Excerpt:
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
Agreed on the reasons why FB stayed relatively strong despite its reputation going down the drain. What kept many people from leaving FB for good is actually network effects: that one’s friends and family, coworkers and colleagues, are more likely to be in FB than not in it. Huffman’s site? Not so much. I don’t care if someone I know IRL is in it, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want them to know I used it.
The platform formerly known as Twitter is a more apt comparison, to be honest, but it’s still way too early to tell if it has actually weathered the storm, or has become so rotten on the inside that it’d spectacularly fail in the near future.
Perhaps Twitter is a third can of worms, it’s neither about content (as Reddit) nor the users’ social circles (as FB), more like a few anchor people keeping the others there. Due to that Musk’s idea (to pay creators to stay there) might actually help.
I still think that it’ll fail due to other decisions Musk took, but less spectacularly than Reddit. Musk is at least trying to think by himself, Spez is simply following others.
I think Steve Huffman is only after the possible profits he’d make on the IPO. He doesn’t care if his reputation would be sullied amongst the proles like us, nor does he care if he’s being original and ground-breaking. He just cares about the money.
Will it work though? I want to bet on the possibility that his IPO will fail due to all the bad news about his site as of recent, but given that the world in general has been disappointing recently, I’ll just keep my money to myself, lol!
He is after the IPO money but Dunning-Kruger is the hell of a drug, Spez is simply not a good CEO and he doesn’t know how to maximise pre-IPO numbers. So odds are that he thought “who’s in the same situation as me? Ah, The Iron Man¹! He’s a cool guy, has lots of money and a platform like mine. I assume that he knows what he is doing², so I’ll ape what he did!”. Musk killed 3PAs and got rid of the people criticising his platform, so did Spez.
And killing 3PAs pre-IPO does actually have some merit. They created value³ for Reddit, but detracted from the immediate profit; but if you’re selling the company you don’t care about the value, you care about the immediate profit to show your potential buyers “see? This company is profitable, gib lotsa moni”. However odds are that things happened faster than Spez predicted, odds are that he assumed that the protests would last a bit and die, not that people would say “enough of this shit”. And now odds are that he lost that “magical” window of opportunity to maximise Reddit’s price to the potential new buyers.
- I cringed writing this.
- Spoilers: Musk does not know what he’s doing.
- By “value” here I mean the potential of a company to generate profit over time.