If by "growth" and "metrics" you mean they have to figure out how to make money to sell themselves to investors in an almost-hostile financial environment, then yes, I agree.
Beginning of the end and all that. You can't sell "community". IPO means ads, ads, ads and dodgy strategies like you describe above.
Discord and Twitch have a funding model that would probably work great for Reddit. Allow users to pay a small fee to upgrade their subscription to a subreddit - maybe $1.50/mo per sub or $15/mo for all subs. The upgrade includes access to special emojis for the sub, a special flair or re-colored username, and no ads on the upgraded sub. A portion of the money would go towards funding moderation for the sub, and Reddit could pocket the rest.
Decent perks for an eye-watering price, and you don’t even get encrypted messages to boot.
That creates bad incentives, though. A streamer I mod for once suggested something similar, I told them I’d quit modding in that case. If it’s a job, it stops being a hobby.
There is a name for this effect (it's no cognitive dissonance) I think - I recall reading about it in Freakonomics, wherein they discuss it in the scope of parents being "fined" for picking up their children late. The fine actually validated the tardiness as part of a business transaction - instead of being a social imposition - and actually led to more delays, not fewer
Are you referring to incentives? Specifically turning a social incentive to a market incentive?
> The fine actually validated the tardiness as part of a business transaction
It should also be noted the parent’s monthly bill was around $380, and the fine was only around $3. So even being late every workday in a month was only an additional $60. And I’m sure some of those parents would happily spend that to be rid of their children for a little bit longer.
I do wish it was recorded whether the length of tardiness increased as well, and what the mean and mode were. Whether parents started to abuse the time or not, in effect milking the daycare for care, is an important data point as well.
Admittedly without quoting it does look out of place. I just edited it to fix that. Thank you!
The most (in)famous example in the US is the American Red Cross following the US forces in Europe during WW2 beginning to charge a few cents for donuts that they had been giving away for free. While they were still inexpensive compared to their usual price at US donut shops, it was a huge change in the relationship that ended up souring a lot of soldiers towards the Red Cross.
The economists have their own name for many phenomena that come down to the same thing that the psychologists would predict. Hence the rise of "behavioral economics" to converge the fields.
If I pay you just a little bit for something you were doing, it may not really register much because it isn't enough money to really do anything with besides buy a meal or a new toy here and there or something.
If I pay you enough for it to be considered a job, that brings in a whole bunch of new expectations on both sides. You may expect to be paid a fair wage compared to what you previously did, to have a good career path, to do something that looks good on a resume, to have a good work-life balance, etc. And they may expect a certain stable and reliable productivity level, advanced notice for any time off, etc.
Then they killed it.
Twitch's model works great for creators but not for Twitch and as a result Twitch has been working hard to force their creators to run more ads.
https://www.reddit.com/premium
They don't revenue share with moderators though, because as far as Reddit is concerned, fuck moderators.
I’m unsure why Twitch would keep squeezing every dollar in insane ways unless their funding model isn’t working either.
therefore they don't exist after IPO.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
..and it turns out it's right on Reddit's wikipedia page as well:
> Supported by the funding from Y Combinator,[28] Huffman coded the site in Common Lisp[29] and together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005.[30][31] Embarrassed by an empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake users for their posts to make it look more populated,[32] an example of a fake it till you make it strategy.
Nobody would accuse a waitress of fraud for seeding the tip jar with a few dollars.
Now, if Reddit is doing fake posts in mass to change the valuation of an IPO, that would be the definition of fraud, specifically a public fraud the SEC could investigate. Reddit doing this at the start at best would be a civil investigation by any investors it had at that time, but it's highly unlikely any investors it had when committing said fraud would bring said investigation because it increased the value of its investment.
On a more serious note, I'd be super interested to know how high the percentage reddit users who don't speak any English is. And how high it could grow in the future. I'd wager that most of the people that hang around r/de and r/france are also members of English-speaking subs (even if passive). That's because the interesting thing about reddit is that you have all these niche communities of your interests that you could join. But if you fragment these niches further down by language, you end up with communities that are too small to be interesting. E.g. r/Elektroautos/ just does not have enough content, compared to r/electricvehicles/
Although I’d be shocked if good old Rocket Internet hasn’t done a Reddit clone by now, thus capturing the non-English-speaking part of the German market.
So yes, members of /r/france and /r/de read and probably participate the other subs as well, and the whole point of /r/france and the variations is less to speak french but to have local discussions gate-keeped by the language.
Same for Japanese communities, there's massive subs for anime an Japan life, and there will be small niche subs in Japanese only to isolate from the bigger group and paradoxically have a less filtered bubble.
For anyone who doesn’t want to translate the French post and German comments: Reddit is using bots to fill copycat subs with local content by machine-translating successful posts of the original subs, and then spammed every user from that country with an admin message about those subs.
Social media sites are usually valued by how many active users they have, so what's a better measure of that?
I am not very active, but people are following me daily.
It's not like they need first to detect those users are bots.
They could use “fake = 1” to report the number of fake users. Or “fake != 1” to report the number of real users.
I can’t imagine the gymnastics they would have to do to make a fake user count palatable in a road show so again, I think your interpretation is most likely. Then again, I’m about a billion dollars short of my opinion mattering…
It's more likely to be some kind of prettified name like "internal public accounts for assuring control of external applications," some sort of technical name that doesn't really make sense by itself but is complicated enough that it looks like someone knew what they're doing when they came up with it.
