I mean, I get that Reddit isn’t making money. And that during the growth phase of a dot-com, it’s okay to burn money in the name of growing the userbase, but that he has to transition to making money at some point. Investors gave him money, hundreds of millions, if I recall correctly, in the expectation that he can generate a return. He’s getting near the point where he has to do that. And the return they’re going to expect is going to be in the neighborhood of what other dot-coms can generate from their investment.
Like, the people yelling at him for being “greedy” in that he’s aiming to make Reddit generate a return at all aren’t realistic. That is something that always was going to have to happen, from the day that Reddit started. If you look at the issues that the moderators are taking up with him, they’re trying to come up with a way that Reddit makes money and their concerns are also met.
The problem is that some of the moves he’s making to try to make a return have really negative impacts, and a number of people want something that has less of a negative impact.
If the Fediverse can support similar functionality based purely on cash donations, or based on some other model (e.g. Usenet runs on software developed by the community, but generally one has to pay a commercial Usenet provider for service to cover the costs), or a “users donate resources” like BitTorrent and provide a better experience, then that’s great. But the Fediverse is also going to have to figure out how to handle the costs of hardware and software development and all that, if it wants to be a competitive alternative. There are some hard questions that may come up down the line for the Fediverse too. The long term for something the scale of Reddit cannot be Earnest paying all of the money out of his personal pocketbook to Cloudflare to handle ramping up kbin’s capacity or something like that from the main Lemmy instance operators.
Right now, I haven’t seen any ads on the Fediverse, and I haven’t yet donated money to Earnest (though he apparently does have a “buy me a coffee” tip jar and people have sent him small gifts). Which means that right now, I’m relying on the gift of resources from Earnest and some Lemmy instance operators to me. Maybe they can afford that for a small number of users. But end of the day, if many more users show up, they are going to have to find someone else to help bear the costs on an ongoing basis.
But he has so many better options. He could listen to his userbase and create a product they enjoy. Then explain his cost and ask for donations on the site (with a progres bar as wikipedia does). If you have goodwill in your userbase, you could even just ask people for money in a monthly fashion and give them some “Reddit Supporter” badge. Maybe a “Reddit Supporter” can then vote on the functionality that will be implemented in reddit.
If he’d communicate it well, he could even monetize the API fairly (let’s say 1-2x the ad revenue he would get with similar traffic) or monetize it on the user side (user has to pay e.g. $10 for yearly api key).
I can say for myself I’d be more than willing to donate to reddit if they asked for it and I had the feeling they were actually trying to listen to the userbase and improve the platform.
With his current behavior he’s just destroying any good-will of the userbase and therefore any direct monetization potential.
I’ll have to find it, but multiple places he’s talked about Reddit being used by companies to train their AI systems. It’s painfully obvious that he’s looking for both moral and immoral ways to monetize Reddit immediately. I give it 3 months before this is announced.
Spez is already talking about monetizing users account histories. Just blocking the ads isn’t going to stop them.
I mean, I get that Reddit isn’t making money. And that during the growth phase of a dot-com, it’s okay to burn money in the name of growing the userbase, but that he has to transition to making money at some point. Investors gave him money, hundreds of millions, if I recall correctly, in the expectation that he can generate a return. He’s getting near the point where he has to do that. And the return they’re going to expect is going to be in the neighborhood of what other dot-coms can generate from their investment.
Like, the people yelling at him for being “greedy” in that he’s aiming to make Reddit generate a return at all aren’t realistic. That is something that always was going to have to happen, from the day that Reddit started. If you look at the issues that the moderators are taking up with him, they’re trying to come up with a way that Reddit makes money and their concerns are also met.
The problem is that some of the moves he’s making to try to make a return have really negative impacts, and a number of people want something that has less of a negative impact.
If the Fediverse can support similar functionality based purely on cash donations, or based on some other model (e.g. Usenet runs on software developed by the community, but generally one has to pay a commercial Usenet provider for service to cover the costs), or a “users donate resources” like BitTorrent and provide a better experience, then that’s great. But the Fediverse is also going to have to figure out how to handle the costs of hardware and software development and all that, if it wants to be a competitive alternative. There are some hard questions that may come up down the line for the Fediverse too. The long term for something the scale of Reddit cannot be Earnest paying all of the money out of his personal pocketbook to Cloudflare to handle ramping up kbin’s capacity or something like that from the main Lemmy instance operators.
Right now, I haven’t seen any ads on the Fediverse, and I haven’t yet donated money to Earnest (though he apparently does have a “buy me a coffee” tip jar and people have sent him small gifts). Which means that right now, I’m relying on the gift of resources from Earnest and some Lemmy instance operators to me. Maybe they can afford that for a small number of users. But end of the day, if many more users show up, they are going to have to find someone else to help bear the costs on an ongoing basis.
But he has so many better options. He could listen to his userbase and create a product they enjoy. Then explain his cost and ask for donations on the site (with a progres bar as wikipedia does). If you have goodwill in your userbase, you could even just ask people for money in a monthly fashion and give them some “Reddit Supporter” badge. Maybe a “Reddit Supporter” can then vote on the functionality that will be implemented in reddit.
If he’d communicate it well, he could even monetize the API fairly (let’s say 1-2x the ad revenue he would get with similar traffic) or monetize it on the user side (user has to pay e.g. $10 for yearly api key).
I can say for myself I’d be more than willing to donate to reddit if they asked for it and I had the feeling they were actually trying to listen to the userbase and improve the platform.
With his current behavior he’s just destroying any good-will of the userbase and therefore any direct monetization potential.
Have a citation for that? Because that sounds like a great link for an inevitable edited response to all my comment history
I’ll have to find it, but multiple places he’s talked about Reddit being used by companies to train their AI systems. It’s painfully obvious that he’s looking for both moral and immoral ways to monetize Reddit immediately. I give it 3 months before this is announced.