They keep changing to make the site worse and worse for users.

On my iPhone, Reddit.com shows 5 articles when I’m logged in. Old.Reddit.com shows 15. The recently killed compact mode showed even more.

To view the same articles I would spend more time scrolling, so I guess I like that. But instead I spend less time on the site.

Compact mode still exists! Add the suffix `/.i` to any reddit URL and you'll get it back. They removed i.reddit.com and the `/i` suffix but I think the PMs forget to mention `/.i` in their "kill compact reddit" JIRA ticket.

People really are bizarre addicts. Companies will literally blatantly say they hate you and your moderately healthy use patterns; and people will desperately try to use the site until they eventually get around to killing the service

It took a long time, my account is 15 or 16 years old, but I've not visited the site in a couple of months now. Addict that I was, they managed to cure me with their latest changes, hallelujah.

I've been trying to cut Reddit usage since I first heard about their impending IPO a few months ago, actually. When they killed i.reddit.com and the /i suffix, it tripped my alarm bells and I realized I shouldn't keep relying on Reddit for much.

I've successfully eliminated it from most of my recreational time, but Reddit posts are still often useful when I'm debugging an error or researching a purchase. When that happens, I'm glad I have the /.i suffix set up on my phone and old reddit redirect on my laptops. Quitting cold turkey is hard anyway, might as well use any hacks available that make the site easier to use while I cut down my use.

The thing I hate is that they constantly push you to use the app. Stop making me use the app! I like the web browser. It works better, it's faster and it's less for me to learn another app.

I actually use reddit less because of this

What are shareholders supposed to care about? They give a company capital in hopes of getting more back in the future. Are shareholders meant to be philanthropists?

They aren't always meant to exist. Why must everything be about the extraction if capital?

It gets created, not extracted

In the case of Reddit, it's definitely extracted. Reddit is just a particularly poorly-run and particularly large forum. Reddit (and Digg before it) did not create new forms of communication, merely placed them under the control of capital.

It gets created, then extracted.

Because that's what the owners of said capital want.

Aka capitalists

Do shareholders give capital? Maybe if you’re on the board or something? But even then it really feels like shares are the dissemination of capital, where if your company does well then the share goes up. Like me buying 5 shares of Apple isn’t really giving Apple any capital as the price is based on market cap. Happy to learn if I’m wrong though.

Market capitalization is a function of share price, specifically share price times number of shares.

You buying 5 shares shifts the demand curve for the share to the right, resulting in an increase in the price. (absent a simultaneous proportional increase in the supply of shares).

While it may not feel like your purchase of 5 shares gave Apple capital, your demand was surely part of the aggregate demand and supply that determines Apple’s share price at a certain point in time, and hence informs Apple’s market cap.

None of what you just described gives Apple capital unless Apple decides to issue more shares. Given that Apple has been retiring shares, not issuing them, your purchase of Apple stock and subsequent shift of the demand curve actually removes more capital from Apple than if you did not purchase any stock.

This is a very naive, simplified, and wrong take on a generally well accepted concept.

Point 1: increased demand for stocks will increase the price of it and thus the market cap. Point 2: the higher the market cap of a company the more capital it has available.

I'm saying point 2 is only true if the company wants to issue shares (unless you are talking about second-order effects like cheaper bond rates). Apple is actively repurchasing shares, so they don't have more capital because the price went up.

Yes, it theoretically means they could raise more money by issuing shares, but that's not happening.

Is it more capital if they are using RSUs in compensation?

So, it's depends how they do that. In 2022, Apple seemed to buy all the Apple stock they used for RSUs in the open market. So, absolutely not in that case.

But they don't have to do that. They could issue the shares for RSUs. If they issue new shares (either to sell to the market or to use for RSUs) then the market cap directly influences how much they can generate in work or cash from such a transaction.

We're talking about Reddit, not Apple. Apple has enough cash flow to fund most investments and enough stability to get a decent rate on the bonds it issues. They do not need to sell more shares for capital, although they do create shares for RSUs. Using RSUs (which are later bought back) as a part of compensation is a kind of revolving line of credit, which conveniently scales with the success of the business. That is, when the business is going through tough times and stock price falls, the stock based compensation expenses also fall.

When talking about pre-IPO companies, yes, shareholders are those that have given money (or in kind) to the company for their shares.

If it were not for the prospect of selling their shares to you (or back to Apple later), no one would have bought those shares in the first place. When a company is going through tough times, it can raise capital by issuing more shares. Apple is so successful at the moment that it does not need to do new public offerings, but it could choose to (like Nvidia recently -- not because of tough times, but because why not take free money when it's being shoveled at you).

Also, price is not based on market cap... market cap is based on share price and count. But the larger the market cap, the more money can be raised by selling shares without diluting existing shareholders too much.

No but usually these things can align quite well. Build a user friendly website and usage will go up. It seemed like reddit worked more on getting usage down by restricting a lot of usage to their app. I don't think that's in the interest of shareholders.

Shareholders are parasite in the first place. They can't be philanthropists. It's like saying "generous thieves". Doesn't make sense.

Simple fix --- keep your company private. That does require you to actually be profitable though.

I agree. Investors and shareholders would much prefer a company that doesn't destroy their product.

If an organization systemically makes decisions that degrade the user experience, it's safe to say that the organization is dysfunctional i.e. it is simply not a competent custodian of the product that it is entrusted to manage. It is up to shareholders to decide whether such a company is still investable.

Shareholders are either those who made the company or people that the founders sold the company or shares of the company to. They are funding the company, something a whole lot different than being a parasite. Nothing stops you from making a reddit without external funding.

> Shareholders are parasites on a company as their interests are one dimensional in favor of themselves.

