No, they're just flailing.
The problem with Reddit is that its product is ideological conformity; but its owners are too busy pretending (or actually believing) that's not true to sell it honestly. Mods are, to put it bluntly, mostly replaceable, and charging for the ability to moderate an established large subreddit would go a long way provided whoever buys that power must go out of their way to plausibly deny that.
And ideological conformity is worth a lot of money- Twitter was fairly valued in the tens of billions for a very good reason- but much like Twitter, that sort of thing sells "at a loss" because having the kind of content which enforcement of ideological conformity upon is meaningful necessarily means major companies won't want to put their products next to that content. Reddit is not a product that can generate a concrete return on investment, which is partially why it can survive operating at a net loss for a long, long time; capital directly funds political power.
Cheap capital drying up means money is tighter- so financiers are getting harder to come by- and if you're in straits that dire and don't want to downsize you have to look for other sources of revenue. In Reddit's case, this will completely kill their main product, but they have a mental block that prevents them from dealing with that honestly so they might be screwed.
>Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks)
Mastodon has the same kind problem that Reddit does but massively amplified- server operators have power over user networks (the same thing happens on Reddit with bots) which is a no-go for honest communication.
Why? I would think it's the much simpler "having a ton of users is worth a lot of money".
Rather unfortunately, the position that "my opinion is unpopular, therefore contrarian and correct" is something that is easily manipulated. The demographic that falls for conspiracy theories loves to amplify the idea that they have some secret / esoteric knowledge. Again, a great way to manipulate people, encourage violence etc.
That's an ancient (in internet terms) problem, framing Reddit as some sort of intentional ideology-spreading-loss-leader-for-powerful-capitalists doesn't correspond with their actions - after all, Reddit has been deeply involved in the spreading of all sorts of ideas on all ends of political spectrums.
They're just running into the same issues all these "give something cool away then hope you can make it profitable later" business do of trying to turn the revenue knobs slowly enough to not drive everyone off.
Reddit’s product is ad-supported message boards. It has a high valuation because it gets an incredible number of eyeballs every day and investors want to monetise them. Reddit is flailing because those users aren’t as monetisable as investors hoped. I don’t think it’s a whole lot more complicated than that, not everything has to be a political conspiracy theory.
Twitter is similiar in that you’re self selecting who to follow, and who to engage with. Things you engage with have hashtags, have observable topics and categories that they generally post about, etc. If you’ve ever looked at the categories that you’re in after doing a Twitter data dump, you can see they know a _ton_ about you. What I don’t remember seeing in there is “confidence,” but it might just be that those numbers aren’t surfaced to users, or that it’s encoded in the ordering (and I don’t remember it).
The point is, Twitter and Reddit have largely the same types of signal that Facebook does, but certainly way less than Google. Facebook’s user engagement might be higher, but I’m willing to bet that the number of people using Facebook to follow their friends, and not random businesses and other accounts is greater, thus limiting confidence in understanding about someone’s preferences. What I mean is that my friends might never post about politics, and I might not follow political figures, or other talking heads, that suggest my affiliation…
In Google’s case, they drop a “pixel,” for tracking purposes, on 75% of the web (inflated estimate for effect), and analyze every accessible page on the internet with the goal of understanding what it says. As a result, they have far greater reach in what they can and do know about you…
This thread feels full of vague insinuations that some powerful political lobby is paying to use Reddit to manipulate opinions or something but no actual detail.