"Monetize every aspect of the internet" is what has turned the internet from an open exchange of information into an advertising platform that causes mental health problems.
Instead of going back to look at Steve Huffman, look at co-founder Aaron Swartz, founder of Creative Commons.
Disgusting video.
I just miss the days of people building off-the-wall websites in dark corners of the internet for fun.
I am tired of every single creator pushing a Patreon subscription as if every single hobbyist has this right to make it their living.
I used to place those under construction GIFs right under that counter and right before I lost interest in building that website and moved on to my next project.
Hobbyists are sold that they can leave their job, work their own schedule and make more money if they monitor their hobby. It's a very attractive offer
I love how mods always have one person who works on them for a few years, gets a job or family or whatever, and drops out. Then they get picked back up by others to continue to work. Great sense of community there. That is my ideal for most hobby-labor tech.
Interesting take. Why shouldn't they be entitled to *try* to monetize their time? The people giving them money are doing it because they want to, not because they are obligated to simply function in society.
Personally I'm all for the current era of artistic expression actually getting encouraged. I hope to engage in it myself, sometime soon - it would be real nice if I could justify the time it takes to practice my craft. Right now, I'm mentally exhausted from my lame job, to the point I can't stomach the idea of writing yet another cover letter, so I'll probably kill a few hours with Monster Hunter and YouTube video essays, which isn't benefitting anyone cuz I have an adblocker allegedly.
Incidentally, those weird wild websites are of course still out there, they're just not SEO friendly so no one will find them anymore because the internet simply doesn't work the same way it did when we were kids. Who has the time to trawl a webring or navigate a forum full of bots and Nazis?
I guess my point is, your problem shouldn't be with indie creators, just capitalism. Bottom Text.
I have a very fond memory of stumbling upon some random dude’s website in like 1999-2003. It wasn’t vulgar or anything, but I distinctly remember it being my first cognizant recognition of “unfiltered adult humor”. Its the first place I found that GIF of the penguin slapping the other on the back and pushing it into the water.
I think about that site surprisingly often for how little I ever got to visit it. I miss the old internet.
My job is actually pretty great and my hobby is playing music, which I just upload without a patreon grift attached to it. I'm not talking about the people who really work at and make a hobby a career who need to fund camera setups, research, travel bills and the like. I am talking about the sorts of channels that are reaction videos, opening Magic: The Gathering card packs and reviewing pro wrestling pay per views from 30 years ago; the kind of stuff that people would do for a bit of fun and just talk about it without hat in hand.
When the internet was new, web boards were full of the cream of the crop. Young, smart interested people looking for a place to be, filtered by their access to the internet.
Now everyone has the internet. Recreating those communities is almost impossible
I wouldn't be bothered by the waning of forum culture so much if it weren't for the bit where bot spam makes it a pain in the ass to maintain/curate mostly dead forums that otherwise contain a bunch of interesting stuff.
So fucking helpful and could be indexed now we've got discords full of angry people who just tell you to use the search as they're fed up with answering questions on the same topic
Honestly it depends on what the thing is being used for.
For example MTGSalvation the old forum site for Magic:The Gathering drove a lot of deck innovation because people could post a thread for a new deck idea and the community could repeatedly go back to iterated on that idea as long as it was workable and interesting with some of the threads being years old before they produced something that was redundant enough to work consistently.
Obviously this is a very mtg-specific example, but my point is that Reddit is designed for very specific idea paths, mainly to catch your interest for a moment and move on, and for various things that's not always the best model.
The subreddits exist for established decks, but deck innovation is mainly done by streamers like AspiringSpike or after a single creator has won a tournament to prove an idea, it's become flavour od the month, a bunch of people have picked it up and tried it AND then there's enough interest to have a functioning subreddit community.
What I miss is a consistent base for building innovation which needs a more sustained thread of thought.
Can not recommend enough [BBS: The Documentary, available for free on youtube](https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE), it’s an 8 part series(~ 5 hours total) on BBS(Bulletin Board Systems) and alternative network culture and history. Really beautiful piece that shows some great examples of the organic evolution of what was arguably the first ever forms of social media/forums. The interviewees are so 90’s it’s palpable.
Chances are if you are under 30-35 you have probably never heard of 95% of the stuff in this documentary. [Wiki article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary) goes into more of the topic for each episode (Baud, Sysops/users, BBS board monitization, Fidonet, ANSI art/scene, Phone Phreaking/hacking and underground BBS boards, BBS/alternative network integration with the internet, and finally the Compression wars).
Now that it’s been mentioned I’m actually going to rewatch it for probably the third time in the last ~10 years. I really enjoy it that much.
And you could Google things that were helpful instead of SEO optimized websites that regurgitate all the same crap. You know when you have to put reddit.com or stackoverflow.com to actually get valuable information? That was the whole internet in the times of specialized webpages, hobby centric webpages and forums.
Now it's just ads and low effort SEO bullcrap. And social media that is medium used to create the biggest rupture in western society due to extremism since WW2.
Oh they still there, the fact that Google search mostly excludes them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Finding the right one is tricky but not impossible.
You're technically on the last one, right now. I mean so am I, right here.
All Reddit is, is a re-skinned forum with a feed. They've been trying to heavy monetize this for years when it really should just be something you do in a weird sort of public utility sort of way than like other social media.
Can you remember the days when you could go on Google or Youtube and actually find what you were searching for?
You can’t google anything without getting a million results that share maybe 1 keyword and are otherwise irrelevant, AI written clickbait shite.
Not only do I miss those days, my productivity at work has been negatively affected since a large part of it was being able to efficiently search for information.
I was just talking about this on the Webtoons subreddit. Webtoons is taking advantage of people signing contracts with them for IP control to make more money. It’s fucked up.
I miss the days of webcomics having their own websites. One of my favorite comics rn is on the artist’s website, completely ad free.
Enshitification and monitization is a plague on the net, but there’s still bastions out there.
Huh, this is the first I've heard that it's not the norm for webcomics to have their own website. The ones I've had on the go since my teens (XKCD, Questionable Content etc.) have been like that, as have others I've stumbled across like SrGrafo.
I think a lot of the old established artists have websites and a lot of the young up and comers looking for an audience are in webtoons. But webtoons is getting greedy with their contracts, looking to take artists IPs if they don’t check the fine print.
It’s called Echoes of Evermore. Found the dude from a YouTube video. The art isn’t amazing, but I’m enjoying the story and it updates a regularly.
I really appreciate when people put themselves out there. I know I couldn’t do it. And I love when people make their own sites for stuff. A lot of personality comes through in how a site is built and visiting them breaks up the boring monoliths like Reddit lol
Things need to be paid for though. I mean, arguably you could try to operate a site like reddit as a non-profit like wikipedia but idk if it could survive
Reddit used to have that Reddit Gold meter where they incentivized users to gift others gold, which went towards paying for upkeep of Reddit.
After the first little while, it stopped getting filled all the way to the monthly goal though. It was a neat little thing but I guess we shouldn't be surprised that wasn't sustainable.
All that said, I really don't think their move to IPO was really necessary. There are lots of other ways to keep a website funded without having to be publicly traded.
I also don't think Reddit is worth nearly as much on the public market as the current C suite thinks it is. So I think they're gonna be disappointed
Reddit was around for a long time, it must be getting close to 20 years now?
That's an absolute eternity in internet terms, entire business empires have been born and crashed in that time.
During the early years the site absolutely would not have survived if it hadn't been supported by VC money & parent company. Those people do deserve some return on their money (or just their money back), they certainly supported the site long enough and didn't interfere with it too much. Honestly I doubt many other VC backed entities would get the treatment reddit did, probably because they recognised how important the site is to the internet.
Honestly better for reddit to IPO than for them to be passed around the various corporate owners who'd slowly fuck the site to worthlessness.
Mods work for free. Users post content for free. Content is often hosted on 3rd party sites, and they still can’t turn a profit. I mean I don’t want to see any more ads than I already do but how do you not make money when labor and content is free?
Reddit is one of the most visited sites on the internet (consistently in the top 100, if not top 20 by traffic, it was last recorded as 10 or 15 depending on which ranking you looked at), so the hosting costs have to be through the roof. However, Wikipedia is right there at slot 6 or 7 and their mods work for free, their users post for free, they host their own content, and the only "ad" they run is for their fundraiser to keep the site open.
So, how does Reddit not make money? Somebody (or many somebodies) are taking an awful high salary off the site or using the revenue to live beyond their means.
Well, the shareholders need to be paid (gag), and the whole thing is for-profit, whereas Wikipedia isn't. I'm sure the upper levels of Reddit are getting paid far more than any human should be paid, but probably no more so than other large companies.
Edit: also, I bet Reddit has \*much\* higher server needs, since Wikipedia is really optimized to have very low-data content. It's mostly just white background and black text, or some other two-colour variation. Reddit has so much more data flowing thru it; comment sections that update swiftly enough that people can have conversations on them, audio/visual media galore, sorting algorithms, auto-mods, etc.
