Reddit (soon to be) Dead

[Blumf]

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/reddit-files-to-list-ipo-on-nyse-under-the-ticker-rddt.html

Social media company Reddit filed its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday after a yearslong run-up. The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "RDDT."

Its market debut, expected in March, will be the first major tech initial public offering of the year. It's the first social media IPO since Pinterest

went public in 2019.

Reddit said it had $804 million in annual sales for 2023, up 20% from the $666.7 million it brought in the previous year, according to the filing. The social networking company's core business is reliant on online advertising sales stemming from its website and mobile app.

It was already shite, with it's crappy site redesign, but now it'll go full on enshittified as it strives to 'maximise shareholder value'.

[touchingcloth]

They have a fiduciary responsibility to enshittify. It's fine.

It feels like they might not actually go full enshittified, cos the first stage is usually to lock users in - for Facebook, that was by making the social networking side genuinely appealing to people at first, for Uber or Amazon it was dumping billions in to undercut people on price to get people used to using them and to drive the competition out of the market - and then to start degrading the service so that they can funnel money elsewhere while the users have no choice but to stay due to network effects, collective action problems, and lack of alternatives.

Does that all apply to Reddit? None of the communities on there feel particularly strong when I've visited, and there are easy alternatives for them to migrate to or to fill in the same blanks. I often add "...Reddit" to google searches so that I can find actual humans talking about things, but niche communities are just as often on Discord or forums these days, and technical support is just as often on Stack Overflow or wherever.

[Kankurette]

Fucking Tumblr's getting enshittified these days. There was a huge row recently about a trans woman who'd made some comment about hoping Matt Mullenweg, the CEO, died in some ridiculously cartoonish scenario involving hammers and explosions, and Mullenweg wasn't happy about it. Plus there's crap like Tumblr Live and recommended posts. People are coming to Tumblr to get away from Twitter, the last thing a lot of us want is for it to turn into Twitter II.

[touchingcloth]

I've never understood Tumblr. Isn't it just gifs?

[Kankurette]

It is but a lot of people post fanart there as well. And porn, although there was a crackdown on porn. I sometimes use it as a blogging site.

[Shaxberd]

Saw this coming after Reddit killed off third party apps last year. Admittedly most sites don't tolerate third party apps anyway but it wouldn't have been an issue if Reddit's official one wasn't terrible. Speculation then was that this was part of preparing to sell off. Will be mildly interested to see if the new owners are ok with the weird hard right conspiracy subreddits and all the porn, those are usually the first things to go in these situations.

[steveh]

Mullenweg sounds like a nice guy: https://twitter.com/WebDevLaw/status/1760925358910505395. (Thread won't show if you're not logged in.)

Meanwhile Reddit's former big competitor Digg is these days reduced to summarising Reddit threads.

[Famous Mortimer]

I've only started using it the last year or so, but it's sort of fun for low-level chat about your home town, or your favourite team, or whatever. Short of charging for some of the bigger subreddits, I can't imagine how they'd make it much more shitty than it is now? There's already enough ads on there.

[Thursday]

Deddit more like.

[touchingcloth]

Meanwhile Reddit's former big competitor Digg is these days reduced to summarising Reddit threads.

I don't think he coined it, but Cory Doctorow (who did coin the enshittification concept linked above) often talks about the modern internet comprising "four big sites, each mostly consisting of screenshots from the other three".

[Memorex MP3]

Tumblr to me is the source of a lot of the shittest aspects of the last ten years of internet. Absolutely everything made solely for likes and shares with curators of shares getting the credit where in the past it would have either been totally organic or gone directly to some weird little website.


Reddit's unintentionally became a pretty important public service in terms of how you can access answers from actual people that are relatively bullshit free. There's virtually no way they won't find ways to let that be skewed like fuck to the highest bidder

[Blumf]

People still use tumblr!?

[touchingcloth]

When search engines have taken me to Tumblr in the past, it's always felt like reading the landing page of Imgur on an infinite scroll.

Yet I listen to a lot of podcasts in the Jamie Loftus extended universe and she's always talked about how she was a Tumblr kid and I'm like...what?

