I agree with a lot that Louis says and what strikes me on this one is when he said the guy doesn't care about you and that he thinks the value is in the servers and the api.
I've worked in tech with a lot of people like this. They will tell you straight up they don't care about users or employees. CTO I've worked with said that developers are like "machines working in a factory" that they shouldn't think above their level and should just do the same thing over and over.
I'll tell you one thing you'll never change the reddit managements minds, never ever ever. Same as I was never able to change any of these other peoples minds.
> developers are like "machines working in a factory"
After I worked a few years in the industry, I came to the following conclusion: The main difference between a factory and a knowledge business is that in a factory, the smartest, most knowledgable people are at the top (not completely the case, but mostly). In knowledge work, the smartest (=experts) are at the bottom. If you move up as a smart person, you will for sure lose up-to-date knowledge.
This has a few consequences of course. In knowledge work, managers should not say "First do this, then do that". Managers should be at the service of their team, making sure they get the focus and freedom to work on their stuff.
Now back to the factories: I'm no expert, but one of the key elements of Lean Manufacturing is that the people on the floor are able to provide feedback to the upper layers. Why them? Because they have the hands-on knowledge and see things management can't. So even in factories, either you listen to the lowest level employees or you're not optimising your process.
And finally, if users and employees can be replaced, so can companies, products and services. The thing is that having great retention in users saves you a lot of investment on acquiring new ones. And having great retention in employees saves you a lot of investment in hiring and training. The leaders that realise this will outperform anyone that doesn't.
The personality of the leadership will determine whether they think of workers as self-motivated (will actively look for work) or externally motivated (will wait for work and try to avoid it). Those who don’t think workers are self-motivated will build management structures where people are discouraged from thinking beyond their station and have all kinds of reporting and incentives to make them do their work.
I was for a long time hard in the self-motivated camp, but eventually realized that’s me and not everyone, and maybe not even most people. A multi-modal management approach that leaves room for both works better but is harder to pin down.
This is a good point. A team might have a few people that will actively get their work done and find more while communicating what they're doing with management, so they can redirect if necessary. Others essentially need a babysitter. A good manager let's the hard workers do their own thing and supports them when they rarely need something, while spending more time working with the ones needing babysitting without dragging the hard workers into the mud.
Have you ever worked in a factory? Because I can imagine that factory management could also lose touch and make decisions that would leave the people on the "factory floor", who have better knowledge about what the machines can and can't do, bewildered. There are however several things that make this less likely: first, some companies have a policy of management having to actually work on a production line (or as a worker in a restaurant, etc.) from time to time so that they know the basics of what's going on there; second, the technology of a factory is maybe easier to grasp and doesn't change that fast as in IT. But still, if you want an example, I bet many of the problems Boeing is having is because their management is (or was until recently) located in Chicago, while their factories are in Seattle and South Carolina.
This is exactly what can happen with factory management. The best factories have a pipeline between management and the warehouse workers. In fact, OSHA explicitly recommends that frontline employees are heavily involved in management-included safety meetings.
If this communication goes wrong it can result in deaths and giant profit leaks until eventual bankruptcy.
The failure mode for a factory is usually “bob continues to assemble widgets” - they may miss out on an optimization because Alice has to half disassemble the widget later, but it all still works.
Really? If there are safety issues unresolved, the factory could burn down or people could die… programming rarely puts people in similar life or death situations
Every mode of transportation except for biking runs on software nowadays. Every bridge is designed with software. All of our lives are to some extent threatened by bad software.
"Safety-critical systems now usually rely on software" is a distinct and largely independent statement from "software is now usually safety-critical". The former is true, the latter is not. (This is actually a pretty clean example of the "Affirming the consequent" fallacy.)
> So even in factories, either you listen to the lowest level employees
If you listen to programmers, the app has technical debt, and needs to be rewritten on [next tech stack needed on the developer’s resume]. I’ve hear that on a 6-month-old app written in SpringBoot/React in 2020.
Leader-blaming is a nice sport, but actually working together with full responsibility on both sides is a much rarer skill. Including being fired with damages if you summon KubernPyKafka in Scala and your team doesn’t produce features during 6 months.
Getting flashbacks from my own time working on what I like to call Cthulhu Architecture. KubernPyKafka in Scala is probably the most reasonable part of it.
The parts that needed to be fast were in python. The parts that could afford to be slow were in Go or LuaJIT. Ops in C++. And the parts that required well defined carefully controlled business logic to be encoded were in JavaScript if you were lucky, but more likely embedded in a DSL constructed over YAML. ACID built over top of NoSQL. Still only scratching the surface of the insanity. I’m sure there are many of us carrying these scars; some of the intent on bringing this dysfunction into their next organization.
The factory analogies only work so far. Factories are subject to the same problems as everywhere else. There's a lot to learn from how factories (or your CM's) operate.
> And finally, if users and employees can be replaced, so can companies, products and services.
Yep.
And now maybe reddit's number is up, and it's time for it join Myspace, Friendster and Twitter?!
> CTO I've worked with said that developers are like "machines working in a factory" that they shouldn't think above their level and should just do the same thing over and over.
This shows how important it is to learn about a company, it's culture, philosophy, and values before joining. I can see how some people operate like this, and I don't want to work with them.
For anyone reading this who thinks all companies are like the one that parent described, I want to share that it is not true. There are plenty of companies who based their collaboration with their workers on other mental models than cogs-in-the-machine.
> learn about a company, it's culture, philosophy, and values before joining.
I may sound dumb, but how does one do this? What question would you ask in an interview in order to determine whether the management are apathetic to their users or employees?
The three interviews I did at my current company gave me a glimpse into the culture, but only a surface-level "first impression" kind of knowledge. With that said, I think I successfully ascertained the company's vision with the product I'm working on, but that's way easier to learn than culture IMO.
If the CEO can tell you about how engineering changed the product, but the dev can't, then your experience is going to match the dev's. And the part of "engineering" that changed the product was almost certainly not a dev.
Besides, it is common for CEOs to think that they are more responsive than they really are. And they are generally better at marketing than truth. So for both reasons, I would not trust their answer unless it is backed up by the rank and file.
That's a good point. I'd go further to argue that if stories like that aren't known around the company (or at least by the staff hiring you), it could itself be seen as an orange, if not red, flag.
There is no single approach. It's a soft skill. I don't think there is a single magic question you can ask and you'll get a black-and-white answer.
Here are some ideas:
- read about the company on glassdoor. Try to read between the lines. Are the reviews fluff? Are there any veiled criticisms. Read the high praises and the vulgar criticisms with a grain of salt. They are a signal, but people often have an agenda or are led by emotion when they post like that. Pay attention to the mixed reviews who give you the good and some bad. See if there are any patterns between reviews.
- I hope you will have an interview with either the hiring manager, or one or more peers. Ask them questions about how it is to work there. Find way to ask without asking "How is it working there?" directly. Some ideas:
- Am I joining because the team is growing, or am I replacing someone? If replacing, why did the person before me leave?
- How long have the people on the team I am joining been there? You're looking to get a feel for tenure and seniority.
- How often do you speak with your manager? Their manager? The CTO? The CEO? In general, the more often, and the more approachable leadership is, the less likely you're thought of as a cog and seen more as a human.
- Ask if they could give a concrete example of how their values or principles have been used in practice recently. Make sure you read these ahead of time. If they can't tell, then their values might be bullet points on a glossy brochure that have no application in reality. If they don't know their values, that means no one cares about them.
- How often do you have to work overtime? Is it normal? Is it occasional? How is that recognized? How is that seen?
- Ask how they define and recognize excellence on their team. Listen to the story they tell. Is it mechanical? Do you get a non-answer? A blank stare?
Draw your own conclusions. This is not a set of checkboxes. The best companies are not perfect. The worst companies do some things right (I would hope). It gets easier with time, as you get more experiences under your belt, you'll understand where you fit and where you don't. You'll build a gut feeling for this.
Read reviews on Glassdoor.com. Take them with a grain of salt, but if you see a lot of reviews all saying similar things about the management, it's probably true.
Isn’t this what a joint-stock company does? Anyone can purchase shares (in privately held companies its more difficult but often possible) which grants them proportional votes for things that the board of directors lay out.
Every tech company I know of grants workers options/stock. What more is fair? What is it about worker status that should grant them outsized influence on a company and not, say, customers?
Of course a joint-stock company allows customers to put skin in the game too (which a worker does not simply by being a worker) and giving them influence in addition to their ability to “vote with their wallet”.
It solves all these problems and avoids the adversarial relationship issues.
> This shows how important it is to learn about a company, it's culture, philosophy, and values before joining.
I can't recall the exact quote so paraphrasing here, I recall the gist of someone saying:
> When deciding whether or not to join a group of people, take a long hard look at people already there, how they work, how they think, and if there's something that you see and don't want to turn into, bail out. Because you're going to join a group of, say, 10 people, and in all likelihood these 10 people will change you, whereas the chances of a single individual changing 10 people are slim at best, and more realistically and bluntly put, nonexistent. So the three choices are a) run away, b) join and embrace (or cave in, depending on how you put it, which may or may not be toxic for you), and c) join but resist (which will be toxic for everyone)
> For anyone reading this who thinks all companies are like the one that parent described, I want to share that it is not true. There are plenty of companies who based their collaboration with their workers on other mental models than cogs-in-the-machine.
