I’m a bit of a broken record about this point so my apologies to those of you have already seen this, but what is so baffling about this whole situation is that Reddit aggressively attacked one of its core, major competitive advantages over other social media sites.
Facebook, Twitter, etc. have to pay tons of money to hire full-time content moderators, nearly all of which need mental health plans and burn out incredibly quickly because of the horrific things they see online. Reddit stumbled across a solution by letting moderators create and run their own communities, effectively outsourcing all of that need across tens of thousands of people who need absolutely no financial support. Edit: These people self select out for their own tolerance and establish community guidelines that attract a community that values those standards.
Additionally, because the way moderators run the show such as use of various (now defunct) 3PA’s, coupled with Reddit’s own structure, a lot of the most awful content is filtered before a real person even sees it, let alone a user. Auto mod, account age requirements, keywords that trigger mod actions, you name it. There are several tiers of filtering that happen before a post makes it onto a sub, especially on the larger ones. Other sites cannot replicate it at the size they are at, at least not easily and without a ton of investment and time.
In the same way that Twitter was never actually worth the $44 billion that Elon Musk paid
Musk paid $26bn. $5bn was from outside inverstors. The remaining $13bn is a loan that Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk’s behalf. This $13bn was essentially a death sentence (like most leveraged buyouts are - see: Toys R Us) as Twitter could barely afford to pay the interest on that loan, even before Musk ruined its income.
Musk paid $26bn to kill Twitter. Most of that $26bn was underwritten by stocks in Tesla (not SpaceX) which have since plummeted in value.
Now, after a few friendly chats between Steve Huffman and Musk, they are killing reddit, too.
It’s amazing that spez saw what Musk did and thought, “I should do that to Reddit.”
They will continue to let their egos run wild. I hope it drives people to spaces which organize against them. These billionaires are a damn menace.
Reddit has real value? It’s 90% bots, shit post after shit post and shit comments all the way down. Nothing you cant find anywhere else on the web. If reddit had any value, it doesn’t anymore.
Reddit was a living thing. An ecosystem of interaction which was so robust it frequently generated content that was useful in Google search results. The shitposts were essential to that ecosystem. There were also bots, which is inevitable.
That ecosystem has collapsed.
I’ll have to disagree, reddit is not a living thing, it is made up of users and creators, the good 10% of which you speak. Although I’ll agree reddit went through many phases, some better than others. The end result though is what I am describing.
Shit posts are not necessary and bots are not inevitable, they are are allowed. I’ll confess, I do enjoy both occasionally. But, real people make these decisions, they are not generated automatically. A real person clicks the button, for lack of a better phrase, and they can just as easily not click it, philosophically speaking.
Humans will be humans though and it’s only a matter of time before even lemmy will be ruined. That’s what we do best, for better or worse.
You’re not describing how Reddit has no value. You’re just saying that you don’t like it, or it’s not valuable to you.
When I think of value, it’s something that is needed. If reddit disappeared right now, nothing would change. Everyone’s lives would continue on as normal, and what information that is on reddit can be found elsewhere. It’s entertaining, yes, but not valuable.
That’s not what “valuable” means.
In this context, it is. Reddit isn’t even a tangible product, barely 18 years old. The 3rd party apps made reddit a little valuable, I’ll admit, but still there is nothing on reddit that is unavailable elsewhere.
Of course these are just my opinions I never said I was speaking for everyone, that’s the point of conversing.
So again, it’s not valuable to you. It’s obviously valuable to the people that keep using it. So it is… valuable.
I honestly didn’t believe they would go through with it. It seemed suicidal, but now I’m reading about it on their competitor’s platform still mourning the loss of bacon reader.
Well I really don’t recommend going back, the revanced team has added patches for a couple popular Reddit apps to change the API key and I’m fairly certain bacon reader was one of them. But again, I don’t recommend going back to Reddit.
The article does a nice job of succinctly pointing out that Reddit’s value is in its users and moderators who create and moderate its content for free.
As a retired business owner, I don’t see what Huffman and the board of directors are thinking. Completely alienating their users and moderators seems like wilful sabotage.
At this point, the only thing I keep my account for is to ferry people over here and poke fun at the Pissbaby formerly known as Steve Huffman. Enough of us have emigrated to here now that the salient content is pouring over. And honestly, it’s refreshing because everything is pretty much on point with very little spam.
Great article…until it told me to sign up.
you can read the entire article without needing to sign in
Ok, but why is this written in font-size=200% or so? I can’t read it better like that and the reader doesn’t work (moronic layout i guess).
Is there something like a font-size.max setting in firefox?
Pretty softball take for an article
It took reddit suiciding itself for us all to realize that reddit’s content has been shit for years.
All it took was a few days on lemmy to remember what reddit was like before bots and low effort memes killed the site.
I think we are witnessing the biggest fall from grace for any social media company ion our lifetimes. Bigger than MySpace, bigger than Facebook, bigger than Twitter.
