How Reddit plans to make money through advertising | Hacker News Reader

How Reddit plans to make money through advertising

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201 pointselsewhen233 comments

It seems to me like they are deliberately sacrificing the old userbase for a younger, "more naive" audience. I moderate a medium-sized subreddit, and I am seriously considering just closing the thing down, because I'm not going to be willing to adapt my bots to a work with a crippled API (its bad enough as it is). And let's be real here, the API will be crippled in the near future. Do you really think you'll be allowed to have an ad-free and tracking-free experience in a third-party app when they are done with this redesign project?

* They went closed-source.

* They removed the cloudsearch syntax from the search API. That may not seem very signifficant since very few people used it for their day to day redditing. But this was the only way of acquiring submissions older than the most recent 1000 for any given subreddit. Now there is no way to obtain old data, short of searching for random keywords and checking the date. I guess they don't want you to benefit from the aggregated data.

* They abandoned iterative development to do a redesign-by-giant-committee. They are just pushing hostile shit and adjust if the complaints get too loud. That's a clear warning sign of things to come.

* They rolled out the redesign on wide scale while it was not even close to alpha state. Half of the endpoints just straight up didn't work, and the remaining half was broken, like flairs, rules, css, and basically everything else.

* The new system refuses to serve hosted image content to non-trackable clients (ie, you need img.png?sid=valid_sid to get image data). It also includes some rather hostile tracking technology, I forget the details but it was described in /r/privacy somewhere.

At this point, it seems like the best thing to do is to set my subreddits to private so at least I am not contributing to their $100M revenue... but yeah, unfortunately it sucks for the community (and possibly other mods interested to keep the place running), hard decision to pull the trigger :/

Session replay tracking might be what you were thinking of. WTF.

I've been on there for 10 years with 60k+ karma and I mod some subs also. I spend much less time on there now because of this crap. If I wanted FB or IG, I'd go there.

https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8mmybp/psa_the_red...

Edit, ps. I've come to realize that Reddit is all about the community, not the software, and it's still there (for now). Recent example: one of the Marvel subs (/r/thanosdidnothingwrong) is going to ban half its members, ~200k, as a fun joke, and they're all excited about it. But if the UI and the monetization pisses them off enough, they will flee.

Funny enough, that ban stunt is the first thing I thought of when I read the part of the article about pitching front page takeovers to brands.

I would like to plug notabug.io It isn't my site but I believe in the tech (peer 2 peer with voting done through crypt) and the philosophy

"I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug."

— Aaron Swartz (1986 - 2013)

Wow. I think it says something about how the community has already been altered or manipulated that this wasn't on the front page of the site. The reddit I joined years ago would have gone apoplectic. The new site is such a javascript spaghetti dish it won't even function without JS enabled, and with it enabled all of your keystrokes and mouse movements are collected. It really is frustrating to see the admins post time and again about "transparency" at reddit and then not clearly disclose a change like this to the community. Which, as other posters pointed out, fits the course for the redesign at large and the site's management over the last couple years.

Aside, I think it shows how much the growth of sponsored content on the front page and the death of IAMA has jaded me that when I saw multiple front page posts about "working with the admins" to ban half that Infinity War subreddit I assumed it was advertising related.

Sigh, you're probably right.

I was looking for an example of users being a fun bunch, but it could easily have been a marketing stunt with a little nudging. I've been mind controlled with the rest of the lemmings.

It's tough to decide! And I think the real problem is that it's tough to decide - the value of a platform like reddit is devalued when even the fun and cute things make you wonder if they're just mind control tactics.

> * They removed the cloudsearch syntax from the search API.

Didn't know that. That sucks. Is the massive dataset of reddit posts still on BigTable?

Showing the error "Unable to find table: fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2015_05" https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_c...

Wow. To be fair, lots of apps/sites scrape viral content from reddit. I can see the argument for why reddit would want to limit that access, but in reality it's a fool's errand in the same realm as Twitter restricting API access.

I'm not seeing an error; you may have to display the `fh_bigquery` project first.

You can just get the canonical dataset directly at data.pushshift.io. That's the origin of the BigQuery-hosted version.

The datasets are still available on BigQuery: https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit... https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit...

They are not owned by Reddit.

> They are not owned by Reddit.

You sure about that? I would bet that if reddit requested google take down the data, google would comply.

If not Reddit, then who owns it?

The individual users own the content they create. The Reddit TOS gives Reddit a broad license to use it but the content itself is owned by the users.

So who owns the dataset aggregated from all users?

More importantly, did the people running analysis on this dataset get explicit permission from the European post authors as required by the GDPR?

I mean the BQ datasets aren't managed by Reddit, they're sourced from pushshift, so Reddit wouldn't immediately take them down.

Whether or not Reddit could file a DMCA complaint to force it down is up for debate.

I am looking forward to the death of reddit because I think it can be done way better. One big thing I'd like to see changed is the very blunt upvote/downvote hammer that results in tyranny of the majority every time. Instead, I'd like comments to be sorted based on my "network of influencers", or users who I've rated positively...

Another thing I think should be changed is that mods shouldn't be all powerful and they shouldn't be able to just shut down.

> Instead, I'd like comments to be sorted based on my "network of influencers", or users who I've rated positively...

This would in essence create your personal echo chamber.

A lot of people do want echo chambers, and a lot of social media is designed to exploit this.

People tend to consider content that appeals to and reinforces their biases and desires to be more interesting, of higher quality and more trustworthy than content that doesn't.

Even self-described "free thinkers" tend not to want their beliefs challenged or to be moved from their comfort zone too much.

I’m not sure your latter statement is true. I’m a “free thinker” (whatever that is supposed to mean these days) and run in those circles. Most of us have jobs, so we only have the time to digest articles that take less than an hour to read except in rare instances.

I’m very open to other ideas and I actively manipulate the mechanisms on sites like Facebook to prevent being put in an echo chamber. But I am difficult to convince using emotional arguments and I also don’t have time to read a 900 page dissertation on my lunch break. Long form journalism is amazing though, but unfortunately rare and often now corrupted by bias.

Most people in my circle are in the same boat. We are all welcoming of total mental shifts if warranted by the data. We’re happy to entertain an idea long enough to get through a lengthy article even if we’re not sure of it. But if you start with trying to gut wrench you’ve lost us.

Unfortunately the majority of people respond more strongly to pithy memes and emotional appeals, so that’s most of what I see both from those who putatively agree with me and those who don’t. It takes extraordinary effort to find good arguments about anything being written/presented by anyone.

> Unfortunately the majority of people respond more strongly to pithy memes and emotional appeals...

This is why I want the described system. I can make it work for me by being selective about who or what I upvote.

(It wouldn't be just upvotes though. I'd like to apply all kinds of ratings. The whole point is that I'd be in control.)

I only have personal experience (and, admittedly, my own biases) to go by, but I suspect you're an outlier, and I'm referring to the norm, both within and outside the mainstream. I think the ways most people approach social media are the same either way, people want to be entertained and they want to feel emotionally validated.

It's fine if you don't spend all your time there. Sometimes you want to visit a familiar place and talk to familiar people.

Now that's a perspective I haven't thought of before.

They could make it so that the more time you spend on Reddit, the less control you get over your feed. I know it's a complete non-starter for business reasons, but it's an interesting thing to think about.

