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Comment by exelius | Hacker News Reader

Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you.

It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects.

I’m still skeptical of Reddit’s ability to turn a profit. But as a community platform it’s the best out there IMO.

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As an immigrant with no family to rely on in the US, I always give credit to Reddit for helping me learn so many things from buying old/used car, applying to grad school, to looking for an apartment. Just like you said, its diverse user base means it has almost all the information one needs. I hope it never changes (although with the recent re-design, I'm afraid it might have unintended repercussions...)

As a native-born American with all of my family in the US, I use Reddit for the same category of things too :)

As a dead animal carcass whos insides are torn out and spewed out along the side of the road, I wish I could use reddit for similar, yet somewhat more distant categories too ^.^

That’s a strange fursona...

This made me lol at work. Don't know why this is getting downvoted

Your first phrase answers the second. Humor is only upvoted in HN if it provokes a wry smile.

Too busy changing the world for the better to smile.

s/changing the world for the better/chasing those sweet adtech dollars/g

Is anyone else cynical about this phrase?

Changing the world inside the box of the status quo.

How many stars do I have to give my Uber driver till they get paid sick days, paid vacation, healthcare and a pension?

> How many stars do I have to give my Uber driver till they get paid sick days, paid vacation, healthcare and a pension?

I don't think there's a checkbox for that. It will need some -shudder- regulation to take care of that one.

I often use reddit as a search engine for answers with a "human touch" for lack of a better word. I once did this with del.icio.us back in the "social bookmarking" days. I'm curious if this is a big use case for Reddit users do this too?

Maybe not based on the low quality of their search engine...

I frequently do the same with "site:reddit.com" searches on Google for "human touch" answers. I do the same thing with Hacker News for technical topics.

I just learned a powerful searching tactic! Thanks for the tip!

Indeed, I use reddit whenever I

a) Plan to learn/read something new

b) Just finished a book/tv series and want to connect with others around it.

c) Looking for recommendations in various genres

Daily news/connecting with people/cat videos are very far away from my use case. Just append "reddit" to qoogle search query and 9 times out of 10, I am golden.

I think the focus on the toxic user base is an artifact of the idea of one-dimensionally categorizing people based on their political ideology. That is such a hot button right now that it completely overshadows all other contributions to society in most forums. Reddit, by allowing some bad behavior and anonymity diffuses that ever present political aspect of modern life.

The kind of toxic people we are talking about on Reddit are not toxic for their politics. Racism, bigotry, and misogyny are not political topics. It isn't like tax policy or any other topic that can be debated. There is one clear side that is wrong.

On top of that, said toxic people usually start harassing other users.

Racism, bigotry and misogyny are politics. You perfectly demonstrate my point in that you hold the political aspects above all other aspects in determining the validity of an entire persons life and contribution to society because of the ideas they express. For example, Roseanne making one tweet and ruining her whole career. Reddit doesn't force that sort of political conformity on people.

If you think Roseanne's sins were limited to a single tweet, you're woefully uninformed on the matter. It was the sum of all of her past transgressions, the tweet was merely the straw breaking the camel's back, surprisingly. I would have thought it was the Nazi cookie photoshoot.

The one she, a Jewish woman, did for a Jewish satire magazine?

... which makes it okay because ...?

Have you heard the phrase "know your audience"? A professional comedian should. Because if they don't, they might not produce any laughs. And if they can't do that, how are they going to get paid?

One tweet? No no... that isn’t what happened. She crapped out a hundred tweets today alone, but let’s look back.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/05/29/rosean...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/arts/television/twitter-p...

Just a list of mad shit from her: https://www.buzzfeed.com/marcusjones/roseanne-barr-tweets-th...

Wow, what a disingenuous comment.

So there's no debate to be had on affirmative action, and everyone who supports it is racist and wrong? Plenty of people I know consider it racist.

The reality is, how people and groups define terms like racism, bigotry, and misogyny is often very politicized.

Sure? You'll find tons of /relatively/ civil and non-toxic discussions of the issue on places like CMV. Toxicity comes into play when the trust that all parties are having an honest discussion break down and everyone believes everyone else is speaking with the two sides of their mouth.

I feel like CMV is overrated.

