crowsby

It doesn’t need to have a use case. Use cases are for users and our priorities don’t really rank near the top anymore. It’s mostly cargo cult follow-the-leader product management at this point, so it needs to have the latest buzzwords tagged on like blockchain or machine learning or something-as-a-service so investors will get hyped for it and maybe generate some buzz in the tech industry.

This is what I believe too. With interest rates rising, companies have been under a great deal of pressure to show profitability, and especially with Reddit aiming for an IPO, it seemed (superficially at least) a great idea to badger their userbase into adopting their mobile app, where they could be monetized to a much larger extent.

So of course they made the conditions of using their new API incredibly onerous.

The whole point was to discourage developers from using it. And then by cherrypicking a handful of select 3rd-party developers to offer more amenable terms to on the downlow, they can show that they were just being reasonable good guys, and doing their best to work with everyone, and that it must be the developers at fault if they decided to walk away and abandon their users.

So yeah, they’ve managed to get their app center stage, and the only minor tradeoffs have been:

• Launching/boosting a fleet of competitors (lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/tildes/etc)
• Driving their very talented 3rd-party app devs into making apps for said competitors
• Creating a massive breach of trust between Reddit Inc and its unpaid volunteer mods
• Squandering any remaining goodwill Reddit once had in the tech community
• Driving away folks who enjoy using 3rd-party apps
• Ruining the image of the CEO
• Negatively affecting the overall community to the point where it’s both a more hostile and unpleasant site, and simultaneously less moderated.

I mean I do analytics on site engagement metrics professionally, like as my job that pays me money, and based on that and past instances of r/place, I can make an educated guess that:

• They were desperate to improve July usage numbers because projections were looking shitty after the events of the past month.

• r/place has traditionally been a good way to juice engagement numbers

• They pulled a lever they knew would generate the results they needed

Is it temporary? Sure. But this buys them some time and August’s numbers are August’s problem.

Here’s are the stats from a previous instance of r/place:

Social platform Reddit re-introduced its collaborative social experiment r/Place on April 1, leading to the highest daily active users (DAUs) its mobile app has ever seen

So yeah, they’ll get the juice they need, probably, but the fact that they were compelled to even need to pull that lever says a lot, imo.

I don’t think there’s going to be a good way to know. Semrush is showing a relatively steady decline since January 2023, but I don’t trust third-party tools for that. And I doubt that Reddit would make its first-party analytic data public if it looks bad, so in that case the default move is to either cherrypick or create a metric that appears favorable, a la Elon Musk’s brand new Twitter metric of median picoseconds of verified user screen time per albatross fart or whatever.

From a qualitative standpoint, both the content and general vibe seem markedly worse than a month or two ago. It’s made it easy to stop using it as my default online platform.

But in any case, I don’t think it’s worth it to get too invested in either its success or failure.