cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19466667
Money, Mods, and Mayhem
The Turning Point
In 2024, Reddit is a far cry from its scrappy startup roots. With over 430 million monthly active users and more than 100,000 active communities, it’s a social media giant. But with great power comes great responsibility, and Reddit is learning this lesson the hard way.
The turning point came in June 2023 when Reddit announced changes to its API pricing. For the uninitiated, API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it’s basically the secret sauce that allows third-party apps to interact with Reddit. The new pricing model threatened to kill off popular third-party apps like Apollo, whose developer Christian Selig didn’t mince words: “Reddit’s API changes are not just unfair, they’re unsustainable for third-party apps.”
Over 8,000 subreddits went dark in protest.
The blackout should have reminded Reddit’s overlords of a crucial fact: Reddit’s success was built on the backs of its users. The platform had cultivated a sense of ownership among its community, and now that community was biting back.
One moderator summed it up perfectly: “We’re the ones who keep this site running, and we’re being ignored.”
Saturn devouring his son, with reddit snoovitars
Somebody with midjourney skills needs to do that
It’s got viral potency
Midjourney skills
I think that’s an oxymoron…
Nah, just fucking draw it you cowards.
ngl i feel like reddit starting falling off after the api thing it became mainstream
I’m trying to upvote as many Lemmy posts as I can find on the Reddit search function to hasten the demise of the pet project of Spez since the third party apps are up to snuff now!
Let’s hope more people will join the fediverse so we can all stop feeding our data to these greedy companies.
I like my transparency, third-party apps, community and open source nature of Lemmy.
You don’t think once Lemmy hits mainstream, companies won’t start polluting Lemmy and harvest data here?
As Lemmy users we always have the freedom to jump ship to a different Lemmy instance if the admins of the ones we’re on decide to sell the site out and/or let the polluters take over, or we can even start up our own Lemmy instance (with blackjack, etc.)
Tbh I doubt companies would stop scraping data. They wouldn’t care to respect the ToS (they never did) and feed in their AI models all the Lemmy posts and comments they can find. Still better than Reddit willfully selling these info
They still can’t game it for engagement optimization to that extreme, not like the closed loops of monolithic sites.
True. Let’s drive away from them as much as possible
I’m not sure if there is any way you can promote links to my account, but feel free:
https://www.reddit.com/user/FlyingSquid/
Your page has been bookmarked. Thank you for the idea of updating the display name to LEMMY IS BETTER.
Good idea!
deleted by creator
Wow, out of a total revenue of $281 million $193 million goes to a single person? Holy shit. What a selfish asshole you have to be to disregard all of your employees and take such a huge cut for yourself.
It’s actually insane. I’m not built for corporate jobs but goddamn I have no idea how anyone would want to work for such a company.
You should look up the absurd pay structure of Musk at Tesla or how at Facebook, despite it being a publicly traded company, Zuckerberg literally cannot be fired.
The reason tech tends to chase stupid trends like AI is that there really aren’t that many people in charge of the whole place. They all know each other; they’re all buddies. And they all chase the same stupid fads together.
Nah, that’s mostly stock options, so it doesn’t come out of the revenue. His cash salary was only a couple hundred thousand.
It’s probably better from a tax point of view. Plus he’s planning to cash out big on his own IPO, so he prefers the stock.
Spez is the unnecessary overhead that creates extra work for the workers
It’s a sign. Spez will now milk the company and make himself billionaires for the next few years, then sell the company for tens of billions, and new owner will run it into the ground, milking whatever left of it. Then it will become the blandest, soulless socmed.
Sounds like a job for Elon Musk.
TBH that would ddos lemmy with new users, lol.
Please let this happen.
No one can ruin a company quite like him.
Or sell it to Trump Media Group.
Basically paid that twat 200 mil to kill the site.
Imagine if they put 100 of that into developers and infrastructure and shit.
I remember when they kicked mods off their platform when the subreddits went private on the API retaliation. Now quite a few are on here. Meanwhile, some of those subreddits are still having issues moderating.
Personally I think mods should be rotated once in a while by the community instead of giving power to them indefinitely on communities. But reddit really messed up there. Some mods are mods of hundreds of subreddits which is silly and unsustainable.
Could moderation be handled democratically with votes and such? Create a system with central authority and you’ll just get people trying to be the central authority.
