> So it was always about money.

I'm more surprised that anyone thought it wasn't about money.

Reddit is a business. An unprofitable business. They have to do something to turn a profit eventually.

Well I think this is a bit reductionistic. Every business is a business, but just about every business also won't cross certainly highly-profitable morally-dubious or long-term damaging paths.

A car company could maximize short-term profits by reducing quality. Reddit could sell your location data to the highest bidder. Apple could threaten to delete all your pictures unless you buy a super-pro account.

And generally companies don't do this, because the backlash. The backlash is good. Often the backlash is even good for the long-term health of the company/world.

I think to say that short-term-profit-oriented behavior from companies is inevitable isn't true, the backlash often wins, and long-term strategic thinking is actually the norm.

Well said.

"A car company could maximize short-term profits by reducing quality."

Like KIA cheaping out on basic anti-theft measures (at least in the United States where the regulations don't demand it).

I agree they have to turn a profit.

I’m just baffled at their pitiful attempts at doing that the past few years. And how it’s now culminated into where we are this week.

2,000 employees. What are they even doing?

> Monetization isn't a short-term concern of ours

To be fair, we're not in the short-term horizon of 2015.

But I've been curious for the last week -- why isn't Reddit profitable anymore?

Did something change about ads since 2015 (likely) ?

Did their cloud costs go way up ? (possibly, since the redesign seems extremely slow and resource heavy, compared to the old site)

Reddit was weakly profitable but now has done a ton of hiring in hopes of building a huge business and chasing the IPO money train.

They have 2000 employees now. They had fewer than 200 in 2015.

That's kind of what I suspected ... it seems like a self-inflicted problem, a consequence of the VC model and "enshittification"

This makes Wikipedia seem prescient. It also has basically all user-contributed content, and user moderation

You can point out a lot of its flaws, for sure, but at the end of the day, the product actually works

Reddit for me is barely functional, I still used old.reddit.com

Of course that was the intention all along -- to drive users to mobile -- which is just sad. Destroying value on purpose

The whole thing can be summed up as such: Reddit has continued to expand its business and increase costs while failing to innovate in any meaningful way.

In a bubble, the business is ultimately a failure and it deserves to die. It's just sad given the quality of the content is so high in contrast to the platform and the lack of an outstanding of alternative for people to congregate around, as Reddit once was for digg users.

Wikipedia enshittified too, to a lesser extent, but still they have made their begging more and more aggressive over time.

I would say Wikipedia has been overly aggressive in their fundraising

But it hasn't enshittified

I would be really happy if Reddit ended up like Wikipedia. You can argue that Wikipedia could make better use of their funds (you can always argue that), but look at what Reddit did with their funds

They basically dug a big hole and are ruining the product to get out of it. I'd rather Wikipedia have extra cash than be in the hole, and desperate

It's a private company. What else was it supposed to be about? Distributing VC money to users?

You could run a company that sustains itself and its employees, maybe makes a modest profit. You could just make something valuable that people like and want to use, and have that mostly be the end goal.

You probably won't get incredibly rich, though.

That sounds great, but I feel like the VC firms that would allow you to start up in the first place aren't going to go for it.

Yeah. If you want to build a lifestyle business then you can't take VC money. The grassroots approach is not an easy one and can take a very long time to grow! But in the end you retain complete control over the business.

Reddit has a fiduciary duty to it's shareholders. Spez is an employee, Reddit is mostly owned by a cable/magazine company lol

> You could run a company that sustains itself and its employees, maybe makes a modest profit.

Reddit is not profitable, though.

They're burning through investment cash just to keep the lights on. That can't last forever, so they have to do something.

Then fire all the management team, the board, the VC's and everybody related to that site. That company is almost 20 years old, they aren't profitable because Silicon Valley reasons, either way if they can't make that god damn site break even they are not just incompetent but a complete waste of space.

On a more "suave" note, they are a Dodo but this is the XXI century.

They're not profitable because they choose to not be profitable, because they have too many employees and are trying to be the next TikTok.

If they operated like archive.org, they could sustain themselves. They don't want to do that, because it doesn't result in big returns for investors.

old reddit was fine

they wasted, and continue to waste, bunches of money, for nothing

It was "fine" in your opinion, for doing the kinds of things you liked to do with it. But that wasn't leading to TikTok-level profits.

They may be wasting money, or maybe not. If they chase away all the people like you, and end up with a userbase of vapid morons who just watch idiotic TikTok-style videos on it, and this makes the company billions in profit, then that money wouldn't be "wasted".

I mean, it sucks (IMO) if running a discussion board service for people to have intelligent conversations about various niche topics is financially undesirable compared to running a social media site for people to share and make moronic comments about moronic 1-minute videos, but that seems to be just how humans are.

what you’re describing isn’t all that compatible with vc funding. reddit is what, 10 rounds and $1.3b deep?

they certainly cannot say, “hey board, we decided we’d like to just be a modest profit company”. spez would be out of a job.

the other option would be not taking funding and building a business organically. would reddit have been able to become reddit if they hadn’t taken all that vc money? i’d say probably not but i don’t know anything about anything.

Yes, in fact the most successful social media companies do just that. Reddit doesn't seem to be aligning its interests with the interest of power users unlike other social media companies. Reddit is really putting itself in a position of getting what it pays for, which it doesn't pay for moderators while at the same time is taking their tools away and also seems to be insulting them too. Treating major contributors as slaves hasn't exactly been shown to be the key to social media riches but the alternative has. Different solutions work for different companies, but one way or the other you have to align your interests with your users - especially power users - or else you'll just limp along, which this would seem especially true for social media companies.

I suspect they see "you get the be the moderator in a community!" as a user feature, and not as an internal job.

And people clearly want to do it, and care enough to do it for free. Up to a point, at least.

If there's a bunch of openings for moderators as a result of this blackout, I'm thinking I might like to try it out, especially on a high-traffic sub if I can. Of course, as an unpaid volunteer with so much power, I'm not going to use it the way they want me to. Instead, I'll just randomly ban people I don't like, and then get them banned sitewide whenever they question my ban. (This seems to be normal behavior in many subs already...) Then I'll continue banning people, targeting the most productive users on that sub, until the sub is nothing more than a wasteland. This probably wouldn't be good for Reddit, but they'll be getting what they paid for.

> it doesn't pay for moderators while at the same time is taking their tools away

The mods mainly were protesting because they relied on these tools. Reddit responded by making exceptions for these tools, and threw in exceptions for accessibility-focused tools to boot. (Taking the "think of the blind and deaf people" argument off the table.)

The only people that are still upset are the people who just want to continue to use ad-free readers, without paying money.

Reddit is a digital drug dealer that just raised prices on its addicts. The power users you describe are the least likely to delete their accounts and leave. Their rage over something relatively trivial is just a testament to their addiction.

>The only people that are still upset are the people who just want to continue to use ad-free readers, without paying money.

I am definitely in the minority, but I am upset that Reddit plans to monetize my writing by selling it to LLM companies (without an opt-out).

They have given us no reason to believe that their half-assed, last second, poorly defined exceptions will be honored in any meaningful and reasonable way.