The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.
That's just straight up incompetence. -Everything- is negotiable at the end of the day. To draw a line in the sand like that and refuse to negotiate at all is extremely childish. It's the kind of thing that's appropriate on a 5th grade playground, not in the world of a purportedly serious business that's looking to IPO.
The counterparty might expect that you are honest when you say it is not negotiable and the reasonable course of action is to re-evaluate working with you as a business partner.
This burns the platform as you destroy features the userbase has come to depend on, see all of the companies and government entities that stopped offering anything (timetable updates, support, etc) on Twitter given the recent burning of API partners that Twitter followed through on.
Governments should meet their constituents where they are. There should always be a self-hosted channel by the government, but apart from that also publishing to common social media sites seems like a great service for people.
I'm pretty sure the reddit trend is from people increasingly including "reddit" in their searches, a trend which is an indictment of Google's search quality deterioration over time, as well as Reddit's search never working well in the first place
The FB trend is amazing, however I suspect the increasing uptake of mobile devices and use of the FB app played a role in the decline of web search. Seems we can't filter by mobile vs desktop.
> "It's the kind of thing that's appropriate on a 5th grade playground"
I'm honestly starting to think that a great many 5th graders may just be a good deal more mature than a lotta corporate and political leaders these days.
> “Protest and dissent is important… The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
If someone is negotiating, you can negotiate with them. Punitive action like boycotta can help put pressure on negotiations, but often the whole point is to force someone to negotiate on something they are currently not negotiating on. The other side not negotiating isn’t a problem with protest and action, its the problem motivating it.
Reddit is a for-profit company that attracted its user base by pretending to be a public good. Now they are behaving like a company and the users are mad about it. Maybe they will be mad enough to fuel an alternative that truly is set up like a public good, but I doubt it.
Ultimately it doesn’t cost that much to serve some links and text. Video hosting (especially live streamed!) can get expensive, but for example HN runs on a single server with a standby[1]. Reddit’s technical moat is negligible. It’s the network effect that matters.
I'm not so sure the network effect is significant to Reddit. Forum going is a solitary activity, not a social one. Reddit does not become less attractive if your friends don't use it. In fact, it would not become less attractive if there were no people and the site's characters were powered by sufficiently advanced LLM models or some such. Any reliance on other humans is merely an implementation detail, not the core offering.
Humans no doubt at this time provide the simplest, most affordable, and best implemented implementation, and for that reason you do need some number of humans to provide the software outputs in practice. As LLMs improve that may not always be the case, but we'll assume for today it is. But, again, I'm not sure a service like Reddit benefits from more and more people ad infinitum as the network effect would. More and more just creates more noisy outputs.
I suggest that so long as your inputs create suitable outputs, say, ~75% of the time then you'll be happy. If even just one person can stay on top of providing that then you don't gain from even more people. In practice, that would be a lot for one person to keep up with, but by the time you have hundreds of people the returns start to quickly diminish. In fact, too many people, again, can create too much noise, which reduces the quality of service.
Reddit gained in popularity because it had, and arguably still has, the best generally available forum software. As we all know, Reddit only staved off certain death a number of years ago because the best forum software that came before it was rewritten and became unusable in that rewrite, prompting a migration to Reddit.
I stays popular because, on top of the quality of software, it benefits from the stickiness effect. Now that people are accustomed to using it, it's easy to keep on using it. One might find that Lemmy, or whatever, works just as well, but "just as well" isn't sufficient reason to put in the effort to try. This is the only real "moat" Reddit has.
But the network effect? The network effect can actually be detrimental to forums. Reddit has been able to stay relevant with a large network because it has done well in avoiding the network effect, pushing users into small, isolated groups.
> I'm not so sure the network effect is significant to Reddit. Forum going is a solitary activity, not a social one. Reddit does not become less attractive if your friends don't use it. In fact, it would not become less attractive if there were no people and the site's characters were powered by sufficiently advanced LLM models or some such. Any reliance on other humans is merely an implementation detail, not the core offering.
What? No. This completely misses the point of highly specialised, high-quality subreddits like r/AskHistorians that would be worthless if there weren't actually other people on it.
If I wanted to talk to an LLM, I would do so directly, but most of the time I don't.
If Reddit silently replaced any outside human involvement with generative actors of sufficient quality and believability one day, how would you notice?
There is nothing about the service that indicates you are interacting with humans, aside from our knowledge of how it is likely implemented, and goes to lengths to hide that there are humans involved. That it is implemented using humans is just an implementation detail.
> I guess this is the same kind of question as "how do you know you don't live in the matrix?".
Not really. The canonical example of tech that does benefit from the network effect is the telephone. The more people on the telephone network, the more useful it becomes. A phone network that silently replaces each node with LLM agents would soon become apparent as when you catch up with the people you thought you were calling in the flesh, discrepancies will start to emerge.
