Users aren’t the paying customer. Users are the product. Most people know this, but based on these comments, few people seem to actually understand the implication.
What it means is your user experience isn’t catered to, and you have absolutely no expectation for conditions to improve or to be good at all. Worse: your experience will be intentionally worsened if that means it generates more money. This is why the official app is shit. It’s not incompetence, or laziness. It’s all part of the business model to manipulate your engagement. It’s why we can’t have unofficial apps that circumvent all that. It’s why not all the comments are loaded by default (they don’t generate money so please go back to browsing promoted posts). It’s why you keep getting reminders to use things you didn’t ask for. Redditors are being corraled. Cattle in a factory farm.
At the same time, I think consumers overvalue the amount of competition between products and services that happens at the product value (e.g. user experience) level. The reality is that marketing and leveraging monopolistic positions are often far more cost effective solutions for capturing market share.
So no, Reddit doesn’t give a flying fuck how nice we make the fediverse, other than to see it as a threat to squeeze more money out of their users who might be tempted to a free-run lifestyle instead.
Social networks are probably where users have the most power, though. The network effect is a reason by itself to join a certain social network, and while there is a lot of inertia in the total mass, larger groups of users are more likely to flock off to wherever their needs are met best.
Reddit may still make money by “trimming the fat” of users who want this or that extra feature… but what’s mind boggling is that they pretty much had the problem already solved: allow the “power users” get their extra features through 3rd party stuff Reddit didn’t need to pay for, while Reddit could keep growing and squeezing the main mass of users who didn’t care.
Instead of just cutting off power users, they should have offered 3rd party apps a profit split for running Reddit ads, required 3rd part apps to use Reddit’s avatar-NFTs, profit split on selling Reddit gold, and generally require everyone to take some part in the money making mechanisms instead of pushing people off the platform.
At this point, even Twitter has a better leadership, at least Musk has turned Twitter into a “pay to troll” game, and lots of people are happy to take part in it.
Users aren’t the paying customer. Users are the product. Most people know this, but based on these comments, few people seem to actually understand the implication.
What it means is your user experience isn’t catered to, and you have absolutely no expectation for conditions to improve or to be good at all. Worse: your experience will be intentionally worsened if that means it generates more money. This is why the official app is shit. It’s not incompetence, or laziness. It’s all part of the business model to manipulate your engagement. It’s why we can’t have unofficial apps that circumvent all that. It’s why not all the comments are loaded by default (they don’t generate money so please go back to browsing promoted posts). It’s why you keep getting reminders to use things you didn’t ask for. Redditors are being corraled. Cattle in a factory farm.
At the same time, I think consumers overvalue the amount of competition between products and services that happens at the product value (e.g. user experience) level. The reality is that marketing and leveraging monopolistic positions are often far more cost effective solutions for capturing market share.
So no, Reddit doesn’t give a flying fuck how nice we make the fediverse, other than to see it as a threat to squeeze more money out of their users who might be tempted to a free-run lifestyle instead.
Social networks are probably where users have the most power, though. The network effect is a reason by itself to join a certain social network, and while there is a lot of inertia in the total mass, larger groups of users are more likely to flock off to wherever their needs are met best.
Reddit may still make money by “trimming the fat” of users who want this or that extra feature… but what’s mind boggling is that they pretty much had the problem already solved: allow the “power users” get their extra features through 3rd party stuff Reddit didn’t need to pay for, while Reddit could keep growing and squeezing the main mass of users who didn’t care.
Instead of just cutting off power users, they should have offered 3rd party apps a profit split for running Reddit ads, required 3rd part apps to use Reddit’s avatar-NFTs, profit split on selling Reddit gold, and generally require everyone to take some part in the money making mechanisms instead of pushing people off the platform.
At this point, even Twitter has a better leadership, at least Musk has turned Twitter into a “pay to troll” game, and lots of people are happy to take part in it.