Not only that, but if Reddit were to strongly disallow any or all of the above we have seen how EASY it is to simply clone the tech and re-host. There have been stories about certain communities being exiled from Reddit only to spring up just as quickly elsewhere with more or less the same exact user experience...
this seems doubtful to me. Reddit has tons of legendary threads, AMAs and is its own library of content at this point, similar to YouTube. Sure the tech could be replicated but the value is all in the content it generated.
Of course, then people might start looking at the fact that they are giving away valuable property to Reddit in return for access to a simple forum site...
Most users aren't going to do this. Really, the reddit folks should just go all-in on tailoring their official apps towards the most casual, highly "engaged" content consumers, and target most of their monetization towards that kind of user. As a bonus, make it trivially easy to post casual content directly from the app. Who cares about "objectionable" content when they'll have so many cat pictures and cute/funny memes to run their ads next to.
Curious to see that even where centralization hasn't financially paid off, people are willing to keep tossing money at the dream of it paying off one day after 16 years.
The problem with "independent forums scattered across the web" is that they make discovery (of users and service instances) harder. There are ways around this, like the Fediverse and SOLID standards, but most bulletin-board-like forums do not support them as of yet out of the box.
Etsy, eBay, FB Market, Craigslist, Fiverr, OnlyFans (which was built-up by riding on social media propagation, taking advantage of services like Reddit), and 400 other various types of online markets. There's no reason Reddit could not have have built something substantial in the ecommerce platform space over the years. Taking a small cut from transactions would have eliminated their advertising dependency. Reddit's karma also lends itself easily to forming an ecommerce trust network via transaction feedback, which would form the backbone of buying and selling products or services on there. Reddit figured out to absorb image hosting away from eg Imgur (which also piggybacked off of Reddit to then form a competing social network), and they didn't figure out to do the same thing in the ecommerce space, despite how obvious it was.
I love this.
It's akin to the "payment per Email" (hashcash as spam prevention) idea that a lot of us have yearned for a long time, which would deter spammers and make people think twice before commenting, so maybe it would increase the content quality.
It would be an interesting experiment.
Based on Reddit's own information, it would appear that they are.
Picking just one frontpage sub, /r/News, you can check the guilded page and see:
> gildings in this subreddit have paid for 142.83 years of server time
pics? 291.80 years.
funny? 364.09 years.
aww? 624.43 years.
askreddit? 724.03 years.
politics? 314.93 years.
That's 6 subs.
According to Reddit's own guildings report, 6 subs on Reddit have paid for a combined 2461.21 years worth of server time.
They're self sustaining. Reddit has bitten the 'growth at all costs' bug.
You're making a huge leap about profitability based on a fraction of their running costs.
And this is before ad sales.
Hell, when it comes to ad sales...
They hit > $100 mil this QUARTER.
https://redditblog.com/2021/08/12/reddit-secures-funding-to-...
Reddit is a 9 figure company. Soon to be 11 figures.
> We will raise up to $700 million in Series F funding, led by Fidelity Management and Research Company LLC. and including other existing investors, at a post-money valuation of over $10 billion.
They're not hurting.
Seems strange to me that a 16 year old company still isn't self sustaining.