Comment by shawnee_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shawnee_ | Hacker News Reader

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Reddit has an opportunity to do right everything that Twitter has done (and continues to do) wrong.

It took me about ten years to figure out that Twitter is a cesspool of useless noise and ego. Everybody tries to outdo each other with noise and follower count. What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities. (Although I actually like the new user profiles, since they tend to be secondary focus).

Twitter could have been something different, and I think that expectation for something more got priced into what it is valued at today. Based on Twitter's current market cap (12.12 billion dollars!) it's already overvalued by a LOT; and there's really nowhere else for it to go but down. Any new users it gets are just bots or other political warfare tools.

For me, the final straw was that Twitter wouldn't "verify" Ecosteader as a legit account. So I deleted my Twitter accounts, sold a small investment I'd opened a couple years ago, and now spend more of my idle time reading Reddit rather than Twitter. And I feel so much better for it...

A subreddit is far more useful than a hashtag... it has stay power, searchability, and (like Twitter) is the kind of place where people will vent and where companies can interact with customers / users. The key for Reddit, I think, will be to do what is right for its users to achieve information awareness... Conde Nast is a news platform, after all. Let's just hope they don't let themselves go the way of Yelp.

Reddit is only marginally better than twitter.

* They're launching new user profiles that center around the user; see the Washington post's Reddit account

* Reddit's model of communities is fundamentally broken. Each sub, unless STRONGLY curated like AskHistorians, develops its own hivemind. Post against the grain and receive downvotes, then take the downvote train as people LOVE to pile on downvotes.

* Reddit's upvote / downvote system is fundamentally broken. Easy to parse, light content or quips / jokes get hundreds of upvotes while actual, informational but boring responses get buried way below.

* Reddit has BLATANT advertising masquerading as user posts to big subs like Pics or MildyInteresting, or TodayILearned. Perfect usage of brand names, convenient brand symbol or product positioned perfectly, etc. And somehow posts that are straight up advertising get thousands of upvotes quickly.

* Reddit has done nothing about certain subreddits automatically banning people who post in X Y Z other subreddits, regardless of the content of their response.

* Their CEO, Spez, shadow edited people's comments in the_donald without telling anyone. Ellen Pao even commented on this and nothing fucking happened.

Etc. there are plus sides to reddit, but very few subs worth commenting in unless you have the popular opinion.

Regarding the third point, although it might be fundamentally misaligned with what you want to read, the Reddit system does do a very good job at highlighting what most people want to read (for better or worse.)

> What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities.

I think they've been trying to change that recently; they've been focusing more on content creators - people like Shitty_Watercolour who are known Reddit-wide for the original content they post. As you noted, they launched a new type of profile which basically turns it into a subreddit, which they're pushing as a way for content creators to post their works easily.[0] The feature is still being developed but is now available to more people.

To be clear, the feature is a good one in concept, but I think the fact that they chose to market the feature this way as opposed to marketing it as "bringing old-school link blogs back" or similar says a lot about how Reddit wants to change its image.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/60p3n1/tldr_...

I think they've been trying to change that recently; they've been focusing more on content creators - people like Shitty_Watercolour who are known Reddit-wide for the original content they post. As you noted, they launched a new type of profile which basically turns it into a subreddit, which they're pushing as a way for content creators to post their works easily.[0] The feature is still being developed but is now available to more people.

To me that feature just looks like a way to add RSS/ RSS-like functionality to links a user wants to share or posts a user has participated in... it can be used for self-promotional purposes, but it doesn't have to be.

Plus, it's pretty similar to registering r/username, which is something that a lot of these "power users" already do.

My biggest complaint (and something I worry about when they talk about redesigning/reimplementing the site) is that the page just isn't all that great.

It's slow to load (where the old overview page was pretty much instantaneous), lacks features (though two more clicks will get you back to the superior overview page), and at least to my eyes, it's even uglier than normal reddit (though admittedly this is mostly subjective).

If this is what happens when they roll out new features, I worry that the rest of the site will wind up like it once they do their redesign.

Not that it has any impact on the validity of your statement but it's a funny coincidence that shitty_watercolour retired from reddit only a couple weeks ago.

I think you're thinking of 'a wild sketch appeared', unless they both recently retired

> It took me about ten years to figure out that Twitter is a cesspool.

Reddit has similar problems

> What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities.

This is an advantage for twitter in many ways, people want to follow and interact with other credible people not with a bunch of random people with no credible experience discussing a topic on reddit

> Twitter is a cesspool of useless noise and ego

That's what Reddit has been, in my humble opinion, since I've started using it - since 2005.

Country subs, most of the most famous subs, pretty much everywhere - it's just a lot of nonsensical quips, flame wars, karma hoarding (Reddit has a different unparliamentary word for that starting with "w"), the ubiquitous herd-mentality - one comment (mostly a "quip" reply) that came early gets bigger and bigger and everything else takes naturally a back seat, your very genuine doubts, points getting downvotted to oblivion sometimes for no apparent reason. It's a big list I believe.

Yes, there are subs which are good and can actually mean some meaningful interaction but it's not very proper to always call reddit right or better than Twitter or any other medium by referring to those few subs like /r/TrueFilm [0], then there's /r/DepthHub and /r/TrueReddit which are supposed to be "good" reddit but there are just no interactive discussions there they usually connect to popular comments usually highly gilded and popular ones.

Initially /r/ImAA seemed promising but that's just a PR board or been reduced to it. No, candid conversation (and I don't mean masala and gossip and scandal) is as rare as it gets. Places like /r/AskHistorians are as difficult to start participating that you just give up in the first go - it doesn't at all encourage participation; you don't know who you will flare up with your seemingly innocuous comment. At many places Reddit makes being a newbie almomst a crime and then there's instant justive too.

Reddit, for me, is mostly about what I have mentioned above and mod ego, monopoloy and knee jerk reactions and botached interventions by admins if at all they do. Abuse goes unchecked which is compounded by the herd-mentality. Like really unchecked and it's a hell for female users. The famous Reddit saying goes like "There are no girls on the Internet" and whenever a user is indentified as one it's almost unlivable there for them. And then there's doxxing.

Reddit sometimes works for just a lurker whenever I need something and it has it. Or a casual browsing for few minutes here and there.

[0] Conincidentally when I opened it there's this post from a day ago - https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/6hg21r/the_declin...

> "There are no girls on the Internet"

Pretty sure that's actually 4Chan originally.

Yeah, this has been a 4chan thing since the mid 2000s. Guess this is a sign of its lack of relevancy these days.

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