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In a schadenfreude kind of way, it's interesting to watch it begin to burn down.
Fuck u/Spez. We'll take great satisfaction watching the next chapter of your self destruction while you try to "cash out".
I remember when Digg collapsed and the Great Exodus happened. It's incredible to see history repeat itself.
... but this time with SO MANY opportunities to say sorry and reverse course. This one is ... kinda crazy to watch.
They burned through all the VC money before ever really putting that much thought into how to become profitable. There was reddit premium which showed they didn't understand the needs and wants of their users (or didn't care enough to research them) and there was NFTs which showed... well the same.
Now they are about out of VC money so they want to IPO to get the investor money, and they see this as their absolute last-ditch effort. To them, if this fails, there is no IPO and reddit is dead.
Far too little too late. I would not want to be in Fuckspez's shoes as he's looking for his next CEO gig. It's like watching the ADHD kid's internal struggle to do his paper on time, and but he's panicking with his pants around his waist as the clock strikes an hour to deadline.
You know, I understand all that. And I understand that the API pricing was never about making 3PA pay, but killing them.
You know what I don't understand? Why, before undertaking this plan why reddit wouldn't identify the biggest friction points (mod tools, accessibility, screen real estate efficiency) and then implement changes to pre-emptively. It would cut the legs out of so many complaints. "Oh 3PA gives you 'x' tool- we just added it to the official app!" is much more soothing than the vague promise to add it at some undefined point in the future. Even being cynical, normal quality of life changes for normal users could be made during this time period, and then quietly rolled back after the IPO. Thinking about it like a callus business person, this seems like the play to make.
There is a universe possible where reddit gracefully kills 3PA, rolls out enough of their own features to look competent, and gets a lot of good press out of it which would help IPO buzz. They have 2000 employees, what are they all doing?
I'm pretty sure it's all panic decision making at this point. They saw machine learning companies slurping up user conversations then panicked. Then they saw dollar signs selling that data to those companies. Problem is that ship has already sailed.
They saw third party apps as leeches that don't contribute anything. Never mind how those apps and third party mod tools are essential to moderating a sub. And power users generate a lot of content using those same apps.
I also think they're feeling the squeeze right now. Easy money dried up with rising interest rates. The tech and advertising sectors took a hit. Reddit laid off 5% of their workforce and slowed hiring.
spez doesn't care about Reddit the platform. He just wants to sell it to Wall Street and get his money. It doesn't matter if it's a flaming garbage truck as long as he gets the IPO through. So it's full speed ahead with no looking back.
Yeah, I get all that. I just figured making it look good during the IPO, even if it crumbled long term was part of the goal. I figured there would have been a bit of meeting room wargaming going on before they set the plans into motion, even if it was on a crunched timeline, how hard could it have been to get their developers to copy even some of the features of 3PA before announcing the changes. They already have developers on staff, I don't understand what they are being paid for if not to develop. Again, I understand features wanted by users and features wanted for monetization won't always be the same, but even just adding stuff like the blind accessibility features before the community browbeat them seems like it would have been an obvious part of a gameplan.
They're developing for ads. I'll quote myself from the previous week.
I lost the link, but someone looked at their job listings a few days ago. They are looking to hire people in machine learning w.r.t advertising.
And the community has been browbeating them for 8 years for better mod tools. r/AskHistorians had a long post (mirror) about Reddit's empty promises. Reddit dropping the ball on accessibility features is the norm given their history.
I wasn't on Digg so I didn't experience that break down. How does it compare? Based purely on user base numbers alone it seems like a difficult comparison.
Digg and Reddit were rivals of sorts, constantly mocking each other, occasionally brigading and competing for being the better site. Then Digg administration changed the design of the site and gave way more power to corporations and advertisers, and then everyone just packed up and went to Reddit, where they were welcomed and accepted.
User numbers were obviously much smaller, because the internet was less than half the size of what it is today (2 billion users in 2010 vs. 5 billion today).
Digg was the far larger and superior site until they fucked it up. I greatly preferred Digg's modern UI compared to Reddit's shitbox (then and now) appearance.
It's still early days with the rexodus. This is comparable to when the HD-DVD key came out and Digg admins were swinging the banhammer wildly. That's when I created my reddit account, as I'm sure did many others. It wasn't until a couple of years after that that Digg decided to play around with how posts were weighted, essentially handing over total content control to power users. That's when I really switched over, and it was still another year or so before Digg went full scorpion and redesigned the site, including eliminating comments entirely.
The comments are what I’m here for…