this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
454 points (96.1% liked)
Technology
59708 readers
5518 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Seems like a terrible investment, I can’t see what they can possibly do to add value. Everybody who wants to use Reddit is already on it and anything they do to try and milk it will just lose them users.
I've had the impression for a long time that Reddit could stand to lose a large part of its users in order to be more profitiable. The nerds getting into long winded "ackchually" "debates" are making the site worse for the meme scrollers and they are also not the type to click on ads. They're not trying to attract more users, they want to maximise revenue from the existing pool. I don't think it's a coincidence Reddit has been slowly moving away from "discussion board" and towards image and short video (like the other three big platforms) because that's where the money's at.
My prediction is that shortly after the IPO we'll see .old go away, and a further sterilizing of subreddits ability to forge unique identities. The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators, buuuut they haven't had trouble after the API debacle so maybe there are more people willing to provide free labor than I assume!
I mean YouTube comment sections were known for years to be an unmoderated nightmare of just people saying the absolute dumbest shit.
YouTube was and still is the most popular video site.
I think reddit has just stopped caring about the real content of the comments since, like you said, they've pretty much pivoted to images and video. Expect the comments section to be further eroded as well, in the name of needing less moderation. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see Reddit do an "AI" push where the "AI" is mostly just replacing moderators with what amounts to a more advanced automod.