Where do they find a new moderation team for a 34 million subscriber subreddit? Surely you don't think they'd start paying money here.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Reddit CEO: Apollo-Related Subreddit Blackouts 'Will Pass,' No Significant Revenue Impact So Far
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
If Apollo doesn't show Reddit ads, that is Reddit's fault. It is completely within their power to require displaying advertisements in a particular manner (and with attribution tracking) in order to have API access. They can make it a contract with stiff financial penalties.
Twitter has enacted just about every decision, good or bad, in the worst way imaginable. It becomes difficult to untangle bad decisions from extremely bad execution.
We'll see if the new CEO is empowered to start cleaning up Elon's mess.
But no, the subscription pricing for Twitter was always supplemental revenue to advertising, even if Elon messed up the math. A typical mix of 1% of users paying for an annual subscription doesn't even come close to covering the interest of the debt that Elon saddled the company with via the leveraged buyout. It was and will continue to be primarily advertising-driven.
The most significant problem in my opinion was that killing the concept of identity-verified notable accounts also severely impacted twitter's free source of their most valuable content. It also made advertisers even more nervous (eg fake Eli Lily account tweeting that "Insulin is now free"). And this was done while marketing departments were desperately seeking ways to reduce spend in an uncertain economy.
This isn't entirely different than what Reddit is doing - they are making decisions that deeply impact their free workforce of moderators, possibly thinking that because they are willing to work without being paid that they don't have value and don't expect a certain value out of their contributions.
I mean, there's a board who can fix this pretty easy via a majority vote.
Get a new CEO in who can start at ground level with community trust (rather than in a deep hole and still digging), and who is willing to listen to the community's needs. Someone who has more experience with IPOs and with running public companies while they're at it.
And honestly, they could do that even if they were the one who gave the current CEO these marching orders.
The sheer hubris of this. I actually think humans can be pretty stupid, and pointlessly violent. But even in that frame of society and i can't imagine anyone assaulting someone because he's wearing a reddit hat.
It is quite a bit more nuanced than that.
For one, the price they've quoted is over a million dollars monthly on a pre-existing product he charges for annually. They did this with 30 days notice. Even if he can raise the price to cover that cost when people renew, he has no way of surviving that long supporting existing users.
Second, there are TONS of third party reddit clients, many of which are used to clean up significant shortcomings in Reddit's (quite frankly awful) first party offerings. For instance, there is very little accessibility support in the official site/client, even leveraging built-in platform accessibility features you would normally get "for free", so there are third party apps that cater to providing access to people with special needs.
Perhaps more significantly, there are clients which are dedicated to the needs of moderators in quite frankly massive communities (like 10 million plus subscribers). In tandem, the API is being changed to not show all posts, which means moderation tools will all be fundamentally broken. Worse, the notable example of posts the revised API will be hiding from moderation tools are ones that Reddit has marked as possibly NSFW.
There are some solutions proposed within Reddit's first party tools, but the multitude of third party software has come from decades of experience in the slow evolution and lack of quality of the first party reddit tooling. Moderation tools for example sound prioritized from this memo, but there would be little trust in them shipping before moderators are impacted (and probably not much of them shipping ever).
To me, it smells a bit like investors aggressively pushing for profitability in certain areas and usage metrics for the first party client for IPO, and a CEO who doesn't quite understand what their company's value actually is.
Unfortunately, Elon wrote that "@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology."
Elon will continue appeasing his Neanderthal fanbase, she'll take the blame for the bad decisions that get backlask, and he'll take credit for the decisions that don't.
There is a webpage put up by the owners of a historian subreddit that explain quite eloquently the problem and that problem is basically the official reddit app is not fit for purpose in allowing reddit moderators to be able to run their subreddit in a manner that allows them to engage with their subreddit in an efficient manner. Not every reddit mod is bad, there are many good ones and it is those ones who keep their subreddits clean of problems which allows their subreddit to flow without hassle and to grow but to do all of this they need a good set of tools to be able to do their job and the official reddit app is not up to the job so the mods turn to 3rd party apps that have proved valuable with mods being able to do their jobs in a hassle free manner. Now those 3rd party apps are being taken away from them which is going to make moderators lives a lot more difficult, a task that people need to remember that they do freely because reddit does not pay them.
