Well they control the mobile apps now, which is most of the userbase. The redesign is still terrible but nobody has much of a choice about image hosting since it’s built-in.

The only thing I can really think they “improved” is that the new gold system allows to be paid for your content:

If you’re eligible for the Contributor Program and your content meets the requirements for monetization, you can receive cash from Reddit for the gold and karma you earn on qualifying contributions.

But that’s definitely not going to help them be profitable lol

Look at a the way everything in tech is moving.

We are in the age of of surveillance capitalism. It will make itself profitable with our data. Maybe identifying people, creating profiles about beliefs and personality, etc.

What else could they possibly do? It’s proven profitable and that’s what they want.

Well recently more people have been using the official reddit app. No relation to anything going on, by the way, just the app getting better, obviously.

Reddit Crypto and Reddit NFTs were good ideas… to get revenue from 3rd-party app users. Then they killed 3rd-party apps instead 🤦

They only have to be profitable long enough to sell their bags.

Exactly. Reddit has been building this huge knowledge base for well over a decade. Built by the users themselves. He knows what he’s got.

I think I’ll go ahead and log back in and delete all my old posts and comments. Fuck him.

I mean, ignoring the balding neonazi dipshit for a moment:

Twitter is more or less showing the path forward. They fucked up on the advertisement side, but it has clearly been demonstrated that there is a strong desire for users to be “power users”. Which is more or less what twitter ran on before. The idea that, because you have ten followers, you are just as important as Barack Obama.

Reddit, coupled with Google fucking up their own shit, is rapidly losing the “best place on the internet to find user sourced information” badge. But there is definitely room for a subscription that either boosts user engagement (not sure how that would work) or provides corporate moderators so that individual people can have their own board about their Sonic OC or whatever.

And then it becomes about converting those users into customers.

I get it, but like I said, that’s ephemeral. Compare that to say Meta or alphabet with YouTube. They have distinct advantages in serving their content that prevents them from completely losing out. Then you’ve got Reddit, who pays hosts that could decide themselves to spin up a competing service pretty quickly and already isn’t profitable due to those harsh hosting costs and isn’t particularly stand out in its advertising business compared to those two.

Every single group you listed selfhosts and uses local data centers to reduce transit fees. It’s very important because it’s how you handle the costs on your business model. Ad revenue generally forces you to operate on tight operating margins. Compare that to another cloud hosting utilizing video provider that nearly sunk despite being quite popular: Vimeo. If you think this stuff is not important, see Twitch’s exit from Korea over transit fees.

“Calls” and “puts” are types of contracts about buying/selling stocks (they aren’t the stock themselves but are centered around a given stock and its trading price, so they are called “derivatives” as they are “derived” from the stock).

A put is a contract that allows the buyer of the contract to sell stock at an agreed upon price to the seller of the contract, regardless of the current trading price. They are used for a variety of reasons. In one usage, someone who is buying some of the stock at the current trading price may also buy a “put” on the stock at a slightly lower price. This way, they spend a little more money at the time of buying the stock, but if the trading price plummets, they can still sell it at that slightly lower “put” price and not lose too much money.

In this case, the idea would be to buy a “put” (without buying the stock at the same time) when the buyer thinks the stock’s trading price is overvalued. Then when the price falls below the “puts” agreed upon value, buy the stock at the lower price and immediately invoke the contract to sell at the "put"s higher price.

Short selling is when you borrow a stock, then sell that stock, then buy it back in time to return it. The idea is that you think it will go down, so you can buy it back at a discount and make a profit.

A put is when you have the option of doing that – i.e. if it doesn’t go down you don’t have to do anything with the stock, and you’ve only lost the fee you paid for the put contract. It’s a way of hedging your bets.

A publicly traded stock option contract. Buying a Put allows you to bet on the share price dropping.