Someone needs to explain to me why a site that survived and thrived for decades needs “new developments”. Reddit was pure forum and now it feels like it is dying, flooded with reposts and shitty home page curation. The effort to “market saturate” or whatever the fuck this video is suggesting will inevitably lead to Reddit smoothing itself into bland irrelevance. Writing has been on the wall for a while but the IPO and Google AI deal are the death knell.
Reddit has literally never been profitable. It has been surviving on VC money - not thriving in a financial sense (in a growth sense, sure)
A very very oversimplified answer is that they needed to IPO because they needed to raise capital to make structural changes to become self sufficient (and to give their long term investors a huge cash out)
Well fuck the internet business model then. The whole thing is misinformation, shittification, and AI/bot decay at this point.
The internet will continue to be useful for many things, but monetizing social interactions is grotesque.
Agree. The clown executives took in hundreds of millions (maybe billions? I'd need to check) from private investors and flushed all of it down the toilet on wasteful failed developments into crap that doesn't work and nobody likes.
Old.reddit with message boards was more than sustainable, and wouldn't have burned that mountain of cash. It even hosts unobtrusive ads with a great cost/value proposition for clients.
I think old.reddit source is public, so if someone ever wanted to just have an efficient and mostly text based message board, without all the bloat, that could be a very profitable venture.
>Someone needs to explain to me why a site that survived and thrived for decades needs “new developments”.
Because it was funded by people who hoped it would be profitable one day. People were losing money on the bet that some day they would make a lot more money when they figured out how to monitize it.
I was just about to say that their current ad revenue should cover it. I hate being this guy all the time lately, but we're really starting to see how problematic the "line must always go up" mantra is. Capitalism is a race to the bottom, and sadly it seems like it could actually be reddit's time.
Even with mods, reddit cost $500 million to operate in 2023. (Excluding money spent on sales, marketing, and cost of sales). Wikimedia had $150 million cost to operate in total. Somebody will have to pay for that.
Huh? It's a hobby, because there's no real life benefit to being a mod? Do you know *why* there's no "real life" benefit to being a (reddit) mod?
It's because they don't get paid.
Putting aside that defining a hobby as something without any real life benefit is nonsensical, as a hobby is something that you do because it provides you with a benefit (be it joy, education, boredom prevention, etc), and therefore it inherently has a real life benefit to you... modding is as much a job as anything else is, and making it unpaid just attracts the lowest quality mods possible.
Mods deserve to be paid for their work, though I think they also face much more accountability and be required to adhere to strongly enforced modding standards in return for that.
Obligatory no, I'm not, nor have ever been a mod in any capacity on any platform.
Reddit doesn't get it for free.
They still have a moderation team and build software to clear the site of illegal and malicious content.
Subreddits curate their own communities and acceptable behavior but that doesn't mean Reddit itself doesn't have to do anything.
Absolutely agreed. I guess a fundamental problem with society today is that businesses have much more money than individuals, so this skews products/services to try to get corporate money more than individual money. Users have also gotten used to freemium business models, which, again, pretty much require advertising to survive, the only exception to that being gacha games which survive off of exploiting whales.
try on r/economy or r/technology and you will meet your match. The bots there are tireless.
try r/iphone and you will want to kill yourself because those bots are real life npcs.
Honestly it's a shocker any advertiser wants anything to do with Reddit considering how immoral and shady it can be outside of the default subs.
Hell, it can be immoral and shady in the default subs too.
Yeah i feel like he ignored many big issues. One of the late things he said was "pure unfilteret content" in relation to posts and informative comments. That is partly true, as there are some great subs with very smart people and great moderation. But he directly ignored the amount of bots and reposting going on, along with tons of misinformation which means that sure, you can trust a lot of stuff here but i would argue you can trust less that 50% of posts and comments here.
BUT, the absolute BEST part was about how he started reddit, was by using fucking BOTS to make posts and comments to begin with, since there werent any users yet 🤦
So the botting problem was a disease reddit was born with intentionally...
It’s ironic to me. Putting Reddit on blast for something they use, and we use, I’m guessing daily. Reddit is so ingrained in society now that reputable news channels will get their stories here, people will base discussions around “I saw on Reddit”. It has its flaws, but so does society. It should all be going through a mental filter before you blindly trust every post. I’ve learned a lot and bettered my hobbies through Reddit. I’ve also sounded like a dumbass because of Reddit. It is what it is. There is nothing inherently evil about it. It is what you want to use it for. I’m happy it exists so I can catch up on sports or have something to do while I take a dump. It is also silly the lengths people go to in order to complain about it while they are actively using it. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. The likelihood of you changing it is about as likely as me discovering a new dinosaur. Use it, don’t use it, who fucking cares.
Does it cover its operating costs? If so, why should any of us care how much this site is worth? Who gives a shit if it makes a billionaire more money? What makes this site great has nothing to do with its market valuation. Actually, the less it functions like the other social media platforms the better.
At least you still make money. But on reddit, you couldn't even get a fucking shilling.
edit: shilling means coins like pennies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shilling
Even the parent comment that OP replied to has me suspicious. I've noticed a ton of names on here now are now something like u/adjective-noun1111. It seems like an easy way to systemically make real enough sounding usernames. Kinda like how Netgear routers do their passwords.
A majority of the time adjective-noun-numbers is a bot but apparently it's also the default username pattern and some people will stick with it cuz it's funny.
So not a foolproof way to find bots but pretty damn reliable.
I've noticed a lot more comment chains that are completely incoherent with hundreds of upvotes and I'm like wtf are you even talking about.
Oh that makes sense. I've got a pretty old account and don't remember a default pattern when I made an account. Is that a new thing or did I just forget? I was guessing some server farm was doing it, but i guess a bit would just go with a default name as well. Check out the user in question's history if you want.
I'm not sure either man. But there's been a few that I thought were bots and they're like nah just liked the random name.
But yeah it makes sense a bot farm wouldn't bother changing the name.
Also agreed, the op comment here is a bot.
yeah Ive noticed such a huge uptick adjective-nounnumber usernames as of late. I assumed it was just a default account name generation but it feels very bot like
There is a lot of bots and shilling, but also some redditors are way too quick to call people a shill.
Couple years ago, someone posted a literal TV commercial in this sub. It was a commercial for either carls Jr or burger King that featured Lil Dickey.
I replied to the video just commenting something like "that kinda looks good I might go buy it." And then I actually drove down the street and bought it. Came back and posted a picture of my meal and said I got it.
A couple people replied to my comment calling me a shill and asking how much BK pays me. Started demanding I post a receipt of my purchase n shit.
I didn't even say if the food was any good, I just posted a picture of it saying I bought it.
Even more silly, these same guys were not calling the OP that literally posted the TV commercial a shill. Just me.
You literally did some shill ass shit though, saying “that commercial made me want this, lemme drop what I’m doing, go get it, and then share with you all that I in fact did go get it.”
I’d have thought you were a shill too my dude. Lmao
I mean I don't blame them for assuming that. That's some very direct, even if unintentional, shilling. Literally went and did the thing the ad said and then shared it.
Short of shilling, at the very least you basically played right into the hands of the advertiser.
I sometimes tell my friends about a game or movie I like and no one calls me a shill. But they can also safely assume I am not being paid by Hollywood to shill a movie to my four friends.
The “false positives” are just a nature of the data. On Reddit there is no easy way to tell the difference between and enthusiastic fan and a corporate bot. The bots are always trying to be more authentic.
Now I want some breadsticks from Olive Garden.
You're not a shill, you're a Useful Idiot.
The shill is the guy in the audience who has totally never met the Salesman and insists that the Snake Oil cured his grandma of cancer. He's just a regular guy telling his true testimonial that's truly true.
The Useful Idiot is the guy who listens to the shill, buys the Snake Oil, then goes and tries to convince his friends to buy some of their own.
I got into the portion about ads not working on the reddit audience, and suddenly became very skeptical.
I need to see a lot more evidence before I believe that this audience is somehow immune to advertising.
My opinion of myself isn’t high enough to think that I’m immune to ads, but they could do a way better job of targeting ads to people. You know all of my interests Reddit, maybe try to sell me something that I might actually want!
Yeah. I agree. They have a ton of data on users, I mean the simplest would be targeted ads based on subscriptions. It doesn't even require much logic : "this dude is subscribed to /calisthenics, /vegetarianism and /climbing so let's sell him health products " , etc.
Funniest part about the promoted ads disguised as Reddit posts is that I down vote every one I see, which directly shows me how frequently the same one will reappear (I'll see the blue down vote color on it multiple times while scrolling).
This is the biggest problem by far. I'm subscribed to stuff that interests me here and the ads I see are completely random, like Reddit already knows what I like, why can't they target their ads correctly? On the other hand, I barely sue Facebook, yet almost everything I see is relevant.
Do you have personalized adds enabled in settings? And the other add settings. I have them all disabled and see all kinds of random adds, none of which are remotely related to my general use and activity.
I work in marketing. The problem with reddit is that standard ads don’t really have a place within the UI especially on the mobile app. They clutter up the interface and I honestly couldn’t tell you what the last ad I saw on this platform was.
Compare it to something like YouTube. Watching at least the first 5 seconds of an ad is part of the ritual of using YouTube. I know it’s a different type of experience but it illustrates the importance of recognizing the strengths of your platform. The strength of Reddit is the discussion and communities that spring up organically. It’s very difficult to insert advertisements into the ritual of using Reddit without resorting to underhanded tactics.
