Q: How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become
increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
Spez: We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive.
Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.
Well, it's true. Third party apps don't have to deal with the entire server side of Reddit, ie hosting text, images, video etc. They're just dealing with the client side off a free API, of course they're profitable. At least the CEO is honest that companies exist to make money, of course.
Hosting the text content is one thing, but reddit willingly became a multimedia hosting site not all that long ago. The site grew and users got by fine using imgur and what not before i.reddit.com and v.reddit.com ever existed. They also decided to do presumably costly ui rollouts that a lot of their most veteran community members opt out of.
Do you know why Reddit actually built their own multimedia platforms via i/v.reddit? Because Imgur didn't want to host Reddit content anymore [0]. This is about NSFW but more generally there was a cooling of relations between Imgur and Reddit because essentially Reddit users were freeloading on Imgur's platform without Imgur necessarily being able to show ads due to how Reddit linked directly to the image and not the Imgur link. Therefore, Reddit was forced (and yes, also wanted) to build their own versions.
There is no free lunch. Someone has to pay the bills on hosting, and I'm sure Reddit thought it'd be cheaper to do it themselves at scale than to pay someone as a middleman.
This is the Reddit announcement about their hosting [0]. At that point in time, Imgur was already redirecting direct image links to the non-direct wrapper page so that they could show banner ads. This made it difficult for Reddit to show images in the site and app well, thus the cooling of relations between both I had mentioned. It's interesting since Imgur started off as "an image hosting service that doesn't suck" according to the creator, on Reddit [1].
imgur started as site to host and hotlink images published at reddit (they wanted to change it to be profitable, but entire point of Imgur was to enable "freeloading on Imgur's platform")
>They also decided to do presumably costly ui rollouts that a lot of their most veteran community members opt out of.
The original UI works well, and it's great they kept old.reddit. Everything since has been horrible, along with the dark patterns pushing their mobile client. It reminds me of all the craigslist UI redesign posts on hacker news many years ago that completely missed the point.
Reddit has definite value (really important as Google quality declines IMO), and I'd love if they could find a way to sustain without destroying the community... but I'm not optimistic.
He's myopic. It's not like any of the third party clients were drowning in millions in profits. The CEO basically shut out his best content producers in one fell swoop. If you're already looking to a third party client for Reddit, clearly it's something you value and that's now been destroyed.
Reddit doesn't care about users who use third party apps, that's simply a fact. It doesn't matter if they are content producers as there are 500 million monthly active users on Reddit and once people either migrate to the official app (or quit, but I highly doubt that since people say they'll quit a lot of things but never actually do), they'll continue to churn out content.
My prediction is it’ll be like the slow death of Facebook. Did Facebook users quit en masse after the Cambridge analytica scandal, or after The Social Dilemma? No, Facebook was still going strong. But it just doesn’t seem culturally relevant any more. People don’t seem to ask to be Facebook friends now. They ask for my insta or WhatsApp. (And meta buying both of those sites seems like an utterly genius move in retrospect.)
I predict the same will happen with reddit. It’ll take awhile for new platforms to mature, and for the good content to leave. But I’d put money on it losing its cultural relevance over the next 5-10 years.
Facebook has 3 billion monthly active users. It's not dead by any definition of the word. Even if you and I don't use it, many people around the planet do. It is simply that we are not in the target market anymore, but don't discount 3 billion people, that's around 30-40% of the world's population. Cultural relevancy doesn't matter as long as Facebook still has the install base to show ads to, which is how it makes its money, and why its stock is still one of the best performing in the business.
People do genuinely click on and buy things from ads. I've never done it, but I helped my personal trainer sell his workout programs online.
I thought he was absolutely crazy and was going to waste a bunch of money. I was completely and utterly wrong. People were clicking ads and buying his workout plans.
At that point I realized I'm completely out of touch with the majority of social media users.
Lots of users that are not you nor I click on ads. I should know, I used to run Instagram and Facebook ads for my product and my user acquisition cost on that was far lower than my average revenue per user. People absolutely click on ads and buy stuff.
One solution to the profitability problem might be to remove all the non-profitable users.
When I browse the home page all I see is anti-work, anti-capitalism, nuance-less politics, etc.
As people have mentioned, the free money decade is over - users are going to have to start becoming Customers if they want their voices to be listened to.
> users are going to have to start becoming Customers if they want their voices to be listened to.
That would be an improvement to the current "free" platforms that users pay for with their data, or attention to psychologically manipulative content. The web should definitely adopt the business-customer model, and cut out the leechy middlemen.