Agreed. The dialect is structurally skewed. I commented in more detail a while ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15098541

It is possible to have a civil discussion about things like affirmative action or immigration policy. Many reasonable people can disagree on those issues (racists just happen to have very strong opinions on these issues). You are being naive if you think everything that is labeled as racist on Reddit is part of a normal civil discussion. Subreddits like /r/Coontown and the many-headed hydra that pop up whenever those subreddits are banned are not looking to civilly debate these policies. They are looking to spread hate. Hate is not a political opinion. Hate is not worth tolerating.

I think you're getting closer to a more useful definition of "toxic" here than your original comment where you asserted "There is one clear side that is wrong".

The problem with this latter/original assertion is that you are at once acknowledging that there are "sides" and, therefore, a debate to be had but at once shutting it down as not worth having. Obviously, with this comment, it's clear you don't actually believe that, though.

> They are looking to spread hate.

Here's where I think you get closest to the root of what I think is the real origin of online toxicity. For lack of a better term, I think it's trolling for emotion.

I'm not convinced that even what you're saying, that they're looking to spread "hate", is strictly true, but I do agree that they're looking to invoke a strong emotional response, whatever that may be.

I'm pretty sure that some trolls don't even believe in the "side" they claim to support. The message doesn't even have to stand up to rational scrutiny, so it need not even have a true side.

> Hate is not a political opinion. Hate is not worth tolerating.

To the extent that such strong emotional response serves to shut down conversation, it's toxic, and I agree it's not worth tolerating.

However, I think it's dangerous to apply such broad labels, especially if it's focused on the opinions (e.g. racism) rather than the behavior (e.g. appeal to emotion).

The "they're looking to invoke a strong emotional response" echos the conversation on What Is A Troll on Meatball wiki ( http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/WhatIsaTroll ) which starts out with:

> Trolls generate emotions in others while not investing any on their own side. In real life you could not escape from the emotions of your peers — if they are angry you would be physically insecure so there is a BalancingForce, but in CyberSpace you can feel safe. Additionally electronic communication is known to amplify emotions. Those two features collaborate to make trolling so demolishing. When you analyze this phenomenon you need also take into account that very angry people have their thinking under an AngryCloud — so the troll with cool mind always has the advantage over the angry community members.

There's also a passage from Anti-Semite and Jew by Sartre. Page 13 touches on this:

> Never believe that anti‐ Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Should subreddits about thug-rap be worth tolerating? Do you think those lyrics spread "hate"? Are you equally vocal about those particular subreddits?

you sure seem fond of that word "thug".

>So there's no debate to be had on affirmative action, and everyone who supports it is racist and wrong?

ofc there is. But you can't deny that the people who often pop up in reddit discussions about race issues have no interest in actually debating, they just want to spread their hateful worldviews.

It has gotten better lately imo. /r/uncensorednews got banned a couple of months ago for example and that was a >100,000 subscriber sub run by an actual neo-nazi (/u/RamblinRambo3). It featured neo-nazi imagery such as the black sun and whatnot in its banner. Those people had no intentions of ever having a civic debate about affirmative action.

When people talk about racism on reddit, it's rarely about people who have informed opinions about affirmative action, but rather about people throwing around "WE WUZ KANGZ" comments and triple parentheses.

> So there's no debate to be had on affirmative action, and everyone who supports it is racist and wrong? Plenty of people I know consider it racist.

Let me guess: they're mostly white, and mostly male, and mostly of average- to below-average intelligence.

So, your comment is a pretty good example why I find Reddit such a toxic place. It's filled with absolute truths, and if you disagree you're a bot, a shill. You make a rational, logical, thoughtful comment but if you disagree with the "hivemind" someone else will just dismiss you with some dumb one-liner, eg. "How much does the FSB pay you?". Nowadays for example it's Russo/Sinophobia. I'm not talking about Trump supporters either, I'm talking about accounts which seem to be from every direction of the political spectrum repeat jargons and falsehoods without previously being given some critical thought into.

While we only hear about Russia's and China's cyber ops on western news outlets, whenever I look into Reddit it feels quite the opposite. It feels like the perfect place to foment war, jingoism and xenophobia. Just look at /r/worldnews.

Every topic has many side and those topics are very current issues in politics today.

The meaning of those terms are constantly changing.

Issue don't have a right or wrong side unless you have adopted a position.

So you’re agnostic on murder, slavery, torture of children and animals, and rape? Come on, we have tons of clear rights and wrongs, and the kind of absolute moral relativism you’re peddling is a smokescreen.

