“If you run a company based on the goodwill of millions of volunteer users, contributors, and moderators, one of your top priorities should probably be to focus on making them happy.”
Never mind that he publicly said that the company has never been profitable.
That is always going to the biggest issue, it doesn’t matter how happy, or unhappy, they make the users, the current business strategy just isn’t profitable.
It may not have been profitable, but it used to at least be sustainable. Remember the old “Gold meter”? Reddit Gold was able to more or less cover server costs, back when the Reddit team was lean. The problem is that they ballooned to 2000 employees and tried to compete with Instagram and Twitter.
The main thing I got from reading Huffman’s comments about all of this is that, despite helping create Reddit, he doesn’t actually know what Reddit is.
Reddit links to other websites, and hosts user-made posts/comments. That’s it. And that’s exactly why pissing off the mods who’ve spent years preventing Reddit from becoming a cesspool (see 4/8chan for what an unmoderated Reddit would look like) is a really bad idea.
Despite what Huffman seems to think - Reddit doesn’t actually make any content of its own. But he seems to think that Reddit owns all of the content on the site. Well, it sure as shit doesn’t own the other websites which are constantly linked to, which only leaves the user-created content, which the users are proving that Reddit doesn’t own either.
Yep. u/Spez should be shaking in his boots at the 53k active user count here, the XXX at k.bin, and the 25k on Squabbles. Obviously it’s a fraction of reddit, but you only need to get to a certain critical mass to where even more obscure groups can have a source for news and meaningful discussion. That discussion and community is why I defended and advocated for Reddit for a decade+. Not reddit itself.
They’re betting that they are the untouchable community but what happens if the community splinters? They’re worthless.
And it isn’t just a matter of numbers, but of content quality too. My impression is that those who are leaving Reddit for the fediverse alternatives right now are also those that create more meaningful and useful content. So the loss for Reddit is already much larger than the numbers tell.
This also connects with the strange way of reasoning about “making profit”, and with some comments I’ve read saying “did Reddit users expect a free lunch?”. The point is that the value of Reddit comes exclusively from the content, and the content was given for free to Reddit by the users. Reddit was having a free lunch too. It’d be funny if people started to say “You want me to post and create content on this platform? Well pay me then”.
53k active user count here
Holy crap that many!?! Where can I view that data?
Here you go: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=30
I have my toes in both Lemmy and Squabbles. I am skeptical that the fediverse can withstand humanity’s collective need for infinite and continuous financial growth, and I am frustrated with the buggy and laggy website. However, I have been enjoying my time on this site more than Squabbles, and I think a BIG part of that is that the doubled user count really creates a fresher and more dynamic conversation, especially in the smaller communities.
Abstractly, I like the idea of the Frediverse more, but if you take Lemmy for example – it could be confusing to a new user as to what the hell is happening with the different instances and servers.
I just link people to lemmy.world and tell them to go from there.
Yeah it almost didn’t happen for me. I’ve been tech savvy all my life and I followed the first link and noped out.
My 14 year old daughter heard me complaining and did some research and said, “Dad, you’re misunderstanding how it works. The servers aren’t isolated, it works like email. You don’t have to be signed up with the same provider to send and receive or in this case, see content. You just gotta sign up with one of them and it don’t matter which.”
I was still a little put off until she made her own account and showed me how it works.
The apps will make this easier. More apps are coming.
They’ll make signing up simple and explain it upfront.