I don't know if a personal echo chamber is such a bad thing in a pseudo-anonymous internet community. Look at what happened to 4chan and voat, where a bunch a racists decided to take over those sites and it was relatively easy for them to do so. They destroyed whatever community was there before their takeover and now both of those sites are known as racist sites. Compare that to hubski, which has a built-in echo chamber mechanism (I think you when block someone, they can't respond to you), and it's much harder for the site to be taken over by an outside group. The community just blocks the outside group and the outside group just ends up talking to each other in their echo chamber.

Echo chamber usually means it merely reflects back what you emit -- that's a possibility, but personally I like inciteful or thought-provoking comments more than I like comments that agree with me, and seeing more of them is also possible: this is one of the reasons I hate that pg (and thus HN) promotes downvoting for disagreement, and basically censors (with near invisibility) dissenting voices.

My favourite system has been Slashdot because you could promote your view of (moderated, and meta-moderated) content voted to be insightful, say, whilst reducing viewing pure joke posts, and such. You could also boost/nerf particular voices.

Reddit is too much "cutesy animal" content, I wish I could filter all of that, it just doesn't amuse me.

Exactly, and this highlights what I've never understood about echo chamber arguments. You might genuinely like things that you learn from, things that change you. You might like a subject matter that encompasses a huge variety of types of content- for instance if you follow astronomy, and see an article about a new discovery, it seems like more is going on than a pre-existing belief being echoed back at you.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as echo chambers, but there's so much else going in when you engage with sources you select that doesn't have anything to do with whether a pre-existing belief is being echoed back to you.

Depending on how it's done. Hubski is pretty similar to Reddit, with a 'follow' mechanic to see content liked by certain people. It can easily be an echo chamber if you want that, but if you follow a good scattering of different people then it comes out much more varied than Reddit's hivemind outcomes.

Votes already create an echo chamber, but not a personal one. Which kind of echo chamber is better, who knows?

There's nothing wrong with that, considering everybody else is strenuously trying to pull you into theirs. Upvote/downvote brigades abound as well as the institutionalization of power-users.

We already build our own echo chambers with personalized multi-reddits (which I use to great effect, since the defaults are trash-tier) as well as the main sub-reddit subscription list. I quite like this idea.

Groups that try to pull you into their echo chamber almost always have dubious or selfish intentions, ranging from blatant advertising to astroturfing. This puts power back into the hands of users.

Communities become echo chambers when a tiny minority of people who have too much time on their hands monopolize discussions. I'd even argue that this is the primary mechanism of echo chamber creation. Other mechanisms like the one OP mentioned aren't that significant a contributor in creating echo chambers.

I think the percentage of the population that desire genuine and thought-provoking discussions may be smaller than those who simply want validation and being part of a like-minded group.

We are going to live in echo chambers no matter what. I'd rather live in my own echo chamber than the one that Facebook or the DNC or RNC or Fox News or some Washington think tank has built for me.

How about none of the above?

And how exactly do you extract yourself from a set of sources neither influenced by yourself or others? Not read news or forums at all?

By doing on your own research on issues you care about. If you have a strong opinion on something and you're only source of information is your own echo chanmber then you're just intellectually lazy.

If you don't want to put in the time then fine, but maybe you shouldn't hold a strong opinion one way or the other. Your own echo chamber is likely no better than any other.

"doing your own research" is by definition your own echo chamber.

I don't think that term means what you think it means.

I mean real research, e.g., quanifiable fact, scientific research. This is not your opinion, it's data, and data tells us things we didn't know before.

So who's responsible for removing the death threats, doxxing, hate speech, spam and other contaminants if not the mods?

Advogato tried the trust metric approach, but it now seems to be offline. https://web.archive.org/web/20161124203307/https://advogato....

IMO /. got right, more or less. Limited amounts of votes, can't vote and comment on the same topic, and both ups and down are hardcapped (-1 to +5, starting at 0 for anonymous, 1 for registered).

I just wish they never had tried to "modernize" their site, as the 2.0 commenting system is a downright mess.

Another large problem with /. is the ageing of their userbase. It's very overtly conservative, now, with few new users getting on board.

I'm not sure if that's (just) aging per se, perhaps Conservatives are, er, more conservative and so less likely to leave to find something else. That would leave older sites that were once the mainstream to become automatically more [C|c]onservative.

> mods shouldn't be all powerful

Modding is hard work; reddit barely provides the tools we really need. Note that _bionoid_ mentioned bots - you effectively need to use third-party tools to effectively moderate even a moderate sized sub.

I'm not sure what you mean by "just shut down", but the best subs tend to be the ones where rules are enforced strongly and consistently.

'Just shut down' might mean "the sub", not "conversation". I don't think mods need weaker tools, but there's definitely a fiefdom problem where mods can't be dislodged by any means. A pair of examples:

For years, the /xkcd subreddit was run by a group of Holocaust deniers, simply because they got there first when an old mod left. They censored content, linked to bizarre white supremacist garbage, and generally did the reddit equivalent of domain squatting. Experienced users went over to /realxkcd or something, while new users just wandered into the garbage fire. I don't think that's a free speech or mod tools issue, I think that's an 'unhelpful labelling' issue.

Another sub, I believe /frission, had a head moderator who had a drug trip or religious experience or psychotic break or something. He kicked out all the other mods, announced that the sub had "served its purpose" by guiding him to this moment, and declared that he would delete all posts and then take the sub private in 24 hours time. There was a massive archiving effort and pleading with the site administration, but ultimately the only thing that helped is somebody talked the guy into restoring one other mod who could avert the meltdown.

Broadly, I'd like to see reddit massively expand the bot api and in-house moderator tools, because it's a thankless job to do right. But I'd also like to see some form of administrative or community review for the cases where moderators go utterly off the rails and destroy subs - even something extreme like >95% agreement would have handled these cases.

> there's definitely a fiefdom problem where mods can't be dislodged by any means

That's true. I do wish there was a way to wrest control away from absentee mods - or something like your example - but I'm not sure how such a system would work in a fair, hard-to-abuse way.

And I completely agree with your last paragraph, with that caveat of needing to think very hard about how to make it abuse-proof.

I’m actually working on this. See ‘users controlling moderation’ section here: http://blog.getaether.net/post/175104485127/aether-news-upda...

You might be a fan of Hubski then - it's a pretty similar interface to Reddit, but in addition to a global top (i.e. frontpage) and tags (i.e. subreddits), you can follow other users and get a feed of the content they like. It's a pretty elegant approach, and helps you see a good range of content if you follow accordingly.

It's also a much better userbase to my mind, but that's probably a function of small size.

For some subreddits, the up/down point system can be pretty useful, there will some substantial comments that genuinely have better (or at least more) content than other comments.

But for the majority of subreddits, I have it sorted by newest comment first. I don't understand why social media sites today are moving away from that, 99% of high-scoring user-curated content just means it's a particularly popular or inciteful comment.

It doesn't promote good discourse if out of 10 comments, the one that naturally floats to the top is the most inciteful one.

> I don't understand why social media sites today are moving away from that

They don't want you to know when to stop looking. If they present feeds "newest first", you can move on as soon as you get to an item you've already seen. With a "curated" ordering, you never know when you'll see new content, so you keep scrolling (and thus providing them your interest data and looking at ads).

>inciteful

This is a very interesting word. I think you mean insightful, which is what people usually use to describe a clever or novel thought.

