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
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.
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
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.
Reddit's value as a social media platform drops as it's value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that's was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.
Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.
In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.
It's kinda funny on Reddit, you would have had to pay for your picture comment. I'm happy to donate to lemmy, but putting features like this behind paywalls is silly.
Anyone else posted this yet? 
Nope and I really wish nobody had still.
Weren’t these assholes supposed to IPO like 6 months ago? lol
They were totally lined up to IPO. I think somebody told him to go all musk on it. I'm still not exactly sure how taking a big fat shit on the user communities face was supposed to impress the investors.
Well yeah, I'm probably not the only daily active user who stopped visiting all together... after 10+ years of daily active use. They brought this on themselves.
Came from using it daily to only going there only when google forces me to use it
Many of such cases I assume
Nothing to celebrate.
Reddit revenue is still up, just not as much as they had hoped.
That's still enough to tank an IPO.
Yep, in the face of the infinite growth monster, anything other than exceeding expectations is seen as a failure
Yup it's all about expected growth.
Nothing says you care to advertisers like single handedly blowing up your website by cutting off 25% or more of its userbase.
They feel like they get shorted because many of those users don't contribute to ad revenue from 3rd party apps but instead of improving their app to lure users in they instead tell those users to fuck off.
A user is a user, even if they don't contribute directly to ad revenue they contribute content to make the site more alluring for those who will contribute to ad revenue. As well they help spread the word about reddit to those who don't use it regularly yet by sharing that content outside of reddit.
They were pretty short sighted by doing what they did.
Fuck spez
Let's for a second take stock of what's happening here.
The ad revenue is falling short of the projected prediction of what it was supposed to be. As in the profit from ad revenue did not reach that arbitrary number.
Reddit is still grossly profitable.
This is the same kind of headline that says Facebook lost 11 bagillion dollars but in reality they didn't lose a dime they just didn't make as much as they wanted to.
We did it, Lemmy!
Remember, the reason I ditched Reddit wasn't the ads per se, it was the constant data selling, and the official app just getting worse and worse with unwanted "features" pushed on everyone. They kept getting greedier and greedier so when they disabled 3rd party apps I ditched Reddit.
Reddit who?
If I can't browse my way, I simply don't use the site.
If reddit pops up in a search result on my browser, wellll best believe I have multiple adblockers making sure their ads don't load.
And every time a Reddit results show up, I'm immediately reminded why I don't want to go there by an error telling me that I can't use the site without logging in.
Fortunately, just changing the link to old.reddit.com still works even through VPN, but fuck this behavior. I do that only for questions I really need an answer and couldn't find anywhere else, and most of the time the replies are shit anyway.
Right?
In-between comments are ads.
Under every post is a recommendation for other subreddits where the last update was 2-3 weeks ago.
Subreddits with clear bait clog up the front page, and no filters to remove them.
Top comments are jokes and memes.
It's a real shit experience on Reddit right now.
It's such bullshit, Reddit could have been so much more. Researching my latest purchase/obsession, and the only way to find anything that isn't corporate sponsored reviews or AI content farming is to add the word "Reddit" to the end of the search.
As someone with an 11 year old account that I deleted during the TPA debacle, I fully recognise that there's a huge problem here. Reddit created a place where people wanted to put their thoughts, ideas, and opinions, and now that they are cashing out TOO FUCKING BAD LAME EBD USER.
Edit: /oblig fuck you spez. Slimy little arsehole sold everyone out and thinks he deserves to be rich because his shitty site isn't absolutely irredeemable.
Fuck Zuckerberg, Fuck Spez!! 🖕🖕
As someone has had their accounts shadow banned across of wide swaths of reddit, despite being one of its first users... good fucking riddance.
The last time I have logged in to Reddit was the day they ended the apps, July 1 I think it was. I haven't been back since. I thought I would miss it more than I do but honestly I never even think about it anymore and am much happier with my new Lemmy life.
I don't normally comment on reddit news, but... Lol.
So they did $800M when they wanted to do $1B. Okay that’s disappointing.
But the eye opener for me in this article is that they did $800M in 2023 up from $350M in 2021. That’s insane revenue growth. This is the first time I’ve seen any inkling that their IPO might have some chance.
Still, you’d have to believe they can get to multiple billions. I think it’s much more likely that they will fall flat and actually help kill whatever optimism there might be about IPOs in the market.
I don't know if reddit ads provide a good roas. We tried a few campaigns and gave up because it was so far off what we see on other platforms. The community is super anti-advertising, the targeting is really limited by community and geo.
People go to reddit to veg out, not to shop. I think the only times I've made purchases based on things I've seen are when there's a discussion and numerous people make a recommendation for the same thing, or maybe a few cases when the op is showcasing something they had a personal part in creating.
Back when Reddit was good the ads used to be like regular posts with a comment section, so you could actually talk about the product and exchange experiences, and the advertiser would sometimes respond. I found it to be a transparent and valuable way of advertising, and I actually liked the ads back then because there was a social and learning aspect to them. But of course they got rid of that, supposedly because what if somebody says something bad. They don't understand that the lack of honesty and dialogue is what makes people loathe ads.
Moved to Lemmy, best choice ever.
Deleted Reddit because they blocked me from fetching subreddit RSS feeds which was the only reasonable interface left
Reddit needs to go!
MySpace is still around. Reddit won't simply "go". But I do agree and everyone should leave it as they left MySpace in 2008.
I’m doing my part! thanks ublock!
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
