We’ve talked several times about the Reddit Blackout already, but the situation has accelerated even faster towards anarchy since last week. Steve Huffman gave an incendiary set of interviews where he compared Reddit’s volunteer moderators to landed gentry
Increasingly I feel pretty jaded with most online platforms. The space as a whole is competitive but within each feifdom, the lord rules with an iron fist. YouTube has demonitized several videos (for no apparent reason) from a creator I love; reddit is nuking the app I use most often (why not just buy Apollo?); Twitter is jamming paid blue check comments into every popular tweet thread.
Spending time on niche subreddits is a real delight that I can't find anywhere else on the web, but reddit is a private corp with its own interests that are not at all congruent with my own. I'm more persuaded by the Jaron Lanier thesis every day--the advertising revenue model is likely at the heart of many of these problems.
Something that's occurred to me recently is that we may just be underestimating how difficult the 'pageviews -> ads -> revenue' pipeline is. Facebook and Google Search mastered it. But most newspapers and written content sites failed hard at it, and have converted to memberships. YouTube took like a decade before they figured it out, and they've had a monopoly on online video practically forever. Twitter famously can't figure it out. Reddit can't figure it out.
Maybe monetization via ads is just more difficult than we think it is.
I've always been skeptical of what we might call "generic" ads, that is, advertisements that involve less interaction than something like a (marked, open) sponsored review. Obviously there's a minimum threshold where you need to inform a potential customer base about the existence of a product, what its features are, and what problems it solves, but going beyond that into an argument that the audience presumptively should purchase the product at issue - that to me converts the interaction from a collaborative one, where I am receiving information about something that exists, into a hostile one, where someone is trying to adjust my preferences to their own benefit. All information about the product becomes suspect, and I begin to wonder if the advertiser is trying to hide some kind of flaw that a reviewer would have noted. And if nothing else, I want my support to be going towards the design and manufacture of products I like, not towards ephemeral pamphleteering.
I suspect you just need a truly enormous number of eyeballs for it to work because conversion rates are very low? Also possible we’ll see more dramatic cost cutting in an era of higher rates and less focus on growth, leading to better margins at lower user counts.
Personally I’d welcome proliferation of fee-for-service, but crucially assuming those fees are the majority of the revenue for the whole platform. I.e., that the platform is designed to please me, the customer, not maximize ad sales.
> Personally I’d welcome proliferation of fee-for-service, but crucially assuming those fees are the majority of the revenue for the whole platform. I.e., that the platform is designed to please me, the customer, not maximize ad sales.
I agree with you, but the entire reason that a site like Reddit is useful is because of the freedom of access that ad-supported allows. There's no way that even 25% of their users would pay for the site - they'd just move on to some other low-effort way to spend their bathroom time.
I feel like our experience has been that you can charge for small, niche sites, or run large, broad-reaching sites, but you can't change for large sites, because there aren't enough customers.
Sadly, you are probably right. I use reddit to search for reviews and advice all the time but I doubt it would be anywhere near as useful if it were paywalled. And I started relying on reddit because normal google searches got obliterated by SEO.
Maybe copium but I could imagine something like Netflix taking off--a smaller fee for service model that gradually grows to displace the existing hegemons.
I think in some ways the advertising model is downstream of more fundamental problems related to the way we approach business administration - specifically, the idea that corporations are permanent things with no particular shape that exist to generate profits. This is what drives enshittification, and it's a big part of why the present information landscape is so toxic.
The profit motive is valid and useful, obviously, but we have to remember that its usefulness is fundamentally contingent. It's useful exactly to the extent that it causes people to make and maintain other, more specifically useful things. We forget this, though, and allow an investor class to emerge that treats the entire economy as a game of blackjack, with their bank account as a "high score" - and this gives us news executives "creating" news, electronics manufacturers fundamentally opposed to their customers' ownership of the products they've purchased, "game" companies hiring psychologists to learn how to encourage addictive behavior in their most dedicated consumers, and on and on.
Broadly agree but I am not really sure what specific thing we would do about it here. Profit motive needs to be regulated in some way that promotes the general welfare so it always comes down to what, specifically, we are going to do to better align the incentives.
Yeah, it's hard to say. I agree with what you've said above about subscription models; I have more faith in those structures, but I think it's important that the audience be subscribed to particular sources within a network, rather than the network as a whole, which is how those incentives get divorced in the media context. Things like patreon and substack are perfect examples, and it's good to see youtube moving in that direction. Spotify's desire to move in the opposite direction is ... frustrating. There's also Nebula, which I'm curious about but haven't tried. It's creator owned, but doesn't do the scaling total subscription that you get with a patreon/substack model.
Ngl wish i was still modding a big sub for all this tea. The end of the usable internet is upon us; google is mostly “snackable” content and facebook, reddit and twitter are having such silly death gasps it might bring back BBS in a new way. Whatever, i sent my six bucks in the mail.
