• BURN@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    122
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Ad revenue is down (at least) 50% and they just keep making decisions that kick people off their platform.

    I’m pretty sure Twitter advertising and Reddit advertising are in a race to the bottom to see who’s going to have to pay companies to put ads on their site first.

    It’s insane to watch this happen. I remember watching the rise of Twitter as a kid and it becoming ubiquitous with social media, only to see it crash down this quickly.

    I’m speculating, but I’d guess a lot of functionality is being limited because they don’t have dev staff to maintain it, as well as trying to cut server costs as much as possible. I’d honestly be surprised if musk was making these decisions because he thinks it’s good for the health of the platform. There has to be some ulterior motive for it.

    • deong@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      90
      ·
      1 year ago

      It is unfathomable to me how Reddit isn’t profitable.

      Facebook makes a mint by telling advertisers, “trust us, we’ll get your ads in front of people who might buy your product based on a lot of inference around their fairly generic profile data plus some tracking cookies”. One guy should be able to sell a billion dollars worth of ads on Reddit. Just put up a form that says, “which subreddit do you want to advertise in?” and “what’s your credit card number?”. That’s it. They have like 10,000 completely segmented markets just sitting there full of hundreds of millions of people who have self-selected to be members of those communities.

      We spend hundreds of billions of dollars collectively trying to figure out which google search terms might find us a few more solid leads. Reddit has an amazing list of them for every company in the entire world. How in the everloving fuck have they managed to blindly bumble around for two decades without ever falling into the giant pile of money in front of them?

      • Lydia_K@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        17
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yes, yes fucking exactly, how is it not an automatic gold mine!? This vexes me as well.

      • ikidd@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        They have plenty of devs, but they’re all the worst in their field. How else could they take a fully developed app and turn it into the dumpster fire itbos today?

        • deejay4am@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          It’s usually not the devs who make the decisions on what to implement; that only happens in the early days of a site when the owners are also the devs.

          C-levels looking to make money are pulling the strings. The devs at any large site just have a list of user stories to burndown.

          • outdated_belated@lemmy.sdf.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Right. Never underestimate the absolute stupidity of hierarchies. (Corp bureaucracy in this case).  Stuff gets done just to make people look good based on who can tell the most convincing lie, not based, primarily at least, even on what would be good for the company as a whole.

             Devs, in most cases, are at the very bottom of this all, and therefore pretty much less responsible and have the least autonomy over what they do

      • III@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Are you saying you can’t find top-tier developers who are willing to work countless hours for no pay?.. what now?

    • deejay4am@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      It’s funny how the biggest fuckups are happening to the platforms that critiqued the billionaire class the loudest.

      Hmmm