Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push users to the app: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1086002848926593025 )
That said, it seems like the really bad dark patterns I reported 7 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446841) no longer appear to be in place.
Why not just load your own css and set the div to "display:none;" then?
Specifying a parameter of reddit’s specification allows me to work with them as a user to follow their parameter. If their users don’t like certain features (like nag popups) then it helps them to proactively solve this problem before their users leave.
Why? What's the business reason? What does a native app provide the business that a mobile website doesn't?
It can’t be that high anymore. All the signals seem to be that rooting is trending down. I could be wrong of course as I have no hard data.
Until then, not being much of a phone user at all, I'd been convinced that mobile experiences were always worse than desktop ones.
As a result, most Silicon Valley product managers are trained to think that websites are nothing more than the top of a funnel to eventually convert low-value search engine users into high-value app users. Once you realize this, almost every stupid thing websites do suddenly makes sense. They will do almost anything possible to grow app installs even if it makes the website nearly useless.
Sure, it's terrible if you care about the web and user experience. But most PMs only stick around a company for 1-2 years and they'd rather be able to show a hockey stick graph of "high value" app user growth to get promoted or get a new job then worry about what makes for a good user experience.
Another reason is that a local app can spy on you more (track your location, for example) to collect data to sell, harass you with notification spam, and display non-blockable ads.
In the case of Sonos, it is much darker and user hostile because there is no danger of "web consumers being siphoned off by google" - you have to buy the Sonos components anyway. In this case it is all about metadata and traffic and user profiling.
e: Most likely the desktop app has seen declining usage the last decade, which is why Sonos doesn't prioritize it.
[edit] now that I think of it, probably the same reason Twitch was pushing its desktop app.
The dev team A/B tests a bunch of options until that number goes up, and then double down on the success. They don't really care about what users actually want, they're just pushing that app number up in any way possible. Their job performance is likely based on whether or not that number increases.
Medium does this too and it's a huge danger of taking a data-first approach to user experience. A/B testing on its own isn't bad, but it's often what drives this business behavior.
A huge investment will likely make them push this type of thing even harder because now they have to prove the investment's worth.
I think another major reason is that if someone is seeking to amuse themselves then in a browser they're as likely to skip over to another website; whilst in an app there's a mental barrier to that. I imagine people are more likely to change and view another subreddit, rather than jump to another website altogether.
There's a censorship angle too, wherein the app operators get greater control over the message their users receive than do website operators.
More often than not, I got redirected to App Store to re-download Reddit app, instead of launching the post in the app.
Product reason: (potentially) better ux/design, but obviously a lot of people think they went down the wrong route
Simple: you can’t block ads in a native App (at least not by installing an ad blocker or other methods accessible to normal users, you‘d have to modify DNS responses or similar).
Especially as the cookie is broken so that you get the pop-up every single AMP visit.
I’m not saying something didn’t go on, but if something did happen, where did that number come from besides “anonymous source[s]”
The current top comment on the current top post on /r/politics [1]:
>David Frum said it best this morning on NPR, his call for unity isn't actually a call for unity, he's demanding that everyone to support him and his policies.
The current top comment on the current top post on /r/The_Donald [2]:
>Schumer looked disgusting. Glasses at the end of his nose. Very disrespectful.
The politics comment might be biased but it is a least a political opinion worth discussing. The comment on The Donald is at best a childish insult and while I personally wouldn't call it "hate speech" I wouldn't be shocked if it was some form of antisemitic dog whistle. I think you are showing your own biases if you think those two subs have a similar level of discourse.
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/anf6vn/trump_will...
[2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/anf6ov/i_see_sc...
(Edit to the guy below: I'm not saying I disagree with you, just adding some context.)
I know that politicians getting criticized for their looks is just part of the equation and Trump is a big victim of that. However it is a little different when you are criticizing a Jewish person's "sniveling nose", especially in a community that is routinely accused of being hateful and antisemitic.
EDIT: This comment is being heavily downvoted, but I am not sure why. Like I said in my original post this wouldn't meet my personal definition of hate speak. However is it really outlandish to suggest that a community that has been accused of antisemitism might be signaling their antisemitism when their criticism of a Jewish person is the most stereotypical physical characteristic of the Jewish people?
This is a case of projection if there ever was one.
To start with, nothing I said here was directed towards Trump so Ivanka isn't relevant. Even if she was, aren't we past the whole "some of my friends are black" excuse for bigotry? Plenty of people otherize a group while thinking the people they know in that group are "one of the good ones".
The next big problem is the equating Jews with all of Israel. It is entirely possible for someone to be antisemitic and pro-Israel or anti-Israel and not antisemitic. Israel is an independent nation with its own politics and there are plenty of Jews there with any number of political ideologies. Over recent years the political climate of Israel has been skewing right (in part due to the support of the American right/Evangelicals who are pro-Israel and not necessarily pro-Jews). It is therefore natural that members of the political left in this country are reacting by distancing themselves from the political actions of Israel.
I am not going to get into a debate about Palestine, Farrakhan, or anything more political than than what I mentioned above. HN is not the place for that discussion and I don't think that discussion has any relevance to the original question of whether mocking a Jewish person's nose is potentially antisemitic.
She's also a woman, but I don't think anyone would see that as sufficient to refute the claim that Trump is a misogynist. Not that Trump was even referred to here except as a victim of the popular act of mocking politicians appearance.
> Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem
Being a Christian Zionist, or politically pandering to Christian Zionists, isn't incompatible with anti-Semitism.
It became a place to hate on everyone who didn't believe in atheism.
It was a very easy game.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admi...
The only issue to Reddit it seems was that he was caught doing it.
Why, their actions can lend plausible deniability to incriminating information in posts that have not been edited.
If only other online platforms were that honest! Imagine Google sending out misleading gmails in your name, or Facebook mining your private messages for incriminating secrets and offering to "share" them with all your friends.
There's nothing technical preventing any of these kinds of abuses, and the sooner average users understand that, the sooner we'll have support for strong legal protections to rein in big tech companies.
I do think you overestimate how trivial it would be for "management" (who? a senior PM? Sergei? Zuck?) to decide to turn off all internal security controls so individual Googlers could send emails using someone else's identity--it would likely run afoul of multiple current laws and contracts, to speak nothing of the universal, strong internal objections there'd be to that change and the high engineering cost to migrate off those systems. And I can't imagine a business landscape that would encourage any company to let individual employees do that.
There are tons of things to worry about wrt BigTechCos, but preventing and auditing rogue employees are something where their incentives align pretty strongly with the public good.
FWIW I do support stronger legal and privacy requirements (with some caveats, mostly because compliance is very expensive and potentially harmful to smaller companies).
Google's servers have the ability to send email from myname@gmail.com and it comes with all the appropriate DKIM signatures to be from "me". They have some kind of auto-reply system such that their computer can automatically send "as me". They're already 90% of the way there: I think you've overestimating how big a change this would be.
I'll also say that I have little to no confidence in "strong internal objections". VW engineers built the emissions-cheating system, Facebook engineers built Beacon, Google engineers dutifully slurped up everyone's private wifi traffic. As long as management dressed it up a little bit and/or reassigned any dissenters, I'm sure they'd get a compliant team to build whatever garbage they wanted.
Obviously you think you're the good guys, and you'd never do that, but you'd be surprised how "good" people can gradually slide into really unethical behaviour. If you haven't read them I recommend https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/558867.Disciplined_Minds and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37976541-bad-blood
Might we say you are a religious athiest?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-this-moment-i-am-euphoric
> a community that is still one of the most hated
As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.
I can't speak for Europe, but as of 2015, at least, about three-quarters of Americans identified as Christian. There are still large swaths of this country where being relatively outspoken about your atheism is, if not out-and-out dangerous, likely to have a negative impact on your social circles and even your career.
Remember that the HN crowd -- e.g., tech workers who by and large have pretty cosmopolitan outlooks -- is not really representative of "median America."
Also, religion comes up routinely, though perhaps not frequently, in contexts where religious belief is assumed. In an ordinary conversation about the right way to handle a situation, people will ask you, "Do you think God wants me to ______?" It's just a manner of speaking, but it forces you to either pretend belief or out yourself and face their judgment. It's only in "mixed company" where people avoid the topic.
I read Nietzsche on my own in high school, and just felt so relieved that I wasn't alone with these thoughts and wasn't just some weirdo. The internet was nothing like it was today, chatrooms were the forum for discussion and there might have been some geocities pages devoted to atheistic belief, but it was still in the dark corners.
