It baffles me they didn’t take the obvious approach of offering apps/API access for Premium users, only turning it into a billable thing for LLMs. They’re not going to pay for the API, they will scrape the site. Your users will! That’s a great source of revenue that can last as long as reddit does.
Mods could be paid on a bounty system with salary or clocked hourly higher-tier mods to oversee moderation to prevent scamming. The higher tier mods would be paid more based on traffic with that ad profit sharing model.
Revert to the source code of about 10 years ago and get rid of most programmers. The only positive change in the last 10 years is the ability of users to ban people from harassing you.
Allow all subs to identify other subs they are similar too, and link all that information together so that users who don’t like how sub is moderated can find an official list of alternative subs.
Allow only temporary bans, not permanent bans from mods. Admins can still give permanent bans for bad faith or dishonest actors and should do so for foreign governments trying to influence other countries.
Allow subs to optionally require flair identifying citizenships and if you are found to be dishonest you can get site ban.
Get rid of certain pieces of automod functionality that subtract value for the users of the site.
What could have been done to increase the valuation higher and maintain goodwill with the community:
It baffles me they didn’t take the obvious approach of offering apps/API access for Premium users, only turning it into a billable thing for LLMs. They’re not going to pay for the API, they will scrape the site. Your users will! That’s a great source of revenue that can last as long as reddit does.
But no, they wanted that LLM money.
Mods could be paid on a bounty system with salary or clocked hourly higher-tier mods to oversee moderation to prevent scamming. The higher tier mods would be paid more based on traffic with that ad profit sharing model.
Revert to the source code of about 10 years ago and get rid of most programmers. The only positive change in the last 10 years is the ability of users to ban people from harassing you.
Allow all subs to identify other subs they are similar too, and link all that information together so that users who don’t like how sub is moderated can find an official list of alternative subs.
Allow only temporary bans, not permanent bans from mods. Admins can still give permanent bans for bad faith or dishonest actors and should do so for foreign governments trying to influence other countries.
Allow subs to optionally require flair identifying citizenships and if you are found to be dishonest you can get site ban.
Get rid of certain pieces of automod functionality that subtract value for the users of the site.