Remember, the reason I ditched Reddit wasn’t the ads per se, it was the constant data selling, and the official app just getting worse and worse with unwanted “features” pushed on everyone. They kept getting greedier and greedier so when they disabled 3rd party apps I ditched Reddit.
I mainly lurked on the art and fanfic forums, and considered getting an account when I had the time/had created something worth sharing on there. But when I learned about the disabling of apps to improve accessibility…I started looking for alternatives.
Plus, I don’t like the idea of the karma system on there. Supposedly, it reduces the number of trolls and low effort posts, but I’ve seen it cause people to post ragebait to karma farm on subreddits that reward you with upvotes for making up outrageous stories. I’ve also seen “debate” subreddits where people downvote people who make good points, but disagree with. Then those people leave, not wanting to be punished on other subreddits that require a high amount of karma to post, leading to “debate” subreddits that are laughably one-sided.
I actively participated in Reddit before the killing of the Third Party Apps, because I really liked the content and the platform was a superb experience on a third party app.
Reddit is the most censored platform on the internet, who wants to use that? Before the API fallout, it was barely tolerable with the subreddit fiefdoms and the shitlords who ruled over them with a pudgy iron fist. To be honest I’m surprised it took so long to make an open source link aggregator since it sucked right after the ye olde digg debacle. “They’re our enemies”
I’m ok with the platform having open speech, so long as I can find communities within the platform that have basic rules of decorum. If I can’t filter out people, like the assholes I have to interact with at my workplace, to actually engage in intellectual discourse without it revolving into this racial slur or that political opinion, I’ll just find somewhere else to spend my time.
The users, and only users, need to be the shareholders. A bunch of useless venture capitalist parasites should never again be allowed to own and destroy our public spaces.
The problem is the content being uploaded to these platforms serves a real and meaningful public, community purpose. Reddit has always been a knowledge base for a plethora of different subjects, YouTube has all sorts of content that has historical importance to the internet, as well as a trove of educational content that is unparalleled in size and quality.
I take issue with that, because it’s not the company’s content, it’s just their platform. The content is vastly more important than the platform, but the companies act as if it’s theirs. They do everything based off what the community has built on their platforms, it’s their true essence and what actually attracts people.
In the specific case of YouTube, I’d say that content is irreplaceable and indispensable. While it’s true that it is a privately owned platform and we don’t have much of a say on its direction, I truly believe the content is so important that the only viable path forward to prevent its loss, is to take said platform off private hands. I don’t believe it’ll ever happen, but it is what should happen, as it’s literally impossible to back up YouTube, just like it’s currently impossible to compete with YouTube.
Let’s for a second take stock of what’s happening here.
The ad revenue is falling short of the projected prediction of what it was supposed to be. As in the profit from ad revenue did not reach that arbitrary number.
Reddit is still grossly profitable.
This is the same kind of headline that says Facebook lost 11 bagillion dollars but in reality they didn’t lose a dime they just didn’t make as much as they wanted to.
And the issue with consistent growth in billion dollar companies is that it’s not sustainable. We can’t just keep pilling on profits on top of profits to sate investors insecurities.
These morons will try though, their strategy invariably seems to be building the Jenga tower as high as possible, thinking they’ll be “quick” or “smart” enough to sell their shares before it tumbles.
To elaborate: what Reddit did this year wasn’t enough for a (major) mass migration. I very much doubt even more ads will deter those that have stuck around so far. Perhaps there’ll be a trickle, but I don’t see anything happening like what was the case for Digg back in the day.
The company I work for spends ads on social media companies for ransomware protection and regularly spend is regularly negative. That means we spend more money on advertising than we do in income. We only do it to maintain some market share but otherwise it’s just a pure loss on that platform.
Sorta both I guess. It’s mostly designed for recovery protection but on the off chance we can’t recover data, we pay out money if we can’t. I don’t think we would pay out if it’s stolen but they will were able to recover the data.
Add comment