It amazed me when I saw that /r/atheism was a front and center thing when I first started going to reddit. It devolved over time into a version of /r/IamVerySmart, but that IMHO was an amazing outlet for those having doubts about all the crap being shoved down their throat their whole lives. It would have saved me a lot of anxiety growing up.
What happened instead was that marginalized people all over the US found out they weren’t crazy or bad. There were people who thought just like them three hours away. So they picked up and moved to the city faster than ever.
On a somewhat related note: A lot of people cite the "faces of atheism" meme/trend whatever you want to call it as being the tipping point when /r/atheism just went too far and it became cringey. I mean some of those posts were a bit cringey, but overall I think it sent a very needed message- that there are lots of people out there from all walks of life that think like you do, don't think you have to give in to the prevailing beliefs. I don't think my upbringing was that abnormal- questioning the existence of god, my parents/family would have smacked me, probably verbally but if I really pushed it they likely would have punished me. My friends all seemed to firmly believe as well but were generally tolerant, it certainly seems you could be a social pariah in more religious parts of the country. Being exposed to new ideas like this I am sure spawned some people to say to themselves I don't have to go along with all this crap, there are bigger and better things out there.
This gets interesting when talking to theists because, if you don’t point it out, many people will hear “he has a religion, he’s one of us”. Many assume Buddha is a deity.
If you do push the point, you learn that some people’s brains short out when you tell them there is a religion with hundreds of millions of followers that doesn’t have a God. The Venn diagram in their brain of Us and Them can’t process this fact.
If you believe that, I don't even know where to begin.
People in the US Bible Belt get death threats if they declare their atheism.
Online isn't offline. And most people still exist more in the offline world.
In meatspace there are plenty of social communities where you will be looked down upon for being religious (if you really don't believe this, you either need to travel more or you need to keep questioning social dogmas even after you've found some place you fit in). The many more places where you'll be looked down on for being atheist does not support making one sweeping generalization - opposing flavors of intolerance do not cancel each other out!
It's similar to how the KKK is still a problem, yet we've got this new trend of oppressing free speech online. It's tough to affect the entrenched players in any game, and all too easy to attack easy targets in a simulation of fighting the good fight.
No, I'm not letting you get away with "equivalency". That kind of mental gymnastics is what allows these kinds of "talking points" to exist.
Christian churches are not taxed. Atheist non-profits are. Christian religions get "marriage" enshrined in law and get to define what "marriage" is. Atheists get their partners decisions questioned in the hospital. I can go on and on about the privileges that religion enjoys in the US.
Taking away undeserved privileges is not persecution. If you want to see persecution, go to the middle east--THAT'S what Christian persecution looks like.
The US qualifies are one of the most religious of the countries that don't qualify as theocracies. Claiming that Christians are being persecuted in the US is hogwash.
If you want to talk to me about persecution, come back after every church in the US is actually paying taxes--I won't hold my breath.
> Atheists get their partners decisions questioned in the hospital. I can go on and on about the privileges that religion enjoys in the US ... Taking away undeserved privileges is not persecution
So, you have implied that it would be progress for a traditionally-married couple to have medical decisions for their spouses questioned, in the same manner that an unlegalized gay couple does. This is the inherent problem with framing things in terms of privileges instead of rights - it implies that the way to make things equal is to tear others down, rather than supporting rights for all.
IMO, but I'm certainly not a scholar here - if you look at the actual messages of Jesus (et al), they were preaching against the oppressive power structures of their time. Their specific dogmas were then calcified and turned into their own oppressive power structure, because real understanding requires continuing vigilance.
If you're not yet to the point where you can forgive the overly religious, then I understand. But closing that door is just setting your dogma up to be a tool of the next oppressor.
Lots of people were fatigued by daily threads like this microcosm. It’s obviously important to folks in the sub, but it was many instances of people just not caring. There must be some form of directed apathy where a description is not that I care about something, but I definitely do not care enough to be aware of it. It’s not apathy as I dislike encountering it, but I am fine with its existence.
This was a story line in HBO's Silicon Valley.
If you believe that then you're living in a bubble. Please, go outside your comfort zone and see how the rest of the population thinks. Hint: It's not what you believe.
For workplaces, I think that ship has sailed. But it probably won’t help you with awkward thanksgiving or high school reunion conversations yet. All the kids I know hang out with the atheists but I can’t tell if that says something about these kids or kids in general.
I don't know what it's like in Europe, but in the US, it's a very divisive topic. Really divisive. Like brawls in the streets divisive. Like secede-from-the-Union divisive. There's cities that will shun you for being religious, and other cities that will shun you for not being religious, sometimes even in the same state.
That's why the government shut down happened, frankly. The religious and non-religious parts of the United States literally hate each other so much that they'll act against their own interests just to hurt the other side.
Notabug.io is a P2P tech using the old Reddit UI.
http://k666.kr5ddit.com/ Is a free and open source version of http://kr5ddit.com made to look like the old Scoop and function like Reddit.
I call shenanigans on the hypergrowth, where the metrics you sent me imply ~1 million pageviews per month yet there is barely any engagement or new/original content on the site itself. (and the few comments there appear to be very Voat-esque)
Semi-related, I dislike straight-up Reddit/Hacker News clones, including the UI. If Reddit/HN has enough issue to warrant a competitor by cloning the UI, that just repeats the same problem.
So notabug itself is 2% of 1 million ~ 20k pageviews.
However, snew.notabug.io is a mirror of the corresponding Reddit posts w/o censorship, which makes it not an alternative! Shenanigans identified!
But the tech has real promise and that's the story here. Of course 'alternatives' get the scoundrels first so criticizing it on that merit is a bit generic.
There's value in federated systems with a p2p overlay even if they're not attracting the money driven crowds. You can't post sci-hub links openly on reddit. You can't even discuss how to handle DRM and bypass it.
Centralized systems are always going to go through the same lifecycle after they reach a critical mass requiring real money. It's not pretty. If anyone can self-host from home or even contribute hosting by visiting with a webrtc enabled browser it benefits a lot of groups pushed out for perfectly cromulent reasons.
I guess everbody sucks on this new, modern and JS-USB-enabled (thanks again Google!) web.
Pretty much, yes.
AMP compliance gets you a better Google search placement. So, every site is going to make sure they get their AMP placement and then funnel you to something non-Google.
AMP is an absolute cancer and its adoption would probably be 0% if google didn’t forcefully shove it down everyone’s throat. (And they are very good at learning from their own history, because that totally worked with Google+.)
Fortunately I have u-block origin so I could just add a few filters to get rid of that nonsense. It doesn't solve the terrible performance however (because apparently you need a top-of-the-line smartphone to load and display a few kB of plaintext comments).
Care to share?
One big 'bootstrapping' problem is that the first to adopt a new platform are the people who are _too toxic_ for the original.
Taking down an incumbent is hard, though. Might need deep pockets for a while.
While everyone on Digg or MySpace could easily move to reddit or facebook, it is much harder for a subreddit centered around say gardening, astrophotography, headphones or a tv show to just jump to a new website. I do hope that these communities won't be lost when reddit does end up losing its charm and popularity.
1. They cycle through a couple of different messages, and the buttons get switched around
2. The wording is such that you read it twice and still aren't sure which button will just take you to the damn website
I don't mind them promoting their app, but these dark patterns truely rile me
Isn't there a ton of data that most people don't even use many apps anymore? Or they install them once and then uninstall them or ignore them?
I hope we can move towards a web that stays in the web browser. Apps are becoming really annoying, especially for interactions you only have intermittently (I'm not a daily reddit user, but I go there every now and then, or it pops up on search).
That doesn't mean the app can't exfiltrate data (presumably data useful to advertisers) in the background.
The mobile app is a program that works for the developer.
The end result of browsers becoming more adtech-hostile and user-friendly is that more companies turn to mobile apps.
Apple decides to start notifying on cookies or make fingerprinting harder? Poof. There goes a chunk of your ad value per user.
And who knows what any given browser vendor will do tomorrow?
Some would say "So it's like the 90s, where everyone was continually adapting as web specs were negotiated." The difference is that now there are billion+ dollar businesses directly tied to that ad revenue.
The latest Firefox release has a built in list of tracker domains to block and next release blocks auto playing video.
From a user perspective, now is probably the best time ever to be using the web.
What is "several years"? This has definitely existed, say, five years ago. Not at this scale, of course, but it's not a recent invention by a long shot.
On my phone I use reddit is fun. I have no issues at all with reddit atm in terms of them fucking with my experience.
Legacy mode will be phased out as soon as it has served their purpose of smoothing over the transition.
Or, it will be allowed to die of neglect, slowly becoming less and less compatible with the site until fully unusable.
