it’s not down because of digg, literally no investor cares about digg. It’s down because ad spending is down. Ad networks are spending steady on places like google and meta but they’re spending less on reddit.
Apparently this is because reddit sucks at the targeted ad game part and the advertisers feel they get a better return by just building a presence on the platform (eg bots that go “oh that’s cool. By the way have you tried the new Taco Bell™ PepsiCo™ Shitbowl®, now with 10% less petroleum byproducts?”).
This likely means they will become more aggressive about data collection and backend analysis of that data to get conversions up but they’ve been doing this for ages already. Reddits staff ballooned up long before the API fiasco and most of the hires were related to analytics. It only works if they can shift the culture away from nerd haven (aka people with adblockers who despise being advertised to and won’t click through) to facebook grandmas and ig normies that apparently love clicking ads.
They’re at least somewhat successful: while I and most of the people on this platform have shifted away from reddit they aren’t bleeding users like you want to believe. They’re not seeing exponential growth either, but they are seeing shifts to some of those populations. Anecdotally I have several family members in their 40s and 50s who were known for facebook drama and they are adopting tiktok and reddit nowadays. They eat up the obviously fake shit on relationshipadvice and places like that bc they’re primed from spending all day scrolling ig and youtube shorts to just digest content without any questioning of veracity and they ultimately love the outrage cycle.
All you said is probably accurate, but this one little dip was probably unrelated. It’s already back up to where it was.
Has ICE been advertising on /r/donald ?
For context, one year:
And that’s without the full vertical axis. There’s like $100 of empty space beneath what’s showing.
Not to mention it already bounced back…
The image shows a line that goes up and down, ending about the same value as it started
Who needs AI when you can answer your own prompts!
Blind people need image transcriptions.
Reddit is the perfect metaphor for America. What was once a beautiful and accessible tapestry of independent contributions, has been gated and monetized. Now it is a place for slop, misinformation, and vitriol.
That it receives support in this form speaks to the mental health of its participants.
What was once a beautiful and accessible tapestry of independent contributions
Reddit has been flooded with bots for decades. Bot engagement was a strategy the firm used to outcompetes Digg, as admins discovered any kind of engagement in comments juiced human participation.
The site’s had quality contributions in the past. I’d argue it still does, in the more neglected and low pop corners of the site. But it’s central thesis of stack-ranked engagement and search optimized meta-tagging fueled the worst kind of online participation straight back to the early days.
Reddit’s last ten years of decline has more to do with the overall decline of the Internet as a service than anything the admins have done directly. Humans have been crowded out by automated promotion tools and AI Slop everywhere. Reddit’s just a big popular spot that got hit hardest.
It was never a good site.
Those are rookie numbers. We gotta pump that stock DOWN
So it’s only up by about 400% instead of 410%.
That same post on Reddit was what encouraged me to look for alternatives. So here I am…
Well welcome aboard! Lemmy is a great substitution once you learn to cope with the fact that there is less content generally, but it is a much better community. Of course that depends on the instance you choose but you can always just silence the ones you don’t want. I came here back during the api fiasco and I’ve never looked back. I can’t even imagine using Reddit now. My wife still scrolls on it and it’s so cringe, all bots and the same tired inside jokes. I like it here much better. We still get dumb jokes but it isn’t nearly as bad as Reddit.
Welcome to Lemmy🎉
As a reminder, that any social network can be captured, if it relies on central control.
But competition is good at least.
Totally forgot about digg, did not even know it was making a comeback. It even has the old logo on it, holy nostalgia
BBS Prodigy CompuServe Slashdot Fark Kuro5hin Digg Reddit Lemmy Digg?
Say it ain’t so
Bring as many good Reddit users to Lemmy or Piefed and make it go down to zero.
good reddit users
You have a contradiction
Everyone who left before me is a pinko troll.
Everyone who left after me is a bad idiot.
diggs front page is more appealing than piefed or lemmys ever is (I prefer piefed/lemmy) But if I didn’t join these and just got banned off reddit, id be all over digg and not considering piefed or lemmy because of the perceived barrrier, might not even hear about them because of no advertising
i did make my script that cross posts from redddit yesterday so that might have something to do with it
Diggnation on revision 3 before YouTube existed
The dumb thing about these tech company evaluations is they’re always based on a degree of future growth that could never possibly happen.
Even after this big plummet it’s still got a price:earnings ratio of 145 (by comparison, most others industries have PE ratios around 15-30), which suggests there’s a lot of people who think that Reddit is going to find some magic way of growing by a factor of 10, despite its current brief spurt of profitability only being the result of them burning a ton of goodwill.
Terrible UI. I have no idea why people put up with those fake divs that take forever to load in.
Checks the P/E
106
Still absurdly overvalued. Let me know when it gets under 20
