The users will piss and moan but ultimately they have nowhere else to go. Reddit will of course only get shittier at an exponential rate. Now they can’t even pretend to put the interests of the user base first, in fact, they have a legal duty not to. Enshittification to the moon!
This isn’t just bellyaching. There are serious questions about Reddit as a business. Reddit isn’t profitable. Reddit has never been profitable.
Yea that's the problem with capitalism. Something doesn't have to be profitable for it to be good. Sure, reddit is astroturfed af etc but it can be a useful forum for niche stuff.
Besides, it's generating money for other sites as a content aggregator.
Under capitalism you have to have something be profitable or be subsidized by some megacorp.
Decentralizing from reddit and making an open source alternative like Lemmy is the path forward. There isn’t anything uniquely innovative about Reddit that can’t be easily copied. The site itself is divided into subcommunities. Why do they all need to be linked under one domain and owner?
Reddit’s original innovation, if you can call it that — and they really weren’t the first anyway — is that it takes the old school forums, which were all the rage in the 00s, and makes them way more efficient to interact with via an algorithm which takes user input (votes). It’s not rocket science, it was obviously the next step beyond the simple sorts of old school forums.
Today, the benefit of Reddit is that it has the capital required for consistent uptime, resilience against DDoS, etc. but even that is solved by services from Amazon and Microsoft and Google…
The value is in the content, even we continue to go back to it by appending reddit to google searches as it’s the only way to get anything valuable out of that useless amalgamation of ai generated detritus.
One thing that could be interesting is to back up a sub’s entire history and add it to a lemmy instance then move a community including the history. I don’t know if that’s possible or not, seems like it should be. Content piracy essentially.
Anyway I see a general trend towards decentralization of the internet which is long overdue. Many of the services we were happy to outsource to the capitalists have become so shitty and/or expensive thanks to greed that more and more people are self hosting their own social media platforms, media servers, etc. It will be interesting to watch how the next 10 years unfold.
But there's just no way Reddit NEEDS to be unprofitable. Lemmy is not exactly profitable, but because it's not bloated it can run on very little money. And it accomplishes the same as Reddit. Why can't we have nice things?
I don't think so. They don't seem to knowingly collaborate with intelligence or any kind of fed (beyond what they publicly do). If they did, they do a bad job of communicating between each other, or they wouldn't have made it public knowledge Eglin Air Base is the most Reddit addicted city.
Kevon, who told me he was thinking of investing, says he thinks Huffman was overpaid. (In the filing, Huffman is listed as making $193 million in 2023.) He was surprised Huffman made so much while the company was operating at a loss.
And there’s the program to give certain power users the option of buying stock before it debuts on the public market.
I am curious about seeing how this plays out. Let's say multiple users, who are inexperienced in investing, decide to buy-in... And then the stock price plummets shortly after IPO. I know very little about law and so I am only speculating here. I suspect that the users might have a legal case against Reddit on the basis that they were sold a risky asset under conditions generally reserved to experienced investors. The inexperienced users could not have been expected to fully understand the risk. Even if the users are given the S-1 form and asked to sign a legal document stating that they understand the risks, I don't think that this would be enough for Reddit to not be liable.
All I do on Reddit is post shitty jokes and takes on sports subreddits lol. And occasionally moan on my country's subreddit. How the hell am I a valuable user?