I miss old reddit, nothing else really fills the niche in a unified way.
Reddit and Facebook both have some hold for me because of niche communities that they both let me aggregate/monitor/interact with easily, without going to a myriad of websites. I really don’t want to have to do that - in some cases, I’m not even sure I can find comparable replacements.
It is interesting because it's related to what I do but different enough to be fascinating.
Random aside: I've long been very down on web tech, but those 3 have sort of reinvigorated my interest in web stuff.
Not Mozilla's fault
Folk would probably move over to something like voat.co
There will be other places for you to migrate to, as there have been for decades, if not an entire generation.
It's already frustrating to view v.reddit content in 3rd party apps.
I use Boost for Reddit (Android) and the old reddit style, and RES in my browser. I see why they are going towards the Instagram style route - people generally like what they are accustomed to; and I guess more people use Instagram than Reddit.
The reddit community is great, but the company seems to not care about their users at all.
Dark patterns are defined by trying to willfully get you to do something that's counter to your own intent.
As for Clippy, it's not hard to design a straightforward auto-correction feature, which detects what you typed and suggests a useful addition or replacement. Google, Apple, etc., all have their own designs that work perfectly well. I have trouble seeing an animated 3D cartoon as anything other than "trying to willfully get me to do something counter to my own intent". That's a classic way to manipulate people.
the captcha is not completable, and when it is, the next section says the captcha signature is invalid
but you can always circumvent that with a clearnet VPN, just need to isolate its use to just reddit, that session.
We should probably be cautious about using the term "dark pattern" so liberally, otherwise anything on the web that we don't like could eventually be categorized as such and the term loses its power.
Reddit is in good company here, notably with YouTube and Twitter.
When the recession hits how do you plan to buffer the revenue beating you're guaranteed to take? If you had built up a cash reserve, you can absorb some or all of the hit.
Where do you plan to get a large amount of capital to make opportunistic investments in expanding what you do? Debt? If you say debt / loans, that's just admitting the necessity of the capital buffer (which is better derived from profit via operations rather than paying for debt and the associated debt interest).
What's your plan for surviving a recession or industry change or regulatory hit (which can demand immense spending on compliance adjustment) with either near 0% revenue growth or low single digit growth? That's the most common business scenario, not 30% or 50% growth every year.
What if you have the opportunity to hire N talented engineers from a failed competitor. You've got zero or very low revenue growth and hiring these talented people could very plausibly alter your trajectory. It's an opportunity to jump on. Where is your capital for that coming from?
You can apply the exact same capital outlay scenario to equipment investment / upgrade opportunities.
How do you plan to absorb any manner of business disaster?
Profit is inherently necessary so that when inevitable bad things happen, you can afford to absorb them. It's also necessary for opportunistic expansion and investment, when you see an opportunity that requires a sizable upfront capital allocation. One of the biggest differences between organizations that seize on opportunities and those that don't or can't, is having the required capital to act.
And yet, Wikimedia is a non-profit. So is Harvard. Non-profit doesn't mean you can't have a capital reserve. It only means you don't pay that capital reserve out to shareholders.
> Profit is inherently necessary so that when inevitable bad things happen, you can afford to absorb them.
Some of the longest-lasting institutions in the world are non-profit.
Is it just some or is it all? Honest question, the only very long lasting institutions I can think of are not for-profit.
There are, of course, religious institutions that are older.
I would posit that it is possible for Reddit to finance itself and it's operation without going as far as they are doing now.
However, that would imply forgoing possible megaprofits that VCs wants - as well as probably reducing growth in headcounts and interesting internal projects. So there are both internal and external forces pushing in the direction of more monetization.
I think Basecamp is a nice example of forgoing profit for a better product.
If Reddit had 10 employees and a $5 million annual salary budget, all the employees would be very well compensated, but they wouldn't need to raise $300 million from investors or aggressively pursue ad revenue by pushing an app to avoid ad blocking.
Personally I'm not sure if running as a pseudo-nonprofit would work or not. It's possible there's a cat-and-mouse game with spammers, astroturfers, and griefers that can only be solved with large numbers of employees and high revenue. Perhaps successful online nonprofit projects like Internet Archive and Debian have only avoided this because the don't have the combination of user-generated content and a large user base that make them attractive to spammers. Or perhaps the fact Reddit has so many more users than MetaFilter is a sign sites following this model just don't get big.
Wikimedia comes to mind. They're by no means perfect, but they're the closest match I can think of.
One answer to this is it is very hard because your users would need to pay fees instead of being sucked into ads en masse by dark patterns. And who is willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for reddit?
Wikimedia just gets donations instead because they provide useful content. The majority of reddit is memes and images so people will just migrate to Instagram. A faithful rest might pay, but not enough to reach a $3bn valuation.
The values people can be browbeaten, outnumbered and marginalized. Once that happens it’s hard to change back, even if you identify and remove the ringleaders.
- http://zerotoonebook.com/ - https://playbook.samaltman.com/
That's by design. Reddit is just another data mining company. Of course they'd rather have you on the app than the browser. Apps can gather info about you even when you're not using them.
Google realized that load times are critical 20 years ago. Facebook realized it when Google was launching G+.
They seem to be forgetting it, lately.
But Reddit is only one of those things.
I'm glad they keep their old mobile interface (https://i.reddit.com) which loads instantaneous. Unfortunately some links redirect you to the new interface, which is when I just close the site.
They've been doing that for months now. Plus their mobile site is hideously slow and bloated.
Here's a tip: http://i.reddit.com. Looks old but does the job.
Clicking 'Signup" brings you to a single email form field screen that in no way indicates you do NOT need to provide an email.
Clicking 'Next' without entering one lets you create your username and PW without an email address.
As a marketer, I understand (but don't condone or agree with) the thinking behind some of what they've done, but as a user of over a decade, I'm nervous about the direction they've been taking the service, and this is not good news IMHO.
Hell, I'm more ready to call it an easter egg than deception.
The dark pattern is that there is zero indicator that it is actually optional and they appear to go out of their way to hide that fact. It is about being upfront with your intentions, and what you are offering users.
my point being that with Google your complaint is valid. But on reddit case, you are just signaling that you liked one dark pattern (which probably benefited you) more than others.
They have also become particularly creepy and anti-privacy lately.
But...
Their current "force you into app" (which appears to leave you logged in, able to make account changes, even if you change your password) approach is fucking horrible. Their mobile navigation is broken by design and.... for what? What incentive do I have to sign up? Why should when its in such a hostile way. The incentive clearly is for them the organization to get new funding and not for me as a user since functionality has been reduced for NO reason. It's like Quora... that worked great for funding but has really done a lot to develop a mature business, eh?
... I'm gonna go pour out some coffee in memory of Digg.
Arguably the best Reddit experience is only available when you are signed in. Reddit's greatest value come from niche communities. Personally I enjoy things like r/savagegarden, r/mycology and r/askhistorians, so when I log in I see pictures of mushrooms and carnivorous plants, and get to read interesting articles about history and science. If you don't log in and subscribe to things you're interested in then you will see memes, jokes, pictures of people's pets etc, it's a totally different experience.
Disclaimer: work for Reddit.
However, the anonymous experience is (was) also terrific for very different reasons. Reddit is next to unusable on mobile safari in incognito mode. Sometimes I don’t want to be tracked. I want to read whatever I want to at the moment, without having that be associated to my name in a database somewhere, and without having related ads follow me around. It’s an intellectual freedom that to many people is non-negotiable.
Reddit is now taking money from a Chinese company, where this kind of anonymity is not possible. That’s frightening to me as a longtime reddit user, both logged in and anon.
I get that I can create an anon account, but I don’t want to spend 5 minutes doing that every time I open an incognito tab.
I find it funny that the OP would ask this question while being an active part of HN. Reddit is HN, for niche topics for which communities are hard to find.
I am regular on subs like r/progmetal, r/boston , r/bodyweightfitness, r/frugalmalefashion and r/gifrecipes . Topics for which I wouldn't find even a close alternative anywhere on the internet.
In addition, there are popular subs like r/soccer and r/dota2 which have developed a personality of their own, with in-jokes, popular posters and regular weekly focused discussions.
In many ways, the front page of reddit is literally the least interesting part of it. I am glad it is that way, because it adds an element of inaccessibility to it, keeping away those without enough commitment. (HN does it too with its interface and topics that need specialized knowledge)
The alternatives aren't just visiting the main page while being logged out, but for instance hitting a thread or subreddit that is linked from another context. Like say a mobile app that uses a subreddit for the occasional announcement/discussion, which is where that nag popup gets really annoying.