Moral absolutism can make it seem like you are on the right side of the debate even when the ground is shifting.

Lets take slavery as an example. Did you know that federal and state prisioners are forced to work for 30 cents or less an hour. If they refuse they get put in solitary. The average time someone is in solitary in the California prison system is 7.5 years. That is a form of torture. Slavery still exists lawfully so does torture.

Are you aware/against those forms of slavery/torture? Is everyone who is against slavery against this form? I think there is still some room for conversations around this issue and all of the other general topics.

I mean murder can be seen as a net benefit if someone murdered hilter before he took power.

Conflating legality with morality is silly.

Are you aware/against those forms of slavery/torture?

Yes, because there are some moral absolutes, which is why you retreated from a moral argument into a legal one.

>There is one clear side that is wrong.

You're doing a really good impression of the average toxic Reddit user.

I think this is the more important part of the quote:

> Racism, bigotry, and misogyny are not political topics.

Is there gray to any of those?

Yep, the UN classifies discrimination based on country of citizenship as racism (a.k.a xenophobia). Every rich country has all kinds of social benefits reserved only for citizens, and nobody is proposing the removal of these programs despite their racist underpinnings.

>Bigotry: noun. stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own.

Hmmm...

I think facebook is more toxic than reddit in some cases. We are just shielded from them as we don't interact with too many people on facebook

This has so much bigotry.

In your case it's always the side that don't agree with you that's wrong, isn't it? From my viewpoint, by holding strongly on your position, you are bigot no better that the racists fks on reddit.

It ain’t politics; it’s a particularly aggressive form of argumentation that holds no boundaries. Even the most hateful subreddit enforces standards (no doxxing, no brigading, etc) because if they don’t, they know the Reddit admins will shut them down or force them private (invite-only).

The subject matter of the sub doesn’t matter, the toxicity is in the methods.

> Reddit works because it’s anonymous

Are you sure there? Anonymity doesn't really exist anymore on the internet for the average person. Reddit has the illusion of anonymity which gives its users a false sense of privacy so they can act the way they truly are (parallels to Westworld if you watch the show).

It would be incredibly easy for Reddit to de-anonymize its user base, the same way Facebook was trying to do with medical metadata, and sell that info (at least for the US users, given GDPR in EU now)

Pseudonymous then.

P.s. Facebook doesn't sell data. It sells ads, targeted using the data it holds.

Facebook effectively sells data. It simply doesn't sell raw dumps.

The distinction isn't a minor one, but in this context it doesn't much matter. Reddit is unlikely to have the kind of quality data that facebook has to sell - directly, or indirectly.

I would say there are huge privacy differences between selling data and selling the right to advertise to their private data. The latter is quite a bit more privacy secure.

(Note, the Cambridge Analytica stuff happened in 2013 when Facebook was much more open with APIs using their data, since popular demand at the time was for FB to be less of a walled garden)

Even just targeted advertising is enough. Setup a campaign landing page for each campaign and anyone that clicks the link just exposed their gender or any other criteria you set up when defining the campaign.

> Reddit is unlikely to have the kind of quality data that facebook has to sell - directly, or indirectly.

It's a different kind of data. Spez claims to know his user's "dark secrets" and that can be an ad-tech advantage for Reddit. [1]

[1] https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows-y...

What if you use Reddit the way I do when posting anonymously: I post on throwaway accounts and delete the accounts every few weeks. The account names aren’t saved in the posts, and the posts aren’t linked in any visible way.

I’m sure Reddit has code in the back end to track people, but afaik thanks to Reddit’s general lack of ads, there just aren’t a ton of DMPs, so there aren’t a lot of data points to correlate with.

IP, browser signature, topic browsing patterns, linguistic mannerisms. Not too hard.

I think GP meant anonymous to other users - not Reddit itself.

Not too hard for reddit, hard enough for the average user. This means that for the purposes of having a conversation with someone else, you're basically anonymous. It's the same level of anonymity that web forums had back in the day before all user-created content started ending up on Facebook and it's progeny.

Right but I think their picture will be disjointed and incomplete. Something like 99% of all users are lurkers who never post a single comment.

If you are mostly a lurker that probably works great. But I have found that the most influential/upvoted posts tend to come from established accounts with higher karma.

Just like Twitter; but most of those millions of eyeballs aren’t posting anything.

There are several sites out there that archive reddit threads. Someone could still find the account name to a comment.

