Paying users or even just moderators is a dangerous idea due to the overjustification effect [1]. Once someone is paid for an activity they previously did for free, it shifts in their mind from a hobby to a job. The joy they previously got from participating in that activity is reduced and they will then reevaluate how they spend their time. I don't think Reddit really wants its moderators to think "I spent 40 hours on Reddit this month and that is worth $20." Because the next thought after that is "My time is worth more than 50 cents an hour. I should stop wasting it on Reddit."
Collary: similarly, switching from social norms to market norms would decrease the motivation of the user base to help each other out. The intrinsic motivation to do a social favour comes with its own rewards - you take that away by switching to monetary payment (even if they could pay an equivalent, fair price).
Or just find a way to cover operating costs and let Reddit be, you don't need to push it into a billion-user company, SV profiteering style. Maybe there is something I'm fundamentally missing, but Reddit is great right now and has been the last couple years. Just cover costs (Reddit Gold is effective) and leave her be.
They sold 16% of their company. Are you saying the interests of minority stakeholders--no matter how small-- outweigh the interests of all other stakeholders in the company?
> Or just find a way to cover operating costs and let Reddit be, you don't need to push it into a billion-user company, SV profiteering style.
Sure, if you can find investors willing to sink capital into a non-profit-making venture to replace those who currently are invested in Reddit, and who would probably prefer liquidating their holdings at a loss to have something to put into a profit-making venture than to let it sit in supporting a non-profit-making discussion forum.
Running costs include the wages for those working there. I think $150,000 or so per employee is more than enough + volunteers. Of course you would have to give up the dream of being a billionaire. Off the top of my head I can think of less than 10 people to have done that, and none of them did it after 2001.
You don't need additional capital beyond operational maintenance expenses if you aren't expanding, but you do need the existing capital, and that means that either (1) the existing investors need to have their standards for profitability met, or (2) someone else who is interested in operating the assets without those profit demands needs to be willing to purchase the existing capital from the current owners before they decide that their profit requirements won't be met and sell it to someone with a desire to use it for something other than its current insufficiently-profitable use.
Reddit faces the problem of competing in a marketplace dominated by businesses losing money that are being supported by VC money (well really the limited partner’s money). It is very hard to build a business in an industry where all your competitors don’t care about profit and are only interested in growth.
Yes this is why you should avoid these markets if you are a bootstrap business.
The positive is there are lots of markets out there that are too small to attract external funding, but large enough that a good $10 to $20 million dollar business can dominate them profitably - I run exactly this type of company in this type of market. All I can say is it is very nice to have no outside investors to answer to and to see a nice positive balance sheet each month :)
What are these competitors? From what I can tell, there aren't any viable "reddit clones" that it's competing with. Rather, it's the more controlled social media (Facebook/Tumblr/etc, profitable at this point), specialized forums (rarely profitable, but not very expensive to run) and anonymous imageboards (4chan/8chan, hardly profitable and no VC money either)
Reddit is competing for advertisers and hence eyeballs. In this space there are an awful lot of growth-without-profit oriented companies. Combine that with a product that is not particularly sticky (nor technically complex) and you have a very difficult problem. I would not like to be the CEO of reddit.
Maybe I'm missing something but Reddit/Imgur is essentially this generation's Usenet. Groups for anything imaginable, bigotry/flaming/trolling, lots of adult material. All that was missing from Usenet was a points system and descriptive groups directory.
Make a CMS with a points system on top of Usenet (tied to message-ID) that is sponsored by embedded ads instead of requiring a paid subscription. Block binaries with the exception of say, images - that way you're avoiding the vast majority of pirated materials. The points system would be similar to Reddit so that posts are ordered by rank but can still be sorted by date/poster. Posts/threads/users/groups can be canned from the CMS side. Posts censored? Feel free to switch to a pure Usenet service but you'll lose your points system/community.
By starting out on Usenet you already have content to begin with. Recall that Reddit started with fake user accounts with some quality content to get the ball rolling.
On further reflection...this would basically be Reddit as it is now.
I can see this ending badly for reddit, if implemented. Farhad Manjoo uses the words "worker-owned cooperative" in the article. If moderators start being compensated by reddit, even if only with shares, I can see them using that as an argument that they are "employed" by reddit. That employee designation isn't working out so well for Uber in California.
One way to reform Reddit is to not allow white suprimist terrorist groups, or any other, for this matter to exist there. It has nothing to do with free speech and it seems one sided right, when it applies to Christian's hate towards everybody, yet not tolerated, rightly, when it's "Muslim" extremist.
Adding money to the equation is just going to multiply the problems & attract a lot more people specifically looking for gaps in the system. Reddit already has people doing wild stuff for imaginary internet points...lets not go for money here...