I also visit several niche communities directly. And despite having a decade old account, if I want to comment I usually create a throwaway nym. Obviously that experience isn't as integrated as it could be, but that's the tradeoff we all have to make in the surveillance society!
I hope your superiors realise how much they are stealing users from the future.
You've basically given your competitors a free USP - "it's like Reddit but without all the bullshit".
FTFY
If it is a common word or activity, chances are there is a related subreddit for it, and askhistorians is one of the more well known ones. There are a lot of similar ask subreddits titled in a similar fashion, but that obviously comes from knowing other parts of reddit.
Well, there you go. There's the issue right there
I've never used the official reddit app so I cant speak to it but I have used an android app called RedReader for a few years now and it is my preferred way to browse reddit. I highly recommend it.
Reddit is huge -- I suspect they will be bigger than Facebook (maybe not in valuation, but usage) in the next 7 years and these problems will only be exacerbated. Facebook isn't what 12-13 year olds today are interested in. Reddit is a more apt model for online discourse and culture than Facebook ever was.
I wonder how big of a part the Russian bots and trolls played. I'd love to read an in-depth book about it.
The idea that reddit helped Trump is absurd. Pretty much every social media company was anti-trump and many, like google, actively worked against trump.
/r/t_d also took advantage of the void left after the DNC primaries ended since the site was very anti-Hillary at the time.
Subreddits are like thinktanks. They are the perfect breeding ground for internet content. You can gauge popularity, you can quickly refine the content based on the comments received, and if you're lucky you can even kickstart and guide whole movements.
What would you suggest the alternative is? I think the real problem is that society is coming to terms with the fact that anonymous free speech isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Does there need to be one? This site seems to manage to avoid it. Quite how you get into the situation reddit did is mystifying to me.
I completely agree that anonymous free speech is not the ideal it sounds.
If we are going to be reasonable a better comparison would be comparing this site to a single heavily moderated subreddit.
As an extreme you have subreddits like https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ if you look into the comments you will see a lot of "[ Removed ]" threads. https://i.imgur.com/Q7mXkPd.png
Other subreddits are purposefully not moderated as heavily. It's entirely up to whoever runs it to moderate how they see fit.
Reddit will also ban subreddits for hosting content that some people may think is "bad", but definitely not illegal. Not that I miss /r/shoplifting, but the discussion itself wasn't illegal. They also banned legal things like firearm schematics and r/brassswap
I would hope you don't have a bad taste from right leaning economics. Not even China can deny the power of Free Markets.
They will cry foul and get plenty of attention.
A while back, a far right sub got closed. People were kind of lost as always happens when moderators take a sub private.
Others, and this happened during the heay of the 2016 election, offered up a space. A thread on a definitely not far right sub.
Was, "have a beer, tell us about it" essentially. No judgement, just a place to talk past frustration.
The chatter that night was interesting. Relations were permenantly improved. Some of the "far" was also rolled off. (I was there, ran that little experiment and followed users and discussion for a time afterword.)
Aaron was passionate about this effect. Reddit, in general, used to be. When people talk broadly, things improve.
When they get contained, things amplify.
Reddit sees people with interests, things to say. Others, including some moderators at Reddit, sees groups of people.
That clash is not talked about as much as it should be.
Humanizing others different from us is something Reddit has done well. When it is done, the state of conflict improves. Reddit has also contained discussion, and amplified the toxic too. Ugly stuff.
We all run the same basic way, and we all have more in common than we often recognize, or admit.
One other thing:
A very toxic shitpost sub got to hating on a community I moderated. Two of us decided to make some friends.
For a month, we would rate their toxicity, employ good humor, laugh with, etc...
Amazingly, this worked far better than we expected. Soon, there were people in that toxic mess rooting for us, and it became increasingly difficult for the sub to be toxic and believe it had impact.
As the tipping point approached, we got banned, and the shitposts to follow fell flat. Everyone saw how ugly it was and our humor was missed.
They quit after that. The friends remained, some left the toxic haven.
Now, there are people like you and me that have the same bad taste for "far lefties", and in general, "those other people."
What we community managers, app builders, data scientists should be doing is finding ways to exploit the effects I put here.
And we should be making tools to foster better communication.
Those tools are software, and giving people options, making them aware of their own agency in dialog.
The former has only limited success as many communities will show. Blocks, bans, other things...
When combined with empowering people to take charge of their interactions, weigh what others say, it is a whole new game.
I have applied these to communities who end up very troll resistant and able to communicate across broad swaths of humanity.
Righteous indignation is not the only way to respond to toxic speech. In fact, it is often the very worst, yet the domimant exchange is indignation, largely for the often set expectations encouraging it.
Some rando says something toxic and when weighted, it is laughable, pathetic. It for sure is not meaningful.
Trolling works on righteous indignation.
Free hugs, humor, empathy, and more all snuff it out.
The same goes for very different worldviews. Make some friends, have a common human basis and those differences begin to melt.
Frankly, I see 3 billion being used to sell shit, get user data.
Shame that some of it is very unlikely to be used to improve communications and add some real value along the way.
Edit: Reddit is an amazing playform to run the social dynamics experiments. Lots to be learned there for those who go looking.
Hell, the fact they won't change r/politics to a more accurate name and remove it from the front page shows you exactly who Reddit caters to.
Reddit has also had a problem with anti-religious hate content, which isn't necessarily left wing except that the hate is often pointed at uncultured, socially conservative stereotypes.
Thanks for the reply in any case. It is enlightening to hear what someone else's viewpoints are on where the current left/right ideological divide is these days. Sometimes it feels like we are in crazyland.
I personally try to avoid the religious stuff because I'm ignostic (commonly misheard as agnostic and I don't usually correct because it gets some folks a little bothered), but just a couple weeks ago we dropped off our kids with grandma for a weekend and when they came home they were telling us all about how grandma told them God this, Jesus that, etc. sigh. If I complain, I look like the asshole, but dammit, why do people think it's okay to proselytize to elementary aged kids that are not their own? So I can almost understand when people get a little nuts with the anti-religious viewpoint, even though I don't advocate namecalling and ridiculing others for their belief or lack thereof.
This is the false dichotomy so often pushed by right-wing ideologues. Literally nobody on any side of the abortion debate advocates for "abortions up to a week after birth" or anywhere close to that. This sort of boolean thinking is the root of our (especially current) toxic political climate.
I think your reaction to this is the very problem you're trying to describe, but, to each their own.
Can you convince a subset of doctors to go anti-vaxx as easily as you can a randomly sampled subset of laymen?
I suspect much of the readership of HN isn't only aware of dark patterns, but actively primed to recoil from them.
I only agree with that in the sense that I think Facebook (the facebnook.com site) usage will decline quicker that Reddit usage. As someone who's been on Reddit for almost 9 years, I feel like the redesign is kind of equivalent to the timeline change that Facebook had. While it's not going to cause massive user drop off on it's own, it's kind of the thing that opened people's eyes to the fact that they are the product on Reddit. Every new complaint about Reddit will be, "First they did the redesign and now they are doing {insert new annoying thing}"
I think we'll see a gradual decline in Reddit usage for a while, but nothing major as there are no real competitors in the space that can handle anywhere near their scale. Once an actual competitor pops up though, all it's going to take is one or two missteps and people will start moving off Reddit.
If you really want an alternative, convince Musk to do it (or bless yours) and tweet it out. Even then I bet it would take years to match Reddit, and it may or may not ever actually exceed it.
One of the main issues with reddit is that a lot of niche interest subreddits are 90-99% non-practitioners or extreme amateurs, even when weighted in terms of contribution. For example there is no subreddit where you can actually learn very insightful things about programming or computer science or machine learning, same for biology/physics/astronomy/etc.
I would be ok with a not-reddit competitor that actually succeeded in being a better reddit. But the #1 thing they should avoid at all costs is taking VC money. You can't have a great community of experts that is also trying to maximize it's viewership, that's how you get Quora or Reddit
It's a non-profit site created by a former Reddit admin Deimorz (known for being the creator of /u/Automoderator, /r/SubredditSimulator...).
It's currently in closed alpha so the community is somewhat exclusive because of that; but if you wanted a HN+reddit hybrid, then it might be worth checking out.
sub: /r/Tildes source: https://gitlab.com/tildes
Voat? Yeah, they're kinda gross...
One such complaint is https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/amg6kr/netfl...
Technically you could say that Gallowboob (and similar) posts ARE ads, and warrant blocking.
https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter_2012/reddit_digg
I love Reddit and have no problem with this move in principle, though I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent."
