Anomander

(since Ambrosia is long since defunct),

That one winds up being such a wild story, too.

That Ambrosia went from The Darling Star of Mac software and gaming, into near total obscuring and quiet collapse, is just ... bizarre. The choice to pivot to "serious, adult" tool software from gaming, where they had this loyal and devoted following and could have continued collecting cheques if they'd just made an agreement with a platform ... over to a marketplace that was already saturated, no one knew them, and most of their tools were significantly more expensive than competitors with only minor polish and UI advantages to justify the price was one of the most openly self-sabotaging choices I've ever seen a company make.

That Andrew Welch just vanished afterwards is probably even more confusing. Trying to find out where he ended up or what he's doing now ... no dice. He's occasionally surfaced for retro interviews about their old games, but it doesn't seem like he's still active or visible anywhere; huge change from a guy who was loudly That Mac Snob for years and was a constant presence on early internet BBS and forums.

Matt Burch doing nearly the same thing just compounds the impression. He is doing computer engineering stuff, walked away from games work entirely after EV Nova and says he "never" intends to return to the EV series or games dev in general. It's seemed like he's super emphatic across a few interviews that it was rewarding at the time but it is absolutely under no circumstances something he'd return to, no matter what fans say or what other inspirations strike.

Have to wonder if the internal collapse of Ambrosia was so horrid that everyone in leadership burned out completely and just wants to put that entire chapter into the rearview.

Some games used the manual as DRM,

I remember hating that as a kid, because I could never remember what was in the manual, so I'd spend hours trying to solve a puzzle that had an answer key already provided - if only I had remembered that the "minotaur's ciper" was just printed in the manual. I would always just assume that I had missed something in-game and keep looking, especially because so few games explicitly told you to go check the booklet.

The game being explicit to "check the manual and do X" would honestly have been preferable, but the games I was into always seemed to have like "pirate symbol translation guide" or similar, that could easily be dismissed as fun flavour inclusions and not the answer key to in-game puzzles.

At one point in time my dad threw away the box & manual for some game we'd bought, only to have to go borrow the booklet from a friend and photocopy the necessary pages, so that we could complete the game. Nowadays, watching Mostly Walking hit those games and one of the lads needs to find a sketchy .pdf of the manual for them to progress has been such a cathartic nostalgia trip.

This is one of those cases where average inflation has decelerated, but consumers' experience of inflation remains unchanged - cost on stuff that the average consumer isn't using has gone back down, while cost on stuff we're buying remains inflated.

Though it's been kind of peculiar seeing people discussing whether a subreddit is "officially" moving to some place other than Reddit, because aside from a few subreddits where there's clear corporate backing there's nothing "official" about any of them in the first place. The only people who claim to be making some kind of "official" decision are a couple of mods, and ironically Reddit's fundamental position in this whole mess is that mods are easily replaceable.

The most official sense you get from the average community is that it is "this group of people" and if you convince enough of them to move, you've relocated 'officially' - in most settings, I don't think that the mods have that sort of relationship with the community members, that they can just announce a move and the move has happened. Instead, you need to coax people to the other site and persuade them to migrate over, and if you manage to move enough of them over then the previous community has "officially" moved - even if their old location still exists and there are still people there and maybe even a community reforming without the previous group.

Community migration I think is something that needs to be done protracted and over time, rather than in one big collective leap.

I would dispute that "easily" part, especially for good mods, but it's not like the creation of each domain-specific subreddit was some unique event that can never be replicated elsewhere.

In the fediverse, I think it really come down to which Named communities can grow the most in the near future; people go where other people are, so the easily accessible names and largest communities are going to see the easiest adoption by new users interested in that topic.

Escape Velocity was pretty much the game that instilled a love of gaming for me.

I got the game on a CD that came with Mac Magazine or something, played beginning missions for hours thinking that not being able to save was part of the shareware limitation; then realized I just needed to install it on disk. Sank many more hours into it as free, then a registration code was the first thing I ever bought online - I still have the postcard it came on, somewhere, and inexplicably still have the code memorized.

