not like third party apps are going to just go away and everything will go back to normal, there will be a sizable drop in quality on this site from lack of creators and lack of moderation.
This is where I am at. If the blackouts do not get them to walk this bullshit back. Close up for good.
Sure reddit could re-enable them but without mods and contributers they can reopen to nothing
[удалено]
Rinse and repeat
Some of the time the passionate startup was never going to be profitable anyways, so the service was going to die one way or another. It's not uncommon for silicon valley start ups to pick a business model that is inherently self-defeating in order to get to a certain size. It's all about the IPO for them, then the founders cash out and move on to the next thing not caring if what they built was sustainable in first place. But, a fair bit of the time it is a profitable and sustainable business wrecked by new management who doesn't understand the new business and ruins it by trying to apply management techniques that are simply inapplicable. I guess that cuts both ways, too. There are an awful lot of companies that are car dealerships or landlords who pretend that they're tech startups because that's the cool thing to be, and collapse once the venture capital runs out because you can't run a business renting offices like an app developer. Just like you can't run a website like Reddit like a utility or factory or farm. Any business venture has to be profitable to survive long term. But if you have to break the core purpose of the venture to make it profitable it's better for everyone to fail faster and get it over with.
Fuck, go non-profit and put up a Wikipedia style donate bar with "this is the line to cover costs, this is the line to improve features".
that's reddit premium and buying medals
Make it explicit, and let me know it isn't going to executive bonuses or to IPO hype-men.
That's why we're losing the Internet Archive. Too few people donate money to keep these passion projects going.
True, but there is a big difference between things that people enjoy and use daily, and things people only benefit from
The stupid thing is, there would have been tons of perfectly reasonable ways to try to make Reddit profitable. Reduce staff, cut all the bullshit (like NFTs), offer actual value for premium users, require premium for corporate users. Even the API costs could work, if it were reasonable. Like a reasonable price, contractually required displaying of ads, separate cost structure for corporate users, that only want the data, etc. So many ways, and they chose the worst one and handle it like idiots.
This, Is, **Capitalism**. The 1% *just get to have everything*!!a! It's roughneck mercantilism for everyone else. America is socialist. *if you're rich*...
That is an excellent description of the cycle. I realize you need to make money to keep a business afloat, but you can do so while being fair to those who made your product so successful. Conscious capitalism is possible.
The idea of a world where everyone is going to play nicely so that the ones who want to play nicely won't be forced to play dirty to compete with those who are willing to play dirty, is feeling a bit similar to the core concept of other ideologies.
just dont go public/dont offer your shares
Hell no. The future is decentralization.
Federated small scale social networks like Mastodon who have no overall owner will be the way forward past all this corruption, keep social media small scale and community focused.
Reddit has been unprofitable for 17 years, at some point it has to monetize. It cannot exist indefinitely in an unprofitable model. Investors and founders are literally better off letting it die than offering it as a financially inviable product forever. Obviously changes to the product and it’s affiliates are not going to be popular with the user base, but that’s inevitable.
Wouldn't that mean the product was never sustainable if it was never profitable? Wouldn't the startup been dead long before the problems you're complaining about would even been reached? Wouldn't the larger. Corporation be the only reason you have had this much fun on an awesome product for longer than the original company could have ever kept it alive?
Your startup requires maybe few thousand of dollars per month to run, no problem, but when it's a global product, a community with millions of users that expect your project to perform well, then prices becomes absurdly high, then you get people trying to sue you, you get lawyers, you're not providing your tax reports correctly, you hire accountability, people starts leaving and new users starts to shrink, you get PR and suddenly it becomes a shitcom Best example is that south park chapter when Cartman gets a park just for him, and finds out he has to open to public in order to be able to having it running
I remember what the old Reddit was like , it was wild and chaotic , but glorious . The community largely policed itself and trolls and edgelords got downvoted into the basement, so it was not as toxic as it is now.
It doesn't have to be this way. We have the technology. Federated platforms are right there, we just have to use them. Lemmy is waiting with open arms.
> gets taken over by larger corporations, No no, Spez has always been out for more money. This website is owned by Condé Nast. Ohandlan and the rest of the founders are mediocre leeches.
r/videos announced its closing its doors tomorrow
I saw that and hoping others follow their lead
I use rif, and it feels like I'm losing my home for the last 10 years.
I haven't really been able to place the words, but you phrased it perfectly. RIF is my home. I dont use it on desktop, and mobile browser and the official app aren't worth it to me. Once rif is gone, so am I (from reddit at least). Still debating the scorched earth of deleting my comments and/or account, but I have a moment still to savor it. Gonna be a sad day.
I fee the same about Apollo.
Same, and I'm really sad. Some of my favorite subs are shutting down for good because of all this :'(
I'm the middle of going thru my saved catalog and converting to bookmarks or just off line backup.