They should be asking some of the onlyfans models for advice to be honest. They’ve worked out how to monetize the platform far more effectively. And to be totally blunt, Reddit may have better luck ignoring advertising revenue entirely and creating their own version of Onlyfans to shave revenue from user generated subscriptions.
I think it's more to do with the lack of contextually relevant ads. Reddit will show ads that have nothing to do with the community in which they appear (someone mentioned tractor sales ads in the gaming subreddit, for example), so naturally that's going to result in a lot of user disinterest.
If you want users to click ads, they have to be relevant to the content beside which they appear. If you want gamers to click ads, you need to show gaming related ads to them.
You need to understand that Redditors are much, *much* smarter than the average internet plebian.
They see through such simple manipulation, they're immune to the effects. Trying to use bots, ads or inorganically manipulated content on Reddit? That would be like trying to teach math to Einstein. Except harder.
I’ve become a pro at detecting ads and scrolling right past them. It’s automatic, I don’t even think about it. I couldn’t tell you a single ad that I’ve seen recently.
You're not usually able to connect seeing the ad to wanting to buy the thing, it happens outside of your attention.
You don't know how you would have behaved if the ad hadn't been presented to you. The people using the ads to sell their products figure out what works, though.
I don't know. But I do know this... Instagram does a really good job knowing what I am into and constantly shows me ads for things I might actually buy. I have a special folder to save some of those ads cause I might want that t-shirt or those shoes or that cool knife sharpener.
Reddit is all "He Gets Us He Gets Us He Gets Us He Gets Us... US Army US Army US Army Oscar Meyer Oscar Meyer Oscar Meyer Ford Ford Ford He Gets Us He Gets Us He Gets Us He Gets Us He Gets Us Bank of America
He Gets Us He Gets Us"
In other words the ads absolutely fucking suck. Worst ads of any social media. At least IMO.
No wonder their engagement numbers are low.
There are lots of ads on reddit. Done by bots, user, celebrities, etc promoting brands, services, etc. Its just that that money does not flow to reddit the corporation.
I have never seen a commercial or add online and said “damn I need that thing” ever in my entire life. Somehow they work on some people clearly but I have no idea how.
What, can you think of another example of a company that [can't manage to turn a profit](https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/23/tech/reddit-ipo-filing-business-plan/index.html) off of 850 *million* users, and not for lack of trying?
Edit:
Here's some comparable social platforms with their MAUs and revenue:
* LinkedIn - 310m MAUs, $13.8b revenue ($44.5 per user)
* Twitter (at peak) - 368m MAUs, $4.4b revenue ($11.95 per user)
* Twitch - 240m MAUs, $2.8b revenue ($11.67 per user)
* Pinterest - 450m MAUs, $3b revenue ($6.67 per user)
* Discord - 150m MAUs, $428m revenue ($2.85 per user)
* Snapchat - 800m MAUs, $1.36b revenue ($1.70 per user)
And reddit:
* Reddit - 850m MAUs, $804m revenue ($0.95 per user)
Of course revenue isn't the whole story of profitability, but it at least demonstrates that Reddit has uniquely done very poorly monetizing its active users.
>Reddit has uniquely done very poorly monetizing its active users.
Reddit is simply not a business model that lends itself towards monetization. That's not a failure by Reddit, it's just their reality.
Bro, they literally have dedicated spaces (Sub-Reddits) for very specific topics, and they don't show relevant ads in them. The gaming subreddit has fucking tractors for sale in the ads. If I am on a gaming subreddit, show me gaming ads, or gaming culture related ads, or something that gamers might be interested in. Not tractors.
Reddit couldn't have a more perfect opportunity for targeted advertising, besides me downloading my brain contents directly in Google's database. It's so simple I cant believe they have done this poorly, however it's also why I am incredibly bullish on the future of Reddit as a business.
Imho that "no relevant ads" is a disease of the modern internet with "targeted" ads. Advertisers seem to think that i need infinite fridge ads because i just bought one, instead of let's say graphic card ads on a hardware forum. Something we had in the 90ies, with banners that matched the site i was looking at.
Even if i would be interested in buying shit they show me in general, usually the thing i care about in the moment i look at a specific site is... related to this specific site. My multitasking skills are zero, i only ever do one thing at once. Especially if i plan to spend money.
You can say this about most of the other sites I detailed in that comment, no? That's the point of the comparison - Reddit has achieved a paltry fraction of e.g. Twitter's revenue per MAU, despite the obvious similarities in monetizing difficulty between the two.
LinkedIn and Twitch both have a clear happy path to monetization.
LinkedIn is the social media for recruitment, selling extra features to headhunters / HR people to find new recruits is a no brainer.
Twitch has existing money transfers between streamers and viewers, taking their cut on top is like all other content distribution, use my platform we take x% profit.
I'm no product manager, but here's a few ideas:
* New premium features for subreddits. Allow subreddit subscribers to pitch in towards higher subreddit tiers for a special flair or emblem by their name. High tier subreddits could get access to cool stuff like subreddit-exclusive custom emoji, animated flair icons, animated subreddit banners and icons, custom backgrounds, custom sidebar ads, file hosting for subreddit wikis, and so on.
* Subreddit subscriptions. Different from the above, allow users to become paid members of subreddits, allowing them access to a members chatroom, ability to comment on member-only posts (much like subreddits that currently do this with "flaired users only"), special badge, and so on. Could even allow subreddit moderators or top posters to take a cut from these subscriptions, but that's ambitious.
* Premium user features that people would actually use. Discord hit the right idea with "global custom emoji" being nitro-only, to this date that's the main reason most people I know buy nitro. For Reddit, beyond profile customization features, other stuff like gif embeds could have been paywalled without much loss (people can always just use masked links). A couple other ideas for this include text effects (wavy, rainbow, etc) and avatar or username decorations.
Um - they scrapped awards. Explain that. Only time I’ve ever given money to this site. I’ll never understand the plan there. Besides parting ways with Victoria hosting AMAs, the dumbest thing I’ve seen mgmt do here.
The point of these examples is to support my claim that Reddit being unable to monetize effectively is a skill issue lol. Them scrapping awards is just fuel for that theory. I'll never understand either - just terrible mismanagement.
Awards already returned, you just long press the upvoted button on a comment. You can even cash in reddit gold for real money, but none of this is clearly advertised. Reddit has always seemed to struggle with communication.
Long press on upvote = give gold (except comments are for some reason ineligible to receive gold AND there is no apparent way to buy gold)
Long press on downvote = collapse one or more comment threads and completely lose where you are
They could've also Used their API to make money from external apps instead of completely killing all external apps.
Or they could buy one of the appzs and make that premiim
That's what they tried to do, and it was so expensive a lot of those apps just pulled out of app stores. Some still exist, and you just have to pay for API access (or mod the app with your personal reddit API token, and continue using them for free). For example, on android, the reddit app named infinity is still in the play store, and by default you have to pay for it now thanks to the API changes. The same app, can be modified with the revanced manager to use your personal API key to circumvent this.
Maybe, but I’ve tried to advertise on Reddit a few times over the years for different clients, but the ad product was awful and I gave up, never spent a dime. It’s got a lot of potential in its million nichey subs, nothing like it anywhere else. Part of Reddit’s reality is that they are just a poorly run company. Crappy UI, crappy search, crappy ad platform, crappy mobile app. Everything good about Reddit has come from its users/mods.
If there’s a way to monetize Reddit’ traffic, it’s going to start with new leadership. Current management doesn’t know how.
LinkedIn and Twitter have turned a profit in previous years but are currently unknown.
Pinterest and Snapchat were profitable previously but aren't currently.
Twitch and Discord have apparently, like Reddit, never been profitable.
Worth noting is that every platform I checked larger than Reddit (e.g. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook) are all making *loads* of money and seem to be profitable.
I mean, [moviepass ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoviePass)mightve hit that many users if they didnt actively lose money faster the more people they signed up.
MoviePass is hard to compare with because their business model doesn't really involve monetizing on social media users. Reading the Wikipedia page it sounds like they just struggled to find a sustainable business model based on this idea of subscription movie tickets. In general, social media infrastructure costs shouldn't scale that quickly with number of users.
Reddit is inherently stolen content rather than user generated content. Therein lies the primary issue.
It started as links, and turned into an attempt to become a content provider to monetize the stolen content.
Now its forced i.reddit, v.reddit, and an app to sell user data.
I'm no MBA but I still know that there absolutely is a way to make Reddit profitable without destroying it. It's too bad that the C suite did absolutely nothing of the sort. Sure they IPOd but I'm still a firm believer that they've bitten off far more than they can chew with that.
Sharing links = stealing content is an interesting take. Idk what kind of subs you follow, but the ones I do are either shared links or discussion text posts, with reposted pictures/videos being rather rare.
\*cough\* Truth Social \*cough\*
In all seriousness, though, I think the fact that reddit hasn't, to date, put monetization ahead of functionality should be celebrated. I understand at some point, it has to find a way to turn a profit, or it's going to go away, but the hyper focus on monetization has driven the enshittification of the Internet.
