Pro-tip from a guy whose first computer had a monochrome display:
Going to war with your community never ends well for a forum.
Specifically going to war with power users ends very poorly.
Treating your forum community poorly is like treating your developer community poorly: You won’t see the impact at first, because it occurs on a side of the platform not immediately monetized. But you will see it.
Short term ad revenue comes from lurkers. But the content that drives them to your site? That is generated, managed, and made possible by power users.
Just to add: By the time you see the numbers _really_ declining, you're already dead, you just don't know it yet. Because at that point you need a massive lead time to fix any issues, and since the community is that force, getting community back after they left is much harder than the first go around.
So by the time they see the bleed, they would have already bled out a terminal amount of users.
Kevin rose said basically - this is revolt #5 for us, this too shall pass.
That's almost word for word what Spez is saying, this is not a good look. I think if Aaron Schwartz were on the board at Reddit, he'd likely say this exactly what reddit is NOT supposed to be. Imagine an alternate universe where Aaron lives, and he, not Steve runs reddit. I'm betting it would actually be profitable by now.
Ah yes, God emperor Aaron Schwartz can do no wrong. He may not have founded reddit, but he certainly got yc to convince the founders to let him use that title. He would certainly make every decision in the way that we would like to see those decisions be made.
Anyway, this thing is amazing ... a company whose product is based on community contributions attacking the community. I dont see how it can end well .
Shit, I dont know why the board hasn't replaced the incompetent CEO... what are they thinking? He is driving their investment to the ground, like, in real time.
I used to think reddit was cool, more intellectual, more refined as a social network, now it's more toxic than Twitter ever was, (not saying there weren't toxic sides) and it's because of the war started by Steve Huffman. Single-handedly if reddit dies, it rests on recent decisions that he won't back down from. There's also a LOT of eerie similarities to Digg -> Reddit migration of 2010.
The CEO, spez, is a founder and YC alumn. His heart is in the right place.
He has to be weighing (a) board pressure to lock down content in the face of its increased value as private ML training data, against (b) the community impact.
He’s betting the (a) training data revenue is higher than the risk of (b) community flight due to (c) the platform-size network effect.
Maybe he’s right. Look at Twitter’s community retention. Maybe not. Look at Twitter’s revenue and Mastodon’s growth.
But if you go earlier back to BBS and the early web, it just never ends well.
I would urge him to look over a broad set of historical case studies and re-evaluate. Still salvageable.
(a) makes little sense to me. All the pristine data, i.e. Reddit up to late 2022, is already packaged up, mirrored, and available to download. Everything afterwards - and especially everything from the last two months onward - is increasingly becoming adulterated with LLM-generated content, which so far is proving poisonous to LLMs when fed to them in training. In other words: the widespread access to LLMs is rapidly destroying most of the ML training value Reddit data could offer.
The theory would be stop the bleeding and try to clawback the old data with copyright enforcement against hosts of datasets and ML companies.
Get the ML companies to license the content to settle the litigation, and include all
new data as part of the deal. Then offer a similar “training only” content license to all other ML companies.
Simultaneously you have to cut down on LLM-generated content, which may prove impossible.
Where they botched it was the execution.
It should have started with community engagement strategy: (a) buy out the 3P app developers, (b) fix the official app, and (c) offer low cost API access for the community by application, (d) shower mods and content creators with honorifics and if necessary rev share on their subs.
If the whole problem is ML companies using the data for free then why not give 3rd party clients free access to the API while making ML companies pay? spez already conceded to giving free API access to basically everybody else, if 3rd party clients aren't the real problem here then this whole thing is pretty pointless for him.
> lock down content in the face of its increased value as private ML training data
That's easy to fix: Give out API keys; moderator tools, accessibility tools and third-party readers get free API keys. ML training data scrapers have to pay.
No need to go to war with the community over that.
Reddit has been constantly nagging users to use their App, so I really don't think it's about ML training data. It's about monetizing users by forcing them into their App.
These aren't mutually exclusive. (Training data and 3rd party apps api usage)
He can provide FREE API access to 3rd party mobile apps, so long as they don't give data to openai/etc.
