this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit.

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Now the social media platform is aiming for an IPO in the first quarter of 2024 with a valuation of $15 billion, and has been in talks with potential investors like Goldman Sachs and and Morgan Stanley, per Bloomberg.

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[–] [email protected] 130 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

And what could they use the money to do? How much innovation has there been on Reddit since it was written? Fancier Reddit gold? A shitty redesign? Video hosting that doesn’t work? Image hosting so bad someone had to make totally separate website for it?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (1 children)

None. No innovation. Every update to the site has made it worse and less reliable. I could single-handedly code a better Reddit in a few months than that entire team has done in ten years. But they're not focusing their efforts on UI/UX improvements. They focus all their efforts on tracking, data harvesting, and circumventing the user safety protocols built into web browsers. We view the project as a cool public forum. They view it as a means to riches, and they don't give a shit if it's a pleasant experience for the users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

This is true for almost every social media. They get popular for one thing and one things only and it’s mostly just content formatting. The rest is ads that make very little and they can’t diversify.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Well they control the mobile apps now, which is most of the userbase. The redesign is still terrible but nobody has much of a choice about image hosting since it’s built-in.

The only thing I can really think they “improved” is that the new gold system allows to be paid for your content:

If you’re eligible for the Contributor Program and your content meets the requirements for monetization, you can receive cash from Reddit for the gold and karma you earn on qualifying contributions.

But that’s definitely not going to help them be profitable lol

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

if your content meets requirements for monetization

"Requirements" being key there. The vast majority of even power users won't end up getting paid with the system as it stands. If anything, it's just there for people to give them credit for making it "possible".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Which requirements are difficult to meet? The highest hurdles I see is receiving 10 gold in a 12-month period and making sure your content isn't porn/gore/drugs. I think reddit blows, but this doesn't seem like difficult-to-obtain goals for somebody trying to make some extra scratch.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I went through a few pages and they don’t seem unattainable. The hardest would probably be living in a country that isn’t included

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Yeah, and while the country thing sucks, it's at least a quick "yes/no" answer before you even start trying. This isn't a deceptive lure like roblox, where they entice millions of kids to try to monetize their content, but make it exceptionally hard to actually make a profit or to even cash out (and even if you meet their ridiculous requirements, there is a huge imbalance of exchange rates when converting to and from a real currency to robux).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

“What’s your business model?”

“We pay people to post on our site.”

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Look at a the way everything in tech is moving.

We are in the age of of surveillance capitalism. It will make itself profitable with our data. Maybe identifying people, creating profiles about beliefs and personality, etc.

What else could they possibly do? It’s proven profitable and that’s what they want.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Well recently more people have been using the official reddit app. No relation to anything going on, by the way, just the app getting better, obviously.