Users aren’t the paying customer. Users are the product. Most people know this, but based on these comments, few people seem to actually understand the implication.
What it means is your user experience isn’t catered to, and you have absolutely no expectation for conditions to improve or to be good at all. Worse: your experience will be intentionally worsened if that means it generates more money. This is why the official app is shit. It’s not incompetence, or laziness. It’s all part of the business model to manipulate your engagement. It’s why we can’t have unofficial apps that circumvent all that. It’s why not all the comments are loaded by default (they don’t generate money so please go back to browsing promoted posts). It’s why you keep getting reminders to use things you didn’t ask for. Redditors are being corraled. Cattle in a factory farm.
At the same time, I think consumers overvalue the amount of competition between products and services that happens at the product value (e.g. user experience) level. The reality is that marketing and leveraging monopolistic positions are often far more cost effective solutions for capturing market share.
So no, Reddit doesn’t give a flying fuck how nice we make the fediverse, other than to see it as a threat to squeeze more money out of their users who might be tempted to a free-run lifestyle instead.
Users aren’t the paying customer. Users are the product. Most people know this, but based on these comments, few people seem to actually understand the implication.
What it means is your user experience isn’t catered to, and you have absolutely no expectation for conditions to improve or to be good at all. Worse: your experience will be intentionally worsened if that means it generates more money. This is why the official app is shit. It’s not incompetence, or laziness. It’s all part of the business model to manipulate your engagement. It’s why we can’t have unofficial apps that circumvent all that. It’s why not all the comments are loaded by default (they don’t generate money so please go back to browsing promoted posts). It’s why you keep getting reminders to use things you didn’t ask for. Redditors are being corraled. Cattle in a factory farm.
At the same time, I think consumers overvalue the amount of competition between products and services that happens at the product value (e.g. user experience) level. The reality is that marketing and leveraging monopolistic positions are often far more cost effective solutions for capturing market share.
So no, Reddit doesn’t give a flying fuck how nice we make the fediverse, other than to see it as a threat to squeeze more money out of their users who might be tempted to a free-run lifestyle instead.