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I just said this yesterday or two days ago when they announced they were going to start paying people for content, but it truly is amazing how Reddit can find another significant thing that will hurt them as a business and move forward with it.
It seems like they’d run out of things that could significantly hurt their business, they just keep finding something else.
Soon they’re going to be down to basic features, And they’ll be like hey look so hyperlinks don’t work anymore. And then that’ll be the end of the press release.
Their “business decisions” are insane right now.
It’s very difficult to see this procession of self-mutilation technologically in another light other than deliberate corporate suicide. Like is someone going to benefit if Reddit goes bankrupt? Is that what’s happening?
Remember the legitimate threat to the status quo of capitalism that came from the GME/robinhood/etc moment, not to mention antiwork/fuckwork. Think about how prevalent discussion of the remote work/4 hour work week/UBI have been on Reddit’s front page.
If a general strike was every close to happening in the last decade, it would have been organized and circulated on Reddit.
Billionaires do each other favors.
Seriously, spend a bit of time looking into Gamestop / superstonk. It explains all of it. And you may get some real money out of it. DRSGME.org will work if you don’t wanna use reddit, r/superstonk. There is a lot to digest but it may change the world as we know it.
they’ll be like hey look so hyperlinks don’t work anymore
How much until all the links open on an internal browser like LinkedIn?
This is what happens when you outsource your strategic management decisions to ChatGPT
To be fair the awards system was complete dogshit and just became a rich man’s upvote and a way to financially brigade comments.
I remember the days when /r/the_donald gilded hateful comments/posts to game Reddit’s frontpage.
Awards well and truly jumped the shark when the admins took Reddit Silver, a meme pic that people would often post to mock the act of gilding, and make that into an award that offered the recipient nothing other than a silver crudely-drawn emblem by their comment.
Normally I’d support the removal of this feature, but it’s blatantly obvious they did it because Reddit’s top payers abandoned the site and because they were fed up with watching “fuck u/Spez” posts getting gilded.
I never used the awards, did awards actually affect the prominence of a post?
Reddit is overall quite left leaning, with a lot of its communities being some of the biggest hubs for lefties on the internet (antiwork comes to mind, all the LGBT subs, majority of the big politics subs also heavily lean left).
I don’t think it’s that crazy a “conspiracy theory” to say that this could be intentional sabotage. IMO it’s what’s happening with Twitter also, I think the alt right is paying big to take down left leaning social media so they can control the flow on information. I know Musk and Spez are profoundly stupid but I don’t think they’re stupid enough to genuinely believe in their recent business decisions. I think these decisions make a lot more sense when viewed through that lens.
They got officially fact checked a few times and that put the fear of god in them, since their whole schtick relies on ignorance.
I don’t understand how this change hurts them. Is it that it makes their premium subscription less enticing? I never had premium or used awards, so I don’t get it.
Reddit’s incompetence is so mind-blowing it’s unreal. Even a crackhead can manage Reddit better than spez
You mean Musk? Because it seems that whatever insanity that Musk does, Spez wants to copy verbatim
Penn and Teller, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Musk and Spez
Hey, Penn&Teller are really good at what they do, and have been doing it for longer than either Twitter or Reddit existed.
All that needs to happen now is for meta to launch a reddit clone that steals away all of reddit’s users
Considering how successful Threads has been, they’d be stupid not to try. So they probably won’t.
Threads is horrible. Aside from being “not twitter,” it’s a waste of time.
Pls no
Give it a few months
I have a bad feeling Threads will turn into this. I mean it’s literally called threads. Kind of up ends the “threadiverse” name.
Not with a 500-character post limit, it’s not. If it decides to change from Instagram in a Twitter suit to Instagram in a Twitter suit in a Reddit flying saucer…?
That’s kind of how instagram has worked… went from Photo Twitter with filters, to video, then to a Snapchat rip-off, then to a TikTok rip-off. Each time they pretty much forgot about the previous functions and promoted the new style and penalized the old one in the algorithms.
