Dec 10, 2020

Reddit's business model is unholy and toxic

So this is what happened on Reddit today. A guy made a post on /r/WebDev subreddit about his troublesome experience with Firebase and Cloud Run cloud computing platforms, the post titled "We Burnt $72K testing Firebase + Cloud Run and almost went Bankrupt" was about how close they came to losing a fortune by merely participating in a product's free trial. The post attracted a lot of attention and instantly gained the top spot with 500+ upvotes.

Now comes the troubling part: the post was removed instantly soon after it started trending. I didn't know what happened and was wondering why would OP delete such a post himself. After looking it up on notabug.io (a site which shows deleted reddit threads), I came to know that it was, in fact, removed by the Reddit admins who assigned it the NSFB tag which apparently stands for "Not safe for Brands".



I was appalled to know that such a thing called NSFB even existed. If popular social media platforms like Reddit start caring about the various brands and become their spokespeople, can you even imagine the implications of that? And we aren't talking about small platforms like Ruqqus or Raddle which are frequented by a very small number of users, we are talking about a subreddit having over half a million subscribers.

The obvious problem here is that of quid-pro-quo. A platform that abruptly removes a post critical of a certain brand by calling it NSFB must be obviously receiving some consideration from the said brand. Reddit admins are certainly part of the Reddit team, however Reddit may try to distance themselves.

The second problem is that of implications. Its also quite obvious that removing critical posts may not be the only service being offered to these "brands". What about things like shilling, brigading and astro-turfing? How many times have you seen that a post critical of something (or even somebody) suddenly gets a surge of downvotes? Or alternatively, how many times have you seen that a post praising something (or somebody) suddenly gets a surge of upvotes?

Reddit is treading a very dangerous path if it tries to suppress or divert public opinion in this manner as part of its business model. I'd rather they do simple commercial ads instead. However intrusive the ads may be, its a thousand times better than these ethically questionable tactics.

The removal of this post today is only symptomatic of a very deep problem in the Reddit's business model since a very long time now. Perhaps it started happening when Ellen Pao resigned as the Reddit CEO in November 2016, but it has crossed all limits now.

The audience trust is the single most important factor in creating a platform's network effect which is the only currency in the basket of a large forum site like Reddit. They should never take that trust for granted otherwise a day might come when they will go down the route of their predecessors like digg, stumbleupon and newsvine. I can see that day coming very soon.

Update: I can see that the OP's removed post was reinstated back today (a very rare thing to happen on Reddit!) which might have happened after the admins received some backlash. I really hope that it won't take a blog post like this for things to get better in future and admins use their own judgment and discretion before removing posts.

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