Anomander

Just the same way the funding bar works. As long as no one is lying, confused, lazy, mistaken or busy it's bulletproof.

Ah. Of course. People will declare the undeclared money they receive.

I recall from past discussions on the site about its finances that theres a few major obstacles they hit;

Huge staffing costs. Not even necessarily bloat - though there is reportedly some of that - but just that they require a shitton of staff with expensive credentials to maintain and develop the site and its' backend. As the site grows, issues with code or algorithm or features require more and more resources to scale sustainably, so development snowballs similarly. It's expensive to maintain a stable of coders or developers capable of working in that scale. And not just code - their community or sales teams are also needing a lot of bodies and competitive compensation, especially up the food chain.

Hosting costs. As more and more of reddit's content is hosted in-house, their cost to deliver content has skyrocketed. There's very good business arguments to be made for keeping that content internally hosted, but those are all long-term payoff, while the costs of hosting are all much more immediate. In a prior conversation a former employee said that reddit's hosting costs have effectively kept pace with its growth in revenue.

Poor monetization, lack of vision, poor understanding of their own community.

Reddit launched without a monetization model, the plans was to build a VC darling and sell it so that monetization was someone else's problem. Now that the platform is trying to get cash positive, they've effectively failed to come up with a Plan A and gone for Plan B: ads. It's a particularly weak option, but a 'safe' fallback option used by shitty blogs and newsreels around the world. Reddit isn't offering particularly great value, it's not offering particularly great targeting, it's not even able to offer prominent placement or assured attention. Reddit is in a very poor position to sell ads when compared to Google or Facebook.

Reddit has struggled to make ads relevant, and has struggled to discover alternative revenue streams. The most major alternate revenue option has been awards / gold, but Reddit's commitment to that space has been half-assed at best, and resented or used toxically by the community at its worst. To the users or the outside world, we've never seen any attempts to make their niche more relevant to outsiders, or to make money from site users. Instead, they've waffled somewhat noncommittally in both spaces, while not excelling in either, or in walking a balance. I think it's safe to say from the Third Party Apps that there was huge willingness from Reddit's userbase to pay money in order to engage with the site in specific ways, and willingness to spend money on the community as a part of the community. Reddit never meaningfully figured out how to tap into the enthusiasm their own site inspired in its userbase.

Which I think is in large part because Reddit never really understood their own community. Reddit started with this wild anti-commercial, anti-adweb, mentality and attracted the technologically literate and internet-savvy demographic as it's core userbase, which went on to inform sitewide culture up to today. They launched a platform with anti-ad sentiment, attracted ad-opposed userbase demographics ... and then went ad-supported. This could have been something that reddit pitched successfully to the site at the time - they could have acknowledged that folks don't like ads and made a point of framing advertisers as entities choosing to support reddit and keep it free & functional - Reddit likes supporting "it's own". They could have facilitated and supported connections between advertisers and targeted communities in ways that bypass Reddit's hostility towards ads and appeals to advertisers. Instead they just started serving ads. Likewise with awards, premium, and similar: they could have done far more to play into the gamification and the willingness to support the platform - they just failed to. And today ... site Admin, Reddit Inc, have burned all of the community goodwill that could have made those programs successful by instead forcing corporate-feeling monetization and advertising upon the community.

More than wasting money directly, they've wasted opportunities and advantages. I think one huge long-term learning from Reddit's current struggle is the importance of soft skills and social acumen in managing a tech platform whose masthead product is its "communities" - they desperately needed people on staff who understood community and who understood their userbase's values and culture.

It didn't host child porn, but when it was shut down part of the statements Reddit gave was that they had found users of the sub were using the comments sections of /jailbait to meet like-minded people, and then were using Reddit DMs to arrange exchanges off-platform - that likely did involve CP.

It was well-known and indisputable that child porn was posted to that community not infrequently, but was being removed by mods when detected. That's why Admin liked ViolentAcrez - he ran the community specifically to prevent it from being worse. The other allegation from that era was that the community routinely featured submissions of scantily-clothed minors who had also appeared in nude image sets, as unremoved content, and the comments sections would reflect that.

