The company, which generates its revenue primarily through advertising and also offers premium access for $5.99 per month, has yet to turn a profit
Ya, this seems like a bad investment. And the need to turn a profit will likely lead to a worse and worse user experience as Reddit tries to monetize them.
Al the "disrupt the system" tech is just something that people use because it operates at a lose. The vast majority of the time the changes to turn a profit kill the platform.
Twitter has been around forever, and never turned a profit.
That didn't stop an egotistical idiot from spending billions in it tho. Because he thought he was smart enough to easily do it.
Ports are "profitable," but absurdly complex to build and manage. The reason many countries don't have deep water ports is because they can't afford to build one.
However, the economic impact of a port is, without question, a benefit to the Peruvian economy.
Seems like a terrible investment, I can’t see what they can possibly do to add value. Everybody who wants to use Reddit is already on it and anything they do to try and milk it will just lose them users.
I've had the impression for a long time that Reddit could stand to lose a large part of its users in order to be more profitiable. The nerds getting into long winded "ackchually" "debates" are making the site worse for the meme scrollers and they are also not the type to click on ads. They're not trying to attract more users, they want to maximise revenue from the existing pool. I don't think it's a coincidence Reddit has been slowly moving away from "discussion board" and towards image and short video (like the other three big platforms) because that's where the money's at.
My prediction is that shortly after the IPO we'll see .old go away, and a further sterilizing of subreddits ability to forge unique identities. The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators, buuuut they haven't had trouble after the API debacle so maybe there are more people willing to provide free labor than I assume!
The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators
I mean YouTube comment sections were known for years to be an unmoderated nightmare of just people saying the absolute dumbest shit.
YouTube was and still is the most popular video site.
I think reddit has just stopped caring about the real content of the comments since, like you said, they've pretty much pivoted to images and video. Expect the comments section to be further eroded as well, in the name of needing less moderation. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see Reddit do an "AI" push where the "AI" is mostly just replacing moderators with what amounts to a more advanced automod.
The offering would also test the willingness of some Reddit users to back the company's stock market debut. Many investors posting on the platform have helped fuel dozens of "meme" stock rallies in the last three years.
Whatever nonsense the're implying here is twisted and awefull. Like they owe it to the platform?
They will short the fuck out of it. There is literally no way this company can make money without making the product so much worse they will really start bleeding the users they need for revenue. It will explode on launch week and crash two or three weeks later.
Long short, long volatility until it flatlines. Basically free money. Their product is users and their data. If they upset the ecosystem users leave and decrease valuations... leads to layoffs and cost saving measures. Rinse and repeat until sufficiently dead.
The second they're publicly traded layoffs will simply be part of the cycle regardless of stock performance. C-Level must be seen to do SOMETHING to generate profits, or at least try. Regulators suck hard at following up on anything, but you gotta play by the book to keep them from sniffing around.
I'm also fully expecting this to be a case of butchering the pig. Huffman and the other cunts in charge will sell of their shares, make millions and run it into the ground. Much less scrutiny if a publicly traded company evaporates due to bad stock performance than when a private company suddenly disintegrates and the C-Level runs away with all the cash. Blame it on the STONK crowd and you're literally golden.
I'm sure they'll try and make as much money on the way out as possible, but tinfoil: This is the start of the end with a certain degree of intent by those in charge of that fucking company.
Without a doubt. They can't reasonably increase revenue so they need to pad* the books with layoffs. Those will result in the platform rotting out (further) from the inside. That's the long short position. Long volatility while the price bounces around like a coked up jack russel terrier.
/r/videos used to be a default and supposedly has millions of subscribers, but when I was still on reddit you'd regularly see content with 100 upvotes reach the top of the subreddit and maybe 10 comments. Often this was on bot reposts.
Their numbers should be take with a huge grain of salt.
And the real strength of Reddit isn't the huge subreddits anyway, they are mostly just trash. It's all the niche communities, most of them haven't moved away, or if they have, they moved to Discord.
I think it's fine. Lemmy was actually nicer with less users. Now it grew a bit and all the trolls also came along. If it becomes huge, it will probably lose most of its charm.
Bigger is actually not better sometimes I think.
I'm happy right now with it. But sure, mostly memes and Linux stuff which I like, so...
First off, US forces are not in Ukraine. Besides that, characterizing the invasion of Ukraine as the result of US actions rather than the reality that Russia’s actions are the sole cause aligns with the Kremlin’s BS talking points. The reality is Russia is pissy because their ex wants to see other people. Ukraine has every right to associate with whomever they want as a sovereign nation.
Yes. Best thing we can do is be ready (from a tech perspective) and welcoming (from a human perspective). They'll come or they won't.
Compared to summer, Lemmy now has thousands more users, hundreds of active communities (no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects), actual made-on-lemmy content in a bunch of places, and a bunch of apps that mostly have the bugs worked out. It's probably fair more appealing now to join than it was in summer.
We still have roadblocks: general confusion about federation (the email analogy seems to be working best), difficulty properly explaining how to sign up, a harder time finding communities, and it's impossible to migrate between instances without starting fresh.
Users can now export their data (community follows, blocklists, profile settings), and import it again on another instance. This can be used for account migrations and also as a form of backup. The export format is designed to remain unchanged for a long time. You can make regular exports, and if the instance becomes unavailable, register a new account and import the data. This way you can continue using Lemmy seamlessly.
Confusion about federation is not helped by federation not working recently due to a few notable Lemmy bugs (which are now fixed). Hopefully anyone new coming over doesn't encounter any new major bugs.