That's a win/win. The way this is structured it's to completely squeeze out ALL 3rd party apps, and make a closed garden essentially. They're basically an open community trying to become AOL for $$.
The data for training seems not super well supported given that Reddit is still wide open to indexing even without authentication. Why bother with an API when you can crawl the site without issues?
Reddit is making money off their unpaid backs, and on top of that they want to deprive them of the tools the moderators use to do moderating, and make them pay for using those tools.
That's the reason the moderators in particular are all very much for the strike...
Then he goes and says nonsense like that, and I have to wonder about his intelligence. Twitter has lost more than half of its advertising money, all from totally unforced errors; that is SO not the pattern to imitate.
I think the point he was trying to get across in the interview was they're much smaller than Google and Meta, and you can run a company at Twitter's scale with a smaller cheaper team. It felt like it was aimed at shareholders, but poorly articulated.
This is the third wave of reddit gentrification. This has happened before. The subreddits going indefinitely closed, reddit kicking out the mods and appointing new ones. It happened before and those of us involved were very upset but all the new users just stayed on the site and did not care. I think everyone very upset this time will find the same. There's still enough trickle of Facebook refugees to replace everyone that cares this time around. And the new users are monetizable users as opposed to reddit's original or first generation facebook refugees that adopted the culture.
Except that's what startups are about these days, CEOs pump and dump the company onto Wall Street, then jump the crashing plane with their golden parachute.
I would be shocked if it takes a year. If a good chunk of people stop adding content the lurkers will stop visiting because they aren’t seeing the novelty they are looking for.
I feel like you're both not appreciating the level with which botting, AI and PR shills/astroturfing can make up for the power users.
The content will suffer in ways that will turn all of us here off, but the content already has suffered and the main forums (most of the ad dollars probably) are full of reposts and inane comments.
Reddit can just keep their Eternal September going on for a long time on endlessly recycled content that most of the users still haven't seen due to xkcd/1053 (Ten Thousand).
There's going to have to be a viable alternative emerge to really defeat reddit, otherwise it is just the only real game in town, and most of the people actually will be happy to use it.
I think that "imminent collapse" predictions of a stark failure of reddit in a year or two are probably off the mark, and the most likely outcome is going to be continued and accelerating "enshittification". My bet is the analogy is probably more like the Discovery Channel and less like Digg.
Of course at some point with all the discontent there will probably be a new social network that emerges and attracts everyone and at some point reddit will likely hit a hard stop, but I think that's more of a 5-10 year timescale since there's currently no good alternative.
That doesn't make for a very emotionally appealing story though because the bad guy is probably going to get his IPO and walk away quite wealthy. But that is our system of Capitalism for you.
[ Oh, and the 2024 election is just around the corner and reddit is likely to turn into a battleground again and that will drive both engagement and shilling/astroturfing like mad, which will all be good for profits and some nice numbers for the IPO ]
I don't know if you're gonna be right or not, but I think that so far we've seen the CEO "bad buy" pretty much always win. So I don't expect this to be different. People like him know one thing, how to turn a short term profit by fucking shit up.
That's more or less what I've been thinking. They are looking for short term profits to get those pay bonuses. That's how the CEO is compensated, and those investors want to pull their money and make them profits.
Its a major gamble, but knowing compensation packages, they'll land on a cushy golden parachute, meanwhile the workers of reddit and the community will massively suffer.
Again in this article he spoke that profits haven’t been affected. This is because advertisers have not been involved in the strike. To ramp up the action the community needs to find a way to bring pressure on advertisers to get onboard and support the community.
Which companies are the most classic reddit advertisers who want to be liked by the community? Which companies are most likely to be sympathetic to this action? Future news needs to read “Company X today bowed to pressure and joined the strike”.
When advertisers start putting their ads on hold this thing ramps up a whole nother level.
Surely there are companies that align with the values of the community. Off the top of my head; Companies that claim to value accessibility. Companies that value affordable pricing. Companies that also are reliant on building healthy communities.
