Reddit’s been on a death spiral for over a year. The API changes are a Hail Mary to try and generate money. This valuation is bad.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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It very much isn't a hail Mary to generate money, they'd have bent over backwards if they'd wanted to keep big players like Apollo and RIF on board, if it had been a hail Mary. 20 million bucks a year is nothing to be sneezed at.
The fact that they left Apollo out to dry shows that it never was about making more revenue, but rather to stamp out competition for their own app. As soon as it has accessibility parity with other apps, it'll turn off API access for unofficial reddit apps alltogether.
By driving out third party apps, it forces users onto their own, which forces users to view ads.
A year ago, Twitter was bought for $44b. That should have increased Reddit’s valuation, but it didn’t. User growth has also been growing for them. The only reason I can think of for the drop in value is if they had a drop in ad spending. Driving users onto their app where they force them to view ads is one way of driving that ad spending back up.
Thanks for your hard work spez!
also fuck spez 🖕
Did I mention "Fuck spez"?
Argh, what I wouldn't give for Discord to absolutely tank itself.
Unfortunately, while the reddit "migration" was difficult, Discord would be even harder to move people from - while also not being as easy to just drop on a dime, since at least for myself there are plenty of friends on there that I don't have another way to contact...
Discord would have to be really stupid and do something really egregious though to get everyone to move off it all at once. The dream? Mumble and IRC, give me those back. I don't see that happening of course, Matrix would still be nice but it doesn't really do voice channels well.
Could pair Mumble with Discord, but I think the days of people being okay with having a different app for messaging and voice communication is over (when it comes to gaming surely) after a post-Discord world.
Just curious, why the criticism of discord? Maybe I'm out of the loop, but I haven't heard anything too negative about them - nothing like the controversy surrounding reddit, Twitter, etc.
Just a personal preference?
A combination of personal preference, and just how much I despise what they've done in terms of making information hidden away from the internet - anything on Discord cannot be indexed (and there is no way as a server admin to allow indexing as an opt-in capability), they're just another big platform that is waiting till it hits critical mass to then start turning against its users (in my opinion).
Oh, and the fact that they couldn't care less about the Linux version of their desktop client (which is riddled with issues due to being on a grossly outdated version of Electron) also doesn't sit well with me, but god forbid you try to develop or use an alternative client... In a way, just like Reddit now I suppose.
Unfortunately, unless all of your friends are in the FOSS world, it feels useless to even entertain the idea of convincing them to switch to something else. Just another case of the "Network Effect"...
It's more the core of how Discord works then anything. The fact that it's hard for knowledge to persist, leading to channels just being people asking the same questions over and over.
And it's not really indexable or searchable, so even if people are trying to provide good information, people are going to struggle to find it.
All the downsides of a private service in that the information is stashed away and impossible to search for publicly, all the downsides of a public service in that none of your messages are private or encrypted and so can be read by the company or whoever pays them!
Before I (unfortunately) budged, it was due to inferior usability (imo), bloated experience, and most notably, shitty privacy policy compared to the likes of a (self-hosted) TeamSpeak server. Discord is free because you're the product, as with any other service.
I can't speak for everyone, but my own biggest concern with Discord is that it seems to me that they're inching their way towards either an IPO or acquisition. The former would end with Discord exploiting our data as much as possible, and the latter with years of our data being put in the hands of the highest bidder. Microsoft acquiring Skype was rough; something similar occurring with Discord would be downright brutal. The thought of a corporation exploiting all of the conversations about extremely personal events is frightening.
Not OP, but as someone who uses discord every day, I think I can speak to the general criticism. Discord has way more bloat than what is needed by most out of a communications program. They've continued to add "features" that a lot of the user base doesn't really care about, but take up visual space and operating space. Discord Nitro ads are also on the list of criticisms as it's nearly constant. I love having a place to easily interact with communities I care about, but if somehow a less "noisy" alternative came along and everyone I care about moved (lol), I'd change in a heartbeat and uninstall discord.
I cancelled my sub because as a paying customer I still get spammed with those ads popped up on top of your user panel.
I didn't know they stuck around if you upgraded. That's awful lol
It has the same downside of any proprietary technology. It can't be forked or audited by third parties. All of it is consolidated in the hands of one company and your data belongs to them.
Could pair Mumble with Discord, but I think the days of people being okay with having a different app for messaging and voice communication is over (when it comes to gaming surely) after a post-Discord world.
Also, as much as I love Mumble and its voice quality (and low latency), Discord is much more plug and play. Mumble needs microphone specific fine tuning to work well. Which is worth it for me, but is nothing you can quickly get someone else to do.
Yeah it’s always a project to get new people started with Mumble. It doesn’t feel like it should be so difficult, but people always struggle.