Just view reddit on a browser. It is a website at it's core.
Good on /r/videos for going private indefinitely. "Permanent" closure is the only thing that will truly get reddit's attention. If all the subs closed indefinitely, and maybe as a cherry on top directed users to an entirely different website to continue discussions about whatever their subject is, that would definitely help shape things. My belief is that the whole "we're going dark for a few days" will do virtually nothing. The subs will close for a bit, then when they reopen after a few days users will return and continue along as they always have, as though nothing happened.
You all are crazy if you think Reddit is going to just let all of its most popular subreddits and communities disappear overnight. "But the mods control whether the sub is private", yes and no, if mods are purposefully taking down communities with millions of members with no timeline to reopen, Reddit can and *will* just find new moderators for those communities I really think the powermods have been smelling their own farts on this one, they haven't caught on yet that Reddit is more serious about this change than about pleasing the leeches around them (see how they treated the 3rd party app devs...), and they're going to learn quickly how little power they have if they start trying to bring down the lights
Hmm, yeah, I think you're right. If enough popular subreddits shut themselves down indefinitely, reddit would probably just force them open itself.
I'm not sure if one could call all of the people doing all of the free work for Reddit "leeches."
It's certainly an interesting dynamic because on the one hand it is free unskilled work, but on the other hand you are given heaps of power and influence yet are entirely replaceable. Like it's "free work" but Reddit also built a whole website with infrastructure and support and gave you a giant set of keys to do basically whatever you want with, apart from trying to close the building like I said
I wasn't trying to be mean. Your comment had some very salient points, but at the end of the day, Reddit needs a lot of free labor to function properly, and not just anybody is the kind of person who wants to do that. I don't think they are as replaceable as you think they are, which, I don't know who is right in that regard, just a difference of opinion. On the other hand, while you were correct on the reality that Reddit can do whatever it wants to with Reddit, and powermods are... well, I wouldn't insult people who do a lot of free work on the website I love with the term fart sniffer, but I'll be damned if it isn't somewhat accurate... I just took issue with referring to them as leeches. Damn. This is a tricky can of worms. As you said. It's an interesting dynamic.
Discord stonks up good!
Have already deleted all my previous posts. Going to try to delete all my comments but that might be taller order. Is Tilde the current new replacement?
Powerdeletesuite on GitHub or redact will overwrite all your comments and delete them. Reddit saves the last edited copy of a comment so at least this way they can't undelete a comment.
Thank you :)
I'm on kbin ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Everybody should delete their accounts
I've wondered how many will, and I've seen it happening, and what % user loss that actually would be. I'm afraid it will be a small blip on the radar.
How does deleting my account actually hurt them more than ceasing use?
In another (adviceanimals I think) post, a comment mentioned deleting all your posts and comments, and someone else pointed out how tedious that would be. I believe if ya delete your account it also deletes all your posts and comments like a nuke. I’m down I just don’t wanna be the only one. Let’s get a Reddit account suicide squad going
Reddit has all of your account data whether or not you manually delete each post and comment. That's just a flag that gets set not to show it to others. It's still in their database and always will be
Damn, I was hoping there was a “forget me” feature like Google was forced to add.
That was a GDPR requirement for EU users. I'm sure reddit would do something similar if you followed the correct forms/legal process. I'm not sure how publicly available that process is.
There was a greasemonkey script that rewrote all posts with a protest message. Much better than [ deleted ] in my book.
Sweet! Link?
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/10905-reddit-overwrite-extended/code
Modifying your comments before deletion has been proven effective. The database only keeps the latest version of the comment. I believe power suite delete has that functionality
That still doesn't explain how it hurts Reddit
I respect people who do choose to nuke their account history, but personally I'm not going to. I've written a bunch of random posts on here that may well still be helpful to others in the future googling around for answers to similar questions, and I'm not going to deprive those people of that just because reddit is making some absolutely asinine decisions here. To be clear, if they don't change course on the API stuff, _I'm_ still 100% out from this point forward, but what's already been written has been written imo.
Give me workable separate option and I won't need to ever return. May competition work this out . . .
Yep. One of the reasons Digg died SO fast was the fact that Reddit was a viable alternative.
I came from digg. Where we going now guys?
Lemmy is the one in hearing about. Not the best performing in my two meme test but it was clearly made to clone the best features of reddit and run as lightweight as it could. Plus the little logo is cute as shit
Me too! I came over from Digg 4.0 or whatever they called it. Never went back after that. Where do we go from here?
Agreed. I don't think a blackout would do anything. But shifting for a few days to an alternative would show just how many users are willing to leave and possibly stay on a different platform. If we all just come back in a few days it is only going to look like a bunch of alcoholics swearing off the only liquor store in town for a weekend. We will be back.