I've never seen the word inciteful before, but that would probably mean something that really riles people up and makes them angry. After rereading your last sentence, it seems like you actually meant inciteful, but it's not a word that's used very often.

https://notabug.io

https://github.com/notabugio/notabug

My goal is to replicate reddit, but the distributed nature of notabug would allow you to experiment with these ideas on your own peer, or possibly just a custom UI build.

Why would you close it? Aren’t the other users getting some value out of it?

Just as a small protest to the hostility, and to spread awareness.

> The new system refuses to serve hosted image content to non-trackable clients (ie, you need img.png?sid=valid_sid to get image data). It also includes some rather hostile tracking technology, I forget the details but it was described in /r/privacy somewhere.

imgur.com is still the more friendly alternative, as in, you can still get a direct link without tracking information with relative ease. Probably only a matter of time though.

Sounds like a job for Greasemonkey.

imgur has been fighting the ability to get direct links for a while.

I don't entirely blame them, there's literally no money in direct image hosting for free, but it's getting harder and harder to upload an image, then get a direct link that will work in all situations.

In many cases they look at the referrer and redirect a direct link, and they make it harder and harder to get direct links (first by having the UI show the "full page" link by default, by making the image link to the full page so if you right-click and select "copy image address" it sends you to the "full page", then they moved everything into "albums" which meant it's even harder to link to a single image, and in many cases if you try to right-click and select "copy image address" you get a data URI.

Just an FYI if you're not aware: the entire corpus of reddit comments, users, submissions and subreddits is publicly available as a dataset from various sources. There is a very straightforward (and as of now, loosely sanctioned) method of continually crawling all reddit activity that doesn't rely on the API. Judging by your complaints you might find this useful.

But I agree that reddit is likely restrict access even more in the future.

Would you have more info on this? I’d like to make sure the entirety of Reddit makes it into the Internet Archive before they go full on Digg.

http://files.pushshift.io/reddit/

I have a little open source project for rudimentary indexing and search of the dataset as well as adding sentiment data: https://github.com/dewarim/reddit-data-tools

Pretty much precisely my view.

I'm offloading my content presently for rehoming elsewhere.

That’s a bummer about the cloudsearch functionality and I’m sure we wouldn’t mind adding it back, but definitely no malice there. Reddit’s search was not exactly great before... so moving it to a completely new backend was necessary. https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/6pi0kk/improving...

Reddit search was incomplete but powerful, and a major factor in my choosing the platform over alternative, particularly Ello (no effective search) or G+ (none until earlier this year).

Most key: searching for my own posts.

Other factors: CSS, markdown. Notifs are middlin'. Fostering conversation: utterly broken.

Nuking my sub's CSS in the new version is among unpardonable offenses.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/faq#wiki_so.2C_red...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...

Reddit are burning massively through goodwill.

Have they started shoving out the less savory subreddits? This may be the alternative to that - the brands that advertise don't want their stuff showing up in the wrong places, and you have to be able to say to them no, that's not true... it's either that or do what Tumblr did and aggressively marginalize anything not ad-friendly.

Yes they have. They've banned subs that could've been used to do illegal things. Subs like gundeals (for users to buy guns between eachother ) or alcoholtrading (same thing but for alcohol). I don't remember the exact names, but there were dozens of similar subs that were all banned.

Gundeals wasn't for buying and selling firearms between private parties. It was for posting links to deals from retailers and FFLs.

They have shoved out the most overtly committed hate and crime subreddits, but they have been promoting only slightly-less savory subreddits to replace them.

The default front page was changed (a few years ago by now) to allow any subreddit to upvote-brigade to the frontpage, leading to flooding by trash subreddits like /r/CringeAnarchy (anti-transgender bullying) and /r/ImGoingToHellForThis (racist jokes) and many flavors of redundant mindless anti-Trump fake-news/clickbait-title subreddits (including /r/esist, /r/politicalhumor, and the ironically named /r/AgainstTrumpSpam which is actually "Against-Trump Spam". )

Why would you not want to contribute to their revenue?

Because those in charge have not been able to come up with any solutions which aren't user hostile.

First off because they are generating that revenue by exploiting my community. Secondly because them rolling out broken updates generates work for me as a moderator; we'll need to update everything to work for a completely new system. It's going to be a lot of work, and they are changing shit all the time.

I don't want to spend my time to support their exploitative and slimy tactics.

I'm a ten year user of reddit and I've found it to be getting worse faster. There are always changes but lately it's been changes coming rapidly that do nothing but threaten users.

Locking of posts I think is a terrible idea it censors and stifles debate. If something gets out of hand it's the job of Moderators to handle it, if it really gets out of hand Admins should step in.

It was great in the old days when you could post something without ready 20 or more rules and still get denied. It's almost getting to be like the old Slashdot.

Aggressive users seem to have taken over. Well-known subreddits spread hate with no policing.

I absconded from all my moderator positions a while back. I was nervous about it, leading up, but it felt so freeing afterwards.

I highly recommend it. Once you've stepped away, you'll wonder at how you could ever have felt so deeply invested in it.

Having observed software and worked in software development for decades, a great sign that a software product is on a final decline is a grand UI redesign. There are exceptions, but it is a fairly reliable indicator. It’s a sign that could mean a number of (usually bad) things: the designers and/or marketers have taken over development, there is no longer internal direction to work on quality or fix bugs, the product people are out of ideas that are feasible so the only thing they can think of to keep it fresh is a paint job.

“A full UI redesign would make this site/software so much better!” - said no end user ever.

> “A full UI redesign would make this site/software so much better!” - said no end user ever.

Said someone who has never used The GIMP 1.x line.

You could replace "grand UI redesign" with anything and your statement is still correct. "grand performance update". "grand timeline feature". "grand 3rd party integration". If it's not grounded in an actual user need or problem, then it's a negative indicator. UI design is sometimes a real problem that needs to be addressed, though I'd agree that they only made things worse with Reddit's new update.

By turning their site into this: https://i.imgur.com/TtVAiMN.jpg

That's what a new visitor to reddit.com would see, as of about a month ago.

Their mission is making short-term money to satisfy the venture capitalist investors. Anything else is unimportant.

They’ve been around since 2005, though. 13 years.

They didn't take a significant amount of VC until fairly recently though. $50M in Sept 2014, and then $200M more about a year ago: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/reddit

And they make no money, recently took on a truckload of VC money, and people want out.

I just hope they always allow users some way to switch to the old Reddit as an option. I had to uncheck the second box in the beta options, at the bottom of preferences. https://i.imgur.com/xnHdFuE.png

If it's anything like their mobile site, they'll leave the ability to use the old site, but it will grow more and more broken as they fail to maintain it, and eventually become unusable.

It's a bad way but old.reddit.com

"I just hope they always allow users some way to switch to the old Reddit as an option"

Pretty much the only thing why I am still using Reddit via PC in addition of mobile app (third-party)

There's no way they'll keep the old site, and I say that as a user of it.

At some point the new site will have new features incompatible with the old and they'll say it uses too much resources to keep it going.

Well, Reddit had a (mostly) good run.

Reddit has presumably decided now is the right time to monetize the existing user base rather than continuing to focus on growth. Reddit's lifeblood is recirculating and remixing content. Given the political climate around copyright with things like Article 13 in the EU it's entirely possible Reddit will be very difficult to run in a few years. Now might be the right time to focus on revenue.

What would bigger growth/userbase/SERP for Reddit look like? That is, while keeping its spartan social network characteristics. Even with the redesign (which I’m not a huge fan of personally) and the attempt to increase visibility of user profiles, Reddit still feels more like Craigslist/USENET than Quora or Facebook.

