Spez seeing this
Lots of people saying this is playing right into reddit’s hands, but can someone explain this reasoning to me please? People click on a pixel and reddit profits… how exactly?
Like this isn’t going to bring back their mods or power users, they’ve burned those bridges already and the exodus of lurkers is just a matter of time at this point. I don’t see how making some pixels say “fuck spez” helps them.
It drives active users and increases activity on the site. Reddit tracks site usage metrics, and active user count + engagement are two of the most important metrics, since more active users = more eyeballs on ads, and more engagement = more ads that can be placed in front of those eyeballs.
The fact that the majority of the new active users are bot accounts that can’t be advertised to is secondary, since the people who would invest in a reddit IPO wouldn’t typically look that deep, they’d just look at the top line metrics and go “oh, there’s a big bump on activity, this is a healthy website.”
I see what you’re saying, yeah, and I don’t think you’re wrong. It’s just that this creates a strong visual of how fucked the site is, that there’s such a massive show of resentment. Like, making a bunch of negative comments is one thing, but it’s easy to miss or obscure. The place image is so unmissably clear that it has to do more damage to reddit than good.
Plus even if this short term bump helps, I don’t think the reddit situation is really salvageable long term. Like user engagement is going to go down over time as they realise how bad it is to browse communities that are poorly moderated and losing submissions. If the place stunt is enough to make a real difference to metrics then those metrics are already permanently hosed.
Oh, I agree overall. Long term, reddit is fucked with a capital F. But I think the goal right now is to put enough lipstick on the pig for the IPO, and then to immediately bail out and let the schmucks holding the bag clean up the mess. (The fact that there’s no real coming back from something like this, and even if there was any such theoretical recovery would take years and is prone to end up further sabotaging the website, is irrelevant.)
