Reddit faces new reality after cashing in on its IPO

Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de to Reddit@lemmy.world – 141 points –
Reddit faces new reality after cashing in on its IPO
arstechnica.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/12276054

Reddit must now answer to its shareholders as well as its vocal users.

30

Wrong.

Reddit only needs to answer to shareholders. Users have never mattered.

It's the old adage:

If something is free, you're the product not the customer.

Right. The users are the product. What do you think happens when a vendor runs out of product?

Users matter.

only if they earn money. otherwise they're something you can sell to an advertiser - and that's the only value they have.

I dunno about you, but if I click a link and it says they're going to share my info with 164 'vendors', then only shows an "accept" button, they can fuck right off and I'll never go to their website again

It's 2024, that shit's illegal in the modern world

If the site is like that, then they probably already shared your info with everyone.

10 more...

Reddit has never been a business capable of generating significant profit. It only exists because it was less monetized than the alternatives. By abandoning this philosophy, Reddit is guaranteed to be the next Digg.

sustained growth can't succeed along with the surroundings. I would like to believe that gross mismanagement would lead to the downfall of this once super cool website but I also think twitter is a stupid idea so I'm a bad judge of what will get funding. I wonder how much of that funding is shell corporations from intelligence agencies harvesting user data and training computer models though too.

Letting the users have their way seems like a great way to harvest better quality data from the user base. Not that I’m in favor selling user data…

Year of the lemmy ?

Maybe in a few years.

Right now we're talking 0.0057% of the monthly active users. Lemmy likes to hype itself up a lot, but the market share is incredibly tiny, and likely will be for years to come. As a platform Lemmy would be incapable of handling that kind of scale, from both a software, design, hosting, logistics, cost, moderation, and community perspective.

I'll be here, but let's check in each year on it. I'm guessing it will be a few before we either see accelerating growth, or Lemmy is upset by better designed federated social media software, or it'll just be fragmented between dozens of competing platforms.

Honestly, I expect that the parts of the Web I enjoy spending time will be fragmented for the foreseeable future.

Lemmy people are obsessed with growth but honestly I think there's a trade-off that people are overlooking.

Yeah. I don't get the obsession with growth. I get missing some communities you want to have (that you had on Reddit for instance) but then try to cultivate those communities instead of wanting general growth. General growth just will eventually just lead to low effort posting/commenting drowning out interesting posts/discussions.

Also, if the platform is good it will grow anyway.

Yeah ok. The new reality it must face is as the temporarily inconvenienced Twitter that it’s been trying so hard to be.