If steam existed back then, I'd be showing up on thousands of hours I think - I played as much as my parents would allow, grinding out credits and playing each storyline and then various self-imposed challenges ... from there, got into mods and modding; I'd have to carefully set up the computer to not sleep and then run downloads overnight because we were on dial-up.

Probably put similar amounts of time into the sequels, as well; Override and Nova were both fantastic games as well. When I got my first PC and swapped off Mac, I still put a crude emulator on it just so I could keep playing Nova. I played from

Across the whole series, that was my main game from grade 5 to second year of college. In all those years, I met exactly two people who had ever played.

Yup. Sure would have been!

I think that they were allocated to separate teams, mind; part of what seems to have gone quietly wrong over there is that there's too many teams that are too silo'd and aren't connecting correctly. Community team does community stuff, but they have no idea what AEO or development are doing, etc.

At least we've heard from Community a few times that they have a really hard time getting answers out of AEO when something goes wrong, and separately heard that development doesn't always give much heads-up to other teams on incoming new features - both of which seem like the worst cases for a failure in communications, which generally indicates the less critical stuff is even worse.

It's a very classic Reddit Inc thing - they know that they have a poor relationship with their mods, they know that they need to address that ... so they do something fun and quirky and showy - but then fail to make any sort of concrete follow-up on or take actions supporting the connections they've made.

Furthermore it's revealed that this powermod claims to have had a connection to reddit admins.

A lot of American mods do; there were a few years there with top admin and community teams did a 'roadshow' type thing where they'd schedule meetups and connect with mods in person. Having met admin in person isn't really that wild an indication of favour, so much as having showed up to an event somewhere.

The one thing I would temper, is that we don’t know for sure if there would have been better ways to monetize.

This is a fair point, and I do want to avoid the Armchair QB issue, where it's easy to make something The Team didn't do sound like it would have been successful, once matters are already decided and whatever was picked clearly failed.

That said, I think that over their lifespan, especially their time at peak, there must have been opportunities and options for monetizing that Reddit failed to fully exploit or embrace. I think that so many other people have made so much money off of Reddit over the years that Reddit Inc not getting their share feels like it must have involved missed opportunities.

At the very least, I don't think that the existence and community of Reddit is inherently impossible for Reddit to profit from.

I apologize in advance, this train of thought ran long and late; it's a really unique situation that touches on some stuff I think is super interesting.

Monetizing reddit required some very unconventional thinking compared to typical approaches at tech startups. Which kind of does loop back to how I closed above - I think that some of what has slowly gone wrong with Reddit over the past decade is rooted in tech startup culture itself, and that tech startup culture very highly values founders, tech people, software solutions, metric-able sales tactics ... and can massively undervalue soft/social skills and knowledge more aligned with Humanities' fields.

Starting off trying to go user-supported on somewhere between a donation basis and a soft-gamified award system is very tech startup - build a good software product users like to interact with, then ask the users to support the company, ~but make it fun~. That their next option was then to transition to ad sales using things like in-community placement to "target" is a fairly equivalent model of creativity - the users aren't donating enough, so lets serve a couple ads just to cover the gap.

Now, fully: I have biases here. I'm from a branding and communications background and my academics was 'community'. With that starting point, I don't think Reddit ever truly understood how significant and how impressive what they had built, from a community perspective, really was. Or how massive a commercial opportunity many of those communities represent if approached correctly.

As a very surface example, I think something like 90% of niche hobbies are fundamentally based around goods or services of some sort, and have companies competing to access the hobbyists as a targeted market. Reddit has hosted the dominant communities for many of those hobbies for a decade or more. Yet Reddit has never visibly attempted to leverage that.

