The Dumbing Down of Reddit by its owners
===The downfall of reddit.===
I miss reddit, the old non-conde-nast reddit .
Towards the end of 2008, our accountants told us that reddit wasn’t “cashflow positive”. Internet-savvy redditors were not clicking on ads. After a brainstorming session, we realized that we needed to make reddit more “mainstream” (read dumbed down). We also wanted to introduce more intrusive ads but feared that that would cause a mass exodus from the site.
It’s just not the same anymore. It’s turned into a digg clone. (read corporate tool)
Enter Alan Schaaf. When he created imgur, he had no idea it would become so popular. But we did. We realized that imgur was the panacea for all our ills. As soon as he set up an LLC, we went ahead and bought it for peanuts… We started gradually sidelining subreddits that were not amenable to our maintreaming scheme…
Reddit has become a “lolcat site over the course of a few months.” While there are subreddits still flourishing, I’ve pretty much given up on reddit. http://news.ycombinator.com/ it is…
Did you know that any link that hits the front page gets approximately 10x the traffic if it is a [pic]?
Now put it all together…
We did. And we were not going to let that traffic go to another site. We got certain mods to ban as many r/pics submissions as possible that weren’t linked to imgur.
Ahhh the love… The primary only function of redditors is to generate money by clicking ads. And the owners will do whatever it takes I guess. If you think about it, content and community are just necessary evils.
Quotes from:
http://i.imgur.com/11DLu.png
