Mostly features.
3rd-party apps, including RIF, do display ads already - I have a vague recollection of it becoming compulsory at one point. The difference is that they tend to be less intrusive than on the Reddit app.
Apart from that, I agree that it's a hard act - but it's also true that trying to be something they're not (i.e. Twitter) will inevitably produce a damp squid which loses what made Reddit unique (and it's happening a bit more every day) while not quite managing to be the other thing.
The social space is obsessed with "competition by copycat", instead of focusing on their core strenghts. Maybe because they all fear to be destroyed by this or that novelty feature, they all end up looking the same, regardless of whether it makes sense.
I paid $5 to get rid of the ads anyway.
All squids are already damp.
Since launch "new reddit" has been broken to the point where the page crashes if you copy and paste text in the comment textarea. You need a hard reload of the page to restore it, and then you lose your comment.
It's been what, 5 years now? I think it's safe to assume that nobody working on reddit's UX actually uses new reddit, and also most likely nobody else either.
The ability to edit text isn't a weird niche feature for powerusers. It's fairly central to using the service. Anyone who does more than passively scroll down the front page will run into this.
It's not because the issue hasn't been reported either. https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/search/?q=paste&restrict_sr=1
The SerenityOS guy will soon have built a fully functional web browser rendering engine in less time it's taken Reddit to restore the default functionality of a textarea tag. It's unbelievable.
A text area box that they could get for free from the browser. It's not like a text entry box is fucking rocket surgery. HTML forms have existed for almost three decades.
Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board?
> invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is
They already do that, maybe you'd like to increase the PR budget? It might be tricky with the ad revenue loss.
> try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content
They also already do that, the whole redesign with individual comments taking 240px height and user avatars are the result of that.
I'm not saying the executive team cannot do better, but doing it without getting kicked out is incredibly hard.