• Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    345
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    9 months ago

    When I look at those numbers I think “Apollo was made by 1 dude with some occasional help from another person. Reddit is throwing half its budget and 200+ bodies at its app and site, and it’s a fucking disaster.”

    • bus_factor@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      290
      ·
      9 months ago

      Different goals. The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.

      I guarantee you a good chunk of that R&D money is for making ads more profitable and other monetization.

      • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        107
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        To be fair, the point of Apollo was to also make money. But it was to make money by selling you things that made a nice experience nicer. Reddit makes money by selling you stuff that makes a shitty experience slightly less shitty.

        • NateNate60@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          58
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          9 months ago

          I said it before on Reddit and I will say it again here—

          If Reddit has asked me for a premium subscription to use my favourite third-party app, I would have fucking paid.

          Just bad business all around

          • Kinglink@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            29
            ·
            9 months ago

            I don’t know the right price point, but 1 dollar a month probably would have worked for most people. It just wasn’t enough because they probably can make more than 1 by spoon feeding you ads now.

            • kingthrillgore@lemmy.mlOP
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              8
              ·
              9 months ago

              I’d go as far as 5 dollars a month, which is more than the buck thirty they make off users right now.

              • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                5
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                9 months ago

                It just boggles the mind.

                They had the userbase. They had the community moderation. They had the power-users basically doing their job for them. They could have had a bulletproof, tied-to-world-population-growth metric - not super fast, but basically monotonically increasing. They basically could have turned it into a sustainable money printer, while not crushing user enthusiasm. Hell, they could have even done an opt- in policy for ML training datasets, either offsetting or outright paying users a commission for content that’s used as part of a training set. There were so many possibilities that didn’t involve pointing the ship at an iceberg.

                Spez threw it away because he wanted the quick payout from ad revenue.

                • Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  arrow-down
                  2
                  ·
                  9 months ago

                  Spez threw it away because he’s a libertarian tool. He doesn’t care how he gets the payout as long as it’s not ‘collectivist’. This commie shit your’e spouting in this post would not impress daddy Elon. GTFO.

              • Kinglink@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                9 months ago

                Active users would, I probably would too. Problem is most apps would struggle to even get new users with that system.

          • Rumbelows@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            13
            arrow-down
            3
            ·
            9 months ago

            100% I did pay for the premium version of Apollo and I absolutely would have paid about £20 a month for access.

            It was the #1 most used app on all my devices.

          • qdJzXuisAndVQb2@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            9 months ago

            Didn’t that become an option at some point? I’m sure I’ve read there are apps you can pay for to have access. Fuck that, though. Make it a reasonable price, too, and I’d listen. No way I’m paying a fiver a month for reddit. Maye 1 or 2.

            • Kinglink@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              22
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              9 months ago

              Apps can pay in a ridiculous deal that no app would be able to support. So you either be a pay app that no one downloads, or a free app that gets killed the second it gets too big (And that number was low)

          • tb_@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            8 months ago

            Recently I stumbled on Relay, still going strong with a subscription model (because API fees).

            That said, I refuse to return to that platform.

            • NateNate60@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              8 months ago

              You can patch old third-party apps with ReVanced. That being said, they are unmaintained and will still eventually break.

        • randomname01@feddit.nl
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          20
          ·
          9 months ago

          Yeah, but the Apollo dev didn’t have the huge server costs that Reddit has. I’m not defending Reddit at all, but this is just comparing apples to oranges.

          • Zink@pawb.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            31
            ·
            9 months ago

            So the reason reddit struggled to develop a decent app is… because of server costs?

            • Anamnesis@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              20
              ·
              9 months ago

              Seriously. They still don’t have a way to increase the font size on the default app last I checked. How is such a basic feature STILL lacking?