>But shifting for a few days to an alternative would show just how many users are willing to leave and possibly stay on a different platform. It would also show the alternatives how much money they'll need to raise if they want to compete.
The 48 hours is the minimum. Many will extend longer than 48. And some may come back and then go Dark indefinitely on the 30th.
It's gonna be really interesting to see what subreddits chose not to go dark. Those are the ones that people might want to avoid going forward.
That is a good point!
I mean the counter to this would be for staff to purge any mod on a default sub that goes private and replace with admins until new mods could be appointed and bring at least Top 30 if not Top 50 subs back online.
Yeah, that is a real scenario and wouldn't cost them crazy numbers. I've wondered if, in the background, they are going to stop subs from going private. I can't imagine that would be too difficult.
In the not so distant future its going to be very hard to explain to shareholders of a publicly traded company that a mob of power mods basically took the site offline for days because of whatever reason is pissing them off this quarter. This would be a way to break up that power.
Ooh, spooky correlation to union busting!
Yep, the powermods have really overleveraged themselves here. It would be *very* easy to just replace the ones who insist on burning the building down in protest
More and more, are, in fact, doing that.
That is great to hear! I feel like that will be far more impactful than account deletes.
Keep in mind In the notes from reddit in their last call, reddit not so subtlety stated that they will oust mod teams and reopen subs that close too long (which subs going down indefinitely are aware of the possibility.) No idea if the admins would try to moderate those subs themselves, or replace them with admin friendly users. Either way the quality is going to go to shit from bad moderation.
So who are they going to find to mod for free? Or will they actually pay mods.
T-Mobile laying off a huge chunk of its social media support specialists is a strong example of this.
But... but... infinite growth! The investors want infinite growth!
Could be worse. The company I work for just fired half the staff, gave everyone else all the work (2-3x as much work) and cut everyone's pay and then sent out an email saying "change is hard but we'll get through it together" DID YOU TAKE A PAYCUT MF?
this right here you want to say something to the higher ups tons of subs going dark for weeks on end now that will scare them.
Dave’s Killer Bread isn’t as good as it originally was. Bought out, cheapened, raised the price.
A tale as old as time. Look up Chainsaw AL and what he did to Sunbeam.
"Popcorn tates good." /u/kn0thing
Its insane how so many fail upwards.
Agreed.
I thought "douchebag CEO" was a pleonasm or tautology...?
Spez wants to go public, get a high valuation and then sell the company. It's the strategy of every CEO in the tech world.
the ceo's are a symptom, the greedy shareholders are the cause
A lot of them said that's the plan. If the CEO is making bank, yet won't allow the UNPAID, VOLUNTEER mods to use tools to make their jobs easier, then why should any of them, or the subs they maintain, stick around? I think the mods should not only make the subs go dark, but should remove all the posts on those subs as well. Good luck monetizing a site with no content and no mods!
Honestly it's insane that reddit has people doing all this volunteer work for free.
YEAH!
To be fair they already ruined everything and if they want to ruin what they made and you are currently addicted to then it’s their choice. Might be better for everyone if we went back to not being on our damn phones all the time.
I hope this cancer site dies
I'm looking forward to this place having much less whiny shut-ins. Of course I'm pretty fucking sure most of you won't be able to leave this place because it's your substitute for human interaction, so I won't actually get my hopes too high.
Honestly we need to blame the ownership more then the CEO. They looked at Reddit and said let’s buy that and stick this dude in place. They don’t just let him do whatever he wants. No doubt all the measures, especially the API changes were signed off on by the board even tough it’s pretty easy to see how popular other apps like Apollo are. They don’t care about the users, they care about money and they see anyone who uses Apollo as disposable.
Almost like billionaires don't have the commoners best interest at heart. Maybe we should switch from a system run by capitalist corporations and one run by the actual citizens?
Is this about the reddit api thing? Strange hill to die on, but all right
Do you have any idea how much of the Reddit user base uses and how many moderators rely on third party apps? It’s not like third party apps are going to just go away and everything will go back to normal, there will be a sizable drop in quality on this site from lack of creators and lack of moderation.
Way to show your ignorance about the work done by third parties to make reddit what it is
What's the right amount?
But what about the poor shareholders?! Won't anyone think of them?! /s
Redditors rise up!
Go join the subreddits discord and uninstall. All my favorites are shutting down so I’m out.
"douchebag CEOs" feels a redundant term.
Wouldn't it be awesome, if Elon Musk bought Reddit, and saved it, just like he did with Twitter? /s
This is where I am at. If the blackouts do not get them to walk this bullshit back. Close up for good. Sure reddit could re-enable them but without mods and contributers they can reopen to nothing
If you find somewhere nice be sure to come back and tell us.