I too would focus on getting money out if the choice is between money and more users, when you're the fourth biggest site in the US and the sixth biggest site worldwide (as of a month ago; if I remember correctly; based on Alexa stats).

Their new design is comically bad at this point. I just loaded up Reddit full-screen on my desktop with a 2560x1440 resolution. I saw 3 posts above the fold in the default non-signed in format. Those 3 posts occupied the center 650px of the screen. There was a column to the right that took up a little over 300px and contained two ads among other site navigation stuff. The other 1600px of horizontal screen real estate was completely empty. I get the idea of mobile first design, but the new design is actively hostile to anyone using a screen larger than a tablet.

There are three views. Have you tried compact mode?

I would never actually use the site like that. However defaults are important and that is the default view for a user who is not signed in. That design is so bad that I almost wonder if it is a dark pattern to get people to sign up/in just so they can save a preference to avoid that view.

I agree that half the content being ads is pretty bad, but what makes the expanded view as a default so bad? I don't like it myself but e.g. 9gag is super popular and it uses this style.

I want to scan the headlines with my eyeballs, not the scroll bar.

I can't stand the expanded view, so I'm 100% on your side, just saying that the actual majority might not prefer it and consider it even bad.

It contains almost no relevant information

> defaults are important and that is the default view for a user who is not signed in.

This is a good point. I never have my browser save cookies / cache information between sessions. Now when I visit reddit I need to tick the "change view" box every single time?

Those were only added after the initial wave of criticism on the new/default design.

Thanks! I never even noticed you could do that when they switched to the new design.

> I get the idea of mobile first design, but the new design is actively hostile to anyone using a screen larger than a tablet.

Don't worry their mobile design is actively hostile to users too, you're getting the full experience. The mobile design also wastes a huge chunk of space pestering you to install the app. And the official app seems to have been built by the same clueless designers, so you need third party apps just to get a decent experience.

I'm starting to think I may have Stockholm syndrome, I shouldn't have to jump through so many hoops to get a usable experience, I'm probably better off voting with my feet.

It's not as hard to leave as you think. Just stop using it for a week. Once you look at it with fresh eyes you'll realize it for the cesspool that it is.

Just choose the Subreddits you chhose more carefully, and it won't be. I subscribe to a number of cheerful, friendly and useful subreddits, and that's it.

The only issue being that there are a number of small, focused subs that contain the best information and discussion on certain topics on the interwebs. I don't give a fuck about the site itself, but the people active in say r/machinelearning and a number of other subs are incredibly valuable to me.

There would have to be a mass exodus of entire subs for this to change. Which probably won't happen until the situation becomes untenable. I don't believe reddit's leadership, despite the harebrained ideas they have shown so far, would Digg themselves into such a hole.

Reddit offers three advantages over a traditional message board: voting, post previews, and a good search experience. All of those could be replicated elsewhere.

Their main advantage is the community, that's the hard part to replicate.

I don't think we're talking about the same reddit, in my experience their search engine has consistently been awful! On different occasions I was unable to retrieve a post I almost remembered the exact title of via the reddit search engine, but found it quickly through google with the "inurl:reddit.com/r/subreddit" option

Something must have changed in the last 2yrs or so since I was last active on the site. The search experience used to be notoriously bad and even non-existent ( If I remember correctly for a while the search box was just a link to a filtered google search). I've also come to look at voting as a negative feature. Nowadays I mostly use twitter for what I used to use reddit for - to keep up with current news. Twitter has its faults but one of its better features imo is being able to read tweets of every different kind of point of view with equal weight, without the filter of upvotes/downvotes by the majority mob.

*edit - I should say, without the filter of downvotes, since twitter has likes which is the equivalent of upvotes.

search has sucked from inception until now, if you want to find anything on reddit, even a post from today that dropped of the front page, you are better off using google and "site:reddit.com" to find it.

I still haven’t found a subreddit that’s better than the other existing communities for that topic. Can you list some examples of subtedddits that are _the_ forum to go to for their domain?

/r/celiac, /r/achalasia, /r/citypop, /r/deathgrips, /r/denver (and Portland, Austin, Santa Fe, Albuquerque... possibly some of these cities have bigger forums on FB, but it depends on your demographic. I can talk to 70 year olds about Albuquerque in the 60s on Facebook, but not necessarily what’s happening at Meow Wolf or with car thefts around Nob Hill or the electronic music show next week).

Reddit is the primary forum for obscure topics that don’t have large enough followings to support other communities, or have a demographic that overlaps enough with reddit that everyone just uses reddit.

For the last year or so I've just pulled a few niche subreddits into Inoreader via RSS so I can still get the value of the smaller subreddits without falling in to /all when bored.

Don't worry, they're also starting to limit third party apps to force you to use their lovely app.

That would solve the Stockholm syndrome and make it easy to go cold turkey.

The few subreddits I follow have also become hostile towards users wrt participation. People are banned frequently and questionable accounts vote in easily recognizable patterns.

I'm not saying there's a concerted effort (by Reddit or 3rd parties) to sway public opinion -- but it certainly feels that way.

And yes, the site has become horrible for usability.

I really wish someone with more free time than me would combine a bunch of current buzzwords (distributed, blockchain, whatever) and cook up something that was easy to use but still free from the tyranny of special interest and / or profit.

That's not to say that they shouldn't get rich in the process, just that they should be building something incorruptible.

I'll donate $1000 to a crypto address if others are willing to match.

Um...are you looking for steemit.com?

I was thinking about building a blockchain-backed, distributed forum like reddit alot lately. I haven't started anything yet, but if somebody reads this and is interested in building anything alike, or needs an helping hand, PM me.

Remember to keep mods (volunteers who curate a subreddit) separate from admistrators (employees with legal and $ constraints). They usually have no contact with each other.

So if you got banned from one sub for some reason, it was the mods. The beauty of reddit is, you're free to take your friends and, in 5 minutes, make another sub which you guys mod. Perhaps you'll outgrow whatever sub you're ditching.

> So if you got banned from one sub for some reason, it was the mods. The beauty of reddit is, you're free to take your friends and, in 5 minutes, make another sub which you guys mod. Perhaps you'll outgrow whatever sub you're ditching.

The problem is that you lose most of the community. Starting a new sub is easy, growing one is hard.

This is why you make it possible to fork a community, retain the content and as much or as little of the moderation decisions as you agree with.

> * The few subreddits I follow have also become hostile towards users wrt participation. People are banned frequently and questionable accounts vote in easily recognizable patterns.*

Which subreddits?

>People are banned frequently and questionable accounts vote in easily recognizable patterns.

Reddit makes it way too easy for bots to post and act like real humans. It's also way too easy to run multiple accounts to outweigh everyone else's votes and make a post seem more popular than it is.

Because of that, many mods are quick to ban suspicious-looking accounts, because on the subs where they don't, the conversation quickly becomes bots parroting the same thing over and over.

Reddit is gamed to shit by god-knows-who-all, and you can't trust anything on there that isn't a meme. The quick and easy answer is to forcibly mark bot posts as being made by a bot, which reddit won't do for whatever reason.

There's notabug.io, which is a federated link aggregator/discussion platform, has optional anonymity, and uses a PoW voting system (which allows for anonymous votes).

