No. 1) We got modmail in /r/movies two days ago from a new admin we'd never heard of. "Hey, guys, your CSS screws up this ad somebody bought. Can you fix it?" We said "yeah, but not immediately because it took us a few months to get the CSS working and it's tricky and why are we hearing of this now?" The response was 'yeah, we don't really test anything do you want us to help?' We said "why doesn't your CSS verification testing deal with stuff like this?" To which the response was "we fixed it." So now the CSS in /r/movies is all fucked up, the ad is all fucked up, and nobody's happy. 2) But it doesn't really matter because adblock nukes Reddit ads and Reddit users are savvy enough to run adblock. Not only that, but their holy grail - self-serve - has been a pigfuck for two years now. One need only visit /r/selfserve to see how badly it plays. We tried running a campaign for one of our web series - we're all redditors - and it was an incredibly unpleasant experience. You essentially pay to have people slag your product. 3) And since it largely refines low-effort content for easy browsing off-site, there's nothing to monetize anyway. The true content farm on Reddit? Imgur. Imgur? $40m in VC funding. 4) Which is okay, because Reddit was never supposed to be a site, it was supposed to be an architecture. Conde Nast bought it (probably for $6m) because it's the perfect hierarchical support engine. Imagine Amazon's "answers" section as a Reddit upvote/downvote engine. Imagine Western Digital's answerbase. This was the idea, anyway. Unfortunately Conde Nast discovered that Reddit requires a shit-ton of queries, is about as inefficient a page-server as you could imagine, and is incredibly sensitive to spam unless you prune it by hand. Reddit went open-source in 2008 - except for the anti-spam measures. Then they quietly went closed-source again because in order to get it to run you need to hand-tweak constantly. Without that constant tweaking you get this. 5) So what you're left with is a cumbersome architecture that needs to be tweaked by hand constantly in order to slag your advertisers without spam. But that's okay, 'cuz it's got lots of pageviews, right? Except Reddit maintains that Google analytics are the only true analytics - any of the actual paid (vetted) reports will tell you that Reddit pageviews are off by a factor of ten or more. So the CPM is already out of whack. But then you discover that a plurality of Reddit traffic is porn surfers. So basically a large portion of your traffic comes from people too stupid to hit pornhub or redtube... 6) leaving a subscription model (Reddit Gold) or an affiliate link model (Reddit Gifts). The subscription model is questionable; /r/lounge hides its traffic numbers but I sure don't subscribe (someone bought me 5 years of Reddit Gold for that Dante thing and default mods were given a year about 8 months back). The affiliate link thing was discovered by accident several years back and is basically the spammer model. So what are you left with? Angry teens doxing each other over cat pics. Know who else has a shit-ton of traffic and no money? Chris Poole. 4chan was literally a server in his mom's basement for most of its existence. Know where most of those guys went? Yeah, they didn't go there to "grow up."
Like it or not, reddit is a very good porn aggregator thanks to its community-driven subreddits which more often than not focus on a particular area. Especially for certain kinks and fetishes it's better to find content through a particular subreddit or two than to search porn sites considered safe like any linked on The Big List Of Porn (TBLOP). In every other area, the website sucks. The admins are very bad at enforcing the website's rules and will only really take action if it involves individual users or if the televised, printed and online press shames them enough into taking action. On top of that, the community is very negative and more emphasis has been turned from actual intelligent discussion to spouting out internet memes like a 'newfag' on 4chan. More power has been placed upon power trippy mods associated with radical feminism; turning subreddits such as /r/LGBT and /r/OffMyChest into shells of their former selves. Stormfront and similar racist communities also have a significant presence on reddit, as suggested by communities such as /r/GreatApes.
I agree with almost all of that except to say that: 1) When the Admins said they wouldn't ban anybody for hate speech (I had some hateful trolls that were trying to googlebomb a friend as a child molester) I'd point out that /r/stormfront was banned and had been since 2007. They never said a word. 2) those same trolls are the ones behind /r/GreatApes so the cycle of life is complete. Some of 'em show up here every now and then... they're actually quite civilized.
I was hoping this was about the general maturity level of the content and comments on the site. Nope, just talk about monetization. Objectively I understand the importance of bringing in at least enough revenue to pay for the site (although clearly there are much bigger financial goals in mind with a site like Reddit) but personally, I fucking HATE advertising in all its forms.
Definitely an interesting subject, but I felt like the article didn't really have much substance other than "Yep, monetizing sure is difficult when you're reddit." Did anyone else get that sense? It might just be because I'm already familiar with the issue.
Yeah, I got that same sense from it, but I too am very familiar with the issue so perhaps we're just not its target audience. The possibly interesting thing to me is this Reddit has a large ecosystem of third-party tools and apps built around it by users - from Reddit Enhancement Suite to a plethora of mobile apps - and has been fairly careful not to step too much on their toes. In the past companies have burned developers by breaking APIs and changing policies to suit the needs of the new first-party apps over the third-party apps which helped build their userbase.It also has plans to eventually release its own smartphone apps.
I think you're very soon going to see reddit stop giving a care about their third party developers. It'll probably try to hire the good ones (RES possible, AlienBlue guy practically had a job opening aimed at him a few months ago), and then shit on the rest. There are some signs of it already, such as altering the API to take away vote counts (I know that's not stated correctly, it's a bit above my understanding how that works, if someone wants to explain it here). Overall behavior these last few years has leaned that way. I could definitely be wrong, that's just the vibe I'm getting. If they want to push ad revenue, they'd be stupid not to build a great app and then put ads / in-app purchase to remove ads within it.
The developers of RES and AlienBlue have both had open job offers at Reddit for multiple years. Both of them continue to turn those jobs down because the benefits offered by Reddit Inc. are not compelling enough to make them want to do more than hobbyist-level stuff.
Reddit had a dedicated iOS client. They abandoned it because they didn't like dealing with the App Store.