I wish Reddit had gone the way of VLC -- keep your core product, the thing people liked, and stop chasing profits. Why do so many of these companies fall to the profit motive and lose their "soul"?
This is why we need to making something like a digital commons co-op, maybe Mozilla, maybe Wikipedia Foundation or maybe Archive but Reddit has replaced usenet, and we need a site run for the people.
Since the web is based around single domains, the source runs behind those domains, this balkanizes what we see and who runs it, creating a winner take all dynamic. Unknowingly, the structure of the web makes it ideal to supplant public protocols for private walled gardens. Sure you can use a "standard" client to connect, but you are relying on the good of the owner, who can _pivot_ at any time.
Right? It's almost as if they have expenses to pay for. They provide value and they're entitled to earn a profit off of it. As a small business owner myself, I'm surprised by the amount of people who expect everything to be free.
reddit was once a small business in 2016 that turned plenty profit. Then someone got it into their head to turn it into a VC company, quintupled the headcount, took $150M investment from China, you know how it goes.
So now you have a whole bunch of people doing a reenactment of Silicon Valley, only the actual site experience for users has basically not changed since 10 years now (except
"corporate innovations" like nagging you to install their app so people playing startup have their hockeystick curve).
It's a common phenomena. Look to Strava or Patreon, perfectly successful businesses that are instead exploding headcount and spending like a cancer, while never actually changing the core experience (except for worse).
God, this one baffles me. I feel like you could write that website and app with 5-10 skilled employees and a handful more for support and administrative overhead, skim your 10% of a good chunk of all Internet microtransactions, and retire early. Then they go and nuke all their goodwill trying to milk every cent they can out of the process[1]. What the fuck? Just make a product people want to use and charge a fair price for it; payment processing with a small blog platform is not rocket science. No part of this requires 60 million dollars and 100+ employees[2].
You're underestimating the abuse, moderation, support, and fraud burden that results from doing so much sheer volume. So that's a lot of support people right there, and those support people will need a fair number of engineers writing the tools they use to do their job.
YEP. Every site that allows user-generated content has to deal with people who want to make stuff near, or past, the boundaries of what is legal and/or moral. If you move money around then you have to start worrying about people scamming each other, using you as a tax dodge or a laundry, and you have a whole bunch of fun new regulations to comply with regarding that sort of stuff as well.
The typical Silicon Valley Disruptor approach is to just wave away all responsibility except the absolute minimum the law compels you to do.
Unfortunately this suffers from the 'Effective Target Audience: Assholes' effect.
It's basically impossible to start a YT or Patreon or Twitter alternative without either accidentally or actively pandering to people who have been kicked out of the main competitor, which mostly happen to be neonazis and/or fascists.
As such, most alternatives will immediately have their main pages full of hate speech and nazi propaganda. Even if there is a part of the user base that just wants an alternative to the Big Thing for other reasons, it quickly gets taken over and drowned out. Finally, after some time, the site just gets labeled as 'The Nazi {Patreon, Twitter, ..}' and every member becomes guilty by association, the community is just pure fash, and sometimes even gets dropped by advertisers/payment processors after public outcry.
See: voat (full of hate speech, basically a shelter for all banned reddit communities), gab (actively pandering to alt-right), subscribestar (paypal dropped them after public outrage), ...
I think the only 'alternative' I've seen not evolve into this is Mastodon, and that's probably because of how openly anti-fascist the first adopters (and developers) were, and because they didn't need to turn any profit.
I wonder if the same company could silo content to address this effect. Essentially have the same staff support multiple sites with identical backends. One which is child friendly, one racists, one for porn, ect. If creators get flagged too much, they just get bumped to a different silo, but you still take their money.
You can already do subscription products, but it's not quite enough to replace Patreon. That's about all I need to start nudging my handful of patrons over.
I tried one, called GameWisp, when a creator I support moved over there, but they skipped the "skilled employee" part. My subscription start date was rendered in their web app as "(null)", which doesn't inspire confidence in a payment processor. The creator shortly moved back to Patreon. Sigh.
The problem with this change is not that Reddit has costs that they are trying to recoup. The problem for me is that much of the user-generated quality content that Reddit is trying to monetize was created, by users, under certain assumptions. Then those assumptions were changed for a short-term monetization gain.
If they initially said that they will be requiring sing-in to read comments, push app over browser, etc. it would be just fine (but then I suspect they would not have any quality content to monetize). Just my 2c.
The problem isn't making profit. The problem is when they see profit, and get greedy and want more and more and more and then become delusional about the "value" provided. Then all these people come out of the woodwork who are only looking to make money and don't care about the rest of it, and it starts going down hill. We're not expecting it to be free, just somewhat reasonable. And you know what? When it becomes unreasonable we quit going and it dies. So maybe they should listen to us a little bit.
Nah, on place like reddit you can easily cover costs by ads. Almost nothing is really free online these days. But greed is never too far away and who doesn't want to have latest yacht, mcmansion etc.
They could have followed the Craig's List model of monetizing just enough to cover all the costs and keep the site running, without overly focusing on revenue growth sacrificing what made the site great in the first place.
I admit this source isn't very reliable, but craigslist does more than just "get by," in fact if you're comparing it to any company besides FAANG it is extremely successful. It does so well the investors didn't even push for an IPO, they happily accept dividends.
Sure, if your only goal is dollars and cents. People should have more, and better, goals than /just/ money. This obsession with only turning a buck is why we can’t have nice things that last.
Let me rephrase it then, if my company made $0 profit, I would be unable to afford my mortgage/bills/insurance, and would have to get a job, taking me away from my company.
That's not entirely true? I mean unless you're not paying yourself then absolutely I agree with you. But we're making it sound like these companies "reddit" back in the day wasn't turning a profit to pay for the mortgage/bills/insurance or hosting. They were it just wasn't to the extent were investors and the owners could buy private jets and mansions. Not sure if that's a bad thing or a good thing but I do believe they were living well off.
It's a for-profit company. Chasing profits is the entire point. If that wasn't the point then they would have an alternative organizational structure and enjoy the various tax benefits that come with it, like VLC does.
The pursuit of profit is not an absolute, though. If you choose a route to profit that ends with the company getting sued out of existence, then you didn't really do a good job. Judiciousness is implicit, by necessity, in the goal; the argument then comes down to what the best sustainable route to profit is.
Unfortunately, VLC is developed by VideoLAN, a non-profit organization whereas Reddit is a for profit company which by definition they will chase for profits.
