Reddit in 2016
reddit.com
reddit.com
I sent them a DMCA to remove the logo that I had commissioned from someone from Dribbble (for my site, but ended up using it as the header there). No response.
Reddit is run by a bunch of leeches who rely on moderators to create content and never reward them.
I plan on making like Twitter, but "followers" "vote" for "tweets" so that the collective community sees the best content. Reddit isn't really meant for personal usage. Subs are typically topic related there.
Inb4 "HN has voting but no groupthink". It has both in large quantities.
Why not? If he owned the rights to the image, it's use was contingent on his approval, absent any other agreement. The only reason it required a a legal notice is because they locked him out of the account he used that had rights to change it.
This is no different than offering to let the office use your ping pong table, then getting fired and having your building access revoked. If the business refused to return the ping pong table, which was in use contingent upon your and the businesses approval, they have essentially stolen your property. Feel free to substitute any other item item (such as fridge, chair, computer hardware or servers...) for the ping pong table in that example.
The user agreement includes perpetual, irrevocable license to reproduce content you submit to Reddit.
What is wrong with that? As long as your aren't spamming or trying to ruin the experience for others, why the fuck should it matter that you post your site to a subreddit that would be interested?
Also, people do this literally all the time in subreddits. Like, ALL the time. Wonder what was different in this case.
It's definitely sometimes difficult to enforce & sometimes poorly enforced.
They supported the user submitting content even though it was his own.
Reddit is the best.
In fact, now when I'm searching for random terms or information, I'll often include "reddit" in the query, because I'm confident that on pretty much any subject there are bona fide experts or people who have already done the research willingly sharing their knowledge on Reddit, for free. Wonderful.
I think sites like Reddit emerged at a point where infrastructure for sharing was very valuable for users in its own right. It seems amazing now that the submit/upvote/downvote flow was so novel and we all lapped up the spirit of freedom. But actually the powerful feature of sites like Reddit and HN is the moderation rather than the technology. I would pay for some of the better subs, and certainly HN.
Good moderation is invaluable and it's a shame that it is hard to make money out of. I have a hunch that Google Contributor is aimed at this market as a sort of Netflix for content.
What was the timeline again... Slashdot emerged in 1997, it developed voting on several different criteria, you could filter for "funny" or "insightful" posts, and it had a pretty sophisticated meta-moderation system.
Digg simplified that with up- and down-votes.
Reddit borrowed digg's model.
I'm not 100% sure what the innovation of reddit was at the time, but I feel like these three just had slightly different tones to their communities. Slashdot was the geek site, Digg had more jokes and politics, reddit was sort of... deliberative? The culture was a lot different back then, a bit more like this site.
I'm maybe the one person who enjoys digg more today than before. I like the curation they do on videos, there's far less variation in quality than when it was all user submitted. Really no social interaction there anymore though.
I think they killed something broken that a lot of people loved, and replaced it with something kind of neat for a completely different use case. Like if McDonald's started making electric cars or something.
Widely hated, I'm still not sure it wasn't the right call though.
In contrast Reddit has thousands of small communities that let new users be heard. Down voting and arguing over "bad" comments gives an impression of authority that make the user want to learn and impress the group. It is really all just a game.
Was that true at launch? I thought that was added later, but can't remember.
And since most of us started visiting Reddit for the tech/programming/science content people saw that stuff as spam.
Still, the subreddit system is really the only reason I still frequent Reddit. The smaller you go, the higher quality the content becomes and the better the community is (in general).
I think it's a much different demographic to the rest of reddit though, a lot of contributors don't really use any other subreddits and are older.
I only had to post a link a few times a week and the friends on my list would up vote it automatically (I never had to ask them). This would hit critical mass at about 20 Diggs and I would get to the front page.
Front page at that time would get me about 50,000 unique visitors and a good percentage of other blogs picking up my articles and coming back regularly. The trick was to write good content, not just top 10 lists.
I was just a student at that time and didn't have much business experience, but I was able to sell some custom PHP scripts. I think I made about $1000/month for an entire year.
Eventually they cracked down on it, and I got a job and stopped updating my blog.
I wish I would have been able to capitalize on it a lot more. I probably could have turned it into a much longer-lasting business.
Those one-off 5 mod points made you feel like scraps off someone's moderation feast table and made it absolutely obvious that you had no say in shaping the site. This sucked above all other issues with Slashdot and it was the reason why I jumped ship as soon as I discovered HN.
... and this is why we can't have nice things.
Sadly, mainstream discourse works in exactly the same way. You can utter the most outrageous lies, as long as you whisper while smartly dressed; but if you shout the truth with uncombed hair, you will be sanctioned.
tl;dr: Rational discourse is the "nice thing" that's worth striving for; treating those with different views with respect is the way to get it; none of us has a monopoly on truth.
Next: implicit up-vote by following link.
I'm a little frightened by what we might learn about our implicit attitudes, but I think it'd be a fun experiment.
Snapzu (http://snapzu.com) is a reddit alternative that has a referral program that splits revenues with moderators, as a reward and incentive to grow it. Their system is similar where instead of subreddits, there are 'tribes', but it's essentially the same way of organizing communities.
Here is a link to their referral program page: http://snapzu.com/referralprogram/
It looks like you might run/work there. Is your "Frank" on the affiliate program just an example or a real person?
Another question I have is about the legality of it. Are these technically employees or contractors?
The problem isn't that your site has ads, it's that you aren't supposed to submit links to your own website at all. Or at least not more than 10% of all your posts should be self promotion is the rule now.
I don't agree with this rule at all, but I understand why it exists.