It's even more complex. While top management might give a rough direction, even within a single company different managers may create way different environments.
> CTO I've worked with said that developers are like "machines working in a factory" that they shouldn't think above their level
Yes, I'm currently working for such a client (not as a dev though) and it's amazing how absolutely convinced even so-called "technical" people think developers are like interchangeable factory workers (which are themselves also probably a myth).
Apparently, the inability to code is some badge of honor, and proof that one is a "thinker"(?!?).
This view seems to be more pervasive in Europe than in the US... Maybe it's an artifact of social classes / hierarchical societies, and more egalitarian societies have an edge to overcome those prejudices.
I also agree that this attitude is much more common in Europe than the US. Founders and CTOs constantly blowing their feet off because they can't seem to give technical people any power, and it doesn't seem to be changing any time soon. I think you would need a big FAANG-like talent feeder to convince them otherwise
It's especially prevalent in France (where you seem to also come from).
I often jest that here engineers are just blue-collar workers with a masters degree. And it's not uncommon to hear engineers refer to themselves as ingésclave ("engineslave").
This being said, companies that really do provide added value and grow are usually the ones valuing their engineering staff highly.
As for myself, I outright refuse to work with traditionally structured French companies.
Yes I'm French and live and work in France, but in the UK or Germany it seems to work the same way, with extremely low wages for software developers compared to managers (except, in some cases, in the startup sphere).
German here. Yes, it's pretty much how you described it.
In my previous company they hired a new CTO.
He doesn't like anyone who is smarter than him and/or who doesn't just follow orders. He quickly started hiring people who he could control, like devs from Iran who were dependent on their work visa, or just "friends" of whom he knew that they always agree with him.
Less than a year after this guy started, a lot of the best people in the company have left the company.
I still have several good contacts there and it is really bad. The company had good revenues and a lot of potential, but they are really struggling right now and they already had to let a lot of people go that they actually needed.
There is one very good developer left who basically built most of the company's software and who is still performing like crazy because he really identifies with the company and he tries to keep it alive, even though it is literally destroying his health and family.
Guess what, the CTO wants to get rid of him because he "doesn't like his attitude".
He tried to force the previous Head Of Software Development to get rid of this guy until he quit himself, now he is trying to get the new Head of (one of the Iranian guys) to find a way to get rid of him.
It is not easy to fire someone in Germany btw. You either need a good reason (like validated documentation that they violated the terms of their contract) or get the person to quit themselves.
The Head Of knows that this guy leaving would be the worst thing to happen to this company, so he is basically just stalling.
Of course the CTO gets more than triple the money of the best paid developer, plus bonuses like a car that's worth ~140k.
view seems to be more pervasive in Europe than in the US
Which is quite weird, since at every Not Software engineering company I've interacted with in Europe (mostly the nordic and germanic countries to be fair), the majority of the top management are experienced senior engineers who have worked their way up from 'the floor' as it where.
I think it’s more about attitudes to specialization and credentialism. People with tech degrees are supposed to do tech. People with business degrees are supposed to do business. A common scenario when a self-taught executive-level manager moves from an anglo country to a germanic one is that employers ask “where is your business degree?”. And this works both ways. Germanic tech employees tend to not value sales/business, and view the money people as a necessary evil that have no idea what they’re doing. This is of course a self-reinforcing cycle. And there’s nothing bad about specialization, really, but interdisciplinary people have their place as well. As for credentialism, I think it’s slightly better than its reputation on this site, but it shouldn’t be applied too strictly.
Ah ok. That make more sense. I find the US distribution of wealth vastly more inégal than Europe but that was not your point, sorry.
Absolutely, a diploma is needed and self starters are view with skepticism.
France is extreme with that for instance. Banks will lend you money to starts a specific business only if you have a related diploma ( hair dresser, butcher, boulanger … )
I mean; they won’t flat out refuse if you dont. But passing thought those trade schools will open doors.
I was just talking it with a friend very qualified in education in both the US and France.
He’s a certify teacher with experience in both countries.
He’s starting a business of teaching music exclusively. He has like 8 years of relevant experiences doing that.
France is still asking him to do a 2 years training if he want to access the government contracts of public schools.
And that’s in a context of teacher scarcity.
Silver lining, the training will cost like $1000/year but that borderline insulting to have him do that and I find the 2 years timeline insane.
So, yeah, long story short crendentism indeed.
I think it was coming from a good place originally. But at this point it’s silly.
This mentality, of the employee as a interchangeable operative box has destroyed so much value. Its what regularly destroys the value of companies bought up by behemoths. The knowledge is just transferable after all, and there can not be any value in constellations, aka teams and pipelines.
Thus it gets all destroyed, people shoved around until they quit.
Its like management has its own toxic ideology, of a world were working people are just a sort of lego brick, and the ideology wins out every time.
That's arguably what they want though. These multinational corporations aren't really focussing at extracting the most value out of what they've got, they're mostly trying to minimize risk.
While a talented and motivated individual can indeed create a lot of value, this will inevitably also create a lot of dependency on said person. Now this person has become a liability, and HR doesn't like liabilities.
Not exactly. I do agreed about the value destroying part. But unless the knowledge mentioned is standardized, it's not really easy to transfer them to the succeeding team members.
Some highly successful products (or features in these products) was created because the effort from one or two employees who got the idea based on their knowledge from life. Without these key employees, the product/features will never be implemented, and the success will never happen (and nobody will know it's possible).
It's the same way how CEO/CTO works, really. Some CEO lead the company to success while others failed, not because they're incompetent, but because the knowledge is not there, which lead to (for example) the lack of imagination and growth.
But unlike the leaders, employees usually don't receive nearly enough reward for their insight, if their effort is noticed at all. That's the dilemma.
This works on the retail level too, where sufficient customers opt to choose a lower quality product (sometimes unknowingly) for a lower price, and causing the higher quality, higher price product/service to not be viable anymore.
I'd say the ideology of mechanization extends to every facet of modern society, to our detriment. Perhaps you're just complaining about CTOs because the ire was aimed at you in particular that time? Mobile game makers weaponize psychology at every level of development and then mock their biggest money-makers as "whales". Rush to dehumanize everyone and why be surprised that this is the inevitable result? A human is only worth as much as its output. Good news is soon the "machines working in the factory" will be smarter than everyone, and you can enjoy your CTO's dumbfounded face before we all shuffle into extinction.
> CTO I've worked with said that developers are like "machines working in a factory" that they shouldn't think above their level
You can pay someone to work but you can’t pay them to care and the difference between a product where people cared and one where they did not is extremely tangible.
> CTO I've worked with said that developers are like "machines working in a factory" that they shouldn't think above their level and should just do the same thing over and over.
The entire industry is infected with management (CXO, VP, Directors, Managers) that think engineers can be pushed to produce "more". And they do this without any idea what "more" is, and how the "more" will bring revenue.
At least in a factory, producing "more" units is likely to return more income. But engineering is not like that at all. There is a creative aspect to it and there is a maintenance aspect to it.
But management ignores it to protect their own stock awards.
It's also usually the type that can never admit their own mistake and instead will push into failure because they think admitting to mistake and changing course makes them look weak
"CTO I've worked with said that developers are like "machines working in a factory" that they shouldn't think above their level and should just do the same thing over and over."
Now ask the same CTO (or, hell, most HN users) what they think of tech support, or QA, or tech writers.
Developers are like gods in the pecking order compared to these other professions.
I never really saw the "factory" analogy of software development: it just makes no sense, unless you look at your CD pipeline and think that's your whole process and where most of the work happens.
The very definition of a factory is that it manufactures the same thing, or a limited range, of items over and over and over again.
That's not software development: you're either doing something new, or working on an existing codebase but, of course, because each part of that codebase is quite different to the others, there's no real uniformity to what you're building. Sure, there are processes that are similar (writing tests, debugging), etc., but it's much more like the design and testing phase of engineering a product rather than the manufacturing phase.
Overall, "factory" is an incredibly vapid analogy that simply needs to die in our industry.
The factory analogy exists because it's still prevalent in managerial culture. The factory model has staying power because it allows outputting a bunch of numbers that everybody understands and can plan upon. It is also utterly wrong when applied to software development but the illusion of constant delivery it provides is so reassuring. We'll keep having it pushed down our throats because managers won't read or understand or believe the Mythical Man Month which is all they'd need to know if they'd care.
I'm sure it exists in management culture, but I'd argue that existence isn't universal: only one data point but I've been a manager for a long time now and, very much because I think it's a ridiculous construct, it doesn't exist in my culture. I've worked one place where it was fairly strong (and wasn't there very long), but it's never really gained much of a foothold in any of the other companies I've worked at. Or, at least, not while I was there, which includes plenty of places where I was an IC or mainly an IC, so couldn't be attributed to my influence.