Going a step further, the business should happen not with a centralized platform, but with web hosters, infrastructure companies, and ultimately ISPs. The technology for anyone to publish and manage their data already exists, but is not user friendly enough to be accessible to anyone but the technically proficient.
The internet is inherently peer-to-peer. Service silos only exist because user-friendly tools are made for consumers rather than publishers, and the easiest way for users to publish content is via a 3rd party. We have user-friendly web _browsers_, but web servers are still reserved for the technically proficient. There's a lot of work needed in this area, but all the building blocks already exist.
Yep. Its incredible that for decades we havent developed a decentralized internet of "apps" that is more aligned with how the economy works.
In some cases the current platform design is totally absurd: like linkedin (or github or azure) thus microsoft having insider knowledge about anything that happens in the digital space.
This is basically down to society being largely tech illiterate and various people taking enormous advantage of that.
I think this was a failure of the early web. You can see in the original proposal[1] that the building blocks were a "browser" and a "server". So the web client gets to have a user-friendly application for consuming content, but the web server is just... a server. There's no user-friendly counterpart for publishing content. This would be equivalent to the modern web browsers not existing, and users having to "navigate" using cURL. I love cURL, but it's intended for a technical audience, and the web would've never taken off had it been the default client interface.
You can also see in the proposal that phase 2 considered a "universal authorship" goal, and has a rough draft of what a user-friendly publishing interface could be, but it was far too vague, and to my knowledge this phase never came to pass.
As a result of this, companies like GeoCities and Angelfire popped up to fill the void of what the web lacked, and later on social media platforms served the same purpose. Advertisers noticed early on a very lucrative opportunity, and tech giants were built to support them. ISPs noticed that the demand was only for downloading content, so they never bothered to build the infrastructure needed to also serve content, and most internet connections were asymmetrical. And, so, here we are.
To be fair, there have been some attempts to make publishing easier. I think the best attempt was Opera's Unite in 2009. But by then, it was too little, too late, and Opera being Opera, it never gained traction. BitTorrent is a big one, but it's only a protocol, so it should be a building block of whatever the solution is.
Now we have all these distributed projects, web3, etc., but they're still unusable by the average internet user. A part of the problem is education, sure, but I reckon that the average internet user has been conditioned to believe that all these mainstream platforms _are_ the internet. So even if friendly publishing tools existed, and users had the knowledge to use them, they would still choose to use the centralized platforms. Partly because, unfortunately, most people don't care about their data, privacy, etc., and just want to consume content.
So I don't think any of this will change. Technical users will keep using niche tools, and the mainstream web will keep being centralized and run by advertisers.
> but they're still unusable by the average internet user
yep that asymmetry is deep-seated. but decentralized serving does not need to be extreme. I can imagine e.g. geographically local (e.g. city-level) infrastructure hosting - supported maybe by local taxes like a utility - and people using wordpress enhanced with activitypub.
Between each user doing self-publishing and all users being captive in one gigantic data-mining and humiliatingly abusive platform there are literally billions of options.
> most people don't care about their data, privacy, etc., and just want to consume content
This is something that is repeated a lot (also here on HN) and of course at some very basic level it is true. If the negative impact of current designs was obvious we would not have the nightmare we drifted into.
But it is a rather simplistic take on how things work with technology adoption, regulation of business behavior, markets etc.
E.g. people didn't not care about ozone layer depletion, they were probably completely unaware of it. That's why we have experts and regulators and institutions to advise the general population about what is safe and in their interest. In the case of the ozone layer, laws were passed. Substances were banned. Substitutes invented. The planet and our skin was saved. We moved on to the next existential risk.
The same playbook has repeated countless times. People generally assume that the system works to protect them and that is not a totally wrong assumption. If everybody moved fast and broke things modern society would quickly collapse.
Yet notice that nobody of authority ever warned users not to use these platforms. In fact the opposite. In what is unthinkable and unprecedented collusion, most public sector entities actively advertise them, by being in these platforms, providing links to them etc.
What has happened in this space is that a major social contract has been violated. Politicians, in a combination of ineptitude ("We run ads, senator") and capture have acquiesced to this drift.
This has played out for so long that people who are aware of what is happening are exhausted and defeatist. We should not give up though. This is important stuff.
That's not quite how I remember it. The early web was dominated by user authoring tools like FrontPage, Netscape Composer and Dreamweaver. Then you could publish to sites using FTP or WebDAV. Many ISPs provided a bit of web space for people as part of the default offer. And it worked - the early web was full of self hosted websites about all kinds of niche topics with relatively unique designs and which were thematically organized.
