Reddit was always very hands-off. They had lots of very unpleasant and controversial content until their hand was forced. Overall they seem to want a site that runs itself as much as possible and over time content that required interaction and management (eg, AMAs, Secret Santa) got de-prioritized and dropped.
Also, Reddit has quite a lot of mindless consumption content.
Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in.
Such a site would require minimal care, and might even be possible to maintain with AI moderation. For moderating something like r/DebateReligion human brains are needed. But for deciding whether something is a cat or not, probably not.
- Kitty/puppy videos
- Exotic street food
- girls with shorts/leggings showing buttcrack or cameltoe acting oblivious or holding a product (i.e. using ambiguous sexuality to sell something)
- Someone doing some kind of weird elaborate craft as a form of spectacle
- Twerking or faux-twerking dances
- A person being kind to the homeless
- "you won't believe" compilations of various things like near car accidents
- Crazy/dangerous parkour
- Some green smoothie brand targeted at young people doing yoga
It's no wonder Reddit has been moving in this direction as well. People eat this shit up, they're more profitable as advertisements, require way less moderation, and are overall less of a hassle than hosting discussions.
- million dollars mansions tours
- asking strangers in the street how much is their rent or what's their salary
- asking strangers in the street to do X for money (e.g. do 10 pull ups for $100)
- tourism videos in "dangerous" places such as South America, Africa, Middle Orient, East Europe, Asia (i.e. everywhere not in NA and West Europe)
- silent walking/driving 4K videos in Japan/China/South Korea
- "one day in the life of a programmer/student/[whatever] at [prestigious company/college name]" videos, showing a person waking up, taking a shower, eating breakfast, etc.
But the question is if people will willingly remain on a Reddit which is just like Tiktok or YT shorts or Instagram, etc and has no differentiator
Especially with their lousy mobile experience
The amount that the market pays to inject adverts into youtube product reviews versus 'proper' content is staggering. A good guitarist is better doing a review on headphones, than actually playing a guitar. A runner is better doing a review on the latest Nikes rather than giving training advice.
Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal.
The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect" has grown significantly within the past few years, though has been a problem for a number of years prior.
Reddit won't come back from this stage of may-as-well-be-bots-posting.
This is what gets me about all the people lately claiming that the only way to get good Google results is to append site:reddit.com - I have spent enough time looking at Reddit threads to know I would never trust them for important information. People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years. New users read the confidently wrong information, take it as gospel and spread it to other new users.
For those old enough to remember Napster, it worked because it was centralized.
That would align with the changes Reddit seemed to have made to their algorithm. They changed something last year that affected what posts were promoted to the top of sub.
In the r/movies sub, text posts were frequently getting to the top, which is fine is these were quality posts. Spoiler: they weren't. They'd be dumb questions like "DAE think X movie is underrated" where X movie is highly rated by everyone or a cult classic, or meaningless observations like "Y movie is now 30 years old!!" as if someone just discovered how time works. In the past, most top posts were links to articles, trailers, posters, etc. Discussion naturally happened in those posts. These low effort posts did spur a lot of discussion, but none of it was new or meaningful.
I think the mods are now filtering out these type of posts, because the sub is more or less back to how it used to be.
What the current decision makers within Reddit Inc. want is to make the site look profitable until the IPO, and then they don't care about what happens with it. Be it discussion site with cats, or cats feed with discussion, it doesn't really matter for them, as long as it looks profitable.
then the last 3-5 years, they are slowly creeping towards a curated model, and with that disrespecitng their userbase
Now they have the lowest value user data of any social media company and are firing people from jobs they do for free (lol) to get the site working again.
It sounds terrible and the opposite of what made Reddit great, and therefore I think your prediction is correct.
I significantly improved my Reddit experience simply by filtering out the word “Trump”. This also had the effect of hiding a good 20% of Reddit, as there were dozens of stories every day about orange man bad. It’s been 3 years into a different guy’s presidency and Trump still gets more attention on Reddit than Biden does.
So when you avoid filtering as much, you end up with something closer to the chans, where you could see a post contemplating bestiality, and the next post proclaiming that pedophiles belong in woodchippers. Not a fan of the former, but you just ignore it and move on. There’s always something fresh and interesting.
This whole operation could be wildly profitable with a team of 50-100 people and no major investors to appease.
Instead they read the room wrong, or just didn't care, and now we're here.
