Reddit isn’t profitable, despite having more than 50 million daily active users. In preparation for an IPO, CEO Steve Huffman put the platform’s API

132 points

I’d argue reddit lost their identity days ago. Several iconic communities and features died with the API slaughter. Now it’s just another link aggregator without the things that made reddit unique.

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16 points

Can you elaborate on this? Which landmarks have permanently fallen?

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47 points

I know that Minecraft left. Based on what I’ve read here recently, the r/android mods moved to the fed as well. BotDefense just closed up shop.

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25 points

The AMA subreddit mod team gave up on support and recruiting people to give AMAs. /r/pics and /r/videos are gone, almost certainly not coming back. Many companies, like mojang, that used reddit as a semi-official forum have left. Numerous small and medium subreddits have migrated over here. Not API related, but april fools this year was literally just a potato. Other than maybe /r/askreddit, there’s not much there anymore that I can think of that still makes it unique.

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16 points

Not OP, but /r/AMA was one major casualty - mods just basically said F this we’re not dealing with this crap anymore. /r/Pics is fighting the admins on the NFSW tag, along with /r/cyberpunk. /r/interestingasfuck was another one.

As a long time ex-Redditor, the impact is definitely felt - it’s just become another link aggregator. I no longer feel any attachment to the site, especially after finding the Fediverse a much richer source of intelligent content and commentary.

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19 points

Yeah the risk has definitely already materialised. Reddit is forever changed even if it’s still alive.

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9 points

Acutely maybe, but it began years ago. I remember as early as 2013 or so people were saying it was not what it had been before

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9 points
Deleted by creator
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2 points

I totally agree. Devaluing the product seems to be the way of business during this inflation. On social networks it’s the content creators. In the music industry it’s the plummeting percentage paid to artists over the last 5 years. You see it everywhere. Simultaneously requiring subscriptions. Essentially Reddit was going to force the API into a subscription profit model if Christian Selig went along and kept Apollo alive.

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39 points

Lemme fix that title, s/risks losing/lost

There ya go :D

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270 points

They have TWO THOUSAND PEOPLE working at Reddit and Memmy for Lemmy is a superior product with how many people working on it?? 3?

Spez is an impossibly incompetent Elon Musk wannabe (the person who just flushed $44 BILLION down the toilet due to incompetence). He needs to be drawn and quartered tbh

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16 points

Damn.

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14 points

Is that 2,000 paid employees or does that include moderators?

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72 points

Of course it doesn’t include moderators. Moderators are users.

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17 points

Also, there are way more than 2000, especially once you call all the very tiny subs that technically have moderators. But even if not, Reddit’s biggest treasure are all the niche subs.

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5 points

The “anti evil operations” team is technically paid moderators, but have no idea how big they are.

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27 points
*

Reddit would implode instantly with only 2K moderators. According to this Reddit post, six years ago there were almost 75K moderators working in subreddits with more than 500 subscribers (i.e. this number only includes moderators who actually have to do some work because their subs are decently active). That number is certain to have grown since then.

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17 points

“Reddit would implode instantly”

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

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23 points

I wouldn’t say it’s a better product, but it is quicky moving in that direction.

I’m so happy user funded and user controlled is a viable market strategy.

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13 points

The official Reddit app is just a miserable experience. Take away the ads and bugs and I still don’t like it. Navigation, layout, voting are all inferior to Memmy already and the gap is only widening

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6 points

Agreed! Any time I go back to try it out, it’s a miserable experience. I was spoiled for 6 years or however long it was with Apollo where the user experience was obsessed upon. I’m using Mlem now and it’s refreshing compared to the official Reddit app.

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2 points

It also works for operating systems ;)

https://kde.org/

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8 points

If you ask a computer engineer, they would say that’s what you get with and without a product/project manager.

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18 points

I’m a software dev, I can fairly claim to be a software engineer as well

It’s not just having a product owner. We have a parable…

A manager asks a senior dev how long it will take him to build a thing. He says 9 months. They ask how long if they get another couple devs on it - he says 8 months. He asks how long if they add a dozen people, and he says it will never be finished

There’s plenty of variations, but it’s not a joke - how many people built the Linux kernel? How many built C? How many built Apache, how many built transformers, how many built osX?

