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Reddit IPO: Company's biggest risk is its reliance on unpredictable users
(www.moneycontrol.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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The wild thing about last summer was it revealing how remarkably stable their unpaid labor pool is. Take away their tools, mock them in the national press and on the site, and the worst most of them will do is participate in a perfunctory protest. They weren't willing to go to war or even organize in a meaningful manner.
It makes me think of how nationalism has sent millions to their deaths. Who needs money? People will put themselves through hell just to protect an identity.
The users haven't left, that's for sure, but didn't the mods of most of the larger subs (something like 48/50 I thought?) leave? Some unwillingly actually...
But if you mean the enormously long tail of smaller subs, then yeah, that happened, fo sho.
Yeah, mostly in terms of the day-to-day operations of the site remaining largely business as usual, at least in terms of what matters to corporate. Plenty of impotent response abounded, too. For example, one of the largest subreddits, /r/games, never even joined the 48-hour blackout.
There's an argument to be made that content quality is down, but that's a subjective measure, and I'm not even going to try to unpack my own personal bias on that front given I moved here because of this in the first place.
I stayed awhile longer, but prepped for the worse that came yesterday.
Honestly, I think it did impact the content objectively for the worse. Now that I'm fully moved into Lemmy I'm recognizing that a bunch of subreddits basically declined into irrelevance after the blackout (and I'm only remembering them as I try to recreate my subscription list here).
And it kinda affected the vibe of the front page. As of now, I'd describe current reddit as very meta-naval gazing. So many of the posts are basically rival subreddits going "nuh-uh" and "yuh-huh" to each other. There may also be a new algo in use that's basically encouraging fights between subreddits?
Edit: I should clarify, I think there's objectively less actual content with now the literal same content being posted multiple times but with different takes on it.
I was mostly in the niche subreddits anyway, and it's frustrating that Reddit is essentially still the only searchable website for non-sponsored content in hundreds (if not thousands) of niches. Quality in my niches is still the same ebb and flow that it was.
There still are questions of validity, though. Message boards like Reddit haven't really had their payola/Gamergate/astroturfed-FCC-comments moment yet.
Yeah, it helps that's what my initial prep was: migrating over to discord for niches. It doesn't hit all the marks you mentioned, but it's good enough for me (for now, it's probably gonna have its true enshittening moment too but it's still usable for me at least).
Making the final move here was for the news aggregation with some community discovery, and so far it feels like it's adequate here too.
Same - well, at least in regard to r/popular, though I did keep going back to the small niche sub that I used to mod and felt a connection to, but while I couldn't call it "dead" now, it definitely does not seem as vibrant as it used to be, and nowadays I only check it perhaps once a week, and haven't commented in a LONG while. Just people trying to drum up content, sorta like here except more inane posts there vs. just silence here. I prefer here regardless:-P.
A couple of months ago, r/popular seemed mostly people arguing with bots - or else I couldn't tell the difference and that is just as bad - while in my smaller sub at least it is people wishing they had something to say, and arguing with what looks like literal and actual children.
Wherever the actual content creators went, they don't seem to be on Reddit anymore.
I'm not sure how much moderators could even do.
I was actually there so my view of events is pretty biased, but watching mods get removed from their position and replaced with more complying people made me think that the power dynamic was insurmountable. Regardless of how much free labor they perform, moderators don't actually get bargaining power in return, Reddit employees untimately are above them to defend the company's interests. Realistically, the function of a Reddit mod is to spare admins the grunt work of ground-level moderation decisions.