A few things broke this model.
One is that the web page design tools struggled to incorporate any kind of dynamism or collaboration. They were fine for as long as you had a website with a single author. The moment you wanted to have multiple people working on it simultaneously, or you wanted to add comments / ads / hit counters / guest books, the best you could do was stuff for programmers like PHP and version control systems.
Another is that the visual design tools weren't very good. Dreamweaver was by far the best, but expensive, and it was still amazingly annoying and hard to get a visual design that didn't look like amateur trash.
Yet another is that the web didn't have good tools for thematic design, and figuring out a good site layout was hard, refactoring even harder. Even things as obvious as a consistent navbar were hard because there wasn't good support for static site rendering and HTML doesn't have an include tag. People hacked it up with framesets for a while but that didn't work well either.
Finally, connecting your website address to your ISP meant if you wanted to switch to a better internet offer your website would disappear which was unacceptable, so in practice people wanted independent providers, and they needed to use ads to make money, which in turn meant that you hit the limits of the WYSIWYG editors that didn't really understand ads and which iterated, maybe if you were lucky, once every few years.
Into this void stepped yes, Geocities, but primarily WordPress. It supported dynamic features, it understood ads, it iterated fast, it had decent looking themes, it said "don't bother with organizing stuff, just keep a diary" and all that massively lowered the barrier to entry for web publishing. Later sites like MySpace and Facebook provided a kind of WordPress-lite and gained success from that, Twitter made it even more minimal and gained even more success, and then finally Instagram took away the obligation to even have anything to say at all and had even more success than that.
So the trend here has only partly been about tools. It's clearly not true that people only want to consume content, the entire success of social media and YouTube revolves around the massively huge desire to create and publish. It's done via centralized platforms for the same reason everything else is: they can move fast, they can raise and make money, they can hire the smartest and hardest working people to build them because there's some real chance of reward. Decentralized systems by and large can't do these things.
WYSIWYG tools came a bit later. GeoCities in '94, FrontPage in '95, Dreamweaver in '97.
They were also _much_ less popular. There were millions of GeoCities sites, while FrontPage was a niche tool, even after Microsoft bought it in '96.
Like you said, these tools weren't good enough. They produced a mess of content that was limited in features and difficult to maintain, but more importantly, they were still reserved for a technical audience. You still needed to know what a web host was, how to use FTP, etc. They were woefully insufficient, even compared to publishing services.
> Many ISPs provided a bit of web space for people as part of the default offer.
I'm not sure if "many" is correct. Certainly _some_ did, but the largest ones like AOL and CompuServe in the US didn't, AFAIK.
WordPress came much later when the web was already established. And it was also largely a technical tool.
But WYSIWYG tools shouldn't have existed either. Like publishing services, they are a response to a feature the web didn't have. People certainly have a need to produce content, but the barrier to do so was so high, that most flocked to services like GeoCities, and later social media, to fulfill this need.
If producing content was as easy as consuming it was in the early web, i.e. if we had an analogous tool to the web browser for publishing, the way the web developed and the modern web would've been much different, and arguably for the better. Nontechnical users eventually learned to use the web browser, and they would've learned the web "creator" as well.
Unfortunately that opportunity has passed, and we can't re-educate people to use a different web than the one they're already used to. At least I'm pessimistic that any of these decentralized projects will gain any mainstream traction.
> It's done via centralized platforms for the same reason everything else is: they can move fast, they can raise and make money, they can hire the smartest and hardest working people to build them because there's some real chance of reward.
None of these are advantages. Centralized platforms _require_ these things because running a centralized service at scale is incredibly complex. Most of the problems these platforms deal with is precisely because of the complexity of scale.
Yet if the web model reused the inherent decentralized model of the internet, scaling a centralized service wouldn't be a problem. Protocols like BitTorrent have solved content distribution that doesn't rely on a centralized server. Had this model been adopted from the start, none of the modern centralized platforms would have a need to exist.
> Unfortunately that opportunity has passed, and we can't re-educate people to use a different web than the one they're already used to. At least I'm pessimistic that any of these decentralized projects will gain any mainstream traction.
This doesnt ring true. The web becomes more disruptable by the day. Familiarity with various aspects of technology is diffusing in various parts of society. The hypes (crypto, AI etc) are conditioning people to accept that "stuff is happening". They wont switch for another social platform. They may not wear goggles in the billions. But they will try tangible proposals.
The real problem is that there is no assurance the "disruption" will a positive one.
No matter how bad we think about the situation somebody can find a way to make it worse.
