Reddit is used to brawls between its 57 million daily users. Now its keyboard warriors are directing their ire at its CEO, Steve Huffman. Thousands of moderators overseeing the site’s so-called subreddits are on strike. It’s a wrinkle in Reddit’s plan to go public, and a sign that plan is premature.
I think every article is missing a key issue and no one has asked Spez yet…
If 3rd Party Apps and AI services are making millions (as he asserts) why isn’t Reddit competing in those areas?
3rd Party Apps aren’t in a war of new features, putting a 5-10 person development team together to analyse the competitor apps and match the features would kill off the unique selling point of the 3rd Party Apps. Why hasn’t Reddit done this?
LLM aren’t new, the first appeared in 2018. Why hasn’t Reddit assembled a team to exploit their own data? In my experience 1 data scientist backed by 2 software engineers can do a lot. It isn’t a huge amount of people needed.
Even if you buy his argument that they companies are profiting from Reddit, Reddit is a platform those companies are building value from. Reddit isn’t providing those services and so those companies profits aren’t “stolen” from Reddit.
It’s like company who sells art supplies. They sell them to a painter for £100, then a painter sells their artwork for £1000. The art supply company then gets upset it didn’t get £1000 for its supplies.