People tell us what they like about craigslist including:
- Giving people a voice
- A sense of trust and even intimacy
- Consistency of down-to-earth values
- Simplicity
- No charges, except for job postings
- Freshness of the material
- No ads, particularly no banner ads
But that probably wouldn't put them on track for a few billion dollar IPO, so of course you can't do it.
And a couple people at the top now have Lake Tahoe vacation homes. That's an important piece to this. It justifies everything.
Did Lars Ulrich ever get his Olympic-sized swimming pool? You really gotta feel for the guy.
This isn't about money...
This is about a shitload of money!
Facebook does this at much larger scale (2B users active in FB Groups), with way more spam, and some FB groups are much larger than most big subreddits
Its not about Facebook or Reddit, its about people being so power hungry they do these things for free. When subreddits post about bringing in more mods, thousands apply, maybe 2 get in. If Reddit deems locked subreddits abandoned, there is already a system to give the abandoned subreddit to anyone else that wants it (within reason). Subreddits also split pretty often due to mod infighting
The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good. The infighting is because some mods love adding arbitrary rules like "no relationship posts" in AITA. Does everyone agree with that? Is that a perfect rule? Why? A new moderation team could be just as good or just as bad as the previous one
For example: Optionally requiring a questionnaire before being able to post to a Facebook group significantly cuts down on spam. Reddit doesn't really have an equivalent. If a Reddit mod wants to implement similar? They could use the API to write something that blackholes new members' comments until they respond to an automated message. Not a great user experience and what happens if Reddit pricing changes now make that integration prohibitively expensive?
Some mods certainly power-trip but ultimately the role isn't a glamorous one: You're a volunteer customer success agent. Most of the work isn't hard or controversial, but at the scale of Reddit there's a _lot_ of it. The hardest part of recruiting new moderators is finding people who'll remain even minimally engaged. Replacing them certainly isn't impossible but the process of replacing proven-engaged moderators with newcomers that need to be vetted can be a ton of work in itself.
There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful community building that must have happened.
Certainly Reddit's setup does incentivize name squatting, but there's been plenty of cases where the obvious name is run by a team so ineffective that it gets outcompeted (r/marijuana vs r/trees, r/lgbt vs r/ainbow, r/moddedmc vs r/feedthebeast are some examples). And plenty of communities get by with non-obvious names, like r/DestinyTheGame, r/Pathfinder_RPG, so it's not purely a name race.
Yeah but they need to be BAD. "Mediocre enough that users don't want to migrate elsewhere" (like /r/games) seems to be enough to keep it running and gaining subs just fine
The existing sub-subreddits organically evolved from disputes between more primary subreddits about the type of content users wanted to see; e.g. r/atheism decides they don't want low-quality meme posts, so r/atheismmemes is created. If reddit were to simply remove the mods from thousands of subreddits, it could easily sour those communities.
r/fragrance for example decided to stay open, but the mods just would quit doing anything. That'll show us!
What happened: no spam. A few silly posts. A lot of good posts. A lot of people remarking how much better the sub is without mods. Mods returned, promising to 'consider community feedback' once they realized they lost control of the narrative.
It's like taking your hands off the wheel when driving. A few seconds and you're probably okay. An hour? You're in a ditch!
In fact it is well known that current Reddit moderators are often very bad and contribute to the worst parts of Reddit culture. It has been discussed here, and on Reddit, how big of a problem current moderator practices are. Yet due to this protest we seem to have developed a collective amnesia and now we're all pretending that the current set of moderators are the heroes of the Reddit story. Baffling. Most of Reddit would be improved by a large-scale shake-up of moderators.
It's like the British Empire, Soviet Union, and United States in World War II - it's not that they don't have a long and storied history of crimes against humanity (or the internet as the case may be) themselves; it's that their opponents are so despicable we're happy to see anyone picking a fight with them. If the moderators (respectively allies) want to call themselves the heroes of that story... well, in strictly relative terms they are.
Though I think a lot of the most notoriously awful moderation cliques (r/ukpolitics for example) have eschewed the blackout.
Isn't that exactly what people have been doing for well over a decade?
Regardless of how high-quality the replacements might be under ideal conditions, I think it would be very surprising if average quality didn't suffer when trying to replace hundreds or thousands of them very quickly, versus the slower, incremental growth that resulted in the original bunch.
Reddit should boot up another letter, /d/ or something, and give the communities numbers or hex identifiers, (which they already sort of do with the short urls) and make the names irrelevant. Communities can choose to port over and redirect. Over time, the ones that don’t fade to disappearing from all and eventually go private.