I think it's completely reasonable to frame that community as "dedicated to actual CP" for all that they weren't hosting it directly. The same way that /r/Piracy is dedicated to pirating digital content, but doesn't host links to piracy because that would be against TOS. The only reason Jailbait didn't host CP directly was the fact that as you note, the FBI would have shut that shit down in a heartbeat - if not for the illegality, that's absolutely what their main content would have been.

So much of what that community was up to had been openly known and discussed by the wider reddit community for years prior to the media attention that eventually pushed Reddit to shut them down.

Do we know he did nothing for years, though? Like, I'm not checking /jailbait is still up on Internet Archive to see how long he was on their mod roster, I don't want to end up on that list, but I've never seen anything that indicates he remained on their list for any particular amount of time.

Didn't do shit about the community as an Admin, for sure. That took way too long from all of Reddit. But that's also separate from the recent narrative that he stayed as a mod for rather a while or was a willing and active mod there.

Maybe a light/dark bar showing declared and undeclared funding.

How is that supposed to work, though?

Like, say I'm wildly corrupt and taking money to push stories about Smurfs. Big Gargamel sends me $1K a month to use my influence to seed stories that talk negatively about the Smurfs. I don't say shit. Big Gargamel doesn't say shit. How would the "undeclared funding" bar know?

Seems like no word yet regarding cause, but a gas leak seems to be the suspicion at the moment.

Absolutely - that so much of Reddit's niche and success was being a place where people already were. Folks who made memes or wrote articles went to the place where the audience for that content was pre-built and was focused in a predictable way. Folks who had questions or contributions to make went to the largest community they could find, tied to the content they were focused on.

Absolute reader numbers or absolute activity are only indirect metrics, what the community needs is a large-enough dedicated core to keep a sense of culture and continuity alive, a steady flow of new content or topics, and enough incoming members to replace natural attrition. I find that the last two tend to be strongly linked - for a niche-topic community, one of the best sources of content and activity is beginner questions. Experts often don't have a ton to talk about day-to-day, unless some big news or development has happened, in which case the topic is explored until exhausted and then dropped. But have a steady flow of newbies there to ask the experts questions, and that will prompt not just responses for the newbies, but conversations among the experts on the side.

I don't think there "must" be an age cutoff where people are supposed to stop playing - instead, there's an age cutoff for where people didn't grow up with or have access to computers or gaming.

I was born right on the cusp of video games moving from niche nerd shit and becoming relatively mainstream. I can see that there's a clear gap between friends who game and friends who don't that nearly directly ties to whether or not they played games as a kid. A lot of the time for my generation, that's a socioeconomic division more than anything else. Computers were expensive as a kid, so most of my friends who grew up poor found other interests in childhood and grew up to be adults who don't really play games. The kids I grew up around whose families were more well-off have continued gaming as adults. Maybe less, maybe different games; but in many ways it's like asking what age someone is supposed to outgrow "having hobbies".

The older someone is today the less likely it is they had access to games and gaming, and often the more intimidating they find learning about computers and gaming - and the more time they've had to find some other hobby that they find compelling.

There definitely is a thing in the dating market where some people can be particularly judgmental about gaming. Personally, I've found that is loudest and largest for some of the more ... "serial" daters I know, who have found themselves in relationships with lots of different people and have found that gaming, or identifying as a "gamer" tends to correlate with other bigger issues. There's also the side concern when something that's big in your life isn't something they can relate to - a little like the ultra-fan Sports Dudes where all of every game day will always be booked off for watching the games with the boys.

I think in regards to the dating market, it's less that anyone needs to "grow out of" gaming, and more that adults are more expected to have a mature relationship with their hobbies, gaming included. And given that there are negative connotations about degenerate adult gamers not really grown up, that may be something to keep in mind regarding how you present that hobby and how you talk about your relationship with it.

Yeah, the entire niche industry community I was on twitter for absolutely ate it during the early days of Elon and the majority have moved on - mainly to social media spaces like Insta or TikTok.

We got some of them on Reddit, even - though that sure was a brief and shallow victory, all told.

No one roots for the destruction of Reddit more than Redditors.

AFIK, or at least as Reddit has said in the past, the 1K limit should roll backwards as you delete recent content from it. It's a display limit to prevent data usage through scraping, not a hard limit on the database.

I can certainly attest that Reddit is not restoring 100% of those edit-for-purge cases, there's been a couple users run those in communities I mod and those edits have remained in effect a few days later.