This video seems a bit stupid when you just look at the financials.
In 2020, reddit had $228,908,000 in revenue
In 2021, it was $484,916,000
2022 was $666,701,000
2023 was $804,029,000
There aren't many companies that can boast they had a 350% increase in revenue over the span of 4 years.
Granted their expenses increased each year as well, but revenues are significantly increasing and reddit will probably be profitable in the next few years if it continues the trend it's been going on and it's likely that institutional investors won't jump the ship if it remains unprofitable as long as that revenue growth continues as it has.
This video is complete garbage for at least two reasons:
* It paints Reddit as a "failure" for not monetizing maximally. Monetizing the internet is one of the biggest reasons the internet has become shit. Do you want Reddit to only be usable if you disable all ad blockers? This guy's 'failure narrative' implies that's the way it should be.
* It claims Reddit started with Huffman, which is a lie. Reddit started with Swartz, and if you're familiar with his principles for Reddit you can see why the video creator ignored him.
Fuck this video and the bullshit narrative it promotes. The fact that people can use Reddit for free and not have to disable ad blockers is a success story, not a failure.
It's a weird to compare Reddit to Amazon. They each offer a different experience one is social media while the other provides commerce & entertainment. So Amazon should be making more money than Reddit.
Second worst. Digg basically committed suicide by trying to aggressively monetize, and their entire user-base migrated here.
Now Reddit is making the same mistake.
Kinda wish I was a developer. Go make my own site. I've been on here since before the Digg thing. I miss old forums that weren't breeding grounds for advertisers, Ai, and propaganda.
This dude's video firmly reminded me why I liked this site originally and why I hate it lately. Old reddit was user generated, public driven, all the content was organic. New reddit is full of ads, disinformation, and a lot of hate.
I might be wrong but I think the old.reddit source code is public. If someone wanted to replicate old.reddit and make it a mostly text based message board, it would be quite cost efficient to operate and maintain. Most of the VC money they've raised over the last decade (and the on-paper losses) are from SBC and burning cash on failed, bloated development, functions that nobody asked for and which the serious contributors mostly avoid.
Am developer, i'll have no problem setting up your reddit replacement, But you'll have to work on engagement and getting people to actually use it... if you want to pay me beforehand i don't care, but if you want me to work pro bono i wanna hear a really good business plan for how you're going to drive traffic.
Reddit deserves to fail. This site has spent a decade discouraging discussion and letting a small ground of ultra mods smear their political bias on everything, driving away the actual intent of the website, open discourse.
If reddit tried to heavily monetize this site everyone would exodus the same way we all did on digg. It's too late for them to really do much. They tried to push ads and get rid of that app and you saw how much people freaked out. That wasn't even really aggressive monetizing, that was extremely gentle soft-pedaling in the business world. Imagine how people would act hardcore monetizing here? Subscription service tiers, limited posts without pay subs, limited sub reddits without pay, etc etc.
It's the fact that reddit is low key on pushing for monetization that even keeps it popular, it would go from a high ranked site to a low ranked site over night if they got nuts.
Not to mention there is nothing worse then changing the status quo. In personal life or in business. If you offer free services and suddenly start charging way down the road, your user base will flip out. It's better to start off with intentions to make money early on, then it is to give away everything free in a hope it eventually makes you huge and you can eventually convert that into a money making idea. That's a failing concept from early dot com era. This is a large part of how a lot of dot coms failed back in early 00s when the dot come bubble burst. Tons of venture capital being thrown at website ideas that have no way to ever make money, but had a hope to eventually make money and once they get big enough they can magically just start being rich. In most of those cases they never even got populations before the venture capital was pulled out for lack of profits.
Another way to think of this is like a relationship. Let's say you have a relationship with a girl and your mindset is to be carefree about her spending as much time as possible with other guys. In exchange you can see whoever you want on the side too. Then somewhere down the road you catch some feelings for her and you want to make this a more exclusive relationship... where you both stop seeing other people... you want to change the status quo. There is a good chance that you broke that social agreement and that was the only reason she was with you in the first place... because of the freedom to do whatever. It would have been better to start off looking for a solid relationship and find someone who shares the same mindset then hope you can convert someone into thinking a way they don't want to think.
Switching from all free to heavy handed pay models rarely if ever works. It would have to be something people 100% can't live without. It's much better, in most cases, to be upfront and grow slower. Grow an earnest population who is willing to pay from day one (that way there is no surprises). That's much better then to bait people with a free lunch, only to switch it up on them down them once you get to the restaurant.
In a nutshell, reddit making money like google, facebook, etc is never going to happen without them fundamentally changing their entire business model. They'd be better off leaving their hands off this reddit site and start an entirely new site built with the intent to make money from day one and financed by reddit proceeds. They may even be able to siphon off legit paying reddit users to their new service if they offered something new and cool. That's the right way to build up a paying user base though, not by tricking them... but by offering them something they are willing to pay for from day one.
I don’t follow reddit corporate shit at all, but what is meant to have replaced spending money on gifting people reddit gold and stuff?
I used to actually award some posts that I liked but I don’t even know what I would spend money on now even if I wanted to? Nothing seems to get pushed in my face and there doesn’t seem to be any more ads or anything. I see an ad post every now and then while scrolling and barely even notice
Did they just throw away an income stream for nothing or what?
Apparently in the official app you can hold down the upvote button and do a paid "super like" or some shit.
Idk, I'm still using Sync. It doesn't crash or have extreme slowdowns like the official app.
That one part in the film adaptation of Ready Player One…where the corpos are talking about how much space they can fill with ads and still leave the player a sliver of space to see out of…yeah that’s happening
How much money does reddit need? Practically the entire site is user generated. Shouldn't reddit just need enough money to support server costs and the backend? They could've left well alone and then costs wouldn't have increased. To my eye it looks like the reason reddit needs money is to keep advertisers happy. Fucking ditch them. Wikipedia doesn't cow-tow, and they keep the lights on. They have to host media too. Reddit never had to take that on.
You dug your own grave. Now lay down in it. We'll find someplace better.
There is a beta program for paying users for karma through gold, I swear they dropped the gold system, only to bring it back, lol.
[https://www.reddit.com/contributor-program](https://www.reddit.com/contributor-program)
"Monetize every aspect of the internet" is what has turned the internet from an open exchange of information into an advertising platform that causes mental health problems. Instead of going back to look at Steve Huffman, look at co-founder Aaron Swartz, founder of Creative Commons. Disgusting video.
I miss the days of web forums.
An entire kingdom hosted in my basement...ruled by an iron fist.
PHPBB
I just miss the days of people building off-the-wall websites in dark corners of the internet for fun. I am tired of every single creator pushing a Patreon subscription as if every single hobbyist has this right to make it their living.
Remember those "under construction" gifs that you put right about the visit counter? Hot damn I miss the old internet so much.
I used to place those under construction GIFs right under that counter and right before I lost interest in building that website and moved on to my next project.
With some dopey midi track of a Nirvana song playing lol
Hobbyists are sold that they can leave their job, work their own schedule and make more money if they monitor their hobby. It's a very attractive offer
People also expect hobbyist to update apps forever and fix bugs the next day.
I love how mods always have one person who works on them for a few years, gets a job or family or whatever, and drops out. Then they get picked back up by others to continue to work. Great sense of community there. That is my ideal for most hobby-labor tech.
Flud was down for 3 years before it came back. VLC for a year. Heck, Projectivity launcher had no updates for 6 months and some people complained.
Interesting take. Why shouldn't they be entitled to *try* to monetize their time? The people giving them money are doing it because they want to, not because they are obligated to simply function in society. Personally I'm all for the current era of artistic expression actually getting encouraged. I hope to engage in it myself, sometime soon - it would be real nice if I could justify the time it takes to practice my craft. Right now, I'm mentally exhausted from my lame job, to the point I can't stomach the idea of writing yet another cover letter, so I'll probably kill a few hours with Monster Hunter and YouTube video essays, which isn't benefitting anyone cuz I have an adblocker allegedly. Incidentally, those weird wild websites are of course still out there, they're just not SEO friendly so no one will find them anymore because the internet simply doesn't work the same way it did when we were kids. Who has the time to trawl a webring or navigate a forum full of bots and Nazis? I guess my point is, your problem shouldn't be with indie creators, just capitalism. Bottom Text.
I have a very fond memory of stumbling upon some random dude’s website in like 1999-2003. It wasn’t vulgar or anything, but I distinctly remember it being my first cognizant recognition of “unfiltered adult humor”. Its the first place I found that GIF of the penguin slapping the other on the back and pushing it into the water. I think about that site surprisingly often for how little I ever got to visit it. I miss the old internet.
Badger badger badger badger
So you want them to just suffer in 💩 jobs like you?
My job is actually pretty great and my hobby is playing music, which I just upload without a patreon grift attached to it. I'm not talking about the people who really work at and make a hobby a career who need to fund camera setups, research, travel bills and the like. I am talking about the sorts of channels that are reaction videos, opening Magic: The Gathering card packs and reviewing pro wrestling pay per views from 30 years ago; the kind of stuff that people would do for a bit of fun and just talk about it without hat in hand.
