Reddit delivered strong earnings, but the numbers beneath the surface tell a different story. Slowing logged-in user growth and AI-powered search could threaten the platform's long-term value.
The last nail in the coffin for that site was when they put Spez in charge. Just some dumbass power-hungry moderator of a jail bait sub thinking he can run a website which acted as a public forum of discussion, information, and entertainment. Pure lunacy.
I remember the personal hate Ellen Pao got back in the day, in hindsight a classic Silicon Valley example of a scapegoat for unpopular decisions senior management were already committed to making. The gendered nature of this was particularly egregious with reddit being well… reddit. Reddit was an ‘old internet’ site trying to pivot into ‘social media’ without massively alienating the older group, they had to make it advertiser-friendly so Pao was set up to make those changes with Spez taking over to put things ‘back on track’ later on, when in reality he was as keen to make reddit into what it is now as any. Why people are still surprised by this I don’t know since reddit was a Y Combinator darling: it’s a business not a commons, and in my view there’s an element of responsibility on the users for not recognising this despite the company’s rhetoric.
Something like reddit is structurally incapable of being the marketplace of ideas it was ostensibly claimed to be. As always the purpose of a system is what it does, any venture capital backed firm ideally goes bust quickly or makes astonishing returns for its investors. Consider the material reality: we already had a marketplace of ideas in the form of decentralised forums, Usenet, IRC, and other protocol-based systems which act much more like a public commons than an enclosed, private estate. Reddit (and things like Discord) are in many ways the modern version of enclosing the commons, and in my opinion so is much recent development of IP legislation.
I’d flatter Lemmy and the fediverse by saying it represents the opposite instinct, to defend the commons rather than enclose it.
The last nail in the coffin for that site was when they put Spez in charge. Just some dumbass power-hungry moderator of a jail bait sub thinking he can run a website which acted as a public forum of discussion, information, and entertainment. Pure lunacy.
I remember the personal hate Ellen Pao got back in the day, in hindsight a classic Silicon Valley example of a scapegoat for unpopular decisions senior management were already committed to making. The gendered nature of this was particularly egregious with reddit being well… reddit. Reddit was an ‘old internet’ site trying to pivot into ‘social media’ without massively alienating the older group, they had to make it advertiser-friendly so Pao was set up to make those changes with Spez taking over to put things ‘back on track’ later on, when in reality he was as keen to make reddit into what it is now as any. Why people are still surprised by this I don’t know since reddit was a Y Combinator darling: it’s a business not a commons, and in my view there’s an element of responsibility on the users for not recognising this despite the company’s rhetoric.
Something like reddit is structurally incapable of being the marketplace of ideas it was ostensibly claimed to be. As always the purpose of a system is what it does, any venture capital backed firm ideally goes bust quickly or makes astonishing returns for its investors. Consider the material reality: we already had a marketplace of ideas in the form of decentralised forums, Usenet, IRC, and other protocol-based systems which act much more like a public commons than an enclosed, private estate. Reddit (and things like Discord) are in many ways the modern version of enclosing the commons, and in my opinion so is much recent development of IP legislation.
I’d flatter Lemmy and the fediverse by saying it represents the opposite instinct, to defend the commons rather than enclose it.