I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website.
If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web (or web mobile or the official Reddit app), the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority.
Of course I think the behavior is shitty but I don't think most people really care and reddit will not see any real impact of it either.
Even if you completely accept these policy changes as a long-term positive for reddit's growth, how can you have confidence in that leadership? How can you trust anything they tell you as an investor?
Steve has some kind of problem. It's been apparent before with editing comments in the live db, and it's apparent now. This problem is a risk for reddit. "Don't lie on or about phone calls" is pretty basic risk management and he can't handle it.
Reddit is still a decent-sized company with a whole team of people who've likely been running the numbers. Third party apps like Apollo are a nerd concern anyway, and nerds are outnumbered on Reddit these days; I'm sure most users are happily poking away at the first party apps.
What about mods? Looks like many of them use 3rd party apps to help moderate their subs. They are outnumbered too, but are they worth less than millions of lurkers? I think not.
Reddit is betting that the loud minority are not the ones bringing value to their site. If they are wrong, it may be too late.
We see this all the time on social media, where companies respond to the very vocal minority, because even though they may be a minority, their voice is amplified by social media. Not saying this is the case here, but it's why companies often respond even when the real impact may be small.
The same organization that is dealing with that, also accepted that when they entered a market to where their potential profibility reaches a vast higher amount of people.
The companies asked for that level of audience. They got it, they're operating on a smaller staff than traditionally you would need for that level. Now they're upset they're paying the pipper.
A thousand times this. Plus their repeated insistence that they "aren't like Twitter" (which is true, I think. They're worse.) They are obviously running scared of something, and that something can really only be that the impact of this is potentially enormous.
It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO I don’t even know how you think people will “lose trust in leadership”. They are stoked they’re about to make ridiculous stacks of cash, and the few that aren’t don’t matter.
It’s absolutely insane to call them freeloaders. Reddit’s business model is not “we serve pages with ads and advertisers pay us”, it is “those ‘freeloaders’ create content that is the whole value of the company, it is nothing without that — and this results in every traffic that hits the site”
But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App Traffic it's probably more that people in reddit care just not their ceo
1. I feel like you didn't read the comment you replied to. It says in a compelling way that reddit wouldn't do this if they didn't feel a threat
2. > But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App
A solid takeaway from the original post is that you can't trust Reddit
3. All the bad press surrounding this is infinitely worse for their brand. The subreddit strike, for instance, could force their hand into taking authoritarian control over the platform, as they've hinted at. "Reddit abandons democracy" is a pretty damming headline, and they just can't seem to stop digging their hole deeper
Of course it's not. According to this site, around 3/4 of their traffic is from mobile.
https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/
HackerNews, I love you, but some of the comments in here are detached from reality. You'd be hard pressed to find any social media company that gets more traffic from desktop than mobile in the year 2023. This site is the exception, not the rule.
I know reddit is pushing it's all but even that is not 3th party apps.
I just hope they don't get rid of old.reddit.com
I've already seen many of these subs having moderator led discussions about relocation options for the communities.
As for liability, the Ninth Circuit in Mavrix v LiveJournal held that if an agent of a user-content-hosting ISP (social media) has the means and opportunity to moderate, they also have the means and opportunity to interdict reasonably known copyright violations, and failure to act on those would jeopardise their DMCA Safe Harbour.
And there’s a lot of registered copyright holders that will 100% line up to be a creditor on statutory damages.
The primary social role of moderators is to curate the community. That involves enforcing some site-wide rules, but it also involves more local rules like "stay on-topic." It wouldn't do for a forum about NFL football to be taken over by discussion for The Bachelor, even though that's not actionable at a site-wide level.
As contractors, we have the same option to us by responding to a request with an outrageous fee that you think nobody will pay so you can avoid having to actually say no.
But he will be the person to increase revenue anyway.
Because he can now say that whatever app survived this is now paying for it instead.
For example, I paid for Apollo Pro as a one time thing so I’m not a subscriber. Only people paying for Apollo Ultra every month are counted. That 50k is just the most invested and dedicated of Apollo users.
But. I'm not a mod. I don't know what mods use. And the only reason reddit is good is because communities have tools to moderate themselves.
What I use is kind of irrelevant if the people who keep the communities I visit consistent and relatively clean are pissed and walk out. A casual user won't drop the site when Apolo closes, it would be slightly later when reddit becomes 4chan in absence of moderation.
For me I will continue to use reddit as I have before.
I won't be using Reddit on mobile going forward, and I'll stop using it on desktop when old.reddit inevitably goes away.
That sounds like a pretty big impact for me...
The loud minority argument assumes homogenous cohorts, and that the loudness happens to cluster around inconsequential things. These criteria are almost never satisfied in practice.
Any online community today has extreme differences: usually a tiny minority contribute almost all content to the site (posts, comments). In Reddit’s case, moderation is also done by human volunteers assured by 3p bots (as opposed to automated ML policing + human intervention when someone famous gets sour). The vast majority of users are passively consuming, occasionally upvoting/downvoting.
Now, Reddit gained a massive amount of users in the last few years (something like 2x-4x) so bean counters start drooling over ad revenue from them. They may think that the old timers, power users and mods are a minority that can be gradually replaced by the new user pool without major incident. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m pretty sure that the bean counters don’t know either, simply because the graphs they’re looking at don’t have the predictive power they think. They’re risking the company’s main asset to find out.
If the majority of people posting, commenting, etc are coming from the other interface it does not matter if the bulk of the "traffic" which is largely going to be non-power users that just read reddit comes from the web and the new interface.
There seems to be this idea that reddit will need to see massive traffic loss to die, no they need to see massive loss of quality link submissions and comments to die, that is a very different metric
In terms of user counts that's undoubtedly true. In terms of user influence I think that's yet to be determined. I think June 12-13 will be fascinating as a view of just how much of reddit and reddit content is managed by people affected by and unhappy about these changes.
Mods and highly influential users aren't evenly distributed across the user base by account age. Older accounts are more likely to be in both of those categories, and they're also more likely to have shifted to third party apps at some point particularly when those apps addressed problems they were having. There are communities that will never come back from this, and there are users who've earned reputation who will react by removing all their content and their accounts.
In a lot of ways HN is like a single highly-active subreddit - what would the impact be if the chronically underappreciated dang got fed up, removed everything he'd ever posted, and quit? How about if in his position as moderator he decided that it was time for the sub to go away and applied automoderation in such a way as to remove all posts?
Do I think it’s going to kill Reddit? No. But I think this is going to have a large effect on their IPO and they will be treated as a hostile entity going forward than a neutral one, and that will add up over time. There’s no plausible deniability.
So, while it may be a small percentage of users, I suspect that losing them (or even just impairing their ability to moderate) will have an outsized negative impact on reddit.
Same. I have never used anything other than old.reddit on a proper computer, with the exception being when I need to edit the new.reddit sidebars for subs I moderate, which I still do on a proper computer.
they might not lose many users, but they'll lose their most important users.
I think this neglects the power struggle that would occur if its many unpaid moderators who do use apps far more than any other group, either shutdown subreddits or straight up quit.
is this a rule of the internet about the most vocal part of the community tends to be a tiny percentage? the "people on the internet" are screaming about something again today. in a previous job, i was introduced to this first hand. that's when i learned people will just double down on an incorrect theory/comment when shown incontrovertible evidence. yet, when you look at the numbers of the people shouting online is just a tiny percentage, but causes so much work for people to defend against. they come across as petulant children throwing tantrums because they didn't get exactly what they wanted.
Hmmm ...