That said, using accounts with throwaway names will keep you pretty anonymous on its own.

I don't care it I am not anonymous to Reddit. I care that the average person, reading my comments, doesn't immediately know who I am.

You can make a new user account on Reddit in 30 seconds and don't even need an email (last I checked).

Pretty easy to maintain a significant degree of anonymity by just deleting your account and making a new one.

With that said, most users are more concerned about being anonymous to their peers in conversation than they are to Reddit's administration itself, IMO.

Now they ask for e-mail before you can sign up, but you don t have to go to your inbox to activate you accounts so basically it's the same.

You can leave the email box blank and still sign up with only username and password with no problem.

It's a dark pattern. They pop up a dialog with just an email field and a [Next] button. Makes you think you have to enter something before you proceed. But you can leave it blank and move to the username/password stage.

Why is that a dark pattern? Seems the same as almost every other site, except with the relaxation of the requirement for an email

Notice all the sibling comments that insist the email is required now? It’s an understandable misread of that sign up flow. Only one field and then a Next button.

Almost no other input flow allows you to hit “next” when the only form field hasn’t been addressed yet. Why not put username, password, and email on one page instead of splitting it up the way they do? Then you can mark the two fields as required and the third as optional.

You do need an email to sign up, although since they allow a user to be 'logged in' as more than one user at a time, they may allow more than one account per email address. And they don't do email confirmation, though. Maybe that's what you're thinking of.

>You do need an email to sign up

No you don't. You can leave the email box blank and sign up with no problems.

Not anymore.

This is not true!

Just to be sure I just tried it via iOS Safari and signed up for a new account by entering a username and a password. Left the email field blank. Works like a charm.

You're incorrect. You can leave the email field blank.

I've got about a hundred accounts and none of them were created with an email address.

I think he's right. There are so many features you can use to profile and de-anonymize a user, even if you're not running the servers.

People generally don't seem to appreciate the relationship between marginal information and statistical likelihood. ~87% of Americans are identified by DoB, zip code, and gender. That was about two decades ago. The state of the art today is going to make Cambridge Analytica look like the Post Office when it gets pulled out of the shadows.

I'm not talking about email, IP address or any other convenient mode of identification.

Think voting patterns, date/times active, submission categories, comments, writing style, punctuation ...

Facebook had a project to cross-reference user behavior to anonymized medical data. Say patient A's history says he visited a foreign country in the Mediterranean, came back with the stomach flu, was hospitalized for 3 days ... Maps to: holiday photos, dates, locations, status updates, friends commenting get well soon etc.

I hear they were pretty successful at it too! Makes you think what a government actor can do with enough data.

> and relatively ad-free

The redesign that's currently in beta seems to mostly be driven by the desire to embed more ads. Instead of just one ad at the top of the page, there's new several spread throughout the feed, very similar to Twitter's promoted tweets.

I didn't visit the site in while since the last "sub cleanse" made really obvious the direction they where steering to, today i saw it due to a google search and the new "Facebook-esque" layout made me throw up a bit in my mouth.

The move in general is to shift from a fixed impression number when you hit a page, to a constantly increasing impression number as you scroll, with other changes made to increase scroll depth (and thus more impressions).

I'm just waiting for them to add auto-play muted videos to the feed so they can charge those higher video CPMs.

I think the uptick in visits is just people clicking "back to old reddit" on every page... why isn't there a global setting to disable this "new" reddit abomination...?

Yeah. And this is why Reddit's slow change to a more Facebook type setup is so risky for them right now. What the administration seems to want and what the users want are odds here, and the former seems to be on the verge of driving away the latter because of it.

It’s going to blow back on them.

The user experience is significantly worse. The entire goal is to reduce information density to cram in more ads.

Guess they didn’t get the memo that this transformation is exactly what drove users away from Facebook.

I think that the industry has not yet solved the question of how to keep a social network interesting when it becomes mass-market.

The problem is that the kind of content and discussion which appeals to everyone also appeals to noone. The biggest common denominator is small.

Networks like Reddit and Facebook are born in a niche and this niche audience is what keeps the quality of content high.

Once the niche gets bigger and bigger, the quality of the content goes down. And the network suffocates.

Small reddit communities are drama free and non toxic and also anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. I think at 100K+ subreddits start breaking apart and toxic voices and groupthink take over.