Who are the big sponsors of reddit that you know of? Who would be easy to convince to come out in support and pause their ad spend for a bit?
I read somewhere that industry watchdog sites on marketing, are telling people to pull ads from Reddit, as it's not clear how this internal culture war will turn out, and basically it's a risky investment. FB / Google and even Twitter ads are much more sound at the moment.
I see moderators giving in, but each forum becomes basically /r/worldpolitics where any post goes so long as it doesn't offend Reddit Admins. Wait too see a lot more porn and gore on non porn/gore subs.
This may be the most spectacular dumpster fire I have ever seen.
Personally I am devastated that such a great community has been bisected so absolutely. If the investors were astute, Huffman would be fired immediately. Unfortunately, most investors are the opposite of astute.
The most spectacular one I've seen in recent years was the Freenode takeover and subsequent implosion. But Reddit, like Freenode and Twitter before it, seems headed for the trust thermocline: https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904
The trust thermocline thread is a great read and I believe it is accurate. It applies to way more things than just social media.
Speaking for myself, I've already lightly started casting my gaze around for potential Reddit replacements with user interfaces I don't hate at first glance. tildes.net last night rated as worthy of a second look later. This means I am already starting to transition through the trust thermocline.
I was on Digg until I wasn't. Reddit can still survive this, but the CEO is making a lot of fumbles. They need to do damage control now. They need to freeze their existing plans, possibly sack the CEO (even though my belief is that corporate CEOs are all the same and the real CEO is the board of directors).
The actual problem as I see it is the Reddit board who don't understand that Reddit does not manufacture a product. People are not looking for a place where they can see the same meme posted again that has already circulated through Twitter and Facebook et al.
I don't understand how he was not pushed out after he was caught abusing his admin privileges to edit user comments a few years back. Any employee caught doing that would have been let go immediately, yet this guy was allowed to remain as CEO.
That was childish and unethical, but it did no harm to Reddit or the Reddit brand, and nothing at all to the Reddit bottom line. It hurt Huffman's reputation, but that's it, and the board probably rightly assumed that would more or less blow over.
This is a different beast entirely, he's betting the farm on this API move and keeps doubling down. The damage that's already been done isn't going to go away, and it's damage to Reddit as a whole, not just Huffman personally.
These are not attributes you want in a CEO. They prevent the building of trust with both employees and users. Both of which you should seek when building a site like Reddit.
The seeds of his character were revealed years ago. Now we're seeing the fruits.
When I heard about the reddit boycott I was not hopeful. Boycotts like this rarely work, particularly when they have a specific end gate. Management can simply wait you out.
But actions like the CEO is taking now shows you that this one is biting. A lot of subreddits have stayed dark. That's personally inconvenient to me and many others but I, for one, am in 100% support of it.
This pattern will constantly repeat while the owners are incentivized to extract as much value as possible from those who create it. UGC sites need to be collectively owned. Think: Wikipedia.
How dare the moderators bite the hands that feed them!
And yet ironically, it's actually Reddit that is biting the hands that feed it. Without the moderators creating thriving communities for free, Reddit would be nothing but fake posts. And yet Reddit has the gall to compare the moderators to gentry. It's incredible.
And when Reddit goes IPO and the moderators get nothing... then I guess every investor and employee including Huffman and Ohanian can cash out and the community will just die a slow death because that's really the only end-game.
I figured I'd post this here because this is probably the most hilarious bit of the news yet. [1]
> Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which Musk purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
> “Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said.
lmao... The rich really are blind, at a certain point. His takeaway from the Twitter dumpster fire, is that making Twitter 10x shittier, is somehow good? I've seen Musk worshippers, but this guy must be the fucking David Koresh to the Musk cult.
