tl;dr: They locked the original icon behind Reddit Premium.

    • eric
      link
      fedilink
      English
      41
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Yes.

      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.

      • deweydecibel
        link
        fedilink
        English
        13
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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?

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          41 year ago

          I don’t think a whole lot better off. I don’t think Reddit has a user base that is easily monetized.

    • mo_ztt ✅
      link
      fedilink
      English
      311 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        211 year ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          01 year ago

          I think the messages thing was more a limitation of the old platform. I looked into it once to see if I could replicate Reddit chats outside of the app/website and it all went through a 3rd party who didn’t expose any api, had terrible latency and throughput issues and constantly broke.

          The new system will be just as bad, just now Reddit will control it.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            31 year ago

            There is no set of raw data that cannot be laundered into a new system.

            They removed the messages because they wanted to.

      • pips
        link
        fedilink
        English
        11 year ago

        This tracks from what I’ve heard from folks in the industry.