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Reddit is the worst. I created a sub that ended up becoming a default (/r/lifeprotips) and ended up getting banned when I tried to promote a site that I built (which was my original intention with the idea). They banned me because I had adsense on the site (funny because Imgur was/has been the golden child for reddit and they've had advertising for quite a while).

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.

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> Reddit is run by a bunch of leeches who rely on moderators to create content and never reward them.

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.

> submit/upvote/downvote flow was so novel

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.

They didn't change the UX and tank their site. That was their innovation, if we are being honest.

That was a weird moment, Reddit's September as everyone flooded in.

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.

Digg could have survived if it iterated I think.

Digg threads become too full and the model just didn't scale up. A thread with 10k up votes and 1000 comments is not inviting to new users. A stupid or insightful comment on such a thread will be completely ignored if it wasn't the first post.

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.

> Reddit has thousands of small communities

Was that true at launch? I thought that was added later, but can't remember.

It was present during the diggsplosion, which is when it mattered.

It was added after about a year or so, and there was two real driving forces behind it. The first was that people started using 'tags' in their submission titles to do things like "Ask Reddit" and also that the main page started getting overrun with Ron Paul tributes because apparently he was the second coming of Christ and would be the panacea that the US needed.

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).

IMO, 50 000 subscribers is about the tipping point for subreddit quality. Beyond that number things start to go down hill real fast. You also don't want too few subscribers, however, or there will be too little new content posted. At about 10 000 subscribers, the amount of posts should be high enough that there's always something to see.

The one exception to that, that I've found, is /r/homebrewing. It's >100,000 now, but is still a great community.

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.

Digg was great for bloggers around 2005. I created software to add hundreds of friends per day (I think the limit was 250..and the only way to do efficiently was with software).

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.

I really liked Slashdot's moderation system. Not everybody got to moderate. You got selected at random. Being able to moderate felt much more like a privilege than a right and I took it much more seriously than I do on Reddit.

And I genuienly hated it.

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.

The other thing about slashdot that's nice is you can't moderate a discussion in which you're taking part.

So the fate of a conversation is shaped by the people who are most likely to know absolutely nothing about the topic at hand (or they would have contributed to the thread).

But is that a problem? You don't usually need technical expertise to judge whether someone is speaking in a productive way or not. The purpose of moderating a conversation isn't to try to remove technically incorrect arguments, surely? It's to stop conversations from being derailed by snarky, aggressive comments, or outright trolling, etc.

> The purpose of moderating a conversation isn't to try to remove technically incorrect arguments, surely?

... 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.

There are reasons why a calmly-spoken lie is more welcome than a shouted thing-the-shouter-is-really-sure-is-a-truth: the lie can be challenged in a productive conversation, the "thing" can't. We all _think_ we've got the truth on our side, you know: your opponents aren't going to be persuaded by you bluntly shouting your arguments at them, any more than you would be persuaded by them bluntly shouting their arguments at you. What can we do about this situation? We can either hive off into separate bubbles, where we rely on the "moderation" of like-minded friends to remove "incorrect" arguments of the opposition, or we come together and make an effort to talk to each other productively and understand each other. The second option is _really difficult_, particularly in anonymous internet forums. But I think it's worth striving for: one of the greatest advances civilisation has offered is the ability to consider which argument is best through rational discourse rather than a shouting match. This requires civility, though, because people shut down if they feel they are being treated dismissively.

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.

HN simplified that with up-votes only.

Next: implicit up-vote by following link.

HN has downvotes once you have a certain amount of karma

On stories too?

Oops, no I don't think so

yes, that was my point. but i see some people weren't aware of it, which could explain the (demonstration of) downvoting.

I really like the idea of measuring content quality by objective metrics, like time on page, or even eye tracking.

I'm a little frightened by what we might learn about our implicit attitudes, but I think it'd be a fun experiment.

>Reddit is the worst.

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.

Can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but you should be weary of the information you read on Reddit. A lot of people simply rehash untrue statements they've heard on Reddit before. I'd say this is true anywhere but Reddit seems to be exceeding prevalent.

