Comment by JumpCrisscross
2 years ago
> Very little, and almost none from a technical POV
I mean, I can sign up and log in. That's more than I can say for the federated competitors I tried so hard to use and finally gave up on.
The fact that none of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok tried to go for Reddit's throat in this lull implies we might be missing something.
The thing you are missing is that Reddit is not (sufficiently) profitable. :)
It would probably be profitable if they didn’t employ 2000 people to run what is in essence a large but relatively basic forum system.
It's still not an absurdly profitable venture even if you drop head count to 300-500 which is likely a reasonable number. A lot of people could have good careers in that smaller reddit, but it's not a multi-billion dollar unicorn.
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Reddit is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars and that number has been rapidly increasing.
They would have easily reached profitability without doing this.
Yes but would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy? Fast may seem good but it's actually slow when compared to the fastest horses. Every company must be a unicorn, so sayeth the investors.
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Is it really that hard for someone who browses hackernews to get set up on a federated platform? I'm over here assuming that everyone on this forum that complains about how hard it is to run a startup should be able to run the docker compose and route a reverse proxy to their own instance, rather than take the 5 minutes to read about how the fediverse and activity pub works and find an instance they like offering free access.
I get that it is not a ubiquitous solution, but after my experiences on mastodon.social and others, I'm really starting to wonder just how genuine the sentiment behind "it's hard to sign up" is. It's not that hard at all - I have found it a lot easier than doing something like creating a modern facebook or google account for instance.
Just because we might be tech-savvy doesn't mean we have an affinity for jumping through hoops that we don't think are worth it.
Agreed, but I'm also confused. I made a kbin and lemmy.world account about as easily as I would a reddit account. Are the servers still impacted for some?
The new UI and general idea of federation takes some figuring out, but the high level experience of "see a post, click, read comments, comment" isn't any different from Hackernews.