Capitalism is not monolithic. Markets and businesses work very differently in different countries on different continents. Or in the same country a few decades apart.
Shrugging at shitty practices and saying "capitalism" is at best reductive and unhelpful.
The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized, and easily expressed. They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.
That's the official Reddit narrative. Do you still believe the official Reddit narrative?
If it was true that they just wanted to make money from the API, then they would have responded to those developers who agreed to the price hike and asked to join the new API program. Instead of ignoring them for two weeks out of the four weeks notice that they gave.
Not sure I'm following here. I can't really think of another motive for doing what they are doing. It's an attempt of a pump before dumping it in the public markets.
Don't know, but there are more points to the compass than profit and loss. It's not hard for me to imagine that a site like Reddit, with a billion engaged and trusting users could add value to the companies that control it, without it being a profit centre directly.
And I added an edit to point out that if the profit motive was true, they would have accepted the money offered by the API users who agreed to the price hike. They went ignored for two out of the four weeks notice Reddit gave.
Yes, signing a few API users would "increase profit" but not as much as the profit they can (or perceive they can) generate by having control over their platform/clients.
With control they can employ whatever dark patterns they want to extract as much value as they can from ads. Some suggest ads by API but still that's nowhere near the same type of control/guarantee.
Ultimately this even strengthens my point. They want profits above all else. They are choosing the highest potential profit over the less profitable API deal that could be a nice middle ground.
In capitalism it doesn't matter if a better alternative costs a single cent more. If there is a choice, it will be to save that cent.
It's the capitalism cliché, but it is not the capitalism. Even if you only seek profits, it's not necessarily in their interest to get tunnel-vision and seek short-term profits. Depending on how it proceeds this might be a lesson in how capitalism actually eliminates this very behavior/cliché. We're going to see.
Disclaimer: I am all for criticizing capitalism, but using the cliché is not well argued imo.
Being a cliché or not doesn't make it untrue. It's not a novel argument but it's still absolutely relevant.
Saying it's not "the capitalism" is a bit of a true scotsman argument. There is only really one capitalism: the one we're living in today. There's no other version of this as far as I can tell. Maybe before we had different variations of it but with globalization, it's one to rule them all.
> it's not necessarily in their interest to get tunnel-vision and seek short-term profits
I wish I shared your hopeful vision because looking at history and current affairs, there's no indication that short term gains are ever going to be replaced by long term ones. The climate change issue is the prime example for that. Everyone knows long term it's bad, but who cares? We need those stocks to go up! [1]
> Saying it's not "the capitalism" is a bit of a true scotsman argument.
The statement I answered was making the worst case the norm. That's why I said that it is not representative for capitalism ("not the capitalism"). Short-term-profiteering is just a part of it - that is usually eliminated, if that's all that is to it.
> I wish I shared your hopeful vision because looking at history and current affairs, there's no indication that short term gains are ever going to be replaced by long term ones. The climate change issue is the prime example for that. Everyone knows long term it's bad, but who cares? We need those stocks to go up!
Now you're shifting the goal post. I specifically speak about profit not about some other arbitrary goal. Capitalism (like any economical system) isn't going to magically fix everything (i.e. climate).
That was not my intention. Climate change was just an example but the point is still about profits. It doesn't matter if you find that in 25 years profits will be better for everyone if we do X. Unless you get growth next quarter, stocks plummet.
Hence why I said I don't share your optimistic vision. With capitalism there is only the next quarter.
Even if you look at some of the longer plays like venture capitalism, it's the same mindset focusing on an exit that is a bit delayed. Swap profit at all costs with growth at all costs for a while in hopes you then profit later with monopolies.
Sure as you state short-term profiteering might not be all there is to capitalism, but I never claimed that in the first place. The issue is not the short-term part, it's seeking profit above all else. You can't really fix that within capitalism since it's what defines it.
So for example people in a co-op or volunteer org can be bad for reasons other than profit, like power or the illusion of regard instead.
But then a few days ago at a family gathering a guy asked what I do, and as part of that I was explaining what open source is, and he on his own started telling me how much he loved the vlc media player. Everything he loved about it was the result of the fact that no one working on it has any reason to mistreat the user.
There are examples of open source software that makes decicions I don't like, but even the worst of those are someone else's legitimate best idea how to do the best possible for the user.
Yes, Reddit's current actions are squarely the result of capitalism, not "people".
It’s simple. The profit motive ruins everything as things get big. Usually because shareholders demand to extract rents from the ecosystem. Even while externalizing the cost to society and the environment
Open source gift economies are a far better alternative for society and don’t have that problem. But they require the productive participants to enjoy financial independence or some disposable free time, and universal basic income isn’t coming from daddy government anytime soon.
If you want to attract infrastructure providers and fund development for your project in an economically sustainable way, don’t sell shares in your corporation - release a utility token for your platform, and make it available worldwide. Heck, peg it to a USDC if you’re worried about speculators or complying with securities laws (although there are tons of exemptions from registration, like Reg D and Reg S and Reg CF etc). Issuing and managing them with smart contracts is super easy, and permissionless. You can do it in a minute. People have their own choice of how to store them. And micropayments for infrastructure can be implemented via trustlines in a free market pretty easily.
The utility token holders — even the people who hoard them — have a far better set of incentives than corporate shareholders do. Ether or Filecoin HODLers aren’t trying to ruin it for everyone using the network, nor are they even trying to assert central control over what people can do with IPFS or Ethereum!
Sadly, many people on HN have it completely backwards with what’s good for society. They hate Web3 with a passion and claim it has no use cases even though utility tokens would lead to a far superior set of incentives, wifh no parasitic shareholder class insisting on centralized control and rent extraction — essentially forever. They see what happens at Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, with a few people at the top making decisions, but they don’t put two-and-two together because the cargo-cult of anti-Web3 is strong in 2023. (But not next year, when the halving event happens and lots of innovation gets released again.)
Meanwhile they are in love with generative AI, the new kid on the block, despite most of its own most prominent inventors screaming about a large chance of catastrophe and running to the governmebf.
That just about sums it up right there. Doing the same thing over and over (shareholder capitalism) and expecting a different result after the platform gets big. Calling daddy government. Bitterly complaining. But to acknowledge the root cause and an actual solution of programmers enabling decentralization? Nah, that smells like web3! Don’t subject me to this decentralized nonsense! Brrrr
By the way, the reaction of those who were used to centralized control has always been priceless… this is the earliest moment when they were confronted with the possibility of everyone empowered to do their own thing on their own personal computers:
The committee meeting where the team first presented the Gopher protocol was a disaster, “literally the worst meeting I’ve ever seen,” says Alberti. “I still remember a woman in pumps jumping up and down and shouting, ‘You can’t do that!’ ”
Among the team's offenses: Gopher didn’t use a mainframe computer and its server-client setup empowered anyone with a PC, not a central authority. While it did everything the U required and then some, to the committee it felt like a middle finger. “You’re not supposed to have written this!” Alberti says of the group’s reaction. “This is some lark, never do this again!” The Gopher team was forbidden from further work on the protocol. (https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...)
Times change, the hilarity of resisting decentralization stays the same…
That's the wrong way to look at it. Try to step out of the cargo-cult for just a second. Shareholders buying an IPO is hyper-capitalism. You have a market of buyers and sellers, say, and some utility token. Maybe it's FileCoin for file storage on IPFS. Maybe it's ETH for gas on Ethereum. It's global and convenient to pay once you have it. Maybe it's Disney Dollars.
But then, you have on top of this "hyper-capitalism". Peter Thiel says "competition is for losers, build a monopoly", making many capitalists blush. Venture Capitalists prop up money-losing unit economics for years (they call it "reducing friction") and then dump the equity on the public. The public then pushes the team to extract rents from all sides from the marketplace forever. Who needs these shareholders? That's hyper-capitalism.
In fact, I would even go so far as to say that your utility token shouldn't be freely available to everyone. Only the actual participants should be buying it. Otherwise a hyper-capitalist whale like Goldman Sachs can pump and dump it, hurting people: https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/27/how-goldman-sachs-creat...
It might even be designed to undergo demurrage, so that if you don't use it, you gradually lose it. This was done in Worgl and defied the depression all around it, even the Mises institute had to gradully agree it worked: https://mises.org/library/free-money-miracle
Its not capitalism per se, when you are small you have to focus on your customers whether you like it or not but when you become big you can afford not to treat your customers properly.
Anyone reading history or following world news will be well aware of that "power corrupts." Period. Capitalism is merely the modern fast means to power but even so its far from the only one. Kings are morally corrupt, politicians are morally corrupt, click bait thought leaders are morally corrupt, cult leaders are morally corrupt, etc, etc. There is always some proxy for social status and power which people will quiet literally kill for. Nowadays it's mostly money or at least it's the most accessible one.
I agree with you, but I think when people complain about "capitalism" today, what they mean essentially is "greed", meaning profits above all other concerns. Obviously that's not the precise definition of capitalism, but I see that as an example of spoken language evolving over time.
