Pretty sure they’re just gambling that this’ll give them a bump in installs/logins with their mobile app that they can use to boost their figures for IPO.
I think they are leaving some of it up so the spez stans can “come to his defence” and this constant back and forth will generate traffic which is what he would use to convince investors to invest.
I think they realize that trying to prevent the “fuck spez” content is futile, and are instead focusing on blocking stuff that tells people about lemmy and other reddit alternatives. That’s much easier to get away with.
This comment is weird to me because people used to use hashtags ironically on Reddit where they did nothing. Here they do and seeing a clickable, functioning hashtag in a comment for the first time is odd.
Maybe. But if I was thinking about buying into their ipo I might be pretty skeptical of a social media site that’s actively antagonizing their users while it can barely turn a profit when 90% of their labor force are unpaid volunteers.
Engagement can be fleeting and I’m not sure their archive content is as valuable to LLMs as they think it is.
They couldn’t make a profit when the engagement was generally happening in good faith. I doubt they’ll be able to convert this bad faith engagement into anything of value. It’s just a web app where you can change pixels, do they even have ads on there, let alone ones that won’t be blocked by all the users using ad blockers?
I mean, it is hard to tell what their goal was in even starting this. The results should have been very predictable. Maybe they were just trying anything they could think of out of desperation, or maybe the whole idea was to get a good idea of what people think of them and if there was a silent majority that didn’t care about the third party app drama but would engage sufficiently to drown out the spez hate at least a bit.
But this should have been predictable because even the very first r/place ended up dominated by automation tools, which are used by people looking for a custom experience rather than an official one.
I think the whole “any engagement = profit potential” is the mindset that got Reddit into this mess in the first place. Though maybe more on the angle of “the admins realized they needed to show evidence of that or even realize it for a successful IPO”.
That’s cool to see. Honestly, I haven’t been to r/place at all, so I have no idea what’s happening there at all. I was only there last year for Technoblade.
Wow, in the article it says you can’t access it from old reddit. So the new “place” is to pull people back in and see how engaged people are without old reddit. I haven’t been on reddit once in the last month. I’d never use reddit without old reddit.
I’m still on reddit on the computer. The app and site both suck on mobile now, but RES is still kicking and until they kill it it’s still the best way to kill down time at work
I mean if Lemmy collapses yeah… Otherwise this is the best place to kill time on my phone. I don’t want to be bombarded with ads and I like having a simple UI, I’m not willing to lose those things if I can find a viable alternative, but I prefer not needing to find one of I can.
I respect that a lot of people are here out of protest, I’m just here because it’s the preferable user experience given my tastes.
At this rate, it’s like shouting against a wall and expect it to melt down by itself – spez gets a nice sum of money in his pockets each time someone goes to reddit to whine post about him.
I’m skeptical about that because if that was the case, why would they have needed to shake things up in the first place? They just make their profit and users continue using whatever front end they want. Instead they’ve burned bridges with people who were giving them free labour and have never been profitable.
Well technically if you shouted loud enough and long enough you could emit enough energy to melt down the wall if it was made of a meltable material like steel. Someone could probably do the maths.
All this is doing is driving up engagement for reddit. If you wanna protest then just stay off reddit. This isn’t to say I don’t enjoy seeing this, cause it is hilarious, but it’s still giving them what they want, engagement.
I don’t necessarily agree, if one persons short term engagement results in five people’s long term disengagements then it’s a net gain and a good investment!
It doesn’t hurt to use these opportunities to remind people of the reasons to abandon Reddit (and of course of all the various alternatives that exist).
If you’re going to protest, do it in a way that will upset Reddit’s ability to sell ads and stock. Put goatse on there. Drop hateful racism and misogyny. Link to The Flash torrents. Post hentai.
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