It’s such a mess. I mean spez is an ass, but some of those career mods were just as bad. Moderating hundreds of subs because they enjoy the power. And you can tell that was the case when they’d harass random people because they did some little thing that upset them.
Yep. If they were periodically replaced, then the communities might have a better mod (or at least a less burnt out one).
I’m calling bullshit on any user count they release. The site was filled with bots even when I still used it. People kept complaining about “karma farmers” as if there were users who repost popular content. It has always been largely Reddit’s own bots too keep new users entertained and recycle popular content so that it reaches as many users as possible. They turned this up to 11 before going public.
Now that they no longer provide an API, they are free to make up any fake metric they want to try to pump up their worthless stock.
People kept complaining about “karma farmers”
I remember the “Reddit is just you, me and /u/karmanaut” meme from 2008. He was the original “karma farmer”. It was a problem since the early days due to how they setup Reddit as a system. It just enforced his behaviour.
I’m very doubtful too. I look at “active users” stats, and for every sub at every time it never goes above a few hundreds.
The millions subs numbers are bs
One of the really popular subs - with hundreds of posts per day - cracked down on bots and nothing was posted for two days afterwards.
Can’t recall which sub it was,It was WholesomeMemes. I caught wind of that a few days later and it was truly a ghost town. Even now they’ve only got something like 5% of their pre-bot-ban traffic back - about 4-6 posts a day.“Karma farmers” is a major reason Digg collapsed and Reddit took its place.
They banned bots from WholesomeMemes and there were no posts for 2 days. Dead Internet is now, and it’s at Reddit.
That subreddit always seemed so off-putting to me and now I know why. I don’t hate wholesome stuff, but there was just something off about that subreddit that I couldn’t put my finger on.
Let’s be honest, most of Reddit’s default subreddits (or whatever the fuck they’re called now) are basically just karma farms with no real moderation beyond removing extreme content. The real value of Reddit has always been in its smaller, niche subs. But as those grow in popularity, they end up having the same problems as bigger subs.
Reddit’s strength has always been its community
There’s something nobody talks about much when it comes to reddit. It’s that the internet has moved past community. It now revolves around monetized “influencers”. Nobody fosters community for the sake of it anymore.
Reddit has outlived its time. It’s apparent they’ve been trying to evolve with the times but the platform isn’t fundamentally geared towards this coporatized era of the internet. They’ve been trying to pivot the platform into social media style. Users now have profiles with avatars, bio text, followers/subscribers. There’s now a social graph. The big picture with these things is they’re trying to make it into a corporatized social platform like all the rest.
The problem isn’t reddit itself. It’s the internet that isn’t geared towards community anymore.
It’s the internet that isn’t geared towards community anymore.
It’s more like people aren’t geared to community, not the internet.
I very strongly disagree. It may appear that way, but community is simply less profitable than “influencers”, so communities aren’t invested in. Social media and even following influencers/content creators is an example of people looking for community, just not having healthy communities to pick from.
People are geared to community. Modern society isn’t.
That sounds more appropriate ya
Maybe the problem is that they’re all trying to ge the same goddamned thing, like how there are 15 or more goddamned hamburger chains.
“We want to be like facebook! Also like Youtube and twitter and tiktok! And like Instagram!”
Maybe if they stuck to their speciality and strengths, pick a lane and stay in it, they would prosper. But no! God forbid!
Will Reddit seize this opportunity? Or will it continue down its current path of self-destruction?
HAHAhahahaha
I think that this article is accurate and sensible.
There’s a point that I’d like to add, that the author doesn’t mention: user trust.
The main value of an online platform is the user trust, as it dictates the users’ willingness to help building it instead of vandalising it. In Reddit’s case it means people writing well-thought posts, moderating communities, reporting content, using the voting system, etc.
And user trust is violated every time that a platform takes user-hostile decisions. Like Reddit has been taking for almost a decade; with 2023’s APIcalypse being a big example of that, but only one among many.
And when user trust is violated, it’s almost impossible to come back. John Bull explains this well, with the Trust Thermocline; but the basic idea is that those violations pile up invisibly upon a certain point, when they suddenly become a big deal and the platform bleeds users like there’s no tomorrow. And once it reaches that point it’s practically impossible to come back.
