Social network Reddit recently began blocking mobile visitors to its website while pushing them to download the official Reddit app, and it's fair to say that the move is not going down well with users. If you visit reddit.com on your iPhone today, you may see a new popup that can't be dismissed, asking you to "get the app to keep using Reddit".
They never learn.
They have learned being evil makes a lot of money
learn what? they’re more successful than they’ve ever been. Their profit is up, their users are up. What exactly do they need to learn? Yes, you and I and most people reading this comment are pissed off at them and left their platform. But 99% of people didn’t bother. This will annoy people but ultimately it won’t drive users away in any substantial numbers. They do it because they know they can and most people will do what they’re told and get the app instead. You say that as if you expect them to be shooting themselves in the foot, but people being annoyed at them does not reduce their profitability.
How many are bots?
Its like facebook. Engagement is up, audience is increased, but, its likely by a small number of people. I started noticing that in the Aussie subs, that every week, near the weekend (right before night), there were obvious lobbyist posts, which suddenly shot up (stuff like pro guns, pro- one nation etc). At this point, our local racism party was clearly doing heavy lobbying on the platform (despite losing 30 years of elections, based on reddit, you’d think they were #1).
Like facebook, a lot of people are switching off now, and trying to find alternatives.
Moderation has also gotten really bad recently. I had an account for 14+ years, never got banned. Made a new account, and within a few months, I got a temp ban for apparently being racist (despite the fact, I spent a lot of time arguing AGAINST racism).
On facebook in fact, on the heatpump posts, I actually noticed 1 or 2 names pop up on almost all the adverts saying they were an engineer, and that heatpumps don’t work, etc (with bad info). Reddit allows infinite accounts, and no doubt, it is not much better there
IKR, I left reddit a couple of years ago when they did the API thing, and even then it felt like there were a lot of bots around. I can only imagine that’s increased massively with Gen AI having become so ubiquitous. If I were an advertiser or investor, that’s a question that would worry me.
Advertisers and investors are drinking the same coolaid. It’s the customers of those advertisers that need to be questioning their ad space purchases.
The average moron decides the rest of our fate. The average moron decided to sell our privacy wholesale and ask for seconds . Let’s face it, intelligent people are just on the moron boat ride, and there is nothing we can do about it.
They are failing and they know it. You talk about money, but the rest of us talk about legacy and longevity. Reddit is dying.
Of course it’s different now. that’s why you and I left. but dying? dying means failing, and objectively they’re doing better than ever. I hate that they’ve cashed in their goodwill/“legacy” and enshittified, but I can’t argue that they haven’t been successful in doing so. I seriously doubt they care about legacy when the line is going up.
Objectively their business is doing well. Their social network is clearly dropping off like most others. Real people are posting much less across the board, Reddit is turning into a passive AI fueled entertainment platform.