There's some interesting elements to the design, such as peers not needing to be in total agreement about the state of the world, so content can be replicated or moderated/censored/blocked at the whim of each peer, and each peer can build their own unique features on top of the same datasets (eg, different tagging or voting systems on different peers, while still working with the same underlying content).

> I really wish someone with more free time than me would combine a bunch of current buzzwords (distributed, blockchain, whatever) and cook up something that was easy to use but still free from the tyranny of special interest and / or profit.

Enter my project: https://notabug.io

But honestly at this point in its development code contributions are more important than crypto if you can spare it.

https://github.com/notabugio/notabug

I’m doing this, and I’ve been working on it full time since February. I don’t want to spam HN so I won’t copy / paste the link again, but I’ve posted it on this thread once, take a look if you’re interested.

it reminds me of mobile as I experience Reddit via the Apolloapp and wholly unsuited for desktop browsing. now you can pick one of the three display styles to get close to original but even then it is a slower experience

>I just loaded up Reddit full-screen on my desktop with a 2560x1440 resolution

do any websites look good when you do that?

Im hoping for a ActivityPub[1] reddit clone (or maybe I will start writing one myself if I have time). At that point it will be downhill for Reddit.

Imagine, even HN could be a federated node...

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

Isn't that the sort of thing Mastodon is about or are you picturing it differently?

I think Mastodon is more like Twitter and PeerTube[1] is like Yoututbe. Both use Activity Pub.

[1] https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

There is one such project in the works: https://mastodon.social/@prismo

(Note that the project is Prismo, not Mastodon - their web presence just happens to be a Mastodon profile at the moment.)

How do their 'subreddits' work? It would be really cool if prismo was sort of an aggregate of independent 'subreddit' servers.

No idea, unfortunately; that Mastodon page is all I know of it. I'm keeping an eye on it though, just in case. I agree that that would definitely be cool.

Edit: Some more info at these links:

- https://medium.com/we-distribute/prismo-is-a-decentralized-l...

- https://mastodon.social/@prismo/100289732805767260

- https://mastodon.social/@prismo/100237371462435727

> Individual instances might be able to choose between representing themselves as one big subreddit, or as a collection of multiple subreddits.

This is why I made an extension that makes sure you always load the old design - https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect

old.reddit.com still works but I dont know how long for, they have basically done a digg however right now there is no reasonable alternative for users to flock too.

Instead of a fast digg they are doing a very very slow digg.

They have a couple more compact options, one with small thumbnails and one with none. Just hit one of the view buttons in the upper left and it stays that way until you change it (at least if you're logged in, otherwise I don't know).

But something I don't like is that clicking headlines takes you to the discussion, you need to click a tiny link to get the actual article. This is still true when you're already in the discussion, which makes no sense.

And for some reason they don't display subreddits' descriptive sidebar text, which sometimes has convenient links.

Luckily, so far they'd rather have people viewing the old design than leaving the site, and have a way to opt out, which after a week or so I did. The old site's not as pretty, but I find it more readable and usable, and I haven't found any tempting features in the new design.

There are so many things about their new design and changes that are very negative for new visitors. I’ve encountered a dozen bugs and niggling flaws which as an experienced user I can work around, and recognize as an error, but a new user would not understand.

For example, say you come to reddit, you get the new mobile design. You do a search. It tells you no results were found and there’s nothing else on the page but that line of text: “Sorry, we couldn't find any results for 'Celiac'”

It doesn’t indicate that it restricted the search that sub, or that you can search the entire site.

However, if you get results? “25+ matches in r/Perfectfit Search all of reddit”. This is starting at one result, so it’s puzzling that it is not there for 0 results.

The behavior of automatically restricting the search to one sub is also the opposite of the behavior on the old the desktop version.

As a web programmer and designer, I also recognize these as the mistakes of lazy people or amateurs which could be rectified without delay. I have reported several bugs like this months ago, and there has been no change.

I wanted to add that the way that this is the mistake of an amateur is how they released the search like that without noticing. The people coding it should’ve noticed immediately, and someone else on the staff should’ve noticed within a week, and fixed it. But then, not fixing it several months later even after receiving many user reports is qualitatively even worse. I can only imagine how many new users have been turned off by this.

> I can only see two ads for the 2-hour series premiere event of Marvel's Cloak and Dagger, and I have to scroll down to see the third

That is a bald faced lie. I don't want to downplay the placement of the ads on that screen, but to say that they are the _only_ thing you can see is a lie.

What I don't get, is why lie about it when the evidence is literally the picture that is being captioned. Color me confused.

EDIT: I finally get the joke, read below.

It's presented as a software bug report, with the sarcastic implication that having to scroll to the third advertisement is a defect in the design.

Ahhhhh after reading and re-reading this a few times I'm finally getting it. They're sarcastically saying that you should be able to see all 3 ads without having to scroll. LOL okay that's actually funny, even after having the joke explained to me.

I do hope people start leaving Reddit.

I love Reddit, don't get me wrong - you can find a community of people who are passionate about pretty much any topic.

In the old world, each of these communities had their own disjointed forums - with Reddit they are all becoming centralised. If Reddit ever decides to be really evil they are very difficult to migrate away.

My problem with disjoint forums is that I can't get a digest of "top stuff happening across all subjects I am interested in". I have to visit each forum individually.

That's where some sort of syndication feed would come in, like RSS or ActivityPub.

That's where my federated Reddit alternative idea would come in. Each forum would be hosted by the community that uses it, and the centralised site would only act as a feed for them with a shared login system.

Something like that seems like the next logical step after Reddit, and the way to make separate forums the main way of talking online again.

Doesn't the err, multireddit (?) system work for that? I recall that was a thing on the old one at least.

The multireddit system doesn't work outside of reddit.

This redesign really makes me think of digg v4. The usability of the site is completely different, the inline ads. The biggest difference is they have 10 years of momentum.

But if someone takes the old open source code base and starts "readit.com" i'll move.

I was part of the digg to reddit user migration. The big difference this time around is there is no reddit to migrate too.

I was affected by that recent wave of subreddit bans and started looking at alternatives.

There's plenty but none are very good.

The biggest move I've seen is people going to Discord servers. The two problems with that are: -Searching and history aren't really a thing on them -Discord does not really have a good way to make money other than nitro.

https://www.saidit.net

I don't entirely agree.

Reddit's success comes from how it has been moderated and tailored to attract new communities (other that geek and IT communities) in an open, accessible and non-anarchic way. It takes time and patience to build such an environment, and the most crucial capital of reddit right now, is its subreddits, and its army of moderators who are applying the reddit etiquette and keeping the site balanced, clean and interesting.

If you look at voat, it's a cesspool.

In short, you cannot easily create a community, it doesn't only require a website and some rules, it also requires community building, and tailoring rules that can make a good user experience. It's not easy.

I think that reddit's founders have been sailing away from money making for a long time now, because they know well that their users can quickly discover they are being used to make money. They owe the success of reddit to not giving to money interests, and frankly that's why this website have been so successful.

So I don't think you can "move" to another clone of reddit, it would still require community building and time. Also the expertise required to make load balancing work just fine on a new clone is not negligible.

Why do you say it's very difficult to migrate away from Reddit?

Most small-mid sized reddits have less than 20 primary contributors. If most of those contributors leave for an alternative community than a large portion of the reddit community will follow. If an admin is onboard than it will be easy to post a link to the new community on the sidebar to help migration. Plenty of online interest groups do not have their primary community hosted in reddit. Plenty of online interest groups have migrated their primary community to different platforms in the past. You might say that those <20 people will not want to leave reddit. I'd argue that reddit power users are, on average, more upset about recent changes than the average user.