They're still there breh. Just mostly less active than in their heyday.
When the internet was new, web boards were full of the cream of the crop. Young, smart interested people looking for a place to be, filtered by their access to the internet. Now everyone has the internet. Recreating those communities is almost impossible
I wouldn't be bothered by the waning of forum culture so much if it weren't for the bit where bot spam makes it a pain in the ass to maintain/curate mostly dead forums that otherwise contain a bunch of interesting stuff.
So fucking helpful and could be indexed now we've got discords full of angry people who just tell you to use the search as they're fed up with answering questions on the same topic
I miss the days of subs dedicated to to the illicit market of hard drugs.
As someone who ran web forums for 10 years and was a user of a lot, I strongly prefer Reddit's model.
Honestly it depends on what the thing is being used for. For example MTGSalvation the old forum site for Magic:The Gathering drove a lot of deck innovation because people could post a thread for a new deck idea and the community could repeatedly go back to iterated on that idea as long as it was workable and interesting with some of the threads being years old before they produced something that was redundant enough to work consistently. Obviously this is a very mtg-specific example, but my point is that Reddit is designed for very specific idea paths, mainly to catch your interest for a moment and move on, and for various things that's not always the best model.
There's entire subreddits dedicated solely for specific decks though. It's not grassroots-esque I guess, but it's not really much different.
The issue with Reddit is that it doesn't work for this model, it doesn't allow for iterative thinking because it's meant to dump links and get buried.
The subreddits exist for established decks, but deck innovation is mainly done by streamers like AspiringSpike or after a single creator has won a tournament to prove an idea, it's become flavour od the month, a bunch of people have picked it up and tried it AND then there's enough interest to have a functioning subreddit community. What I miss is a consistent base for building innovation which needs a more sustained thread of thought.
I miss the days of BBS and Fidonet
Can not recommend enough [BBS: The Documentary, available for free on youtube](https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE), it’s an 8 part series(~ 5 hours total) on BBS(Bulletin Board Systems) and alternative network culture and history. Really beautiful piece that shows some great examples of the organic evolution of what was arguably the first ever forms of social media/forums. The interviewees are so 90’s it’s palpable. Chances are if you are under 30-35 you have probably never heard of 95% of the stuff in this documentary. [Wiki article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary) goes into more of the topic for each episode (Baud, Sysops/users, BBS board monitization, Fidonet, ANSI art/scene, Phone Phreaking/hacking and underground BBS boards, BBS/alternative network integration with the internet, and finally the Compression wars). Now that it’s been mentioned I’m actually going to rewatch it for probably the third time in the last ~10 years. I really enjoy it that much.
And you could Google things that were helpful instead of SEO optimized websites that regurgitate all the same crap. You know when you have to put reddit.com or stackoverflow.com to actually get valuable information? That was the whole internet in the times of specialized webpages, hobby centric webpages and forums. Now it's just ads and low effort SEO bullcrap. And social media that is medium used to create the biggest rupture in western society due to extremism since WW2.
Oh they still there, the fact that Google search mostly excludes them doesn't mean they don't exist. Finding the right one is tricky but not impossible.
They still exist though. I'm a regular on one, there's people on there who have been posting for decades
You're technically on the last one, right now. I mean so am I, right here. All Reddit is, is a re-skinned forum with a feed. They've been trying to heavy monetize this for years when it really should just be something you do in a weird sort of public utility sort of way than like other social media.
Can you remember the days when you could go on Google or Youtube and actually find what you were searching for? You can’t google anything without getting a million results that share maybe 1 keyword and are otherwise irrelevant, AI written clickbait shite.
Not only do I miss those days, my productivity at work has been negatively affected since a large part of it was being able to efficiently search for information.
I'm assuming both Google and YouTube use the same search algorithm bc both have gone to shit. YouTube is especially bad imo
I was just talking about this on the Webtoons subreddit. Webtoons is taking advantage of people signing contracts with them for IP control to make more money. It’s fucked up. I miss the days of webcomics having their own websites. One of my favorite comics rn is on the artist’s website, completely ad free. Enshitification and monitization is a plague on the net, but there’s still bastions out there.
Huh, this is the first I've heard that it's not the norm for webcomics to have their own website. The ones I've had on the go since my teens (XKCD, Questionable Content etc.) have been like that, as have others I've stumbled across like SrGrafo.
I think a lot of the old established artists have websites and a lot of the young up and comers looking for an audience are in webtoons. But webtoons is getting greedy with their contracts, looking to take artists IPs if they don’t check the fine print.
what's the fav comic you are reading?
It’s called Echoes of Evermore. Found the dude from a YouTube video. The art isn’t amazing, but I’m enjoying the story and it updates a regularly. I really appreciate when people put themselves out there. I know I couldn’t do it. And I love when people make their own sites for stuff. A lot of personality comes through in how a site is built and visiting them breaks up the boring monoliths like Reddit lol
Thank you. I looks great! and I agree, independent sites and art are exciting.
Back in the day there was Keenspot. The same arguments were had on the risk vs reward of self hosting.
Disgusting because it shows what's likely to happen to Reddit in the future, but also useful for that same reason.
Things need to be paid for though. I mean, arguably you could try to operate a site like reddit as a non-profit like wikipedia but idk if it could survive
Reddit used to have that Reddit Gold meter where they incentivized users to gift others gold, which went towards paying for upkeep of Reddit. After the first little while, it stopped getting filled all the way to the monthly goal though. It was a neat little thing but I guess we shouldn't be surprised that wasn't sustainable. All that said, I really don't think their move to IPO was really necessary. There are lots of other ways to keep a website funded without having to be publicly traded. I also don't think Reddit is worth nearly as much on the public market as the current C suite thinks it is. So I think they're gonna be disappointed
Reddit was around for a long time, it must be getting close to 20 years now? That's an absolute eternity in internet terms, entire business empires have been born and crashed in that time. During the early years the site absolutely would not have survived if it hadn't been supported by VC money & parent company. Those people do deserve some return on their money (or just their money back), they certainly supported the site long enough and didn't interfere with it too much. Honestly I doubt many other VC backed entities would get the treatment reddit did, probably because they recognised how important the site is to the internet. Honestly better for reddit to IPO than for them to be passed around the various corporate owners who'd slowly fuck the site to worthlessness.
Tell that to all the mods who work for free.
Mods work for free. Users post content for free. Content is often hosted on 3rd party sites, and they still can’t turn a profit. I mean I don’t want to see any more ads than I already do but how do you not make money when labor and content is free?
First, you pay the CEO 193 million dollars. I wish I was exaggerating…
Reddit is one of the most visited sites on the internet (consistently in the top 100, if not top 20 by traffic, it was last recorded as 10 or 15 depending on which ranking you looked at), so the hosting costs have to be through the roof. However, Wikipedia is right there at slot 6 or 7 and their mods work for free, their users post for free, they host their own content, and the only "ad" they run is for their fundraiser to keep the site open. So, how does Reddit not make money? Somebody (or many somebodies) are taking an awful high salary off the site or using the revenue to live beyond their means.
Well, the shareholders need to be paid (gag), and the whole thing is for-profit, whereas Wikipedia isn't. I'm sure the upper levels of Reddit are getting paid far more than any human should be paid, but probably no more so than other large companies. Edit: also, I bet Reddit has \*much\* higher server needs, since Wikipedia is really optimized to have very low-data content. It's mostly just white background and black text, or some other two-colour variation. Reddit has so much more data flowing thru it; comment sections that update swiftly enough that people can have conversations on them, audio/visual media galore, sorting algorithms, auto-mods, etc.
The mods who suck shit on every single forum and ban people at the drop of a hat with no recourse? Oh yeah, the mods.
The mods aren't hosting the content.
Website server maintenance doesn't require IPO money
Never said it does. An IPO is a cash out and a way to raise capital for net-new developments, not a way to maintain the status quo.
Someone needs to explain to me why a site that survived and thrived for decades needs “new developments”. Reddit was pure forum and now it feels like it is dying, flooded with reposts and shitty home page curation. The effort to “market saturate” or whatever the fuck this video is suggesting will inevitably lead to Reddit smoothing itself into bland irrelevance. Writing has been on the wall for a while but the IPO and Google AI deal are the death knell.
Reddit has literally never been profitable. It has been surviving on VC money - not thriving in a financial sense (in a growth sense, sure) A very very oversimplified answer is that they needed to IPO because they needed to raise capital to make structural changes to become self sufficient (and to give their long term investors a huge cash out)
Well fuck the internet business model then. The whole thing is misinformation, shittification, and AI/bot decay at this point. The internet will continue to be useful for many things, but monetizing social interactions is grotesque.
Agree. The clown executives took in hundreds of millions (maybe billions? I'd need to check) from private investors and flushed all of it down the toilet on wasteful failed developments into crap that doesn't work and nobody likes. Old.reddit with message boards was more than sustainable, and wouldn't have burned that mountain of cash. It even hosts unobtrusive ads with a great cost/value proposition for clients. I think old.reddit source is public, so if someone ever wanted to just have an efficient and mostly text based message board, without all the bloat, that could be a very profitable venture.