            • randomname01@feddit.nl
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              5
              arrow-down
              4
              ·
              edit-2
              9 months ago

              Im a way, yeah. They clearly they made a shitty app to extract as much value from their users as possible. But my point was that Reddit has significantly higher costs than third party app developers (because they host the content), so the business model that works for third party app developers doesn’t work for them.

              Looking at a third party app - made by someone who doesn’t have to bear the costs of running the site and can therefore make decent money on an ad-free experience - and a first party one which does have to recoup those expenses doesn’t really work. The financial models are just fundamentally different.

              I don’t say that to defend Reddit. They’re clearly a shitty company headed by shitty people, and I’m sure they could’ve found different ways to make money. But yeah, their financial incentives for making an app are fundamentally different than those of other devs.

          • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            9
            ·
            9 months ago

            Server costs don’t force you to make a bloated and shitty app experience. You might have an argument that 3rd party apps put strain on the servers, but that’s just reddits fault for making an awful and borderline unusable UX.

            • Optional@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              9 months ago

              I think he’s arguing that the organization, being several hundred times bigger, makes it a lot harder to focus on one thing, like making the app awesome.

              As an example, in an hour long meeting you’d spend x% of the time on server costs, another y% on, i dunno, legal, another % on how to enshittify, and finally 5 minutes on the app.

      • Kinglink@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        54
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.

        Spot fucking on.

        Ever have a good app? Something you like using but it’s by a corporation but that’s ok, because it’s a good app and does what you want? And then they start adding more features to it, and it slows down, and it’s more annoying and it keeps offering services you don’t want, and it changes and it morphs and it becomes a shit app.

        Hell I’ve watched Whisk become something I liked using to something worthless now it’s Samsung food… Switched to using CopyMeThat which actually also gets me recipes from sites that you can’t just read the recipes from, and that’s ALL it does (well recipe book/shopping cart/meal planning, which is what it’s designed for.)

        I’m just sick of “How do we make more money” instead of just being an app that does what it says. Gaming is going down the same hole, sadly.

          • Kinglink@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            9 months ago

            This is the result of shareholders. Capitalism doesn’t have to turn into this and people can have small businesses that are comfortable and don’t grow. But when you get investment involve the question is always “how do you ‘grow this business’ so I can get a ROI”.

            There’s a few cases where that’s not the case, but the majority of the mindset of the modern business world is fast returns, rather than sustainable growth.

          • Morefan@retrolemmy.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            9 months ago

            This is the inevitable long term goal and result of CORRUPTION.

            I’m not advocating for capitalism.

            Corruption exists in both capitalistic and socialist systems.

        • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          9 months ago

          Always going to upvote someone talking about CopyMeThat. Been a premium member for over a decade, it was a game changer for us.

        • reflectedodds@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          9 months ago

          I also quit whisk when it became samsung food. Does CopyMeThat let you have shared lists with other people?

          • Kinglink@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            9 months ago

            It does have a “Community” aspect, but honestly I think it’s quite weak on that. however if you have someone you know and their recipes are public you can see them, but not in any organized sense.

      • Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        I get your point and you’re not wrong, technically . Technically that is what Reddit is trying to do but you need to remember that this is Reddit. They fucking suuuuuck at everything.

        I remember years ago a disaffected ex employee wrote something about what it’s like to work the and in just remember thinking to myself: “Imagine going in to work and they call an important meeting, all hands, to discuss “brigading” and then, without an ounce of irony they proceed to sternly discuss this important topic.”

        Just imagine those little snot nosed shots puffed up with so much self importance discussing how these “brigades” are destroying their “bastion of free speech”.

        I thought I was going to pule in my own mouth again just typing this.

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      63
      ·
      9 months ago

      We just have to look at how much the CEO and COO paid themselves last year to know the whole thing is just a huge grift.

    • phcorcoran@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      53
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      The comparison is even more apt when you remember that the official Reddit app also used to be the most popular and great 3rd-party app called AlienBlue, which was purchased from 1 guy and rebranded a decade ago.

