zlacker

>>robbie+(OP)
Many people are pointing out that they're going to lose a huge number of users over this, but that seems to be the point of the "cutting" phase of bulking and cutting.

(By bulking and cutting I mean eating a calorie surplus to gain muscle and fat followed by a calorie deficit to reduce fat while hanging on to as much muscle as possible.)

Reddit, Netflix, YouTube... they bulked their user base by subsidizing products. Now they're in the cutting phase and raising prices, restricting features, and/or increasing ads. They know they're going to end up with a significantly smaller user base, but if the cutting manages to maintain a large enough number of profitable users (muscle) while shedding unprofitable users (fat) then the business will end up in better shape.

Alternately one can keep calories stable and slowly increase muscle without gaining fat, but that's much slower and harder than a bulk/cut cycle, and most people and public companies don't have that kind of patience.

>>asonet+PR
Reddit relies on user-generated content so cutting the "unprofitable" users makes the product less useful for the "profitable" users.

This could lead to some initially profitable users into leaving the site and as a result make it less useful for the remaining users. This could lead to a negative spiral until Reddit is left with a fraction of its' user base.

>>Kibae+6e1
A lot of user generated content is recycled though. Take a look at the top twitter subs /r/whitepeopletwitter etc. notice the dates on the screenshots of tweets. Notice how they are 3-6 months old or longer.

Then notice how many posts in /rAskReddit are recycled from 6-12 months ago.

It’s gross, but honestly I kind of respect it. Reddit has recreated modern day TV for mobile phones. And it works because people can’t be bothered to retain what they’re consuming, so waiting 6 weeks for the news cycle to restart makes it all feel like a whole new thing.