David Lovett’s Post

Reddit is the last real public bastion of the "cozy web," namely because of how amazingly these communities police themselves for promotional content. If you even make it past the mods, the members will downvote you to hell.  It's that vigilance that has kept Reddit content relatively high quality, compared to the exploited dark forest channels in the ad web.  Think how much better the information is when you just add a site:Reddit.com to your search queries  Reddit going public is entirely at-odds with this relationship, and will undermine the quality of the content, forcing people to withdraw farther into their own cozy web (group chats, Discord, etc). Not only that, AI scraping Reddit arms it with "cozy web" knowledge... Soon it'll be masterful at seeming like it's not promoting itself when it is  This is the kind of stuff marketers need to be thinking about now. There are channels that are dissolving in front of our very eyes and developing an owned presence is the only real way to win here. 

Trust & Safety if often looked at solely as a cost center for platforms, or a 'dirty word' seen as the suppression of free speech, censorship or 'a team spoiling the fun'. Today's article in the The New York Times looks at the success story of moderation for Reddit, Inc. who are set to go public. "There are a lot of lessons in Reddit’s turnaround. But one of the clearest is that content moderation — the messy business of deciding what users are and aren’t allowed to post on social media, and enforcing those rules day to day — actually works." Moderation, when applied well and relevant to the community you're looking to protect, can massively enhance the experience for the 99% of good users who will remain. There are many examples of 'moderation gone wrong' (I won't point fingers here) but it's great to see Trust & Safety providing a key foundation for a driving value on a $6.4 billion IPO today. Let's learn from Reddit's turnaround and embrace Trust & Safety as a critical aspect of platform success. As a long time Redditor, let's also celebrate a once niche corner of the internet becoming the success it is today! #TrustAndSafety #ContentModeration #IPO

Watching the Reddit, Inc. blackout… I enjoy using the platform. My first few million viral views about #datascience came from Reddit. That said, it has always been mis-managed. Amazing community held back by the tyrany of extremist often highly political ‘subreddit mods.’ I have a half dozen posts deleted just as they started trending for odd/arbitrary reasons with no follow up. They (the mods) believe they own the platform by virtue of the time they spent selectively deciding which posts are allowed to be seen; they don’t. Users create the data and content, mods are the problem. The mods are the unnecessary middle management of Reddit. They can and should be replaced by a smiple #artificialintelligence that mostly let’s the users decide what posts trend. The blackout is a perfect example. Reddit is not free to run, the internet is not free to run. Why would anyone feel entitled to monetize data when someone else creates the network effect that generates that data is crazy. Reddit used to be fun, now it’s not. Extremist mods should leave Reddit and try to make their own platform.

When I'm researching a product or service I haven't heard of, one of the first things I do is Google '[product/service name] Reddit'. It seems that's a more common behaviour than I realised! Reddit is a quirky part of the internet but the conversations are real and that makes them valuable. As marketers, we should take note of the recent Google/Reddit partnership and how it's going to amplify Reddit's impact on consumer decisions even more. As a consumer, I really hope this doesn't turn Reddit into a cesspool of bots and marketing jargon. 🥲  As marketers start to leverage the platform more, fingers crossed it's in the same authentic conversation-driven nature that is native to the platform. 🤞🏼 Is that a realistic hope? Full story - bit.ly/GGLRDT

What a great article from Kevin Roose in the The New York Times about how Reddit, Inc. recent #IPO is a clear success story about #contentmoderation. I couldn't agree more with his analysis that #trustandsafety is good business (because its what most users want)! A few key takeaways from the article: 1. Reddit empowered "an army of volunteer moderators, rather than trying to do it all itself."..."It tapped those existing moderators to help enforce its new, stricter rules, and built tools to help them root out bad behavior, such as an automated tool known as Automoderator." 2. "It nuked thousands of offensive and hateful subreddits, attaching culpability not to individual posts or users but to the spaces where toxic things frequently happen"..."Users who had frequented the banned communities largely either left Reddit entirely or changed their behavior. The toxic spaces didn’t reconstitute themselves, and rule-abiding Redditors got the benefits of a cleaner, less hateful platform." 3. "[R]ather than tying itself in knots trying to maintain the appearance of political neutrality and avoid angering right-wing partisans...Reddit focused on getting rid of users who were making things worse for other users, regardless of their politics." Read the full text here: https://lnkd.in/gYe8u6F5