      It’s pretty clear that the reason why the official Reddit app isn’t good is because a good experience for their users isn’t their goal.

      • Stovetop@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        19
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        The fact that the app is still so bad after so much time has gone by indicates that it is the desired product that the company wants to offer. And after realizing that they were still losing users to better competitors, their solution was to destroy the ability to compete in the first place rather than improve the product.

        They like the app as-is, with all of the terrible performance and UX that goes along with it. The reason behind that is because they’re getting user engagement metrics and other telemetry data, more control over ad delivery and the content users see (including astroturfed sponsored Reddit content), and more monetization.

        Third party apps, like Apollo and AlienBlue before it, cared about providing a good user experience. It just happens that users typically prefer experiences that aren’t trying to capitalize their every interaction, and companies take that personally.

        • dai@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          9 months ago

          I’ve started using Geddit, a 3rd party app that doesn’t use the Reddit API. And it’s still better than the app they develop in-house.

          I rarely visit Reddit, but when searching for something niche there always seems to be a few threads over there sadly.

      • DBT@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        9 months ago

        Alien Blue wasn’t rebranded. They bought it, called it the official app (with the name Alien Blue) for a little while, then launched their own app and stopped supporting AB.

      • SomeoneElse@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        9 months ago

        Yeah I paid for alien blue pro or whatever it was called. Then they killed the app and gave me a year of Reddit premium (my memory is shit, idk the proper name). After a month or so I switched to Apollo, Reddit’s app was just so shit. I left when Apollo died and now only use dystopia (an app designed for blind users) for the infrequent times I visit Reddit. No adds. It’s almost read only. But it’s ideal for visiting niche subs that aren’t on lemmy without giving Reddit clicks/seeing ads.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        9 months ago

        You can also see this with the old website being much better than the new one and apparently there’s an even newer one that people who like the old new one generally hate.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        a good experience for their users isn’t their goal

        They are in tension with the more pressing goal of extracting revenue. But how do you extract revenue from a site that’s mostly just “user content” + “ads” in an era when ad revenue is plummeting?

        Maybe if they increase the prices on Reddit Gold?

        • Stovetop@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          9 months ago

          They got rid of Reddit Gold and other awards. It’s now “super upvotes” or something to that effect.

      • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        9 months ago

        This is one of those things where, I totally feel for all the big tech employees who’ve been laid off, and it is ultimately the fault of the companies, but like, that’s just too much.

        • kingthrillgore@lemmy.mlOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          9 months ago

          Reddit doesn’t need 150 people at best, and you really don’t need 2,000 programmers let alone 30. They’re all doing ad sales probably.

          LOOK AT THE QUALITY OF REDDIT’S ADS AND TELL ME THAT’S A GOOD USE OF 2,000 PEOPLE

      • isles@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        9 months ago

        And so many unpaid moderators… Which is an acceptable trade when the site isn’t cashing in on your work.

        • kingthrillgore@lemmy.mlOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          9 months ago

          The API was a fair trade. When they killed it and decided to make LLM money, that was it for me. It wouldn’t matter if they paid me for my contributions (which they aren’t, they want redditors to pay for their exit with stock), the API and free access was the social contract. Its gone. Reddit can fuck off at this point.

    • Shouted@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      Seriously. Reddit is a glorified link sharing service with comments looking for a 6+ billion valuation. Christian and a couple backend devs could recreate it all in a weekend.

      Reddit is hopeful that AI training is their golden ticket but in all reality they’ll only ever have one large buyer. OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, etc, don’t want something that Gemini already bought.

      With all that out of the way, I don’t see very many companies lining up to license a far left-leaning dataset that had all non-echo chamber discussion banned. I mean, look at how much trouble Google got in with an objectively racist Gemini that forced them to turn off human image generation.

      • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        9 months ago

        Depends on the sub. The news, technology, and politics subs are 99% link sharing. The subs around DIY stuff, health, etc are often people sharing personal experience and advice. The latter is likely the most valuable thing for AI to crawl.

        • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          9 months ago

          With all that out of the way, I don’t see very many companies lining up to license a far left-leaning dataset that had all non-echo chamber discussion banned.

          Maybe this isn’t what you are saying, but Reddit (at least in the past, on smaller more expert subreddits) is no more an echo chamber than any other politically charged community space online, it’s just in other communities the rightwing people who control the levers of power usually don’t let leftists have any kind of voice or power in the first place.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    146
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    This is one of those rare cases where what is being said is less interesting than who says it.

    What: Reddit stock is junk, the IPO will fail hard, and anyone investing on it is begging to lose money. I believe that most people discussing this in Lemmy already know that, so the info isn’t new here.

    Who: Forbes. Forbes’ target audience is investors; greedy vulture capitalists love it. So if Forbes says “it’ll sink!”, investors are less eager to buy stock, and that sinks the stonks even further. So what Forbes says is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    I’m glad that Forbes is doing it. I want to see Reddit die.

    EDIT: as other posters are correctly highlighting, I derped - the article is from a “contributor”, and it has basically no impact or visibility.

    Damn - now I want Forbes shitting on the IPO!

    • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      88
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      Note that this is a “contributor” post, which is essentially their sneaky wording for editorial. It isn’t a real Forbes article and anyone that knows the Forbes website won’t pay any attention to the article.

      • taiyang@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        27
        ·
        9 months ago

        Very important distinction! Even I’ve written “contributor” posts on behalf is a company when I was moon lighting for a block chain startup. They’re not quite ads, but you very much can buy your way into that.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        9 months ago

        Good catch - I didn’t pay attention to the fact that it’s a contributor post. Even then, I believe it to be still exposing the “Reddit is junk stock” (implied: “don’t buy it!”) discourse to potential investors. The title alone already does it, for those who skip past the article.

      • Rimu@piefed.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        Yeah, too often Forbes will publish any old trash.

        But it’s hard to argue with maths.

      • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        Great piece of marketing to have someone write the article, have people talk about it mistakenly as an actual Forbes article and drive interest in the stock that will make many clueless individuals suddenly have an interest in Reddit Stock.

        News is news … any news whether good or bad, especially if it is controversial and agitates people, is good news for the company pushing their name.

        Chances are … it was Reddit company marketers that set up this article to be featured on the Forbes website to drive attention to their company and their upcoming IPO.

    • Kinglink@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      34
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      9 months ago

      “Forbes” is not the Forbes you are referring to. It’s a blogging platform that shows the forbes name and claims they’re “Contributors” but isn’t actually “Forbes Magazine” which is what investors actually trust.

      Basically this is just some shitbag pretending to be classy by hiding behind someone who sold him that space. There’s a ton of shit Video Game “Articles” on the site too, same story(masquerade), same value (low) , same respectability (none)

      • kingthrillgore@lemmy.mlOP
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        9 months ago

        Don’t talk shit about Paul Tassi, he’s the best thing they have going on that part of the site (when he’s not going off about Dedstiny 2)

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      19
      ·
      9 months ago

      One of the most convincing points is …

      competition has had many years to acquire Reddit prior to this IPO and have chosen not too. Acquiring Reddit now wouldn’t create all that much value for a competing social platform.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        9 months ago

        I sure as hell wouldn’t acquire a company for a product that has a near identical, free, open-source alternative that’s in active use.

        • NateNate60@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          9 months ago

          Well, at least one person thought it was a good idea to acquire a Mastodon competitor, and they paid a pretty penny for it

            • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              9 months ago

              The scale is immensely and massively different. Modern social media is not going away, the digg phenomena was one driven by a much smaller number of more passionate users.

              That much smaller number of more passionate users has already left Reddit.

