Reddit IPO Filings Reveal the Company’s Hopes—and Fears
Reddit IPO Filings Reveal the Company’s Hopes—and Fears
WIRED reviewed edits made by Reddit to its IPO filings over the years ahead of its stock market debut this week. Here are seven big takeaways.
🤔Am I overdoing it with all the reddit-related posts? https://archive.is/SFcRn
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I just hope that the IPO backfires, or that users suddenly realise how shitty that webpage is and they leave.
The lessons from Twitter are clear: most people will not leave bad social media without a better replacement. They're attached to their history, and attached to their routine. It getting worse does not change that.
Mastodon didn't scratch the Twitter users' itches, and it doesn't look like Lemmy will scratch Reddit users'. These aren[t the people that populated the Internet 20 years ago.
They're the people who never would have touched it, because it was too technical, had too high a barrier of entry, and saw it as niche.
It's time to stop focusing on whether Reddit succeeds or fails. They're not going to fail. Instead, it's time to make an internet of niches again, for ourselves, without the Twitter and Reddit users.
They’re the people who never would have touched it, because it was too technical, had too high a barrier of entry, and saw it as niche.
Yep. My dad uses Facebook, Reddit and Youtube now. I remember having conversations with him where he was confused about why anyone would ever want to use Facebook and what the point of Youtube is... it just wastes time. When I first exposed him to AMAs I thought he would be interested in, in like 2012, he was like "It's really cool that you can talk to this person, but there's so much noise and joking around... how are you supposed to follow it all?"
Now he posts on reddit for help with home improvement projects and watches youtube channels about classic cars and how to fix your garage door opener and talks about stuff he saw his other Boomer friends post on Facebook. He sends me unfunny Youtube videos of AI Deepfakes of Trump and Biden talking about how they pooped their diapers. It's a weird role reversal, because now I'm like "I've left every single one of those enshittified platforms." But it took him years to get on them. It would take him even longer to get off.
I think it’s important to say that while history and routine are part of it, social networks are only as useful as they are populated. If your friends and people you follow are all on Twitter, you’re not going to jump to Mastodon. If the content creators start switching, people will likely follow… but they won’t switch unless their followers switch.
I switched to Mastodon when Twitter went to X, and cold Turkey dropped to Lemmy from Reddit when the API scandal hit and the only thing I miss is most of the reason I was in those platforms in the first place, the content creators.
I still go to Reddit for some communities that don't have critical mass on Lemmy. Sure you can talk about programming or Linux here, but the more niche ones (like specific mods for specific games) are entirely absent.
But when I want to post something or create content, it goes here.
You don't need a better replacement. People just need something that keeps them in the app longer, these sort of "dark patterns" that are often mentioned. The app can be total shit, as long as it manages to engage users. That's why something like Lemmy or Mastodon is not succeeding with the general population because they explicitly have been made not to utilise such things.
By "better", I don't necessarily mean of higher quality. Those dark patterns are often features from the point of view of the average user. Without them, they can feel lost, and they spurned their platforms of choice until they had them.
They’re the people who never would have touched it, because it was too technical, had too high a barrier of entry, and saw it as niche.
Yup, if anyone wants to "replace" these platforms, they need to make them very approachable to tech naive individuals. Most people have close to no technical skills, and nearly everyone on federated software seems to fail to recognize this.
Ultimately I am in agreement that we shouldn't be trying to drop a replacement to these platforms directly in. We should be offering an alternative, something fundamentally different, because those platforms have failed to fulfill our desires and needs from social media on the internet.