I am now under the operating mindset that no Web 2.0 company that depends on unpaid moderators can ever be a business. facebook works by flat out collecting every scrap of data about you it can and selling it to every advertiser and swindler with a checkbook. Then it locks in the user eyeballs and feeds them the content that will keep them fat happy and too lazy to go elsewhere. fucking nailed it, man. Thanks. That is what I was trying to put into type when I shared this last night. Ohanian does not want to run reddit anymore but, IMO he is stuck there. When he left a while back nobody cared that he existed; nobody will really pay to hear 'that guy who is no longer in charge of reddit' on the speaking tour. I made my account right about when comments on articles were enabled, but I had been lurking for a while as a lot of the Fark headlines came from Reddit. The SOPA fight was the best thing to come out of the whole experience, but the community there is no longer worth weeding through to get to the interesting bits.Reddit is not, and will never be a legitimate business. It's too much of a shithole for that.
Isn't the core problem with Reddit that the company "Reddit" is completely divorced from the thing that is Reddit?
And it's super-effective. We pay Facebook $1 a day and fully 80% of our links are from Facebook, 40% paid, 50% organic. We pay Yelp $5 per click and they've gained us three. Facebook effectively said "fuck your internet, we're doing this thing instead" and it totally worked.facebook works by flat out collecting every scrap of data about you it can and selling it to every advertiser and swindler with a checkbook. Then it locks in the user eyeballs and feeds them the content that will keep them fat happy and too lazy to go elsewhere.
I actually said this in my deleted comment to this article: But I felt like it was too ranty so I deleted it. Personally, I think reddit's death is because of shit like /r/news, or the constant abuses of moderators and the constant lack of attempts by admins to rein in their controls by some manner to reduce undue censorship. Users are leaving to sites that they don't have some all-powerful person over their heads that can remove them from the space in which all or speaking, or where a small group of squatters can kill a community of a hundred thousand. As well, many people seek a "smaller" or more personal experience with their content. This is one of such sites, voat is another.
That executive director failed because he thought he was smarter than the website, thought he knew better, thought reddit's userbase belonged to him.
The internet is full of amazing ideas that were ruined by the people running the company, trying to cash out in poor ways or user communities that are simply rotten. For about three years I only used Reddit for my internet needs. It took over from Fark, 4chan, everything. Then one day I realized that I no longer wanted to be in with the new crowd and fucked-off the internet as a whole for about a year and a half. Now, I only got on Hubski, spend about 30-40 minutes on news sites, and either read or play games and don't care about social media any more. The mods are not employees, they are users. If you start to treat them like employees, well, bad things. If you get the toxic SA Goons in charge of your subreddit, you drive away the people who made that community work. If you treat your area like a 4chan message board you attract the edgelords and push out the people who just want to talk and shoot the bull. Snapzu has the potential to be interesting but it is a circlejerk of circlejerks wrapped up in groupthink. It needs a big invasion of new blood to add content and character to the place. Voat, back when it was Whoaverse, had the potential to be a right-wing leaning Reddit clone until the FPH and coontown people/bigots/racists took over and make the place something that a guy like me does not want to be associated with. As has been said many times before I think Hubski, for now, can resist the pitfalls of the other places. This is a place that is not going to just aggregate the Imgur front page and offer comments; one of the reasons Reddit's traffic is falling is people just brows Imgur now. I wish I had the mental ability to work this all out, but I don't. I think that as long as Hubski allows the filtering it currently does and also does not implement a "downvote" system we can make this place work. And ranty is good. It helps me get the crap out of my head and helps me organize what I am saying versus what I wish to communicate.Personally, I think reddit's death is because of shit like /r/news, or the constant abuses of moderators and the constant lack of attempts by admins to rein in their controls by some manner to reduce undue censorship.