My point is that greed always exists with or without capitalism. Many attempts over the last 150 years have been made under the assumption that "capitalism" is the problem and they all failed because "greed" is the problem. If you remove "capitalism" then people will simply find a new means to satisfy their "greed" because people are rather clever actually.
So the answer is to distribute power and not let it concentrate.
The best is a gift economy with no profit motive. It creates more value for the world than its capitalist counterparts:
1) Wikipedia vs Britannica, Encarta, et al
2) VoIP vs Telcos
3) Linux vs closed systems like Sun, etc.
4) World Wide Web based on open protocols vs AOL, MSN, Compuserve
They beat them within a decade. Gopher was good but started trying to use the government to control its licensing. It lost.
Now, if you need an accounting system, that rewards ecosystem participants for storage, hosting, uptime/availability, computation, security, translating, moderating, whatever, then use decentralized crypto utility tokens based on open protocols. Micropayments can be done peer to peer via trustlines.
It’s the proper use case for crypto. And it beats the current system of financing projects because the end result is more like
1) Ethereum for business logic
2) IPFS for storage
etc.
vs Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other centralized things.
The rest — realtime chats, video, endless doomscrolling feeds it’s all gimmicks designed to get you addicted to centralized control. It’s not good for healthy society.
Frankly, neither are celebrities who can tweet to 5 million followers at 3 in the morning. In true gift economies like Science, Wikipedia, Open Source software etc. people actually have to run the gauntlet of peer review for the privilege of having their ideas reach the public. That’s how it should be. Not polluting the public with mindless advertisement and smut and one sided news stories radicalizing them to hate and wars.
Think about it. https://rational.app also goes into more detail on the economics of how we got here and how to get out.
Reddit and Wikipedia both get complaints for the abuse of power by power users or mods. They both work (well up to now for Reddit) because there's an absolute admin group bound through a corporate governance structure to step in when needed. Without that you get shit.
>Science
There's a reason for the saying "science moves forward one funeral at a time." Those with power block those who do not have power from competing with them until they literally die of old age.
Also, peer review is not something people go through for the joy of it. Academia and many corporations will literally not hire or promote you unless you go through it. Publishing and conference entities will not publicize your finding unless you go through it and historically without the internet that was the only real way to get publicity. In other words corporate power structures are forcing you to play the game or they will effectively block you from being able to do science professionally. So that seems a pretty poor example of non-corporate power structures.
It’s less about size and more about moat, though most businesses with no moat tend to stay small. If you have a moat you have less competition so you can and will extract more profit.
I would say size correlates rather strongly to bad incentives for the shareholder class vs society.
Mark Z was an open source bro who turned down M$ in High School and ended up open sourcing Synapse. He built Facemash and Facebook and was going to build an open-source, decentralized file sharing network (“Wirehog”) but the Venture Capitalists proudly “put a bullet in that thing”. Gotta extract them rents!
I heard Sean Parker myself on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 telling the story. Sean likewise tried to make a file sharing economy (Napster), and got nailed for it by another set of really big monopoly-like organizations, in the music and movie industries. He learned his lesson of capitalism: don’t mess with the centralized control!
Peter Thiel, the first investor in Facebook, says like you: “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”. That’s not hyperbole, that’s the actual title of his talk at Google, that I listened to.
With such investors it is no wonder that Mark Z went from an open source bro to corporate golden boy who buys up the competition, makes unilateral decisions — moves fast, break things — and then says “calm down, breathe, we hear you.”
Society has become like this (lonely, angry, addicted) not by accident. It is the end result of the system where shareholders and venture capitalists and the profit motive shape our platforms.
Reddit never seemed to behave in a way that made any business sense. VC money has distorted its business model since the beginning, and now it seems that Reddit is willing to burn itself to the ground to put up a barrier for preventing new players from accessing the data that OpenAI and other big tech companies have already used to train their LLMs. I guess that since it never turned a profit this is the only way VCs can get their money back.
Honestly, I find this a very repugnant way of dealing with the user base. A business that never tried to earnestly generate enough value to be sustainable can only be classified as a scam in my book.
No, it’s the business model of YC and “New Silicon Valley.” The original companies that caused people to start calling this entire region Silicon Valley were making—and, in a few cases, are still making—real things intended to make their users’ lives better.
It was the dot-com bubble and its couple of resurgences that really fucked things up here and made everything off-kilter. The finance bros were drawn like vultures to “easy profit,” and brought with them attitudes like treating Google’s chef getting rich too as a “problem” to be “solved” rather than the system working as designed.
Well when everything is based on unsound money, and a literal ponzi scheme the entire financial sector is the largest con ever created
I am not sure how civilization was dupped into the mass delusion of our current economic systems but I do believe we are seeing them unwind right now... the Fed and other controllers have been attempting to catch a falling knife for at least 15 years if not longer... at some point they will loose that battle
I think a traditional venture capital model makes sense for some businesses, but not others. There are many cases where you might need initial investment to reach escape velocity, and you probably won't be very profitable in the first few years.
Something like Spotify is a good example of this working as intended. It's not without its problems, especially their blatant rent-seeking within the podcast sphere, but at the core it's VC working well.
That's not what Reddit and indeed many other VC funded enterprises are doing. Reddit was never going to make a profit without upending its entire value proposition. They may or may not successfully cash out, but what's in store for them if they don't flame out immediate is essentially turning into Facebook. Not cool 2008 facebook, but lame minions memes and grandmas Facebook.
> There are many cases where you might need initial investment to reach escape velocity, and you probably won't be very profitable in the first few years.
>Something like Spotify is a good example of this working as intended.
Spotify is a 26 year old business with zero moat. It’s most valuable to the 3 major record labels as a negotiating tool against Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon. That means the 3 record labels need to price their music just low enough to keep Spotify limping along, resulting in a cap on the profit margin Spotify can earn.
Spotify’s only move is to try to become a record label themselves, but due to excessively long copyright terms and cultural longevity of music, they basically have to keep buying from the 3 major record labels.
Spotify's moat is the byzantine legal maze of negotiating music rights with the record labels which needs to happen in a by-country basis.
Their profit cap is mostly the result of actual competition. That's a healthy market, which is fundamentally a good thing for the consumers since it means they need to innovate and provide a good service.
Wall Street felt they had lightning in a bottle with Silicon Valley in the 1970s.
This turned business plans from making money at scale to IPO machines. The fundamentals of financial exchange have been distorted to take the form a rent seeking sine that is what VCs want to buy.
I feel like there's irony to be found in Facebook holdovers posting minions memes amongst themselves, but I'm going to hold off on explicitly trying to find it in fear that I don't actually know what irony means.
Aomngst all the dicsussion of reddit's flawed business model, I haven't seen much conjecture into how they _should have done it_. Clearly they need to make money at some point -- I'm curious if they ever had a route to do this that wouldn't alienate their userbase?
They could accept that "reddit the product" (in its current form) is a 2-5bn market cap business with solid 0.5bn revenue; run the business on that basis (all values in today $$'s).
Not every product / market is a trillion dollar business. Trees dont grow to the sky.
This isnt to say dont innovate. If they invented a new product; the VR Meta TikTok Shorts iPhone Satellite Headset Watch (TM), then one can reevaluate what "reddit the product" means, but charging for your API or introducing a paid verified badge isnt changing that definition.
The revenue doesn't matter though if their expenses exceed it. Reddit is not a profitable company. So the parent poster's question remains valid: was there ever going to be a way to "make money" (i.e. profit) without alienating the user base?
Why is Reddit not already profitable? They don't pay their moderators, they don't pay for their content, it's mostly text- and image based, very little video, they have a userbase which buys meaningless awards for real money, they should have "native advertising" deals to no end, and very high CPR for their ads since the userbase tells them about their interests.
Sounds to me like they're just bad at running a business.
Couldn't agree more. A web site who's content is freely provided, moderated for free and pretty much just linked to other content and they still can't make money without charging extortionate amounts of money.
So many suitable options were voiced for the 3pa such as profit shares or just reasonable priced API fees.
It baffles me that Reddit didn't already turn a profit. So over bloated and the shit they have actually paid people for such as the official app and desktop site, is just sub standard
You are wrong in that they DO host videos and images and quite a lot at that. Originally they only allowed text posts but that changed a while ago and now a lot content is hosted on reddit itself. I personally think that was a huge mistake. If where is one thing you have to know on the internet is that you should stay away from being a hosting site, it almost never works out.
It’s kind of silly, to be honest. They basically had free video and image hosting, and Reddit decided to say screw that, lets increase our server fees dramatically. I still don’t really understand what motivated that decision. Did they really gain so much by self-hosting content?
I do understand that business decision though. You don't want your business model to depend on a dominant supplier who then can extort high API fees from you... does that sound familiar, somehow?
Imgur also became a community of its own. I don’t remember when it happened, but perhaps Reddit thought they were becoming a true competitor and opted to pull away.