Something I'm sure has been suggested and I strongly suspect has been rejected because it's complicated and has a long payoff scale would be selling abstract 'community membership' to companies buying ads. Not just placing the ads, but a much more comprehensive, but less strictly tangible, package of traditional ads, product placement, community management, and communications coaching. Redditors really like supporting "their own" and they tend to value even corporate entities that can engage on their level and participate in community membership; companies that can proverbially "take off the suit and shitpost" can Fellow Kids their way to financially valuable relationships with communities. Reddit being able to offer an advertiser a package similar to the level of support Victoria provided AMA celebrities during her time with the community - meets the successes that a company like Ghost Ship sees in their level of community engagement around Deep Rock Galactic.

It definitely is more complicated than just that and that model has other separate sales barriers, especially as a starting program. Equally, it cannot offer the concrete outcomes many large companies currently look for, while being a challenge to price accurately for smaller companies etc - I absolutely acknowledge that it would be hard. At the same time, I'm also wanting to note that this approach would be playing into an existing model for many companies' engagement with relevant consumer groups on Reddit already, and when done well the approach has a massively proven track record and clear payoff. Without necessarily following the exact model I'm speculating about above, but using it as an example of ways that Reddit could have been working to add value and and support to a space that already exists with proven (advertising) marketplace demand.

TLDR; at the very least, there absolutely were ways Reddit could have monetized its strengths rather than just its traffic.

It was over four hundred at his peak.

When they sent him the award and made a huge fuss over him, they were pretty open that it was largely due to him that the site had been able to keep NSFW content and not have it be a legal impossibility.

Some old Reddit users say that it was indeed possible to add people as moderators without their consent

Can confirm, that's how I got put on the modlist at /DoesAnyoneElse for a spell. Someone figured I'd be a good hand on deck, hit the "add" button, and suddenly my mod queue was filled with a lot more bullshit than it was the day prior. I had to go hunting through their modmail to figure out if I'd been added deliberately or in error.

Just ...

I tried looking for some archives of the subreddit and spez's account, however I didn't find anything that helpful. I only found two archives on archive.is from 2010 and 2011 (which I'm not gonna link here for obvious reasons), and the moderator lists didn't include spez.

That also checks out with my recollections. I was pretty involved in some of the calls to get /jailbait taken down when it first came to site community attention, so while I'm open to being wrong - I feel pretty confident that it would have been something we'd talked about at the time if he'd been there particularly long or was particularly active.

As a somewhat separate point, I think VA - head mod there, among other places - would absolutely have burned Spez on the way out if Spez had that sort of clearly voluntary connection to the sub. Reddit had encouraged him to be there, then hurled him under the bus the moment national press caught wind of the sub's existence.

I'm at fifteen - same username - and my signup predates the subreddit system, I was definitely there at the time.

That's why I'm expressing doubt - this telling isn't really adding anything I wasn't aware of, I just think you're missing a few details and filling in the gaps with a more lurid narrative than would be strictly accurate.

Reddit and Steve himself actively promoted and supported the sub AND the main moderator (violentacrez). The mod had a "Pimp" badge added to his profile specially for him. He also had a golden Reddit Snoo trophy sent to him personally.

I never saw site Admin or Steve promote /r/jailbait, and I was one of the voices yelling at them to take it down, so I feel confident that I was genuinely paying attention to the issue while it was live and present. That a huge part why I'm asking for some more concrete confirmation that they did promote /r/jailbait, if it happened. I did see them honour VA and give him the custom award - for the sake of being specific, it was actually titled "Pimp Daddy" and it was related to his running some hundreds of different porn subreddits.

The original and main mod had a couple of AMAs that were often commented in by admins like Spez and Ohanian.

Reddit Admin made a huge deal about fussing over him because he personally oversaw that some 95% of NSFW subreddits were compliant with the law and with Reddit rules. The fact that "jailbait" and similar distasteful subs were included in that sure is shitty, but leaving out the context that VA collected NSFW subs, in large part because he didn't trust who might otherwise want to run them, does leave this version as something that seems like it's sacrificing strict accuracy for the sake of feeding the current anti-Spez sentiments.