LMAO. The only time I visit Reddit any more is when it dominates the first page of search results. Spez has failed upwards for so long, he thinks he can fly.
IMO this is the best evidence yet that Spez is trying to kill the usefulness of Reddit even if it kills the platform itself in the process. Just like Musk is doing with Twitter. Free and open mass communication were in the process of turning the tide against the ruling class. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still very early in that process, but I’ve noticed a lot of things go from “you’ll be ridiculed if you question this” to “some people still try to defend it, but the ridicule is going both ways now” over the years.
He was probably offered a ticket to a higher financial level. Whether he’s stupid or just corrupt will depend on whether that offer is followed through on.
My guess is he was told if he did x, y, and z to Reddit, the IPO would allow him to sell his shares at some number that he really liked.
But I don’t think he can just undo the damage he did if they change their mind about buying it at that price when the IPO comes. I don’t know if he’d even be able to talk about that without implicating himself in crimes, so it might happen.
That’s assuming he’s corrupted by the carrot and not the stick.
I think it would be more a plan to make people come to reddit to search for that kind of information. Google is destroyed by seo listicles and non advice that is referral programs.
Reddit has lots of useful data that is from users who just provide the data with no ulterior motive. That is useful to users. Currently they might search and suck in to reddit for the result but that’s hard to monetise. So Google gets the benefit. They have crap search and people don’t go there to search and users are down.
This is probably a play to try and encourage search on reddit and raise advertising dollars. However, it will likely make reddit less visible, lowering new users and infrequent users, all the while they keep losing existing users.
They are floundering. They have some ideas that aren’t terrible on the face of it but execution is awful and hostile to users.
Same here.
Interestingly back when myself & others were moderating subs on Reddit, & we locked the subs during the protests, the majority of PMs us mods would receive were from randoms that found a link via Google or wherever & were trying to view the post. It did make me wonder how often people browse Reddit just because they stumbled into a link via Google or whatever search engine.
I can’t see how Reddit would survive without the big search engines, without those random visitors the ad revenue would plummet.
Half the traffic to reddit is because someone is looking for a recommendation or solution. Reddit’s internal search function is about as useful as it’s video player or it’s app.
Half of the unique visitors maybe, the traffic of the people on Google visit 1 post. The people with an account who browse it at work see 500
Both reddit and google will become useless if they do this.
sad and amazing how true this is.
to find anything worthwhile in Google search you often needed to add site:reddit.com
to find anything at all on Reddit you needed Google
well, glad I don’t go to those websites anymore…
People say this all the time, but I search prolifically and have literally never had to do this to get a relevant result top 4.
What are you guys doing, using full sentences with puffery like you’re talking to the Enterprise or something?
Have you never searched for a problem where you wanted to hear actual people talk about the solution? If I don’t suffix it with “Reddit” I just get SEO spam/AI generated articles which may or may not actually be useful. Usually I want to know what real people think about the issue.
to find anything at all on Reddit you needed Google
Huh? I just used reddits own search bar. Worked just fine for me.
Edit: Man some of you are bitter at the fact that not everyone had issues using Reddits own search. Lmao
oh man this is hilarious.
you’re kidding right? did they fix it right before everyone left in disgust and no one even noticed?
I’ve found that Reddit’s search generally works when searching within a specific subreddit, but otherwise it’s mostly useless.
Idk I always found the result sorting to be, I mean, obscenely bad. I would find better more accurate results searching in Google “r/whateversub” followed by whatever it was I was trying to find.
Reddit’s search was broken when I joined in 2009 and it never improved. The only thing that made Reddit searchable was Google.
Reddit somehow missed that the value of the was in the comments, not the post. Post titles are easily searchable but searching the comments using Reddit’s own search is still difficult. It mystifies me how badly the people running Reddit misunderstand the most basic things about it.
I’m pretty sure reddit’s search is basically fake, a stopgap “todo” placeholder that never got done. It always seemed like they wanted us to forget that Reddit is even supposed to be searchable, but now we know that search really is against their mission somehow. Even from the perspective of greed it never made sense to me.
if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.
There’s your problem, Reddit, you think it’s your data.
The people using Reddit for its data have the easiest time scraping it for its data since they don’t need API access to post, comment, or moderate; it’s unfortunate that Reddit management continues to degrade the experience of the average user just to make it slightly harder for that scraping to occur.
Next step: charging 1 dollar a year to maintain an account there
I found Reddit so useful that I would have paid but only for the user experience I wanted. not the stream of vomit their app wanted to show me. Im almost 40, I’ve got a pretty good job I can cover another subscription. I wouldnt have liked it, but I could have.
This is what pisses me off about tech companies. Tell me “for $20 a month you get the fully customisable app with no tracking for advertising or data mining or use the free add supported, try and sell you shit app” give me the option, I will pay to not be annoyed.
Exactly this. I wasn’t paying for using third party apps because I hated reddit as a website. I payed because it offered me the user experience I desired. Customization, ad-free, privacy-focus, etc. If they offered that with a paid solution to an official “pro/premium” app, I would have been interested in buying a yearly subscription. But no, the baseline experience on the official app is the same for everyone. Zero customization, doesn’t even support the core moderation functions that the site’s mods and maintainers need to do what they do (for free).