Basically the end of an era where tech companies will finally have to make a profit. Obviously from the development of Reddit over the years they never really care about any of it until interest rate punch you in the face.
Finally, it is nice. Back to the good old days where things have to at least pass the common sense test.
I think Spez feels his power/dominance is threatened by Apollo/Christian and he is lashing out because he thinks the problem is Christian, and not his own actions. I think it's possible investors are forcing him into a situation he disagrees with, but I suspect that's charitable.
I think his lack of self reflection rivals that of Triplebyte's CEO when they forced public profiles on people.
People understand when force is being used against them rather than persuasion, and nobody likes to feel like force is being used against them. I am very happy to see collective force being leveraged towards someone in a position of power.
I think Spez hasn't explored the idea that people value their anonymity, so attaching a credit card to an "anonymous" account isn't going to be popular. If reddit showed a desire to be frugal and fired all these awful dark pattern implementing UX devs who are devoid of professional ethics, and was ok breaking even instead of making money. I would strongly consider a 3-5 dollar a month donation not associated with an account. But they would have to trust the community enough to be somewhat open with their books.
Of course the real problem here is likely a violation of fiduciary duties to their investors, although given how things are turning out, he may already be liable.
Steve Huffman (ie spez) made a deliberate choice to act without integrity, putting it mildly.
The company hoping to IPO too… Heck, I’ve been a user for a decade, I would have bought some shares. They could have made it super interesting for retail.
Absolutely not going to happen now, since we have a better sense for how the CEO handles difficult situations. I can only imagine the shitshow it must be internally with leadership like that.
> If reddit showed a desire to be frugal and fired all these awful dark pattern implementing UX devs who are devoid of professional ethics, and was ok breaking even instead of making money.
I suspect the direction to employ dark patterns comes from the top.
Semantics I guess. The way you worded it just seems like a bunch of machiavellian UX designers brought these dark patterns to management who were simply ethically negligent. All I'm saying is that I suspect the UX staff were directed to do this or at least to drive installs through "whatever means necessary".
> If reddit showed a desire to be frugal and fired all these awful dark pattern implementing UX devs who are devoid of professional ethics, and was ok breaking even instead of making money. I would strongly consider a 3-5 dollar a month donation not associated with an account.
You are a low value user to them. Why would they remove the thing that gets people looking at more ads? Most people don't pay for subscriptions if they don't have to, and the 3-5 dollars you'd pay per month is really nothing to them. People live in a tech and power user bubble not understanding that the vast majority of Reddit's 500 million user per month base simply do not give a shit about any of the drama that's happening and will continue to see ads.
The more I think about this the funnier it is. A third party app built by two guys is so much better than the official Reddit app that people are willing to pay actual money for it... and his response is to throw shade at the developrs?
Yeah, meanwhile reddit apparently has 2000 employees and can’t make a simple enough site written in react work well. It lags my $3000 computer that can run cyberpunk in ultra.
This is such an underrated point. I straight up can't use Reddit on my phone without quickly switching to the old interface. Seriously, my phone will just crash, and that's with trackers being blocked. I have no idea how they managed to make such a bloated UI, without even having anything new besides profile pictures.
Hi Seph, sorry to contact you this way, but as you have left the Braid group, is there a way to contact you? You stated at your departure that we could message you, but your DMs are closed on Discord. No worries if you don't want to be contacted, just asking as you stated to be contacted via DMs, but your DMs are closed.
Because third party apps are user agents, in the original sense of the word. The reddit app is Reddit's agent. The official reddit app exists to advance reddit's strategy. It isn't that reddit can't produce a better UI, it is that doing so isn't a part of their strategy.
> Also pretty damning they can’t make a profit where others can off their data lol
I agree that Reddit's failure to convert their enormous reach into profit is a failure, I don't agree that this particular thing is damning. I'll bet if you pooled the revenue of every third party app it still wouldn't begin to cover Reddit's overall costs.
Well, one of the 3rd party developers suggested that course of action... alas spez and/or other folks at reddit decided to frame that as being 'threatened' by them.
Which, honestly is great insight into the fragile mind of a man manchild lucky enough that their startup happens to be very visible to.the public eye.
That doesn’t really follow. A third party app could be profitable because it pays little or nothing for the Reddit API and makes money from app sales or in-app purchases. If Reddit bought the app it hardly helps them.
1. It's entirely possible they could make more money monetizing the highly engaged users that use mobile apps through ads than those apps make directly.
2. Their cost structure is higher than the apps since they need to own and manage the backend and promote the overall Reddit branding.