        • kingthrillgore@lemmy.mlOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          9 months ago

          Compare to Lemmy’s userbase, which is anti-capitalist and clearly has a bone to pick with reddit. If I had to value Lemmy it would be for the cost of hardware and operations alone.

          Which is kinda what Reddit should be valued at, because its a community oriented site, the value is never in the contributions. You can’t guarantee their engagement. They can always pack up and leave. Anyone thinking there’s a value in community oriented sites is being fooled.

          I know people are gonna think “daaaamn, you just shit over lemmy too” but Lemmy makes no illusion of it, its a community funded effort, so the product offering is going to be suited to its audience, and this helps engagement. Reddit has no greater objective than tricking advertisers that people will visit.

        • jkrtn@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          9 months ago

          I absolutely would, for the users. But only if the userbase wasn’t full of Nazis and pedophiles, so reddit is still a no for me.

    • cron@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      But you should also take into consideration that this article did not get a huge attention. It is almost a week old and has a few thousand viewers.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      9 months ago

      Yes it’s a bit confusing with that “Forbes” name?
      But the article is good IMO, and has many 100% valid points.

  • athos77@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    98
    ·
    9 months ago

    I think the company may never monetize its platform without angering its users and the entire premise of Reddit is user-generated content.

    Yep.

    Also - reddit spends 55% of it’s budget on R&D?! WTAF!?!

    • blargerer@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      35
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      So, they are likely very poorly managed but, R&D is a common slushfund to keep your profit negative so you don’t have to pay taxes.

    • finthechat@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      9 months ago

      It’s expensive to research and develop Spez’s apocalypse bunker.

      Or as I like to call it: Super Weenie Hut Jr.

    • Treczoks@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      9 months ago

      Delivering ads to people who are armed up to the teeth with adblockers requires quite some research effort.

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      9 months ago

      Shouldn’t most of a midsize tech company’s budget be that?

      That said, they’re terrible at it. And having worked with some of the folks they hired, I’m not totally surprised.

      • Rimu@piefed.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        13
        ·
        9 months ago

        Hundreds of millions of dollars each year and in 20 years all they did is two redesigns, both of which sucked worse than what they had originally.

        Oof.

    • Kinglink@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      What else do you think they should spend their money on?

      Serious question, they’re a social media site, their whole goal is to sell ads to consumers, which is all R&D cost and server cost. User acquisition at this point is minimal, Sales is basically “We have a lot of users, want to talk to them.” The goal is to create ways that sales can sell to consumers to make money.

      Doesn’t help the consumer base is actively hostile to advertisements.

    • Ullallulloo@civilloquy.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      Stocks are basically a percentage of ownership. The share price as a dollar amount is meaningless because it could be 1% of a company or 0.000000001%. The relevant number here is that Reddit is IPOing at a valuation of $5 billion (that stock buys a ¹⁄₁₅₀₀₀₀₀₀₀ interest), which all I can reply with is hahahahahahahaha

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      $6.5B valuation (assuming a standard 20x EPS model) should imply in the neighborhood of $325M/year in revenue from a company that makes about a third of that.

      Either Reddit plans on tripling its revenues in the near future or this is an unrealistic target.

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        9 months ago

        It’s a sham, imo. I was on reddit for 15 years. It has peaked already. They won’t be able to get more for ads and I don’t believe their data for AI will go higher than what they’ve gotten for it this year. The only way they’ll be worth more is to cut overhead.

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    60
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    9 months ago

    What could have been done to increase the valuation higher and maintain goodwill with the community:

    1. Cut CEO pay by 90%
    2. Pay mods as employees, think of the GM/guide structure of early mmos where you start as a volunteer for a free sub but can work your way up
    3. Subscriptions to remove ads
    4. Push ads in API for third party apps to host your ads, remove for subscribed users
    5. Profit sharing from ads and subs with top content creators
    • kingthrillgore@lemmy.mlOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      9 months ago

      It baffles me they didn’t take the obvious approach of offering apps/API access for Premium users, only turning it into a billable thing for LLMs. They’re not going to pay for the API, they will scrape the site. Your users will! That’s a great source of revenue that can last as long as reddit does.

