Where Reddit differs among its tech peers is in its striking dependence on its user base to keep things operational. Reddit must keep its users satisfied and its efforts to expand its limited (and already unpopular) advertising formats could send users packing. 98% of Reddit’s revenue is made up of advertising income. And of that, 26% came from just 10 ad clients in 2023. Investors will be watching this closely and expect more diversity sooner rather than later
The wild thing about last summer was it revealing how remarkably stable their unpaid labor pool is. Take away their tools, mock them in the national press and on the site, and the worst most of them will do is participate in a perfunctory protest. They weren’t willing to go to war or even organize in a meaningful manner.
It makes me think of how nationalism has sent millions to their deaths. Who needs money? People will put themselves through hell just to protect an identity.
The users haven’t left, that’s for sure, but didn’t the mods of most of the larger subs (something like 48/50 I thought?) leave? Some unwillingly actually…
But if you mean the enormously long tail of smaller subs, then yeah, that happened, fo sho.
Yeah, mostly in terms of the day-to-day operations of the site remaining largely business as usual, at least in terms of what matters to corporate. Plenty of impotent response abounded, too. For example, one of the largest subreddits, /r/games, never even joined the 48-hour blackout.
There’s an argument to be made that content quality is down, but that’s a subjective measure, and I’m not even going to try to unpack my own personal bias on that front given I moved here because of this in the first place.
Same - well, at least in regard to r/popular, though I did keep going back to the small niche sub that I used to mod and felt a connection to, but while I couldn’t call it “dead” now, it definitely does not seem as vibrant as it used to be, and nowadays I only check it perhaps once a week, and haven’t commented in a LONG while. Just people trying to drum up content, sorta like here except more inane posts there vs. just silence here. I prefer here regardless:-P.
A couple of months ago, r/popular seemed mostly people arguing with bots - or else I couldn’t tell the difference and that is just as bad - while in my smaller sub at least it is people wishing they had something to say, and arguing with what looks like literal and actual children.
Wherever the actual content creators went, they don’t seem to be on Reddit anymore.
I’m not sure how much moderators could even do.
I was actually there so my view of events is pretty biased, but watching mods get removed from their position and replaced with more complying people made me think that the power dynamic was insurmountable. Regardless of how much free labor they perform, moderators don’t actually get bargaining power in return, Reddit employees untimately are above them to defend the company’s interests. Realistically, the function of a Reddit mod is to spare admins the grunt work of ground-level moderation decisions.