I’m a bit of a broken record about this point so my apologies to those of you have already seen this, but what is so baffling about this whole situation is that Reddit aggressively attacked one of its core, major competitive advantages over other social media sites.

Facebook, Twitter, etc. have to pay tons of money to hire full-time content moderators, nearly all of which need mental health plans and burn out incredibly quickly because of the horrific things they see online. Reddit stumbled across a solution by letting moderators create and run their own communities, effectively outsourcing all of that need across tens of thousands of people who need absolutely no financial support. Edit: These people self select out for their own tolerance and establish community guidelines that attract a community that values those standards.

Additionally, because the way moderators run the show such as use of various (now defunct) 3PA’s, coupled with Reddit’s own structure, a lot of the most awful content is filtered before a real person even sees it, let alone a user. Auto mod, account age requirements, keywords that trigger mod actions, you name it. There are several tiers of filtering that happen before a post makes it onto a sub, especially on the larger ones. Other sites cannot replicate it at the size they are at, at least not easily and without a ton of investment and time.

In the same way that Twitter was never actually worth the $44 billion that Elon Musk paid

Musk paid $26bn. $5bn was from outside inverstors. The remaining $13bn is a loan that Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk’s behalf. This $13bn was essentially a death sentence (like most leveraged buyouts are - see: Toys R Us) as Twitter could barely afford to pay the interest on that loan, even before Musk ruined its income.

Musk paid $26bn to kill Twitter. Most of that $26bn was underwritten by stocks in Tesla (not SpaceX) which have since plummeted in value.

Now, after a few friendly chats between Steve Huffman and Musk, they are killing reddit, too.

I honestly didn’t believe they would go through with it. It seemed suicidal, but now I’m reading about it on their competitor’s platform still mourning the loss of bacon reader.

Reddit has real value? It’s 90% bots, shit post after shit post and shit comments all the way down. Nothing you cant find anywhere else on the web. If reddit had any value, it doesn’t anymore.

At this point, the only thing I keep my account for is to ferry people over here and poke fun at the Pissbaby formerly known as Steve Huffman. Enough of us have emigrated to here now that the salient content is pouring over. And honestly, it’s refreshing because everything is pretty much on point with very little spam.

The article does a nice job of succinctly pointing out that Reddit’s value is in its users and moderators who create and moderate its content for free.

As a retired business owner, I don’t see what Huffman and the board of directors are thinking. Completely alienating their users and moderators seems like wilful sabotage.

Ok, but why is this written in font-size=200% or so? I can’t read it better like that and the reader doesn’t work (moronic layout i guess).

Is there something like a font-size.max setting in firefox?

Great article…until it told me to sign up.

Pretty softball take for an article

It took reddit suiciding itself for us all to realize that reddit’s content has been shit for years.

All it took was a few days on lemmy to remember what reddit was like before bots and low effort memes killed the site.