I'm not a big believer in crypto, but Reddit seems like one of the few platforms that would allow a crypto economy to develop and provide an alternative to the dominant money-making models.
I guess you could say they were already early pioneers of the "cryptocurrency scam flameout" pattern.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditnotes
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2014/12/19/reddit-notes/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2uadvd/the_real_re...
[3] http://fortune.com/2015/01/30/reddit-notes-is-not-going-to-h...
Because trying to do crypto properly in a language without integers is recipe for disaster?
It does seem like we are stuck in a cycle where we are super into platforms until they become large and too beholden to investors, then we swap. Some kind of truly community driven (open source) federated service does seem like a real answer to this problem. Maybe we will all end up on Mastodon-like services pretty soon.
I worked at reddit for 4 years, but quit in 2016, largely because they were clearly beginning to switch from a small, fairly independent company (despite being owned by Advance/Conde) to one that was going to become completely dependent on venture capital and I knew what that would end up doing to the site.
A few months later, I decided to start a non-profit and start working on a site that would be able to address a lot of the issues that I think are hurting online communities: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of the announcement here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)
It's in private alpha and is still fairly small, but it gets several hundred posts/comments a day and is progressing steadily. If you (or anyone else) is interested in an invite, send me an email at the address listed in the blog post and I'll be happy to give you one.
(I totally miss my old BBS too...)
Just based on your blog post, you seem really in tune with what the real problems with Reddit (and social media as a whole) are in 2019.
Here's one of the top of my home page right now, in the Solarized Light theme (there are a few other options too): https://i.imgur.com/GbfpnT1.png
Community management and moderation aren't simple, black-and-white decisions. Anyone that claims they are has never been involved in doing it at a meaningful level.
User A, new account, posts a single comment: "Illegal immigrants should be deported."
User B, new account, posts a single comment in reply: "You're a racist."
What does Tildes do?
It's not impossible to answer that. And the answer will tell us a lot about what Tildes wants to be.
No matter how much I use it, I'm constantly amazed that I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about.
I'm not a fan of the redesign or their push to look at other social media platforms, but I understand the direction they have to go to build revenue.
You can find anything you want there if you look long enough.
Some popular subs can have good content, too - askreddit has a good topic once or twice a month, and depthhub (used to) have good curation of deep learning.
I disagree. Those subs are chock full of people who suffer from "expert beginner" symptom. The real experts have moved on to communities with a higher bar of entry (mostly forums). You can't have real in-depth discussion about technical subjects when you're constantly getting buried by people who are mostly trying to score internet virtue signaling points by pointing out that their table saw is old and lacks the most modern safety features or that they're not using jack stands. Forums (or 4-Chan, or anywhere else with linear, non-ranked discussion) doesn't have that problem. Once you're above the lowest common denominator in any sub there's little left to gain because you can't reliably interact with people who are at or above your level (because those people get drowned out so they start keeping their mouths shut or leave entirely).
This was inevitable though. At some point the corporate overlords will want to cash out. Time for something new.
If you only browse /r/all then yeah it's very likely you will be in a room full of teenagers.
Go to /r/askhistorians to be in a room with academics that take themselves very seriously.
I think it's just that, ultimately, younger people have more time for online community than middle-aged folks, and the average tone of most subreddits clearly shows this.
Perhaps I'd have a different perspective if I was pursuing a new hobby, so I was the n00b, but I'm.. not.
/r/starcraft: doesn't have nearly as much good discussion as TeamLiquid, but TL's forums are not easy to trawl through. Great coverage of tournaments/announcements tho
/r/personalfinance: really great here, lot of professional financial experts drop knowledge bombs. I've improved my financial life oodles just reading through this.
/r/piano: lots of great/interesting posts, mostly people playing pieces or shots of their set-ups, not too much memery but people try a little bit. Quite a few better/more experienced players than I am to answer my Q's.
The main thing I hate is memes. They are very low effort, many of them are inside jokes/highly meta, and the humor is usually bargain-basement, not very funny. If you can avoid those subreddits where memery takes over, then you have a better experience IMO.
Politics on Reddit seems to fall into either The_Donald or "Orange man bad" with very little objectivity in the middle in my experience.
Frankly, Democrats are being pulled to the left by the progressives and Republicans went hard right years ago with the tea party, so the reason there's no middle-of-the-road discussion is because there isn't one anymore. Luxuries of a two-party system.
The democrats have moved further left than republicans have moved right since 1994/2000: http://www.people-press.org/interactives/political-polarizat...
What's interesting is that most democrats want a more moderate party and most republicans want a more right/conservative party: https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2019/01/gallup-poll-...
Interestingly, the GOP probably contains the conservative and right wing impulses of the base. And it certainly feels that way, among my friends, we hate that illegal aliens are entitled to health care at ERs. I want to see their countries billed for the care / or I want to see the illegals dumped at the embassy rather than hooked up to medicine. I'm certainly not going to get my wish granted by the GOP. However, should the party fail, there's a chance I could get the representation I want.
'But there are drugs at burning man' - if it were truly a land onto its own, they'd be synthesizing the drugs at burning man.
That is a horrible, near sociopathic, line of thinking. You seem to have gotten to a point where you can't even recognize illegal immigrants as human beings.
If I saw illegals as non-human, I'd advocate for the local DNR to hand out hunting permits for illegals.
Don't you see my humanity? I bust my ass to earn my keep, I don't demand access to things others have, if that attitude were reciprocated and people took care of themselves, their livelihood wouldn't depend on my opinion of them.
As long as you coerce others to provide for those who are unwilling to do so for themselves, you're going to have this tension.
My borders my choice. If I can't advocate for my hard work and sacrifices to be invested as I see fit, what autonomy do I have? Do you tell women they have to spread their legs for the less fortunate or else they're sociopaths?
If someone is hurt and comes to me for help, I don't ask to see their papers.
Please keep reading my mind - why do I think this way? What status do I think illegals have if I want to treat them better than animals but worse than fellow citizens?
>Advocating to let people die, instead of treat them, because they aren't here illegal is putting their immigration status above them as a person and to me absolutely lessening their humanity.
Then why don't you advocate for a voluntary system to take care of illegals rather than tell me I'm a sociopath for exercising challenging but important fiscal discipline?
For the record I'd be fine treating illegals if someone else paid for it voluntarily - billionaire philanthropists, DSA chapters, the countries that these people remit their earnings to, etc. I'm not saying they don't deserve health care, I'm saying that I don't want to pay for it and I'd rather they suffer than I do.
Please address: My borders my choice. If I can't advocate for my hard work and sacrifices to be invested as I see fit, what autonomy do I have? Do you tell women they have to spread their legs for the less fortunate or else they're sociopaths?
Glad to hear you admit it. Money > humanity.
You can advocate for whatever you want, just like I'm free to tell you that it's a horrible idea that's only justification is to "punish" people you think deserve it.
My humanity is more important to me than others. I have to take care of myself because I know others would resent me if they had to take care of me. I'm sure you wouldn't be thrilled to provide for me if I came to your house with my hat in hand.
And you feel the same way - we're just arguing over where to draw the line. If you save any money that could be donated to those in need, you've also put money above humanity. Have you ever bought a Mcflurry? Did you really need that sweet treat more badly than someone needed a malaria net?
So where's the line of sociopathy? What's the permissible amount of money to put above humanity?
And as a society-level thing it makes sense to fund with the general tax fund. Charging the countries of origin does sound like it should be attempted though!
Trying to fix every problem in the world is more fraught. We probably should be trying harder, but there are severe issues where throwing resources at a poor country invites corruption and can be worse than doing nothing at all.
And I'd do the same. My objection is that my tax obligation is roughly the GDP per capita - that's well above and beyond calling an ambulance. What are the limits of what you'd do for me? Could I come into your kitchen and eat until I'm full? Could I play your video games if I were bored? Could I ask for a sexual favor?
>We have enough collective resources to treat the life-threatening illness of everyone within our borders
Why stop at the borders? Is the inside the border / outside the border distinction more ethical than the illegal vs non-illegal distinction?
You don't get to come in my house unless it's an emergency. I'll help pay for things you need, but if you keep coming for food and shelter and you're not a citizen then we can get on deportation proceedings. (I don't want to tie deportation to medical attention because it can lead to people getting sicker, likely costing more, and definitely dying more. But for other things we can.) If you want niceties then here is the library and you can use the resources inside to search for a job.
Food for the starving would be a negligible part of taxes.
> Why stop at the borders? Is the inside the border / outside the border distinction more ethical than the illegal vs non-illegal distinction?
I think I addressed that fine in the last paragraph of my previous post.
But also this is what we have control of, and we should make the best of it!