Tying name to community url makes discoverability of replacement communities shitty for new users. Politics is easy to understand. Whatever people come up with as a substitute word for a forked community, will be less clear. Of forked communities, maybe only trees and rainbow came up with a better name.
Or they work for 3rd party groups who have an agenda they want to push
They evaluated themselves and found that they were actually excellent moderators.
Even counting just large groups, there likely several thousand subreddits which have individually-specific focuses and moderation criteria. Reddit reports 100+ million active subreddits.[1]
The two problems with moving to an in-house, wage-labour moderation team are that this is expensive and wage labour at prices Reddit is likely willing to pay will not meet the standards of dedicated volunteer teams.
From various sources I've encountered over the years, human-based moderation peaks at somewhere between 500--1,000 items/day (multiple sources put a peak at about 700--800, though that's with very thin review). Reddit ... doesn't seem to offer stats on daily / monthly comment volume, though it claims ~60m DAU and 13 billion posts and comments overall. I'm going to SWAG[2] and assume roughly half of those have occurred in the past five years, which would mean that there are ... about 3,300 posts / comments day. Which seems low, so my SWAG's probably wrong. If 13 billion items are posted per year, then there are ~35 million items posted per day. That seems possibly high, though Facebook's claim is 5 billion items/day, so ... maybe? shrug
One criteria I've suggested for moderation elsewhere is based on prevalence, which is the number of times an item is viewed. Short version: prevalence follows a power-law distribution, and as the views threshold is raised, the number of items falls off drastically. With some tuning and adjustments (e.g., risk-rating comments to raise or lower estimated harms), it's possible for a finite moderation team to offer an SLA[3] that content with a given prevalence threshold will be reviewed. It's also possible to set holds such that content reaching that threshold is withheld from further visibility until it is reviewed (say, if some specific item starts taking off), which effectively throttles visibility of content and scales it to the limited moderation resource.
(I'm not aware of any UGC[1] service applying this model to moderation, but it is one which strongly suggests itself. It is effectively what a gate-kept editorial model applies, e.g., where an editor specifically reviews all incoming entries from a "slush pile"[5].)
Going back to my content numbers above, a 35 million items/day content stream and a moderation team capable of reviewing 500 items/day (roughly 1 minute per item on average) ... would requite a 70,000 member moderation team, which is likely prohibitive for Reddit.[6] A prevalence set such that 10% of all items require human review reduces that to 7,000, still likely high, and a 1% review which would still cover the overwhelming majority of all content presentations) a somewhat more tractable 700. From third party and my own sources there's a roughly inverse relationship between content items* and prevalence, such that increasing prevalence 10x reduces the number of individual content items by a factor of 10. For reference, looking at Hacker News historical front pages and votes and comments of the 1st and 30th ranked stories, we see about 6.3x more votes, and 3.8x more comments on the 1st-ranked story.[7] For Google+, a near-logrithmic scaling of number of communities vs. size was noted.[8]
________________________________
Notes:
1. As of January 2021: <https://www.redditinc.com/>
2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_wild-ass_guess>
3. Service level agreement, basically a guaranteed minimum service level.
4. User-generated content.
5. <https://www.writersdigest.com/getting-published/what-is-the-...>
6. The somewhat better-capitalised Facebook is reported to have 7,500 moderators: <https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwk9zd/how-facebook-content-...>
7. Own data based on a crawl of all HN front page "past" listings from 2007-2-20 through 2023-6-13, with 178,642 stories.
8. Own data based on a crawl of all extant ~8.1 million Google+ Communities, data provided by Friends+Me creator. The data actually show far fewer large communities than a strictly log-log relation would suggest, for reasons that are unclear. See: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/ab6a5470f57001368d4002...>
A discussion elsewhere had me looking at how much front-page HN activity is attributable to what number of profiles. Using my crawl data mentioned above:
- 2 submitters with > 1,000 stories
- 170 w/ >= 100
- 2,812 w/ >= 10
- 19,165 w/ >=2
Half of all HN front-page stories since 2007 were submitted by just 2,092 profiles, of 43,598 represented in all front-page stories. As of 2021, Whaly.io found 767,496 active profiles since 2005: <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>. (Post or comment activity.)
I agree they made awful decisions, my usage patterns will definitely be changing due to a re-enable /etc/hosts entry. However, what is the impact on a broader scale? This is like Twitter firing a ton of engineers - we can't really evaluate until much further down the road.
From Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
Nothing blew up in their face. It's almost as if the vast majority of users simply don't care about this kind of drama.
