Thousands of moderators overseeing the site’s subreddits are on strike. It’s a wrinkle in Reddit’s plan to go public, and a sign that plan is premature, columnist Anita Ramaswamy writes.
I want all of the scabs and the naysayers to see this. Without the protest, without the exodus, without the blackout, we don’t have Reuters, one of the world’s most respected journalistic institutions, publishing disparaging info on Reddit’s IPO. The longer this goes on, the worst it gets for u/spez and any other rube who feels entitled to make tens of millions off of the backs of the community they neglected.
I don’t know, the actual tone of the article leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. The basic point seems to be that reddit should become more like a business and stop giving so much of itself to users and mods. In essence, it is exactly the mindset of this writer that got us to where we are.
This writer fails to understand the exact same thing that spez fails to understand: the only reason that Reddit grew, the only reason that Reddit is valuable, is because for the last 15 years it has not operated as a business. Reddit could never become a successful one because in order to do that, all of the community power, customization, and the inherent human element has to be stripped away and replaced with elements that turn profit.
The only way to make Reddit profitable is for the users to (stealing a line from a blog post a few months ago) “stop talking to each other and start buying shit”, i.e. stop having genuine interaction with each other and start being dragged in front of other corporations that paid good money for the user’ eyeballs. And the moment that happens, Reddit stops being Reddit.
This was a folly from day one. Spez thinks he owns a cow he can milk for years and years. Really, he just owns a pig, that he’s convinced himself will provide bacon forever once he takes the knife to it.
The funny thing is, Reddit might have had a chance to become profitable. If spez implemented a reasonable pricing scheme for the API (even charging two or three times what they’d expect to make from a user using the first party app–magnitudes lower than the proposed pricing), and if they made a few other adjustments, it might be profitable. They already had the advantage of not having to pay for moderation, which was huge.
I think the pig is getting away though–he might not even get that first round of bacon.
It’s still disapointing to see media misrepresent the reason for the protests. Nobody went up in arms when Reddit announced they’ll charge for API access, which was announced in April. The protests started because they’re charging a bazillion dollars, aka “the fuck you price” effectively banning 3rd party apps without actually banning 3rd party apps
And the “strike” got extended due to the extremely poor handling of the protests from Reddit, like slandering the Apollo dev
What I find curious is how long it’s taking for Google to react.
2/3s of my searches have Reddit as the top result and the only one with good answers, and the majority of said results are broken due to a closed subreddit. I know how to use the cached page, most users do not. I can only imagine that’s very frustrating for a casual Google user.
It’ll be more frustrating that reddit has become the best source of information for a lot of stuff. This will hurt in the beginning, but they can go fuck themselves nonetheless.
