Nice post, man. The reddit story is definitely interesting.
I read somewhere that during an early release of the platform they basically had an admin console that allowed them to specify a username, when they posted or commented and were posting comments and votes as a bunch of different fake users, to make it seem like more discussion was happening than really was.
Reddit has an amazingly loyal audience, yet their ad product is just the pits (doesn't help that redditors hate ads). It'll be curious to see if they can come up with a strong monetisation route in the future, that doesn't rely on ads.
Haha, yeah it's a trope you hear about in Silicon Valley. In fact, I think in one episode of the show Silicon Valley, one of the guys hired an "impression farm" in S.E. Asia to fake user engagement. But hey! These guerilla tactics work sometimes.
Indeed, once someone has been redditing for a while, it develops an almost cult like following. The promoted posts and sidebar ads are a start. Now we know the company mission is to democratize information and all that good stuff, and I'd argue that because that's their goal, and their founders exude a sort of free spirited/non corporate/earnings heavy mentality, that maybe monetization is not entirely what they're after. However, the founders are out and being realistic, Reddit was defintely acquired to be a cash flow machine (eventually) for their parent company.
Who knows! Maybe tokenization of their platform might be a way for them to monetize services in the future. Of course it'd probably be met with some intense disapproval for the Reddit community.
Love that show. I only found out the other day that TJ Miller's not coming back for the next season, but I guess his character had run its course.
I do love reddit... one of the reasons I haven't been posting more here is because there's just not enough content that reflects what I can find in /r/entrepreneur or /r/marketing, but I guess there's only one thing to do about that. I also found, early on, that everyone here was being really super positive. "Don't upset people or they won't give you upvotes!" - kind of discouraged real debate, or flagging of shitposts.
Hopefully both of those will resolve themselves in time.
In the meantime, tokenization for reddit might work really well. Their audience is more tech savvy in general, and there's already an established culture for rewarding posts you really like with tokens you pay for... just not tokens that have any value once you give it.