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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Genuinely don't understand how reddit has failed to make money.
Reddit's entire value is based upon the unpaid contributions of its users- they generate and moderate all the content on the site for free, and these are the things that bring people to the site.
How entitled must one be to think they can ignore all this and be fine?
Also how tf is reddit not able to break bank?
The functionality of their website was relatively simple - not underming the reddit devs here. The costs must've been minimal before the redesign and the dumb ass decision to host their own images and videos. Did they burn up all their money for the redesign and the shitty app?
They’re bloated. Thousands of employees. Tons of developers. Marketing people. And in the end? The real product is like you said, it’s the users and volunteer mods.
Those developers? Produced an absolutely terrible mobile app and mobile website.
The marketing people? They’re more focused on NYC time square ads than fixing sponsored posts on Reddit.
It’s an absolute shitshow but that’s what happens with these extremely bloated companies…
It's amazing how much of this fallout could have been avoided if Reddit had just developed a competent mobile app at literally any point over THE LAST TEN YEARS. You had plenty of time Reddit. Posted from Jerboa, a mobile app which already works better for Lemmy than the official app for Reddit works for Reddit and was developed by one tankie in his spare time for peanuts.
And yes I know I am talking from a regular user perspective and not a moderator perspective and I can't speak to the mod capabilities of Jerboa, but I work in IT and have developed apps, it's not that hard to pay someone to make a decent one or just buy out an existing one and don't shit it up. The solution to this problem has been available for Reddit for literally years. Almost like if Huffman was a legitimate businessman instead of a tech bro who fell ass backwards into internet relevance, he would understand the concept of investing in the future rather than just doing nothing until a few months before IPO and then flinging shit directly into the fan in front of him.
AlienBlue was reportedly good before Reddit bought it, so I'd say the official mobile app is intentionally bad.
Yeah, back in the day Alien Blue was better than almost any other app. It was the first place I ever used Reddit before I moved to Android. The official app is nothing like Alien Blue used to be. It's been gutted and smeared in shit.
Yep I had alien blue back in the day and it was essentially what Apollo is today (not quite as fleshed out as Apollo though). When Reddit bought alien blue I was actually somewhat excited because it was a great app. But they completely destroyed and tarnished it. I’m sure the dev who sold it (or was hired by Reddit, I can’t remember) is sad about it.
They didn't even really need need to make a better app to make more money. If the objective is getting the telemetry for ads by forcing the use of the official app, they could have the equivalent just via APIs and user-specific tokens. The backend would be key, and it would take advantage of an established app market. They could additionally monetize the API, if they approached it more reasonably. They could have the data and have developers pay a toll. Maybe hindsight is 20/20, but the animus they're displaying here is self-defeating.
Yes, but then they would need to hire mature devs. I interviewed at Reddit a few years ago and the "staff" engineer was a smug 25 year old. Their engineering culture is one of elitism and a shocking lack of humility. IMO, the rot from the CEO goes all the way down. It wouldn't surprise me if someone had your idea, but the organization is incapable of execution.
To be fair I don't think it's that he's not ending of a "legitimate businessman", I think that's the way that all large corporations are and if anything he's learned too well how to think like CEO.
But yeah otherwise I agree with you.
Actually sounds like a pretty standard case of feature creep, the bane of all large scale software. A vicious cycle of trying to do too much, failing, and then needing more people to maintain all of the crappy code. All the while they can't make any actual forward progress on things that do matter.
Not sure why they had to blow up like that. At its core Reddit should have been relatively simple to create and maintain.
It’s not “feature creep” when you prioritize ntf avatars over tools for moderators to keep the site functional.
I disagree. Feature creepy has to do with trying to do too much with limited resources. Nothing that reddit tried was super ambitious. It's stuff that other platforms not only do, but do a lot more of. I think it's just general mismanagement.
Can't forget about https://nft.reddit.com/, the real moneymaker. Nothing says value-adding like nfts, the dumbfucks.
An NFT as your avatar? Wow, it's dumber than I thought.
Ah but it's exclusive you see. Your avatar can be a glowy, animated Snoo, whereas everyone else just has free peasant avatars.
For the low price of 105 ETH $(227,389.05). Makes about as much sense as the really high priced ships in Star Citizen.
I hate how much effort they put into this.
The real landed gentry.
And they are still hiring engineers to build this NFT marketplace, just saw a job ad on LinkedIn the other day
Holy shit, I totally forgot about how stupid that was lol
Because maybe there just isn't a profit to be had in being a place for good faith discussions over text on computers. Its not exactly a hard problem for computers to solve. The hard part is moderation, and reddit the company never actually did any of that.