I’ll have to take your word for how Instagram has developed, since I have used Instagram for a total of about 15 minutes, and found it confusing and unpleasant. And it’s definitely a good argument for expecting them to shift ground and go for what’s left of Reddit, (maybe after they’ve mopped up what’s left of Twitter, which might not take long, since Twitter is busily mopping itself up).
When I say “Instagram in a Twitter skin,” I’m going off articles saying that Threads uses Instagram’s algorithm, which seems a little less likely to change than the user interface/general style…? I can try to find my exact sources, if you like. It seems like Meta might have business justifications for adding a separate Reddit-replacement service, though there could be equally strong reasons to morph Threads for that purpose. I’m morbidly interested in seeing how it develops.
Maybe Elron can buy reddit and finishing destroying it
Good ol’ Elon… delivering the coup de grâce.
Wouldn’t surprise me if he did buy reddit
He said a few months ago that he was interested.
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If that’s the case, maybe reddit thinks if they do the same things Musk is doing to Twitter, it will appeas the Musk and he will want to buy reddit. I mean soon it will have everything that Twitter has: more bots than actual users, more ads, more pointless shit to make crypto boys wet, and fewer eyes on the page due to required signups and logins.
Nobody said musk was competent 🤷♂️
Sure but the crackhead part.
coke or meth?
Yes.
First one, then the other
that explains both the elogated moskowrat and the ex-mod of r/jaibait.
It’s truly shocking. Like all the Twitter stuff that musk is doing, seems in some way connected to his ego and they seem like genuine mistakes that he’s just making because he’s completely out of touch and an a******.
But with Reddit, it’s like I can’t follow the logic of these decisions at all, I can’t tie back these obvious blunders to any sort of logical troubleshooting decision making process for their company.
Perplexing
It’s just Huffman, an Elon simp, deciding he wants IPO money and that the best way to make it is to blindly follow whatever Twitter does. Because, you know, Twitter’s so hot and profitable right now.
The logic is to destabilise public forums ahead of upcoming elections, so the wealthy can consolidate more power.
I hate that this take seems like the conspiracy take but also is totally plausible. Just look to the example of the Arab spring and how instrumental social media was for organizing. By fragmenting all social media it’s a lot less likely you see a massive resistance if shit goes sideways.
If this is the case, I guess it makes sense why these bad, seemingly “money-losing” changes aren’t going to be felt by the company or CEO. Soon as they go public, the elite that pushed these changes will buy up the amount they promised, spez will take his payout, and they will have “union-busted” another prominent social media platform used for progressive ideas and discussion.
Fun fact, most of the money Musk spent on Twitter was underwritten by stocks in Tesla, which have drastically shrunk in value since the purchase.
TSLA has mostly recovered though.
This might be the top-down view, but the bottom-up is Telegram forums, Mastodon, Lemmy, and similar distributed hard to close down spaces.
“Divide and conquer” is a valid strategy when one can conquer each part separately, “guerrilla warfare” is the aftermath of failing to conquer the divided parts.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this r/conspiracy-tier theory is really the only explanation for this beyond ‘spez is dumber than a rock with brain damage’.
We just don’t have as much firsthand information about Splez because he doesn’t try to make himself the center of attention on his platform and the news.
If only his common sense applied to running reddit.
The logic is the same as Twitter, Spez said so: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700
Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
Fucking wat Spez been sniffing gas straight from the pump or wat?
Please, the Speztic has been fighting to cram his rectum docking nose deeper into the Elongated Muskrat’s anus every chance he’s gotten. He’s the epitome of every single one of Elon’s cucked, arse barnacle followers, the only difference is he also had a world class platform to burn to the ground in retarded mimicry of his waste of a good wankstain idol.
Ad revenue down 70%, who wouldn’t want to emulate that!
Regulatory Capture is when corporations install favourable politicians and former employees into positions that enact policies and regulations favourable to the goals of industry (profit).
