Comment by kaddar on 28/08/2020 at 19:32 UTC*

110 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)

View submission: Testing a new concept with select subreddit partners

Thanks, I hate it

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Constructive feedback:

It depends on your motivations. I might actually be totally cool with this.

If you are motivated by justifying costs working on esoteric feature requests (gifs in comments, different threading models for some subreddits, etc), fine, whatever, it's a maintenance cost for your team to build low-use features, and I get it.

If you cooked this up as a way to try to cross the fact that whales, saudi princes, etc, use reddit with networking effects, fuck off. You're not solving jobs-to-be-done by committing to this work.

• You'll disincentivize communities that do not have these whales, thereby making poor communities worse. It will disproportionately impact marginalized communities and that sucks, dude.
• You punish users, essentially, for paying for reddit. Why I am giving you money again, if you're gating *my* paid ability to use reddit on *my community* also paying the tax?
• _YOU_ are responsible for the future of reddit, the same way a politician is responsible for the future of our democracy. Yes, you, plgrmonedge's boss, or whatever. You might not abuse power-ups, but when you quit and go work at twitch, do you think the new product manager is going to respect the same values you had? Make sure it's hard to build into your organization onramps to grift your users, please.

Now, that said,

If you do this to solve problems those subreddits already use third party services for (e.g., coordinating trading swaps, handling patreon payment, paying content hosting fees for types of content that is not already free on youtube, giphy, etc), maybe consider that each of these requests' needs are different, and you likely will have a power-law of power-ups being actually used.

Whenever I see a tool build a plugin model and the top 1 or 2 plugins are almost universally the ones used, it begs the question of whether the plugin model could have been architected differently.

My suggestion: Think about what each reddit is hiring (and / or paying money) to third parties to solve for them currently. Solve each of these actual jobs-to-be-done first and then reason about whether or not those should be combined into a plugin.

Replies

Comment by [deleted] at 28/08/2020 at 21:38 UTC

11 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by highlord_fox at 29/08/2020 at 05:08 UTC

6 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Ah yes, the WoW mod approach. "X is one of the most downloaded mods in the game, maybe we should incorporate that into the base?".

See: Threat meters, enemy health displays, map trackers, quest location trackers, ground particle effects, etc.