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Reddit is in danger of a death spiral (www.zdnet.com)

submitted 2 years ago by doophy@kbin.social to c/news@kbin.social

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Can Reddit survive as its volunteer workforce close down subreddits and walk away from the site in protest at the management's new policies?

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[–] JoeCoT@kbin.social 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Yeah, it's been a slow boiling pot of water, but the problem has been the same basically the entire time.

Community: reddit, we do not like this thing you are doing. Insert thing here. All of ViolentAkrez's messed up porn subreddit stuff, r/jailbait, r/thedonald, firing the woman in charge of AMAs, Ellen Pao's drastic attempts at monetization (which was just her being the scapegoat for Huffman and crew) and now these API changes. Stop doing this thing that is hurting your community.
reddit: Here are a lot of words to say that we don't care about what any of you think, and we believe we are making the right decisions. While we understand you are all upset, we do not care and do not plan on changing.
Community: OK, well we're going to continue protesting this and escalating until you change it.
reddit: that's all great but we still don't care.
repeat x5 escalations
The matter finally hits mainstream media. Gawker, or a major online news site, if we get really lucky, there's a CNN segment on it.
Within 30 seconds of mainstream media coverage, reddit caves and does the thing the community asked for the entire time.

This is why the protests for this escalated so quickly. We've done those steps over and over again, for over a decade. The point of protests at this point is never to get the reddit admin's attention or change their minds. The point is to cause a big enough stink to get major media attention. The protests ramped up so quickly because there were only 30 days to change reddit's mind, they showed no indication they wanted to change, and we needed the media attention. We got plenty of media attention this time. Unfortunately, media attention isn't going to be enough to change their minds now, because this is all for an IPO and the execs want their bag of money. Even if reddit folds entirely, they'll get to walk with the bag.

But in reality, we should've ditched years ago. Because, does any of that cycle sound healthy? It's not that reddit's admins don't care. It's that they haven't cared in a long time. Huffman doesn't care. I don't think Alex Ohanian did by the end either. Aaron Schwartz cared, but too much. But if a community can only get a site's staff to stop actively harming them by putting a gun to their head every time there's a problem, there's no future for that relationship. This was just the exclamation point. Even if reddit staff totally caves, we should not go back.

[–] figjam@midwest.social 5 points 2 years ago

I've purged a lot of my social media footprint in the last 6 years and I have regretted it zero times. This too shall pass.

[–] doophy@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Well said. Boosted and upvoted... whatever those two things mean. Internet points to you, good sir!

I'll edit to add that the main thing you point out that I think most fediverse folks want to avoid is the investment that leads to the IPO bag of cash. When the incentive is profit, I think social media can only ever get worse for the average end user. Keeping these things small and non-corporate is great in theory, but who pays for the servers and other costs when/if it needs to scale?

[–] GizmoLion@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There's still a big difference between making money to survive, and the insane cash grab that was this new API pricing...

[–] doophy@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

That's kind of the problem, though. That insane cash grab is profit driven. Spez said it himself in the AMA: Reddit is profit driven. That goes beyond makiong money to survive. That's investors seeing a return on their money. That's generating value in preparation fo that big IPO. That doesn't usually mix well with the way a site like Reddit generates value: free community created content. Right now, Reddit is banking on enough users not caring about the protest, or the fact that the site is arguably on a downward trajectory. Looking valuable is more important than being valuable at this point.

Thanks Jack Welch for that kind of mentality. I hope you're burning in Hell.

[–] GizmoLion@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

No argument with what you said, I'm just saying there's a big difference between paying for a server, and paying your shareholders.