I'm not even saying he's lying. He could be telling the absolute truth. However, that post would not constitute evidence for him telling the truth, because it is what he would say if it was the truth, and it is what he would say if traffic dropped 98%.
This sort of thing is true of a lot of corporate and political communications. The only thing that carries information content is things they didn't have to say and couldn't be predicted in advance.
In this case, the only tidbit of information in that post is that they still intend to ignore the community(/communities).
Of course the CEO during an IPO year is going to downplay the shutdown. That said, there's no way the shutdown is going to change reddit in this case. They will replace the mods on the bigger subs.
It was all about getting the message out.
Real "shutdown" comes when the good moderators decides they had enough and stops being active, so reddit becomes run by shitty mods.
Only then will the users leave. So it will take many months before the effect is visible in user count.
This is the funniest because it shows how little they're actually able to generate from people using their product
But what I'm more curious about is that this memo went out not even a day after the protests started. Both revenue indicators and impact itself might be delayed, especially now that many subreddits chose to extend the protest indefinitely
Had*. Ever since Aaron died, it's become a censorious bubble.
Aaron Swartz had very little involvement with Reddit for several years before his death, and also some of Reddit's most notorious (at least at the time) "censorship" actions took place before his death.
It's a little unfair to his memory to conflate the two things, especially given that he spent the last five years of his life doing things he deeply cared about (and which had nothing to do with Reddit corporate strategy or policy).
All have definitely not been reinstated. They banned my 13 year old account without warning because I dared to make an alternative API for Reddit[1]. Even after agreeing to suspend the service they are still yet to unban my account.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are others in the same boat.
So you created an API to bypass the official APIs, promoted it on Reddit itself, and wonder why you got banned? Color me surprised.
If you saw that title a month ago, you might read "Reddit" there as "the people talking on Reddit".
Whether it was people's emerging consensus/behavior on a noteworthy incident, a more general zeitgeist or Reddit Hive Mind exhibited over time there, or whatever.
Reading "Reddit" in the title instead as "Reddit, the company" is less familiar to me.
We can't expect profit motivated companies to provide a true public shared space with shared public values. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Google -- all of them naturally have their own interests at heart -- not yours -- and as Doctorow explained in the "Enshittification" article, they all go through it. Their shareholders will demand it.
We evolved traditional state run postal services for a reason; but I won't enrage the libertarians here by suggesting we need the same for online forums and suffer the downvotes. I would submit that it's delusional to expect private corporations to provide these kinds of services on the terms we expect once they've gone beyond initial market capture.
Somehow the message needs to get out to stop trusting and embracing these kinds of fake public spaces.
The EFF article submits that "Content moderation doesn’t work at scale"; I'd take a stronger position: social networking does not "work" at scale. It degrades into "social media" and/or walled gardens and/or automated mob manipulation. I hope one of the results of the last year -- with Twitter and now Reddit going through this kind of crazy -- is the partial return of some smaller scale more intimate spaces to replace their use.
Addendum: With LLMs and automated "content" production going seriously"webscale", I expect things to get worse before they get better
There's the fundamental problem. The bills need to be paid.
This is less about ad revenue than it is jealousy over closed communities like Instagram and tiktok where you are locked into their app.
Could Reddit not have gone the 501(c)(3) route like the Wikimedia Foundation? Wikipedia has an immense amount of content, moderation, high traffic, open API, and they manage to keep the lights on.
But I haven't heard of any place like that so far. No real competitor for users to jump ship towards.
And yet, very many people are terminally online in one way or another. Even if the term "terminally online" has very strong stigma and most people would not consider to be a part of that group, they still spend hours every day on social media, and have no means of quitting it even knowing the harmful effects.
If they're craving content and don't want to spend the time going to distinct sites, they're likely not going to all of a sudden pick up a new hobby. I hope I'm wrong.
For example... let's talk about The_Donald, shall we? (inb4: I'm not from USA, "Trump" and "Biden" for me are just "some leaders from some tacoland", so I'm not emotionally attached into this matter.)
Some users were protesting that The_Donald should be banned on the grounds of hate speech. Some said that it should be allowed to exist, for the sake of free speech.
What did Reddit do? Quarantined it, showing that it doesn't care about hate speech _nor_ free speech, while paying lip service to both. And using a bullshit reason to do so (a single post encouraging people to beat cops, or crap like that.)
Why doesn't Reddit outright tell its users its values? Why is it always lying? Why does it put a CEO to disdain the community, with a "we snoos" (something redditors never use)? A: because it doesn't fucking care about its users. That issue predates the 3rd party apps killing, and it will postdate it.