> Reddit’s ability to turn a profit

Maybe our society should recognize that some platforms should be treated as utilities, impose a small tax ($5? 0.05%?) which individuals can dedicate to a platform of their choice, and keep these vital forums away from crushing forces of market?

Wikipedia does well with a periodic fundraiser. Hi Jimbo!

Could Reddit do similarly? Style itself as mostly a service and not especially profit-driven?

Hi, I'm @spez. By Creddits this week to help Reddit meet its quarterly fundraising goal! We've gamified it a little ...

In EU many governments force you to fund state TVs you never watch; instead giving portion of that to a site (or sites) of your choice could be preferable.

Technology allows high productivity and efficiency.

Ads have cognitive cost that users pay for the service. Price competition in free service means annoying users less with ads. If there is competition and innovation in social media works, it has the potential to become the lowest profit margin business sector ever existed once it matures. Wast volumes and very thin profit margins.

They've banned so many of the toxic people that Voat, Gab, phuks et. al. have pretty much become toxic cesspools of ostracized communities.

> Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects.

The problem with Reddit's toxic user base is that they're only concerned with blocking bad actors on one side of a subject. They've repeatedly turned a blind eye to the open doxxing and brigading from SRS, and the complete takeover of the politics subreddit by CTR.

Do you believe that the majority of reddit users are "toxic"? I wouldn't describe myself as a heavy user of reddit but I almost never come across "toxic" behavior. I follow sub-reddits like personal finance, VR and phillips hue lighting. There just isn't much "toxicity" in there as far as I can tell.

I think you're being a little bit disingenuous here. Not everybody only subscribes to a bunch of niche subreddits with good moderation. A lot of the larger / less strictly moderated subreddits are filled with toxicity, bots, and other nonsense.

Yeah and right now they’re trying to change more than one to fail faster.

Has Reddit tried “periodic fundraisers” like public TV and Wikipedia?

Yeah.

Reddit Gold used to go into funding infrastructure. Gold buyers used to be able to name servers and all.

I have always been wondering, would people choose to pay reddit instead of getting ads, like 1$ or 10$ a month?

This is effectively what Reddit Gold is. In a perfect world, Reddit would be completely funded through Gold, therefore eliminating the pressure on higher ups to increase revenue through ads or other less than ideal revenue streams.

Unfortunately, Gold has not been enough to fund the site (if the sidebar on the front page is to be believed) for a long time.

reddit gold is voluntary tho, I was wondering what if you force it like when you enter reddit it make you choose between spending x$ or accept ad, I wonder if people will still use it?

They would not.

Why would people do either of those things when ad-blockers exist?

Possibly naive question: how does reddit make money, and how's it going for them? Ads, promoted content, reddit gold... Is that it?

I knew they were purchased by Conde Nast, then spun off at some point? Are they owned by VC now, or something?

>Reddit works because it’s anonymous //

Yet I presume the majority of the drive to make users use the app is in order to deanonymise them and associate their input with a real person?

>I’m still skeptical of Reddit’s ability to turn a profit. //

The reason it fits in with a media conglomerates portfolio must be influencing and profiling, no? Such profits aren't direct, they're through things like tax regimes tailored to the overlords, political systems that serve your needs, etc.. That's the media tycoon game isn't it?

Reddit is now adding profile info and friends and such. Unfortunately.

The last thing it needed was that. Those just amplify the thundering herd problem.

Better than than lose all of their sub-communities to discord.

Friends have been a feature for years

I imagine useful-but-not-inherently-profitable stuff like this would be supported voluntarily by its userbase. And if you're as popular as Reddit, I guess there must be a couple of big patrons whose support alone is bigger than the upkeep costs.

Moderators volunteer hours of labor at least

> drive away the toxic users

I am surprised there isn't some kind of NLP based solution for that. I think labeling of slashdot-like informative/funny would be useful.

What does "toxic user" mean in this context? How do they differ from a "non-toxic" user?

It's vague but real.

Maybe someone who makes the experience miserable for other users? Or is destructive / harassing / mean-spirited?

It strikes me as a term where everybody thinks they know what it means but if you drill down most people just made up their own definition and there's no agreed-upon definition.

While everybody agrees that toxic users are bad and you probably should get rid of them, many would really disagree on who the toxic users actually are.

My made-up-on-the-spot definition would be: "Everybody who hinders business interests."

