135
A developer says Reddit could charge him $20 million a year to keep his app working
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 31 May 2023
135 points (100.0% liked)
13621 readers
1 users here now
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think your perspective and goals simply don't align with those of reddit's admins.
To be clear, I'm 100% in your boat. That said, reddit is becoming a publicly traded company. Its admins now have the goal of maximizing value for potential shareholders rather than fairness to users, community sustainability, etc.
Through that lens, I have difficulty finding flaw with any of reddit's decisions. The number of users will likely be far lower in a year. They will have a crisis in moderation growing before that. I'm sure an admin speaking candidly would agree with all this, but they're doing it anyway because driving users to the official app (and I expect removing old.reddit soon) will at least temporarily boost ad revenue.
For anyone not familiar: Among other factors, stocks price according to a ratio over their earnings (P/E) that varies by industry. Do you know what Facebook's P/E is? Last month it was 30. If that's where reddit's IPO prices out then every $1 of ad revenue they generate over the next couple of months will make them not just that $1 but another $30 at their IPO.
They don't care if it's sustainable because this isn't even about running a profitable business in the long run. This is about amplifying their IPO price to cash out.
My perspective and opinion surely doesn't alling with - who ever is in charge at reddit. Almost exclusively all content is created by users - for free, for others - they provide a platform, moderation etc. yes. but I don't belive "this is the way" - without the content creators, they don't exist.
EDIT: sure sure they have their own app, you can use the website. The official reddit app is unusalbe to me - just for the fact of privacy invasion. I haven't even properly tried it for performance. Essentially shutting the door for developers of 3.party apps - which all together made reddit what it had become ... is like... yea. I'm done.
I recentely had do use reddits via web-browser from a public library computer - no adblockers or anything; I was honestly shocked abou the amount of ads and sponsored posts. It's too much. way to much.
maybe at some point a project - like reddit - just becomes too large to handle in a good way... I don't know. It's sad to see - I like(d?) reddit and I always felt it's a nice and friendly community.