Reddit Falls Short of Ad Growth Targets Ahead of Likely 2024 IPO

Quantity is not quality.

I was active nearly every day for 13 years, and I didn’t return. Granted, I don’t come here much either, but what Reddit did disgusted me too much.

Did they? I had one of the top non-porn accounts actually run by a person (most high karma accounts use bots, I didn't out of ironic laziness) and I haven't posted or commented since whenever Day 0 was for rif is fun. I've been back a couple times for very specific things but not logged in or participating in any active way. Of course, I'm just one (high karma) data point, but I really don't think I'm unique in this. I also have no real desire to contribute to Reddit again in the future. Getting off of it has been pretty nice.

Look, it's not that people aren't still posting, the site obviously still has content, but it really is just "content." The quality of discussion I've seen has gone down pretty steep. Modding appears to be almost nonexistent in big subs or very agenda-driven otherwise. I think a lot of contributors who treated Reddit like old school forums have left and it's slowly turning into a weird combo of Facebook and 4chan if that makes sense. If that's what the userbase wants, go for it, I guess. But that's not my jam.

A lot of search results still take me to Reddit. It is still a source of knowledge.

I'll be honest. I want to believe in the Fediverse and Lemmy, really really hard.

It's ideals (rather, the gestalt of the best of what everyone says is the best of Federation) appeals strongly.

But sometimes, it's instance after instance of complaining about this or that. Double points when it's all reddit complaining.

I dunno if being a heavy content creator necessitates an air of misguided superiority but there's no more nuance here than anywhere else, and the content can't seem to form precisely because everyone decides to take their toys away and do their own thing at the smallest provocation.

I don't use them on my phone because fuck their app, but I've found no choice but to join up with an alias and as much extensions to make their job harder as Firefox allows, just to have genuine discussions on hyper specific topics from a PC.

As much as I hate to admit it, I’m considering it too - not instead, but also. I haven’t been back since Apollo died but Lemmy just doesn’t have the diversity of interests and niche communities yet. It feels really one dimensional sometimes.

But after cementing lemmy as a viable alternative. I actually find fun content on lemmy. Reddit feed for me ends up turning into a left vs right garbage.

When I’ve gone back for a look I’ve found just the opposite. It’s just bots and trolls.

But they lost the best 10% of their posters and content. That's devastating. Same thing as happened to Twitter, FB, and others before them.

What's your basis for this statement? Any evidence to back it up?

I go back for a couple niche communities that haven’t escaped yet. And occasional search results for advice, but that tends to be 3-5+ years old on average.

Never going back.

Same. It runs so badly now, and enough moderators left or cut back that it is not the same site it was at all. Some communities are still intact, but I've begun to see lemmy and even Mastodon results in searches alongside reddit. It's going to take a while to see if reddit can recover (it'll take some humility and leadership from the top which seems unlikely) or die slowly then all at once. Remember digg, etc? The internet is fickle and for every Facebook there are a hundred friendsters.

Ironically way more bot now

The only sub I still go there for is /r/zerocarb (a low carb diet sub), and that's now mostly deleted comments and posts. With the moderation tools unavailable on mobile the mods have made automod very strict. Heaven help a person new to the diet, they'll have a hard time asking their questions

I still occasionally browse the smaller subs when I need help on things like /r/unraid.

This became an instant classic lol, do we know who the artist is?

Subs I followed (and still rarely visit) became much harsher with moderation, to the point of being very difficult for new visitors to use; in a sub that is mostly for helping people adopt a very low carb diet

Some communities were unaffected. Some are still shut down. Some replaced mods who wouldn't play by spez's rules.

I'm not sure what the data would look like or how one would obtain it. Number of active moderators per day? Moderator satisfaction survey? Change in posting habits of top 1% posters?

I am speaking purely anecdotally from communities I know that shut down entirely and moderators who left. I have no way to estimate the scale of the exodus.

I imagine your priorities become different.

You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you're one of them.

Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don't understand because they aren't privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they're probably more understanding than your users who don't have a lot of stake in these choices.

Then your platform grows and it's not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It's open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.

Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, "You know what? Fuck em. I'm a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren't even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly."

I assume at that point you're just trying to cash out. And you've listened to the MBAs for long enough that you're thinking like them now. It's even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don't understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.

I'm not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.

Sounds like Enshittification.

You mean hubris?

You had me at bacon...

You have to pay to post pics? When did that happen?

I will say, though, anything that disincentives people to spam useless images and gifs in the comments, kind of like the next comment down, has its merits.

If there's one thing I miss about Reddit, it's that there was a lot less of this Discord-esc image spam over there than there is over here

Sounds very familiar. I think I’ve heard pretty much the same thing before when discussing paying for streaming services as opposed to sailing the high seas.

Dear fucking god, THAT explains why I couldn't do that.

Its always the same with online services/platforms looking to make money. Offer a free or cheap online service/platform, then advertisements, then more advertisements, then start removing features and hiding them behind paywalls, then more advertisements, then death.

Or, like Facebook and Insta, you get so big that the world itself warps around your platform because no one can remember the before times.

Someone needs to redo this with the answer being "s p e z"

No idea

You mean "I'm sorry John"?

Be the change you want to see in the world, TacoButtPlug.

He took one for the community with spez, I’m surprised there isn’t one yet. Guess you can have the honors, TacoButtPlug.

!imsorryjon@lemmy.world seems to exist
Edit: not exactly active, though

Too much lasagna.

You spelled "magnificently" wrong.

The origin story:

https://nitter.net/silkentine/status/1406050689009262600

basagnas

Yes

Why not both?

It’s referencing this meme.