But those suppliers would be extorting fees from users, not reddit. You could say the same thing about any paywalled content. Reddit doesn't scrape and host web content, why do they feel the need to do so for images/video?
I think there is a point to be made about a smoother user experience, but youtube is a great example where their embeds can still be monetized.
Reddit not pushing ads through the API is like if youtube didn't give you ads on embedded videos.
"but reddit is extorting fees from users, not google. why would google care if reddit wants to self-immolate and keep content inside their platform?"
my brother in christ, no man is an island; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promentory were.
nobody wants their website to be a linkfarm to content that's all 404'd, it's not that complex. How do you keep that from happening? Host it yourself.
YouTube and Twitch even pay the creators, and are apparently (at least sort-of) profitable, and they don't even get a share of the brand deals that are baked into the video. Sure, they are backed by huge cloud operators, but still. The hosting costs for Reddit should not be that high.
I wonder if they perform image/video deduplication at scale (or if it is even possible). So many images are just reposts or slight variations on the same thing.
I don't know. I can only guess that it's because it was created by two college students with the intent of allowing people to share interesting content with each other (a pet project), and then became more popular than they could ever have imagined.
Server costs went up in order to keep the site alive, and investors saw the potential and subsidized those costs, and everything ticked along swimmingly until the investors became impatient. Again, this is just speculation.
If Reddit's goal is " is a 2-5bn market cap business with solid 0.5bn revenue", then do they need an order of magnitude more staff than say, 5 years ago? My understanding is their, rather dramatic, scale up was to chase Twitter/Instagram/TikTok. If they're going to drown in expenses before achieving it, then it seems pursuing that was a poor business decision driven by investor expectations of hyper scale (never mind its effects on the product for users).
Trim the workforce. How many engineers, UI/UX, product and QA do you need to run a reddit.com? Likely, 200-300, not 2000! Focus on the core product and the profit will come.
I am sure that this part of the business is a tiny, tiny fraction of the current bloated workforce. Know what, agree, it’s a hard job, keep all those people in. I think they are mostly relying on the volunteer mod force, rather than internal people, but whatever. Keep them all. Still 200-300 is more than enough.
I don’t think that’s true. I remember, for several years now, how after each VC capital, they boast how they are to “double in size”. That’s not just ad sales.
The point was this: Reddit should have held costs down to be profitable. Growing at all costs is not a great way towards profitability, believe it or not.
Growing at all costs is not a great way towards profitability, believe it or not.
Depends on whose profits you care about. Growing WeWork at all costs was wildly more profitable for Adam Neumann than trying to slowly grow a sustainable commercial real estate company ever would have been.
The core problem is that no one in charge at Reddit HQ 'wins' if reddit where to become a much smaller, but profitable, company.
Reddit isn't profitable because its management runs it in an unprofitable way, because they're chasing even bigger profits. They have way too many employees, namely.
Their infrastructure costs can't be much different than archive.org, but archive.org doesn't try to get huge profits and doesn't have many employees.
These all sounds great and if nothing else would be great starting points. And most importantly would be a basis for win/win solution.
I’ve listened to the Apollo guy on a Vergecast interview and he went out of his way to compliment the Reddit CEO and never took any of the opportunities given to fuel the fire. Maybe this Canadian thing is real? =)
Thinking out loud… or my latest random thought…
Reddit Premium users can use 3rd party apps effectively unrestricted and with no ads. In turn, Reddit would pay the 3rd apps say 25 to 35% of the premium fees they collect to the 3rd party app.
Non-premium users can use 3rd party apps but ads must be pushed through and NSFW related material is blocked.
You'd have to be nuts to use a credit card and your real identity to pay for that ... And then in effect consent to being tracked around their website with a key
Your bank and all their friends will have a record of that till the end of time
Some people don’t care, others think with their dick and ignore it, when they urgently want to access something - which is the reason MANY people pay for porn with credit cards.
But I would think, the majority of reddit users would not.
In theory you could offer anonymous payment, paysafe and co. but more and more governments implement age restriction for porn anyway. No one cares for small sites (yet), but reddit could be pressured to not accept anonymous payments as the are big.
Yeah, any of those 3 would be fine. Except that in all cases it needs 6 months notice to reduce the hit on app developers that have year long contracts with users.
But the developers didn't make any contracts with Reddit, prior to making contracts with their customers. Which is egregious, since the developers had no way of guaranteeing that they could actually fulfil those contracts.
Charge for commercial usage. The goal would be to re-capture value from commercial entities that use plain reddit posts (not paid reddit advertising) for commercial gain. A prime example would be a publicity firm hosting an AMA with actors to promote the release of an upcoming movie.
Update the standard user ToS to allow for only non-commercial use. Introduce paid plans for commercial usage. Introduce terms that allow for legal remedies to prevent companies from opening accounts only for the one month they want to host an AMA. Just like mods can decide whether or not a particular post is wearing a "mod hat", let commercial accounts decide whether or not users can wear the "commercial hat". Etc.
Price the plans such that the revenue reddit generates scales alongside the value that the commercial entity gets from the account.
When you run out of ideas in your B2C business the answer is always pigeonhole some B2B model on top of it whether it fits or not.
Reddit is an ad business. Increasingly a mobile ad business. 3rd party apps do not fit that business model and never has. Everyone is blowing it out of proportion because Spez didn't want to be honest about it.
AI/LLM is just a sweetner on top but probably not a billion dollar API business.
What Reddit should be doing is making a better mobile app (and web app at that). Design and software dev in general has not their strong suit and hasn't been for the last decade.
I think you nailed it. In reality from a business standpoint, Reddit should have taken Selig's offer and bought out Apollo and built the main app around it and injected ads, maybe offered an overpriced subscription to minimize ads for premium users. I think nobody would have complained a bit.
Reddit balked at Selig's offer that he based on their API pricing (and he even halved it!). They poisoned the well before walking into that discussion, hence it was effectively off the table from the start. Negotiating for a lower buy-out would have been conceeding the point that the API price is severly inflated beyond the actual value of the users Selig served (and the cost to serve them).
That would block every small business owner, independent artist, indie game developer, twitch streamer, open source developer with a donation link, etc. from the platform. The legal hassle alone would make them not want to deal with it.
After all, it's a list of links and for years Reddit operated exactly like that - a skeleton crew running bare bones infrastructure to serve up basic pages full of links. Yeah, you need more now because of regulation and more sophisticated bots etc. But not that much more.
Users who use alternative clients are banned the moment Discord finds out about them, not a great example.
Discord Nitro's perks seem just as valueless as Reddit Gold to me. The top listed features are ephemeral stuff like custom emojis and stickers and super reactions. You could argue stuff like 50+ MB uploads and HD streaming is more valuable but few users would really use those features often.
Like Discord, Reddit is a community, there's limitations to what you can charge for because you don't want to raise the barrier to entry. I suspect Reddit Gold and custom emojis actually earns Reddit and Discord quite a fair bit, I think a key difference is that Discord has 750 employees to feed while Reddit has 2000.
It seems like discord tolerates alternative clients, so long as they are not used for abuse, but this is indeed not a good situation. Discord is very far from a paragon of user choice and privacy, but it'll take a fair few screwups from them to disrupt the network effect now.
And I agree on the company size: it is hard for me to understand what those employees are doing to make reddit run, considering the nature of the platform.
I recall reading that their engineers tolerate alternative clients, but they said that when they ban bad actors the alternative clients have a chance of getting scooped up due to detection heuristics.
3rs party clients users are banned the moment they find out about them because for them to find out, they must be doing API abuse. Otherwise, they could just go in the betterDiscord server and ban everyone there.
I think discords model is fundamentally better because however useless the paid features are,2 there actually are features to speak of. HD streaming, higher upload limits and global emojis are fundamentally not that important, but you do get something out of paying. You also feel like you're sponsoring several free users, while paying for reddit gold just puts a shiny badge on a post, gives you access to a useless private club that has no direction (which is by design) and removes ads for a month.
If Reddit was a business I wanted to give money to, then Reddit Gold would be a perfectly fine way to do so. Ephemeral is just fine when all you want to say is: hey, poster, I liked your words. Hey, website, I liked how you enabled me to read those words.
> If Reddit was a business I wanted to give money to, then Reddit Gold would be a perfectly fine way to do so
I think people underestimate this. I'm always much happier for my cash to go to a business that I like. Where "like" includes both quality of product and their ethics/attitude.
I don’t know munch about business but it sounds from all parties concerned like they could easily (i) introduce API pricing at 20% of what they want to charge now, (ii) give a three-month runway so app developers could turn up prices and generate revenue flow ahead of sudden outlays, and if they really wanted to milk it (iii) serve ads alongside content in the API. That has the benefit of generating revenue higher than the cost of running Reddit, reduce the opportunity cost of not having people on their own platform but still generate a neat profit. People would complain a little about the cost and a little about the ads but it would be fine.
I heard a lot of people say their main app is trash and lacks many of the basic features you see in third party apps.
