I think it is probably not a coincidence that, after so many years of running without sustainable profitability, Reddit is having these issues shortly after the free money ran out (i.e. interest rates rose). They cannot put off an IPO much longer, and even if they did that would just mean they need to pay their own way, which points also at profitability.
Of course, just because they raise the prices on their API, doesn't mean enough companies will pay for it, to make them profitable. Just because they are forced into these measures (assuming for the moment that's true), doesn't mean that (unpaid) moderators will want to continue doing the job (in enough numbers) to keep things running.
In other words, like cheap Uber rides, it may be that Reddit was never actually a viable business, it just looked enough like one that it caused investors to keep shoveling them money?
I don't understand how it's a losing battle. A small number will quit and the rest six months from now will be on a shittier version of the site, like Twitter users now compared to last year. Reddit and Twitter will take as long to die as Delta or Wells Fargo or Facebook. Many better challenging products will die because they don't have a network effect.
Put it this way: would you buy stock in a gas station where the owner was getting the gas for free from his friends, and now his friends hate him and aren't giving him free gas anymore?
Now imagine that this station is located on a busy intersection surrounded by multiple other stations.
Reddit is just a dumb pipe; its only real value came from its users. Management doubling down on its increasingly undisguised hostility towards those users doesn't scream "growth" to me.
I don't doubt that Reddit will stagnate, just that it will lose. The rules have changed. Reddit and Twitter know they're too big to be disrupted, and surviving open hostility to their users opens a Pandora's box that we all have to live with now.
I’m not sure if Reddit is losing, or the moderators are losing, but I’m sure that Steve Huffman is losing. He has made this situation so much worse than it had to be.
There also isn’t going to be another diggv4-like collapse where a new community just totally eats an old one. Even if the fediverse takes off, Reddit is still going to be very active in ten years, it has so much inertia now. The question is its trajectory and it’s IPO price.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 23.5 ms ] threadOf course, just because they raise the prices on their API, doesn't mean enough companies will pay for it, to make them profitable. Just because they are forced into these measures (assuming for the moment that's true), doesn't mean that (unpaid) moderators will want to continue doing the job (in enough numbers) to keep things running.
In other words, like cheap Uber rides, it may be that Reddit was never actually a viable business, it just looked enough like one that it caused investors to keep shoveling them money?
Now imagine that this station is located on a busy intersection surrounded by multiple other stations.
Reddit is just a dumb pipe; its only real value came from its users. Management doubling down on its increasingly undisguised hostility towards those users doesn't scream "growth" to me.
There also isn’t going to be another diggv4-like collapse where a new community just totally eats an old one. Even if the fediverse takes off, Reddit is still going to be very active in ten years, it has so much inertia now. The question is its trajectory and it’s IPO price.