My question is why would you want to do that? You're just going to come against the same issues and problems that Reddit has, especially if you want to achieve anything close to Reddit's scale.
You'll need staff, money, legal and tech folks (not cheap). And to get the funds, you'll prob have to make the same decisions about ads and API fees.
You could pull off something smaller, maybe by being distributed or whatnot, but you'll probably never operate at the scale of Reddit. The killer feature of Reddit is that everyone goes to Reddit because Reddit is Reddit.
Maybe my pessimistic brain can't see the opportunity. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Reddit used to have pretty low overhead. You couldn't upload/host videos directly on Reddit, you could only share links or create self-posts. They didn't have all these superfluous features that they have now like live chat, push notifications, cryptocurrency wallets, first-party mobile apps, etc. A "classical" version of Reddit would be a fraction of the development and hosting cost compared to modern Reddit, especially if you can continue to keep moderation the responsibility of individual subreddits.
Think this all the way through - why did Reddit do these things? To attract more users and to generate revenue. As the OP said, what are you going to do to solve Reddit's income problem? This isn't a technical issue, the technical piece is straightforward and well-known.
They can't really push for advertising until they eliminate 3rd party API access to the content. That or they have to start charging a usage fee.
Which is interesting. One option they do have is to charge the user for using Reddit via an API, not the apps using the API. If you want to access Reddit via a 3rd party app then you'll have to pay for it - say something on the order of $1.99 per month or $19.99 for the year. I imagine they must have explored that option, so it makes me wonder why they abandoned it.
I’m pretty convinced that given the userbase, there exists a small team of exceptional marketers, engineers, and product designers who could come up with a “classic” reddit which could operate at a profit. A combination of ads, API limiting, and a monthly premium charge for some super turbo user features.
The product itself is _done_. The code has been _written_, one can host their own open source reddit this very moment. Image/video storage has long been a problem for reddit, so perhaps users will have to get used to YouTube and Imgur again.
I think people are making too many excuses for Reddit when they act as if the product itself is unmonetizable. It’s not, they largely just hired too aggressively and made some design decisions which have been broadly poorly received.
They’ve effectively owned the space since 2008. I think in another world with different leadership Reddit could be in a much healthier position than it is right now.
The replacement of external links with inferior in-house versions (the reddit video player is particularly egregious) makes sense if you're trying to maximize profit-per-user.
I think there's an alternate timeline where reddit just kept on being a low profit-per-user site, and didn't do the 'monetization-degradation-decline' cycle we've seen so often with other sites over the years. There's no reason why you have to make all the money at once, especially if it's a tried and true method of trashing your platform, just so whoever absorbs all your fleeing users can repeat your mistakes in a few years time.
"Think this all the way through - why did Reddit do these things? To attract more users and to generate revenue."
I'd love to see the numbers of how these features actually amplified the experience. My gut tells me not much at all. Tech companies have huge misses all the time trying to make more money and often at the cost of the long-term success of the product.
This is absolutely possible but your numbers are off by a factor of 10, which means it'll be prohibitively expensive for many folks. I worked in advertising once upon a time; do you know the demographic that advertisers are most interested in reaching? It's not women 35-60. It's not men 18-15. It's not college educated minorities in Alabama. It's not any of these. The folks advertisers are dying to reach -- the reason they spend all that sweet, sweet ad money in the first place is to reach people who have the discretionary income to throw away $5/mo on a free website. People who spend money on the internet -- for a site that is free no less -- are going to be a gold-mine. The average ad revenue per user of this demographic is easily 10x higher than the overall per-user ad revenue site-wide; and if you take away these users advertisers will pull back spending and you'll actually get a bigger loss. You need to charge way more in subscription fees to make up for this ad spend loss.
Because the suits want more money, while we just want a functional reddit alternative. I know this is difficult for you MBA types but not everything exists to maximize profits.
That version of reddit was created in 2005. The world has changed a lot since, and users are expecting certain features. If you don't have them, you are going to struggle to grow nowadays. For instance, the majority of users are on mobile now, so you need to offer them a proper UX.
It isn't that simple, for example I don't use old.reddit as a URL, but I use RES or another program to force it into the old configuration regardless of the URL.
One big issue with Reddit is that it is mismanaged. With the revenue they are generating ($456 million USD), it should be more than enough to run a site like Reddit.