They could have focused on fixing their app and only charging a fair amount to api access so they had a slight advantage over their data. It reminds me of iPhones to be honest. All the best jailbroken apps and features were slowly added to the iPhone over time. Reddit could have been following the same route and slowly killed off their competitors. There are many ways they could have added value to their app and thus get ad revenue and data but ignored it this entire time.
I'm pretty sure just giving app developers more time to prepare for price increases would've been enough. If they'd given Apollo and RIF 6 months notice of the new pricing instead of 30 days, the devs would probably have adapted to a paid model and moved on. There would still have been plenty of grumbling, but not nearly as much outrage.
All of this is happening because Reddit Coins is a meme of a paid tier.
Discord understands its not about comments, its about communities. Give users a way to boost/upgrade the subreddits they love, so users have a better experience on those subreddits.
It's not a and never has been a traditional company. Lots of people have said it should be a trust like Wikipedia. It was was always a republic in a world full of Kingdoms.
It's a legitimacy issue. If you get the data through the API, you don't have to hide that you used it. Which might be a big advantage if you want to publish/sell what you've been doing.
It's unlikely that the legal landscape will be such that you would need to hide this at all. It would require a reversal of precedent on the legality of scraping and that training data is ruled to not be fair use.
But isn't it the case that all that could be scrapped from Reddit before ChatGPT came on-line already has been scrapped, and is publicly available? Anything post-ChatGPT is going to be increasingly worthless, as there's an unknown amount of LLM-generated content mixed in it, which is going to be wasteful, and potentially poisonous when used in training next-gen LLMs (some early studies already indicate that training LLMs on LLM output leads to visible degradation very quickly).
I thick Reddit management believes they’re able to close this barn door and that additional horses will appear because Reddit content will continue to remain high quality and LLM-free.
Wow that sentence was hard to write with a straight face.
There are data you cant scrap.
e.g. you dont know what posts they feed to each individual user(assuming they use personalized recommendation like other social platforms),
you dont know which post is shown to a user and is not clicked on,
you dont know the subreddits a user subscribes to,
you dont know which user upvotes/downvotes which comments,
you dont know the users' browsing pattern(which subs they check first, when does a user open reddit during the day)
It's really funny how many subreddits have posts telling people to join Discord. I mean, Discord, really? Where are the Discord third party clients that consume tiny amount of data and have low latency? At least with reddit we still have the old interface.
Feeling really sad for the all the lost communities.
I've read several comments here on HN from so called "insiders" over the last few months that old.reddit.com is going to go away this year. They already shutdown i.reddit.com for mobile users so I tend to believe that old.reddit is next.
I like Discord well enough for the right purposes but it does make me truly sad to see so many niche communities go behind closed doors like Discord.
Discord isn't indexed or searchable by folks (or search engines) outside of the server, and even then, it's a real-time chat application that just doesn't lend itself to the type of content that makes reddit special. Discord also has investors who will want payback on their investment...so users on Discord may find themselves in the same boat some years down the line.
But people use it because the barrier to entry is so low. Even non-technical people can set up good looking and functional communities.
Yeah I'm slightly dumbfounded that we are so much at loss on where to go next, I can't really take calls to boicot reddit but go to Discord seriously. Where are the lightweight newsletters or lightweight forums as an alternative.
Yeah I've said this at least dozens of times. The subs for those who want a slower reddit and discussion linked to the subs for faster communication, probably with some levers like "you're talking too fast" or "AI has detected too. many cucks and soyboys, calm down, here's a 24 hour time out"
Reddit's main value is (was?) collective convenience and familiarity. Like Whatsapp. Like Facebook. Those social networks where you wish that everybody you're connected with would just quit to join something else, together, all at once. But your family and friends just won't budge. You could hate the management itself, but knew what to expect from it and could find solace in the idea that "surely, they won't shoot themselves in the foot!" A devil you know kinda deal.
But now, Reddit has gone and shot itself in the foot and the communities are trying to understand what it means for them.
The difficulty to find a new home is likely political. So many users migrating to a single new network is a lot of power afforded to any one entity. In an age where so many visionaries have claimed to want a good future for humanity, but ended up either selling that dream away, or revealing their own dystopian version of it, who are you going to trust? Short of the enduring brand and gravitas of something like the Wikimedia Foundation, or Craigslist, who are you going to entrust such a responsibility?
So what concrete problems and potential solutions do you see?
Edit: People have been participating in federated networks since ages.
But it is hard. Especially if you want to give users the same experience as with non federated sites.
And I am not sure, if for example lemmy has solved it
The biggest problem I see so far is discovery and UX. UX is going to be fixed by the devs with time so I'm not worried about that but discovery isn't getting the same attention yet. Right now on Mastodon we have like github repos with lists of people of certain types and then the presentation of user lists by the instances themsleves but these are both primitive. We need to figure something else out. Being able to follow hashtags was a great step forward but we'll have to do better. I think even cultural changes could help, like make it normal to introduce people to eachother. Maybe add a suggest protocol for people to recommend people/communities to other people.
Reddit doesn't really have network effects the same as Whatsapp and Facebook.
When I say "network effects" I mean two things:
1, A self-fulfulling draw
2, An increase in the utility the more people exist
So, having everyone on whatsapp means you can have group chats.
Having everyone on facebook means you can plan events.
Reddit kinda doesn't do that, in fact it optimises for a loose coupling of many independent and semi-isolated communities.
It doesn't really take advantage of any network effects; and like Lois Rossman mentions: there is next to no benefit being on reddit than using private forums except having a single login. Which is essentially a solved problem these days because SSO is easy and ubiquitous (thanks google/github!).
I have to disagree with this. Sure, it's different from 'all my friends are there' like on Whatsapp and Facebook. With Reddit it's 'all the info is there'.
I'm looking for a set of binoculars? Check the discussion on Reddit. Looking for some info in flashing Tasmota? Check the discussions on Reddit. Need some info on debugging my 3D printer? Same.
I've resorted to appending 'Reddit' to my Google searches whenever I'm looking for experiences people have with products or services, because it's a pretty sure bet for getting useful answers. It's also well indexed by search engines as opposed to Facebook groups and it has a much lower barrier for asking questions than Stack.
The only reason all of this content is there, is the network effect of those loose communities all being attached to the same domain and having a single account to interact with all of them. And of course, not having to search all over to find the best community / private forum for whatever thing you're interested in. As a man of many hobbies, Reddit is great and I really hate that Discord is starting to become the alternative, because searchability is crap and discussions are impossible to follow.
I'm going to take a leap and say it's not by typing reddit.com/r/binoculars or by using reddit search (which has been terrible since inception and shows no signs of improving).
I'd guess instead you use DuckDuckGo or more likely Google.
So what you say you really get from Reddit is a site that has a modicum of trustworthiness that it won't ruin your computer and that maybe there's an opinion here that reddit is the canonical place where all binocular enthusiasts will also participate.
Am I right in this assumption?
If I am, doesn't that completely break down the moment a decent chunk of communities decides it must not be on reddit?
As in, it's not really network effects, it's more "all or nothing" because anything other than everything brings doubt into the trustworthiness of the site/communities.
If there's a very popular and well known community (Linus Tech Tips for great example): then their forums are more trustworthy and have much richer densities of information. And you would find that information the same way as you would on reddit if I'm not mistaken.
> doesn't that completely break down the moment a decent chunk of communities decides it must not be on reddit?
Of course it does. We only search with Google and site:reddit.com because it works. But it works VERY well right now. Remove that site:reddit and you don't instead get quality content from lots of other community forums. Instead you get garbage and ads. Reddit's only "moat" right now is that I, as a rational human being, will add site:reddit.com if I want to find an answer to a question.
There are other specialized communities that I will search using site:xyz.com. And there will be many more if communities leave Reddit and setup elsewhere. Time will tell if this will happen.
That's exactly what I did. Most of those subs have either a pinned guide or a wiki with recommendations and considerations. And often I do use search, because it's fine for simple things like searching for model numbers.
> If I am, doesn't that completely break down the moment a decent chunk of communities decides it must not be on reddit?
That's the point of it being a network effect, right? Like, when people collectively start using Facebook in stead of Myspace, so Myspace died?
> Am I right in this assumption?
No, I don't exclusively use Google to search Reddit and when I do, I explicitly mention site:reddit.com.
> And you would find that information the same way as you would on reddit if I'm not mistaken.
So, no, you are mistaken. Because I didn't even know those forums existed and they don't seem to show up on Google often.
Recently, I was looking for a monitor for example. Say I'd want to know more about the 'G95SC' entering 'G95SC review' in Google shows mostly review sites like CNET. I want to see regular people's opinions so I look on Reddit and see those. And I can do the same thing for 3D printers, cars, brake pads, track tires, laptops, android car stereos and pretty much anything else. In stead of having to find the relevant forums.
The single account for me it's a lot more important than you'd think
An old account that has been consistently interacting with multiple subs and hasn't been banned tells me that at least the account isn't a low effort bot
It could be that what you're calling the "network effect" is what keeps people tethered to Facebook or Whatsapp, but I doubt it. Speaking only for myself, I certainly don't keep my Facebook account open for events. I also don't care for groups on Whatsapp. I have to have both solely because I value the relationships that I have with the people that I expressly added as friends/contacts on both.