May it be by hindering user growth or even causing user loss. For example making large groups of users feeling uneasy in some way. For example using bad words or posting bad ideas or even purposefully provoking users or user groups.

Or by hindering revenue streams for example by advocating ad-blockers or making the advertisers or other money sources feeling uneasy.

Or other reasons.

Sometimes it's just people that don't participate in the echo chamber.

Surely it should be possible to run something like Reddit at a profit? Run it with like 50 people. And not necessarily in SF. I think that's doable if you're happy with where the site is, product-wise.

Just googled quickly and found a figure of 250 employees from last year.

Right; if you run the Craigslist model.

Reddit has been more interventionist with content, which means they need more people to manage the community. I would guess they have all the developers they need...

I don't get the impression they are spending a whole lot on community management.

In a way, that's a big part of what I see as their largest problem - they are relying on the zeal of the subreddit moderators to work for free. (They should have a model which allows moderators for large subreddits to get paid. And for the subscribers to vote for moderators.)

This is why the large subreddits are so incredibly polarized in either left or right directions - the moderators are not paid to deal with things fairly, they are there spending their time working free - the only benefit they get is that they get to enforce their particular political choice onto others in their subreddit.

Look at e.g. r/politics and r/the_donald as extreme examples of what I'm talking about.

I would go so far as to say that while the moderators of most major subs may have started as volunteers, they are almost certainly on someone’s payroll now as “social influencers”.

This includes the political subreddits (actually especially the political subreddits). It’s legitimate user posts and discussions filtered by whoever has the coin to rent access to those moderators.

There's also been a few accusations of r/tesla moderators being on payroll (can be read at r/realtesla).

I know someone who is a mod for a couple major subs and he absolutely does paid placements (he has his own bot network for everything, but being a mod his shill posts don’t get deleted).

Mods don’t necessarily use their mod power itself for profit, but knowing how the sub works and what users like is very powerful. So is ignoring obvious upvote botnets because they belong to you or another mod.

The inevitable conclusion I come to:

Something like reddit2 should be run by a minimalist apolitical company.

They should work on building some kind of democracy in each sub-reddit, based on some factors (where "participation quality" is one important factor). If the users are unhappy, they should be able to call for an election, etc.

The reddit2 company should focus primarily on keeping the platform alive and on fighting bots. And on tuning the scoring model.

They should be financed in some way that doesn't depend on the content. Be it individual contributments, random, anomymized advertisments etc.

The company should try to hire apolitical engineers and managers. People who just care about solving an engineering problem.

Tildes [0] may grow to align with much of what you're looking for here, maybe not.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093

Not sure about the second one. Isn't Reddit's whole point that volunteer moderators and community founders moderate the content, not a centralised moderation team? Honestly, I'd expect them to spend less on that stuff than something like Facebook or Twitter, since the users do a decent enough job of removing the truly objectionable posts anyway.

Honestly, it should be possible to run MANY internet services at a profit if you keep your costs low and stop throwing money at every little irrelevant thing. Reddit, Medium, Twitter... all of them probably could have been profitable businesses if their founders ran them out of a normal office, with normal staff salaries (not in the hundreds of thousands of dollars), with less staff and with less money spent on office perks and what not.

Does every business need to be some huge deal with thousands of staff and huge offices and tons of perks and a staff cafe now?

The problem is not the salaries or the perks that drives the unprofitability, it's simply the investment model. If you're backed by venture capital, you're goal is to get to an exit 500x larger than the investment ($2M round; VCs don't invest unless they think they may make $1B+). That requires people to focus on growth and world-eating more than any respectable-in-the-moment profitability numbers.

Generall that's the case, but not for reddit though, right?

Well kind of...if you're in the Bay Area, you need to be able to compete for engineers with the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook etc. No perks == no employees. Why should I go work at your crappy startup when I could live the life of luxury at one of the FANGS.

Surprise: You don't need to be in the Bay Area to build/run world class companies/products. Maybe sometimes to build, but definitely not to run.

I think a lot of people would be very interested in a job posting with a tagline like: "We don't have ping pong or topo chico; we have eight hour workdays".

If I saw that, saw a clear description of the thing they're building and reasoned that it provides value to someone, I'd be over the moon.

I think you'd like working in Scandinavia.

Not true anymore. You need an email just to sign up now.

If an email is all they require, that seems almost like an intentionally low bar.