By the way: there are talks that Reddit might finally implement limits on how many subs a mod can moderate. An old request from people concerned about power mods. Why now? (A: because it happens to align with Reddit Inc.'s interests - userbase be damned.)
I'm fucking glad that I've migrated.
[[And the fediverse is nice, the fediverse is great, but if you're a Reddit user and can't stand the fediverse: migrate elsewhere. Don't stay in that sinking ship.]]
In general they want to do as little policing as possible, and only do the least amount they can when their hand is forced. But there's also some signs of the higher ups actually being okay with things that are icky and of very doubtful appeal to advertisers, like r/jailbait
I'd say overall the leadership is just not good. It neither has any sort of moral center, nor is even properly business oriented because their efforts on that regard seem very lacking as well.
Eg, I think this API move makes little economical sense. If one were to be ruthlessly profit oriented I think an approach might be to introduce an API price and gradually raise it little by little. Milk the market for all it's worth. Rather than killing it from the start, either extract every dollar people are willing to pay, or kill it by squeezing all the profit that can be had from the maneuver by doing it slowly and gradually.
The real answer is that everyone asking this question is just revving up for a fight. It's like apologizing for something that you said as a teenager that was found on social media: the only people asking for the apology don't really care whether or not you apologize.
The right approach in this situation is always to walk the path where no one can tell what's up. Do not define the situation. You're going to get raked over the coals anyway, so get the best you can out of it.
It's more like apologising for something that you kept doing, since your teenager times, and that you keep doing. In this case at least some people asking for an apology want to see a difference, not just "revving up for a fight".
That said, even not saying your values would be better than lying about them. And worse than lying - lying in an obvious way, that is bound to be interpreted as "you're such braindead trash that we can throw any bullshit on your snouts and you'll eat it".
Some might say this approach would result in echo chambers, but guess what...echo chambers are going to happen anyway, whether it's restricting your intake of news to certain news networks, restricting internet browsing to only specific websites, or your local/offline real world community gatherings. There is no way to stop echo chambers.
the_donald also promoted the white supremacist Unite the Right rally (the tiki torch KKK one) in an official manner with a stickied post from mods.
Was almost assuredly a false flag, given the other content in T_D.
And ironic, given the contemporary ACAB fervor in the others.
If it was possible to uphold every fundamental human right and be commercially successful at the same time, we wouldn't need a government.
Which is not to say that the amount of hatred and bile she received wasn't - unsurprisingly - wildly excessive and disgustingly misogynistic.
The article brings up a good point regarding how Reddit relies a lot on free labor to work. The incentives for operating the communities are primarily built on good will.
I've been working on a Reddit/Discord/Patreon style hybrid community platform that puts a focus on the community owner/admins getting paid. It feels like the people running the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.
Important to remember some of the people moderating this stuff have had to deal with spam/bot activity severe enough to make the news (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wallstreetbets-reddit-bot-activ...). It's unsurprising some ended up dependent on external apps.
The problem with federated networks ("Fediverse"?) like Mastodon and Matrix is that you still rely on a (sub)domain and someone running a server. That someone could be yourself, but that's just an option for a small minority. That domain could be shut down.
Nostr may solve this: instead of usernames the user has a private/public key. And instead of relying on a specific server your data can flow through many servers (relays).
The moderators of some of the political subs work for certain parties or political groups and it is blatantly obvious.
The only reason people are protesting api pricing is because they want to protest. The actual concern here isn't what they are protesting.
They want to quit but they can't. They likely even realize they are addicted. They likely even realize the content they view is censored and curated to manipulate them.
Just quit reddit already and be happy.
If you mean want to quit but can't in the sense that there is no other place on the Internet to have a like-minded community forum around fountain pens or a particular bank or third-tier game shows, yes, this is true.
But if you mean in a broader sense, of "I just can't quit you!", then no. Reddit steamrolled all of the older forums--and, before that, Usenet and Echomail groups--I used to participate in. Much like how so many sellers of niche products have moved to Amazon, Reddit is where the quirky forums have moved to.
I don't use Reddit as a general-purpose site. It's simply the place where the community that discusses the topics I want to gas on about live. And, yes, I object to what Reddit is doing so I will leave it if the changes come to pass.
No...? It's a decision that impacts millions of people that rely solely on third-party apps to have any decent experience on Reddit at all. The "official" app is a hot dumpster fire and lacks incredibly basic accessibility features, among other shortcomings. The official app is a joke but instead of making it better to entice more users onto it (and thus see more ads), they just exploded the entire community.