For a site that had 3rd largest visitor count on the web, they only managed to make $100M.

It is very hard for me to understand how Google and Facebook manage to make that much money. Because even if Reddit made 10x at 1 billion, it is still so far off from the other two.

Also, they have a way of direct monetization with Reddit Gold (I wonder what % is that of their earnings)

I thought it was public information because there was also a "We reached X% of the daily gold goal!" banner, but I can't find a direct answer anywhere. It seems they never mentioned what that goal actually is.

Here[1] is an attempt at an approximation in 2014, but I doubt it's accurate since it extrapolates the number of servers they run from 2012, how much it costs to run them, and doesn't consider (usually the biggest cost) employee wages and other things like rent.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-Reddits-income-from-daily-Redd...

It is astounding! This question merits a deeper analysis but here are my thoughts:

First, Reddit (up until the recent redesign) functions as a community service. Reddit’s unprofitable nature is akin to other public service websites like Wikipedia. If you design a system simply to cover the costs of hosting fees and maintenance to provide the public with a great service, it shouldn’t be surprising to have great reach without making money. There are probably many useful website ideas that would only work unless funded by the government or donations.

Second, it provides a place for discussion, and its anonymous threaded, commenting system promotes a structured and unfiltered, often viscous view of reality that scares marketing departments.

They should never have switched away from Lisp.

The language really doesn't have much to do with product design, but I thought Reddit was written in Python? https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Reddit used to be written in lisp - here is discussion from 2005 about the migration to Python:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3815491

Viewer count is not proportional to capitalism opportunity. It's really really simple.

If I made a business that gives you a dollar when you send us fifty cents, I could probably be super popular until I run out of VC funding.

> make $100M.

That was their revenue.

Both Google and Facebook offer Advertisers something novel. Google has Search, Maps, YouTube & Gmail data it can use to offer high degrees of targeting through AdSense. Each of these applications alone is nearly the same magnitude as Reddit. Facebook has one of the most complete networks of human relationships the world has ever seen. With their embedded Like Button they can gather data on these users even when they're not on the site. They give advertisers the opportunity to target groups in ways previously impossible.

Reddit seemed to follow the path of traditional media such as newspapers for a long time, thinking static ads were enough. Viral 'organic' marketing seems to be one of the most valuable services the platform offers, and other firms capitalize on this, but it's tricky for them to capitalize on this and maintain their credibility.

I'd think subreddit browsing statistics should be at or near the relative value for advertising targetting as search or network behavior, no? Google can sell you ads shown to people who have been looking for power drills. Reddit can actually put that ad on /r/diy.

Obviously that's not how it works in reality, so I argue something else is at work than just targetting.

As someone else pointed out, they didn't make $100M, that's their revenue.

If anything I believe that what Reddit has shown us is that there's absolutely no money in online advertising, for most sites. You'd have to built your site around the advertisers, and not the users, if you want to make money going down that route.

The idea that you can built a service and just slap ads on it when you reach a certain number of users only work in rare cases.

Google is there when you're in the buying mindset. "I need car insurance, let's google car insurance" that's worth $40 a click. And there's return on investment from that too.

Facebook is fantastic for advertisers what it mastered is targeting. It knows EVERYTHING about you. However it is at a disadvantage from google in that, you're not in a buying mindset when you're on the site. So as an advertiser the clicks are worth less.

Reddit could enter facebooks space. Your comments and forum activity could be data mined to build an advertising profile. However, they haven't really mastered that yet.

Reddit has many many shopping/spending-oriented or -friendly subreddits, many of which hit frontpage frequently.

The #1 post on https://www.reddit.com/ right now is an post about a Marvel movie.

#2 is World Cup, surely monetizable.

#4 is a video game

>3rd largest visitor count

* Not counting mobile

Former Reddit admin and automoderator creator Diemos has launched an alternative site, as-yet invite-only, Tildes (https://tildes.net). I've been exploring that over the past few weeks, and am positively impressed. It's young yet and small, but shows promise, a sane and healthy community (sharply contrasting both Voat and Imzy in this regard), and some innovative and positive technical features, as well as an expressly member-driven, donor-supported, model.

There's plenty of opportunity to go wrong, but the launch looks good so far.

Reddit are certainly providing a golden window of opportunity.

https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes

Tildes is still kind of finding its feet as a community, and there's a certain degree of navel-gazing as everyone tries to figure out exactly what kind of content and behavior is/isn't desirable.

That said, the stated goals and driving philosophy seem sound, and the design of the site functionality seems to be on track to fix some of the core problems with reddit and similar sites.

The concepts of nested groups with "bubble-up", content tagging, and multi-dimensional vote/tags on comments (when comment tags are eventually re-enabled) are all really appealing.

Morbius's Law of New Media Platforms:

The first topic of discussion shall be of the platform itself, what it is, what it isn't, and how its design shapes those roles.

Add in healthy quantities of tugging from all sides trying to shape their own pet platform of choice.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/H4mXSK6nC35gLUucGdkrqw

What do you consider to have been problems in relation to the Imzy community?

Edit: this looks like a project with phenomenal potential that I would definitely be interested in using.

Mostly addressed here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/500ysb/the_imz...

An "us against the world" founding cohort bent on seeing (or making) enemies where none existed, a fundamentally toxic anonymity dynamic, no effective user-focused moderation tools, staff incompetence, indifference, or blindness, AWOL forum moderators, brigading, and more.

The cohort problem is similar to other disaffected diasporas, across the political spectrum -- Voat and Imzy couldn't be more different in outlook, but the behaviour was quite similar. This is why founding cohort is so crucial. Usenet, Slashdot, Reddit, Facebook, and HN draw from a similar (if highly nonrepresentative) group in that regard: larrhely techy, college-educated, wealthier, male, and generally culturally privileeged. There are of course numerous individual exceptions, but this is the general trend. Finding a formula for a more inclusive, but healthy, founding group would be a Good Thing.

I count among G+'s negative foundations the strong tepresentation by marketing and SEO types early on. Now the challenge is (frequently Asian) sex and pr0n bots.

Thanks for the heads up. That concept looks very promising.

Two thoughts as someone who is also building online community software:

- I think there should be ways for community creators to monetize directly through Reddit. For example, allow community creators to add a donation/subscription button for really small amounts (e.g. 1$/month).

- There is a growing opportunity in online chat communities. I guess that's why they also started experimenting with chat. There is a large but non-obvious difference between a forum and a chatroom, and as you might know from Slack vs. email, it's a significantly different vibe.

Checkout steemit.com.

That's a great idea!

Discord is basically the latter, aka Reddit for chat rooms/IRC equivalents. Slack is pretty close to that idea too. So if Reddit got into that market, there'd be real tough competition, even before taking the decentralised/federated stuff into account.

No, it's not. Discord is made for gaming.

If you would build a software for communities (for discussion in general), then you would add different features that don't make sense for Slack or Discord.

It's a huge market with a lot of distinct use cases, and therefore can support a lot of similar players that focus on different use cases.

You seem knowledgable about the space. Mind sharing examples of such features, or where you feel Discord is lacking?