You need Google to search Reddit, and you need Reddit to search Google. As a Redditor stated 8 years ago, “𝙄 𝙖𝙙𝙙 ‘𝙍𝙚𝙙𝙙𝙞𝙩’ 𝙖𝙛𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙮 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙄 𝙨𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙘𝙝 𝙤𝙣 𝙂𝙤𝙤𝙜𝙡𝙚 𝙗𝙚𝙘𝙖𝙪𝙨𝙚 𝙄 𝙩𝙧𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙣 𝙤𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙚𝙧𝙨.” But.. What would happen if that stopped being the case? What if Reddit forced users to log in to see content? This question was answered last year, when Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman, saw the value of Reddit's API. He stopped third-party access to the API and subsequent protests. “𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘼𝙋𝙄 𝙪𝙨𝙖𝙜𝙚 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙤𝙨𝙩𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙙𝙖𝙩𝙖 𝙡𝙞𝙘𝙚𝙣𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙞𝙨 𝙖 𝙣𝙚𝙬 𝙥𝙤𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙖𝙡 𝙗𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙨 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙪𝙨.” This makes sense since Reddit's valuation is at $10 billion in 2021 To boost its valuation, Reddit made a $60 million deal with Google, which will: 👉 Use its user-generated content to train its search's generative AI model and 👉 Sell online ads against it What do you think Redditors’ opinions were to the news? 🤔 And what is your take on this? Comment👇 I like challenging discussions and opinions

Harsh truth: most people new to Reddit don't engage authentically. As creators, we can fall into a dangerous train of thought that people "should want" our website/newsletter etc… So when we write a post, and it gets lots of upvotes, It's easy to jump to conclusions and either see it as an anomaly or chalk it up to flying under the mod radar. Here's a basic mindset shift that has served me well in my 3+ years on Reddit. Audience attention on Reddit is earned each time you contribute. Contribute clear value to Redditors and they will be framed to take interest in what you're sharing. If what you're sharing presents them clear value, you have the ability to earn them as website traffic. Trial and error is the key to Reddit. But once you crack it, it's cracked #reddit #marketing #organicmarketing

🦝 Reddit sold access to its UGC content for $60M to Google, allowing AI models to train on Reddit posts This deal came to light as part of the IPO filling where Reddit is aiming to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol RDDT. As you can imagine, the community and moderators are not happy. In an effort to win them over, Reddit reserved some shares for Redditors. How many, no one knows. The program will come in six phased priority tiers, with each eligible participant being assigned "a tier based on that participant’s contributions to Reddit" measured by Redditors' karma, the platform's metric of a user's community contributions. 🧐 legality and ToS aside, do you think users should be allowed to opt out from having their content used to train AI? Do you think the community will move elsewhere? 👇

Reddit, Inc. is one of the biggest social media platforms with over 400 Million monthly active users. And it is facing one of its greatest challenges yet. Some of the major subreddits, like r/Music with 30 Million subscribers, have gone dark, leaving users without access. What is causing this blackout? Reddit is a goldmine of data and they have been giving it all away for free. This data is being used by large language AI models like ChatGPT for training, and other third-party apps like Apollo and Sync for add-on services. Given Reddit’s IPO plans for later this year and the plan to reach a valuation of $15 billion, they have decided to grow revenue by charging third parties for this data. These (hefty) charges, which could go as high as $20 million/year, might lead to some third-party apps shuttering down. Who is causing this blackout? Reddit has largely been scaled by users and unpaid volunteers that provided content and moderation. And a lot of these moderators use third-party apps for ease of use. Moderators feel that the extra charges do not go with the “community spirit” of Reddit and they have decided to stage protests in the form of subreddit blackouts. While Reddit has enjoyed the benefit of free labour with unpaid moderators, it has also created an unhealthy dependence on users to operate the platform. Without moderators, the platform is likely to quickly fill up with spam links and objectionable content and start losing users. Will Reddit be able to implement these changes without losing users, or will they be arm-twisted into receding? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. #reddit #technology #socialmedia #education