[Sebastian Cobb]

Tumblr to me is the source of a lot of the shittest aspects of the last ten years of internet. Absolutely everything made solely for likes and shares with curators of shares getting the credit where in the past it would have either been totally organic or gone directly to some weird little website.


Reddit's unintentionally became a pretty important public service in terms of how you can access answers from actual people that are relatively bullshit free. There's virtually no way they won't find ways to let that be skewed like fuck to the highest bidder

They'll already pull threads if it contains negative stuff about a big advertiser. This vid's pretty long and not worth watching but the tl:dw is a Samsung repair guy slashed a guys tv to save themselves the hassle of replacing the dodgy panel and when the owner made a thread on it with the video it got removed by reddit.

[touchingcloth]

Look at that cunt with his Britney mike and shoulder-level desk.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Yeah he's a bit of a knob really. Ultimately right about what he's on about but has the air of a grim pua edgelord who unironically appears to use phrases like 'gargle my balls'.

[touchingcloth]

I posted that thing about his massive desk before I got to the bit about him talking about how he's a tiny man who women hate.

I'd feel bad, but he'd called a SATA cable a "little bitch" about twenty times by then.

Cory Doctobro.

[Theoretical Dentist]

Saw this coming after Reddit killed off third party apps last year. Admittedly most sites don't tolerate third party apps anyway but it wouldn't have been an issue if Reddit's official one wasn't terrible.

I haven't really followed what ended up happening with the API changes that were meant to kill third-party apps, but the mobile app I sometimes use, Infinity, still works. For a while when the API changes were announced it had warnings that it was going to stop working, and there were plans to add a paid subscription model so it could use an API that Reddit charges for, but it kept working past the supposed cut-off date and eventually all the warnings and stuff about subscriptions were removed. I only use it for browsing without a Reddit account, but the features that would require an account are still there so I assume they still work. I use the version from F-Droid, which seems to have been removed but that must have been quite recent – I've had updates fairly recently. Not sure if that removal is anything to do with the Reddit API changes. It's still on Google Play – I don't know if that version is any different.

Some other things that were supposedly going to stop working with the API changes, like the bots on /r/subsimulatorgpt2, are still working too. I haven't looked into what happened but I've always assumed the API change proposals were dropped or indefinitely postponed. Of course something similar might come back at any point, and the IPO may make it more likely.

[TheAssassin]

Mullenweg sounds like a nice guy: https://twitter.com/WebDevLaw/status/1760925358910505395. (Thread won't show if you're not logged in.)

Meanwhile Reddit's former big competitor Digg is these days reduced to summarising Reddit threads.

Haven't been on Digg for years, so I went on and this was the headline page, Vice article published in The Guardian

[Sonny_Jim]

I've only started using it the last year or so, but it's sort of fun for low-level chat about your home town, or your favourite team, or whatever.

This is the correct way to use Reddit, stay out of the bigger subs and find whatever niche you are into.

Also it does have some fantastic posts, like the classic 'Someone keeps on leaving post its in my house'

https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34l7vo/ma_postit_notes_left_in_apartment/?share_id=OJSi4eDUyM8fP5h7OTRjc

[gabrielconroy]

Reddit can still be pretty great but it is becoming more and more overrun by bots, astroturfing, nation state disinfo and propaganda waves and reposts of the same shite over and over again.

The smaller specialist subs are decent and stuff like r/soccer for goal highlight clips 30 seconds after they're scored.

[jonbob]

Surely the obvious thing for reddit is to expand the astroturfing they already have in place. Are sure that's a genuine discussion or just a couple of Ai bots telling you what the best product is?

[Sonny_Jim]

Astroturfing on Reddit is pretty rife and has been so even before the IPO:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/

Back in the day it was fairly obvious as with Reddit you can very easily check a posters comment history, you'd find 'high value' accounts that hadn't posted in 4 years, then all of a sudden they'll be like 'hey this Starbucks wrote a funny name on my cup!'.  Very obvious if you know what to look for.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/6ql2tu/made_my_delivery_drivers_night_by_showing_him_vr/

So the delivery driver has enough time to come in and play VR?  And coincidentally every single brand other than McDonalds is not visible in the picture, even the wine bottle has the label facing away?