      But no, they wanted that LLM money.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        9 months ago

        They’re just looking to cash out and run. They don’t care about anything to do with the actual service anymore.

    • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      9 months ago

      The refusal to seriously explore cross API marketing is absolutely nuts to me. That’s reddit’s billion dollar innovation and it was right there. Everything was in place, and it would have legitimately set reddit apart from every other shitty social media marketing paradigm, and would have been an actual game changing innovation.

      All they needed was to put some actual engineering effort into it. Which I guess explains why they didn’t even fucking try.

    • Zink@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      9 months ago

      Just imagine having a website that makes no money, and you get paid so much to run it that if you got a 90% pay cut and quit after a year you’d still be set for life.

      • willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        Capitalism.

        Basically entities flush with wealth do not make their decisions out of a sense of economic survival.

        Capitalism is all about brutal survival for the lower classes and for the upstarts without any background.

        At the same time capitalism is all about a decision making process that is leisurely, capricious, and forgiving for the aristocratic upper classes.

        If the company is sufficiently large (don’t know if reddit qualifies, but my past employers have, so speaking from experience here), their own upper management is robbing the company on the inside every day when they make deals with contractors by taking kickbacks as opposed to what benefits the company. Make no mistake, all the upper management that is sufficiently aristocratic are looking out for their personal interests instead of the company’s. In other words the same mentality of personal gain at all costs that supposedly drives the creation of some of the companies is also their undoing. “Greed is good” capitalism eats itself. Large ultra consolidated/merged corps are every bit as bureaucratic and internally Machiavellian as any government can hope to be. Their very existence is a tax we all pay and we don’t get a vote about how these corporate fiefdoms run both themselves and us.

        Reddit at this point is a very important and well backed propaganda tool, the backers can afford to pay their CEO and there is no hurry to make profits, and they have plenty of time and resources for every manner of business mistake.

    • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      9 months ago

      Mods could be paid on a bounty system with salary or clocked hourly higher-tier mods to oversee moderation to prevent scamming. The higher tier mods would be paid more based on traffic with that ad profit sharing model.

      • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        9 months ago

        Or maintain a flat general rate across the board for all mods … make it a liveable wage so that it is worth it to everyone.

        This way, moderating can’t be monetized or gamed to drive nonsense content just to drive up the income of a small group of people. If you award moderation with even more money … then the whole system eventually becomes generating whatever content, bots and artificial popularity just to make money … rather than in just maintaining an equal well paid workforce that all work to maintain the service as it is and let the users develop the content based on actual interests and popularity.

        But what do I know … the world is just set up to make money and no amount of common sense will ever be implemented if the whole system is perpetually set up to just award those that can make as much money as possible no matter what.

        • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          9 months ago

          The bounty mods that are incentivized to act are kept in-check by the salary mods who have a base pay determined by number of bounty mods(which is determined by user metrics) with volume bonuses. The salary mods primary responsibility is oversight and only have incentive to increase traffic, which can be kept in-check by bot limits per active users so the mods can’t botfarm base pay or bonuses via traffic metrics.

          Bounty mods would be established community members supplementing income, salary mods would be would be established members of the community who had a solid track record as a bounty mod.

          Just having low-level mods paid a living wage creates waste or overwork as they either get paid to do almost nothing or have to have multiple subs they maintain, which means less focus. If they have a certain number of subs that they have to maintain, they may not have the interest or knowledge of their subs to effectively mod them.

          Higher-tier mods would have the same issues but at a higher pay scale, workload, and cost. Not having a higher-tier mod would mean no oversight for the actions of mods except outside of the sub community with people who don’t have an active involvement and understanding of that sub community.

