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Reddit: Return Of The Junk Stock IPO
(www.forbes.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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What could have been done to increase the valuation higher and maintain goodwill with the community:
It baffles me they didn't take the obvious approach of offering apps/API access for Premium users, only turning it into a billable thing for LLMs. They're not going to pay for the API, they will scrape the site. Your users will! That's a great source of revenue that can last as long as reddit does.
But no, they wanted that LLM money.
They're just looking to cash out and run. They don't care about anything to do with the actual service anymore.
The refusal to seriously explore cross API marketing is absolutely nuts to me. That's reddit's billion dollar innovation and it was right there. Everything was in place, and it would have legitimately set reddit apart from every other shitty social media marketing paradigm, and would have been an actual game changing innovation.
All they needed was to put some actual engineering effort into it. Which I guess explains why they didn't even fucking try.
Just imagine having a website that makes no money, and you get paid so much to run it that if you got a 90% pay cut and quit after a year you’d still be set for life.
Capitalism.
Basically entities flush with wealth do not make their decisions out of a sense of economic survival.
Capitalism is all about brutal survival for the lower classes and for the upstarts without any background.
At the same time capitalism is all about a decision making process that is leisurely, capricious, and forgiving for the aristocratic upper classes.
If the company is sufficiently large (don't know if reddit qualifies, but my past employers have, so speaking from experience here), their own upper management is robbing the company on the inside every day when they make deals with contractors by taking kickbacks as opposed to what benefits the company. Make no mistake, all the upper management that is sufficiently aristocratic are looking out for their personal interests instead of the company's. In other words the same mentality of personal gain at all costs that supposedly drives the creation of some of the companies is also their undoing. "Greed is good" capitalism eats itself. Large ultra consolidated/merged corps are every bit as bureaucratic and internally Machiavellian as any government can hope to be. Their very existence is a tax we all pay and we don't get a vote about how these corporate fiefdoms run both themselves and us.
Reddit at this point is a very important and well backed propaganda tool, the backers can afford to pay their CEO and there is no hurry to make profits, and they have plenty of time and resources for every manner of business mistake.
Mods could be paid on a bounty system with salary or clocked hourly higher-tier mods to oversee moderation to prevent scamming. The higher tier mods would be paid more based on traffic with that ad profit sharing model.
Or maintain a flat general rate across the board for all mods ... make it a liveable wage so that it is worth it to everyone.
This way, moderating can't be monetized or gamed to drive nonsense content just to drive up the income of a small group of people. If you award moderation with even more money .... then the whole system eventually becomes generating whatever content, bots and artificial popularity just to make money ... rather than in just maintaining an equal well paid workforce that all work to maintain the service as it is and let the users develop the content based on actual interests and popularity.
But what do I know .... the world is just set up to make money and no amount of common sense will ever be implemented if the whole system is perpetually set up to just award those that can make as much money as possible no matter what.
The bounty mods that are incentivized to act are kept in-check by the salary mods who have a base pay determined by number of bounty mods(which is determined by user metrics) with volume bonuses. The salary mods primary responsibility is oversight and only have incentive to increase traffic, which can be kept in-check by bot limits per active users so the mods can't botfarm base pay or bonuses via traffic metrics.
Bounty mods would be established community members supplementing income, salary mods would be would be established members of the community who had a solid track record as a bounty mod.
Just having low-level mods paid a living wage creates waste or overwork as they either get paid to do almost nothing or have to have multiple subs they maintain, which means less focus. If they have a certain number of subs that they have to maintain, they may not have the interest or knowledge of their subs to effectively mod them.
Higher-tier mods would have the same issues but at a higher pay scale, workload, and cost. Not having a higher-tier mod would mean no oversight for the actions of mods except outside of the sub community with people who don't have an active involvement and understanding of that sub community.
That leaves the actual company to act as oversight and investigate suspicious activity within a sub's numbers which indicates some malfeasance. If the numbers aren't genuine, then that harms the profitability of the company because they are paying more for a salary mod and bounty mod than they rightfully deserve.
What you don't know is how a sustainable and effective business or people work. You can't expect everybody to be honest and hard working withithout adequate compensation driving that and you need limits to keep bad actors in-check or flagged for removal. You can't pay people to do less than the value their labor creates and you cant pay people more than the value they creates, that is inviable due to turnover and unsustainability respectively. An unsustainable business leaves the company to derrive sustainable income via alternative revenue outside of their core business like selling user data and rampant ads, which is harmful to the users(See: Reddit).
Within a few years almost all of reddit's mods would be from China or other 3rd world country.
Revert to the source code of about 10 years ago and get rid of most programmers. The only positive change in the last 10 years is the ability of users to ban people from harassing you.
Allow all subs to identify other subs they are similar too, and link all that information together so that users who don't like how sub is moderated can find an official list of alternative subs.
Allow only temporary bans, not permanent bans from mods. Admins can still give permanent bans for bad faith or dishonest actors and should do so for foreign governments trying to influence other countries.
Allow subs to optionally require flair identifying citizenships and if you are found to be dishonest you can get site ban.
Get rid of certain pieces of automod functionality that subtract value for the users of the site.