They are most likely running out of runway with investors refusing to keep lighting more money on fire. And since their burn rate is still more than their revenue, they are pulling out all the stops looking for any new revenue stream.
When you’re that desperate, no idea is a bad idea, and there’s no time to think anything through fully, so they are going to just keep rolling out half-assed new “features” in attempt generate more revenue. It’s sad, but it blows my mind that they’ve never been able to generate more than $350m/year with one of the largest sites on the internet (for comparison, Twitter maxed out with 20x more revenue or $7b/year), so I don’t think there’s any chance spez & co are going to figure it out in time.
Well it doesn’t help when you continually invest in bullshit. If spez had just focused on maintaining the site this whole time instead of throwing money at all kinds of new features and other crap no one asked for, effectively burning cash to morph reddit into a Facebook knockof, how much better off could he have been at this point?
I say this with all seriousness: This, and the API pricing fiasco (not the price change itself but the gratuitously insulting and dishonest way it was handled), and firing Victoria which still strikes me as a sad thing, and “fighting back” by removing moderators who were doing a “protest” instead of just shrugging and ignoring it all, and removing reddit coins even from the tiny fraction of people who were actually paying for them, are all totally nonsensical and self-defeating actions from a strict business perspective. Anyone who runs so much as a corner pizza shop and has to interact with the real world could see how counter to reddit’s interests they are. So, why did they do it?
I genuinely think that the motivation stems on an individual personal level from the psychology of “Well you’re disobeying me, so I’ll punish you.” The users are being disobedient on my platform? Fuck them, I’ll show them what I think of them, and unless they get in line, I’ll do it even worse. Your icon’s pixellated now. How do you like that?
I’m sure it works on a personal level, for some definition of “works.” On a corporate level though, I think the results so far pretty much speak for themselves.
Don’t forget: they also deleted all messages pre-2023 with no notice.
Spez has said that he admires Musk’s playbook with Twitter and aimed to model after it. Considering Twitter’s outlook, I would say I admired the stones on a man trying to launching the IPO like this, but if he had any real stones, he wouldn’t have pressed these viciously unpopular moves that will reduce engagement and destroy the site over time.
Technically you can use Shortcuts to set whatever icon you want but it takes some effort to set up. And I don’t think it can use transparency so it’d have to take up the whole square (or out more effort into making the background of the icon match your background). And it’ll take a second longer to load the app as it goes through Shortcuts first
Shortcuts do not behave exactly like the default app icon when it comes to animations, notification icons, and so on, and they create a redundant duplicate icon. It’s not as big of an issue now that there is an app drawer on iOS, but it’s still less than ideal.
There’s still no justification as to why an user shouldn’t be able to control how things appear on their screen - a developer doesn’t get to choose what I see or not see.
They’re thinking if they don’t make every last cent today their IPO will be a catastrophe and this will all be for nothing.
This is basically like a old wooden ship trying to outrun a hurricane by jettisoning everything on board that can be lost. Right now, they are not thinking long term in the slightest. It’s solely about stopping that valuation from dropping, and they’ll do anything at all.
All they had to do was say, “ok, third party apps can stay for premium users only” and I’d probably have Reddit premium now. Instead I deleted my ten plus year old account along with all my posts that weren’t mod announcements (so only two didn’t get deleted).
Instead I’ve fucked right on off to Kbin and Lemmy and all is well. Fuck Reddit and MOTHERFUCK Steve Huffman the stupid pig boy.
Ehh, i disagree. Apollo for example used the same strategy. It's a way to support app developers through purely cosmetic app icons, without having to resort to paywalling major features which actually bring function to the app.
You might be missing quite a few points in general but I think, I can see where you are coming from…
Yet, there is, at least for me, a big difference in:
Apollo: oh we have some fun icons, people love them, maybe they would pay a little to unlock more and have fun with them, or even better, enjoy the premium subscription and have even more useful stuff
Reddit: well, other apps were selling shit like this and people loved it and payed money for it, we want that money, let’s block what we already have and see what will happen…
Here’s what I don’t understand. Your platform is extremely popular, to the point where you’re worried you’ll hit saturation. Sure I get that.
But at what point do you decide “I SOMEHOW need more money, I’m running out of people.” instead of being like “we’re gonna make this service so good, everyone will have to go through us”
Netflix did this as well. When they hit a critical mass of subscriptions, they had really good shows. Instead of saying we’re gonna stay the best streaming platform out there, they went “NOO yOU can’T ShaRe youR PasswoRds yOu SILLY person”
It’s desperate and pathetic, and companies which fall this way will get no sympathy from me.
I would have loved attending the meeting where they decided which were the most ugly icons possible.
It’s impressive how little self-respect they must have to block their own branding behind a paywall. I don’t even get how it could be a good business strategy, I feel like it would very badly affect the perception of quality for a new adopter.
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