Reddit may be different, but only in the sense that its overall value is less tied to individual relationships, but rather to the communities themselves. Each is a treasure trove of searchable, moderated, insightful, and trusted (if sometimes opinionated) information.
One obvious similarity is how difficult it is to migrate communities. I've seen so many attempts. None convincing. All such successful migrations that I've witnessed were actually slow organic growths of new networks that progressively made the older ones obsolete or redundant. I don't recall a successful one that was a mass exodus from one platform to another. The fine prints never made the unanimity (new moderation rules, etc). It seems that you really need to have a new destination that people can agree to gradually join and use concurrently with the old one, before abandoning the latter altogether.
Even Wikipedia sucks. Many articles have biased individuals watching them like hawks; however, as a casual user, you might not notice, and simply trust in the happy idea that misinformation can be edited easily (however real that capability is).
Everyone is biased, it's just a scale of how much, and even that scale is biased. You can't get away from it on any forum, it's basic human nature, barring something like a math formula (which I sure can be made political unless it is the simplest of concepts)
There's a problem with the fundamental underlying argument here, which rests on the notion that all the value of Reddit actually comes from the moderators and the users posting content. The problem is, if Reddit itself has no value, why does every other option suck?
During the blackout I made an honest to god attempt to use other things. I tried Lemmy. I tried Discord. I tried Mastodon. I hated them all. It's definitely partly just critical mass - the communities just aren't there - but it's not only that. Nobody has managed to replicate the classic / old Reddit UI/UX either. I hate all the new UIs. I don't know what's so hard about it. It's a list of links with some upvote / downvote buttons.
I'll be more ready to believe there's no value in Reddit when I see that somebody has actually successfully cloned it and made a place for these communities to go to that's anything like as good as what Reddit offers.
Reddit Inc doesn't even believe in the UX you're talking about, old.reddit won't be around forever and the API move is killing off alternative apps.
Discord is a fundamentally different platform to Reddit so I am not surprised it didn't compare.
What reddit has is a network effect and good enough technology, given their tech is already available as open source clones ready to be deployed, their only edge is their network effect. Kill off the community and all you are left with is some easily reproducible code and a server bill.
> if Reddit itself has no value, why does every other option suck?
Becuase its a money losing model. Nobody is competing because in Reddit's 18 years of operation its yet to get even remotely close to turning a profit.
The alternatives that have popped up (Lemmy for example) arent even close to being at the same level from a software point of view.
Hosting images and videos has a powerful lockin effect. For example I look to repost things from Reddit and then realise I can't because Reddit is hosting the video. It's additional work to go find the original source and post that.
I went to Reddit during the Digg exodous and remember scoffing at Reddit's terrible UI. I stuck with it because that's where the content was. Then I got used to it and still browse old.reddit.com to this day. What makes a UI suck or not is highly subjective and moreso based on familiarity.
When this started, I jokingly told my friend, "F it. I'll make my own reddit." Over the course of the evening (and just tinkering around some more the next day), I tossed this together: https://github.com/RemmyLee/effit/
Again, it was more of a joke than anything, but it quickly made me realize that the core of reddit is pretty easy to quickly toss together. If anyone wants to take that mess of code and do anything with it, by all means, feel free to.
Reddit is effectively just a text-only forum (image and video uploads are fairly recent features, and the latter has never even worked properly) with subthreads and a voting system.
Text forums have effectively been solved ever since NNTP was invented. All HTTP forums are pretty much just centralized recreations of various components of Usenet. With modern databases, load balancing, and infrastructure management, the cost of building, hosting, and maintaining a web forum is effectively negligible.
The only real selling point of Reddit is having all of your forums in one place, with the ability to easily and instantly create your own forum if you want to. Everything else on Reddit is just a random collection of social media features bolted on to appease investors/advertisers/stakeholders, and the vast majority of Reddit users (or at least the ones I interact with) never touch any of them.
The only thing keeping people on Reddit are network effects. Which, admittedly, is a lot, given that’s what’s allowed Facebook to weather its seven quintillion controversies with minimal damage, but a well-designed successor with enough server capacity (this is very important, crashing under the initial migration load has been what sunk a number of previous high-profile “Reddit killers”) could easily take Reddit’s place.
> Text forums have effectively been solved ever since NNTP was invented.
Yes, and you should use that. I even have NNTP service with newsgroups for my own projects but they are not used much, so far. I would hope that other people can easily set up their own forum (like you say is possible with Reddit), possibly with any number of remote services which have NNTP access as well as HTTP perhaps, and if you set up an account then you can set it up and it can also be federated. ActivityPub and other HTML-based forums are not very good I think, and NNTP is much better in my opinion (although bridging can be implemented if it is desirable, some things might not work very well in all protocols e.g. ActivityPub only works with Unicode). (There is one change to the protocol which I think should be useful, which is to allow 63-bit article numbers instead of 31-bit article numbers. My own server and client software implements this feature.)
> Text forums have effectively been solved ever since NNTP was invented.
The unsolved problem is moderation. Reddit mods are partly protesting because the official app's moderation features suck. And Lemmy just had some defederation drama because their moderation tools can't handle the spam bots.
Powerful moderation tools will be the killer feature of Reddit's killer.
I've been using Lemmy, and while there are a couple of places to improve (around how interacting with communities on other instances works, and how you end up looking at your own instance's view so you can interact) my only issue is the critical mass. There are some decent communities on gaming for instance, but I can't do the thing I can on Reddit where I know there's going to be a good community on every hobby I have an every game I play and I can just join if I want.
Lemmy is the closest thing to Reddit. The community is small now, but it's growing exponentially due to this Reddit protest and migration. I'm looking forward to see its future. It's a bit confusing at first for new joiners though. But when you get it (it works like email), it's truly brilliant. Luckily I moved to Lemmy to see a whole new paradigm that excites me about the Internet again.
But for Discord, it's good when you need to interact with someone, but otherwise it's overwhelming with chat flows. And it's also a blackhole of information.
Thanks for mentioning kbin - I tried that and it's better than everything else UI-wise. Not quite as good as old Reddit but good enough! Now just to solve the problem that it's a ghost town for the communities I'm interested in.
That’s basically just Lemmy/kbin. Those two services can even interconnect with Mastodon thanks to ActivityPub.
As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, moving text around on the Internet has been a solved problem ever since NNTP. And that was 1986!
The only problem is that there’s not a lot of money in it, which is why having the ability to federate a bunch of smaller services together is such a good solution (at least on a technical level).
if reddit itself had no communities would that UI/UX even matter? you didn't learn it because it was good, you learned it because you had to to use the site lol
We all know the drill: pick up the shambles of your community. Move to a federated service (lemmy in this case) and try to get as many of your peers to join you there.
Actually, subreddits being mapped as lemmy instances makes more sense to me than the "single identity" of reddit.
The problem with that plan is that a huge amount of the value of Reddit was that it was well-indexed by search engines so that when you went searching for something, the conversations from Reddit would pop up, which were generally quite high-quality as far as forum-type content goes.
If you move everything to Lemmy, that won't happen much and as a result fewer people will join the community that don't already know about it somehow.
Migrating communities from one platform to another is a lot more complicated than most people assume.
Cold start problem: initially the new community has no content archive and only a few users, most people are lazy, it takes time to relearn the ui and set up subscriptions(there is no good way to export/import subscriptions and saved posts)
Transfer of moderation: some people are going to take the opportunity to seize ownership of the new community, and the community will split up
Discoverability: reddit gets a lot of user traffic from google since google search quality has gone down and people add site:reddit.com to their search
We need a new form of social media where users and communities can easily export their content and data. A reddit clone with a similar UI is not enough.
Why not a reddit clone with the API data and some sort of claim for accounts via proof of ownership?
Just make them comment a special string on reddit to claim your account on the new clone.
Clone content and subreddits of the last X days.
Shouldn't be toooo hard.
Maybe use the reddit links for images and video for the first POC until you can serve them yourself.
Moderators could claim their subreddits, people dont lose too much - maybe also migrate your subreddit subscriptions.
Isn’t there a 2TB dump of Reddit posts and comments as of February 2023? Couldn’t you that instead of the API to seed your site’s content as a workaround to the TOS?
> We need a new form of social media where users and communities can easily export their content and data. A reddit clone with a similar UI is not enough.
If a site allowed imports how would it work? It could work for all of a user's top level tweets, but for something with threads like reddit I don't see any solution.
well, what good is it when google indexes ANYTHING? even cohost appears high in results nowadays... and dont get me started about how google includes also crap generated by llms... google is on its course of devalueing itself.
the human internet is probably doomed. long live the llm generated internet
oh which gives me an idea: fake users as a service: using llm to generate comments for reddit after the dark
I'm sure with enough community-support someone will write a plugin or tool to expose Lemmy content to http pages that can be indexed? I haven't used Lemmy before, but if I was making a Reddit-like clone, that sort of thing would have been baked in from the start.