Also related was the moderator of /r/IAMA being fired:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/03/reddit-ama-victoria-taylor-subforums-shut-down-protest-sacking

TL;DR was IAMA is a popular sub where people like Bill Gates, Barack Obama would answer questions from Reddit users.  It was great, really interesting but then the marketing droids started creeping in and moderating the comments, to make sure things like this wouldn't happen:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bqy5zf/i_am_james_corden_alongside_ben_winston_and_five/

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/p9a1v/im_woody_harrelson_ama/

They booted out the moderator and made sure that anyone advertising with them would get the softest of soft soap interviews.  So my point is the enshittification has been going on for years, maybe even decades at this point.

[Mobius]

Good I hate reddit mods

[Video Game Fan 2000]

now apply that logic to why everything political online ends up as democrats v republicans, which reddit has been a hub of for years. the front page of imgur is 50% obviously astroturf political memes at all times

reddit is pure astroturf arse. i wish someone would look at tumblr circa 2012/2013 because i remember being weird, like that post about it being classist to criticise mcdonalds because mcdonalds have wifi and the thing that kept going around about how whoppers were the perfect nutrition and hating processed food was bigotted for some reason

[Noodle Lizard]

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/p9a1v/im_woody_harrelson_ama/

I had no idea about this one. Pissing myself, cheers!

[Johnboy]

lads what's discord

[Sebastian Cobb]

now apply that logic to why everything political online ends up as democrats v republicans, which reddit has been a hub of for years. the front page of imgur is 50% obviously astroturf political memes at all times

reddit is pure astroturf arse. i wish someone would look at tumblr circa 2012/2013 because i remember being weird, like that post about it being classist to criticise mcdonalds because mcdonalds have wifi and the thing that kept going around about how whoppers were the perfect nutrition and hating processed food was bigotted for some reason

Tangential but I reckon the best bullshit social media discourse is 'cooking food from other cultures is cultural appropriation'.

[touchingcloth]

Tangential but I reckon the best bullshit social media discourse is 'cooking food from other cultures is cultural appropriation'.

Something about how peace (at home) in the West means we've had to find enemies within and are increasingly microtargeting perceived wrongdoers.

This thesis doesn't really hold together as it's essentially the Judean People's Front, so maybe the Left just love a bit of infighting.

[Kankurette]

Tried Discord, hated it. As for Reddit, I'm glad it has a block feature because some of the ones I'm on do get brigaded.

Tangential but I reckon the best bullshit social media discourse is 'cooking food from other cultures is cultural appropriation'.

Ah yes, and you end up with shit like people laughing about blood pudding because it's ~white people food~, only for a load of Koreans to explain what soondae is. Or 'white people don't use spices' when Spain and Hungary exist, not to mention the whole spice trade and Anglo-Indian cuisine. 'White people' does not just = 'white Americans'. 'Learning Spanish is cultural appropriation' is similar bullshit, because Spanish itself is a coloniser's language. The UK isn't the only coloniser in the world.

Not to mention the amount of Americans who think England is to Scotland as Belgium was to the Congo and Scotland is a colony of England, and that hating the British means hating the English, and that Scottish people weren't involved in colonialism or slavery (so it's totally fine to call the England football team 'colonisers', even though the likes of Saka, Calvert-Lewin and Sterling have roots in countries that were colonised by the British). AyeForScotland has loads of these following him. I mean, they barely teach Scottish history here in England, let alone in the US, so I get not knowing loads about it but fucking Braveheart is not a historical document and nobody in Scotland is arsed about clans and clan chieftains apart from maybe those far right Gaeltacht loons. Apparently there is a clan with my name and they have a tartan, but I only know because I googled it - my dad's family are cigs about it.

Sorry, it just annoys the fuck out of me. So much wrongheadedness on Tumblr and people who have no idea what they're on about.

Reddit can still be pretty great but it is becoming more and more overrun by bots, astroturfing, nation state disinfo and propaganda waves and reposts of the same shite over and over again.

The smaller specialist subs are decent and stuff like r/soccer for goal highlight clips 30 seconds after they're scored.

My favourite is One Orange Braincell. Endless pictures of adorable dopey ginger cades. I hate r/soccer though, too many obnoxious Americans. I'd go on the Wednesday Reddit but I worry I won't fit in due to being too 'woke'.