I think what we’re saying here is Corporate Capture, where malicious players have captured major corporate entities in an attempt to neuter platforms that are used by the masses in an effort to control the messages given to the population.
People start talking about revolution, and suddenly the mediums used to enable free communication are removed.
Thanks for putting my thoughts into easily digestible words. Enshittification isn’t natural, it’s deliberate. Any CEO 's who throw up their hands and say they’re all of ideas are just trying to pull the rip cords of their golden parachutes, given to them by people who want us to believe it’s unavoidable.
Was not breaking something that hard? No, but it doesn’t pay as well.
And Threads shows up right on cue with a stated deemphasis on news and politics. Meanwhile politicians are pushing to ban TikTok.
Agreed that Threads is sinister, but I think a lot of the reason politicians dislike Tik Tok is that it’s exporting massive quantities of American users’ data to China. US politicians don’t really take it seriously enough to believe that teenagers could use it to start a revolution, but they are pretty sure the Chinese government can use it to spy on Americans.
politicians are pushing to ban TikTok
Depends on the country. All over Europe politicians are using TikTok to promote their political views…
Well, TikTok has China, who would love nothing more than to destabilize the US further to increase their global power. Had it not been for COVID, they only needed to wait since tRump was doing his best to help them out. I suspect this is why it’s only TikTok they want to ban anymore; it’s the only social media platform they can’t directly control.
This has been happening to reddit over the last decade and was only accelerated when reddit was used to facilitate a short squeeze on the market and caused a bunch of “market makers” to lose a lot of money. They couldn’t control reddit back then, but they sure can once it’s public and they fulfill their fiduciary promises to reddit.
I don’t use TikTok but it seems like young people use it to get the word out whenever they are treated unfairly. Huge portions of Reddit, IG, and YouTube are TikTok reposts now.
Didn’t they come out and say early on when they firsr introduced rewards that they’d made enough money to cover their server costs for many decades? Whatever happened with all that?
Line must go up. Doesn’t matter if it’s sustainable or if a bag was gotten in the past
Did they? Do you have a link to that? I’d be very interested in that. The whole situation is so bizarre
I think it used to say on people’s profiles something like “This user’s gold has paid for x hours of server time”
Maybe it covered their costs for old school reddit pre built in image/video hosting when it was essentially just text and thumbnails?
Now that they’re no longer relying on imgur (which is doing it’s own thing) they have to host their own images which is EXPENSIVE.
In other words, they digg their own grave.
They probably blew all of the money on Spez’s pay and NFTs.
Reddit is selling NFTs (avatars), not buying them.
To prevent score manipulation, voting is now a premium feature.
Yeah, actually. This has completely derailed what has historically been a powerful platform for progressive and leftist movements going into a US election cycle. Same with Twitter. Meanwhile, the MAGA propaganda machine at Meta chugs along unfettered.
I can’t see any other motivation. There is certainly no economic incentive to run either business as they have been, but running the companies into the ground as a means to control or destroy opposition communication platforms definitely makes sense.
It’s all going to plan. A wealthy investor has paid a lot of money to shut down popular platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Knowledge is power and they can afford to, and have the incentive to keep us in the dark. Can’t have us poors rising up against inequality if we have no soapbox to stand on.
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But seriously, why aren’t we talking about this more? We’ve seen some fairly significant mass movements gain real traction on Twitter and Reddit in the past few years and, simultaneously and nearly instantly they are both quickly scrambled and made completely useless for that purpose.
Take a look at the Hong Kong protests. Twitter was a huge way to show the world what was going on. But also full of shills and bots sewing discord
Honestly at this point I can’t tell if I’m happy or sad about things like Twitter going away. It was full of horrible discourse and bots and misinformation, but also helped a lot of people. Back in the day it was insanely helpful for directing large areas affected by disasters.