To my knowledge, Lemmy instances can all be crawled by Google already. Using "site:lemmy.world" for example, returns indexed results. It's just that Google's algorithm has received billions of reddit searches for years, so they're biasing Reddit results. This will change organically.
Lemmys far too immature to take over Reddits position. Even with 24/7 development (Which isnt happening) its not going to get to a strong enough position to take over for a long time.
It'd have been like Mastodon trying to step in to take over Twitter in 2017.
I agree with you, but I am actually finding some enjoyment in using something that's at an earlier stage. I'm not normally the early-adopter type and Lemmy does fundamentally work - its issues are missing features rather than bugs.
I also don't think Lemmy is too far from the prime time. Based on my usage over the last week, its perfectly usable and I think it needs two things for it to get to the point where I could just tell a non-technical friend to join without a long explanation of things they need to know:
* A better approach and advice for which instance to register on. https://join-lemmy.org/ is OK but isn't the ideal landing page for someone who isn't a SW engineer
* Better handling of links to posts/communities on other instances, so that you end up on the view from your instance and you can more easily upvote, reply etc. There's a few options here, but one would be to fully adopt the !community@instance notation, rewrite links in posts into that form, and when displaying posts generate the link to your instance.
There's also the more general federation problem (that Mastodon also has) of finding something via Google or similar, and then if you want to follow you have to go back and search in your own instance. Browser extensions can solve this, but I don't know if that is sufficient.
I think it depends a lot on the use case. For me there are two Reddits: the large, wildly popular subreddits with a lot of meming, etc. These are probably where the bulk of users are. And probably what Reddit the company is most interested in. These users care less about third-party clients and fit in well with Reddit as a social media company.
The other Reddit is one of small niche communities with hundreds or thousands of subscribers, but where a lot of experts of that niche hang out and comment. Pretty much like old web forums. Lemmy looks (I have only joined yesterday) good enough to serve that type of Reddit. And I think at least tech niche subreddits are somewhat inclined to jump ship, since they are more principled about third-party client, etc.
It's similar to Mastodon and Twitter. Twitter hasn't collapsed (yet) and Mastodon hasn't taken over its role. However, many tech folks have jumped ship. My Twitter feed (especially with recommendations) is now mostly tech bros and influencers with hot takes on LLMs. My Mastodon feed is mostly high-quality, insightful tech posts. And in contrast to before Elon took over Twitter, it's not a ghost town anymore.
The problem is that many people have come to think of reddit as a public utility.
People expect a public utility to, perhaps, not be that innovative and maybe a little poorly run at times. What they do expect from a public utility is long-term reliability. They expect it to be there, doing what it does now, five or ten years from now. For some people (e.g. the blind), all of reddit is going dark on July 1st.
Reddit is not a public utility. It's owners have decided that short-term profits are more important than serving as a long-term non-profit public utility. I can't fault any business person for making this decision, but it's the key reason why we need publicly controlled infrastructure to do what reddit does now.
Reddit is many beneficial things. Just for one example, it's a new foundation of journalism. How many professional journalists rely on reddit to find and research news stories? If you read your local city's sub and then read your local newspaper the following day, there will be a surprising amount of repeated material.
Governments in many countries run public broadcasting corporations, public news programs, and even subsidize privately owned news companies, although in many cases that's mere corporate welfare. They do this because they realize that journalism is a cornerstone of free society.
The functions that reddit now performs are too important to leave in the hands of short-sighted corporate executives who have absolutely zero interest in anything beyond their next quarterly report and the bonuses tied to it. We must not jump from reddit into the hands of yet another corporation or this will simply happen again.
Public funding has produced things like lemmy.ml, but such projects aren't ready to scale nor, arguably, interested in doing so. This is something the UN should tackle to prove they still have relevance in the modern world. Instead of simply issuing non-binding warning after warning, perhaps it's time for international organizations to build the kind of public infrastructure that provides a benefit to all of humanity.
> The problem is that many people have come to think of reddit as a public utility. (...) Reddit is not a public utility. It's owners have decided that short-term profits are more important than serving as a long-term non-profit public utility. I can't fault any business person for making this decision, but it's the key reason why we need publicly controlled infrastructure to do what reddit does now.
Exactly this. And the same applies to Twitter and Facebook as well. And probably increasingly Discord.
In the end, both sides lose because of this misunderstanding (well, except the investors on the business side win). There is demand for both, and there is space for both, and I think the society at large is going to slowly realize that the two things - utility-like social media and regular private business - are different, and learn to differentiate between them - and maybe then, finally, the utility-like social media will be created.
Also that we actually pay for public utilities and like.
Water, Sewage, Electricity, District Heating, Waste management, Internet etc. All have real monthly payments. But we have gotten too used to be subsidised on online... Bills have to be paid somehow and time of free content is coming to pause.
Good luck getting Anglo countries to pay for public infrastructure. I'm an advocate for transit in the US, and the amount of people who perceive any problem in services that they don't use and use that as justification to defund it is huge. I really doubt you'll be able to convince people to fund something with such marginal utility. Anglo cultures hate paying for other people.
>> How many professional journalists rely on reddit to find and research news stories?
That would be very unprofessional journalists. At least with the issues of the current war the flow of information is as follows: small telegram channels -> large telegram channels -> translation -> twitter -> reddit.
but it's the key reason why we need publicly controlled infrastructure to do what reddit does now.
There's no such thing as a free lunch! Even if we were to somehow (miraculously) get the public to pay for a free utility-scale Reddit-like site, there would still be huge problems.
For one, making it public causes it to be thrust into the political spotlight. Conventional utilities (electricity, running water) are just about as boring and uncontroversial as anything you can imagine, yet there are still political fights over them. I cannot even imagine how ugly the political fights over something like Reddit would be.
People would be out in the streets protesting over the kind of content that goes on there. They would demand an extreme level of moderation which would alienate all but the most anodyne users. It just wouldn't do to have the government pay for a free-speech zone like that.
> The problem is that many people have come to think of reddit as a public utility
That's a good summary of the problem, and I would extend that to say that public utilities should be in control of the public, which means federated services.
My hope at this point is that Reddit massively doubles down (and that Twitter goes back to trying to eat itself) so the migration to Lemmy and Mastodon continues. Neither has quite crossed the chasm out of the early adopter/tech sector users. It looked like Mastodon got close at one point and then Twitter ran out of completely idiotic ideas.
One statement that fell outside of my agreement was him balking at how people leaving Reddit could cause it to crash. Fewer people should mean less load :O
That position reminds of me of the Simpsons episode where Homer runs for mayor. At a debate, Homer's opponent shows up late because someone cut his car's break lines, and Homer goes - "Well then you should have been here early!"
Any sufficiently large irregular site activity will cause issues. The people who are 'leaving' aren't being inactive. They're either disabling accounts, or disabling sub-reddits, all of which causes activity on the servers. It's absolutely to be expected that outages occur.
For example, to make some numbers up, if only the top 10 posts in each subreddit are cached, in normal circumstances the Popular page can be constructed from cache. If the number of open subreddits reduces by 95% then suddenly a request for Popular might be hitting the database a lot more.
Whatever happened is going to be more complicated than that, but I can believe people leaving, and subreddits going dark, could cause a crash.
Pretty much a week after starting any web development job, you discover that 95% of making a site fast is simply reducing the number of times it has to call the database.
Typically, this means caching everything as much as you possibly can.
This is the same reason why Wikipedia can’t just roll out a cookie-based “revert to old look” option for logged out users. It would require caching every page twice since you’d need a file prepared for both skins. The reason they can have skins for logged in users is because they already bypass the cache for logged in users (to allow for individual user scripts and stylesheets to be run, among other things). Even then, things like article text and category lists are still stored in various database caches, hence why there’s a “Purge cache” option available to logged in users.
I can't remember the last time I deleted an account. I only do it for legal reasons. I would probably just visit Reddit less and less, until one day it's for the last time, and I never go back - not even to delete it, because it's just not occupying my thoughts anymore.
Maybe if I wanted to send a message by deleting? But I think most people would just trail off and move on.
I'm actually not that comfortable with the idea of deleting my account. Deleting part of my history especially if i don't really have a convenient way to archive (and see) it isn't something I like. I even still have my Facebook account!
A theory I read that makes sense is their code/services for handling private/closed subreddit post fetching wasn't very well optimized and so when a record number of subreddits went dark suddenly that portion of their service was overloaded.
That or some other black swan shift in user behavior makes the most sense why it would paradoxically crash during a boycott.
did he mean crash in a technical sense, or crash as in implode: people are leaving because people are leaving, a situation of mass behaviour that nobody can really control
I've worked in tech with a lot of people like this. They will tell you straight up they don't care about users or employees. CTO I've worked with said that developers are like "machines working in a factory" that they shouldn't think above their level and should just do the same thing over and over.
I'll tell you one thing you'll never change the reddit managements minds, never ever ever. Same as I was never able to change any of these other peoples minds.