this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
536 points (100.0% liked)
World News
22059 readers
26 users here now
Breaking news from around the world.
News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
For US News, see the US News community.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Genuinely don't understand how reddit has failed to make money.
Reddit's entire value is based upon the unpaid contributions of its users- they generate and moderate all the content on the site for free, and these are the things that bring people to the site.
How entitled must one be to think they can ignore all this and be fine?
Also how tf is reddit not able to break bank?
The functionality of their website was relatively simple - not underming the reddit devs here. The costs must've been minimal before the redesign and the dumb ass decision to host their own images and videos. Did they burn up all their money for the redesign and the shitty app?
They’re bloated. Thousands of employees. Tons of developers. Marketing people. And in the end? The real product is like you said, it’s the users and volunteer mods.
Those developers? Produced an absolutely terrible mobile app and mobile website.
The marketing people? They’re more focused on NYC time square ads than fixing sponsored posts on Reddit.
It’s an absolute shitshow but that’s what happens with these extremely bloated companies…
It's amazing how much of this fallout could have been avoided if Reddit had just developed a competent mobile app at literally any point over THE LAST TEN YEARS. You had plenty of time Reddit. Posted from Jerboa, a mobile app which already works better for Lemmy than the official app for Reddit works for Reddit and was developed by one tankie in his spare time for peanuts.
And yes I know I am talking from a regular user perspective and not a moderator perspective and I can't speak to the mod capabilities of Jerboa, but I work in IT and have developed apps, it's not that hard to pay someone to make a decent one or just buy out an existing one and don't shit it up. The solution to this problem has been available for Reddit for literally years. Almost like if Huffman was a legitimate businessman instead of a tech bro who fell ass backwards into internet relevance, he would understand the concept of investing in the future rather than just doing nothing until a few months before IPO and then flinging shit directly into the fan in front of him.
They didn't even really need need to make a better app to make more money. If the objective is getting the telemetry for ads by forcing the use of the official app, they could have the equivalent just via APIs and user-specific tokens. The backend would be key, and it would take advantage of an established app market. They could additionally monetize the API, if they approached it more reasonably. They could have the data and have developers pay a toll. Maybe hindsight is 20/20, but the animus they're displaying here is self-defeating.
Yes, but then they would need to hire mature devs. I interviewed at Reddit a few years ago and the "staff" engineer was a smug 25 year old. Their engineering culture is one of elitism and a shocking lack of humility. IMO, the rot from the CEO goes all the way down. It wouldn't surprise me if someone had your idea, but the organization is incapable of execution.