Sociopaths looking to other sociopaths for inspiration. It really is that simple. All of the "Why is the Reddit CEO doing this?!?" indignation is completely unnecessary.
hahaha yeah, for real he's gone off the deep end at this point
> “If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he told NBC. “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
Is anyone taking him aside and saying.. bro I don't know if anyone told you this but you invented Reddit and the way it's designed. If you wanted moderators to be democratically elected you would have implemented it that way from that start. You have repeatedly ignored users throughout the years who complain about unfair moderation. You throw your hands in the air and say moderators can run subreddits however they see fit. You tell them to create their own subreddits and run it how you want. Now that the moderators are running subreddits in a way you don't like you want moderators to be democratically elected? Why don't you make your own subreddits or invent a new class of subreddits that are administered by Reddit? You could promote your official subreddits over the unofficial ones and make it extremely difficult to run a community on your own. Hell, you could make the official Reddit subreddit API free and charge out the ass for self moderated subreddits. There are so many ways you can solve the problems you created for yourself. You've already fractured the entire community into two sides, why not just rip off the bandaid and fully embrace a two-tier subreddit system?
How long before coordinated brigading of mod voting starts happening, so that the most popular subs can get taken over by people who want to monetize it?
The vote is like Who's Line is it Anyways? The points won't matter and everything will be made up. If it's gamed by the stay blackout crowd they'll say there was fraud and do what they want. If it gets gamed by the takeover crowd they'll accept the results as is.
However, the Washington Post should know that "the landed gentry" and the aristocracy are not synonymous. Even the dictionary definition they linked to in their own article (and, by the way, it's weird that a major newspaper just links to the dictionary) says it's just someone with money and land. For example, a CEO might have a lot of money and land, and an actual Baron might not have much. Yes, it's pedantic, and yes, it's splitting hairs, there is not a whole lot to say about a story that hasn't changed much since the last story about this, except maybe that newspapers should slow down and write better stories rather than just breathlessly covering everything as quickly as possible.
I definitely side with the users and mods who have given their time and effort on making the site what it is. I like the protest and think it's bringing attention to really just the tip of the iceberg of a big issue in society today around information asymmetry.
But I also sort of like the "aristocracy" term for mods. I've found roughly 50% of time I hit the front-page my posts are taken down by a mod for ulterior reasons. It can be infuriating. So I think some pushback might be warranted. Unfortunately not every mod is dang, patron saint of moderation, who in all my run-ins with him has been strict but fair, instructive, and non-anon (which I wish all mods were).
> roughly 50% of time I hit the front-page my posts are taken down
An unanchored percentage doesn't give much information. How many posts have you had taken down for dubious reasons? Were they all from the same mod(s)? Were they controversial to neutral(ish) third-parties?
I've never had a front-page post myself, but I've also only had a single interaction with a mod (that I am aware of) in my entire 10+ years on reddit.
> How many posts have you had taken down for dubious reasons?
Just checking my main account, of my top 5 posts of all time, 3 were taken down for dubious reasons.
Sometimes posts get modded fast, but that doesn't bother me much because often the mistake is mine. It's only when something proves popular with the masses and then the mods nix it that it feels wrong.
> Were they all from the same mod(s)?
1 is from /gifs and 2 from /todayILearned. I have not had as much of a problem with smaller subreddits or more narrow technically focused subreddits.
> Were they controversial to neutral(ish) third-parties?
No. All had upvote percentages well above 90%, and were taken down after hitting the front page. If anything I would say they were all inspirational.
Minor grievances in the big scheme of things, but in general was very annoying, as though it's ultimately trivial, it's very fun to hit the front page and feels cruel when you hit that and mods snatch it away from you anonymously. Makes me wonder if social media is just an illusion of meritocracy.
>But I also sort of like the "aristocracy" term for mods. I've found roughly 50% of time I hit the front-page my posts are taken down by a mod for ulterior reasons. It can be infuriating. So I think some pushback might be warranted.
However, wouldn't that be on Reddit too? Reddit made the conscious choice to have unpaid non-employee moderators doing the frontline grunt work. Reddit could for instance have paid, trained employee mods with a standard of conduct where there would be consistency in what to expect on a Reddit sub. If some company cheaps out and looks toward getting free labor notwithstanding they're for-profit, it's not really the free labor's fault if they're not good, there's an inconsistent work product, etc as you get what you pay for, so if some company isn't even paying at all, well that's on the company for doing that...
