Comment by henfredemars@infosec.pub on BotDefense is leaving Reddit

Title says it all. If you think Reddit’s been trending down lately, just wait.

What Reddit fails to understand with their decades of industry experience and 2k employees is that without their users, they don’t have a product. Moderators work for free. Creators work for free. These people didn’t do it for Reddit. They did it for you and me.

And then like three developers in their spare time ate their lunch.

And yet, with all that supposed experience they still fail to maintain a decent platform.

There’s a reason nobody uses their official app.

It’s worse than that, when this all started I had a look at their Wikipedia entry. They have 2000 employees across 5 locations. What in the ever loving Christ are they all doing if that app is the best they can do?

Most of them are either admins (read: global moderators to enforce site wide policy) and “community builders” that spam subreddits with reposts and junk to boost activity. Some of that spam was malicious bots of course, but a lot was also from reddit themselves. That’s why the site appears as active as it is with so many content creators leaving.

Their development team is probably very small.

Jesus it sounds like they took a look at /r/subredditsimulator and thought, “hey let’s make the whole site like that”.

I mean what do you think they were doing for all those years? I still remember when r/subredditsimulator would frequently pop up on the front page because of some of the ridiculous and funny things the AI language models would post. But eventually over time as they learned to mimic typical user posts, it got to a point where it was a clone of every other sub on the site and everyone sort of forgot about it. So I honestly would not doubt for a second that they’ve spread them out to numerous subs and are using them as content creators to try and keep subs appearing active.

This sounds really dumb, but the “activity” is primarily what draws new users and keeps existing ones. The primary complaint/desire of new Lemmy users is more/sustained activity on the platform. That’s also what keeps people using Twitter and other SM platforms.

For a company approaching an IPO, increasing amd sustaining activity from real users is maybe the second most important thing to do, second only to showing a clear route to monetization. It doesnt surprise me their team may be mostly admin and “community builders”, but it does surprise me that they’d risk loosing major contributors and moderators without a clear replacement.

Most people use their official app

Most people probably just interact with it through the browser via google searches.

Nah, nearly 90% of mobile users interact with Reddit via the official app (most people use Reddit on mobile devices).

Damn, it’s so strange knowing that it’s so bad and yet people use it. Goes to show just how important the content is even with such terrible UX.

most people don’t even bother trying it, from the few that I’ve seen that do converted real quick.

Where did you get either of those statistics?

These numbers have been thrown around since the beginning of the protest. I don’t believe Reddit actually publishes that data (someone can come and correct me if wrong).

I think what happened is someone did the math on downloads for all the 3PA (or maybe just just major ones) and compared it to active users.

Fact is, no one knows just how many users used 3PA vs the official app except for reddit. Me thinks because the data doesn’t look good for them, otherwise why not back up all that boasting with numbers.

Insightful question. After all, 34.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

I too am curious. It would also be insightful to see where the real OC comes from, I would think most casual users browsing and occasionally commenting would be on the official app. Where the users who contribute popular, useful content are likely on a 3rd party app and/or pc

There was a post on r/dataisbeautiful that pulled the estimated values from the app stores. The author noted the massive grains of salt we should take with those figures, and that they couldn’t get reliable data from desktop browser use.

I’m not bothering to get the link for two reasons. 1) the aforementioned reasons to be skeptical anyways, and 2) fuck giving reddit some ad revenue.

I meant any browser including phones.

Your point stands, but just wanted to point out that the lemmy devs have been working full time on this for the last 3 years, funded by https://nlnet.nl/

I had no idea about that foundation - it seems like they’ve done a lot of great work. Thanks for sharing!

I think they do understand this, to a point. That’s why they keep threatening their mods instead of outright removing them.

Except they have outright removed a bunch. All but two of the r/TIHI mods were purged, as an example.

Their reopening efforts aren’t looking so hot…

r/tihi as of [Sat Jul 8 19:30:18 ~EDT 2023~] looks like its back to pre protest affairs

It looks like it’s back, but are they really? One of the posts from the last 12 hours is “Thanks, I hate the new Sonic” with a still from the movie before they reworked it. I smell a repost bot in action to make it look like there’s more traffic…

He was a Co creator.

I think you accidentally responded to the wrong comment. I assume you meant to respond to the comment below asking whether spez was with Reddit since the beginning.

And they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for spez being an open raging asshole.

Did spez create reddit or did they just hire him?

He’s one of the founders of Reddit. The other two being Aaron Swartz and Alexis Ohanian.

Are Swartz and Ohanian still around? Are they all trying to cash in?

I can understand wanting to get retirement money out of your long-term project, but we’re not obliged to stick around and assist in the degradation of a once-great platform.

Swartz unfortunately died in 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz?wprov=sfti1

Whoa, I didnt know that guy was involved with reddit. He’s the anti-spez.

He’s one of 3 founders iirc

However, they do understand that the APIcalypse will make their financial figures look great, and that’s what actually matters in the coming IPO. They also understand that these actions will hurt the site and that the fallout will come at a notable delay. However, by the time it’s clear the site has only a few months to live, the previous owners have already taken the money and left. At that point, it’s a problem for the new owners. Let them figure out how to fix a sinking ship.

they do understand that the APIcalypse will make their financial figures look great

That would require people to actually pay that API pricing. The apps closing down and AI people scraping the web site instead won’t help them.

Ahh, but it’s a bit more subtle than that.

The API pricing was a tool to kill the apps, because Reddit is not able to milk ad money from those users. Now that most of the 3rd party apps are dead and most subs are open, users have no choice but to be exposed to adds. That’s where the real money is.

Yeah, but Reddit makes pennies per user from showing them ads, so they’re still losing money.

Rather than laughing all the way to the bank, it’s more of a forced chuckle on the way to the dole office.

They do have a choice though. They can just not use Reddit at all, and/or come here.

Also, AI only really needs to scrape a post once. I don’t think there will be much financial gain from openai or someone else scraping reddit

They don’t even need to scrape it. There is a torrent out there with all the data for the last 10 years or so neatly packaged.

Sums up all communities. Doesn’t matter how much money you have, the “social” part always wins.

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