I just don’t see the good uses of these platforms ever coming back from all these primadonna CEOs
Not to divert too much from your point, but Reddit was a progressive and intelligent community? Thanks for the laugh haha
Reddit is 1000’s of communities. It’s just as wrong to say that it isn’t progressive and intelligent as it is to insinuate it’s all one big community in the first place.
However, it’s really not a secret that reddit’s majority (at least used to) lean left harder than any other social media. Intelligent is maybe subjective and not accurate, but they were at least more progressive than most other social media sites.
That’s interesting, but there’s one problem: are they really that coordinated?
You’re talking about organizations that can put down $20bn to fund Musk’s takeover of Twitter. People with that kind of money absolutely have the resources and know-how to manipulate entire markets. It would be naive to believe otherwise.
laughs in tencent
I’m willing to bet it is somehow connected to BlackRock.
I don’t know how you could more organically commit corporate suicide than the way they’re going about running Reddit recently.
Any proof you can offer on this, except for your hunch?
I doubt doubt it, but damn it makes sense
It fits with existing patterns depressingly well. The issue is, it’s generally very subtle.
E.g. Murdoch once even admitted on camera what he does. He “suggests” what he thinks should happen to politicians. Those that either agree, or follow his “advice” start getting negative stories about them dropped from his papers etc. Conversely, those that disagree get their positive stories dropped more. Once a few politicians have had their careers ended by it, most of the rest fall into line, it’s only minor favours. Until it’s not; and all the previous favours suddenly risk looking very bad in the press…
No laws broken, no overt threats given, but the more it happens the stronger it becomes. It eventually helped cripple BBC news, in the UK, among many other problems.
Reddits behaviour fits this pattern too well. Something has been offered in the background. Initially, it was for small favours, but it’s now reached a tipping point. I suspect they are hoping that they can fire sale the whole user driven system (everything must go [at once]). People fatigue on the constant news, and there’s nowhere new to flow and reorganize.
Hard to prove that type of stuff. It could just be incompetent leadership but it’s starting to feel like it’s something more given how many back to back missteps they’ve had recently.
Everything is a Machiavellian drama nowadays and some people are determined to be the rebel heroes.
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I mean, Twitter? Dude (may as well have) lost 45 billion dollars and is still a hundred -billionaire now with a circle jerk site of “supporters” rather than people talking about how much his cars suck and how unethical his business practices are.
I’ve played with this idea in my head on several occasions. It does seem rather insane how all social media sites are self destructing and making business decisions that are questionable at best. Given all the uprisings across the globe in recent years, it would not surprise me if there were various investors and governments who would pay good money to destroy those platforms. Also the sudden and complete self destruction of both Reddit and Twitter right as we’re about to head into the 2024 US presidential elections, seems rather suspect as well.
The other idea I’ve been considering is that both Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists who are throwing a massive childish tantrum and burning it all down simply because the users on their sites made fun of them.
Whichever ends up being true Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists regardless.
Musk would’ve had to agree to making himself look bad, which I don’t think he would’ve done.
This.
People keep laughing at how dumb execs are. Like they are dumber than the average person. They aren’t. They pay lots of money to very smart people who tell them what will happen. It’s just much easier for them if people think they’re dumb instead of malicious. Because again, they have smart people telling them how to play this.
I’m leaning into the theory it’s someone in power in Saudi Arabia. A member of their royal family is heavily invested in Twitter, owns shares and fronted Elon a big chunk of money for Twitter and they would surely like to crack down on social media in pretty much every middle eastern country, what with those pesky women protesting by not wearing their hijabs and protests and riots happening over there in the past decade. The first thing they do when there is trouble is shut down twitter, shutting it down permanently makes things easier for them.
They’d be arrogant and stupid enough to call for it, that’s for sure
It’s pretty entertaining to watch though, like a train wick in motion
I’m definitely enjoying it, the self destruction of both Twitter and Reddit.
Paying their users for content is actually a good thing on paper. In fact, it counteracts the largest argument over API charges that I had: That they were gonna make more than per MDAU via ads, but have the audacity to keep all of it, while not even giving the users that provide it nary a crumb.