Over the last few years they've invested heavily in things that are very unrelated to the core features of the site, such as NFTs and other odd things that are barely visible, while firing people (Victoria & the death of r/IAMA, and snackexchange) that brought a lot of traffic to the site.
If a Reddit competitor were to surface that treated the company not as a facebook competitor // unicorn but rather than a company that is willing to reach a certain size and then stay there, none of this would be problems.
But isn't making awful business decisions part of the human condition? They happen so often that I think they're not exceptions but the norm for almost all large companies.
Its almost impossible to name any company that has not created at least a handful of major flops. And there are plenty of companies that continue to bungle and make multi-million dollar mistakes almost constantly.
What boggles my mind is that there are so many companies that continue to thrive while blowing millions of dollars on stupid decisions. Must be the power of having cash-cow products (and maybe some monopolistic traits too).
> One big issue with Reddit is that it is mismanaged. With the revenue they are generating ($456 million USD), it should be more than enough to run a site like Reddit.
So who gets fired? How many people are you willing to make unemployed? What services get removed? What improvements stop? Realistically, the reason they don't make a profit is they're aiming for growth and they're getting the growth.
Everybody involved with the NFTs, with this API decision, with everything about New Reddit, the dumb crypto currencies, do we need to go on? It's a long list.
Firing people who manage the ethics and technical specs of your site is different from shutting down a superfluous NFT division. That is a gold rush for stupid people.
I think the answer in cases like that is there needs to be a public Reddit. We all benefit from it and we all want its operation to not be warped by profit-seeking… so we all should just pitch in a dollar a year (?) of our taxes.
Moderation would become a nightmare since a private business's right to remove certain content wouldn't apply and now what do you do when a mod or /r/buyitforlife takes down a post that doesn't support the type of coffee maker that like, or whatever a shady reddit mod does these days.
I also would rather not post or log into any government run social media, that's seems like a big no from me.
I really don't know what a fix would be but I would be interested to see how a government ran social media would look, even if I wouldn't use it.
"The government should do it" is (almost?) never the answer.
If people are willing to pitch in a buck a year, just charge them for it. Either you can find enough people to support it voluntarily or you can't. If you can, you don't need government, and if you can't, it's not enough of a benefit to force people to pay for it.
So you want a Reddit that gives intelligence agencies and law enforcement full access, is censored by the FCC or some similar three letter agency, and is infested with propaganda and psyops? Where you'll be required to present your real name and ID to have an account and you can be arrested by the mods?
If you want a "free" Reddit look at federated and distributed solutions. But "public" means "controlled by a government." No thank you. I prefer a Reddit where even a sitting President can be banned for breaking the rules.
Reddit makes a lot of decisions that tax-payer funded entity would never be able to do. It’s one of the unfortunate circumstances where publicly owned social aggregator would be severely lacking.
I’m not even talking about Reddit’s one of the most annoying current problems - AI bots disguised as real people. Make it publicly owned, people will have more skin in the game to make it worse. Sorry for the bot rant, but anything other than hyper-local subreddits are completely useless for getting any opinions at this point. The same points repeated every day to advance one or the other point of view, making it a hell hole. I feel bad for people who take in those opinions at face value thinking these are all real people.
You could make the argument that some web sites are part of the "public good" and could get funding from government. Think of NEA grants of PBS/NPR funding (small amount of their budget but not chump-change).
Of course, it would be a pretty hard sell, and how the country would choose which web sites to fund would be a shit-show, but still, its an interesting idea.
Maybe the scale is the problem. What if instead you built the infra and then snatched away the users of one of the less popular subreddits, then federated the code? You'd have the same problems as Mastodon and stuff, but that would allow the concept to scale (you just wouldn't become a millionaire). Leave giant subs like /r/funny and /r/pics alone and nibble around the edges?
I have the same thinking you do. I think it's extremely unlikely anyone would invest seriously in a Reddit competitor for one simple reason - Reddit users will try and flee at any attempt to make a profit. The fact everyone knows this means a competitor is unlike and fleeing is unlikely since there would be nowhere to flee to.
You'll need staff, money, legal and tech folks (not cheap). And to get the funds, you'll prob have to make the same decisions about ads and API fees.
You could pull off something smaller, maybe by being distributed or whatnot, but you'll probably never operate at the scale of Reddit. The killer feature of Reddit is that everyone goes to Reddit because Reddit is Reddit.
Maybe my pessimistic brain can't see the opportunity. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.