Ironically, I struggled immensely with forcing Discord to stop messing with my system audio settings, which is apparently something apps are allowed to do in Windows.
In my circle it's always the fine tuning of voice activation thresholds that causes trouble. Then you either hear every single background noise or half of their sentences are swallowed. Once it's tuned correctly it's a bliss, but getting there can be quite exhausting.
That is very true too! The future is uh, not looking so great in that regards sadly.
I had to push so hard to convince my main friend group to move our group chat over to Discord. They would have happily kept using Facebook messenger forever. I hope discord doesn't start tanking because a switch to yet another different platform would be a hard sell.
Holy cow I was in the exact same boat haha. Just this year we finally moved clan chat over since we were recruiting. They were the last reason I even checked Facebook.
I'm not aware of what Discord has been doing that is causing people's concern. What are people currently concerned about re: Discord?
I accepted that it would have to start doing something eventually - it can't operate for free forever. But the only news I've heard recently is giving servers optional tools to monetise, and free users can continue to not use servers that do that. The few servers I've been in that do it are doing it ironically - donate to the sub to gain access to a channel with a giant 🍆 emoji and nothing else! Comments disabled! etc.
I wouldn't blame Patreon for somebody moving all their content behind a $20/m sub, I just wouldn't subscribe to them... so I'm not concerned with Discord until it enshittifies for users.
I'm surprised we haven't seen a mashup of either Mumble + IRC/XMPP or even Mumble + Matrix yet.
May I ask why you'd like discord to tank itself? I know they have some ridiculous limits on non-nitro users, and the design keeps getting bloated with nonsense no one asked for, but to me it seems to work pretty slick for sharing things like photos and chatting in games.
I guess those reasons alone are enough to want it to go down, but I'm curious if there's something more that I haven't heard
I still have TeamSpeak on my machine. I always thought it was a fairly decent chat program.
I use a combination of Matrix and Mumble, personally, as well as hosting the servers for each. But yeah, the convenience of Discord is hard to compete with.
Fidelity valued its holdings in Reddit at:
May 2023 > $15.4 million
Apr 2023 > $16.6 million
Aug 2021 > $28.2 Million
So Fidelity lost $1.2M in the value of their holdings based on this bullshit triggering the issues with 3P apps and the black out and beefs with moderators?
Spez gotta get fired sometime soon. I figured that the initial cut in April may have triggered the push to cut API.
My guess is that it's more than that it just hasn't been priced in yet. You don't want this sort of stuff in your IPO risk disclosure.
As a reminder, there's a megathread about all Reddit-related news here - please direct all discussion about Reddit there. Thanks!
Could the megathread be reposted every ~24 hours with the sum of the changes be included in the top of the post or a pinned comment? I would rather have a discussion about a current development than read something from 1 week ago.
Edit: i saw something about 1 day ago. perhaps you started implementing this. Nevermind.
Let's hope the ipo fails and the c-level staff who thought they were going to be able to buy their mega yachts cry themselves to sleep. After they get the boot, someone could revive reddit into a great service and being used as a scheme to fill bags of money.
Spez is apparently only worth 10 million which is... Shockingly low honestly. Pretty sure someone with a decent plumber business could be worth more than that.
Considering he lives in SF that's quite low. Basically just means he probably doesn't have a mortgage at this point.
I think he's younger than me and I'm happy just to have a positive net worth.
Your above average FAANG engine at his age would have a higher net worth than that. Honestly I think that figure might be too low.
Tbh, every one of these social media IPOs so far has been a bit of a wet fart.
There is the argument that these sites might not be able to be profitable to begin with...
Be it Twitter, Reddit or anyone else, I don't know how taking drastic, sudden measures to tighten the purse-strings, while giving the middle finget to users would work to increase or maintain its valuation.
Couldn't happen to a more deserving company …
Oh dang, if only somebody could have seen this coming! Oh well, nothing can be done.
It warms the soul.
Nice to see that spez's hard work are making a difference
You’d have to be crazy to give Reddit any substantial investment right now. If anything this whole thing has shown that Reddit is nothing without its communities, and the communities don’t care about investors.
Fuck spez.
Real time video and audio are a different beast to text. The only way forward for these is P2P, not federation.
Maybe some Matrix like protocol for chat rooms (call them Channels, Communities, Club Houses or something trendy if you want) that also setups a P2P audio room, and a P2P video sharing system.
No one can independently host and transfer the insane amounts of data discord moves, but P2P networks resources for serving data grow linearly with the amount of devices consuming data. And audio/video streaming can be ephemeral, no need to save 80tb of a streamer sleeping.
The thing is how are they going to use the piracy bogie man to make all this ilegal hahaha.
Gosh if only there was a sticky thread for the latest reddit crap.
It's worth nothing to me as I now have my own instance that does exactly the same thing!
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