I was going to say… the only times I ever used Reddit search, it just prompted me to question why I was wasting my time, then googling “xyz problem statement reddit”

If I was a VC, I would want a glut of ad-sensitive, lowest common denominator users. Think your Aunt on Facebook, or your sister on VSCO, or your young nephew on TikTok. I don’t think those people are necessarily attracted to the overall community attitude(s) currently on Reddit.

I would never call the ex-Hacker News/Digg Redditors smart. But.

Those users do have certain proclivities that make them EXTREMELY unattractive to investment dollars. Strong interest in anti-mainstream topics, including the 3Ps (Privacy, Piracy, and Pornography) doth not good ROI make. This exodus of users and elimination of features, outside looking in, seems like a misstep. I’d be skeptical.

Probably. I write half my comments drunk, so I wouldn’t use them as a basis for ESL learning 🙃

It’s a good catch!! Apologies for any confusion.

This is a really good oversight (see: insight, overview, etc). Honestly, for anyone actually interested in this stuff and what makes the internet tracking/advertising machine tick, take some of the HubSpot Academy’s courses. There’s definitely other courses out there, but the HubSpot ones are all free, and the topics aren’t hard once you get immersed in it.

Plus afterwards you can put the faux-certs on your resume and knife fight with the 20,000,000 other adtech people that just got laid off.

Top 100 anywhere is INSANE. So proud of Memmy. Happy to be here. Congrats Gavin!

Bingo. The Reddit app wasn’t designed for UX; it was designed as an IAA engine for their ad network. I know we’re tired of the “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” adage, but reading through the Reddit for Business page, you realize that’s what you are:

https://www.redditforbusiness.com

Having lived in that whole gross mobile attribution / AdMob / CPx world for a hot minute, I’m especially appreciative of platforms that don’t all immediately race to the bottom. Cory Doctorow calls it “enshittification”. Good times.

TL;DR - you should. We collectively need to reassess how we tackle this kind of behaviour.

We have weird partitions for things. It’s sort of clear the division isn’t really state v. state or country v. country, it’s urban pockets versus rural spreads. You can make inferences regarding accesses to resources, education, meaningful work, etc. as you will.

The political delta between Northern/Southern California, Eastern/Western Colorado+Washington, Upstate/Downstate New York, is FAR more significant than USA/Canada.

Alberta would slot in easily into the US Southeast. Ontario would slot in easily into the US Northeast/Northwest.

I worry for Canada (and the US, and many countries), because people are more or less the same everywhere (despite their grandest objections), and are quite susceptible to the same rhetoric and influential activity across the board.

Others have basically captured it, but my read is a massive change in the overall risk profile held by venture capital firms. The time of reckoning has come, and it’s time for everyone’s (or at least VCs’) favourite three letters: ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

The last twenty years, we’ve seen this sort of spray-and-pray model, where 99 bad investments could be offset by 1 “unicorn”. The risk appetite seems to have shifted largely because 1.) there’s a higher volume of early stage concepts (so there’s more bad ideas), and 2.) there’s either fewer unicorns, or the unicorns that mature are ultimately less valuable.

Crunchbase put out a good analysis of the current trend of global venture dollar flow:

The Party’s Still Over: The VC Downturn In 6 Charts

You can read news from various outlets - some say it’s a post-pandemic correction. Some say it’s because labour is too expensive. But the bottom line is that VCs aren’t willing to spend money on “users-in-lieu-of-revenue” like they once were, and I honestly don’t blame them. There were a lot of really, egregiously stupid ideas coming out of SV, and their wax wings melted. sad_trombone.mp4

Adam Kotsko summed this entire phenomena up nicely:

When I started lifting, I was in my early 20s, when I had similar goals as you and a tremendous amount of free time.

By the time I hit my “target”, life started getting busy and my free time was replaced by various obligations.

For me, the desire to continue lifting shifted from a goal body to having an hour a day that was 100% mine. Maybe that could work for you as well.

The ever-present fear of losing all your progress also helps.