And without shareholders, the company would not have money or incentive to grow.

I'd love to see a non-profit succeed at these things, but you need money to motivate and select for these types of founders who build products people want(ed)

Paying back big loans when they come due is always painful but calling them parasitic would be incorrect. Fundamentally reddit like many other website business models was based upon borrowing from the future. That is infamously basically the digital start up business model: offer unsustainable goods to build a user base under the expectation that it will pay back later. Much goodwill was based upon the assumption that it will do so, goodwill which helped fuel the growth in the first place. With a structure like that there is hardly anywhere to go but down. Maybe it could establish its own market section when at a large enough scale but that is unlikely.

Calling it parasitic is to operate under naive assumptions that free lunch is somehow the natural state of being in a fundamentally entropic and uncaring universe. The enshitification is the result of a devil's contract as that which livestock effectively enter: to be fed crops, and protected in the now in exchange for later certain doom. There were always the "wild" alternatives of free software and DIY but they aren't popular at all in comparison.

Because to continue the metaphor, the wild can hardly feed itself. There is no salary paid for maintaining your own Mastodon or message board, hell it doesn't even pay for its own server bandwidth let alone salaries for the work involved. Traditional message boards are pretty much extinct, choked out by spammers and lack of interest.

Financial engineering as a discipline is insane. Literally the definition of insane: seriously mentally ill and unable to live in normal society [0] -- so detached from the "normal" reality most people live in, and taken hold like a schizophrenic about things that only exist in one's own head.

Shareholders are rent-seeking parasites. They have put down an initial investment to purchase some asset, and now consider themselves given the right to lord over those who labor for that asset, while providing little in value (no different than absentee/"hands-off" landlords).

It would be one thing to actually loan a set amount of money, with a set payback period that ends sometime in the future. It is another to declare oneself a relative God Emperor, and shackle others for entirely one's own benefit, in perpetuity.

To continue the metaphor, the wild can no longer feed itself, because of a set of people taken hold by delusions have irreparably destroyed the wild's ability to. No different than someone buying a cat, and keeping it locked up in a house all day. Yes, food and shelter is provided -- but a cat would be able to achieve those for itself, were it not for a chain of man-made events that landed it in such a predicament. The cat would've either not been born and never landed itself at the mercy of others, or would've been born in the wild, and lived without a sovereign ruling over it.

[0] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/ame...

Do you have a better system in mind?

Outlaw modern-day corporate trafficking. You cannot buy pieces of a person; corporations are legally people; you should not be able to buy pieces of them.

Remove the corporate veil. All liability will rest upon a corporation's guardians. Bankruptcy, and civil and criminal suits, will personally affect the officers and shareholders of said corporation (and their assets). The same way, if your child goes out drinking and driving, the parents are now liable for any people slaughtered along the way; or if your dog goes out and mauls some child, it will be put down and you will face restitution for damages.

> Paying back big loans when they come due is always painful but calling them parasitic would be incorrect.

Investments are not loans. Loans entail finite returns from finite input. Investments entail infinite returns from finite input. Its that infinity that makes investor-ownership parasitic in a way that loans ain't.

The worst thing about Reddit, IMO, besides the UI garbage, is that they condone warfare between communities by allowing moderators to ban people merely for being subbed to another community, and for reasons as simple as the other community being the wrong politics and no history of raids.

That said, I actually think Fidelity's valuation is a bit harsh. Reddit's true utility today is in being a source of actual opinions and not corporate blogvomit. When I do searches today, I frequently use site:reddit.com, and I know many here on HN do at the very least. Reddit is, for better or worse, a centralized version of what the web used to be inside the web itself. For that reason alone, I think there's reason to believe that Reddit is not going anywhere, and that it still has opportunities to correct course. As far as I know, there are no serious competitors yet.

Reddit: how to be a dark web without being a dark web?

>is that they condone warfare between communities by allowing moderators to ban people merely for being subbed to another community, and for reasons as simple as the other community being the wrong politics and no history of raids.

Either these are communities or they aren't. If they are communities, they have the right to ban whomever they please for nearly any reason. The right to decide who is and who is not a member is about the most important right a community has. My buddies and I have no obligation to let you hang out with us if we don't like your politics.

I certainly don't care for the way Reddit runs its "communities". They are, in practice, run by a variety of petty tyrants. The admins ban anything that might scare off the advertisers and the moderators rule by edict. The solution to that is not, in my opinion, to increase centralized control even more.

It's not really a question of whether communities have a "right" so much as that I don't think it's something that Reddit should support, but they provide moderator tools to do this. Worse yet, they bring this problem upon themselves by making it ridiculously easy to setup dummy Reddit accounts and can be active in a very short period of time, which practically encourages ban evasion. Instead of allowing innocent users to face guilt by association, Reddit should add a lot more friction to creating new accounts and add read-only period.

> My buddies and I have no obligation to let you hang out with us if we don't like your politics.

There's nothing wrong with this in principal, except the default behavior for subreddits is to allow literally anyone to "join" in a single click. Those people aren't all your "buddies". A community can become private, but this also means not being visible to anyone except members. This creates a weird dichotomy where either a community is full-blown open and is encouraged to use other people's subscriptions against them, or to be invite only but few want to join because they can't see the activity of the site.

> I certainly don't care for the way Reddit runs its "communities". They are, in practice, run by a variety of petty tyrants.

That's exactly why the guilt-by-association approach frequently goes overboard.

> The solution to that is not, in my opinion, to increase centralized control even more.

Agreed. Some better approaches would be to allow a middle-ground for communities to be more exclusive and for sock puppet accounts to no longer be piss easy to create.

> As far as I know, there are no serious competitors yet.

Anyone reading this want to build one? :)