The Growth of Reddit
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More recently, they started injected tracking into outbound link clicks and introduced the terrible redesign to help with growth/monetization also. As they've grown, the quality of the content within sub-reddits and discussions within those communities, have fallen dramatically.
The Video Game sphere takes up a huge chunk of it. Then many of the other subs are basically gamer adjacent. Many of those technology subs are just about building PCs and stuff, which is largely gaming related or correlated. Even a lot of the politics is invariably linked to Gamergate type stuff. The Entertainment section is all genre fiction, anime, etc. Stuff you would expect a gaming forum to focus on.
The dedicated meme parts of the site are gone. The interesting stuff that fits in no particular category are gone. If you had told me 4 years ago that one day I would come to miss the derivative rage comics and image macros in the face of the unrelenting stream of toxicity that the site would become I wouldn't have believed you.
Just look at this joke post https://external-preview.redd.it/dv9xRUyCUzzan5wZnVBCmmHIriH... from 6 years ago. It all seems so innocent compared to what it is now.
I've notice a number of questions on how to filter out all political content, so I suspect a lot of people are just trimming out the parts of reddit they don't care about.
I'm at a point where memes in themselves have become a bit of an interest of study. Why do I enjoy the aforementioned meme-y subreddits more than others? I'd like to think it's because there's a certain creativity and unicity to them, but I can't be sure. Assuming I'm right about that, what is it that makes them work in a way that, say, /r/prequelmemes doesn't (anymore)?
And I guess more importantly, how did I get to the point where I'm asking questions that are multiple layers of 'meta', and how might this affect my general wellbeing?
(I suppose the pragmatic answer is that regardless of how meta it gets, reddit is probably best in moderation, like most things. And an interesting in the whole process is not inherently tied to how much time I spend actively consuming/participating)
Anyway, the userbase is so huge that even "smaller" subreddits has a decent amount of activity. Sure, video games and SF movies/TV is all you'll get browsing /r/all, but there's, e.g., /r/truefilm, /r/flicks, lots of music subreddits.
They can actually foster an internal community without getting Eternal Septembered once they break a certain size.
To me, Reddit's the last bastion to find good conversation for people with many niche interests without going too crazy. (4chan is a bit too eccentric for my tastes)
I frequent the soccer, manga, headphones, metal, male fashion, thrifting, cooking and fitness subreddits.
No other forum let's me feel like a part of such a wide array of topics with discussion being the core focus. To be able to maintain anonymity while nuturing a community is incredibly hard, and Reddit had somehow managed it. The communities in Reddit are second to none. From meta jokes to entire sagas, Reddit in some ways reminded me of the times when I played Mmorpgs and joined guilds.
The removal of custom subreddit themes was where to me it started going wrong. I didn't care what they did with the popular subreddits and r/all, as long as they left the niche subreddits alone. But no, they had to interfere.
Reddit's forced UI change is to me a symptom of a greater problem. The idea that a company never stops growing. Sometimes you hit gold and the best decision is to stick with it.
I don't think any website offers the product Reddit does, and allows easily migration for entire communities without compromises. Thus, if the current web landscape stays the same, Reddit isn't going anywhere. But, it took weeks for Digg to die once Reddit came alive, and the introduction of a well moderated website for discussion may be all it takes for the Reddit exodus.
It is no surprise, that I find myself on HN typing this comment. An HN clone may just be where Reddit refugees find their calling.
To be fair, it isn't really a "forced" UI change, as you may disable it in the settings or use "old.reddit.com" as URL.
The best part is that the subs I lurk have banners that only appear in the redesigned view that instruct you to use old reddit because they rely on custom CSS for filtering and other things.
It's amazing that reddit management has thrown it's creators under a bus in search for monetization.
Same. I'm a frequent reddit user and have almost no exposure to the "gamer" bits. Reddit, in my experience, is exactly what you make of it. For me, it's a DIY and craft forum.
Discussion is simply not important. Demonizing opposing opinions is very important though. Very much an anti libertarian echo chamber.
Allow me to rephrase. Are you immediately fearful or deeply (emotionally) offended by original opinions or opinions challenge assertions you care deeply about but are not fully informed of? Libertarianism is simply the idea of individual independence (each individual is equal) which is the opposite of democracy (majority rules). John Stuart Mills spells this out in his On Liberty book.
The most clear example of absurdity is challenging the belief that WASM is replacing JavaScript. The position on this issue is stated by Mozilla, the WASM working group, and individual contributors to the WASM spec. Regardless of what the technology, or what's the authors mention, people form an independent reality and demonize anything contrary in an aggressive manner. Contrary opinions are taken as a personal threat necessarily demanding punishment.