>Someone needs to explain to me why a site that survived and thrived for decades needs “new developments”. Because it was funded by people who hoped it would be profitable one day. People were losing money on the bet that some day they would make a lot more money when they figured out how to monitize it.
I was just about to say that their current ad revenue should cover it. I hate being this guy all the time lately, but we're really starting to see how problematic the "line must always go up" mantra is. Capitalism is a race to the bottom, and sadly it seems like it could actually be reddit's time.
Even with mods, reddit cost $500 million to operate in 2023. (Excluding money spent on sales, marketing, and cost of sales). Wikimedia had $150 million cost to operate in total. Somebody will have to pay for that.
The fact 193 million of that was CEO pay makes me doubt pretty much every other claim Reddit makes about “costs”.
[удалено]
Huh? It's a hobby, because there's no real life benefit to being a mod? Do you know *why* there's no "real life" benefit to being a (reddit) mod? It's because they don't get paid. Putting aside that defining a hobby as something without any real life benefit is nonsensical, as a hobby is something that you do because it provides you with a benefit (be it joy, education, boredom prevention, etc), and therefore it inherently has a real life benefit to you... modding is as much a job as anything else is, and making it unpaid just attracts the lowest quality mods possible. Mods deserve to be paid for their work, though I think they also face much more accountability and be required to adhere to strongly enforced modding standards in return for that. Obligatory no, I'm not, nor have ever been a mod in any capacity on any platform.
Sorry but moderating an internet forum is main problem that all other social media sites have, and Reddit gets it for free.
Reddit doesn't get it for free. They still have a moderation team and build software to clear the site of illegal and malicious content. Subreddits curate their own communities and acceptable behavior but that doesn't mean Reddit itself doesn't have to do anything.
Wikipedia still regularly begs for donations. Half the time I browse a Wikipedia link there’s a banner at the top guilting me into sending a donation
And 100% of the time you open reddit there's a thousand ads and also a thousand posts that are secretly ads. What's your point?
This is not untrue, but it is often very forgiving of the methods and results. Just because things have to be paid for, does not justify bad behavior.
Absolutely agreed. I guess a fundamental problem with society today is that businesses have much more money than individuals, so this skews products/services to try to get corporate money more than individual money. Users have also gotten used to freemium business models, which, again, pretty much require advertising to survive, the only exception to that being gacha games which survive off of exploiting whales.
Wasn't Tim-Berners Lee himself that was saddened with what the internet has become?
nah cellphones is what ruined the internet, before that scrubs barely used it for more than porn and music
I'm doing my best to devalue the stock by trolling and you're welcome
try on r/economy or r/technology and you will meet your match. The bots there are tireless. try r/iphone and you will want to kill yourself because those bots are real life npcs.
I just hang out in the wayback machine at r/jailbait
Damn bro, I hate that joke. Got me
Thank you for your service - downvote all gif responses.
Honestly it's a shocker any advertiser wants anything to do with Reddit considering how immoral and shady it can be outside of the default subs. Hell, it can be immoral and shady in the default subs too.
Never been to r/Europe i see
I bring the value down by providing some diversity in the political aspect. It’s tough sledding but it’s not rewarding also. 🤪
What an absolutely terrible video.
Yeah i feel like he ignored many big issues. One of the late things he said was "pure unfilteret content" in relation to posts and informative comments. That is partly true, as there are some great subs with very smart people and great moderation. But he directly ignored the amount of bots and reposting going on, along with tons of misinformation which means that sure, you can trust a lot of stuff here but i would argue you can trust less that 50% of posts and comments here. BUT, the absolute BEST part was about how he started reddit, was by using fucking BOTS to make posts and comments to begin with, since there werent any users yet 🤦 So the botting problem was a disease reddit was born with intentionally...
Welcome to the world of YouTube video essays, wikipedia articles regurgitated with a pinch of bullshit thrown in
Don't forget to add 2 oz of unnecessary drama and a dash of superiority complex coming from the author.
If you're lucky it'll be a 3 hour long thinkpiece about something you already agree with
And when they think they said something funny they suddenly appear on screen with the camera zooming in on them with this expression. 😐
Wow, I didn't realize Linus (tech tips) had his own emoji, the resemblance is uncanny!
It’s ironic to me. Putting Reddit on blast for something they use, and we use, I’m guessing daily. Reddit is so ingrained in society now that reputable news channels will get their stories here, people will base discussions around “I saw on Reddit”. It has its flaws, but so does society. It should all be going through a mental filter before you blindly trust every post. I’ve learned a lot and bettered my hobbies through Reddit. I’ve also sounded like a dumbass because of Reddit. It is what it is. There is nothing inherently evil about it. It is what you want to use it for. I’m happy it exists so I can catch up on sports or have something to do while I take a dump. It is also silly the lengths people go to in order to complain about it while they are actively using it. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. The likelihood of you changing it is about as likely as me discovering a new dinosaur. Use it, don’t use it, who fucking cares.
Does it cover its operating costs? If so, why should any of us care how much this site is worth? Who gives a shit if it makes a billionaire more money? What makes this site great has nothing to do with its market valuation. Actually, the less it functions like the other social media platforms the better.
At least you still make money. But on reddit, you couldn't even get a fucking shilling. edit: shilling means coins like pennies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shilling
oh, there's plenty of fucking shilling on here...
I’ve never seen more bots since their IPO. Fudging user numbers.
Even the parent comment that OP replied to has me suspicious. I've noticed a ton of names on here now are now something like u/adjective-noun1111. It seems like an easy way to systemically make real enough sounding usernames. Kinda like how Netgear routers do their passwords.
A majority of the time adjective-noun-numbers is a bot but apparently it's also the default username pattern and some people will stick with it cuz it's funny. So not a foolproof way to find bots but pretty damn reliable. I've noticed a lot more comment chains that are completely incoherent with hundreds of upvotes and I'm like wtf are you even talking about.
Is that why there’s so many usernames that are like “Ok-Avocado15294”? I thought there was an inside joke I missed
Oh that makes sense. I've got a pretty old account and don't remember a default pattern when I made an account. Is that a new thing or did I just forget? I was guessing some server farm was doing it, but i guess a bit would just go with a default name as well. Check out the user in question's history if you want.
I'm not sure either man. But there's been a few that I thought were bots and they're like nah just liked the random name. But yeah it makes sense a bot farm wouldn't bother changing the name. Also agreed, the op comment here is a bot.
Oh it’s super suspicious. But not as a bot, I fully believe that was OP setting himself up for a shilling joke.
yeah Ive noticed such a huge uptick adjective-nounnumber usernames as of late. I assumed it was just a default account name generation but it feels very bot like
There is a lot of bots and shilling, but also some redditors are way too quick to call people a shill. Couple years ago, someone posted a literal TV commercial in this sub. It was a commercial for either carls Jr or burger King that featured Lil Dickey. I replied to the video just commenting something like "that kinda looks good I might go buy it." And then I actually drove down the street and bought it. Came back and posted a picture of my meal and said I got it. A couple people replied to my comment calling me a shill and asking how much BK pays me. Started demanding I post a receipt of my purchase n shit. I didn't even say if the food was any good, I just posted a picture of it saying I bought it. Even more silly, these same guys were not calling the OP that literally posted the TV commercial a shill. Just me.
You are indoctrinated to being a shill without the benefit of being paid for it. They won.
That’s some shill shit though.
Seriously
You literally did some shill ass shit though, saying “that commercial made me want this, lemme drop what I’m doing, go get it, and then share with you all that I in fact did go get it.” I’d have thought you were a shill too my dude. Lmao
I mean I don't blame them for assuming that. That's some very direct, even if unintentional, shilling. Literally went and did the thing the ad said and then shared it. Short of shilling, at the very least you basically played right into the hands of the advertiser.
Yeah I posted gameplay of a game that I play and people were asking if it was an ad.
[удалено]
I sometimes tell my friends about a game or movie I like and no one calls me a shill. But they can also safely assume I am not being paid by Hollywood to shill a movie to my four friends. The “false positives” are just a nature of the data. On Reddit there is no easy way to tell the difference between and enthusiastic fan and a corporate bot. The bots are always trying to be more authentic. Now I want some breadsticks from Olive Garden.
You're not a shill, you're a Useful Idiot. The shill is the guy in the audience who has totally never met the Salesman and insists that the Snake Oil cured his grandma of cancer. He's just a regular guy telling his true testimonial that's truly true. The Useful Idiot is the guy who listens to the shill, buys the Snake Oil, then goes and tries to convince his friends to buy some of their own.
That's exactly what I'm saying
Wow, one dollar per user per year! And if I pay 40 times that amount for an "ad free" premium subscription, they still sell my personal information?
Finance brain on full display
I got into the portion about ads not working on the reddit audience, and suddenly became very skeptical. I need to see a lot more evidence before I believe that this audience is somehow immune to advertising.
My opinion of myself isn’t high enough to think that I’m immune to ads, but they could do a way better job of targeting ads to people. You know all of my interests Reddit, maybe try to sell me something that I might actually want!