Sure. My company is focussing on communities that revolve around discussion and learning (mostly targeting teens and young adults). Some features we are working on are specific tools like a whiteboard that helps you quickly draw something to better explain. Or a library of common definitions (e.g., formulas for math, definitions for CS) that take the friction out of helping others. Furthermore, with our target group gamification and providing incentives to a meaningful discussion is important, so we're working on avatars and points that you can collect and use.

More general communities could use features such as:

- Monetization directly in the software vs. sending users to a signup and payment form (better UX, higher conversion rate)

- Discoverability (e.g., a search function similar to Reddit)

- Better onboarding for communities: For some communities, it makes sense not to be public, but to require a short application (for whatever reason) - currently community creators much build a separate website and send users there, etc. This would be much better if it existed natively.

- More focus on conversations/discussions instead of productivity tools

Just to mention a few. Of course, for Slack and Discord, it doesn't make sense to implement these features because it would dilute the whole product.

Discord and Slack don't have discoverability. You have to know where are you going before you join a conversation.

Another thing they could do is find a way for people to sell their original content and take a small % of the sale. For example, a redditor could sell print art, furniture, toys, books, etc... Basically like Etsy.

Seems a bit far-fetched to me.

With the recent profile redesign and the option to view original content exclusively, I think that may happen eventually.

I'm not sure this is a wise move - Reddit already has ads, which clearly haven't done enough for them. And there are legit reasons that ads are not as reliable of a revenue stream as they were in the past. Tweaking a failing business model won't produce a major shift in revenue.

They need some real change if they ever want to be something different than what they are today. And what they are today is a mildly entertaining site with both good and bad impacts on our society. But reddit is not a great place to find paying customers, and therefore not a place I need more ad capabilities.

How good of a job are they doing at advertising? Advertising is tough since it has to satisfy both the ad buyers and the users. It’s very easy to turn off one or the other side.

As a user, I like the promoted "posts". In that case, well. I sometimes click the ads!

As a user I hate the banners. I don't see them of course, because I ad block. I would never click them.

Unlike, say, Facebook, I hate the ads that Reddit presents to me. They're often poorly targeted, or flat-out obnoxious.

Reddit has shown me the same ad about online mental health counseling every day for 4 months. “Because I deserve it”.

Ditto, and something about a crappy IDE for golang.

Ditto for me too, and I only keep an eye on 2 subreddits: /r/baltimore and /r/maryland, so I have no idea why they're targeting me with that ad. Maybe it's because general news headlines can be grim? However they're doing it, it's not done well.

I started enjoying Reddit when I unsubscribed from all subreddits, i.e. having 0 subscriptions. What I did instead was to group all of them in various private multireddits inspired by USENET, so I have comp, emacs, langlearn, laugh, etc. Thus when I'm just checking to see if a notification I'm expecting is there, there is no links that can immediately distract me on the front page. This saves me countless hours, and combined w/ opting out of all personalisation [1], of the new profile overview and of the fuckup^H^H^H^H^H^Hredesign, and with strict JS and content blocking, and Redirector extension, it becomes bearable.

One thing Reddit should note is that people are there for the communities. If there was sth. identical but run by a foundation or NGO, I'd jump there and delete my reddit account once the important communities are migrated.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/personalization

The have recently quietly introduced video ads, isn't that great?

Compared to the companies started at similar times which followed the grow fast path but ultimately failed and looking at the slow but steady growth path reddit has been allowed to follow I wonder why ycombinator does not accept more companies like reddit(slow but steady growth companies) into their accelerator, I mean being a founder of one such company I think that will be awesome .

Look at how early Reddit was in YC’s history. QED.

reddit grew fast and was acquired just over a year after it launched (which was in June 2005): https://techcrunch.com/2006/10/31/breaking-news-conde-nastwi...

I'm fairly sure YC's stake in it was bought out at that point.

YC's stake maybe, but Sam Altman followed on as a lead investor later: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2hwr02/i_am_sam_altma...

I don't think they intended to grow slowly. When they launched, there were similar aggregators already (digg?). I think they just kept the site under the radar long enough to become sort of a Craigslist for content. The design was antiquated and simple, userbase was limited but loyal. It just caught on from there, sometime around 2012-2014 when people wanted more content per unit of time invested (vs other social networks).

Anyone have any insight into why goog/fb haven't acquired reddit at this point? If they could get it for anything near the 1.8billion previous valuation surely they would just snap it up?

The reason marketeers don't like traditional advertising in Reddit is because they are getting their advertising for free by pretending to post as normal users. A room full of students can push any product, message or image. Its rampant in resdit. Why pay more for less reach?

To me Twitter is a sort of archetype of online, mass media businesses and some of the quirky side effects of "unicorn culture."

At least at early stages, market value (and hence wealth of founders, investors & early employers) is some version of: (Likelihood of reaching $N bn revenue) X (N).

The size of "N" is so open ended that a lot of traditional economic/finance logic of the kind Warren Buffet's generation used, it gets very abstract.

When Google launched adwords, no one really knew what the potential was. The adwords team themselves understood the model (overture had already proven it) and probably knew it would get > $1bn. Past that, it was an unknown. That kind of a business had never existed at this scale before. Adwords is now $100bn pa, and growing.

Facebook were in the same boat. The adwords/overture system didn't work on FB, and the size/value of the new market they were building was unknown. They knew it had potential, because of all the attention FB commanded, but how much was a guess. They waited until after IPO to find out. It turned out to be a lot, about $45bn currently, halfway to Google and gaining.

We have already forgotten this, but when Facebook IPO-ed they hadn't really launched their mature business/advertising model. Revenue potential was still unknown and the range of possibilities was still very wide. Even on the premise that FB remained as popular as it was, anywhere from <$1bn to >$100bn was very possible. A huge range of possible outcomes.

My belaboured point is that without the benefit of hindsight, the revenue potential of Google, Facebook, Twitter & Reddit is very detail dependant. Extrapolating from user/usage stats will only get you to within 100X.

Anyway, in this kind of environment, the pressure is on to hit the top of your potential range. Take risks. Add costs.

About 5 years ago, Twitter looked down this barrel. They 10X-ed their number of employees from 300-400 to 3,000-4,000 and cost base. Very little of this expansion was strictly necessary, to provide the service they were/are providing. Twitter was still Twitter @ 300 employees, more or less the same Twitter we have today.

In an alternate world, they could have probably achieved >$1bn (currently @ $2bn) in annual revnue with just 500-1,000 or so employees. That's at the very top of the revenue/employee spectrum, and a recipe for one of the most profitable (in % terms) companies in the world. But, the current capital allocation economy does not have room for this sort of thing.

Say it had been executed perfectly, $1.5bn/$0.5bn revenue/profit. They would have been worth less than they are currently, even though they'd be making far more profit. ...And Twitter didn't achieve the high end of their revenue potential. They've had mediocre results, with their advertising model. Still, just leaving open the possibility of Google/FB-like outcomes adds more to market cap than any level of profit.

To put this in some numerical terms, Twitter spends 40% of it's 2.2$bn revenue ($1bn) on "Selling General and Administrative." This is more than twice "R&D" spending, which I assume means "making Twitter features."

Reddit is in the same sort of boat (though they're userbase are more beligerant to this sort of thing), but scaled down. Investors are looking at Reddit's users & usage stats. DAUs, Times-on-sites... They are comparing it to FB, Google, Twitter. They are coming up with massive revenue results that might be achieved if only a good advertising model could be plugged in.