So perhaps we aren’t watching Reddit die. Nor we will, in the future - because Reddit is already dead. What we’re watching instead, with morbid curiosity, is a headless chicken running around, while we place some bets on when it will stop moving - so venture capital can have its dinner.
I can’t pinpoint when Reddit died in my eyes. But I can say the long road to where it is today started with Reddit Gold.
Reddit Gold was a minor change that didn’t do much of anything besides offer a way to collect money directly from the user base. But it was the start of monetizing the site and every decision by Reddit management after that point furthered that monetization at the expense of everything else.
I can pinpoint the exact moment: When the admins actively gave t_d a full pass on anything they wanted to do in 2016.
That single act drove away more users than any previous exodus.
There were a few around that same timer period. IIRC, that’s also about when the whole /r/jailbait controversy happened, and the site suddenly had a really bad reputation among non-users. Like before it had been seen as a weird site, but then it was suddenly seen as outright predatory. Users suddenly didn’t want to associate with the site. Then the t_d stuff happened, which just compounded the issue of users not wanting to associate with the site due to the bad reputation.
There were even earlier signs of Reddit caring more about profit than the best interests of the users.
2014: buying and crippling Alien Blue. Reddit could’ve built its own official app and users would have two to choose from; or it could have bought and improved Alien Blue. By doing neither, Reddit showed complete disdain towards user experience.
2015: Reddit fired Victoria Taylor. Except that Taylor did an essential job there, as she was a bridge between Reddit Inc. and mod teams; she was for example the one verifying people for Ask me Anything (back then it was a big deal).
You probably could find even more signs of that, if digging further. And while neither is as serious as the way that Reddit handled T_D, both already show that it was putting revenue over users.
I didn’t mind Reddit gold as a method of paying for upkeep on an ostensibly free site. If well-off Redditors wanted to chip in to help with maintenance resulting in fewer or less intrusive ads then that’s grand.
The point when they started losing me was when the Reddit front page modernised into the Instagram feed looking abomination it is today and when they shifted from Reddit gold to the silver diamond thing they have now. No I don’t want to make an avatar. No I don’t want to follow users or have them follow me.
It started as the last example of old social media like forums and got metric’d into this half-formed freak of a site that seems to actively resent the users that build and maintain their entire platform.
Hell, I chipped in for reddit gold. I’m not well off, I just used the platform loads and didn’t mind paying a little for something I enjoyed. Like so many others, my goodwill was pissed on, though, and I am just another paying customer that they lost. The API thing was the final nail in the coffin for me.
Spez and his executives do resent the users. He’s on record making statements which make it clear that he sees the user’s resistance to monetization as a roadblock between him and his money. The fact that people built all of the content on the entire site for free, doesn’t matter to him. He actively hates them for not behaving in a way that gets him more money.
Reddit Gold is a great example IMO.
If Reddit’s goal was to serve users, instead of profit, it might’ve still implemented Reddit Gold. A site doesn’t run for free, and having another source of income could help to serve users better.
However then the nature of Reddit Gold would be completely different:
- There wouldn’t be a “gilded” sorting, as it enables astroturfers to exchange money for visibility.
- There wouldn’t be microtransaction mechanics associated with it, such as packs of “X+Y coins” associated with broken values in real money (so you need to pull out a calculator to know which one has the cheapest price).
- Even if platinum might’ve appeared, silver wouldn’t. Because the userbase was already joking about a “Reddit silver” award; so creating a Reddit silver was basically “nice meme you have there, it’s now my source of profit, sucker”.
- It wouldn’t change every five minutes as they were trying to find the best way to capitalise on it. “Gold! Awards! Coins! Back to gold! Rewards system!”
- They would’ve asked the users on potential ways to finance the site without contradicting its values.
Very well said, and it was the trust violation which finally pushed me off of Facebook and Reddit. Reddit as we know it is dead, it’s obvious to anyone who used to use it. But AI is here, and it’s going to continue pumping semi-believable posts and replies for years, making it look as if the site is still booming. But the posts are valid, devoid of soul, and almost always written with an ulterior motive to sell something or some idea. The Dead Internet is here.
So perhaps we aren’t watching Reddit die. Nor we will, in the future - because Reddit is already dead. What we’re watching instead, with morbid curiosity, is a headless chicken running around, while we place some bets on when it will stop moving - so venture capital can have its dinner.
