I think it started like five years or so ago? They ran it as a "pilot project" in three subreddit, thinking they'd expand it eventually, but they never did. Now they're just officially killing it off.
My personal suspicion is that it's proven expensive to code it into the app, to maintain the accounts and infrastructure, and that rolling it out more widely would cost too much money. And since it was only three subreddits anyway, it's easy to kill off and say they're going to roll the "benefits" into their new rewards program. The one where you can "cash out" based on your reputation and rewards, except it's specifically designed to make it difficult to "cash out" anything. And I fully expect the available "rewards" to decrease in value over the next couple years.
It's more evidence that the platform is being run by investors that don't really know what they're doing. Reddit was a great platform, but instead of spending energy to "fix search" or "build better admin tools" they put their focus into buzzwords and ads. The NFT profile snoos, the crypto approach - is just pandering to the idea of an IPO so that they can all dump their stock and make a buck. Likely used engagement numbers from before the layout changes to pitch advertising without updating them as to how engagement has changed.
If they had any intention of running the platform long term, they would balance the experience that Redditors are used to with a sober approach to advertising. They would create meaningful community features and charge for them as a community add on (such as a community event calendar that ISN'T Facebook, community marketplaces, association management, etc.) With the audience and reach that they have, the long term profitability of the platform was almost assured. They would have adopted federation in order to aggregate even more content. They would have rolled their own AI instance into their search and community recommendations instead of freaking out about it. Instead, we got NFT avatars that literally nobody asked for, because crypto bros.
Fwiw, the site has shit the bed. There isn't nearly as many active users as people seem to think. There's… A LOT of very obvious bots. New communities that being floated now are clearly gaming the algorithm. It's very obviously different than what it was.
instead of spending energy to “fix search” or “build better admin tools” they put their focus into buzzwords and ads. The NFT profile snoos, the crypto approach
Now that you put it that way, it sounds like reddit is run by people from r/wallstreetbets.
That's the weird part. Apparently it's existed long before the API shutdown, and they only started advertising it a little bit when they killed off reddit awards, as some sort of alternative.
Not that it would've succeeded either way, but it seems like they didn't even try?
I don't ever remember hearing about this in the first place and I've been on there like every day for the past 5 years.
I think it started like five years or so ago? They ran it as a "pilot project" in three subreddit, thinking they'd expand it eventually, but they never did. Now they're just officially killing it off.
My personal suspicion is that it's proven expensive to code it into the app, to maintain the accounts and infrastructure, and that rolling it out more widely would cost too much money. And since it was only three subreddits anyway, it's easy to kill off and say they're going to roll the "benefits" into their new rewards program. The one where you can "cash out" based on your reputation and rewards, except it's specifically designed to make it difficult to "cash out" anything. And I fully expect the available "rewards" to decrease in value over the next couple years.
Fuck spez.
It's more evidence that the platform is being run by investors that don't really know what they're doing. Reddit was a great platform, but instead of spending energy to "fix search" or "build better admin tools" they put their focus into buzzwords and ads. The NFT profile snoos, the crypto approach - is just pandering to the idea of an IPO so that they can all dump their stock and make a buck. Likely used engagement numbers from before the layout changes to pitch advertising without updating them as to how engagement has changed.
If they had any intention of running the platform long term, they would balance the experience that Redditors are used to with a sober approach to advertising. They would create meaningful community features and charge for them as a community add on (such as a community event calendar that ISN'T Facebook, community marketplaces, association management, etc.) With the audience and reach that they have, the long term profitability of the platform was almost assured. They would have adopted federation in order to aggregate even more content. They would have rolled their own AI instance into their search and community recommendations instead of freaking out about it. Instead, we got NFT avatars that literally nobody asked for, because crypto bros.
Fwiw, the site has shit the bed. There isn't nearly as many active users as people seem to think. There's… A LOT of very obvious bots. New communities that being floated now are clearly gaming the algorithm. It's very obviously different than what it was.
If spez hadn't sunk so much money into his pet projects, reddit would've been profitable long ago.
Now that you put it that way, it sounds like reddit is run by people from r/wallstreetbets.
That's the weird part. Apparently it's existed long before the API shutdown, and they only started advertising it a little bit when they killed off reddit awards, as some sort of alternative.
Not that it would've succeeded either way, but it seems like they didn't even try?
I've only ever heard about it from things posed here