The obvious way out of that is to join bubbles that are aligned with your interests rather than political views. If your interest is politics then find a better interest :)
For us, going to a rural town or even many suburbs elicits the observation "It smells like dead gay people" as you've entered an area where you may get lynched for being yourself. Even here in Seattle, non-straight couples are getting violently assaulted for being out in public with their significant other. The state of affairs is rapidly getting worse for us!
It took a bit of finagling to exclude the US college and city subreddits but otherwise I subscribed as-is to everything on that page. I think I only have unsubbed to a couple of them manually after, mostly because of excessive political posts by people who clearly don’t live in the area (Israel and Palestine subreddits come to mind)
You get some great content from doing it. Specifically Denmark and Sweden have amazing content in Danish and Swedish respectively that you wouldn’t ever see otherwise. Plus the former Yugoslavia countries and Eastern Europe and basically a lot of Europe generically has some sweet content you would not normally see if you weren’t subbed to their subreddits. Right click to google translate helps a lot. There are some truly dank European memes out there.
One of the other things I noticed that was really cool is that I now am tuned in to state politics outside of my home state in US. You really start to see the major issues other states have when you are subbed to their home subreddit.
(Shameless plug: https://beta.getaether.net)
It looks interesting but with no way to preview the current communities or content before downloading, I'm hesitant to go through downloading, installing, and signing up to a new service, only to find out it's another Voat.
Could you direct me to that page?
One of the problems with attempts to keep the "old internet" alive is that they still skew technical (because most of the people who are nostalgic for it are comfortable enough with those technical things), but now regular Joes have other options. They're not going to bother learning the technical stuff if everything else is set up to make it brainless and easy.
Moreover, since you HAVE to be technically inclined to build such a thing, the initial word of mouth and distribution winds up being constrained to the technical crowds. This makes the communities one-note and boring, so people just don't feel very compelled to stay.
Edit: No, i don't talk about /pol/. No one likes the right-wing /pol/-scum. That's not 4chan.
Addendum: to say /pol/ isn’t 4chan is both true and false but it’s kind of weird and unfortunate you felt obligated to apologize for using 4chan because /pol/ exists. Just because /pol/ tolerates witches doesn’t mean 4chan’s a witch site for witches populated entirely by witches.
Nostalgia is powerful! The key has always been to unsubscribe all the “front page” (once “default”) subreddits.
Leaving your comment moderation duties up to majoritarian voting is inevitably going to do that.
IRL, when debating another person, most people IMO wouldn't be at least half as extremist as they're on reddit or HN
The interface of reddit and HN kind of encourage this. Old PHP BBs used to have avatar pics and signature blocks and stuff that distinguished your post as yours. It sort of anchored your “content” to an identity, so over time a community develops and people start to develop reputations and stuff. That doesn’t happen as much when everything is visually indistinct from everything else.
I have never found any sites/forums/bbs that didn't eventually devolve into a echo chamber given enough time.
People like to repeat the same opinion as others and those who don't like these opinions tend to be the first to leave for other pastures.
(Unfortunately, there's not much to do about the mobile app, which is pretty bogus... although there are a few third-party apps which are less obnoxious.)
This is a phrase I'm not familiar with. What do you mean?
Unfortunately your table is within 2 meters of the bathroom. Every time the door opens, the bathroom light casts shadows on your silverware and lights the back of your head highlighting the thinness of your hair. This is followed, a few seconds later, as the smell of urinal mints wafts over and mixes with the delicate anise and dark plum notes of your $26 glass of wine.
I guess you have to have been there :|
....says a person signed into HN engaged in pointless internet comment arguments....
old.reddit.com works fine when logged out, for me.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
which will auto-redirect you to the old-design
Why can't I just have a nice link aggregator with decent discussion? HN is great, but it doesn't have as much content as other platforms. I just want to discuss politics, hobbies, and lifestyles with the same level of discussion we have here, why is that too much to ask?
because it's bloody hard to create civil, thoughtful communities. HN is interesting since the general user base seems to have learned to self-moderate, buuuut, it has made HN a pretty dry place (boring maybe?).
I have found some absolute hilarious gems on Reddit. The wit and humor of some users really catches me off guard sometimes, but the issue with Reddit is that there is just so much low effort garbage to sift through to find anything interesting/funny. Reddit seems to have converged on to a low effort meme-fest for the most part. I've gone to the effort to customise my sub-reddits to match my interests, but each community seems to very quickly become a repetitive echo chamber, so there are not many new/unique POV to explore. For example I sub to /r/Australia and it's basically the same content re hashed over and over (NBN sucks, Libs suck, House prices suck, magpies are annoying, here's a picture of a Kookaburra etc.)