Well put
And also because the only other place my niche interests have communities is discord
And AI. AI is a wet dream to a company like Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter. They can keep the appearance of an active and popular site indefinitely, stealing money from advertisers years before they catch on.
Yeah that’s my main problem with the article, it argues “as if” it was all but inevitable. As if something could be done. As soon as you have for profit motivation of social media, it’s all but inevitable that enshittification ensues. That obscures the real problem.
You want a website that is run non-profit for users and somewhat democratically. But they shy away from that conclusion.
Also, I think the unaccountable moderators really are a problem. You end up with major subs like r/politics or /worldnews getting camped by people who just happened to get there first, and then being forever unaccountable for bias or stupidity. And then you get sitewide bans if you subvert the bans from the tinpot dictators camping on what should be community-led spaces.
Yeah. Worst offender is r/climatechange which is still moderated by a “both sides” climate skeptic. It’s practically aiding genocide / omnicide.
Unfortunately lemmy doesn’t have good solution to fracturing and default instances either.
Reddit could’ve become a non-profit for users, financed by them. So the outcome was avoidable, at least years and years in the past.
But for that Pigboy and kn0thing would need to give up the pretension of drinking champagne in an IPO. kn0thing gave up too late; Pigboy never did.
A good “dividing line” where the outcome became fixed was the introduction of Reddit Gold.
Wrote something similar 1 year ago 😁
I remember reading your text back then. It’s great, and it shows something that neither the article in the OP nor my comment show - the role of network effect in the process.
That das a nice read, but the site is weird to read on mobile i had to switch to the desktop mode lol
not if I eat it first!
How can the demise of reddit be hastened ? Its bloated corpse clogs up the pipes of the internet still.
I heard that 99% of the internet traffic is marketing bots fucking each other
The remaining 1% is those humans still plugged into the matrix, they won’t be able to escape until the pipes get unclogged of all the Web 2.0 big tech floatsam still swimming around.
It gives me great joy to be reading this via Boost.
And Spez’s response?
“OMG! STOP GOING DARK OR I AND MY LEGION OF SLIME ADMINS WILL REMOVE YOU FROM POWAH!”
And so he did which is why some subreddits came back from being dark. Some subreddits submitted to their own fates. Other subreddits reluctantly came back, proving the protest was just a mere farce that amounted to a nothingburger.
And what did Spez do after the whole fiasco? Why, he punched Reddit into now being Public. Completing what people had long speculated that he’d do.
And what did Spez do after that? He’s now rolling out the concept that Subreddits will be monetized.
Spez has ultimately learned nothing from these incidents and expects it to get better, with that stupid shit eating grin on his face because he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts.
Oh the irony getting removed by a mod here. Although its probably in the mod logs somewhere with an actual reason :)
actually it’s not … An admin banned OP (troll account). Seems that no record of comment exists. Kinda a bug in the Lemmy software where logs of banned accounts aren’t stored, or at least I don’t know how to see them.
What do you think he would learn? He got like $190 million dollars in compensation last year, broke the protest, and only lost a small fraction of users. He doesn’t view the site with the same love that we did. It’s just a business to him, and he’s just a soulless executive.
Spez has ultimately learned nothing
He’s learned he can do this shit and make money. It may not be a perpetual money machine. But he now has enough and will milk it for all that’s left. That’s what he’s learned.
he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts
This is comedic gold. But the bad part? I envisioned it. Thanks a lot.
And he’s getting rich off of it too. I mean, that’s his whole gain, right? Money! He’s given his soul for money. The whole community hates him, but at least he’s gotten rich now. I’m sure reddit’s annual founders parties must be a hoot.
What does he care if a bunch of people that he thinks are losers hate him? He’s sitting on his private yacht, anchored just off his private country club, and eating lobster in the hot tub. He’s a major world player now. He doesn’t give a fuck what reddit users think of him.
For a group of so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists, Reddit users seem to have a knack for taking it up dry than doing anything about their problems.
I guess that is truly Reddit’s nature.
For a group of so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists
Those were the early days of Reddit. They’re long gone now that everyone has joined. Those so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists have now abandoned Reddit. It’s mostly just the sheep left there now.
It’s the same story with Twitter.
Corpos gonna corpo, there is a lesson here folks but people reading this right now, already know this.
