Lurkers (who did click join, but never posted) are included in the subreddit user-counts advertised on the protest subreddit. If they count as users there, they count as users here.
Why are you dismissing this? I don’t understand all of these comments talking about Reddit as if it was 100% free to operate and the only important users are the commenters
Why did they hire 2000 people? Nothing they have done in the last decade has provided new value to users. If they had simply accepted their role as a utility instead of chasing the mega-growth tech fantasy then they would be a (modestly) profitable company with 200 employees at most.
yes, and fund service running. Looks like important part of the ecosystem.
does it exist and works on scale, or it is like communism where everyone will be happy, but it is never achievable and sustainable just because most of the people want money, power and free stuff.
And yes, the entire foundation structure of the platform and protocol are quite different, that's kinda the point. ActivityPub and Matrix protocol are similar in this regard. And yes the AP impls are seeing huge explosions in growth in the last 3 weeks
I am not familiar with all those projects, but my understanding is that reddit's moats are:
- infra which can serve significant traffic over petabytes of content with search and recommendation on top of them
- they have bootstrapped content volume and communities
- they have monetization in place which pays for all infra and salaries
how far mentioned projects from that state?
Search? Reddit search is so bad it’s practically a meme. They only added the ability to search within comments (y’know, like 90% of the site) _this year_.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/11dgwzy/whats_up_wi...
> they have bootstrapped content volume and communities
Do you mean when the founders (including current CEO) posted as a bunch of fake users to create the illusion that it was popular?
https://venturebeat.com/social/reddit-fake-users/
> they have monetization in place which pays for all infra and salaries
How is possible if Reddit has never been profitable/reached breakeven?
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...
People like to say that users who post content care about lurkers because they want to be seen/heard. No. People who post content care about commenters (and up/downvoters at the bare minimum) who interact with them in meaningful ways, not lurkers. Lurkers are the cosmic neutrinos of social media: they pass through without leaving a trace.
Reddit wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want millions of hours of unpaid labour from mods, posters, and commenters. And they want to control these people as if they were employees (by dictating what tools they're allowed/not allowed to use). This will not turn out well!