Mastodawn

I don’t care about Reddit but I still can’t get over what a devastating self-own it was to say “unlike 3rd party apps, Reddit isn’t profitable.”

Like you run a site with one of the internet’s most recognizable brands, completely driven by volunteer moderators and people posting free content, and you STILL can’t make a viable business model from it? Absurd.

Dale Price Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral Not to mention how he called it “profit driven” to double down on the things that had already failed to make them a profit, when the profitable apps were mostly doing the opposite

hypnobeard Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral I think you need to add an unspoken “…enough” onto the end of that statement. The VCs are the ones driving this, I’m sure; Reddit’s corpos just don’t have the backbone to stand up to them.

Anca Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral @briankrebs CEO’s are expensive

@SasquatcherGeneral it's also so disingenuous, these types of companies are unprofitable because their goal is growth, not profit. That's why these VC funded companies always have much larger R&D spend and employee count than you would ever guess.

slyborg Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral @briankrebs Bring in Elon Musk to fire 75% of the staff and stiff all of your vendors and get rid of moderation (of stuff not about Elon) and Reddit will be just as profitable as … Twitter…

Joe ❌👑Jun 15, 2023

@slyborg @SasquatcherGeneral @briankrebs But the moderators are volunteers, doing it for free, and now they are striking. They were not a cost to Reddit, just the reverse.

Bill Woodcock Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral And there are lots of us who are paying significant monthly subscription fees. So, yeah, what gives?

That Man Jun 14, 2023

@woody @SasquatcherGeneral were

Miguel de Icaza ᯅ🍉Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral @briankrebs seems like they poured all of their R&D budget into the pursuit of NFTs.

nonlinear Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral And you then manage to alienate your free labor.

Like.

🇺🇦Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral the thing that really struck me was that the chosen approach would have made the third party apps *more* profitable if they priced so they wouldn't be at risk if they estimated too low. The apps would have no choice but to use fixed pricing, but reddit would only get per unit pricing effectively making reddit the one getting piecework pay.

Kyle Sawatsky Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral The only thing I'll really miss (and this is more of a Google failure) is that pretty much the only good search results occur if you put "<query> reddit".

It's the only way to get opinions and information from (probably) real people.

Standard search results are just SEO'd to hell and back copy-pasted and/or AI generated useless stuff.

Internet search is really broken.

Musser Jun 15, 2023

@ksawatsky @SasquatcherGeneral There’s a tons of forums which have existed along side Reddit which will have the answers to your questions. What reddit offered wasn’t unique, they just collected all different forums to one platform.

Marcos Kirsch Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral I’m surprised about how the CEO has shown ZERO appreciation towards their power users, the app developers that made accessing their service a better experience, and the moderators working for them in a voluntary basis.

He views them as a temporary pest at best, the enemy at worse.

That and the lies and gaslighting.

Jonah Stein Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral In fairness, Reddit advertising is far less intrusive vs Google/Meta or even Twitter.

Reddit users, while we certainly scroll, seem less likely to click on the "usual" targeted clickbait.

OTOH, I don't know why people click on FB ads either.

@SasquatcherGeneral Tumblr can't either, because its users think paying for things is offensive and actively root for it to lose money.

➡ [email protected]Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral there was a time when people donated to reddit and they transparently showed their fundraising goals. it could have been profitable if they'd focused on community engagement and not investors.

Negative12DollarBill Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral
Over 400 million MAU, 2 billion hits per month. Relatively lightweight site compared to say YouTube. Still they can’t figure it out.

Officer-involved pooping Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral I wonder what the effective labor cost of their mod community is?
Obviously could be priced anywhere from US job salary scale to mechanical turk, but I do wonder.
Seems like a 10+ year conflict of user-generated content vs profit motive/model coming home to roost.

Officer-involved pooping Jun 15, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral found this, via
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blackout-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-rcna89544

Reddit CEO slams protesters, says he'll change moderator rules

Steve Huffman, the Reddit CEO, said in an interview that a user protest on the site this week does not have wide support and is led by a minority of moderators.

NBC News

Officer-involved pooping Jun 15, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral cited research: https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19318

Measuring the Monetary Value of Online Volunteer Work | Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Noah Cook Jun 14, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral Wait, this is the same website that is preparing for an IPO? I mean, I know the government isn't very good at making money but I was under the impression that one wants to make a company look as profitable as possible in advance of an IPO?

Rougecrown Jun 15, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral they tried to make the NFT shit which didn’t pan out. What a shocker

🍄🌈🎮💻🚲🥓🎃💀🏴🛻🇺🇸Jun 15, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral at least Twitter built a capable web app before choking off their third-party developers. Reddit couldn't even manage that.

sabik Jun 15, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral @luciedigitalni
Right? Other companies in that situation clear 40% profit margins

Extinction (our fate)Jun 15, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral It should have never been a business then. Like Twitter. It's more like a public utility. They should have offered it to a nonprofit to run, or turned themselves into a nonprofit. But no! They're tech bros. Gotta follow the carrot of cashing out.

Capitalism is a ponzi scheme.

Mika Jun 15, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral

someone help me budget this:

moderation: 0 dollars
content: 0 dollars
NFT bullshit nobody wants: 250 million dollars
servers: 10 million dollars
office space: 500k dollars

(random guess numbers idk how much they spend on each thing)

Fabio Romeo Jun 15, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral how well will go an IPO from a company whose CEO leads it for almost 20 YEARS and STILL could not figure out how to make money, and pisses off a community that is what it is because THEY put in the time for free, and they can simply burn it all to the ground if they wishes so?

Joe ❌👑Jun 15, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral Yes, it seems hard to understand why, when most of the labor is farmed out to volunteers, they get a huge volume of traffic, and they have ads, that they are still losing money. Where is it going?

wrosecrans Jun 15, 2023

@SasquatcherGeneral "It's hard for Reddit to run a profit," the CEO announced from the prestigious Reddit HQ building in the heart of San Francisco, in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the hemisphere.

Surely, third party apps are to blame?