[…] a dearth of profit this late into its existence portends the lack of a real business model, suggesting it’s still not ready for public company life.
Losing $69M last year I don’t see how they turn things around without massive changes. I think they missed the peak of their societal relevance and growth and traded invaluable user goodwill for short term profits. Maybe if they hadn’t consistently supported hate speech, radicalization pipelines, astroturfing campaigns, and so forth, and instead focused on better mod tools they could’ve gained more free mod labor (and now just a few feudal lords), grown faster, leaned their org, gained more relevance and significantly increased advertising revenue. They frittered away time and resources on bullshit the platform didn’t want or need, missing the point that it is about creating a welcoming community not turning the site into a mashup of all the other socials.
I never found any hate speech on Reddit. They were actually slightly liberal politically speaking.
Lol ok. Well I saw numerous examples of transphobic, homophobic, antisemitic, anti-black, and other sorts of bigoted comments in default subs. Good for you that you somehow managed to avoid all that ugliness.
why does every web page need to be a fortune 500 mega-corporation?
They don’t, but Reddit is one of the highest traffic sites on the internet, and the infrastructure and programming requirements are massive. That needs $$$$$, otherwise they’re going to be scaling it down, fast. And maybe that will be a good thing.
The programming requirements are “just copy and paste any updates from that RSS feed thing no one ever bothered to use”.
Infrastructure, sure. But programming, I don’t see it. Reddit doesn’t have to be complicated if all you want to do is make it a good link aggregation and threaded discussion site.
But Reddit got greedy, they wanted to be everything to everyone. So they kept trying to add new features to compete with other social media sites. They wanted to be Facebook and Tiktok and Imgur as well, and so they spent huge amounts of resources fiddling with their format and adding stuff like video hosting. Surprise, people already had Facebook and Tiktok and Imgur and weren’t interested in something that was second-best at doing those things. So it was a huge amount of costly work that didn’t end up earning them much.
This is yet another symptom of the “endless growth” problem faced by lots of modern companies. They can’t settle for simply being solidly profitable in their niche. They always need to make their share price go up by getting bigger.
This is actually what I think Huffman’s biggest weakness as a CEO is. CEOs are supposed to be forward-thinking, coming in ahead of or on top of the next new wave. But Huffman sees an exciting new tech trend, waits until it gets big and then tries to cash in on it. He didn’t start reddit crypto until crypto was at it’s peak. He didn’t do reddit NFTs until they were peaking. He didn’t try to do reddit video until after TikTok was huge. He only shut the API door after he’d paid all the bandwidth and infrastructure cost to transfer all of reddit’s valuable user commentary to multiple AI companies, including some of the richest corporations in the world. He absolutely fucking sucks as a CEO.
Reddit’s ability to unite niche communities around common interests could eventually translate into a sustainable model, especially if it can sell loads of data to artificial intelligence model-builders.
ok boomers
You love to see it