Increasingly I feel pretty jaded with most online platforms. The space as a whole is competitive but within each feifdom, the lord rules with an iron fist. YouTube has demonitized several videos (for no apparent reason) from a creator I love; reddit is nuking the app I use most often (why not just buy Apollo?); Twitter is jamming paid blue check comments into every popular tweet thread.
Spending time on niche subreddits is a real delight that I can't find anywhere else on the web, but reddit is a private corp with its own interests that are not at all congruent with my own. I'm more persuaded by the Jaron Lanier thesis every day--the advertising revenue model is likely at the heart of many of these problems.
Something that's occurred to me recently is that we may just be underestimating how difficult the 'pageviews -> ads -> revenue' pipeline is. Facebook and Google Search mastered it. But most newspapers and written content sites failed hard at it, and have converted to memberships. YouTube took like a decade before they figured it out, and they've had a monopoly on online video practically forever. Twitter famously can't figure it out. Reddit can't figure it out.
Maybe monetization via ads is just more difficult than we think it is.
I've always been skeptical of what we might call "generic" ads, that is, advertisements that involve less interaction than something like a (marked, open) sponsored review. Obviously there's a minimum threshold where you need to inform a potential customer base about the existence of a product, what its features are, and what problems it solves, but going beyond that into an argument that the audience presumptively should purchase the product at issue - that to me converts the interaction from a collaborative one, where I am receiving information about something that exists, into a hostile one, where someone is trying to adjust my preferences to their own benefit. All information about the product becomes suspect, and I begin to wonder if the advertiser is trying to hide some kind of flaw that a reviewer would have noted. And if nothing else, I want my support to be going towards the design and manufacture of products I like, not towards ephemeral pamphleteering.
I suspect you just need a truly enormous number of eyeballs for it to work because conversion rates are very low? Also possible we’ll see more dramatic cost cutting in an era of higher rates and less focus on growth, leading to better margins at lower user counts.
Personally I’d welcome proliferation of fee-for-service, but crucially assuming those fees are the majority of the revenue for the whole platform. I.e., that the platform is designed to please me, the customer, not maximize ad sales.
> Personally I’d welcome proliferation of fee-for-service, but crucially assuming those fees are the majority of the revenue for the whole platform. I.e., that the platform is designed to please me, the customer, not maximize ad sales.
I agree with you, but the entire reason that a site like Reddit is useful is because of the freedom of access that ad-supported allows. There's no way that even 25% of their users would pay for the site - they'd just move on to some other low-effort way to spend their bathroom time.
I feel like our experience has been that you can charge for small, niche sites, or run large, broad-reaching sites, but you can't change for large sites, because there aren't enough customers.
Sadly, you are probably right. I use reddit to search for reviews and advice all the time but I doubt it would be anywhere near as useful if it were paywalled. And I started relying on reddit because normal google searches got obliterated by SEO.
Maybe copium but I could imagine something like Netflix taking off--a smaller fee for service model that gradually grows to displace the existing hegemons.
I think in some ways the advertising model is downstream of more fundamental problems related to the way we approach business administration - specifically, the idea that corporations are permanent things with no particular shape that exist to generate profits. This is what drives enshittification, and it's a big part of why the present information landscape is so toxic.
The profit motive is valid and useful, obviously, but we have to remember that its usefulness is fundamentally contingent. It's useful exactly to the extent that it causes people to make and maintain other, more specifically useful things. We forget this, though, and allow an investor class to emerge that treats the entire economy as a game of blackjack, with their bank account as a "high score" - and this gives us news executives "creating" news, electronics manufacturers fundamentally opposed to their customers' ownership of the products they've purchased, "game" companies hiring psychologists to learn how to encourage addictive behavior in their most dedicated consumers, and on and on.
Broadly agree but I am not really sure what specific thing we would do about it here. Profit motive needs to be regulated in some way that promotes the general welfare so it always comes down to what, specifically, we are going to do to better align the incentives.
Yeah, it's hard to say. I agree with what you've said above about subscription models; I have more faith in those structures, but I think it's important that the audience be subscribed to particular sources within a network, rather than the network as a whole, which is how those incentives get divorced in the media context. Things like patreon and substack are perfect examples, and it's good to see youtube moving in that direction. Spotify's desire to move in the opposite direction is ... frustrating. There's also Nebula, which I'm curious about but haven't tried. It's creator owned, but doesn't do the scaling total subscription that you get with a patreon/substack model.
Ngl wish i was still modding a big sub for all this tea. The end of the usable internet is upon us; google is mostly “snackable” content and facebook, reddit and twitter are having such silly death gasps it might bring back BBS in a new way. Whatever, i sent my six bucks in the mail.