I loved Sync for Reddit as an app. But I already was seeing Reddit go downhill even before they killed the apps, that just sealed the deal for me. I was a digg refugee so sadly I've been through this before already.

tHiS cOmmUnIty MiGhT hAvE sEnSiTiVe CONTENT, dOwNlOaD OuR ApP pLeAsE!

Yep, in the face of the infinite growth monster, anything other than exceeding expectations is seen as a failure

Yup it's all about expected growth.

Can you buy puts on an IPO?

It's just many power users and mods were power users and mods thanks to tools in these apps, and Reddit still didn't provide anything comparable. Many small communities I still care about have a lot less posts if they don't have bots. It's not like Fediverse won Reddit, but something changed in them. NSFW OC subs are still good, but idk if they make the image spez wants from that platfom. The only thing we def should do is to stay online and be welcome for stray redditors to join.

I would have been happy to pay to get API access for 3rd party apps on my account. Maybe 1 or 2 dollars per account and month would have been reasonable to cover the costs without ad revenue. Double it to please greedy shareholders.

Instead they asked for such ludicrous amounts from 3rd party developers, basically telling them to fuck off.

Either they were mad for control or got greedy over their „golden data“ for AI training. Or both. In any case, they never were interested in finding a user friendly solution so fuck them.

The phrase "cutting off your nose to spite your face" comes to mind.

Some app dev mentioned they wanted to work with them to introduce ads that Reddit would have made profit from in the free version of the app and it's Reddit that said "Nah it's ok"...

Source: my bias

And the issue with consistent growth in billion dollar companies is that it's not sustainable. We can't just keep pilling on profits on top of profits to sate investors insecurities.

Are you not aware that public companies split the profits too? They do not need to grow to have value for investors.

so it does have to grow every year to have value for investors

This gets said a lot but it is not true for a couple reasons.

1: With an IPO you're not as dependent upon individual investors, and as your value grows - which often has nothing to do with your company's performance, you obtain additional funding.

2: private or large-scale investors will literally have you sign contracts stating X% return on investment is what you owe them - once you surpass your return on investment, unless you seek additional funding, significant growth pressure is gone. Most companies immediately seek additional funding, which is how this gets interpreted as "requires perpetual growth."

If this includes % of revenue, then yeah, your investor will want you to make wise choices, but they own that percentage in perpetuity, so there is generally not the pressure related to seeking new investment - they're already priced in and getting their returns.

You can literally find examples of these contracts online by searching for "investor agreement sample."

People usually only care about your growth as a function of how it correlates to a rise in your value. Most stock growth is entirely based on feels - it's closer to social media than it is to any sort of accounting.

Yep. I tried to lookup something on it yesterday and I had my VPN on. Wouldn't let me onto the site unless I logged in, when I turned the VPN off it let me onto the site ok. So glad I don't use it often. The only times I check Reddit is for info for Kodi add-ons and old stuff, in the case of yesterday it was about a TV.

Not on old thankfully. Although who knows how much longer it'll be around

I actively participated in Reddit before the killing of the Third Party Apps, because I really liked the content and the platform was a superb experience on a third party app.

Hate any results from Twitter as well.

Log in, log in, tell us who you are!

Fuck you. I never made an account when it wasn't run by a thin-skinned narcissistic man-child, and I'm not about to start now.

I honestly can’t believe they haven’t killed old.reddit yet.

God, I hate infantile, "quirky" messages. Same shit with discord, but at least discord is useful.

It's probably more to do with using a VPN than not being logged in. If I'm searching for something on a search engine and Reddit comes up in the results with potentially useful information, then I'll go there (the only time I go there now). I don't use a VPN and I'm never logged in, and I've never seen that page come up.

Which makes sense, because those greedy bastards are trying to hyper-monetize the content. And pesky VPNs make it difficult for them to harvest useful visitors info and/or throw tons of partially targeted ads on the poor user's screen.

Still good info on how to avoid it for the people who do encounter that annoying error page. So thanks for comparing that tidbit of knowledge.

If you use Firefox, get the Redirector extension and add a rule that automatically redirects reddit.com/* to old.reddit.com/$1.

Thanks for the tip I didn't know that 🙂

I just use a browser addon to always use old reddit.

They really leaned hard into the fraud strategy, hoping to IPO in 2023 and run with the money.

It got to the point where the entire front page was just bots reposting the greatest hits, with the comments section literally being bots reposting comments from the first time it was posted. There were entire comment chains of bots just having reposted conversations with each other.

The release of LLM APIs was the last straw, now even the conservatives are jumping ship because it was just a bunch of fascist liars lying to each other. And if there is one thing conservatives hate, it’s being around other conservatives.

Obligatory recommendation for uBlock Origin and Firefox :)

Some of those issues went over here pretty quick too.

I feel we have a lot of the faux intellectual crowd who thought 5-10 years ago they were better than other for using reddit.

IFunny is unironically better

Fuck man, I've had this happen to me multiple times:

1. I make a relatively long and detailed comment.
2. Someone replies with a vehement argument against a /misreading/ of many of the things I said in my comment.
3. I point out that the replier is misunderstanding or misreading my original comment
4. My original comment /is then edited not by myself/ to make it seem like the replier was correct the whole time, and then the same or other repliers dogpile on the thread claiming I am insane.

It is truly unfortunate that so many reddit mods seemingly have no problem using alt accounts and abusing their powers exist governing very interesting niche subject matter communities that you will just never realistically find a group of like minded people in the real, not online.

People used to think the internet could be used to the mass benefit of humanity by sharing information and having lively discussions about it.

It is now clear that the vast majority of people basically just use it to consume mediocre entertainment content and basically have one kind or another of popularity contest.