So I doubt Conde Nast has much say, if any, at this point.... and while I dislike everything spez is doing, I imagine he has the full backing of investors looking to IPO soon.
And to think it all started because of API pricing increase...
Market's aren't rational.
> "Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/the-reddit-protests-...
(That article is a day old now, and I still don't think it includes everything that's happened late this week.)
They're hell-bent on getting everyone onto new Reddit (Reddit 2.0).
Hopefully this is the move that kills Reddit, and we get something even better to take its place.
I feel bad for spez at this point. We obviously are seeing what he deems as the boards request of him. We have no idea what he really feels about everything going on
Secondly, people aren't necessarily mad about him charging for the API. In my experience, most users want Reddit to succeed financially. He could have easily figured out a way to roll this out in a better way.
People are mad he's been caught lying multiple times and has at this point decided to declare war on the thousands of people (the mods) who do free work for him, in order to pit users against the mods.
"My bank balance is going to look so good once we finally IPO", probably.
Even though he’s a cofounder, his current position is like the one of a non founder ceo in a post-exit company
It's not like he was brought on 18 months ago just to get the IPO done.
Do you realize how tone deaf that sounds?
I'll give it a shot!
Sure
Idk he's made his views quite clear at this point. Although he may edit them and everyone else's comments again.
But everyone invested is crazy rich and doesn't have time to waste micromanaging a $5-$50M investment.
1) Spez is right, this is a tempest in a teapot that hasn't (yet) had a big impact on traffic, and won't once they seize control of the rebelling subreddits. A vocal minority cares of the public about the impact on the community, but stakeholders realize the business will be fine.
2) Spez is wrong, and is comfortable misrepresenting the situation to the public at minimum. Maybe he misrepresents it to internal stakeholders too. The situation will appear under control right up until the moment the wheels fly off.
Could be a little of column A, a little of column B.
(Don't shoot the messenger! Just adding some objective data amid the flames.)
Roughly half of the biggest subreddits went dark. And almost all of them are back (r/funny, r/gaming, r/aww, r/todayilearned, /r/pics, etc)
AFAIK the only huge holdouts are r/videos and r/music.
Mods and some users have been very vocal...but there's a quieter, larger group that is fine with the official app and just wants a place to post.
---
EDIT: My bad. r/aww, r/gaming, and r/pics have disabled new posts.
Plenty of others...r/funny, r/askscience, r/earthporn, r/explainlikeimfive, r/food, r/gadgets, r/nottheonion, r/space, r/sports went dark and are now back.
Total affected subscriber count has fallen ~60% [1] since the peak.
FWIW, I think #2 is true as well. This is by no means a inconsequential disruption. But it's also far from "the death of Reddit."
I understand that the big subs are either no longer dark, or can be forced to reopen. But that is significantly more difficult to force upon the smaller, more numerable subs.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinit...
But that in some form should be terrifying to institutional investors evaluating or underwriting this IPO. Will users under the new status quo have significantly different retention patterns and lifetime value when consuming content moderated by the moderators that led Reddit to the point where it's able to IPO in the first place?
It's very possible that retention numbers drop through the floor because subreddits lose the unique character that made Reddit different from any other social media platform - a character traced through a continuous history of mods on large and small subreddits, chosen as stewards of established per-subreddit culture, now to be wiped away. In the current market environment, doesn't that make Reddit a riskier investment than ever?
And it wouldn't take a lot to fix. Spez doesn't even necessarily need to reverse the API restrictions. He just needs to communicate and listen to mods with empathy, and establish that empathy publicly and privately as a top company priority. It's not too late for him to do that and save the company. And the more he refuses to do that, the more questions investors will ask about his readiness to lead.
Far more terrifying is a site that is perpetually at the mercy of a handful of powerusers. That if the winds change, they collectively could tank the value of the product with no way for investors to intervene. If I were going to invest in Reddit, I would want the CEO to show that ultimately he/reddit is in control. He is a known, predictable quantity. He is also someone that can be replaced if things go too far off the rails. The whims of the pseudo-aristocracy is completely out of my control.
If a subreddit for a class of products gets flooded with sale spam, low quality content, memes, it will push the users who create higher quality content away. The same for a subreddit about hobbies, if it's not curated to have a good intro FAQ and collection of guides for beginners, and good moderation that is empathetic but can enforce guidelines on questions that constantly pop up, it will push people away because of the noise.
Moderation on reddit is what can control the noise, with a low signal-to-noise ratio the power posters disappear.