Banning sites for having AdSense is extremely hypocritical, Reddit lives thanks to ads or cohercing users to remove them ("gold")
The negative was only related to the netsec subreddit which I think is really great but banned me several times in the last few months because some moderators said my post were offtopic while the same kind of posts were really successful there before. For example, benchmarking different ways of betwork traffic capture in Windows including drivers developed by ourselves.
To get noticed, you have to have upvotes. If you have upvotes, that means that users appreciated the content. If, say, a company or person is promoting themselves and the community upvotes it, I don't see any problem with it. That's how it's supposed to work.
But I don't think that's what you mean by 'disguise'. I would guess rather that you mean that some entity is paying the reddit the company to create artificial upvotes (i.e. not originating from users) and maybe even paid commenters. I personally would be surprised if there were a lot of this clearly happening (there's a number of people on reddit that make a 'career' out of debunking stories, identifying brigades, etc).
Can you point to some popular posts presently on reddit that are examples of it?
http://www.redditsecrets.com/buy-reddit-accounts
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=725562.0
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/32rr56/do_peo...
You can build a small voting ring for a few hundred dollars to boost posts. The problem is all of Reddit's countermeasures to reduce spam made it hard to tell how successful these things are.
However, the fact people are still buying in 2016, implies at least some people succeed at it.
> Can you describe this sponsored/organic content dichotomy?
Really, only Reddit can say how bad this problem is but my guess its non-negligible and cutting into their monetization via native ads as its basically an end run around paying Reddit.
"However, the fact people are still sending money to random emails they get, implies at least some people get the money they were promised in return."
I assume that's the official Reddit SlideShare account.
And HN is different...how exactly? There's a definite air of superiority here, but I don't find the commentary any more insightful. Besides, "reddit" isn't a single entity.
It's almost as if reddit is made up of millions of users and you can deduce the "average" or aggregate opinion of reddit by examining voting patterns.
Really? I do. Some subreddits approach what I see as a clear quality advantage in HN comments, but even then there's the occasional joke or non-sequitur. Which is fine. Reddit is not HN, and if they were the same, there would be less overall usefulness.
I enjoy HN and its semi-official policy of down voting comments that are are jokes and don't contribute to the conversation (it's easy to joke on HN, just include something substantive to the conversation as well). On Reddit, even in the more serious subreddits and discussions, one-liner joke comments still pop up, because while they may not get many up votes on serious discussions, I rarely see them get down votes.
Not that I don't enjoy jokes, but if I want that, I'll find the same (or a similar) discussion on Reddit. I just like that HN tries to keep people to a higher standard of conduct, because then that place exists.
(but yes, totally agreed)
Besides, what's the point of commenting on something that already has 700 comments? Nobody is going to read it.
/r/homelab, r/selfhosted, subs like that.
I left reddit a couple years ago and pretty much only waste time on this news aggregator. There were too many agendas getting pushed and it leaked into every sub.
If we look past all the controversy and all the other reasons most people point at the site as a negative, it boils down to one thing in my mind:
Base cynicism.
There's cynicism when someone else reposts something.
There's cynicism over imaginary internet points.
There's cynicism by, from, and to the moderators and site owners.
There's cynicism every time something with a brand name gets mentioned (zOMG it's an ad!)
There's cynicism among communities.
It just goes on and on and on. Never-ending negativity. Everyone always assuming the worst of the other person (rather than trying to have an understanding discussion) and taking snarky potshots at them (and then hiding their comments by -1's in a fit of pique, rather than any kind of thoughtful analysis of quality).
I'm quite happier (and not a little bit more productive) not participating anymore. Reddit is, IMO, the world's greatest concentration of negative, irreverent, straight-up dickhead behavior in one convenient place.
(feh, word filter plugin went a little crazy there, sorry for the unreadable comment earlier)
Aside from one or two outliers like DepthHub, most instances of someone on reddit linking to something on reddit are a variation on "Hey, look at this stupid thing this person did, let's all point and laugh at how stupid they are".
(and I did mention outliers)
In fact the main reason I read hn comments is the hope of finding comment gems posted by an expert in the field, someone with a unique perspective on an issue, or someone with a heretical but plausible idea.
You don't get it if you haven't experienced how tiresome it is to see long-running subcultural feuds shitting up whatever conversation you'd like to be having.
It's amazing how long Reddit existed before rolling out a mobile app. Now I'll finally have something other than Facebook to check compulsively on my phone.
It's become noticeably buggier since the acquisition, in my opinion.
This isn't their first mobile application, it's their new one. The original one is six years old:
Other link aggregators like inbound.org or growth hackers are definitely prettier, but I have to focus and slow down to understand all the submissions.
Many perfectly valid posts are removed by mods, there was recently linked a version of the homepage based on votes alone and something like a third of the posts were deleted. I would much much prefer something more organic where what the people declared good was shown, and that power largely stripped from the mods/admins.
Just look at how incompetently the site was redesigned: https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile/issues/247
45 seconds load time...
There's also the tiny buttons(obviously not mobile-first, even if it is a mobile-only redesign).
And of course, the poster child of "we are doing complex JS stuff, but still think that JS is for kids, so we didn't bother learning how to actually do it". I'm talking about the infamous "We built a single-page-app, but it doesn't always work right, and the back button is kind of broken, and it sometimes treats scrolling over a thing as clicking on that thing".
> "Recently we built an A/B testing system, which allows us to test changes to individual features scientifically, and we are excited to put it through its paces. "
Does this mean that Reddit made it all the way to 2016 without an A/B testing tool?!
You can still get feedback from users, and I would argue this is more important than automatically detecting which button has a 2% higher CTR.