this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
586 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37800 readers
415 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'd be surprised if Reddit hasn't recovered and grown past its size at the point of the exodus. Only about 60,000 came here. 60k isn't even a big sub.
I read somewhere that they were 2% smaller in July. We are no threat to Reddit.
still, enough people have moved over here for Lemmy to finally replace Reddit for my use case (:
Reddit wasn't much bigger than this when I first used it. This feels a lot like Reddit in those days. It was a nicer place than today's Reddit.
once again, people turned out to be the root of the problem
The real answer was replacing human-human interaction with human-dolphin interaction.
Didn't a lot of people who create content leave, though? 10k OPs is more important than 10k lurkers for Reddit.
I think it's mostly wishful thinking unfortunately
Meh, whatever. Even if the fediverse were to never get any bigger, it's still a win. This place is big enough to be stable and generate it's own content and culture. All that matters is if you're enjoying it here and actively trying to make it a better place.
Maybe for you but I miss interacting with actual developers, personalities or other content creators that post and respond on reddit or twitter. Mastodon and lemmy/kbin only get second hand crossposts (if even that), without any of the actual interaction and back-and-forth that usually happens. I'm still hoping it takes off eventually but if the "big exodus" didn't do it I don't see it changing at all for the foreseeable future.
If the content creators left Reddit, they certainly didn't come here.
I don't mean content creators necessarily, but people who post content.
Or at least beans.
Lurkers still give ad hits, probably even more than OPs
Yes, but not without content.
Just as a note, losing 2% (and there’s a lot of different and more meaningful KPIs) is a really big deal if you’re supposed to be growing double digits. The ridiculous valuations built into tech companies is based on massive growth, not current numbers. If you’re expected to grow at 30% and instead you lose 2%, that’s a massive loss. Reddit, last I checked (before the rexit) had come down something like 66% in the estimated IPO valuation. That’s why they freaked out and basically banned third party apps in favor of controlling advertising and subscriptions. They said they want to emulate what Twitter is doing.
If they do go through with their going public, the short side is going to kill them. I think the appeal of Reddit is different than Facebook and that they’re going to do a slow run of Digg and MySpace.
this fits the narrative nicely but im certain a 2 percent trade for increased profits is not a loss for them
What I’m saying is that their pre-IPO valuation dropped by 2/3 before the additional user drop post-Spez closing everything down because he literally said he’s trying to do what Elon is doing to Twitter.
To be even more clear, what Elon is doing to Twitter has cratered them from the $44B that he paid for it (which was at the time probably overvaluing them by about 10-15%) to what was in April (as I recall) a $15B company as per the write down from their major bank investor. It is now widely considered a $4B company post the X transition and I think they’re still somehow bleeding valuation. Even that might be generous, since it has come out that Dorsey only kept his $1B stake in the company under the agreement that they’d buy his shares from him at the original $54.20 offer, so you can count that as yet more debt - this time for a quarter of the worth of the company. The Saudis also agreed not to sell and hold another $1.5B iirc, so if they have a similar deal Twitter is a $4B company with an additional outstanding and not on the books debt of $2.5-3B.
Spez did what he did because they crashed from a massively overvalued IPO estimate - what the bank that will be writing their IPO expects the company is worth - to about a third of what they thought. That’s why Reddit freaked out - Spez was watching his (hypothetical) money being set on fire. He really thought he was going to be the next Silicon Valley multimillionaire based on that site. His attempt at Eloning has not, based on anything I’ve read, increased the value of the site.
I think most of the cratering is because, as we all know, the money went away. That’s the same cause of the 500k layoffs in the tech field or whatever we’re up to. Literally everyone but Apple has cut tens of thousands of people because the covid boom and the free money went away. He’s still chasing the dragon and lashing out in a panic.
Spez thought he was going to be the next Elon. He’s going to be the next Tom MySpace if he’s lucky at all, and even that is more than he deserves.
On social media sites, the users are the ones who create the value. The company provides the structure to expose that through developing the software and the algorithms, and obviously paying to host everything. But unlike, say, a newspaper, everything that makes the site worth visiting at all is the community.
The moderation is the product. That’s it, 100%. When they get confused about that - that is, when they lose sight of the fact that 100% of their real value is being created for free, and their job is to just get it to people - their community starts to fall apart. A fall in KPIs, pre-IPO, is deadly. I would be shocked if they go through with it at this point, because they’re going to get killed. spez needs to show ballooning numbers to justify anyone institutional investors staying involved.
They should sell themselves to anyone willing to write a check at this point.
Not all leavers join Lemmy, I'm pretty sure some just stopped and found other things to do with their life.
Still plenty of people who can’t live without reddit unfortunately. We’re just in the initial crowd here. I really think FOSS at this point is the only way to a fair and open future on the Internet Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. are great bastions for that.
On the other hand, the exodus catapulted Lemmy from being an obscure project to a well rounded one. Lemmy doesn't seem to have as many problems these days as it had initially. Meanwhile, we are spoilt for choices on clients after many of the defunct reddit clients were repurposed for Lemmy.
I think my only concern with Lemmy is that federation is not guaranteed two-way. Some changes have broken federation in the past for certain instances where they can see everything but their comments or posts are not federated out. I would hope, at least in the future, this part of Lemmy would be difficult to break with an update.
Honestly don’t know. Whenever I check back in on the few communities that I care about that didn’t find a new home on the fediverse (at least that I’ve seen) the rest of Reddit seems less engaged than before.
I mean, I visit but don't engage. I'll browse but don't really do anything on reddit since they made it so cumbersome and difficult to do anything there. Couple that with draconian mods/admins and you're better off going elsewhere.
yet
Please don't let this be another Reddit, i didn't switch because i only wanted to get rid of the platform itself.