But Reddit (and HN for that matter) tries to hide the existence of people. While I assume you are human, I don't really know. I don't know your name. I don't know what you look like. I don't know where you live. I know nothing. And, frankly, I don't need to because you are not part of the experience. That you are (probably) human is just an implementation detail. Whether you are human or an LLM is completely immaterial. What human participation there might be when using a forum is done so in solitude. It is not a social experience.
The reddit mods are getting what they deserve, they turned reddit into a cancerous echo chamber where the slightest hint of wrong think will get you banned. They made their bed now they get to sleep in it.
Karma is sweet and as someone once said "Popcorn tastes good".
My account on reddit is 17 years old, I have watched reddit go from being a smart, nice place where people share knowledge and experiences to a narcissistic black hole of snark and cringe and the new tone was set by the mods.
The only sub I have been banned by is the web dev sub because I replied to some one who said “anyone who uses PHP is an idiot” with “only an idiot would have that opinion”, I was perma banned from webdev and the other person was not. I know many people who have been banned for less.
A house cleaning of the mods would do reddit good. There are some good mods but they are rare and only handle a few niche subs.
Out of interest I looked up your Reddit profile and read those comments, and whilst I (personally) think it's slightly harsh that you were banned rather than warned it's not particularly surprising...
On the thread announcing PHP 8.1's release you first posted:
> If only PHP had a niche like the web... if only. Also the only reason python is used in ML is because data scientist are dumb and can’t write a loop to save their lives, all the advanced ML stuff is not written in python, just manipulated with python because its an “easy” language.
> Also its C++ > c# for game dev.
Then in the context of someone asking whether its' worth learning PHP and a user replying that it's not worth it versus other server side languages you replied with:
> It’s almost like your comment comes from a place of ignorance and or stupidity.
Calling people dumb and stupid isn't really conductive to positive and good-faith discussions - if you don't want to put in the effort to a reply simply downvote and move on - similarly if a mod doesn't want to have to deal with discussions trending to toxicity they'll ban and move on.
So you want to remove potentially good mods from communities because you have had bad experiences with bad mods from different communities. Does that really make sense to you?
Is there some special features that make Reddit a must for small/niche community building? Or is Reddit's value purely that it has the most users?
I'm failing to see why Alien Blue, RiF, other 3rd parties cannot create a replacement platform. I'm sure there may be some context why (feel free to inform me).
>Or is Reddit's value purely that it has the most users?
Most users and now that SEO spam has corrupted search results, Reddit often has the most useful answers. This is why reddit also has a karma farming and astroturfing problem since the spammers are trying to inject themselves into search results from the platform as well.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if there's not a reddit fork or mass exodus when a compelling replacement comes along. So far it's early days and much like mastodon vs Twitter, there's not a yet a critical mass on the replacement.
Every one the site doesn't have good ARR. While investors may fund these now, they are funding on the expectation of getting their money back. And as of now enshittification for ads is the only proven way to earn revenue that is good enough for the valuation. Donation model or premium model(like discord or reddit premium) doesn't work.
As they are a company trying to make profit, isn't it their _literal job_ to find a way to make the site profitable without alienating a significant chunk of the userbase?
Because, from this standpoint, it just looks like they're incapable of doing their jobs properly. Especially Steve.
> to find a way to make the site profitable without alienating a significant chunk of the userbase?
Is it? Apple is the most profitable company and by most metric a well performing company and they never shied away from alienating their users(by things like removing 32 bits, headphone jack, iphone mini etc). Google is the same where they killed many services used by millions.
> Is it? Apple is the most profitable company and by most metric a well performing company and they never shied away from alienating their users(by things like removing 32 bits, headphone jack, iphone mini etc).
Apple has intentionally raised it's userbase inside of a walled garden from the start of the second Jobs era. The Apple experience is to be told what is good and why. Yes they are very effective at this but I see no point of comparison with how Reddit has evolved - or failed to - over the last decade or so.
>Google is the same where they killed many services used by millions
Google are as bad as Reddit, if not worse, for the same reasons that I gave. They are an ad company with a slew of vanity projects that wouldn't exist without ads, or only exist to deliver more ads or provide data for more accurate targeting of ads.
> Google are as bad as Reddit, if not worse, for the same reasons that I gave
No one is denying that the things reddit or Google did are bad for the users. The discussion was whether it is bad for the company's shareholders.
As a company, Google kind of succeeded even after killing lot of products and only keep the products which are relevant for the ads at least till now. And keep the focus on scaling ads at the cost of user satisfaction.
That's just straight up incompetence. -Everything- is negotiable at the end of the day. To draw a line in the sand like that and refuse to negotiate at all is extremely childish. It's the kind of thing that's appropriate on a 5th grade playground, not in the world of a purportedly serious business that's looking to IPO.