If we could pay some single-digit percentage of GDP and provide basic health care to the entire world, I'd suggest that we have a pretty strong moral imperative to do so. But I don't believe that's the world we're in.
I know these things are terribly subjective but that subreddit seems more to the left. [1]
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/adjw5h/sweden_has...
You have either not been there enough to see it for what it is, or been there too much.
/r/politics is far-left. I'm sorry if that offends you. /r/latestaecapiatlism is extreme-left.
The middle is in the controversial comments on these places.
Maintaining a centrist position can't work when both parties see the other as actively undermining/destroying the fabric of our system (i.e. Trump packing the courts with activist judges, dems raising taxes to Vietnam era levels.)
Identity politics largely doesn't permit nuanced political opinion because you're cast out if you don't subscribe to all of the major tenants of the party you're trying to loosely align with.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/
https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/
CMV and ELI5 also have decent political discussion at times I think; askHistorians often seems to provide insight into current political issues; there's probably more I don't know.
The same rules apply. The bigger the community the lower the signal-to-noise ratio. Also, the more political or religious the community the more strident the users will be. The echo chamber effect is huge.
The biggest difference is that Reddit mostly has spam under control, something the Usenet could never claim. Also, it's much less efficient under the hood, but the world has tons of bandwidth now so nobody cares. Plus as far as I know nobody posts binaries to Reddit by UUencoding them and splitting them across hundreds or thousands of posts--torrents are much less hassle.
And without the quality conversation.
Maybe some of the CS subs are better in quality, that's not my field, but the only biology sub I've found where technically trained people regularly post and comment has only like 50k subscribers and posts reach the top with 100 votes.
I can't imagine being a celebrity and getting dozens of hate tweets in my mentions because a tweet I made 8 years ago shows up as a link on a facebook group somewhere.
10 years ago when reddit would go down, you rooted for them as the underdog to figure it out. Now when it happens, it's just sad. They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out.
What has the focus been if not stabilizing their infrastructure? It appears to be the introduction of a single page application that feels clunky, conceals ads better, and implements all kinds of dark UX patterns.
Meanwhile, there are still bugs that have existed for years that still aren't fixed. There's even a redirect loop that you can get stuck in during authentication in certain scenarios that will completely break the site and bring you back to the same page until your session expires. It's been there for at least a year now.
Reddit has gone full digg v4
EDIT: After thinking about this more, I'm not sure that reddit going full digg v4 means that they'll share the same outcome as digg. The internet now seems to be a small set of companies so entrenched in their position due to swallowing mass amount of users and raising enough funds to optimize all the various little corners that can be optimized. Reddit might not actually be dead, but as they continue to optimize the weird and cool ways that people used to use the site, I know it will be for me.
Discussion by others here [0] "I'm a senior mod at /r/watchpeopledie, and we can all see through Reddit's bullshit and hypocrisy" and here [1] "Just a few thoughts on the hypocrisy of Reddit's quarantine"
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/9js8gf/im_...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/watchpeopledie/comments/9js9j4/just...
Gore will always be considered shock content, but the comments in WPD are almost always downright repulsive.
What is downright repulsive is people who think like you do. Here's an idea - you don't like it, don't go to the subreddit and let them do what they want. We don't need people like you dictating the repulsiveness level of what others can say. I know it makes you feel more in control of your life, but who would want to live like you do? That would be one sad existence.
Was that possible _by accident_ in recent renditions of reddit? IME you have to be in a reddit where that sort of content is, and change settings to make it default visible?
When it comes to visuals, there is a big difference with how comfortable people are with sex vs violence (NSFW/NSFL). Some people would be happy to see one but want to stay away from the other. Then you have the difference within those categories. A picture of a person in skimpy underwear is not the same thing as hardcore porn. Similarly a video of an athlete hyperextending their knee on a sports subreddit is different than the type of gore that you might see on the watchpeopledie subreddit mentioned above.
Maybe you should be able to indicate the severity and category of the NSFW-ness. Potentially something similar to MPAA ratings were you can have PG-13, R, X with an indication if it is for sex, violence, or something else. However that puts even more work on the users/moderators which is probably why Reddit would never implement it.
From the American perspective: our love of and support for free speech means you can make your own website or newspaper and say what you want. (And people have the freedom, conversely, to tell you your content sucks and f you)
But we never envisioned a world where some private newspaper would be forced to print the speech of those they didn't want to, or disagreed with.
Considering the content of the VAST MAJORITY of quarantined subs (holocaust denial, virulent and shocking racism, white nationalism), it's actually shocking that Reddit allows this content to continue without banning.
You say it's sad they are choosing who can speak and who cannot, but I can point you to objectively evil and noxious speech on reddit today that isn't going anywhere...
Frankly I think it's obvious that the entire point of quarantines is to hide away the content Reddit doesn't want advertisers to see without any community blowback. Quarantined subreddits are completely ad-free after all.
It’s not the end of the world, but it’s hardly desirable.
But in general people who try to be "edgy" and "dark" to a fairly ridiculous degree.
Conversations with them are impossible and frustrating because they aren't looking to talk to someone, they're looking to talk AT someone and collect as many upvotes as possible.
Since I move around exclusively by bicycle, I paid particular attention to the videos where cyclists met their untimely fate. I've learned a lot watching those videos, since it gave me a more clear perspective on how some things, apparently not too extreme, are insanely dangerous traps to a cyclist (riding near a truck with open wheels, for instance, even if at some distance).
Shame it's quarantined...
I’ve become a bit disillusioned with cycling after 2 fairly bad crashes in about 6 months.
I didn’t have a fear of metal drawbridges, having gone over a variety of them numerous times. Then I hit one that was slick from rain earlier in the day. Tires swerved like I was on ice and I did not fall gracefully. Broke my elbow, nose, and needed many many stitches.
Recently I did all the “right” things- riding in daylight, in a bike lane, in bright clothing with a helmet, and still got right hooked by a careless driver. Walked that one off but limped for a week. after.
As you are by now aware, we're pretty much exposed to all kinds of dangers, and sometimes bad things happen. But if you aren't discouraged, and you keep on practicing, eventually you'll learn how to avoid most of the worst case scenarios where you could find yourself by your own negligence and/or lack of attention.
The important thing to retain is that you have to have the muscle memory to know how to react properly when in a tight spot. That's why reading about things isn't much of a help — you don't have time to think in order to act properly. My advice? Practice, and practice riding defensively.
I live in a very rough country for cyclists — Brazil. And in order to find my place on the road I have to be twice, thrice as careful as I would have to be somewhere else. But I've found that if you play it safe and learn to be nice and respectful of what the other perceives as its rightful place on the road, thanking everyone that shows you even the smallest act of kindness or basic respect for you, you'll be surprised how much things change on the road around you.
Be nice and don't try to be a hero. You're a glorified pedestrian and your skin is no match for steel.
Where do you live that has numerous drawbridges made of metal?
What really grinds my gears with this is the fact that you cannot see quarantined activity via the API. If you browse a user's overview on the website, you'll see comments/posts in quarantined subs with a "quarantined" label. But if you fetch the exact same data via API, the quarantined activity is simply not returned at all, even if the account is opted in to the quarantined subreddits. There is no way to retrieve this data, and as a result, my bot can't block users that hail from these cesspools...
Reddit goes down pretty rarely and I can't remember when it was ever down more than an hour or two. It also definitely didn't go down for the SuperBowl that I saw.
The rest of your points are fair though.
They have intermittent server issues all the time that usually don't last all that long but I rarely if ever see intermittent server issues from any other top 20 site.
[0]: https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/news/237455-problems-...
EDIT: My how time flies. It was bought by CN in 2006!
While admire that CN is not squeezing them to death, it appears like Reddit is vastly under-managed.
Reddit grew to the point where its audience is now a lot more broad and the previous audience is a vocal minority. They can get away with ramping up ads and other behaviour because the audience is no longer sufficiently monolithic to revolt.
Bearing in mind in the past the audience did revolt and basically kicked out the then CEO (temporary CEO but still...) Ellen Pao, in what was a kind of full scale riot that shut most of the site.
Remember that YC is an investment company. They certainly made billions of dollars through the companies they funded, that were in part thanks to HN.
Every time you send a direct job application to a HN company, that's 20% of your yearly salary staying in the company instead of going to recruiter fees. That's the hell of a revenue per click.
(Plus the old "MySpace is only 6 months older than Facebook" [ignoring the semi-private nature of Facebook, initially].)
There are definitely problems with the user experience, but framing it in absolute terms and kicking off with a sweeping statement about the perceived incompetence of some people who are presumably bright and talented is… weird.
