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Reddit Falls Short of Ad Growth Targets Ahead of Likely 2024 IPO (www.theinformation.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 610 points 2 years ago (63 children)

Well shucks, all they did was drive out their most active content makers and cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free moderation labor. Who could possibly have seen this coming?

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  • [–] 224 points 2 years ago (48 children)

    Don't be fooled. Most went back.

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  • [–] 223 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    Quantity is not quality.

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  • [–] 140 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    More important is originality...

    Lots of people/bots would just take an existing post from Reddit, and repost it. Sometimes to a different sub, sometimes to the same sub.

    For most users, it was still "new" because they hadn't seen it before.

    Those accounts are still reposting. There's more than few that do it here too.

    But that OC has been drastically cut down, there's just a delay in users noticing that there's fewer and fewer "new" reposts going around.

    So reddit doesn't see a huge decrease in users immediately, but time on site and daily users will continue to decrease

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    More important is originality...

    Is it, though? I left Reddit for here, so don’t take this as being in their defense, but if originality and ad revenue were meaningfully correlated, Facebook and Instagram would be bastions of original content.

    Hell, some of the most profitable YouTubers only post reaction content.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    You’d have a point on any other platform. See, the unique thing about Reddit was that you could go there for OC. It’s basic business that you carve out a niche and you play that niche away from the competition. Reddit may not be doomed to fail but it is doomed to stagnate because it is competing closer with Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and news sites without decent ways to monetize and grow.

    Investors like to see a unique market. Why is the platform retaining users? Moderation is on a downhill slide and these huge communities hardly feel organic.

    Reddit is becoming Facebook + porn and the porn makes them no money. It’s actively unattractive to investors.

    What sucks for them is that the users themselves cause this. OC is hard to make. Harder to highlight and celebrate. Reposts and news about politics and porn are 90% of the site. They get upvotes constantly. There’s an audience for that, but it has far less growth potential.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I would love to agree with you, and OC is certainly important to us, but the majority of the most upvoted content on Reddit hasn’t been OC for quite a few years now. I would guess Reddits serves most of its ads to people doom-scrolling the front page, and it probably likes it that way.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Yes but OC is what makes platforms unique and what makes them thrive. Facebook has the content of your friends and family. Twitter has the most recent words of celebrities and politicians. Instagram is similar.

    Those platforms all have the same content as Reddit does. Reposts and news and memes aren’t unique to Reddit. So will Reddit fail and die? No. But Reddit isn’t as social. Why stay on Reddit if your friends aren’t on there to easily share content with? This is what TikTok does extremely well. It’s designed to share reposts and memes and news with friends easily even if few of them make OC. That’s the problem for Reddit. They’ve encouraged the wrong things with their platform and have not made it homogenous with the rest of the internet.

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  • [–] 161 points 2 years ago* (13 children)

    I was active nearly every day for 13 years, and I didn’t return. Granted, I don’t come here much either, but what Reddit did disgusted me too much.

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  • [–] 34 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I was transitioning out, but it just felt disgusting to even open the site so I stopped doing it. I probably have a bunch of unread messages because of that.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    As 10+ year vet, I still go back for certain things. Mostly communities that have not been recreated here yet in any meaningful sense, and there are a lot of those. There are people here, yes, but the niches, the non-general topics, are lacking a true community. That will come with time, but I still can't substitute Lemmy for reddit 100% yet, much as I might want to. Unless I only want to talk technology, news, and politics all day.

    But I will say Boost for Lemmy has taken the spot RIF once had on my mobile home screen. Lemmy is what I open reflexively now. I only go back to reddit when I need to see something specific, I'm not browsing there. Partially because it's very tedious to navigate old.reddit on mobile, but partially because I just don't want to spend too much time there anymore.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    For me it was a sub I participated in for years whose mod suddenly accused me of advocating for the abuse of children, told me I had mental health issues, and permanently banned and muted me. It was weird and I haven’t been back since.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    same here, since 2008. Pretty much every user of the site was on the same standard default subreddits. I don't like what Reddit has become but I don't blame them like a lot of people here.

    Honestly they were a corporation from the get-go, out to make money once it became popular. They built something no one else did.

    But going forward, the little reddit escapade from their corporate suite shows that freedom of speech can only thrive when there is no driving profit motive.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    They weren't a corporation from the get-go though? They were a Y-Combinator project that became successful, and were eventually bought by Conde Nast (when the "sell-out" began, btw).

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  • [–] 51 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Did they? I had one of the top non-porn accounts actually run by a person (most high karma accounts use bots, I didn't out of ironic laziness) and I haven't posted or commented since whenever Day 0 was for rif is fun. I've been back a couple times for very specific things but not logged in or participating in any active way. Of course, I'm just one (high karma) data point, but I really don't think I'm unique in this. I also have no real desire to contribute to Reddit again in the future. Getting off of it has been pretty nice.

