this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Technology
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The twitter/elon thing is hilarious. I honestly do think he accidentally got himself into quite the pickle and now his pride is keeping him there. As for reddit and twitch, I don't assume these are the surface-level-dumb moves that we think they are. My guess is that this is a calculated means of rolling out the changes they actually want by:
Internet users love to cancel shit, but at the same time, are always looking for the next thing to cancel. So as much as people hate twitter or facebook or tiktok or youtube or windows or nintendo or chick-fil-a or whatever, they're all just looking for an excuse to forget all about it, and continue using their product as quickly as possible. And corporations know that, so they've worked "giving them that excuse" into their plans.
For a minority of users on reddit, there's a line. For me, it's forcing me to use new reddit. If that happens, I just have to quit, I can't stand it. I don't want to quit, I have a lot of subreddits I read.
But I saw the stats for the old school users vs new reddit/app users, and we're outnumbered. Reddit knows they might lose thousands of redditors but they don't care because lots will just switch to their toxic app and if they lose 5% of the stubborn old folk then so be it.
The stubborn old folk are the ones responsible for creating a significant portion of the content on Reddit. While they may appear to be in the minority, without their content, casual users will be less inclined to use Reddit.
I've been wondering about that. You know if there's a youtuber with 10 million subs, you'd think they're a big, important star on the platform? And then you find out that youtube gets 80% of their ad revenue from kids watching Baby Shark on a tablet, and your 10 million sub youtuber actually isn't that relevant at all.
Well I was wondering if there's a reddit equivalent to that. Like maybe reddit gets 60% of it's revenue from Indian cricket fans and we don't even know about it. I'm sure sports fans in general are a lucrative userbase. And then places like /r/funny... basically imagine who would be less likely to use an adblocker and old reddit and the app, without caring too much. That's low-effort content that basically runs itself.
At least, that might be what they are gambling on. I do agree with you that the old guard are very important for developing good content. I just don't know if reddit cares about good content anymore.
The rub here is content moderation. Remember when Amazon carried brand name everything, then it slowly became shitty offbrand ZERBONO and AQUIVOO socket wrenches and alarm clocks?
That could be reddit's future, times 10, if they don't get a grip on their spam bot problems. In the last two months, my sub of 60k started getting tons of offtopic posts from bots. Users would flag them as quickly as they were posted, but even with third party tools, we were starting to have trouble removing them in a timely manner. Bots don't sleep. Mods do. And without third party tools, blockers, all that...I shudder to imagine the cacophony of that many bots on subs like r/askscience.
Very well thought out post and I agree with everything you've said. I still remember the outrage with Whatsapp and how everyone was moving to Signal. Once everything died down, people went back to their old habits and what was familiar to them.