They don't even require that

At the time I'm posting this message, email is still not required. Just click 'Next' with an empty email value to skip that step during registration.

That's dark patterns 101, but technically it's not required.

Sneaky. Ty for this, I had no idea.

>Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects

Almost as if toxicity of a person is an integral part of their nature and politically correct spaces are detrimental to the discourse.

Toxicity is detrimental by definition, so not sure what you're getting at.

Detriment is wholly subjective here. When it comes to politics or social issues, people have different views on how society "should be", and those differences are offensive and considered toxic to the other side. In that sense, everybody is toxic and the label is meaningless and unactionable.

Obviously, most people hold beliefs of some form, and those beliefs will clash with others. Bandying around "toxic" as an absolute in those situations is narrow-minded and prejudiced. Reasonable people with contributions in one neutral area and one controversial area are lumped with this same label as trolls, doxers, and inciters of violence.

Specificity of labels is very important, especially when they are tied to consequences.

Where "toxic" can certainly be used is in relation to a certain goal, like reasonable level-headed discussion, or subscription to a certain worldview; instead of as absolute. Even actions like deliberate trolling aren't considered toxic on sites like 4chan, because that's part of their accepted and promoted culture.

I think the point is, much like offensiveness toxicity is something that is percieved and not objectively determined. Some users and groups may be perceived to be toxic, while much of the user base may consider it positive. Two examples would be the_Donald and /r/late_stage_capitalism. Lot of people think those subreddits are toxic, but lots of users also like and participate in those subreddits.

Is there even a definition to "toxicity"? I've just seen it used as a buzzword for "thing I don't like".

Safe spaces tend to turn into echo chambers. By reddit banning everything, they've effectively dictated the narrative that's currently found on the site.

> Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free.

Reddit is none of those now. It's not anonymous ( they track your identity and feed it to the government ). You may be "anonymous" to fellow users, but not anonymous to authorities. It isn't information dense. It's propaganda dense. Almost all the content there now is government, media, ngo, etc propaganda. As for ads, check out the videos, movies, music, etc subs when a particular movie, album, etc comes out. The frontpage will be littered with ad-like submissions ( aka ads ).

Reddit is 80% government, politics and news propaganda and 20% ads ( movies, music, etc ). I think you are confusing the reddit of 2011 with today's reddit.

> It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom.

Actually reddit could and did monetize "toxic content". How do you think reddit has been around for nearly 13 years? And once again, you are confusing reddit of 2011 to reddit of 2018. Today, reddit isn't any more "toxic" than twitter, youtube, facebook, etc. Reddit is heavily censored. Besides, on social media, you don't monetize content, you monetize eyeballs/clicks/data points.

> I’m still skeptical of Reddit’s ability to turn a profit.

Do you really think reddit is unprofitable? Let me guess, you think that youtube is not profitable right? You think these companies have been around for more than a decade because they are not "profitable"?

Their "hollywood" style accounting may make it seem like they are not profitable, but these companies are incredibly profitable. It's why youtube has a valuation over $100 billion and reddit's valuation is in the billions.

> But as a community platform it’s the best out there IMO.

Have to disagree with you there. Any garden variety forum is better than reddit. Also, reddit stopped being a community a long time ago.

I've stopped using it because it's all political nonsense or advertisements.

> Reddit is 80% government, politics and news propaganda and 20% ads ( movies, music, etc ).

I am a heavy Reddit user and I don't notice any of these things, except when I specifically go looking for them. Curate your subreddit list and unsubscribe from all the default subs - they are all garbage, and that isn't even Reddit's fault, it's just inevitable once they reach a certain size.

> I am a heavy Reddit user and I don't notice any of these things

You don't see politics related content on reddit daily? I used reddit since reddit was days old ( years before the digg migration ) so maybe we visited different websites.

> Curate your subreddit list and unsubscribe from all the default subs

That defeats the point of reddit doesn't it? Or what made reddit great. I never used reddit to be part of a bubble. Not only are default subs a bubble today, reddit itself is a bubble.

> and that isn't even Reddit's fault, it's just inevitable once they reach a certain size.

Actually it is reddit's fault. When they allowed and encouraged censorship, it allowed a small faction of political and news media/ngo affiliated mods to turn subreddits into their propaganda platform.

How do you avoid being in a bubble? Usually of your own creation. Whether it is curating the subreddits you see, or selecting the news sites you visit, you are only ever going to see a tiny fraction of what's going on in the world.