    Look, it's not that people aren't still posting, the site obviously still has content, but it really is just "content." The quality of discussion I've seen has gone down pretty steep. Modding appears to be almost nonexistent in big subs or very agenda-driven otherwise. I think a lot of contributors who treated Reddit like old school forums have left and it's slowly turning into a weird combo of Facebook and 4chan if that makes sense. If that's what the userbase wants, go for it, I guess. But that's not my jam.

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  • [–] 30 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    A lot of search results still take me to Reddit. It is still a source of knowledge.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I'll be honest. I want to believe in the Fediverse and Lemmy, really really hard.

    It's ideals (rather, the gestalt of the best of what everyone says is the best of Federation) appeals strongly.

    But sometimes, it's instance after instance of complaining about this or that. Double points when it's all reddit complaining.

    I dunno if being a heavy content creator necessitates an air of misguided superiority but there's no more nuance here than anywhere else, and the content can't seem to form precisely because everyone decides to take their toys away and do their own thing at the smallest provocation.

    I don't use them on my phone because fuck their app, but I've found no choice but to join up with an alias and as much extensions to make their job harder as Firefox allows, just to have genuine discussions on hyper specific topics from a PC.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    As much as I hate to admit it, I’m considering it too - not instead, but also. I haven’t been back since Apollo died but Lemmy just doesn’t have the diversity of interests and niche communities yet. It feels really one dimensional sometimes.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I'm not. Pretty happy here overall.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Sometimes I want to see things besides hard left politics, Linux and furries. And a huge helping of divorced-from-reality beyond-left opinions from .ml and whatever hexbear is.

    And I know I can block all those communities, but you’re not left with a ton once you do. Those demographics are dramatically over represented on lemmy.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    If someone can tell me which direction to game specific communities i used to be part of (RimWorld, Souls games, Paradox games...) I'd be happy. Now I can only rely on discord.

    And no, don't tell me to create the community and content myself. The audience isn't even high enough for discussing all games as a whole let alone specific games. This is what "let Lemmy stay small" crowd misses. Niche community can only be started as branch of (very) large community.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago*

    For me the main issue is that my professional community is pretty active there but not here. So if I want to share some professional work and discussion, I can only go there. I will probably double post out of activism but I know it won't have much effect. For entertainment though, I'm good here.

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  • [–] 78 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    What I've noticed is it became way more toxic over there since the API changes

    I still scurry over occasionally (a lot of communities didn't move over) but not nearly as much as I used to

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  • [–] 37 points 2 years ago

    Same. It runs so badly now, and enough moderators left or cut back that it is not the same site it was at all. Some communities are still intact, but I've begun to see lemmy and even Mastodon results in searches alongside reddit. It's going to take a while to see if reddit can recover (it'll take some humility and leadership from the top which seems unlikely) or die slowly then all at once. Remember digg, etc? The internet is fickle and for every Facebook there are a hundred friendsters.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago

    The only sub I still go there for is /r/zerocarb (a low carb diet sub), and that's now mostly deleted comments and posts. With the moderation tools unavailable on mobile the mods have made automod very strict. Heaven help a person new to the diet, they'll have a hard time asking their questions

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  • [–] 42 points 2 years ago

    That was one of the reasons they killed the api: to support ad growth. Unfortunately they failed to realize the combination of ad-blocking browsers and users just quitting the site from losing client access means they were never going to hit pre-IPO revenue targets.

    Had they instead focused on affordable API pricing and driving subscriber revenues up, they would have exceeded revenue targets.

    source: I was in a somewhat similar position (not quite the same, no third party client), but chose different and found myself making more subscription revenue than ad revenue thanks to a viewer base more than happy to pay more.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Do you have any data to support that? My feeling is that not much changed after that. I feel like there is business as usual there. At least when I talk to my peers.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Subs I followed (and still rarely visit) became much harsher with moderation, to the point of being very difficult for new visitors to use; in a sub that is mostly for helping people adopt a very low carb diet

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I feel like this was definitely the case in small subs where the main content generators were also mods. The ones who didn't straight up leave became uncommitted. Places like Askreddit didn't change, but smaller communities are pretty dead.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Some communities were unaffected. Some are still shut down. Some replaced mods who wouldn't play by spez's rules.

    I'm not sure what the data would look like or how one would obtain it. Number of active moderators per day? Moderator satisfaction survey? Change in posting habits of top 1% posters?

    I am speaking purely anecdotally from communities I know that shut down entirely and moderators who left. I have no way to estimate the scale of the exodus.

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