this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 107 points 9 months ago (28 children)

Sure feels like they timed this IPO pretty badly. I think the ideal time to strike on this would have been a few years ago... Based on market conditions anyway. Reddit itself may just not have had their ducks lined up enough, but that's their problem, not the stock market's.

  • Tech stocks trading sideways for the last year or two
  • The interest rate money printer got shut off and cash is not cheap anymore
  • Seemingly all the major new tech stock investment interest is circling around stuff like AI
  • Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media
  • The pandemic is more or less over and people have pulled back from being chronically online somewhat (this is my guess, I don't have data to back it up)

Also what exactly is the monetization strategy? Ads I guess? More catering towards creating corporate "synergy" with the Reddit community? Selling user data/content? So basically making the place suck considerably worse for users is what it looks like to me.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media

I think you're overselling the importance of this one. When I've talked to friends about federated alternatives, they really aren't interested. Even if they hated Twitter/reddit and think they've gotten worse, they just don't really care about a federated alternative. I've heard some interest in threads, so maybe we count that?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, people don’t really care about decentralisation nor federation. People want an easy experience where everyone is

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If they really understood the phrase 'too many cooks spoil the soup', then they'd realize the advantage of smaller online communities.

Reddit was at its best when it had a low count but engaged userbase, and became actively worse as it grew.

I think this is because trolling and response isn't a 1 to 1 ratio. All it takes is 1 toxic person to make an entire subforum rancid and takes the effort of several mods to mitigate it.

The more people you have, the more chance you will have these trolls organize, the more likely they will either overwhelm or infiltrate the mods.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I tend to agree. I think all communities have a critical mass and past that point they go downhill.

I was just googling for the rat overpopulation experiment because I think it works as a great example of this and it turns out this whole concept has a term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I think a better metaphor is fermentation.

It happens naturally whenever the ingredients are brought together but in order to get a quality product you need ridiculous amounts of knowledge, process, and technology.

And even a tiny bit of the wrong bacteria can ruin an entire batch, but people will still drink it and go blind.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Regular people didn't know or care wtf reddit was for quite a while also and there absolutely is a building friction between people and corporate social media. We're in the early stages for now, but stuff like Activitypub is not going away.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Even my most alternative, vegan, communist friends agree with me when I pitch the fediverse and then flock to capitalist social media like moths anyway. It's disheartening.

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