In my mind, they fail their users in three distinct and pretty basic ways:
1. Site reliability is still a regular issue (my perception is this is due to both infrastructure problem and show stopping application bugs).
2. Bad UX practices that get implemented that are documented all over this thread. This is a mostly new thing that seems to have started in the past few years.
3. Continuously underdeveloping or cutting back moderator tools and 3rd party integrations/applications.
I am not judging the individuals that work at reddit, but the sum of their parts do not meet the expectations that most other sites of their popularity meet.
This is, of course, from the eyes of someone who uses reddit - not someone selling ads on reddit.
I'm sure you don't mean to, but as an FYI, when you say:
> It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated
It does sound like you're judging the individuals.
I totally agree with everything you said in this post, I just think the way to couch it is not by seeming to attack the competency of people who have business pressures / goals. Just my two cents.
Several high profile issues i encounter on a daily/weekly basis:
- Sometimes you are "not logged in", but when you click the login button, it says welcome back and you're properly logged in.
- Subreddits can change background color pagewide, which renders dark practically useless.
- It's so resource intensive that simply scrolling will make a youtube video in another tab start lagging.
Disable subreddit styles altogether to fix this problem. I have my complaints as well but this one you can't blame Reddit for. They wanted to do away with custom CSS on Subreddits but the community was very pro-css and thus they kept it.
I personally like to keep it on by default and blacklist ones I find annoying.
I’m sure their product team is doing “fine” insofar as they’re setting a roadmap, delivering on a fairly predictable schedule, and doing traditional things like analytics, user research, usability testing, and so on. I would wager some really smart people actually.
The issue as I see it though is that “product” will only get you so far if there are platform/community issues. Reddit has an opportunity to leverage their massive reach and throngs of volunteer moderators to build a strong voice for the internet. But I keep seeing the fringe game the system, large communities crushed under the weight of brigading and exploitation, and the stereotypes of edgy, immature users blot out any chance at real discourse.
In my opinion you can’t UX/UI/user story your way out of that bag, and the execs at reddit have repeatedly and conspicuously refused to take on the responsibility of cultivating their platform for success. Instead, I think they’ve throw “product people” at it.
I think your characterization of Reddit's infrastructure challenges - which basically considers the problems as solved versus unsolved - is the wrong one. In my opinion, a better characterization would be whether or not Reddit has:
1) the money required to attract talent or buy infra, in order to 2) scale the website to extremely high availability under extreme load, while also 3) doing feature engineering and turning a profit.
This seems like a highly nontrivial problem. Do you know of another website with Reddit's daily active users and revenue profile, but significantly higher availability?
Note that performance is a related but distinct problem from the Reddit UX and advertising. I think that they are probably introducing these kinds of user-hostile changes because they are precisely in the position I've described, and can't find a way to improve performance in the way you're describing.
My strong reaction comes from being a formerly very engaged user of the site observing a continuous detraction of all the reasons I started using the site in the first place.
The content quality has gone down as well but I can't ever say reddit was known for high quality content.
Also the fact it has so many users has caused its decline. Reddit today has so many obvious shill/advert posts.
I think that is to ensure that when they tell you "it's faster to use via our app" that they're telling the truth; certainly when the 3 "use app" buttons per mobile view came along mobile appeared to get slower (the change also including cunning "continue" confusion to make people think they're continuing to use the website but they're really "continuing to nothing and instead changing your mind and installing our app").
When it first began. before there were subreddits, it was a place for respectful, serious conversation.
A few years later /r/TrueReddit was started as an attempt to get back to the glory years. Now it's as bad as the rest of reddit.
I'd say stack overflow. They're both a relatively simplistic website showing text messages posted by users. Nothing fancy.
Reddit is a simple message board as there were many 15 years ago. They don't host images or video themselves, which avoid the issue of bandwidth. They don't seem to have the breath of analytics and advertising tools offered by google or facebook.
Edit: here's some confirmation.
Reddit has 330M active monthly users: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/reddit-now-has-as-many...
And SO has 10,002,577 total:
https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/9766...
I wouldn't be surprised as well if reddit was two orders of magnitude more than that, but that's still a fairly moderate site to operate.
It is numerous orders of magnitudes away from the like of google, youtube or facebook.
Maybe things have changed, but in 2016 they were running three or four dozen servers in each of two data centers:
https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...
You can see that most of the servers are deployed in pairs, the minimum to have any redundancy, so they are nowhere near capacity.
Another blog post stated that the servers rarely go above a few percents of usage, they are very powerful, often close to the highest specs available.
I will stand by my statement. It should be largely possible for reddit to serve 2 orders of magnitude more traffic than stack overflow with 1 order of magnitude its hardware. We're talking a couple of racks times ten.
You said a couple, which usually means 'two'.
You offered StackOverflow as "another website with Reddit's daily active users and revenue profile, but significantly higher availability" and then said this:
"I wouldn't be surprised as well if reddit was two orders of magnitude more than that"
> I will stand by my statement
I have no literally idea how to have a conversation with someone who's willing to revise their previous numbers by a factor of ten or more, say it's the same statement as it was before, and call it good.
Reddit raised hundreds of millions of dollars, whereas stack overflow didn't, they have the means to buy a rack more if that's what is missing. There is no excuse to be slow or broken all the time.
The amount of traffic is not significant. It's perfectly scalable and shardable, it's only text over HTTP and most of it is cachable by a CDN.
Growth & success despite inattentive & abusive product evolution (Reddit, Twitter) is actually a bullish signal of the core product's entrenchment.
The kind of things happen when their goals get set like:
1. Increase mobile app sign up/usage by 30%.
2. Revamp UI and launch by 2019.
etc etc.
People optimize for what they are asked to, setting fire to pretty much everything around.
>>They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out.
Kind of strange, because they rewrote their whole site in Python, which was originally in Common Lisp. All of that to solve this problem.
Seems like it was just a project for some one at Reddit to get a promotion.
OKR are a gift that keeps on giving.
I just experienced a site overload/offline error a few days ago (not Super Bowl). It's really unacceptable for a site of its age and presence on the Internet.
I hope that affected the amount of money they raised. As a reddit fan, the site redesign has not been pleasant. The mobile experience, too.
Well, otherwise, tildes is looking great.
And, if you follow any links, it sends you straight back to the new version.
Whenever I'm logged in it's always the old version. RES helps too!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
Given this design, I suppose one must suffer: [new.]reddit.com adoption or the experience for old.reddit.com.
Admittedly it's a problem more common on the more technical subreddits.
Even if it's uglier, I much prefer the experience of using old website than the React redesign.
Not because it's a single-page app, but because it's slower and has many usability problems.
Their official blog posts continue using that same 330M number: https://redditblog.com/2019/01/23/health-fitness-on-reddit/
The TechCrunch article does as well.
Either their number of active users hasn't changed at all in over a year, or they're actually shrinking and deliberately just staying with an outdated number that looks better.
The team at Reddit has all the data. They will know how to leverage/present them in order to raise more money. Web ranking is not the only thing used in valuation.
https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8ra9y6/i_hate_the_...
The app also sucks. They try to make everything play embedded, so that if you want to share it, you pretty much have to share the reddit link, because the link to the actual content is hidden. That's bad enough but the embedded stuff also barely works. More often than not I have to go directly to the source for an embedded video or giphycat thing to play.
Every story I've heard about reddit sounds like a nightmare. It really sucks that it's become the defacto repository for so many hobbies.
This is despite being pretty ban-happy in general about topics they don't like. So now they've got the worst of a censorship-heavy platform and the worst of a censorship-free platform.
Dig a little past the front page, though, and all the problems of having those groups share the same space with everyone else become evident.
The only downside is that maybe these niche communities would have done better as individual forums existing on the open web rather than as a part of reddit's walled garden.
I think you have to separate the admins, who are reddit employees, and the subreddit moderators, who are mostly not.
The admins are ultimately accountable to the CEO, who is accountable to the board and, by extension, the investors. The admins want to maximise traffic, because that maximises their ability to monetise the users. A certain degree of controversial content is actually good for that as long as it remains below the threshold where you start losing advertisers (see 4chan).
Meanwhile, the moderators are usually volunteers, but there are a few very active "powermods" (or groups thereof) who have control over one or more large default subs. This has allowed them to carve out their own personal fiefdoms. Some of them are abusing this power to enforce their own idea of how things should work, or to push their ideology and narratives. Some others (like the infamous GallowBoob) have even found ways to monetise their influence by getting paid to promote content for 3rd parties without disclosing that fact. This often goes hand in hand with abusing their moderator privileges in order to increase visibility of their own posts (e.g. by removing highly upvoted posts from users, so their own posts can take the top spot in that sub).
