Two IMO on-point excerpts of the article:
The highest-ranked replies are very critical of the post. “What good is our feedback when reddit seems perfectly happy to ignore all of it?” wrote one user. “What’s the point?” Another pointed out that Huffman called mods “landed gentry.” “Show, don’t tell,” wrote another user — to which the admin replied, “Agreed.”
“A beginning of what?” replied one user. “This solves nothing, and just wastes everybody’s time.”
Reddit’s administration is sounding more and more like an abusive SO trying to gaslight you into staying in the relationship. “Baby I’ll listen to you, I swear.”
The irony is that while Reddit tried to commercialise what it’s users perceive (whether accurately or not) as a community. It’s like your local picnic spot or doggy park that you’ve been going to for years all of a sudden started charging an entry fee. That alienates consumers.
The unfortunate truth is that Reddit could have ended up being a very profitable respected business had the leadership decided to monetise it’s venture in a different model.
Ultimately consumers have had their fill with the perceived corporate greed culture and in this author’s view is the main drive away from Reddit by early adopters to other platforms such as this one.
Time will tell if the middle majority will follow in time.
That’s a great analogy, specially if the hypothetical doggy park (or picnic spot) had multiple kiosks selling stuff - so the park owners already had some profit. As soon as the fee pops up, the owners do get a bit more short-term profit… but then people stop visiting the park, and that reduces the associated profit from both the fee and the kiosks, making the park even less profitable in the long run. And the alienated customers might not come back, even if the park owners realise the mistake and get rid of the fee.
My bet is that they’ll leave. Not due to the alienation, but because the content there will become trash. They’ll simply disengage, and their disengagement will snowball into more disengagement.
This is exactly what happens most of the time. Check out the short Twitter thread on the thermocline of trust.
This is a better link to explain that concept: https://every.to/p/breaching-the-trust-thermocline-is-the-biggest-hidden-risk-in-business
On the surface I agree with you but please remember that content quality need not be high. 9gag is apparently still going despite, well… Points vaguely at 9gag
Yes, the quality can be garbage, but I think a lot of the automatic scrollers require both quantity and low repost rate so they don’t run into stale content while they’re having their daily scroll. I think quality will go first, then the repost level will rise (and I know, it’s already high, lol, but it’ll get worse), and eventually either the quantity overall will go, or all the content will be created by bots, which will eventually drive off even the casual users. And when enough users go, the advertisers will go, and that is what will actually put Reddit on the rocks. It might take several years to happen, based on the changes they have already made, but they have the power to accelerate it if they fail hard enough.
What really creates train wreck appeal for me is how hard they are deliberately failing. I agree with the general sentiment that it’s profit-motivated, and they have to do something to get profits, but they are missing a lot of sane, likely-to-work options in favor of pipe dreams and emotional abuse.
Ah, but if reddit loses 2/3 of its traffic after churning out 9gag quality content (9gag has 150m to reddit’s 430m) i don’t think their shareholders would call that a win
Like it wasn’t alr bad years prior.
A better analogy would be the park banned outside food and set up a mediocre food court instead.