Technology

In case it's paywalled for others I'll quote the whole section:

The bigger question: should Reddit even exist?

So, in light of all of this, should Reddit even exist? Is there really a point to a web forum in 2023? Aren’t we past all that? I guess it depends on who you ask. I certainly am. The last forum I frequented was Macrumors’, and I left for two reasons.

• Forums are struggling with GDPR and my legal right to be forgotten. On the one hand, I understand that deleting parts of conversations when users want to leave, renders the threads quite unreadable. On the other hand, however, content is owned by the person who posted it (that’s true for Reddit as well, last time I checked), so I should have the right to leave a forum and take my content with me.

• I realised I was wasting time writing long, elaborate replies on technology threads instead of posting them here on Medium, as stories. Somehow, for me, a platform where people write articles then discuss in the comments, makes a lot more sense than what forums can offer. But I’m sure not everyone is like me, or thinks like me.

That doesn’t necessarily mean though that there isn’t still a genuine place for sites like Reddit in the modern world. Having online communities is certainly good, though we seem to be heading towards a monetised content model where even a tweet can generate pennies or dollars. On the one hand, I’m not against it when the content is good, on the other, it does beg the question, how are forums like Reddit supposed to stay alive in a world where advertisement isn’t necessarily a very lucrative model?

I guess I find myself less up in arms against Reddit and its potentially misguided attempt at getting a good IPO valuation, than most of its users and critics. Many of those throwing stones never owned or ran a company, and while Reddit’s CEO does come off as arrogant, it’s a trap easy to fall into when your site has a daily 52 million users. Many CEOs also tend to have a bit of a God complex. I guess it comes with the territory?

Steve Huffman does have a point, though. This will blow over one way or another. The question is, what’s left in its wake?

He does at least put the caveat of "it depends on who you ask" on it, but both of those bullet points he raises strike me as very ill-thought-out.

The first bit about GDPR and the "right to be forgotten" is kind of interesting in the wake of Reddit restoring deleted comments, but I'm not sure that this is actually a GDPR problem. As far as I'm aware the "right to be forgotten" means that the site has to delete anything it's stored that's personally identifying, but that doesn't necessarily mean it has to delete literally everything you've ever written. When someone deletes their account and you scrub their username off of the comments they left it seems to me that this would suffice (note: not a lawyer by any means, I'd welcome a response from someone more familiar with that).

The second bullet point... huh? "a platform where people write articles then discuss in the comments" is literally a forum, is it not? How is it not a forum? He's saying that he was wasting time writing in forums when he could be writing in forums instead. I don't get it. I guess he's saying he prefers to write the initial entry of the thread rather than one of the responses? Seems like a pointless distinction to me.

His question as to how a forum is supposed to stay alive when advertisement isn't very lucrative also doesn't really mean anything. There are plenty of businesses that stay alive without a "lucrative" income stream, all you need to do is operate within the means provided by your non-lucrative income stream. For something like Reddit that means don't spend huge amounts of dollars supporting buggy video hosting when you don't need to, don't waste your programmers' resources developing features your users don't want, and so forth. Hosting a simple text forum should not be all that costly, even on a scale as big as Reddit, and there's plenty of ways to monetize the fact that you've got all that data and all that user attention coming your way. Reddit seems to have consistently made poor decisions in this regard. That's Reddit's problem, not a problem with fora in general.

We'll see with the Fediverse, I guess. If collectively a bunch of hobbyists can provide the resources needed to keep all of this running out of pocket or based off of whatever advertising and donations they can scrape together then Reddit could have too.