          That leaves the actual company to act as oversight and investigate suspicious activity within a sub’s numbers which indicates some malfeasance. If the numbers aren’t genuine, then that harms the profitability of the company because they are paying more for a salary mod and bounty mod than they rightfully deserve.

          What you don’t know is how a sustainable and effective business or people work. You can’t expect everybody to be honest and hard working withithout adequate compensation driving that and you need limits to keep bad actors in-check or flagged for removal. You can’t pay people to do less than the value their labor creates and you cant pay people more than the value they creates, that is inviable due to turnover and unsustainability respectively. An unsustainable business leaves the company to derrive sustainable income via alternative revenue outside of their core business like selling user data and rampant ads, which is harmful to the users(See: Reddit).

        • btaf45@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          9 months ago

          Or maintain a flat general rate across the board for all mods … make it a liveable wage so that it is worth it to everyone.

          Within a few years almost all of reddit’s mods would be from China or other 3rd world country.

    • btaf45@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      9 months ago

      Revert to the source code of about 10 years ago and get rid of most programmers. The only positive change in the last 10 years is the ability of users to ban people from harassing you.

      Allow all subs to identify other subs they are similar too, and link all that information together so that users who don’t like how sub is moderated can find an official list of alternative subs.

      Allow only temporary bans, not permanent bans from mods. Admins can still give permanent bans for bad faith or dishonest actors and should do so for foreign governments trying to influence other countries.

      Allow subs to optionally require flair identifying citizenships and if you are found to be dishonest you can get site ban.

      Get rid of certain pieces of automod functionality that subtract value for the users of the site.

  • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    48
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    More specifically, Reddit notes in its S-1 that, as an emerging growth company, it will:

    • present only two years of audited financial statements in the S-1,
    • not be required to obtain an auditor’s attestation report on the company’s internal controls over financial reporting requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act,
    • provide less extensive disclosure about executive compensation arrangements, and
    • will not require stockholder non-binding advisory votes on executive compensation or golden parachute arrangements,

    That sure sounds like a solid investment

    Also, the two classes of shares (new shares get 1 vote per share, existing shareholders get 10 per share)… what the fuck. Why would anyone buy that shit

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    48
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    Great article and very thorough, if you have interest in the subject, I’d say it’s a must read, despite the source. And I 100% agree that reddit would be a very risky stock to buy, with more chance of becoming worthless than actually make you money.

    This is completely disregarding my personal opinion that reddit quality has deteriorated for years, because sometimes even poor quality can be a great money maker, when it has achieved market dominance or critical mass in its segment, and no doubt reddit has done that.

      • Kinglink@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        If you really haven’t… you need to. Better yet read the book. It should be required reading in America to see how the financial institutions fucked over America in 2008 and most of them got away with it or got the government to pay for it’s mismanagement, while a LOT of people got saddled with absolutely awful loans because all that mattered was creating and selling new debt.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    9 months ago

    Extremely well written and put together. Still, as harsh as it is, I think the author was still not harsh enough.

  • DingoBilly@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    It’s a hard call on Reddit.

    This article seems to leave out the reality that Reddit’s big win is data and an in built machine learning capability in what is good quality. For future AI and LLMs it’s actually a treasure trove of information that will only rise in value.

    Realistically it’s had massively bad PR and issues but people still use it over Lemmy and many others, and Lemmy/others aren’t going to overcome it any time soon (if ever). So it doesn’t seem like it’s going to go away at end of day, and it’s still one of the best sources of information on the internet available.

    At end of day it’s stocks so it’s coin flips all the way. No one beats the market consistently over time that doesn’t also utilise insider information.

  • btaf45@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    9 months ago

    “[moderators] may be able to leverage their influence within those communities to change the dynamics of the discourse within the communities or to disrupt the normal operation of their communities or other communities on our platform.”

    And they can give you rando-bans out of nowhere, suddenly cutting you off from your topic of interest and exposing serious flaws with the entire site.