For me, it absolutely was a sign to evaluate my usage. I may go back, I may not. The local city subreddit is a good counterpart to my local newspaper, but the real dangers for reddit are twofold: individuals will be less likely to provide free labor (on which Reddit depends both for content generation and moderation), and it gave its most passionate users a timeout on which they started evaluating alternatives.
I specced out a decentralized spam-resistant reddit alternative a while ago, and posted it here a few months ago. Please build this, happy to sign away non-exclusive IP rights if you have an idea of how to monetize. ---
I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone please take this and build it. Let me know if you try, would love to spectate and advise on development.
The key is there shouldn't be a globally consistent front page. Sorting should be done on an individual basis. Upvotes boost signal signal to peers and downvotes squelch. By propagating content scores transitively through the network proportionally to trust scores, users can moderate their own feeds by voting and managing their friend list.
Users have a peer list, containing a list of server/users on it. Each peer has a user-managed 'trust weighting'. Each user has a list of "good content" (ideally hash identified for content addressability), with each item having a score based on that user's votes and votes from peers, weighted by that users trust in that peer.
Periodically, your server contacts all of your peers, and asks them for their good content list. The scores from peers are multiplied by your own trust weight for that peer, and you build a personal "good content" list that merges the lists from each of your peers together (and drops insufficient scores).
You are presented with a score-descending-sorted page of content. Whenever you upvote something, it increases your score weight for that content as well as the trust weight for each peer who sent you the recommendation, and vice versa for downvotes. Votes are transmitted to peers as a crypto signature of the content hash, but when retransmitted to peer-of-peer, they only see the intermediary's aggregated and trust weighted merged scores.
The specifics of the algorithms on how you calculate and adjust weights can be configurable by each individual user, the protocol only cares that peers are able to produce some kind of score list.
Dividing content into topics is a bit trickier, could just label content with tags. I think it may be preferable for each user to have multiple topic focused 'personalities' that are basically distinct user accounts with unique peer lists and votes. In that way, I could follow Dave-gardening without having to follow Dave-sports.
For this example I'm using 1 user per server for simplicity, though not required. All users could be on same server, which is probably best for MVP to avoid implementing p2p networking stuff until validated.
Ex.
Alice follows Bob with weight of 0.5, Dave with 0.1
Bob scores content A as 0.8, B as 0.2
Dave scored content A as 0.4, B as 0.9
Alice downloads both lists.
Alice score content A as avg(0.8 * 0.5, 0.4 * 0.1) = 0.22
Alice scores content B as avg(0.2 * 0.5, 0.9 * 0.1) = 0.095
Content A gets sorted higher than B.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21011645 (previous discussion)
Attention is the reward for moderation.
I think there could be different clients for different kinds of users - do you want to curate your follow list and transitively republish? Or do you mostly want to only consume and only publish your direct upvotes?
But I haven't gamed out the network effects very deeply, could be some pernicious scaling problems I have handwaved away.
Personally, I think they got focused on one particular thing (AI firms and any other content vacuums) and lost sight of other options for making money. In that context, trying to do volume-based charging to the third party apps makes sense, because in a lot of ways you're just treating them like all the new customers you're targeting.
I think this completely misses the potential for monetizing their users beyond ad impressions, but maybe they did analysis and decided it just couldn't happen - or maybe they just dismissed it because they had different customers in mind.
It still seems to me that they could (now could have?) converted a significant percentage of mobile app users into paying customers - perhaps not at the Premium price point of $50+/year, but likely at a lower price point of $18/year (still way more than they were getting from ads) they'd have taken a ton of free users and turned them into paying customers, and they'd have done it while keeping the lion's share of the money themselves instead of having app devs and app stores thrown into the mix. In addition, once you've got them paying you have plenty of options to try to steer them to higher plans - someone wants to have multiple accounts for family or privacy reasons? That's only available with Premium, or with a Family plan. Want higher API limits? We can sell you that. Spending time moderating a popular subreddit? Thanks, would a free subscription make that easier for you?
But maybe potential investors don't actually care about having paying clients.
I just don't think either side has the moral high ground. The mods like the convenience of 3rd party apps. I get it. It's not a real moral issue.
Why not embrace the "subreddit simulator" meme and simply make users argue with GPT-X, trained on previous Reddit posts? No moderation required — every user is corralled into a tiny bubble, perhaps consisting of a single real person, all while consuming ads.