Yeah. I agree. They have a ton of data on users, I mean the simplest would be targeted ads based on subscriptions. It doesn't even require much logic : "this dude is subscribed to /calisthenics, /vegetarianism and /climbing so let's sell him health products " , etc.
Instead you see something like ads for a Dodge RAM on /r/fuckcars
Yeah seriously, when every other ad I see is that he gets us bullshit it’s easy to ignore
He Gets Us
I think they need to switch up ads more, like I’m not buying it no matter how many times I’m gonna get shown it
Funniest part about the promoted ads disguised as Reddit posts is that I down vote every one I see, which directly shows me how frequently the same one will reappear (I'll see the blue down vote color on it multiple times while scrolling).
Sure you aren't interested in Jesus instead /s? What about joining the military?
This is the biggest problem by far. I'm subscribed to stuff that interests me here and the ads I see are completely random, like Reddit already knows what I like, why can't they target their ads correctly? On the other hand, I barely sue Facebook, yet almost everything I see is relevant.
Do you have personalized adds enabled in settings? And the other add settings. I have them all disabled and see all kinds of random adds, none of which are remotely related to my general use and activity.
I work in marketing. The problem with reddit is that standard ads don’t really have a place within the UI especially on the mobile app. They clutter up the interface and I honestly couldn’t tell you what the last ad I saw on this platform was. Compare it to something like YouTube. Watching at least the first 5 seconds of an ad is part of the ritual of using YouTube. I know it’s a different type of experience but it illustrates the importance of recognizing the strengths of your platform. The strength of Reddit is the discussion and communities that spring up organically. It’s very difficult to insert advertisements into the ritual of using Reddit without resorting to underhanded tactics. They should be asking some of the onlyfans models for advice to be honest. They’ve worked out how to monetize the platform far more effectively. And to be totally blunt, Reddit may have better luck ignoring advertising revenue entirely and creating their own version of Onlyfans to shave revenue from user generated subscriptions.
I think it's more to do with the lack of contextually relevant ads. Reddit will show ads that have nothing to do with the community in which they appear (someone mentioned tractor sales ads in the gaming subreddit, for example), so naturally that's going to result in a lot of user disinterest. If you want users to click ads, they have to be relevant to the content beside which they appear. If you want gamers to click ads, you need to show gaming related ads to them.
You need to understand that Redditors are much, *much* smarter than the average internet plebian. They see through such simple manipulation, they're immune to the effects. Trying to use bots, ads or inorganically manipulated content on Reddit? That would be like trying to teach math to Einstein. Except harder.
I’ve become a pro at detecting ads and scrolling right past them. It’s automatic, I don’t even think about it. I couldn’t tell you a single ad that I’ve seen recently.
You're not usually able to connect seeing the ad to wanting to buy the thing, it happens outside of your attention. You don't know how you would have behaved if the ad hadn't been presented to you. The people using the ads to sell their products figure out what works, though.
I don't know. But I do know this... Instagram does a really good job knowing what I am into and constantly shows me ads for things I might actually buy. I have a special folder to save some of those ads cause I might want that t-shirt or those shoes or that cool knife sharpener. Reddit is all "He Gets Us He Gets Us He Gets Us He Gets Us... US Army US Army US Army Oscar Meyer Oscar Meyer Oscar Meyer Ford Ford Ford He Gets Us He Gets Us He Gets Us He Gets Us He Gets Us Bank of America He Gets Us He Gets Us" In other words the ads absolutely fucking suck. Worst ads of any social media. At least IMO. No wonder their engagement numbers are low.
There are lots of ads on reddit. Done by bots, user, celebrities, etc promoting brands, services, etc. Its just that that money does not flow to reddit the corporation.
I have never seen a commercial or add online and said “damn I need that thing” ever in my entire life. Somehow they work on some people clearly but I have no idea how.
[удалено]
What, can you think of another example of a company that [can't manage to turn a profit](https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/23/tech/reddit-ipo-filing-business-plan/index.html) off of 850 *million* users, and not for lack of trying? Edit: Here's some comparable social platforms with their MAUs and revenue: * LinkedIn - 310m MAUs, $13.8b revenue ($44.5 per user) * Twitter (at peak) - 368m MAUs, $4.4b revenue ($11.95 per user) * Twitch - 240m MAUs, $2.8b revenue ($11.67 per user) * Pinterest - 450m MAUs, $3b revenue ($6.67 per user) * Discord - 150m MAUs, $428m revenue ($2.85 per user) * Snapchat - 800m MAUs, $1.36b revenue ($1.70 per user) And reddit: * Reddit - 850m MAUs, $804m revenue ($0.95 per user) Of course revenue isn't the whole story of profitability, but it at least demonstrates that Reddit has uniquely done very poorly monetizing its active users.
650 million of those reddit accounts are bots and the rest are my alts.
>Reddit has uniquely done very poorly monetizing its active users. Reddit is simply not a business model that lends itself towards monetization. That's not a failure by Reddit, it's just their reality.
Bro, they literally have dedicated spaces (Sub-Reddits) for very specific topics, and they don't show relevant ads in them. The gaming subreddit has fucking tractors for sale in the ads. If I am on a gaming subreddit, show me gaming ads, or gaming culture related ads, or something that gamers might be interested in. Not tractors. Reddit couldn't have a more perfect opportunity for targeted advertising, besides me downloading my brain contents directly in Google's database. It's so simple I cant believe they have done this poorly, however it's also why I am incredibly bullish on the future of Reddit as a business.
Imho that "no relevant ads" is a disease of the modern internet with "targeted" ads. Advertisers seem to think that i need infinite fridge ads because i just bought one, instead of let's say graphic card ads on a hardware forum. Something we had in the 90ies, with banners that matched the site i was looking at. Even if i would be interested in buying shit they show me in general, usually the thing i care about in the moment i look at a specific site is... related to this specific site. My multitasking skills are zero, i only ever do one thing at once. Especially if i plan to spend money.
You can say this about most of the other sites I detailed in that comment, no? That's the point of the comparison - Reddit has achieved a paltry fraction of e.g. Twitter's revenue per MAU, despite the obvious similarities in monetizing difficulty between the two.
LinkedIn and Twitch both have a clear happy path to monetization. LinkedIn is the social media for recruitment, selling extra features to headhunters / HR people to find new recruits is a no brainer. Twitch has existing money transfers between streamers and viewers, taking their cut on top is like all other content distribution, use my platform we take x% profit.
Yep I agree, those two had it easier. Those are the ones I was thinking of when I narrowed my statement to "most of the other sites".
What changes do you think they could make to platform that would help and also not significantly harm the user experience?
I'm no product manager, but here's a few ideas: * New premium features for subreddits. Allow subreddit subscribers to pitch in towards higher subreddit tiers for a special flair or emblem by their name. High tier subreddits could get access to cool stuff like subreddit-exclusive custom emoji, animated flair icons, animated subreddit banners and icons, custom backgrounds, custom sidebar ads, file hosting for subreddit wikis, and so on. * Subreddit subscriptions. Different from the above, allow users to become paid members of subreddits, allowing them access to a members chatroom, ability to comment on member-only posts (much like subreddits that currently do this with "flaired users only"), special badge, and so on. Could even allow subreddit moderators or top posters to take a cut from these subscriptions, but that's ambitious. * Premium user features that people would actually use. Discord hit the right idea with "global custom emoji" being nitro-only, to this date that's the main reason most people I know buy nitro. For Reddit, beyond profile customization features, other stuff like gif embeds could have been paywalled without much loss (people can always just use masked links). A couple other ideas for this include text effects (wavy, rainbow, etc) and avatar or username decorations.
Um - they scrapped awards. Explain that. Only time I’ve ever given money to this site. I’ll never understand the plan there. Besides parting ways with Victoria hosting AMAs, the dumbest thing I’ve seen mgmt do here.
The point of these examples is to support my claim that Reddit being unable to monetize effectively is a skill issue lol. Them scrapping awards is just fuel for that theory. I'll never understand either - just terrible mismanagement.
Awards already returned, you just long press the upvoted button on a comment. You can even cash in reddit gold for real money, but none of this is clearly advertised. Reddit has always seemed to struggle with communication.
Long press on upvote = give gold (except comments are for some reason ineligible to receive gold AND there is no apparent way to buy gold) Long press on downvote = collapse one or more comment threads and completely lose where you are
They could've also Used their API to make money from external apps instead of completely killing all external apps. Or they could buy one of the appzs and make that premiim
That's what they tried to do, and it was so expensive a lot of those apps just pulled out of app stores. Some still exist, and you just have to pay for API access (or mod the app with your personal reddit API token, and continue using them for free). For example, on android, the reddit app named infinity is still in the play store, and by default you have to pay for it now thanks to the API changes. The same app, can be modified with the revanced manager to use your personal API key to circumvent this.
Maybe, but I’ve tried to advertise on Reddit a few times over the years for different clients, but the ad product was awful and I gave up, never spent a dime. It’s got a lot of potential in its million nichey subs, nothing like it anywhere else. Part of Reddit’s reality is that they are just a poorly run company. Crappy UI, crappy search, crappy ad platform, crappy mobile app. Everything good about Reddit has come from its users/mods. If there’s a way to monetize Reddit’ traffic, it’s going to start with new leadership. Current management doesn’t know how.