I skip pretty much all the political and news subreddits and stick to the focused communities that match my interest. Things like r/3dprinting, or r/omscs, etc. I find most communities are decent as long as they're not enormous. Any significant political content and I bail, I am just too tired of being reminded how horrible many people are.

> How do you avoid being in a bubble?

Simple. By exposing yourself to a variety of ideas, opinions, viewpoints.

>Whether it is curating the subreddits you see, or selecting the news sites you visit, you are only ever going to see a tiny fraction of what's going on in the world.

Hence why I never subscribed to a subreddit...

I disagree wholeheartedly.

> You may be "anonymous" to fellow users, but not anonymous to authorities. True, but this only matters to a very small percentage of its user base. A vast majority of people who use Reddit don't know or don't care about data collection. They only care if their friend/coworker/family can ID them from what they post.

>Reddit is 90% government, politics and new propaganda and 20% ads... The front page/top posts, maybe. 90% of the content doesn't reach the top of /r/all though. And I don't know if I consider what is popular/part of the echo chamber as an 'ad'.

>Do you really think reddit in unprofitable? Profitable or not, what's the difference? They've maintained a relatively ad free experience and don't expect you to 'pay to play'. Content isn't pay-walled. Yes they've made cosmetic changes to shift towards a more 'social-media' style experience, but the changes are not that bad and haven't drastically changed the user experience.

>Any garden variety forum is better than reddit. This is personal and can't be claimed with any objectivity. You may find that certain nice forums offer you more value, personally, but that doesn't apply to everyone.

In my experience, whatever shortcomings Reddit has are greatly outweighed by the information and entertainment I've received.

> It's not anonymous ( they track your identity and feed it to the government )

Are you referring to the missing warrant canary? That's about the time I stopped using Reddit, but I doubt they're selling data to the government. They're probably ordered to give out data due to National Security Letters.

> The frontpage will be littered with ad-like submissions ( aka ads ).

/r/hailcorporate is kinda interesting in that they like to point this out. It's not necessarily advertisers pushing their stuff, but a mix of regular users who just embrace consumerism and corporatism + ad bots. It's sometimes impossible to tell the two apart.

> Actually reddit could and did monetize "toxic content". How do you think reddit has been around for nearly 13 years?

I think OP is talking about all the now banned subs: /r/jailbait (and all the other bait subs), /r/niggers, /r/fatpeoplehate, etc. etc.

> Also, reddit stopped being a community a long time ago

I don't use Reddit anymore, except for local subs sometimes. The combination of the warranty canary and the mass bannings made me fed up. But what pissed me off the most was the CEO that edited comments in the database, and then kept his job with an apology. You should have to step down after that.

I agree though. Reddit isn't a great service. I hope we see more smaller sites based around the concept; maybe more Lobster instances for niche communities.

> Are you referring to the missing warrant canary?

That's certainly part of it. But even before then, reddit was sharing data with the authorities. Just like google removing "don't be evil" didn't mean that they weren't evil before they removed it. It just made it "official".

> I think OP is talking about all the now banned subs:

Right. And reddit was monetized while those subs were around.

> I don't use Reddit anymore, except for local subs sometimes.

The only time I check reddit is if there is a major news event, but the news and worldnews subs are now run by the news media employees, so it's all links to bbc, cnn, nytimes, etc, so even those subs are pointless now.

On the internet of 2018 sites like Reddit/FB/YouTube/Twitter are perceived to have VALUE to users for just one simple reason - instant validation of whatever bull is flitting thro their minds.

The like/upvote/view/retweet counts never existed next to every thoughtful or thoughtless utterances prior to these sites. Just as in the real world. And just as it should have been. Everything your mom says doesn't need a popularity score next it.

The ppl who defend these sites have blindly accepted that popularity scores next to every thought/speech/action have no downside.

These days I don't even expect them to overcome that blindness which is why comments like yours will always get down voted despite the common sense in them.

> Reddit is 80% government, politics and news propaganda

I don't think the list of top 50 subreddits [0] particularly supports that assertion.

[0] http://redditmetrics.com/top

> You may be "anonymous" to fellow users, but not anonymous to authorities.

reddit doesn't collect a large amount of information about users. They can give authorities the contents of your "private" messages and non-public subreddits, and your IP address. If you're making even a minimal effort to be anonymous, this will not be useful to the authorities.

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