I'm always saddened by how not-active some of those subjects are. For example: Even many large games struggle to have dedicated, active communities on Lemmy (assuming I'm not terrible at finding them, which is sadly also possible). Even some of the largest games have only completely dead communities here. A huge draw of Reddit for me was to be able to talk about the games I play with other people who do too. And mostly, the games I'd love to talk about aren't in the top 10 most played games list.
Now I could try to (re)vitalize those communities I would love to see around, and I have done so shortly after the exodus (on my previous account that died with the instance it was on). However, there's only so much talking into the void I can do until it gets boring.
I also feel like that might be a big issue for people coming over. After I manage to explain to my friends how federation works, they ask me to help them find the [topic of their interest] community, and all I can show them is a community with 10 threads, all over 3 months old and with 0 comments. Sadly it shouldn't surprise anyone they're not sticking around after that.
I think part of the problem is that we migrants decided that each reddit community also needed a corresponding lemmy community right out of the gate. For example, on reddit, there is r/hockey, then there's a sub for each individual team. However on lemmy, the team subs are dead due to insufficient traffic, and stay dead due to the exact chicken-and-egg problem you describe. The solution is to congregate in a larger community instead, where traffic is higher, even if you're posting about your relatively popular game. So as a Winnipeg Jets fan, I should post in the lemmy hockey community and not the Jets community. Likewise, if you want more chatter about Cyberpunk2077, post in the general gaming community. It works reasonably well for now, and if the signal to noise ratio ever gets bad in the larger community, then you can split off into specialty topics.
Ironically, reddit also went through this exact process 10-12 years ago. r/science became too noisy, so people ended up in r/physics and r/chemistry, and r/askscience and such. We need to start with communities with larger scope until they're active enough to split.
At this very moment I'm looking for a discussion on sci fi oriented table top rpgs. On reddit, there is dedicated discussion forums for a few of them. Here, I'll post to !rpg because there's more people there. Off I go!
Basically this is similar to my "organicness" argument. Reddit grew over many years and these niche subs got created as they were needed, not all at once. On Lemmy and the Fediverse in general, there will be another layer of organic growth and organisation with regards to federation, where instances will clump into "neighbourhoods" that users can choose.
I feel like in some big game communities (like BG3) it looks deader than it should but if you post something you actually get quite a few replies. People are there it’s just that not everyone feels like making a new post.
Though I agree that concentrating on more generic communities for now is a good solution
I find Kbin's Collections feature a good fix for federation confusion. Honestly I think it should be the default type of view when browsing communities, you need to abstract the average user from federation as much as possible and leave browsing by instance as an advance option for those that want to engage with federation in detail
I still feel like if we want to grow faster organically we need to natively support more "discovery functions". Just things that you can toggle off like for example a recommendation screen and stuff. The algorithm for it we can make and adapt open source so no one is scared we collect data.
We're running into the Linux Vs Windows problem, where you can technically do more stuff and have more control over you account on Lemmy, but you need to be familiar with the fediverse before joining, just to Unterstand how to use Lemmy. That's a big problem for any potential new user.
Some of those popular subs were reopened with a new mod team that falls in line. Spez was too busy stuffing his ears with ad money instead of listening to his stakeholders
“Didn’t see much interruption”? It was all over r/all and they simply decided to not switch. How will less people remaining to protest make more of a difference?
Huffman is ostensibly following Elon Musk's lead, and last I checked, Musk had pretty effectively chased away a massive amount of what one might call "rational" advertisers. Reddit is absolutely following a similar path, and soon enough there will be advertisers who no longer want to be associated with a toxic brand.
It's not just similarities; Steve Huffman is openly and directly copying Musk. Honestly, given Ex-Twitter's performance, I have no idea why any investors are allowing that.
spez doesn't care. He's realized that, despite his best befuddled efforts, reddit is failing and that no one else will hire him for a cushy CEO job. He wants to take his bag and leave while the getting is still (relatively) good.
Founded in 2005 by web developer Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, Reddit became best known for its niche discussion groups and its users voting "up" or "down" on the content posted by other members.
I appreciate this extremely sly shade at Steve Huffman.
He's not an entreprenuer because he didn't do dick between leaving Reddit and coming back to Reddit whereas Ohanian had a few other companies in his back pocket.
I mean, Ohanian sucks, too, but this sentence is just Reuters kicking dirt in Steve Huffman's smarmy little bitch face and I'm fucking here for it.
Shoutout to all the tip of the spear folks here on lemmy for devaluing reddits ipo. Even if it makes a minimal dent kudos for taking the more difficult road and standing on principle.
I've tried to go back to Reddit occasionally and it's garbage, vastly more garbage than I remember last year, from the web design down to the userbase. Whereas I can't recall a single time I've been on lemmy and encountered an [undeclared] bot
Just today I noticed how low skilled the reddit base seems to be in my general meme/tech/piracy thrmed feed.
So many basic questions that could literally be answered by or get a start on from ChatGPT etc.
Instead they pollute the subs with their low effort requests for help or guidance.
I don't want to bash those folks that want to liberate themselve but this is either a designed request to engage discussions (state a correct fact, nobody responds vs. state a purposefully wrong fact and everyone and their dogs will come to correct them) or they are literally unable to search google on how to pirate.
This is like being unable to look up porn by themselve searching "Woman tits naked".
Iran arms Russia to attack Ukraine, bombs Pakistan, Syria and Iraq, arms Hezbollah and Hamas to try to massacre Jews. Sends war heads to the Houthi to tie up sea lanes. But, it's the Pakistani that attack them first. Gotta say, unexpected.
reuters.com
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