The answer to the best technologies is always 1 or 2, maybe with helpers. The more people you add, the harder it is to innovate - you can polish all day long, but 1 sharp person can build something better than a dozen equally sharp people. One brilliant person is more effective than one brilliant person with a dozen helpers

It’s all about quality, quantity only weighs down the process

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13 points

At one of my previous gigs our boss was big on the “double the devs/half the time” mentality. Our favorite response was 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month

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6 points

I think this is somewhat overstated (also a dev), but there’s definitely truth to it. The division of work needs to be clear from the start, and ideally the design done collaborative to really have additional devs help.

Part of the problem is we all think different, so even two brilliant devs can step on each others toes and cause problems if they’re not synced up on what the plan is.

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3 points

Linux Kernel is kind of a bad example since its one of the examples of project scaling with many people from many companies. Even if you want to go with its inception, it came from Unix which already had many people. Of course, its also one of the best examples of actual leadership, proper technical people management, which is something very hard to come by. Its also a great example of how to divide your design and make it scalable, so people are working on different parts totally independent on each other.

That’s all actual, proper, work, not whatever crappy slide presentation passes as leadership on many places.

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1 point
*

Unix has a similar backstory. Prior to its existence, there was a project called Multics aimed at enabling efficient sharing of a computer among multiple users. However, with a lot of teams involved, the project became overwhelmed by excessive complexity and stalled, eventually being regarded as a costly burden and dismantled.

Later, the guys who would later develop the programming language C joined forces and created Unix. They drew inspiration from Multics but took a much simpler approach, and added some innovative ideas. The result was a remarkable achievement.

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73 points

Elon flushed 44B and made 96B just this half year.

The game isn’t right somewhere.

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44 points

The game was rigged from the start.

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4 points

Always has been.

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21 points

Haha never has been

There’s one interesting thought that never comes up in history class…

What happened to the aristocracy?

They didn’t give back their land holdings (basically anywhere), they didn’t pay reparations, they didn’t give up their investments… In some places, they never stopped getting a stipend.

France and Russia. They killed the aristocracy (although others filled the void). In the Americas, if they existed they were killed and replaced with Europeans. In much of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, locals were raised up to the position.

The US is organized into counties (Counts), territories (Marquis), and states (Duke). There’s a couple commonwealths like Virginia too… Why? What does landowners mean? It’s all over the constitution. A jury of your peers sounds a lot like a group from the peerage. A redress of grievances from the federal government isn’t an option for the common man, but it’s in the bill of rights.

When did it end? Because Lord Fairfax isn’t a title held anymore, but Fairfax county VA most certainly still hosts the Fairfax family, who are extremely wealthy landlords. They called capitalists who rose up from the common people “robber barons” only a few generations ago… Maybe not because they stole from the people (Carnegie and Rockefeller most certainly gave back to the community), maybe because they didn’t come from a certain social class? Name a billionaire or a senator that didn’t come from the “I never have to work” class…I can’t.

Yeah, the game is rigged. It has been since Rome. The lines have been blurred, but they’re still clear if you look for them

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8 points

“Why is America constructed similarly to the country the people who founded it were from”

C’mon man this is not a conspiracy lol. There is no true American aristocracy, in the way an aristocracy is actually defined. Having money is a very good thing, and your life is easier if you have it. That’s not a conspiracy.

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9 points

He needs to be drawn and quartered tbh

I do declare, spoken like true landed gentry m’lad.

How much revenue do you think it would generate if streamed on ThreadsLive?!

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25 points
*

FOSS does not have an inherent detriment versus corporate products. If enough people want to do it, development of FOSS can in principle move just as quick or quicker than corporate development (and more efficiently too).

The recent interest in Lemmy, largely thanks to Reddit’s incompetence, means that not only is the core software moving very quickly but the app scene is growing quickly as well.

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61 points

They’ve already lost their identity. The parties over, spez has turned it into corporate garbage no better than Instagram

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82 points

Already gone. We Lemmy now.

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1 point

True! We just need a few more people from Reddit over here and then the party can really start

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6 points

We Lemmy now. ahu

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4 points

Qapla’!

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