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Reddit Falls Short of Ad Growth Targets Ahead of Likely 2024 IPO
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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Well shucks, all they did was drive out their most active content makers and cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free moderation labor. Who could possibly have seen this coming?
Don't be fooled. Most went back.
Quantity is not quality.
More important is originality...
Lots of people/bots would just take an existing post from Reddit, and repost it. Sometimes to a different sub, sometimes to the same sub.
For most users, it was still "new" because they hadn't seen it before.
Those accounts are still reposting. There's more than few that do it here too.
But that OC has been drastically cut down, there's just a delay in users noticing that there's fewer and fewer "new" reposts going around.
So reddit doesn't see a huge decrease in users immediately, but time on site and daily users will continue to decrease
Is it, though? I left Reddit for here, so don’t take this as being in their defense, but if originality and ad revenue were meaningfully correlated, Facebook and Instagram would be bastions of original content.
Hell, some of the most profitable YouTubers only post reaction content.
To me it is.
You’d have a point on any other platform. See, the unique thing about Reddit was that you could go there for OC. It’s basic business that you carve out a niche and you play that niche away from the competition. Reddit may not be doomed to fail but it is doomed to stagnate because it is competing closer with Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and news sites without decent ways to monetize and grow.
Investors like to see a unique market. Why is the platform retaining users? Moderation is on a downhill slide and these huge communities hardly feel organic.
Reddit is becoming Facebook + porn and the porn makes them no money. It’s actively unattractive to investors.
What sucks for them is that the users themselves cause this. OC is hard to make. Harder to highlight and celebrate. Reposts and news about politics and porn are 90% of the site. They get upvotes constantly. There’s an audience for that, but it has far less growth potential.
I would love to agree with you, and OC is certainly important to us, but the majority of the most upvoted content on Reddit hasn’t been OC for quite a few years now. I would guess Reddits serves most of its ads to people doom-scrolling the front page, and it probably likes it that way.
Yes but OC is what makes platforms unique and what makes them thrive. Facebook has the content of your friends and family. Twitter has the most recent words of celebrities and politicians. Instagram is similar.
Those platforms all have the same content as Reddit does. Reposts and news and memes aren’t unique to Reddit. So will Reddit fail and die? No. But Reddit isn’t as social. Why stay on Reddit if your friends aren’t on there to easily share content with? This is what TikTok does extremely well. It’s designed to share reposts and memes and news with friends easily even if few of them make OC. That’s the problem for Reddit. They’ve encouraged the wrong things with their platform and have not made it homogenous with the rest of the internet.
That works in both directions. Don't assume that the few that didn't return are the ones that would have saved Reddit via incredible content.
Quality is the same, on most middle size subs.
Never was subbed to those. Quality dived many years ago on those subs I cared about.
Did they? I had one of the top non-porn accounts actually run by a person (most high karma accounts use bots, I didn't out of ironic laziness) and I haven't posted or commented since whenever Day 0 was for rif is fun. I've been back a couple times for very specific things but not logged in or participating in any active way. Of course, I'm just one (high karma) data point, but I really don't think I'm unique in this. I also have no real desire to contribute to Reddit again in the future. Getting off of it has been pretty nice.
Look, it's not that people aren't still posting, the site obviously still has content, but it really is just "content." The quality of discussion I've seen has gone down pretty steep. Modding appears to be almost nonexistent in big subs or very agenda-driven otherwise. I think a lot of contributors who treated Reddit like old school forums have left and it's slowly turning into a weird combo of Facebook and 4chan if that makes sense. If that's what the userbase wants, go for it, I guess. But that's not my jam.
Why not delete the account ?
My old one? It's a good question and I have actually thought about it. I have a lot of inanity on there but some (I think) decent replies to people trying to be "reasonable" fascists, racists, misogynists, etc. if that makes sense. I'll admit I mostly posted news articles I thought were interesting, though I would regularly participate in the discussions for those articles, but those articles frequently got a lot of traffic. So I guess there's two problems with nuking the account:
(1) If I delete all my comments, you end up in some cases with what looks like someone deleting their response to a bad actor, leaving that bad actor not only unchallenged, but looking like they "won" the argument, and
(2) If I delete all my posts, I remove from public view the comments of (at this point) likely tens of thousands of people, if not more given how many high karma and high participation posts I submitted, many of whom might not have wanted me to do so.
I have so many of both that it'd be a massive pain to go through and selectively delete stuff. Easier to just leave the account be and never use it again. Deleting the account just means it's anonymized, which can also invite bad faith.
A lot of search results still take me to Reddit. It is still a source of knowledge.
I tell myself that landing on Reddit, because of a search result is different than logging in on Reddit and subsequently browsing Reddit.
Using their app is on another level.
It is, there's a lot of highly specific knowledge on Reddit. It's still a resource.
