JonEFive

Businesses valuations and a business’ success overall unfortunately don’t always correlate to what the business seemingly has to offer. In this case, reddit is not going to be sold as a community website, but rather a marketing tool.

It’s as the saying goes - if the service is free, you’re the product. I think there will be a decline in active users and overall engagement, which I suspect might lead to fewer ad impressions. Spez is banking on the fact that eliminating third party apps will make up for that.

So long as there is a critical mass of users - which there will be for the foreseeable future, and so long as Spez only goes half Musk and doesn’t turn the site into an alt-right paradise, I see reddit potentially becoming profitable. Advertisers who have been scared away from Twitter/X might be looking to go somewhere safer and might find that in Reddit once all this controversy blows over.

And it will blow over in terms of relevance to advertisers. The API controversy doesn’t concern the average person. Even a CEO being a petulant child is barely worth mentioning to most.

Reddit users assumed that the site was for them. Spez has made it clear that it is not, that it is for advertisers. As much as I hate to say it, there will be plenty of people jumping on the Reddit IPO from that perspective.

I’d say a significant decrease in valuation just before IPO is some consequence. Not enough to truly impact Spez personally mind you, but it’s something.

I’m more satisfied with my experience here personally. I don’t scroll for hours, I read a couple articles, maybe comment on them and move on. If I come across something interesting that isn’t already posted in my community here, I’ll actually post it because it might actually get some engagement.

One reddit, my post would either be removed by overzealous mods or generally ignored. I had one instance where I posted a question on r/askScience. I searched before I posted but couldn’t find a post that asked the same question. A mod removed it saying that it was too similar to other posts. When I asked which post it was similar to, the mod said “You need to search for yourself, we aren’t librarians” then muted me for 10 days so I couldn’t respond. The sheer ego trip of the matter just appalled me. I thought that a community about scientific inquiry would be a bit more open, but nope - just as toxic as every other sub.

The real point is doing something that gets attention. Buying beer just to pour it down the drain is dumb. Buying beer to make a video of you pouring it down the drain then posting that video to social media is protest. The difference is all about how many people see/hear you, and how many other people decide to join your cause.

Likewise, continuing to buy the product after all the protest is hypocritical showmanship, but buying a single 12 pack as a prop and never buying that product again for is boycotting. Keep in mind that the type of people who buy a case or two of bud light at a time are often the type of people who buy that much every week. If enough of those people switch brands, it might create a blip on on the company’s radar at the very least.

Now my cynical point of view is that major companies no longer care very much about negative publicity. No matter how many shitty things the company does and no matter how shitty those acts are, people will still buy their product. Boycotting works on smaller companies because you can meaningfully impact their bottom line. That’s rarely the case with massive corporations.

They don’t care about the users who are making a fuss. In fact, they want those users to leave. They want the complacent social media users who can be easily monitized.

depends on the desires of the majority of the community I would say. If the majority of the community says they want to change the community, then who are we to disagree? I’d vote for the change. Unfortunately for that vote, I haven’t been on Reddit since before the blackout. The only reason I’ll be going back will be to delete some/all of my posts.

Plot twist: The AI can detect pirate speak and uses these posts to write dialogue for a pirate character based on a prompt.

Can’t wait for the pirate bluebeard to speak about where his buried API is.