The problem with this is: What is a fair price for user generated content? What is a fair redistribution based on DAUs and activity? Is there even a fair model? How could you guarantee it when there will be cabals to provide content at a certain level, as was seen when blogrings tried it in the late 2000s?
Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer, because reddit will always give the least amount they can endure, especially as they are not profitable. And when they are, they will bargain down because they need cheap UGC to function. Such a system is probably going to be unfair by philosophy and design.
guess we’ll see blue checks on reddit too
they announced they were going to start paying people for content
I must have missed this. Do you have a link?
Paying content creators, but not mods? That’s hilarious
Pretty crazy about the paying people for content, hadn’t heard of that. Seems like a great way for content to get dumbed down to appeal to the lowest common denominator and fish for free money. Oh well, I’m sure reddit has honorable intentions and is doing this solely to benefit its average user.
Someone always benefits when public companies go bankrupt or lose value, so yes.
Honestly, the part I don’t get? That they didn’t wait to start self sabotaging the business after the insiders had been able to offload their positions in an IPO.
Like, the usual way to do this would have been:
IPO at status quo Redditors buy shares Insiders sell shares and open shorts Reddit begins to implode itself Redditors hold bags, insiders laugh from their yachts
Who, at this point, is going to buy into reddit’s IPO?
Like Mel Brooke’s The Producers yet with more to lose and even more stupid.
I bet they just don’t like seeing all the awards go to fuck u/Spez posts.
This is brilliant. Instead of advertisers making sponsored posts that are ignored or trying to sneak an ad into a community, they can outright buy engagement. Utilize subliminal advertising, then advertisers buy their own “awards” (or whatever they end up being called) and then they get back a portion of the money spent. There’s been an uptick in those types of posts lately and reddit’s just leaning into market trends.
Most pepega move I’ve ever since since the APIcalypse
It hasn’t been 2 months already lol
Banning coins that people paid for, hmm something is fishy and since the announcement they just nuked all my accounts. For ban evasion on main page sub that I never visit. I said F it and I’m here now. I have a nasty feeling that they are going to ban all the porn pre IPO. Some of my accounts were mods on some NSFW subs that weren’t too big. Start small and work your way up from there.
They can go the way of Tumblr/Digg/Etc I’m done.
I will be curious if they nuked my accounts at work. I have never cross pollinated between machines (no upvote/comments between work/home). If I do have bans then they might be using AI to look for common misspelling/writing patterns/ect
Listen, gold was cute while it first happened, and the evolution of silver was hilarious, i believe a crappy Jpeg with a Microsoft paint style silver coin, hilarious. In my opinion it should have never moved pass this point. It was clutter, a quick visit to mlmym gave me a kick of nostalgia as its like Reddit used to be when i started 11 years ago.
the site used to be so good but now its just going downhill, welp it was fun while it lasted
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Lemmy is the new old Reddit, Reddit is the new new Twitter.
tldr: they’re trying to implement more expensive awards and coins
I know the timing lends itself to dogpiling, but honestly? Good for them. Throughout the fog, reddit made a solid choice - awards and coins were absolutely fucking stupid. I had posted regularly on reddit since 2011 or so. The coin shit distracted from the original sorting system - upvotes/downvotes.
Of course, hindsight belies that even that algorithm was bullshit the entire time. Alas, fuck reddit. Good riddance.
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I feel like I’m standing on the shores of sanity while I watch Reddit sail off into the sunset.
Except the whole ship is on fire and everyone is fighting each other.
I found Reddit Gold and Discord Nitro’s gifting systems to be smart ways of monetization.
There are people who, despite what you try, cannot or will not pay you. Gifting allows you to keep the people that positively contribute on your platform while still earning money from elsewhere.
Amazing how swiftly they’re progressing with their enshittification. Makes me re-think all those 9 years spent there.
