[Reuters BreakingViews] Investors will say “OK Boomer” to aging Reddit
reuters.com
[...] a dearth of profit this late into its existence portends the lack of a real business model, suggesting it’s still not ready for public company life.
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How the fuck are you not making a profit on $800M annual revenue? Just how much is Spez salary?
That's actually the thing that gets me about this whole situation. They don't create the communities. They don't create the content. They don't add comments. They don't upvote or downvote content or comments. They don't moderate their communities. They don't really respond to support tickets, and rely on other users to help others out. That's a lot people they don't have to pay.
Imgur was created because reddit refused to host native images. They refused to host native video. If you change or delete something, they only keep one version as backup. The vast majority of their content is text. Their storage and bandwidth needs should be comparatively minimal.
They've spent decades refusing to upgrade the user experience: RES has all the features reddit refused to make. The moderator toolbox has all the moderator tools reddit refused to make. The apps have all the features and all the disability features reddit refused to make. Their own app is something they bought from the original developer for a minimal amount of money - and then they made it worse.
What are they spending their money on? Reddit crypto was a failure. Reddit NFTs were a failure. Reddit streaming events (RPAN) was a failure. I'm sure they invest money into their April Fool's thing, but how much does that really cost?
Not only that, but the original source code for Reddit - which they're probably still using a lot of - was open source.
What really bothers me is that the original plan for that open source code was to make Reddit federated. They wanted to make it so that other people could run their own Reddit servers for their own communities. Sure, they would have locked it down somehow and tried to make it so that they got paid in the process, but the concept of the Fediverse could have been a common thing over a decade ago already. I'm sure that would have been a far easier walled garden to break out of than the current-day monolithic Reddit is.
Holy fuck guys, we’re showing our age here.
On my profile it says "redditor for 18 years".
Reddit exists despite itself lol.
With most of the labor unpaid mods!
Mods, and people posting too. At least Facebook and Twitter have network effects of people you know or want to follow. Reddit doesn't even have that.
Don't forget that users paid the server fees, for literally years.
Never trust a c corp in good faith.
They've tried to implement features people didn't want and haven't seemed to develop a decent business model going forward. Even worse, they destroyed two of the better ways of generating revenue; profit sharing from phone apps and Reddit Gold.
They made a video and picture hosting platform that no one asked for or wanted that likely balloons their infrastructure cost by an order of magnitude.
It's probably hosting costs. Reddit uses huge amounts of bandwidth and storage
¯\_(ツ)_/¯