I'll be honest. I want to believe in the Fediverse and Lemmy, really really hard.
It's ideals (rather, the gestalt of the best of what everyone says is the best of Federation) appeals strongly.
But sometimes, it's instance after instance of complaining about this or that. Double points when it's all reddit complaining.
I dunno if being a heavy content creator necessitates an air of misguided superiority but there's no more nuance here than anywhere else, and the content can't seem to form precisely because everyone decides to take their toys away and do their own thing at the smallest provocation.
I don't use them on my phone because fuck their app, but I've found no choice but to join up with an alias and as much extensions to make their job harder as Firefox allows, just to have genuine discussions on hyper specific topics from a PC.
Really? No choice?
Take control of your life, goddamn.
As much as I hate to admit it, I’m considering it too - not instead, but also. I haven’t been back since Apollo died but Lemmy just doesn’t have the diversity of interests and niche communities yet. It feels really one dimensional sometimes.
I'm not. Pretty happy here overall.
Sometimes I want to see things besides hard left politics, Linux and furries. And a huge helping of divorced-from-reality beyond-left opinions from .ml and whatever hexbear is.
And I know I can block all those communities, but you’re not left with a ton once you do. Those demographics are dramatically over represented on lemmy.
If someone can tell me which direction to game specific communities i used to be part of (RimWorld, Souls games, Paradox games...) I'd be happy. Now I can only rely on discord.
And no, don't tell me to create the community and content myself. The audience isn't even high enough for discussing all games as a whole let alone specific games. This is what "let Lemmy stay small" crowd misses. Niche community can only be started as branch of (very) large community.
You can search for communities with https://browse.feddit.de/ .
For Rimworld I found: https://lemmy.world/c/rimworld
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !rimworld@lemmy.world
For me the main issue is that my professional community is pretty active there but not here. So if I want to share some professional work and discussion, I can only go there. I will probably double post out of activism but I know it won't have much effect. For entertainment though, I'm good here.
Yeah. Lemmy really isn’t as good as Reddit. You run into people on Lemmy who will ban you just because you disagree with their echo chamber. Also, there isn’t as much content.
But after cementing lemmy as a viable alternative. I actually find fun content on lemmy. Reddit feed for me ends up turning into a left vs right garbage.
When I’ve gone back for a look I’ve found just the opposite. It’s just bots and trolls.
But they lost the best 10% of their posters and content. That's devastating. Same thing as happened to Twitter, FB, and others before them.
What's your basis for this statement? Any evidence to back it up?
I go back for a couple niche communities that haven’t escaped yet. And occasional search results for advice, but that tends to be 3-5+ years old on average.
Never going back.
?
Me, going back to that cesspool. I left quite the account behind as well.
What I've noticed is it became way more toxic over there since the API changes
I still scurry over occasionally (a lot of communities didn't move over) but not nearly as much as I used to
Same. It runs so badly now, and enough moderators left or cut back that it is not the same site it was at all. Some communities are still intact, but I've begun to see lemmy and even Mastodon results in searches alongside reddit. It's going to take a while to see if reddit can recover (it'll take some humility and leadership from the top which seems unlikely) or die slowly then all at once. Remember digg, etc? The internet is fickle and for every Facebook there are a hundred friendsters.
Ironically way more bot now
The only sub I still go there for is /r/zerocarb (a low carb diet sub), and that's now mostly deleted comments and posts. With the moderation tools unavailable on mobile the mods have made automod very strict. Heaven help a person new to the diet, they'll have a hard time asking their questions
I still occasionally browse the smaller subs when I need help on things like /r/unraid.
This became an instant classic lol, do we know who the artist is?
That was one of the reasons they killed the api: to support ad growth. Unfortunately they failed to realize the combination of ad-blocking browsers and users just quitting the site from losing client access means they were never going to hit pre-IPO revenue targets.
Had they instead focused on affordable API pricing and driving subscriber revenues up, they would have exceeded revenue targets.
source: I was in a somewhat similar position (not quite the same, no third party client), but chose different and found myself making more subscription revenue than ad revenue thanks to a viewer base more than happy to pay more.
Do you have any data to support that? My feeling is that not much changed after that. I feel like there is business as usual there. At least when I talk to my peers.
Subs I followed (and still rarely visit) became much harsher with moderation, to the point of being very difficult for new visitors to use; in a sub that is mostly for helping people adopt a very low carb diet
Some communities were unaffected. Some are still shut down. Some replaced mods who wouldn't play by spez's rules.
I'm not sure what the data would look like or how one would obtain it. Number of active moderators per day? Moderator satisfaction survey? Change in posting habits of top 1% posters?
I am speaking purely anecdotally from communities I know that shut down entirely and moderators who left. I have no way to estimate the scale of the exodus.