What they are not looking it is "how much revenue would it take to profitably make reddit reddit" without necessarily targetting or leaving open the possibility of 100X more, at some point.

it seems that for these kinds of companies, you are either Google/Facebook or you are a probability of becoming one. How profitable, popular or well liked you are by users doesn't matter, only (probability of X). The implications of this are big, and worrying for the future of media.

Social media + sponsored content = fake news problem. It’s taking the trust and integrity of the platform and selling that in exchange for exposure to unverified content.

"It's almost a little strange why marketers and advertisers are so apprehensive" about Reddit, said Amanda Parker, an account supervisor for digital marketing agency PMG. "Marketers chase scale, and Reddit has it. I think they have an old-fashioned view of who Redditors are."

Pretty obvious I would have thought: as long as reddit remains the platform of choice for all the worst hate groups in America, the harder it will be for them to attract advertisers.

If reddit insists on turning a blind eye to open and unchecked racism, calls for genocide, threats of physical violence, and bucketloads of other abhorrent content its co-founder describes as "valuable discussion", then that's the price they have to pay.

I thought they did away with nearly most of those "famous" toxic subreddits.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So whilst dead children might be off limits, /r/the_donald is still around despite the whole pizzagate shooting.

Wouldn't your statement be equatable with "Churches are still around despite some crazy attacking an abortion clinic"?

Apparently we will gladly give away our rights and freedoms to hurt "the other side".

Churches aren't supported by ad revenue.

reddit has a long history of doing away with the most famous toxic subreddits while allowing other nearly identical subreddits to exist as long as they aren't getting significant media attention. for every scandalous subreddit you hear about in the news, there's a hundred more potential controversies just waiting to be discovered, and no proactive enforcement of any rules or community standards.

yeah, i don't think you understand how free speech works or why reddit is so popular

They're fairly proud of hosting weird fringe communities, it's a good market. With this reputation, most subreddits being harmless and full of puns and the opportunity to super-focus ads to perfect groups there is a lot of real value in it for advertisers.

At the same time it falls into the youtube problem though - advertisers are very uncomfortable with their brand appearing next to some incredibly objectionable content, which is very hard to police.

I wonder if there is a corollary to rule 34: that someone, somewhere, will find anything objectionable.

Typical HN pessimism, so objectionable. /s

Is it hard to police? Put stories in to an advertising bidding queue, buy the story you want to advertise in; probably decreasing cost starting at 5x average for the sub (or something like that). Queue items get flushed to the site after a timeout (few minutes). Advertisers police their own ads, they pay up front but can remove ads from a story.

Advertisers is such a system will be rewarded for targeting appropriate subs, they get lower costs, less competing bidders.

Advertisers could even virtue signal on predicted negative stories, "we too think Hitler should have kicked back and smoked a bowl, fellow kids".

Seems like there's a million and one ways to do similar: giving advertisers control (and using timed-bidding to push revenue).

i'm not too familiar with the mechanics of digital ad buying, but i can't imagine any advertiser will be willing to sit there and individually choose which individual stories their ads appear next to. don't ad purchases happen in bulk?

Well, from the limited amount of Google ad buying I've done, and some independent stuff that's pretty much it -- of course most advertiser's would be automating the purchase, and I daresay Reddit could even provide a front-end for that. Social media managers (manipulators) are a pretty common position in many companies -- they're already "optimising" story postings, timings, comments, and such. If you're already managing the story submission it's not much extra to manage the advertising.

Choosing where to advertise by human hand seems like a great way to maximize the effect of a given budget.

Curious what subreddit you're referring to. I've seen all you describe and worse in the politics subreddit.

It could be this, but I also think it's just...no one has any idea how to market on reddit via paid advertising. Obviously /r/hailcorporate exists for a reason as many marketers are successful in marketing on reddit "organically", but those don't go through their official advertising system.

Reddit users as a whole seem averse (much like HN users) to ads. I would imagine conversion on reddit ads isn't very high, but I haven't looked at any data on that so I could be wrong there - just a feeling based on comments I see from many reddit users.

Also it's hard to implement ad types on the platform that don't piss off users or use shady tactics making them "blend in" to the organic content of a reddit page.

> Pretty obvious I would have thought: as long as reddit remains the platform of choice for all the worst hate groups in America, the harder it will be for them to attract advertisers.

Hate groups? Are you talking about the DNC, liberal media, lgbt groups or some other groups on reddit? Because reddit is now pretty much entirely DNC, liberal media and lgbt content.

Also, it's previous obvious from a naive social justice warrior perspective, but it's far more complex than that. The biggest problem for reddit is that it's fairly anonymous and they are fairly late to the mobile scene. It's one of the reasons why reddit now tries to "trick" you into providing an email address to create an account and even provide your cell number for authentication. It's why they are trying so hard to move their user base onto mobile with their redesign.

While google and facebook's ( and even apple/amazon's ) are able to glean data off of their user base, reddit is unable to ( for the time being ). Advertisers love targeted ads. It's difficult to target ads on an anonymous forum. Whereas on google and facebook, their users are willing to provide all their private information for free and these companies can leverage the information to upsell to advertisers.

> If reddit insists on turning a blind eye to open and unchecked racism

Why don't you check the racism? Go to reddit and fight it. Why should an open forum based on free speech censor racism?

> calls for genocide

You think reddit can shut down the DNC and RNC? The media? Hollywood?

> threats of physical violence

Then call the police. It's a criminal matter, not a reddit matter.

> and bucketloads of other abhorrent content its co-founder describes as "valuable discussion"

Abhorrent to whom? You? Using your logic, every sub should be shut down. Do you think the lgbt sub should be suspended because billions of people find that abhorrent?

> then that's the price they have to pay.

Their co-founders are multi-millionaires. And it isn't "abhorrent" content. It's reddit's insistence on being anonymous for much of its history. It was one of reddit's major selling points. It was HN's major selling point too until people who hated free speech gained influence.

It never ceases to amaze me how people on a "hackers" forum could be so blindly and naively pro-censorship.

I want to think that they're ignorant of how Reddit rose and what happened to Digg but I'm skeptical that's the case. I think some people would rather kill something good than continue to not risk capitalising on it.

How's Voat doing these days?

Extremely toxic, as usual.

https://q3k.org/u/0a15b5ec655a7153e7c37ee5062da48c57196af3f0...

I totally respect the "Anyone is allowed to post anything, even if it's toxic". but when that's all the site is, or if I can't easily ignore it, it's not usable.

The core audience of a forum set the culture. The core culture of voat were people angry they couldn't post their racist shit on Reddit.

It was started as a refuge for sub-Breitbart conspiracy theorists, and continues to decline.

It's pretty toxic overall, though there are better and worse communities there depending on what you look for. Something political or social will make Breitbart look sane, whereas something topical (like a gaming community on the platform) is usually a bit less extreme.

Voat's been having some downtimes but otherwise it's alright. You'll need to to pick and chose which subs you subscribe to to avoid the more abrasive elements. Subs like /v/justgrowit are pretty good and I'm trying to make /v/radioastronomy good.

You gotta be the change you want to see.

I bet organizations such as the KKK would love to advertise on reddit, so hey, if they want to turn this into a money thing they should have plenty of monetization opportunities.

My popcorn is in the microwave..... ;-)

What's wrong with $100,000,000? Why does everything have to be about money all the time anyways?

And if it does have to be about money, then they should give the content creators and moderators their share, should they not?

This is what's called a "slippery slope" ...

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