Splinter the community, I'm going to stay with the people who went through the mess of setting up a new place that isn't beholden to Reddit. It may be forever smaller, but of the 600,000 subscribers, how many of them contribute?
It may be forever smaller
I would honestly consider this a feature, not a bug.
eh, it is what it is, and i'd say not really either. For now, probably nearly everyone that's staying here is probably a contributing member, but if we continue building and promoting this community, then it will get to a sizeable number of lurkers. As long as we don't attract bad actors, or bad actors are dealt with swiftly, it's all good.
yeah we gotta grow this community. And wait for reddit to make the next mistake that will drive people here.
For sure. If this community stagnates, it will eventually die of attrition.
The "sacking" of the current moderator volunteers that I've seen in some news articles this morning leads me to the next step, which is if a moderator can be tossed, that's a chilling effect for the next moderator and then, all the people who remain subscribed to that subreddit. I don't know if that will actually happen this way, it will at least be a fascinating exploration to see how this all unfolds. Someone on Mastodon mentioned that Reddit makes no content of their own, it's all volunteers, the public, and their 3rd-party toolset. That they are burning all of it and maintaining that everything will be fine in the end. Smells a lot like bravado and big-talk.
I think this is a important take - as far as users are concerned Reddit merely hosts the content and the community, but as far as Reddit is concerned it owns the content and wants to monetise the community.
The problem for Reddit is the moderation is done by users who do it for free, mostly because they love their communities and want to keep them going. Those people are not easy to replace - plenty of communities shut because no one wanted to moderate them, and plenty of users just aren't interested. So if they lose the moderators, there is a small pool of people to replace them and many of those may not be motivated in the same way. There will also be bad actors amongst those untested moderators.
Lose the moderators, and the communities fall apart as bad content, rule breaking and negative behaviour takes hold. The "content" becomes lost and the value of what reddit things it owns falls massively. An archive of old reddit comments is actually not worth much - sure people google things and find answers on Reddit - but it's the current active users and daily content that draws people in.
I think Reddit is doomed as it is failing to understand it's own business and what made the site successful.
Yup. An opinion writer in the Washington Post had a weird analogy yesterday, but it works — Reddit’s business model is almost the same as a thrift store’s. People donate stuff (clothes and furniture to Goodwill, analysis and humor to Reddit). Volunteers sort through it and throw out the bad stuff (volunteers at Goodwill, moderators at Reddit). And the business sells it (Reddit has one extra step here in that it sells ads, so it uses the donated-and-sorted stuff to build an audience to sell).
If the donators and the sorters walk, what do they have to sell?
That opinion peace helped me to understand what was different about this situation vs Twitter. The business model at Twitter is different. Twitter didn't require communities with tremendous user investment to create a community, and by not realizing community was the differentiating aspect of Reddit, they didn't understand how passionate people would be.
That's a good analogy, makes it easier to communicate Reddit's business model and how messed up they are right now. Thanks for sharing!
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