I think the best scenario (globally) is that a new generation of internet power users, at least 5-20% of them, would learn federation and forums. This could be a lesson for... half a decade, maybe. The ones foolish enough to stay in their pens will be only having it worse as time goes on.
As of this writing, per https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/, r/aww, r/gaming, and r/pics are all restricted to new submissions. r/music is the largest subreddit still in private mode.
At least r/gaming, r/aww and r/pics are still restricted and do not allow new post or comments.
So the protest is still going with some really big subreddits supporting the cause.
Mods are out, making a tempest in a teapot, but consumers are fine -for now. Medium/longerm, no one really knows if mods will permanently quit, and whether anyone replacing them (or not) will have an effect in traffic.
It appears like a bet. Not sure if its one i'd take though if i were the CEO.
Are they? They're not private, but (last I checked) at least some of those were not allowing new posts or comments.
Every person I know who uses reddit app does so very passively. They are read-only users who just ingest posts and rarely contribute. Yes the vocal minority is mostly mods and power users, but the argument here is that those are also the people who make reddit what it is.
That cuts both ways, however. If moderators get compensated with a sense of satisfaction rather than money, then site changes that affect their "quality of life" carry extra weight.
In plain English: if you do this for fun, then you stop doing it once it's no longer fun.
The API changes are the proximate cause of the protest, but the widespread participation suggests that many moderators were already near the breaking point. (ed: was capitulation)
That'd be me, although slightly different. I've been on that site a long time. I have an account is amongst the first thousand to join it. 17 years.
The official app is fine for me when I decide to use it, which is rare. I just don't use my phone for "apps" that often unless I really need to. Otherwise I'm still on the site daily, on a computer.
I don't get the hatred. It shows ads, unlike what you can get on the computer. Other than that? I guess I'm not the target market. It works.
Since I've been on the site for 17 years, I remember old.reddit.com well.
But things change, times move on, we adapt.
So I'm using the new layout, dark mode, compact mode, no subreddit styles. As simple as I can get it.
Slower? Yes. But it doesn't look like I'm back in 2006 again either.
For me reddit without the superior functionality of a group of competing third party apps just isn't worth participating in anymore.
But I recognize a lot of people don't care, or won't be bothered by the changes. For me it just gets added to the list of sites I watched crumble to a shell of their former selves. I was addicted to Reddit in 08/09 and had many sleepless nights digging around niche subs for interesting stories. But like my daily slashdot habit from the early 2000's I move on when its time to give up on a site.
The lifecycle of website enshitification rolls on.
Honestly, it feels like the Reddit team saw one of the "Everything Apps" from China and thought its UI and UX where something to be modeled after.
I simply wish they would have attempted to buy Apollo and RiF. Then offer them up as official clients. RiF is the only way that I will interact with Reddit because of the way it is laid out and how functional it is. That's where my hate come from. They are effectively killing Reddit for many of us.
It's not that it works for me really, it's I'm not the target market.
I obviously getting on in the years. I have a 17 year old Reddit account and I signed up for that at work!
I just don't use my phone for apps like Reddit. I use it for what I need to, calling, texting, delivery apps, banking, navigation, music and that's about it.
If I'm sitting in the doctor's office lounge too long I may fire up Reddit's official app otherwise I don't use it.
I can see the benefits Apollo and others bring, they look far better from all angles. I just don't need them.
But I'm not alone, that's why this whole fiasco will likely blow over. Most people don't know and/or don't care about these apps, but they use Reddit. The HN crowd is not your typical home user, or a "get off my lawn" type like myself. Even though I have multiple decades of working as a software engineer.
Now should they be doing this now? Should they be trying to rush this IPO and these profitability targets and whatever to get that big payout?
No, they shouldn't. But that's the choice they made.
I mean sure, its not the vast majority of users utilize 3rd party apps. I also wouldn't say its a small number. RiF has been downloaded on the Android App store 5 Million times. That's just one of the apps. I know apollo has even more users. I'm not on IOS so I cant really search it right (not willing to lol).
I am sure it will blow over also, but the site is going to be worse for it. Its also a matter of time before he comes to remove old.reddit in hopes of squeezing blood from the stone. Its not a profitable venture. It wasn't and never will be.
If someone made the official reddit app have customizable colored comment depth lines and added a toggle for the video mode I would be very happy with it.
Obviously I'm just being picky here, I'm very used to the official app. Also, people can patch out ads on Android with revanced anyways.
