If this was meant to be a good PR thing for Reddit, they wouldn’t have done that terrible AMA. I really do thing Reddit is dead set on their plans right now.
I almost wonder if the whole thing was a deliberate move to make some of us leave. They view us as negative value users.
Demanding that a for-profit business forego profit seeking is like asking a cat to stop hunting.
It’s what they do.
Communities are fundamentally not profitable. Maintaining community requires work and infrastructure, and all adding profit on top of that does is increase the price of maintenance.
The profit motivation, instead, causes people to do things that are inherently anti-social, and which injure communities.
Reddit is entertainment, above all else. There’s no “community” in a forum with 2 million people in it. There is only noise. But communities found homes on Reddit, and Reddit has no use for them.
There’s no profit motivation here, though. Costs need to be covered, but costs are also distributed. Transparency and the understanding that community is an investment can keep things rolling and free of meddling from pepole who want to abuse our psychology and degrade our mental heakth to line their pockets.
Reddit and their sham AMA will be remembered as how NOT to manage a social platform and its PR
Do we really need more examples of how to not manage a social platform and it’s PR?
can we get some positive examples instead
Never forget what happened to digg.com People don’t seem to learn, although they managed to slowly bring the site to a halt in 14 years which a long time so they are not that stupid I guess.
I don’t think it’s a problem of not learning the lesson. The problem is that you can’t succeed in making a social network if you ask anyone to pay in any way. You need it to be useful, which means you need everyone on it, and everyone won’t be on it if it costs anything or is otherwise gated behind even the smallest of hurdles. So rich VCs come in and say, “here’s $100,000,000 to go make this thing invaluable, and then I want my money back with a handsome profit”. Everyone in the game always knows that the product is going to get shitty when it comes time to pay the piper. Being shitty is a side-effect of making money. The gamble is that it’ll be so ingrained in people’s life than they’ll begrudging eat the shit to keep using it. They’re looking for the elbow in the curve – how shitty can it be before everyone abandons it. That spot of maximum shittiness isn’t a mistake – it’s the target.