Management would flip if they stumbled on anything titled "fake." It's way easier to just hide red flags behind technical sounding terms than it is to try to explain why a "problem" isn't a problem and shifting the blame to someone you won't miss.
Sure, they could be dumb enough to do that, but no evidence of it.
I agree, but all content _is_ generated by users.
Maybe they're hoping to find a private buyer for all of their equity who's willing to waive due diligence.
(this is more a user persona rather than meaning an actual tiktok user but it seems that's the way Reddit wants to go)
When you’re trying to gain traction on a new and free website it’s one thing (Reddit essentially started this way)…but if you’re trying to sell the company to investors this should be a crime.
And if the latter is not fraud but legitimate usage of the site, then it seems like there could be a huge gray area of plausible deniability that the owner was simply using the site the same way that anyone else could (albeit with a streamlined interface).
But when the actions are done in an attempt to trick individuals weighing financial incentives? That becomes much more murky. Had they bootstrapped these communities prior to the IPO filing? Fine. After the spotlight is on them to prove organic growth for the IPO? Murky.
Strong disagree, reading such things habitually is corrosive to the mind and turns people bitter. For reddit to recommend and promote ragebait subreddits to their user is deeply unethical. And to create fraudulent ragebait content, to make people vicariously mad about something that didn't even happen, is evil on par with being a tobacco advertiser.
Literally no one is talking about how all of the LLMs are training on Reddit data via the API.
So far…
- PaLM
- GPT3
- Falcon
Yes, Reddit is closing on its IPO because it’s not a non-profit.
But that doesn’t mean they should be forced to provide a low cost service to OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and the entire investor community backing LLM startups.
Source:
They can fully dictate the terms of their API sure, but unless they want to drop off all search indexes there is nothing they can do about people scraping the data the old fashioned way.
There’s a real non-negligible cost to Reddit hosting the content.
The bottom line is there’s solutions here.
- High volume API users pay up and subsidize the cost of everyone else
OR
- All Reddit users pay a monthly 9.99 subscription and the API stays the same.
OR
- A not-for-profit let’s say Internet Archive takes ownership and begs the Reddit community for donations (ie. Wikipedia)
- Everyone will just run web scrapers increasing the load on reddit's servers even more
An API actually REDUCES load and lets you manage it.
Please answer the question:
How is Reddit supposed to make money with increased load and demand for its content?
Please answer the question:
How is reddit supposed to prevent scraping when it is legal to do so, and they have incentive to appear in search engines? Considering that scraping is legal and WILL happen, why not opt to reduce the load by offering an API?
The infrastructure they provide is easily replicable at almost no cost (really it's just the bandwidth that costs any money at all). The community curation and moderation is done by volunteers. The content is all from the users. Reddit Inc is providing almost none of the value, and it's just benefiting from network effects. People go there because people go there.
The real meat and potatoes is plain old text with Reddit style markup.
The bottom line is they'll happily pull the rug from under those 3rd party devs if it means they can pump their numbers for their IPO.
Small cost x moderate usage = moderate cost Small cost x overthetop usage = overthetop cost
What they should do is really hammer the LLMs.
I think this is more about the IPO and inflating figures.
They can EASILY provide high prices to LLMs and low prices to app devs. They just won’t. It’s in their best interests to remove third parties and force everyone on the inferior, ad-ridden official app. They could even make premium-based account tokens to allow them to use third party apps, but that’s too long-term oriented. They have to pump’n’dump NOW.
Reddit content is actively being pillaged by LLMs.
In fact, making the API paid does nothing for that goal. Scrapping has been long established as legal so if their license doesn’t change, nothing about LLMs using their content will either
And there's the scam laid bare.
It's *NOT* Reddit's content. Sure, by posting you're granting them a whole slew of rights. But you dont transfer ownership to them.
And when your content creators leave, blammo, you have no more new content. And I'm already seeing some subreddits drop dramatically in terms of comments and posts. Tech ones, naturally. Turns out Lemmy is actually pretty cool for a fediverse version of reddit.
We're already seeing the start of death of Imgur as "reddit image host", oh wait "imgur social network", oh wait "no porn Imgur". We all know how this works out. Same game, just a bit ahead of reddit.
Any one can scrape too. The bigger one is, the more likely they have extensive scraping tools.
Sucks.
I wonder if the demographics are different or if it's just the lack of bots/fake accounts/astroturfing.
Having reddit try to push down low-quality content that was auto-translated to these (in my opinion) higher quality communities is quite funny in a sad way.
Moderator from those community have been contacted by reddit admin to tell them that they created localized version of popular subreddit ( r/offmychest, r/tooafraidtoask, ... ) and asked them if they basically could signal boost them. In itself nothing is wrong here. The issue is that people have found that a lot of activity in those subreddit are seemingly just poorly google translated popular post from the original english sub or just plainly generic classique karma bait post (but also clearly google translated).
Karma bots are nothing new but in this case, those subs are brand new, have very few member and very few karma to gain and are basically of interest only to reddit (since the communities already usually had their own better moderated subs). So there is a lot of finger pointing at reddit themselves using bots to try to force engagement in non-english community and virtually (since it is mostly bots) bump their stats before their IPO, which is very dodgy.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/14199iu/reddit_saut...