So Reddit isn't really for me any more and I spend little time there. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I find that I get more out of just sitting in the sun and letting my mind wander.
So it's not just me? I quit using Reddit because this happened on my phone all the time. Don't they test this sort of thing, or pay attention to abandonment stats?
This would be bad on so many levels.
I use Reddit daily, but it's days are numbered. Having Facebook acquire them I think is it's only saving grace. I use the word "it" deliberately, because Reddit is now in the hands of its VCs.
Then it would be bad for them, too.
Fixed that.
Your FB is probably far more diverse than reddit at this point. Maybe reddit 5 years ago, but reddit today is a propaganda platform for a political party and ideology. It's the echo chamber of echo chambers.
I've never had FB. I started weaning myself from reddit years ago. I primarily use youtube now. Though that is getting screwy too.
> Bold prediction: FB will try to acquire Reddit soon
Doubt it. Bolder prediction: FB will be around long after reddit is gone.
Reddit's main traffic problem for advertisers is that most users don't really subscribe to subreddits or make accounts, but rather browse the front page casually. So you can target, for instance, /r/smallbusiness to target small business owners, but you'll exhaust that inventory very quickly. A Facebook acquisition would mean that a much higher percentage of Reddit's audience could be served relevant ads.
I don't believe Reddit (owned by Conde Nast, a subsidary of Advance Publications) has any intentions to sell the platform outright, as they essentially get to control the v̶o̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶ front page of the internet.
That's just about the worst thing I can imagine
I literally have no connections on FB to people I haven't met in person, and don't know a single friend's reddit account.
But unlike forums, most of the conversation on Facebook is 20 comments at a time and you can't just link to page X of some conversation...
"We know all of your interests. Not just your interests you are willing to declare publicly on Facebook – we know your dark secrets, we know everything… (laughs)"
Also Reddit is owned by Wired's parent, Conde Naste. I don't think it is up for sale.
It's a shame that they are 'good enough' to prevent much growth in the competitors, leading the cool tech made by competitors to often become exclusively filled with content that would be banned on reddit.
The hierarchy is on GitHub: https://github.com/MetASnoo/Subreddit-Directory-Skeleton/blo...
But it's not in a structured format and tough to verify. There's no methodology for the current organization, and it doesn't look like it matches the actual graph.
Needless to say it's cut heavily into my reddit usage. I genuinely believe they raised a bunch of money, hired a bunch of engineers and managers, convinced the C-levels a re-design was necessary, and then implemented a subpar re-design with a giant middle finger to users all in the name of ads. Glorious, world improving, ads.
Reddit not logged in is like watching that garbage truck full of memes crash into on-coming traffic.
Would be really neat to select a single sub or group of subs and generate a line chart of the same data.
http://ryancompton.net/2016/08/07/upvotes-over-time-by-subre...
This deleted post outlines the catastrophic degree of astroturfing that riddles the sub.
The post had to be archived because of drama around the original post when the user presented his research to administration.
I'd really like something like HN, but for political discussion. There are a couple okay subreddits, but it's just not worth it anymore IMO. I just want quality discussion about issues, complete with evidence. PoliticalDiscussion is okay so far, but then again, so was politics a couple of years ago.
> that activity decrease is far larger than any other subreddit, even political ones
I agree that a direct comparison of activity levels isn't all that sensible. I was just surprised that TD has lost nearly 50% of its activity while the rest of Reddit has grown, even growing in the subject area TD is a part of.
There was some issue with sticky threads not rising as much to the r/all that impacted r/the_donald, but otherwise, I can still see posts from that sub on the front page though I do have to scroll quite a bit.
The only distinction at this point is that the subreddit doesn’t have the yellow banner or verified email on account requirement. It is quarantined in the ways that count, such as inability to hit the front page regardless of popularity.
I wish. That subreddit is an absolute cancer that infests the entire site.
https://austingwalters.com/trends-on-hacker-news-activity-gr...
When people say Reddit is 4chan-lite, I see where they're coming from. They're not signed in, so all they see is r/all, which has about the same quality level as the front page of Youtube.
The trick to it is to install the Reddit Enhancement Suite browser extension and start blocking the subs that frequently post low-quality/hate speech/just plain irritating content. Block a sub from your home page once, it never comes back.