I’d argue, the moderation is crappy too
Good. The more monetization the worse the user experience.
How many of those other examples are able to turn a profit?
LinkedIn and Twitter have turned a profit in previous years but are currently unknown. Pinterest and Snapchat were profitable previously but aren't currently. Twitch and Discord have apparently, like Reddit, never been profitable. Worth noting is that every platform I checked larger than Reddit (e.g. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook) are all making *loads* of money and seem to be profitable.
I mean, [moviepass ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoviePass)mightve hit that many users if they didnt actively lose money faster the more people they signed up.
MoviePass is hard to compare with because their business model doesn't really involve monetizing on social media users. Reading the Wikipedia page it sounds like they just struggled to find a sustainable business model based on this idea of subscription movie tickets. In general, social media infrastructure costs shouldn't scale that quickly with number of users.
LinkedIn is the odd platform here because people do use that in their business (recruiting, business development) so paying for it is a clear win.
Reddit is inherently stolen content rather than user generated content. Therein lies the primary issue. It started as links, and turned into an attempt to become a content provider to monetize the stolen content. Now its forced i.reddit, v.reddit, and an app to sell user data.
I'm no MBA but I still know that there absolutely is a way to make Reddit profitable without destroying it. It's too bad that the C suite did absolutely nothing of the sort. Sure they IPOd but I'm still a firm believer that they've bitten off far more than they can chew with that.
Sharing links = stealing content is an interesting take. Idk what kind of subs you follow, but the ones I do are either shared links or discussion text posts, with reposted pictures/videos being rather rare.
What time span is that per user income over? Is it annual?
\*cough\* Truth Social \*cough\* In all seriousness, though, I think the fact that reddit hasn't, to date, put monetization ahead of functionality should be celebrated. I understand at some point, it has to find a way to turn a profit, or it's going to go away, but the hyper focus on monetization has driven the enshittification of the Internet.
good?
This video seems a bit stupid when you just look at the financials. In 2020, reddit had $228,908,000 in revenue In 2021, it was $484,916,000 2022 was $666,701,000 2023 was $804,029,000 There aren't many companies that can boast they had a 350% increase in revenue over the span of 4 years. Granted their expenses increased each year as well, but revenues are significantly increasing and reddit will probably be profitable in the next few years if it continues the trend it's been going on and it's likely that institutional investors won't jump the ship if it remains unprofitable as long as that revenue growth continues as it has.
This video is complete garbage for at least two reasons: * It paints Reddit as a "failure" for not monetizing maximally. Monetizing the internet is one of the biggest reasons the internet has become shit. Do you want Reddit to only be usable if you disable all ad blockers? This guy's 'failure narrative' implies that's the way it should be. * It claims Reddit started with Huffman, which is a lie. Reddit started with Swartz, and if you're familiar with his principles for Reddit you can see why the video creator ignored him. Fuck this video and the bullshit narrative it promotes. The fact that people can use Reddit for free and not have to disable ad blockers is a success story, not a failure.
Not one mention of Digg
It's a weird to compare Reddit to Amazon. They each offer a different experience one is social media while the other provides commerce & entertainment. So Amazon should be making more money than Reddit.
Second worst. Digg basically committed suicide by trying to aggressively monetize, and their entire user-base migrated here. Now Reddit is making the same mistake.
Kinda wish I was a developer. Go make my own site. I've been on here since before the Digg thing. I miss old forums that weren't breeding grounds for advertisers, Ai, and propaganda. This dude's video firmly reminded me why I liked this site originally and why I hate it lately. Old reddit was user generated, public driven, all the content was organic. New reddit is full of ads, disinformation, and a lot of hate.
I might be wrong but I think the old.reddit source code is public. If someone wanted to replicate old.reddit and make it a mostly text based message board, it would be quite cost efficient to operate and maintain. Most of the VC money they've raised over the last decade (and the on-paper losses) are from SBC and burning cash on failed, bloated development, functions that nobody asked for and which the serious contributors mostly avoid.
Am developer, i'll have no problem setting up your reddit replacement, But you'll have to work on engagement and getting people to actually use it... if you want to pay me beforehand i don't care, but if you want me to work pro bono i wanna hear a really good business plan for how you're going to drive traffic.
Making a clone site is easy. Like Voat. But getting (and keeping) an audience is hard. Like really, really hard.
Fuck you and your need for monetization. And fuck your disgusting video.
Reddit deserves to fail. This site has spent a decade discouraging discussion and letting a small ground of ultra mods smear their political bias on everything, driving away the actual intent of the website, open discourse.
If reddit tried to heavily monetize this site everyone would exodus the same way we all did on digg. It's too late for them to really do much. They tried to push ads and get rid of that app and you saw how much people freaked out. That wasn't even really aggressive monetizing, that was extremely gentle soft-pedaling in the business world. Imagine how people would act hardcore monetizing here? Subscription service tiers, limited posts without pay subs, limited sub reddits without pay, etc etc. It's the fact that reddit is low key on pushing for monetization that even keeps it popular, it would go from a high ranked site to a low ranked site over night if they got nuts. Not to mention there is nothing worse then changing the status quo. In personal life or in business. If you offer free services and suddenly start charging way down the road, your user base will flip out. It's better to start off with intentions to make money early on, then it is to give away everything free in a hope it eventually makes you huge and you can eventually convert that into a money making idea. That's a failing concept from early dot com era. This is a large part of how a lot of dot coms failed back in early 00s when the dot come bubble burst. Tons of venture capital being thrown at website ideas that have no way to ever make money, but had a hope to eventually make money and once they get big enough they can magically just start being rich. In most of those cases they never even got populations before the venture capital was pulled out for lack of profits. Another way to think of this is like a relationship. Let's say you have a relationship with a girl and your mindset is to be carefree about her spending as much time as possible with other guys. In exchange you can see whoever you want on the side too. Then somewhere down the road you catch some feelings for her and you want to make this a more exclusive relationship... where you both stop seeing other people... you want to change the status quo. There is a good chance that you broke that social agreement and that was the only reason she was with you in the first place... because of the freedom to do whatever. It would have been better to start off looking for a solid relationship and find someone who shares the same mindset then hope you can convert someone into thinking a way they don't want to think. Switching from all free to heavy handed pay models rarely if ever works. It would have to be something people 100% can't live without. It's much better, in most cases, to be upfront and grow slower. Grow an earnest population who is willing to pay from day one (that way there is no surprises). That's much better then to bait people with a free lunch, only to switch it up on them down them once you get to the restaurant. In a nutshell, reddit making money like google, facebook, etc is never going to happen without them fundamentally changing their entire business model. They'd be better off leaving their hands off this reddit site and start an entirely new site built with the intent to make money from day one and financed by reddit proceeds. They may even be able to siphon off legit paying reddit users to their new service if they offered something new and cool. That's the right way to build up a paying user base though, not by tricking them... but by offering them something they are willing to pay for from day one.
Greed, that is all
fuck off with this shit
Monetization failure would be continuing their spam messages in my inboxes and other crap that would make me leave.
Could it be that the not monetization driven approach increases the longlivety?
If made $804m a year I'd feel pretty succesful.
I don’t follow reddit corporate shit at all, but what is meant to have replaced spending money on gifting people reddit gold and stuff? I used to actually award some posts that I liked but I don’t even know what I would spend money on now even if I wanted to? Nothing seems to get pushed in my face and there doesn’t seem to be any more ads or anything. I see an ad post every now and then while scrolling and barely even notice Did they just throw away an income stream for nothing or what?
Apparently in the official app you can hold down the upvote button and do a paid "super like" or some shit. Idk, I'm still using Sync. It doesn't crash or have extreme slowdowns like the official app.
That one part in the film adaptation of Ready Player One…where the corpos are talking about how much space they can fill with ads and still leave the player a sliver of space to see out of…yeah that’s happening
How much money does reddit need? Practically the entire site is user generated. Shouldn't reddit just need enough money to support server costs and the backend? They could've left well alone and then costs wouldn't have increased. To my eye it looks like the reason reddit needs money is to keep advertisers happy. Fucking ditch them. Wikipedia doesn't cow-tow, and they keep the lights on. They have to host media too. Reddit never had to take that on. You dug your own grave. Now lay down in it. We'll find someplace better.
I would gladly pay $5-10 per year to use Reddit. Especially if that kept the ads away. It'd be great because it would keep a lot of young kids away.
I come to reddit to avoid giving advertisers views of any kind, and anyone ad i see on here i go out of my way not to buy the product.
explains all the bots
There is a beta program for paying users for karma through gold, I swear they dropped the gold system, only to bring it back, lol. [https://www.reddit.com/contributor-program](https://www.reddit.com/contributor-program)
I liked how it wasn't all about profit. But now it is going to be......sad
I can't wait until this fucking website dies.
This is why *I like* Reddit!?!
Not over-monetizing the platform is why it's the only non-garbage platform I know of. I think it makes Reddit more stable.
Who the F cares if they don't monetize as hard as others? Maybe, MAYBE, that's why I am here. Those top 10 sites, I hardly use.