Good point. I think mods of big subs should be required to be non-anonymous. BUT, they should also be paid because it is a ton of work. At the very least some kind of stipend.
It does surprise me if Reddit was not paying the mods of top subs.
I don't like it but Reddit will win in the end. Mods will he ousted and in a couple of years no one will remember this.
Why? Because network effects are stronger than outrage. The CEO is right in thinking he holds the winning hand because he controls the platform the network is built on.
Maybe he owns the technology that powers reddit, but he does not control the community. Social media platforms have fallen before. Reddit only gained traction after Digg fell.
Reddit just became much less cool, and lost the last vestiges of its 'open' and 'free' image.
This is actually a huge problem for them - the general discourse on Reddit reflects values that the company clearly no longer holds. They're not as entrenched as they seem to think they are. Reddit produces zero content.
Reddit is just a forum host who's pissing off its users.
The funny thing is, reddit had a really good crisis communication consultant when they had their outage earlier this year. (Everybody knows now that the wokerati made the servers gay, instead that reddits IT needs to be fired.) So why don't they just pay that guy.
Steve is King, the board is Upper Nobility, Admins are the palace guards / military, Power Mods are the Nobility, lower mods with less control over subs i.e. ancillary staff are serfs tilling the land. Everybody else is basically a tourist.
This whole thing seems just crazy to me. Here's how I imagine Reddit dying.
Day 0: The API is shut off / too expensive / whatever.
Day 1: Moderators leave because their tools / apps were taken away, or because they were removed from their position by administrators.
Day 2-365: Popular communities end up having more and more flamewars / low-quality comments / off-topic posts, etc. A second tier of moderators filled the power vacuum, but they aren't as good as the original moderators. They mostly stepped up to fulfill their desire to control, not their desire to curate and nurture.
Day 366-500: The average user realizes they don't enjoy reading the subreddits they used to frequent. All the comments are mean and all the posts are off-topic. Their comments don't get upvoted. They stop posting, but keep lurking, occasionally.
Day 500: The average user realizes, after refreshing r/all whenever they're bored and having nothing interesting come up, they don't need to visit Reddit anymore.
Day 530: The first derivative of active user count trends below zero.
Day 1000: "An update on Reddit: it's been an amazing journey."
I don't care about Reddit that much (but do read it nearly every day), and I think this is the dumbest thing they could possibly do. If people work for you for free, you do everything you can to make them happy. Let them use their ad-blocker. Let them trumpet a random social cause once a year. Do not touch. It's a sensitive balance; without curation, your whole site dies. You can't make decisions that piss off the curators and creators.
I think you have a little more leeway with the lurkers. It would probably have been more profitable and less harmful to just charge every user a 1-time $5 fee. It's a tested model (hello Metafilter), and it doesn't change anyone's day-to-day. At this point, it's too late, people will burn the headquarters to the ground if you suggest it... but it could have worked if you just needed cash.
Some random off-topic thoughts:
1) The reason people need third-party apps is because the first-party app is terrible. How many years has "new Reddit" been a thing, and the video player still doesn't work? Why does clicking on the page outside of the comment-composition textarea cancel writing a comment? Like do the designers not know that Windows and Linux pass window-focus clicks through to the application (whereas MacOS eats that click)?
2) Reading Reddit during all of this, and most people don't notice or care. That's why this isn't a crisis today; but something that will sloooowly get worse over time as moderators / power users leave the platform. It will be a very slow death, hidden by general user growth (new people being born or whatever) for quite a while. So if things look good to you today, you're not out of the woods.
3) Stop letting the CEO talk and get a different PR department. Elon Musk can be a jerk to everyone because he's the richest person in the world. You are not.
Why is Huffman taking interviews when he could have just had the company not engage and let the community sort themselves out. They'd probably need to eat lost advertising revenue on the locked subs but that's a one time cost.
Specifically going to war with power users ends very poorly.
Treating your forum community poorly is like treating your developer community poorly: You won’t see the impact at first, because it occurs on a side of the platform not immediately monetized. But you will see it.
Short term ad revenue comes from lurkers. But the content that drives them to your site? That is generated, managed, and made possible by power users.