this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Although I guess people on here don't want to hear this, he's right on that one. Price to pay with the normiefication of reddit. No more community. Only consumers.
Yes, but reddit is unique in the social media companies in that Twitter (pre-Elon) and facebook at least had to pay a shit ton of money to get people to moderate.
It's basically "no one cares as long as the trains run on time." In the extreme, I would bet that it's single-digits of TikTok users that actually make content. Reddit is probably not even that far from that. This move, let's piss off our unpaid moderators and the users that make all of our content, is going to effect even the normies.
Also a lot of the normies use those 3rd party apps that are going to cease to exist on June 30 and are not going to be happy with Reddit's "official" substitute. For a lot of people the app is Reddit.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that's true. Have you looked at the numbers in the app stores?
The official reddit app on the google play store has over 100 million downloads.
RIF has only 5 million downloads. Boost, Sync, and Baconreader are all sitting around 1 million downloads each.
It looks like about 90% of mobile users are on the official app and won't notice any change.
The 'normies' don't go beyond searching for the word "reddit" and installing the first thing that pops up.
I suppose if it's truly that low then his claims of third-party apps allowing "free" browsing hurting their bottom line isn't true. Honestly, they could have worked with third-party developers and forced them to implement ads in a non-subscription tier while allowing the API to operate with minimal cost to the developer. But they went into this "negotiation" in bad faith because they never wanted to continue allowing third-party apps anyway. They wanted to kill them entirely. The problem is Reddit is scarce on offering mod tools and incorporating a lot of features people could get in other apps. Hell, the few things they have added over the years are garbage. The video player is pure trash. They implemented photo hosting because they wanted to undercut imgur which just adds to their own server and bandwidth cost. And in the end they rely entirely on users to deliver content.
Also, his claims are probably off where he says 97% do not use a third-party app to browse the site. I'd say that's because the vast majority are browsing on a PC. Anything he says can't be trusted anyway because he's been caught lying. The truth is you are the product, and the real money is in selling your data to third parties.
Yep, spez is a greedy pig boy and this whole thing reeks of him being personally offended that any portion of the userbase can use apps where reddit can't squeeze quite as much value out of them. A deal could easily be worked out to appease all parties if reddit was willing to be even slightly less greedy, but corpos gonna corpo I guess.
Agreed on the 97% thing. I think that's reddit counting pc browsing in with mobile just to make the number using third party apps seem even smaller than it actually is. Which is ridiculous since the actual number isn't that much different. Going by the downloads on google play they still have something like 90% of the mobile users on official.
Isn't it amazing how he's so insistent on how unfair it is that third party apps are profiting off of someone else's content when that's essentially reddit's business model?
Honestly Reddit is one of the few things where I wouldn't have minded paying a $5-$7 monthly subscription. When looking at how much hours and how much entertainment I got there, it's a better value proposition than half the streaming services I subscribe to.
Yeah I've been saying this all week, Reddit won't die here. But the product is different to what it used to be, and we all needed a push to go looking for that special thing that it used to be. Let the normies have their memes and clickbait who the fuck cares
Yeah, well, digg.com is technically still up, and I've visited it at least three times this decade, so I'm sure it's doing fine.
@BlueForestDev The issue that they realize but are not saying out loud, is that small but vocal group is the glue that is holding Reddit together.
@SonNeedGym
Wouldn't be shocked by this. Twitter is / was this way. A small percentage of the userbase was responsible for most of the high quality content that drove engagement. Even before Musk's buyout, the leadership was concerned that this group was leaving in numbers and not coming back.
Quality matters, and Twitter was (rightly) concerned that they were losing their quality posters. I think there's a real chance of that happening to Reddit too.
I don't think so. For some individual subs this might be true (like apolloapp lol), but reddit has gotten too big to fail like this. IF they fail it will be a slow decline and not at all like Digg.
Very sad, but also very true.