Wish I could say the same for Youtube. I swear, you watch ONE Bill Burr standup clip, and your recs are suddenly full of "feminist gets pwned by redpill logic" and other "viral" garbage videos, each of which has to be manually set to "Not Interested".
- user accounts and profiles (users have their own "subreddit") - friends list (and block list) - live chat - personalizable feed - communities
So yeah, it's a social network that looks a lot like a message board, and it has been getting more and more social features.
That's the reason I'm leaving Reddit. I liked how it was a while ago, but the recent changes and the culture just aren't my cup of tea anymore. Discussion is still mostly okay, but there's just far too much noise.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/87q8pn/the...
https://imgur.com/gallery/c4Wzo
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8yma4e/oc_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8ahy05/int...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
Note that FB owns 4 out of the top 6 social media platforms on that list. That's how dominant FB really is.
When I start digging down into the lower quality comments those comments are obviously lower quality. But here's the thing-- within the lower quality comments is the OP responding to the low quality comments!
In other words, an OP (probably like many OPs) has a limited amount of time to get feedback on Reddit about a pressing problem. And mods/downvoters cannot react quickly enough in that period of time to appropriately moderate the responses.
Imagine OP's "Reddit time" (let's say an hour) as a rectangle in a video game that starts at 100% and drains to 0%. Let's say those dregs comments drained 15% of the OP's total time or energy participating on Reddit.
Now, suppose a lurker reads the thread later when the mods/downvoters have caught up with all their work. The lurker's default view is only the quality comments. This misleads the lurker by hiding the 15% time-or-energy hit the OP had from interacting with the dregs. The lurker likely assumes that participating on Reddit requires less time or energy that it does in reality.
Now the lurker tries out posting for the first time and starts to experience the 15% time-or-energy hit from the dregs comments. The more impatient OP is about reading comments, the more likely OP is to increase that wasted time-or-energy by interacting with the dregs.
Worse, that 15% time-or-energy hit includes content that would be beyond the pale for in-person social interactions-- it's mindless trolling or misanthropy which nearly no one would utter face to face. Some of it-- like accusations that the OP is an imposter-- is unique to social media.
Worst of all, that poster probably started as a lurker. So their decision to post in the first place was based on a view of Reddit that radically downplays the costs of interacting. I mean, I don't see any clear warnings on first post that let the poster know "shit will roll in" faster than the mods can flush it.
The obvious solution is to throttle all posting activity so that participating on Reddit slows to a level approaching those tree people from Lord of the Rings. (The larger time slices would actually get rid of whole class of problems, like the internet sleuthing BS that happened after the Boston bombing.) But I'm sure Reddit wants to encourage OPs to increase their # of responses for maximum buzz, so I don't really see any non-manipulative practical solution to this problem.
The upshot of my comment was something like this: lurkers likely interpret a post as the OP being on some sort of mountaintop. In this view the moderators and voters are spread out along the mountainside, helping some hikers reach the top and hindering others from getting there. Thus, it looks to the lurkers like the mountaintop is a place where "unwanted" commenters have been stopped from climbing up and only "desirable" discussion occurs. (For whatever definition of "unwanted"-- it doesn't matter and we'll come back to that.)
To the OP, however, the experience is much more like a parking lot where anyone who wants to can walk up and interact with OP. Later the mods and voters come in and "clean up" the lot so that it appears to onlookers that there were no "unwanted" interactions with OP-- only "desirable" discussion.
Now, let's assume 100% of downvoted comments are actually good faith actors who happen not to agree with what you call the "hivemind."
Because of the manipulative design of Reddit, here's what will happen:
* people who agree with the hivemind point of view and don't want dissenting opinions will overestimate how good Reddit is at facilitating "desirable" discussion. They will do this because the OP's interaction with dissidents is hidden from them.
* people who disagree with the hivemind point of view will underestimate how much interaction OP had with dissident points of view. They will do this because OP's interaction with dissenting opinions is hidden from them.
Hivemind peeps lose because they want OP to have what they consider a pleasant discussion when in reality OP is expending considerable energy having what they would consider an unpleasant discussion.
Non-hivemind peeps lose because they develop an exaggerated sense of the problem of dissidents not being heard. They were heard by the OP, but the non-hivemind peeps don't see that interaction.
OP loses because the hivemind peeps consider the discussion a success and overlook the problem of OP (and many others) expending energy on the more adversarial interactions. But OP loses again because OP's adversaries don't credit OP for interacting with dissidents!
Reddit just exists, sitting there in the background, steadily growing over time, but never seemingly even trying to raise its own profile. Yet (or perhaps because of that) I certainly spend far more time there and get far more value from it than any other social media site.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...