subreddits do well because they are run well and how are they run well? due to the free time given by the moderators and why do the moderators keep the subreddit running well? because they have the right tools to do the job. Take those tools away and problems start to creep in. It is completely moronic of the CEO of reddit to penalize a group of people, people who give their FREE time to help reddit be what it is and then to basically dismiss their concerns by basically saying 'reddit is not being affected, it will pass'.
subreddits do well because they are run well and how are they run well? due to the free time given by the moderators and why do the moderators keep the subreddit running well? because they have the right tools to do the job. Take those tools away and problems start to creep in. It is completely moronic of the CEO of reddit to penalize a group of people, people who give their FREE time to help reddit be what it is and then to basically dismiss their concerns by basically saying 'reddit is not being affected, it will pass'.
Anything that helps kill or maim Reddit is fine with me. It’s the site where reason goes to die.
The Neanderthal fan base that’s really into electric cars, artificial intelligence, and space travel?
The site itself is fine, as are many of the users. The main problem are the lonely demented freaks it attracts as moderators.
These are the types of people you’d cross the street to avoid if you saw them in public. The type of guys who are 35, live with their parents, and make love to rubber sex dolls.
These people curate whatever subreddit they “moderate” to fit their own particularly disturbed worldview.
Normal people either get banned or are so disgusted they leave. So you are left with a hive mind of abominable weirdos.
Did exactly that.
And while I was at it, unsubscribed from Premium as well.
It’s clear at this point that whole purpose of Reddit doing this is solely for Ad Revenue and force people to sign up for Premium. And the fact that CEO is not budging means she is now de-facto dictator of Reddit, like how Elon is with Twitter.
Things will never change. Time for everyone to dump Reddit and move to the Fediverse like Mastodon or Lemmy.
That won't happen.
The Fediverse is a confusing place for the average user. Mastodon has the tech crowd, and it works because they're almost all on there and follow each other. The rest will never touch that.
But Lemmy? What is the point when you're lucky to have 10 users online in a "popular" community? There is nothing like reddit.
Have experienced that a couple of years ago. Sent a message using the 'Message Mods' button you see in the subreddits pointing out a number of people getting around the bot that the subreddit used to prevent advertising. Gave the mod the names of the people advertising and a link to their posts and what happened, I get banned from the subreddit!!!. I then sent another message saying I have been banned in error and that I was just bringing to the mod's attention the people breaking the rules. What did the mod do? block me so I could not communicate with the mod and banned me from other subreddits that they moderated as well. That's what I go for trying to help so yeah, I am sure there are thousands upon thousands of reddit users that have experience the same. But does reddit admins do anything about these rogue mods? nope. Reddit would rather have users leave than having to deal with bad/rogue mods.
It would seem the reddit CEO has the same attitude/temperament, let users leave rather than deal with the underlying issues.
issue is a lot of the subs out there there isn't much discussion that's as busy as on reddit. certainly when it comes to NBA and soccer. apple content here is obviously the best place but it's still fairly active on reddit.
Mastodon Have crappy OEM app - not tested any other but its impossible for me to find posts related as it was on Twitter or people who are not copy-paste posts from it :/
Not yet enough people to run it for everybody.
wow, the ego on this man! These companies just love to treat employees and customers like crap. Where is the empathy? Why is greed always so mind-corrupting on CEOs and executives? Ugh.
Cool, that totally excuses what the company is doing. Continue your support.
The Neanderthal fan base who thinks that money = intelligence.
If only a site like MacRumors had forums for people to post in and ask for help. If only a site like MacRumors had those forums for ad-supported free. If only a site like MacRumors had free registration for the forums.
Seriously, Reddit trying to shoot themselves in the foot should be…shooting themselves in the foot. There are way too many free alternatives. Let the big fish do this stupid stunt and stay dark.
Seriously, Reddit trying to shoot themselves in the foot should be…shooting themselves in the foot. There are way too many free alternatives. Let the big fish do this stupid stunt and stay dark.
See but by doing this you seem to be deliberately and maliciously hurting the users and the community who have absolutely nothing to do with this decision. Probably the very people who supported and used third party apps and relied on the information and help provided on reddit.... Are they to blame for the CEO's decision?
At the end of the day you can do whatever you choose.. it's your data and your decision.. but this is a perfect example of people getting overly passionate about something and becoming extremist. We see way too much of that nowadays.... People are just more reactionary and less and less rational.