Having 0 or negative karma is a barrier to posting. Some subs completely disallow posting if you don’t meet a threshold, but even outside of those subs you still run into things like having your comments held up in the spam queue until they are manually reviewed.

So having a bit of karma allows them to post their scam and/or spam links and have a chance of being visible.

Is this really the content that we want for @news ?

Yes, overwhelmingly so, it seems:

imgur

rif’s UI was near perfect for me. I called it an app version of old.reddit, which was exactly what I wanted.

(Before old.reddit I just considered it a perfect app version of Reddit.)

Neat history, I guess? Still seems to be an abhorrent label to self identity with.

I typed a long response but it seems to have disappeared.

It wouldn’t be hard for Reddit to find sympathetic mods to jump in. Any mods of big subs that didn’t participate in the blackout would likely be thrilled to grow their empires.

If necessary, Reddit could throw some interns or some contract employees at the problem. A huge part of the job moderating the giant subs is removing spam and other obvious rule violations. It doesn’t take specialized training to check a report to see if it is accurate and click ban/remove/approve.

The parts of moderating a sub that do take special skill – the parts related to growing and tending a community through thoughtful application of subreddit specific rules and norms – will not be missed in the million+ subscriber subreddits in the short-to-mid term. r/funny and r/TikTokCringe and whatever other giant subs don’t really have any quality standards to speak of anyway.

No. I mentioned that:

Forbes did mention it in their most recent article, but the majority of the drop in valuation was last year.

The “new” valuation, 41% lower than their investment, was announced in April 2023.

Note that this cut in valuation has nothing to do with the blackout. It’s actually old news. Forbes did mention it in their most recent article, but the majority of the drop in valuation was last year.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/

Fidelity, the lead investor in Reddit’s most recent funding round in 2021, has slashed the estimated worth of its equity stake in the popular social media platform by 41% since the investment.

Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund’s stake in Reddit was valued at $16.6 million as of April 28, according to the fund’s monthly disclosure released over the weekend. That’s down 41.1% cumulatively since August 2021 when the asset manager spent $28.2 million to acquire the Reddit shares, according to disclosures the firm has made in its annual and semi-annual reports. […]

The substantial markdown of Reddit’s value by Fidelity predominantly occurred by the previous year. Nevertheless, it merits pointing out that Fidelity has persistently implemented minor reductions in the worth of Reddit’s shares in the ensuing months.

My initial response was “probably everywhere, duh”. But then I remembered that Reddit tried to throw Apollo under the bus, claiming that their API usage was only high because of inefficient code.

As I recall, Apollo (Christian S.) responded by open-sourcing their backend. Maybe Reddit should do the same?

From a business perspective this probably won’t hurt Reddit much if at all in the short/mid term. Enough power users will stay, meaning that content will still get posted, meaning that regular accounts (lurkers+dispassionate users) would be happy enough, meaning traffic won’t nosedive.

Plus, there won’t be as many people pointing out bots, so reposts and stolen comments will keep engagement numbers up as well.

From the perspective of people who actually care about the Reddit community, though, things may get really ugly. The quality of content and interaction will be hurt, possibly (hopefully?🤞) irreparably.

Christian has been the public face of this and therefore has borne the brunt of it. I can’t even imagine how frustrating it would be in his shoes.

I do also wish the best for the Android app devs.

I’m a “rif” user for over a decade, so a special shout-out for talklittle. (I hear he’s developing an app for Tildes, a link aggregator.)