[Reuters BreakingViews] Investors will say “OK Boomer” to aging Reddit
[Reuters BreakingViews] Investors will say “OK Boomer” to aging Reddit
[...] a dearth of profit this late into its existence portends the lack of a real business model, suggesting it’s still not ready for public company life.
Losing $69M last year I don't see how they turn things around without massive changes. I think they missed the peak of their societal relevance and growth and traded invaluable user goodwill for short term profits. Maybe if they hadn't consistently supported hate speech, radicalization pipelines, astroturfing campaigns, and so forth, and instead focused on better mod tools they could've gained more free mod labor (and now just a few feudal lords), grown faster, leaned their org, gained more relevance and significantly increased advertising revenue. They frittered away time and resources on bullshit the platform didn't want or need, missing the point that it is about creating a welcoming community not turning the site into a mashup of all the other socials.
I never found any hate speech on Reddit. They were actually slightly liberal politically speaking.
Yeah, me neither. My favorite wholesome subs were /r/the_donald, /r/altright and /r/fatpeoplehate.
For the communities I participated in, I usually hung out in /new, not /rising. There was absolutely hate speech going on: the troll and influencer accounts also hung out in /new, trying to get their comments in early enough to be read by anyone else entering the thread. It's particularly noticable late at night, when more of the US is asleep and more of Asia / Russia is awake.
Lol ok. Well I saw numerous examples of transphobic, homophobic, antisemitic, anti-black, and other sorts of bigoted comments in default subs. Good for you that you somehow managed to avoid all that ugliness.
why does every web page need to be a fortune 500 mega-corporation?
They don't. But the dot-com frenzy where people threw money at anything tech-related is long over, and investment firms aren't going to give lots of money to a barely-profitable business with a long history of bad decisions. Oh, they'll buy some stock but it's not going to be the massive frenzy Huffman desperately wants. He's going to take whatever he gets and work on his doomsday bunker, and reddit will continue to contribute to the enshittification of both the internet, and society in general.
They don't, but Reddit is one of the highest traffic sites on the internet, and the infrastructure and programming requirements are massive. That needs $$$$$, otherwise they're going to be scaling it down, fast. And maybe that will be a good thing.
Infrastructure, sure. But programming, I don't see it. Reddit doesn't have to be complicated if all you want to do is make it a good link aggregation and threaded discussion site.
But Reddit got greedy, they wanted to be everything to everyone. So they kept trying to add new features to compete with other social media sites. They wanted to be Facebook and Tiktok and Imgur as well, and so they spent huge amounts of resources fiddling with their format and adding stuff like video hosting. Surprise, people already had Facebook and Tiktok and Imgur and weren't interested in something that was second-best at doing those things. So it was a huge amount of costly work that didn't end up earning them much.
This is yet another symptom of the "endless growth" problem faced by lots of modern companies. They can't settle for simply being solidly profitable in their niche. They always need to make their share price go up by getting bigger.
The programming requirements are "just copy and paste any updates from that RSS feed thing no one ever bothered to use".
Reddit’s ability to unite niche communities around common interests could eventually translate into a sustainable model, especially if it can sell loads of data to artificial intelligence model-builders.
ok boomers
Yeah, the window of opportunity for that has already started rapidly closing. In 2022 the strategy that worked for launching the AI craze was "throw as much data as you possibly can into the training phase and somehow a functioning LLM comes out." But over 2023 the state of the art advanced a lot and it became apparent that you don't need vast reams of raw data, what's really ideal for producing a good LLM is a smaller amount of high-quality data.
You can still use Reddit data as a source for that, but it needs extensive culling and massaging to make it really good. I can easily see that making Reddit less unique and so less competitive.
The AIs already pulled loads of data from Reddit and can re-use what they have. They don't necessarily need to go back ever again, and they'd only pay for access to newly created data if they care at all.
Right. If it sucks for users then where do you expect to get the data to sell to AI bots?
Doing the Lord's work. 🙏🏻
You love to see it