Anyone who believes something at face-value is asking to be deceived. I think reddit is truly great at playing to the common denominator. Whether that is good or bad, I do not know.

I think you're oversimplifying an extremely large and complex thing. How does a post like this "play to the common denominator"? https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/3y3fj...

I said "I think" which I hope was interpreted to mean it was my subjective opinion. There are some great things to be found in reddit, but immaturity is rampant along with one of the strongest examples of groupthink. this is just my opinion though. No statements of fact here.

I do the same. For pretty much any topic there's a decent subreddit with a community of people involved in it, who did lots of research and collected relevant information in various FAQ / Wiki posts. Whenever I want to seriously learn something outside of programming, I usually search for a subreddit on it.

You tried to use their site to promote your site and they banned you? And then you threatened legal action to get them to take down an image that you yourself posted?

I took a survey of what was lacking on the subreddit at the time and there were plenty of things that were suggested that I thought I could build/provide.

> And then you threatened legal action to get them to take down an image that you yourself posted?

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.

> absent any other agreement

The user agreement includes perpetual, irrevocable license to reproduce content you submit to Reddit.

Depending on how that's worded, and how "submit" is defined, that may or may not apply. We're talking about theming a subreddit, not submitting content as part of a regular reddit submission.

Does that mean if you link to a website, they own that code?

The link itself (and the title) is the submission, not the site that the link goes to.

> You tried to use their site to promote your site and they banned you?

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.

As far as I know they try to deny self-promotion because it leads to a flood of people posting crappy content because it will make them money, rather than good content because it is good.

It's definitely sometimes difficult to enforce & sometimes poorly enforced.

There was a case of theoatmeal.com a long time ago.

They supported the user submitting content even though it was his own.

The guy who runs the youtube channel Smarter Everyday has his own subreddit and promotes it regularly.

to be fair, both oatmeal and smarter everyday didn't start a community on reddit, wait for it to grow, and then try to divert that community into their own sites (as planned all along)

I think one key difference, as far as Reddit is concerned, is that for things like Smarter Everyday the "relationship," if you could call it that, probably drives more of Smarter Everyday's traffic to Reddit than it pulls from Reddit over to Youtube. People go to Reddit to talk about SED videos and suggest content and ideas because it's a better communication platform than Youtube provides. This is, of course, totally in line with what you're saying.

I have mixed feelings about reddit but mainly positives. One, it is the main driver of traffic to my blogs because there are specific subreddits with very focused audiences about these topics.

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.

I'm working on a site: https://skimur.com

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.

Interesting idea, but right now this is just a self-hosted instance of Reddit, is it not? How do you plan to develop the idea further and (most importantly) attract actual visitors/users?

voat.co is already a good alternative.

If you don't mind digging through blatant racism.

The problem with starting a community made of the banned members of another

C# based and struggling to keep up with load, last I saw

The "next big thing" won't have voting. It's too easily gamed and leads to groupthink in the worst way.

Inb4 "HN has voting but no groupthink". It has both in large quantities.

I've always had the idea for a comment system where you can only down vote with a comment on why, and that comments down vote power depends on its votes.

Reddit has so many users that it always has to behave as the most common lowest denominator dictates, to survive this that CLD has to stay away from your subreddit, consciously ("I understand I'm not smart enough to talk here " or subconsciously "I don't care about this"). Otherwise it just goes to shit.

Banning sites for having AdSense is extremely hypocritical, Reddit lives thanks to ads or cohercing users to remove them ("gold")

I know it sucks, and I'm not saying their policy is best. But they do get a huge number of spammers and people self promoting their own websites.

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.

Reddit is run by a bunch of leeches who rely on moderators to create content and never reward them.

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/

This is very interesting and I think there might be something here with this idea.

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?

I'd imagine it's similar to how YouTube works. You're self employed/independent contractors and need to sort your own taxes and everything as you would in any other similar position

Is lifeprotips.com the site you were trying to promote? I see that the banners are really similar.

Correct.

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