Well shucks, all they did was drive out their most active content makers and cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free moderation labor. Who could possibly have seen this coming?
This became an instant classic lol, do we know who the artist is?
That was one of the reasons they killed the api: to support ad growth. Unfortunately they failed to realize the combination of ad-blocking browsers and users just quitting the site from losing client access means they were never going to hit pre-IPO revenue targets.
Had they instead focused on affordable API pricing and driving subscriber revenues up, they would have exceeded revenue targets.
source: I was in a somewhat similar position (not quite the same, no third party client), but chose different and found myself making more subscription revenue than ad revenue thanks to a viewer base more than happy to pay more.
Reddit’s value as a social media platform drops as it’s value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that’s was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.
Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.
In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.
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Yes, I agree. In the end, Reddit lives off its reputation, just like every social media platform. Seriously, is there an effect that when you’re long enough the CEO of a company, you begin making decisions where it is obvious that they will negatively impact the user base and thus long-term survivability of a company? Is there a term for that?
I imagine your priorities become different.
You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.
Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.
Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.
Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”
I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. It’s even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.
I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.
You make some good points. I’d agree if it wasn’t for the API changes that fucked all the 3rd party apps and 3rd party tools like automod.
Even if it was priced well it still somehow filtered NSFW content out.
They clearly wanted more market share for the reddit app by any means necessary. It’s sad for all the mods that were ignored.
Sounds like Enshittification.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking. Examples of alleged enshittification have included Amazon, Bandcamp, Facebook, Google Search, Quora, Reddit, and Twitter.Thanks :)
You mean hubris?
Thanks, yes! Well, another word learned :)
More like stupris, amirite
When having a bacon and egg breakfast the hen participants the pig is committed.
as its* value to advertisers rises
Honestly feels like a scam for rich people. Spez just has to convince some suckers that Reddit would be profitable as he cashes out. Then they’re left with a dead platform as they kill it with ads and astroturfing.
This is honestly what I feel like most businesses are these days, just scams to convince other rich people to invest, so they can cash out early on. Basically the same stuff all the crypto currencies were doing.
Someone needs to redo this with the answer being “s p e z”
Is he Australian?
No idea
Weren’t these assholes supposed to IPO like 6 months ago? lol
They were totally lined up to IPO. I think somebody told him to go all musk on it. I’m still not exactly sure how taking a big fat shit on the user communities face was supposed to impress the investors.
Anyone else posted this yet?
This reminds me… we need an “I’m sorry Garfield” community on Lemmy.
You mean “I’m sorry John”?
Fuck. You’re right.
Stick to your guns. I’m sorry John has been done. Now is the time for Garfield’s comeuppance.
No, i want ‘im sorry garfield’.
Be the change you want to see in the world, TacoButtPlug.
You’re right.
why does garfield have preposterously large bazongas
* basagnas
Does this represent some higher meaning or is it just Garfield fucking spez?
Yes
What a terrible day to have eyes
Looks like someone’s got a case of the Mondays
So many questions about this
It’s referencing this meme.
Ohhh thank you!
No problem, I know it can be hard to figure out the context.
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Maybe logoff in the new year.
Critical hit to my self esteem.
Ya do realize that internet access is pretty much universal, dudes well within the acceptable posting amout id expect. It aint 20010 no more, everyone has a pocket computer and can do it damn near everywhere. Fuck the mountains near me are now scattershot on signal rather than completely worthless like they were back in 2014.
Fuck spez
Nothing says you care to advertisers like single handedly blowing up your website by cutting off 25% or more of its userbase.
Do you have a citation on that 25% figure?
We did it, Lemmy!
I’m doing my part, fuck spez
Do you want to know more?
Yes
Let’s for a second take stock of what’s happening here.
The ad revenue is falling short of the projected prediction of what it was supposed to be. As in the profit from ad revenue did not reach that arbitrary number.
Reddit is still grossly profitable.
This is the same kind of headline that says Facebook lost 11 bagillion dollars but in reality they didn’t lose a dime they just didn’t make as much as they wanted to.
The difference with Facebook is that it is a public company, so it does have to grow every year to have value for investors.
Reddit doesn’t. It’s existing private investors can splot the profit and be just fine. They just want a huge payout that will only come from an IPO.
And the issue with consistent growth in billion dollar companies is that it’s not sustainable. We can’t just keep pilling on profits on top of profits to sate investors insecurities.
These morons will try though, their strategy invariably seems to be building the Jenga tower as high as possible, thinking they’ll be “quick” or “smart” enough to sell their shares before it tumbles.
It’s gambling, but with people’s livelihoods.
It’s such bullshit, Reddit could have been so much more. Researching my latest purchase/obsession, and the only way to find anything that isn’t corporate sponsored reviews or AI content farming is to add the word “Reddit” to the end of the search.
As someone with an 11 year old account that I deleted during the TPA debacle, I fully recognise that there’s a huge problem here. Reddit created a place where people wanted to put their thoughts, ideas, and opinions, and now that they are cashing out TOO FUCKING BAD LAME EBD USER.
Edit: /oblig fuck you spez. Slimy little arsehole sold everyone out and thinks he deserves to be rich because his shitty site isn’t absolutely irredeemable.
11 year old account on Reddit too and I left it during TPA too. Had nearly 2 million karma. Same username as this one.
Reddit was like the StackOverflow for life
…sometimes coding too We’re like regressing to friend’s or known in person people’s opinions, because Internet will be full of bot and sponsored content and opinions. Either way, double money for corporations, sponsored content ->more sales; people not trusting reviews and trying out stuff just to find out it’s rubbish ->more sales
I wish Elon would scare away Reddit’s advertisers instead of twitter’s.
Reddit who?
If I can’t browse my way, I simply don’t use the site.
If reddit pops up in a search result on my browser, wellll best believe I have multiple adblockers making sure their ads don’t load.
Right?
In-between comments are ads.
Under every post is a recommendation for other subreddits where the last update was 2-3 weeks ago.
Subreddits with clear bait clog up the front page, and no filters to remove them.
Top comments are jokes and memes.
It’s a real shit experience on Reddit right now.
They really leaned hard into the fraud strategy, hoping to IPO in 2023 and run with the money.
It got to the point where the entire front page was just bots reposting the greatest hits, with the comments section literally being bots reposting comments from the first time it was posted. There were entire comment chains of bots just having reposted conversations with each other.
The release of LLM APIs was the last straw, now even the conservatives are jumping ship because it was just a bunch of fascist liars lying to each other. And if there is one thing conservatives hate, it’s being around other conservatives.
Some of those issues went over here pretty quick too.
I feel we have a lot of the faux intellectual crowd who thought 5-10 years ago they were better than other for using reddit.
Obligatory recommendation for uBlock Origin and Firefox :)
Fuck Zuckerberg, Fuck Spez!! 🖕🖕
Good, fuck spez.