It's a little bit ridiculous that a webpage serving millions of unique visitors every day cannot manage to turn a profit. A savvy business person would do a lot for a head start like that.
I think that the whole website is pretty bad. It's old and crummy, easily one of the worst designed popular sites on the internet. Open a new one as a subscription service, leave the old one open for free as it is right now.
I mean that wouldn't exactly be challenging and the whole site needs to be revamped anyway.
> It's a little bit ridiculous that a webpage serving millions of unique visitors every day cannot manage to turn a profit. A savvy business person would do a lot for a head start like that.
Care to elaborate on how a savvy business person would extract a profit? Unobtrusive ads obviously don't make enough money. Obnoxious ads are going to push users away / to use AdBlock. Sneaky manipulation of rankings will get out eventually, and when it does, is also likely to lose users.
> I think that the whole website is pretty bad. It's old and crummy, easily one of the worst designed popular sites on the internet.
Really? I find it quite functional.
> Open a new one as a subscription service
Yeah, a reddit paywall is going to go over real well. (And if the free version doesn't compromise basic functionality, good luck convincing anybody to pay for frills)
> Yeah, a reddit paywall is going to go over real well. (And if the free version doesn't compromise basic functionality, good luck convincing anybody to pay for frills)
Reddit is already addictive. I'm sure they could take a bit of inspiration from the variety of addictive "free to pay" games and work in microtransactions and perks.
To be fair, I don't think the parent is talking about preserving this gilded crystal egg of a community. They are talking about making Reddit profitable. Two (apparently totally) different things. You could slap banner ads and sneak stories onto Reddit's top posts list and enough users would stick around for you to not only turn a profit, but turn it into a huge return for investors. I'm all for preserving and protecting the fragile, warm community wherever it exists, but that's not what makes a profit, or people would never lament "the good ole days" of community X.
The value of Reddit is the userbase. Unless you can convince a critical mass to move over to your new Reddit it's dead, and how are you going to convince people to leave their established communities and pay money to start over somewhere new?
I made this prediction some years ago, that the Reddit userbase is change-resistant enough that any change that made it profitable would kill the whole thing. Frankly, I'm astonished it made it this long. But then again, thinking about how terrified the management must be, sitting on this huge treasure trove of active users, knowing that they could kill it with even minute changes... In a way it's not surprising Reddit has been in a kind of design stasis.
I'm just pulling ideas off the top of my head since this isn't challenging honestly. Retroactively give everyone that has ever purchased or been purchased reddit gold a one year subscription. Do the same for reddit gold purchases going forward. Immediately you have a new reddit populated by users that are valuable.
Nothing is stopping anyone from returning to their old communities. The whole thing hinges on the new website actually being good, fast, and better.
"It's old and crummy, easily one of the worst designed popular sites on the internet."
I love Reddit's design, it's very effective and to the point. You don't visit Reddit to view Reddit, you visit to read posts and comments. The design gets out of the way and lets you do that.
Well, to start, it's not a place that people wake up in the morning and visit hoping they'll be drenched in video pre-roll ads. For that, we have Wikia. ;)
EDIT: I noticed that the article kindly compares reddit to Wikipedia, which Wikia is basically the for-profit sister of, in fact originally created by hosting content that was removed from Wikipedia and putting Google Ads on it. Both Reddit and Wikia have the problem of generating revenue from the people who create the content that the revenue is generated by, many of whom are children.
Reddit actually has one of the better mobile interfaces I've used (certainly better than, say, Hacker News). I'm referring to i.reddit.com, not the new one that they're trying to push on people.
Reddit is thriving on community and gigantic network effects. If I were them, I would essentially do what their new CEO is currently doing: ask the community what they think would work (he's doing regular AMAs and I expect monetization will come up frequently). That's probably why I'm not too worried about it currently.
I think it's decent, but quite a few people I know browse imgur for Reddit content instead of browsing Reddit. They say that the UI is "too confusing".
I'm not really a redditor, in fact I don't even have an account. But whenever I do visit it's immediately apparent where to click or search to find a discussion around whatever content I'm interested in. I'm genuinely curious if there is a non-aesthetic reason I should I think the design is "bad"?
The community on reddit isn't fantastic, it is just large.
Successful subscription models have been employed in the past. A lightweight paywall intended for a large user base covers operational costs, weeds out users who are just there to spam or troll, and reduces policing. It also cuts down or legitimises multiple accounts handled by the same user.
Popular reddit accounts sell on ebay so it isn't like nobody out there has money. Go ahead and downvote me. I feel the same way about it as I do when I try to explain the failings of Bitcoin. There are people passionate out there about whatever.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect