Yeah I mean there’s that but the reddit demo uses ad blockers frequently and ad-based content on reddit is already probably not that profitable. There’s a lot of people running astroturf campaigns for various things, but how are you seeing revenue out of that? Some schmuck buying the wrong type of portable speaker because of a crappy recommendation won’t add to reddit’s bottom line when it’s the speaker maker’s internal marketing intern. If anything, it’ll just further cause people to lose confidence in them.

The only path they had toward profitability was feeding all of their user data into AIs for revenue from AI companies, but chatbots are also unprofitable and that revenue probably won’t even cover the costs to run the servers, and besides how many companies are going to be dumb enough to pay for that privilege? We’re talking about folks that already stole every piece of artwork, literature, and news article they could get their grubby little mitts on. Why would they continue to pay reddit?

Ultimately the biggest conceit of the “attention economy” is the idea that attention automatically translates into dollars.

(And they’re bleeding attention too.)