For my particular niche (illustration) it has a way better concentration of active (and also importantly) high quality actual working professional artists on it than mastodon.

The art scene on mastodon is pretty meh and the largest art centric instance is run by unstable authoritarians that are some of the biggest sources of drama on mastodon.

Meh. I’ve already moved on.

Reddit’s been running ads for a while and has never turned a profit

Yeah I tend to agree. I think all communities have a critical mass and past that point they go downhill.

I was just googling for the rat overpopulation experiment because I think it works as a great example of this and it turns out this whole concept has a term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

Regular people didn’t know or care wtf reddit was for quite a while also and there absolutely is a building friction between people and corporate social media. We’re in the early stages for now, but stuff like Activitypub is not going away.

Yeah that was kinda my understanding too. And regardless of my feelings on it, I think rulings are mostly gonna go in AI’s favor.

Sure feels like they timed this IPO pretty badly. I think the ideal time to strike on this would have been a few years ago… Based on market conditions anyway. Reddit itself may just not have had their ducks lined up enough, but that’s their problem, not the stock market’s.

• Tech stocks trading sideways for the last year or two
• The interest rate money printer got shut off and cash is not cheap anymore
• Seemingly all the major new tech stock investment interest is circling around stuff like AI
• Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media
• The pandemic is more or less over and people have pulled back from being chronically online somewhat (this is my guess, I don’t have data to back it up)

Also what exactly is the monetization strategy? Ads I guess? More catering towards creating corporate “synergy” with the Reddit community? Selling user data/content? So basically making the place suck considerably worse for users is what it looks like to me.