Reddit is in danger of a death spiral
Can Reddit survive as its volunteer workforce close down subreddits and walk away from the site in protest at the management's new policies?
Can Reddit survive as its volunteer workforce close down subreddits and walk away from the site in protest at the management's new policies?
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I think Reddit will be fine from the exterior. IPO may not go so well. But what really matters is the soul of Reddit died long ago.
It's going to be Facebook's little cousin.
So I haven't used Facebook in ages but what's its relevance? Do people share articles, memes, etc. on Facebook? What about celebrity AMAs?
I think Reddit won't fail in a long time, being so established now. And say what you will about Fediverse but shared "front page of the internet" is really useful when every other popular social media spews garbage customized just for you. (And I hope I'm wrong but quietly afraid I'm not.)
Facebook being used as a way to keep up with friends has been fading for a while. It's mostly only older people left on it, Elder Millennial and older (I'm an Elder Millennial fwiw).
Facebook's real social media power is in its groups and pages. There's usually local town groups, like you'd have with NextDoor. But there's also giant meme groups. New Urbanist Memes for Transit Oriented Teens (NUMTOTs) is huge, and is basically posts about trains and hating landlords, but it was big enough to the notable when the group endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016. Another huge one is Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends, which is memes about nature and wild animals. Facebook has become a lot like reddit, in that it's what you make of it in terms of weird friends and niche groups.
The current go to joke about facebook goes like this:
"Facebook is lame, there's no one on it anymore and it's no fun."
"Facebook is still fun if all your friends are gay communists."
Facebook is still fun if all your friends are gay communists
Or anti-vaxxers. Or qanon cultists. Or "friends of January 6" or whatever.
FB is mostly used by the 40+ crowd.
IG is mostly 25-40
Tiktok is predominately under 25.
I use Facebook to talk to about a dozen or so people I wouldn't otherwise. I know, because I dropped off for a couple years and didn't really connect with them, which sucked.
But on a day to day basis? It's the absolute worst dregs of boomer humor and low effort, brick stupid content. It took a long time to screen out the political garbage I hate and slowly unfollow the various people who've gone insane in the past 8 years. I was left with like ... purposefully bad cooking videos, advertisements, the occasional comic book page (why?!?), more advertisements, old/bad memes, more advertisements, and most important of all, advertisements.
In fairness my wife uses it to coordinate with other parents from our kids school. Why we can't use something else to do that coordination I don't know, but eh.
tldr: It's for older millenials on up and mostly garbage algo promoted content thoroughly seasoned with advertising.
Yeah, it's been a slow boiling pot of water, but the problem has been the same basically the entire time.
This is why the protests for this escalated so quickly. We've done those steps over and over again, for over a decade. The point of protests at this point is never to get the reddit admin's attention or change their minds. The point is to cause a big enough stink to get major media attention. The protests ramped up so quickly because there were only 30 days to change reddit's mind, they showed no indication they wanted to change, and we needed the media attention. We got plenty of media attention this time. Unfortunately, media attention isn't going to be enough to change their minds now, because this is all for an IPO and the execs want their bag of money. Even if reddit folds entirely, they'll get to walk with the bag.
But in reality, we should've ditched years ago. Because, does any of that cycle sound healthy? It's not that reddit's admins don't care. It's that they haven't cared in a long time. Huffman doesn't care. I don't think Alex Ohanian did by the end either. Aaron Schwartz cared, but too much. But if a community can only get a site's staff to stop actively harming them by putting a gun to their head every time there's a problem, there's no future for that relationship. This was just the exclamation point. Even if reddit staff totally caves, we should not go back.
Well said. Boosted and upvoted... whatever those two things mean. Internet points to you, good sir!
I'll edit to add that the main thing you point out that I think most fediverse folks want to avoid is the investment that leads to the IPO bag of cash. When the incentive is profit, I think social media can only ever get worse for the average end user. Keeping these things small and non-corporate is great in theory, but who pays for the servers and other costs when/if it needs to scale?
There's still a big difference between making money to survive, and the insane cash grab that was this new API pricing...
That's kind of the problem, though. That insane cash grab is profit driven. Spez said it himself in the AMA: Reddit is profit driven. That goes beyond makiong money to survive. That's investors seeing a return on their money. That's generating value in preparation fo that big IPO. That doesn't usually mix well with the way a site like Reddit generates value: free community created content. Right now, Reddit is banking on enough users not caring about the protest, or the fact that the site is arguably on a downward trajectory. Looking valuable is more important than being valuable at this point.
Thanks Jack Welch for that kind of mentality. I hope you're burning in Hell.
No argument with what you said, I'm just saying there's a big difference between paying for a server, and paying your shareholders.
I've purged a lot of my social media footprint in the last 6 years and I have regretted it zero times. This too shall pass.
This, a lot of the people who remained on reddit don't seem to understand that this wasn't a single incident, it was the culmination of years of smaller problems. I found it easy to leave because these newfound spaces are much more like the reddit I remember in 2012.
I don't really care either way if reddit stays or goes. I'll be on kbin and lemmy regardless.
It's not going to instantly die, no. But once the power users and the ones who truly cared start leaving the content will start dwindling to the point that the normal users start noticing and leaving as well. It's a slow spiral that will likely take a few years and reddit probably won't truly "die" for a while, but it will never be the same again. Time will tell what rises to take its place, whether it's kbin or lemmy or something else.
"Maybe we should have checked where content is being created from before we cut that off." - Some guy before getting fired at Reddit.
How delusional is that stance though? Charging someone to post their created content on your platform then turn around and sell access to that content to users through advertising. Did Mac come up with this plan?