My $DayJob has been running Reddit Ads campaigns for the last couple months. Starting Monday we saw a ~60% drop in impressions. They have not come back up yet, they've continued to decline all week.
What seems more likely Spez is lying and/or saying this with the subtext that a week of disruption hasn't impacted what their projected quarterly revenue will be, because they'll have time to revise those projections and smooth it all over by the time they IPO. But re-projections never happen in real time, it'll take a few months to see if they're deviating far enough to require a downward projection.
It is very plainly having a much bigger impact than spez anticipated.
It's not journalism and it does a disservice to their listeners.
What sort of naive idealism is this? People in power will exercise that power however they see fit as long as they believe they can get away with it. With Reddit of course it’s even easier as there’s no real stake/serious consequences (or at least the owners seem to believe there’s not). People don’t get leadership positions because of their superior ethics and morals.
I don't know if he's right or wrong, but it's pretty clear that he's comfortable misrepresenting things to the public.
What they crave is community.
I am betting that the big winner of all this will be Discord.
Which is still a bad thing as now all that hoarded reddit data that comes up when I look for problem solutions is going to move to tech support discord channels for that community and vanish from the public web.
Even if he's "right" what "Spez" has done here is pure idiocy.
Even if Reddit comes out of this largely unharmed, why did they even take the risk? Why didn't they just incrementally increase API pricing or implement policies that slowly kill off 3rd party apps one at a time? What he's doing is simply bad from a strategical perspective.
But further, this event has put me off ever wanting to invest in Reddit post-IPO. "Spez" seems approaching conflict like a child in an argument with their parents might. Even if you like Reddit's product I don't know how anyone in their right mind would invest in a company where a child is calling all the shots. The dude edits comments to pwn people he doesn't like, he lies, he's comes off as arrogant and entitled. It's just so unprofessional.
If anyone else was in charge I'd have assumed they wanted the controversy.
Might just be a rip-off-the-bandaid type of calculation. Maybe the response sucks now, but it'll resolve in a week or two (vs having smaller protests every time one of these incremental changes take effect). Similar to how people were really angry when companies had more than one round of layoffs.
btw not an endorsement of spez's actions; just trying to game out why he might be doing it this way.
I guess that the goal is not to kill all the 3rd party apps, but only those that make profit from the Reddit API (which doesn't include their advertising if I understand well). Now assuming that a progressive price increase would be put in place, I guess that these apps would simply offload the API tax to their user base with each new raise. As it has been mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, with an abrupt price raise in a very short time, the apps would not have enough treasury to be able to "buffer" the cost until the users pick the pace up - assuming users would, which is perhaps a more important (read: long term) worry.
It should be observed that the goal is not to kill off all 3rd party apps, since there are special exemptions for non commercial apps. I don't know if these exemptions are actually useable in practice, or if actually this is just a part of a larger scheme to get rid of all those apps while having a plausible line of deniability.
It is certainly sad for iOS users as Apollo seems to be their only option besides the web site, but I wonder why they did not see that coming miles away. Maybe they did expect a price to show up at some point, but not with such a magnitude.
If Reddit just came out and said they can’t support third party apps. They are not profitable and they need to focus on their ad business. Third party undermine the business.
Inside they killed third party apps, while lying about it. They keep doubling down on this passive aggressive point of view.
This is making the community and mods realize that they are providing all the value and not getting any of the benefit. This is becoming much bigger than about third party apps.
Woah. Ianal but that sounds like a gdpr nightmere. Are they doing it to european accounts too?
Haven't heard about accounts, but the HN thread about comments being undeleted had multiple HN comments confirming that their own comments they had scrubbed had been reverted
The company is bleeding cash. There's a good case to be made that this is the only way to make it stop bleeding cash. So either this needs to work, or the company will die anyway.
1. Doing long term damage to search position for Reddit content. Results, short and long term reduction in SEO generated traffic, fewer ad clicks, lower revenue, and a loss in valuation. Also, paying to get traffic will cut into margin, further reducing valuation.
2. Causing users to delete their accounts, lowering active user counts, and cutting Reddit's valuation.
3. Forcing people doing work for free to stop, meaning that Reddit will have to spend money to either hire or recruit and train more free moderators, resulting in increased operating costs, thus reducing profit margins, resulting in a lower valuation.
4. If it is true that management at Reddit is undeleting deleted users and accounts, they may be creating a situation where they claim they have more users than they do. Because this is the result of management's actions, it could be viewed negatively by regulators and law enforcement.
What is going on needs to be stopped. It's insane.