this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Reddit

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[–] [email protected] 307 points 1 year ago (2 children)

LMAO. The only time I visit Reddit any more is when it dominates the first page of search results. Spez has failed upwards for so long, he thinks he can fly.

[–] [email protected] 94 points 1 year ago (2 children)

IMO this is the best evidence yet that Spez is trying to kill the usefulness of Reddit even if it kills the platform itself in the process. Just like Musk is doing with Twitter. Free and open mass communication were in the process of turning the tide against the ruling class. Don't get me wrong, it's still very early in that process, but I've noticed a lot of things go from "you'll be ridiculed if you question this" to "some people still try to defend it, but the ridicule is going both ways now" over the years.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

So he could be incredibly stupid in a different way than I originally thought.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

He was probably offered a ticket to a higher financial level. Whether he's stupid or just corrupt will depend on whether that offer is followed through on.

My guess is he was told if he did x, y, and z to Reddit, the IPO would allow him to sell his shares at some number that he really liked.

But I don't think he can just undo the damage he did if they change their mind about buying it at that price when the IPO comes. I don't know if he'd even be able to talk about that without implicating himself in crimes, so it might happen.

That's assuming he's corrupted by the carrot and not the stick.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

I think it would be more a plan to make people come to reddit to search for that kind of information. Google is destroyed by seo listicles and non advice that is referral programs.

Reddit has lots of useful data that is from users who just provide the data with no ulterior motive. That is useful to users. Currently they might search and suck in to reddit for the result but that's hard to monetise. So Google gets the benefit. They have crap search and people don't go there to search and users are down.

This is probably a play to try and encourage search on reddit and raise advertising dollars. However, it will likely make reddit less visible, lowering new users and infrequent users, all the while they keep losing existing users.

They are floundering. They have some ideas that aren't terrible on the face of it but execution is awful and hostile to users.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Same here.

Interestingly back when myself & others were moderating subs on Reddit, & we locked the subs during the protests, the majority of PMs us mods would receive were from randoms that found a link via Google or wherever & were trying to view the post. It did make me wonder how often people browse Reddit just because they stumbled into a link via Google or whatever search engine.

I can't see how Reddit would survive without the big search engines, without those random visitors the ad revenue would plummet.

[–] [email protected] 165 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Half the traffic to reddit is because someone is looking for a recommendation or solution. Reddit's internal search function is about as useful as it's video player or it's app.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

So many times I saw a meme and I wanted to show it to someone else only to be sure it was lost forever to that useless excuse for a search.

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[–] [email protected] 143 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Both reddit and google will become useless if they do this.

[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 year ago (16 children)

sad and amazing how true this is.

to find anything worthwhile in Google search you often needed to add site:reddit.com

to find anything at all on Reddit you needed Google

well, glad I don't go to those websites anymore...

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago

Reddit needs google a lot more than Google needs reddit

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[–] [email protected] 132 points 1 year ago (3 children)

if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.

There's your problem, Reddit, you think it's your data.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago

This sentiment sums up so much of what is wrong with modern consumer oriented tech companies

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The people using Reddit for its data have the easiest time scraping it for its data since they don't need API access to post, comment, or moderate; it's unfortunate that Reddit management continues to degrade the experience of the average user just to make it slightly harder for that scraping to occur.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Next step: charging 1 dollar a year to maintain an account there

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

I hope they both block Google and start charging for accounts. Watching Reddit kill themselves will be so cathartic.

My schadenfreude can only get so much stronger.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I found Reddit so useful that I would have paid but only for the user experience I wanted. not the stream of vomit their app wanted to show me. Im almost 40, I've got a pretty good job I can cover another subscription. I wouldnt have liked it, but I could have.

This is what pisses me off about tech companies. Tell me "for $20 a month you get the fully customisable app with no tracking for advertising or data mining or use the free add supported, try and sell you shit app" give me the option, I will pay to not be annoyed.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This, for me, is a good example of why the assessments that I've seen lately about how much Lemmy/Kbin may or may not have caught on, and the assessments about how Reddit may or may not have been impacted by the migration, are way, way too early and kind of nonsensical to make right now.

It is important to understand that Reddit is set on becoming a public company, and for a public company, not taking any avenue that could provide additional revenue is essentially only one step below setting that money on fire. If there's a chance that something will make the company more efficient, you are kinda obligated to do it. This will constantly (and increasingly) lead to policies like this, which sacrifice user convenience or add additional friction to the experience, because an experience that is open, accessible, non-intrusive and non-restrictive inherently implies lost opportunities of revenue at each one of those unrestricted points (which is a weird paradox of digital capitalism, in which to make your product more profitable it has to become worse, which flies in the face of the traditional capitalist theory that you make the most money by making the best product, but that's another story and I don't wanna get sidetracked).

Anyway what I wanna get at, is that each person has their own points of friction (mobile becoming app-only, old reddit dissappearing, who knows) past which they would find the idea of transferring platform less intrusive than the experience they would get by staying on Reddit. And the fact that cutting Google off is even in the realms of discussion shows that Reddit is very willing to reach those points and beyond. If these changes pile up and the friction created in the experience by them becomes significantly greater than the idea of transferring platforms, then it's not outside the realm of possibility that Reddit will bleed out slowly by taking actions like this. Time will tell.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago

Great, one of the only good uses left for both reddit and google.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (11 children)

No it cannot lmao. It's hilarious they think otherwise.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I actually used Google to search on Reddit. Reddit search sucks.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Every did.

I quit reddit and I still do.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

Reddit is a study in inertia. It steadily declines in quality and the users just continue to hang around and eat their shit. Reddit will be around for a long time, and stubbornly get worse every quarter. It's pathetic.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Rome didn't start putting up walls like Hadrian's until the end of the empire. The Rome of Pax Romana had no limits.

FYI

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How can a platform be so narcissistic?!

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They mistakenly believe they are a company that generates amazing content instead of being a company that hosts amazing content generated by others. It's the same problem Twitter, Youtube, and many other content hosting platforms have.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They think they sell beer. They sell the bottles.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is an apt analogy. Because on reddit, a lot of the bottles actually turn out to be filled with piss.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Honestly after I noticed the declining users on Lemmy I started using reddit again, it just has more activity on a lot of niche communities I'm interested in.

However I still use Lemmy almost daily since I like the content and comments here more, and it's the kind of platform I enjoy, just like the Reddit of old.

Spez is a fucking idiot.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

spez walking his baby nuts around the block trying to flex on Google and Microsoft. Let's see how that goes for him.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Every time I think it can't possibly get any dumber .... reddit proves me wrong. I have been a redditor for nearly ten years before I jumped ship and switched to Lemmy, and during that almost-decade I have used reddit's own search function for all of fifteen minutes before giving up and using google with the keyword "reddit + whatever I wanted to find" instead. It simply sucks.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That CEO has definitely shorted Reddit somehow.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Thank goodness for the Fediverse.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Reddit's CEO is copying Twitter's CEO mindset again I see.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

So, to stop ai crawlers, they will block Google and Bing crawlers?

To cut off your nose to spite your face comes to mind

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's all about training language models, isn't it?

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