This is a real problem, but reddit are mostly unwilling to intervene unless there is a large degree of external pressure, like we saw with the "creepshot" subs that got banned in 2013 after the media picked up on their existence and the one user behind a lot of them.
Admins created automod which delegated shadowbanning to moderators. Who's to blame for that? The mods or the admins? It's an age-old question whether kings or peasants are to blame for humanity's imperfections.
Some mods probably would have scripted something themselves, yet admins helped them and others along. You can go in circles trying to assign blame. I'm not sure there's an answer except to continue to try making it better.
They did not. Automod was created by a user as just another script that interacted with reddit's api (albeit, a powerful and useful one). Deimorz eventually joined reddit and became an admin, and Automod was eventually integrated into the site code (primarily for performance reasons), but that was completely user-created, and in fact a great example of how reddit's community governed the site for a long time in absence of much direction from reddit Inc.
The problems Reddit is facing now are largely a result of the admins getting more activist as Reddit is more visible than ever. They're not just merely banning subs now. They're quarantining them. They've systemically changed their algorithms to stop controversial content from being seen by most users. They're saber rattling against mod teams more and stacking mod teams. The users have gone from a core of mostly geek to well your typical eternal september users. The moderators are censor-happy and seriously don't know how to fuck off.
Reddit will never be as good as it once was because its size is such a liability. This is a site which went from a founding member risking jail to post stuff from JSTOR to the internet to founders who decided they've "Grown up" ($$$) and don't care about free speech anymore.
Really? It seems to me that the problems come from not banning things, still: see all the complaints about racism and other "undesirable content" on the site.
As for the thing with the CEO giving drugs to someone in a cabin...I think you should interpret this a little more holistically. For a variety of reasons (starting with illegality, and moving on to liability), that is generally not a thing you want your CEO doing in a well functioning organization of Reddit's size. It's not really about whether or not you're personally okay with recreational drug use. It's a bit of a dog whistle. Things that are generally okay can become very not okay in the context of the workplace and professionalism.
Each subreddit is a kingdom to itself but the fact that you can start your own kingdom allows free speech without forcing all speech on everyone.
IMO you should be able to express any opinion, and of course you'll be downvoted if you are a bigot or a religious nutcase
Right now Reddit is going full censorship, which I hate
Why can the CEO even technically get access to the data ?
Same with communities, a lot of them get banned. Basically every week I hear about some community get canned, it’s pretty usual, and often justified.
Yet these “other points of view” subreddits that are pretty frequently violating the service rules (no individual bullying, no doxxing, no stalking etc.), and get reported like crazy still get by for years under the excuse of “making efforts to collaborate with the admin team and act on the violations”.
I don’t have insider insight, but from the look of it I can’t imagine a healthy organisation behaving this way.
Huffman has repeatedly demonstrated poor judgement. Using your admin privileges to edit comments for personal reasons is the kind of thing one would expect from some power tripping admin on some small, privately run forum, but not from the CEO of a multibillion Dollar company that operates one of the largest sites on the Internet. That incident alone should have been reason enough for him to either step down or get fired. In fact, his predecessor as CEO Ellen Pao even commented that she would have fired him for this.
Many users left, most just complain on reddit. Raw usage is not important at this stage for reddit.
That shouldn't make it a good or bad place to work
The strange situation for most of us is that while doing the window dressing they left a spiked bat and a swastica flag in the corner and pushed the poop bucket in a closet instead of just getting rid of it. And then have to defend not getting rid of it when publicly asked by their users (the CEO himself gets involved in these back and forth with the community, so it’s not just them ignoring the problems)
It could be just some weird bit that has no impact on how the company works internaly. As you say, content policy has no direct relation with work environment.
But I can’t stop myself from thinking, would that same CEO abuse his position to get rid of unconveniences internaly ? How do they handle gender balance or diversity topics ?
Looking at Ellen Pao’s shitshow (and she did a ton of that “window dressing”), it’s difficult to imagine the internal state is that much better than the external one.
Closing down a forum with thousands of users just because of the attitudes of a handful of them is, well, retarded.
For the record, this is the current incel sub: https://old.reddit.com/r/Braincels/
Maybe they have exceptionally high operating costs? Or are they just really bad at selling ad space? I get that there are some advertisers that don't want to go on there because they are afraid their ad will show up next to a picture of a naked lady (which is something Reddit could control pretty easily), but Reddit is so big that it seems pretty hard to ignore.
All of FB's users are logged in and can be targeted by interest.
- you want to advertise B2B software to small/medium business owners.
- you want to advertise expensive fashion items to 20-35 y.o. women in NY/CT.
Will you pick FB or reddit? And then yes, lack of brand safety for non-targeted ads.
Thats just my perception though - also that reddit as a whole is very lowest common denominator tech/business wise.
Seems like your userbase self-segments pretty quickly on Reddit, although it's no doubt a fulltime job for several engineers to keep up with the classifications on subreddits.
I guess the biggest problem is that so many users don't log in and just browse the default, which is pretty generic. Reddit could track the not-logged-in users and what they click on like Google, but that's a fair bit more work.
Rethoric question.
I used to post my DNS-host (dns-api.com) on /r/sysadmin, for example.
Instagram, every day of the week.
reddit also houses tons of NSFW and controversial content which probably scares some companies away, even if their ads won't show up there.
However, I think the real money would be for them to be more like Craigslist. Subreddits could pay to upgrade to become more feature-rich "Classified"-like pages whose posts could then be further boosted (re: upsell for ad team) across other subreddits.
Users react with hostility to forced social media / redesigns geared to ad revenues. They like new features that are actually useful and enhance the experience.
This round is 150-300mln. How do you fund 150 startups for 10 years with 2mln per startup?
It seems that investors in the US have gotten so used to paying high economic rents and financial middlemen that they have lost track of the real value of money. 2 million is an enormous amount of money.
I could build an entire reddit from scratch for 100k. Scaling to millions of users is not difficult these days. I could even build an entire cloud platform from scratch for less than 200k on top of Kubernetes.
I am spending more time on HN though...
I had started off by trying to unsubscribe from the subreddits that were mainly image based. This didn’t really make much difference as my sub list was already too saturated, and I would scroll further to find the quick attention satiation. Eventually I realized it wasn’t worth the trouble.
HN is different though, there’s far less clickbait and no thumbnails. I regularly read articles that I feel teach me about important or very interesting topics. It’s pretty rare that I would read an article in full from Reddit. HN comments are often filled with valuable insights that I think will benefit me in the future, and jokes are fairly uncommon. I’ve been more and more frustrated with the low effort Reddit jokes over time.
Sure, the concept is the same between the two sites, but I think my frame of mind is very different when I browse either site. I don’t see myself needing to cut HN out as I did Reddit because it doesn’t have the same effect. HN is meat and veggies and Reddit is candy. Or a dopamine drip.
And I agree about HN, it's similar in system, but the content is very different. I'll look at the front page and maybe read 2 articles and their comments in full, and actually feel like I've learned something or it wasn't a complete waste of my time.
Gotta cut those dopamine drips. So many companies make their money figuring out how to hook you.
Same boat. Twitter as well.
Snipped reddit, went to twitter. Snipped twitter, came to here. Seems I just can't get enough of "talking with people on the internet."
GF says I should try to find a book club. She's probably right.
If you want to be an "influencer" on twitter (which most folks seem to want to be), you just shout the most outrageous things you can to try to cast a wider net.
In my experience twitter has been an educational journey.
Are we sure this is a bad thing? Socializing with other people is a key component of well-being... could it be good for us even if it's online? What if it's even more fulfilling than IRL socialization? Why do we naturally recoil from the suggestion that conversing with people online could be a good way to spend a significant portion of our time?
I don't go on reddit and am here only occasionally (would be 100% gone if I could delete my account). Instead of replacing reddit/HN time with X.com, I just do other stuff entirely.
Is there something you'd rather be doing with your HN time?
// ==UserScript==
// @name BackToOldReddit
// @namespace Reddit
// @match *://www.reddit.com/*
// @grant none
// @run-at document-start
// ==/UserScript==
const currentURL = window.document.location.toString();
if(currentURL.includes('//www')) {
const newURL = currentURL.replace('//www','//old');
window.document.location.replace(newURL);
}edit (removed wrong maths): $1.9m per month in staffing costs @ 230 employees/100K each. Although a reply below says the staff may have almost doubled and $100K may be a low guestimate for the area (inc. benefits, etc).
My question would be: Why does Reddit have 230+ staff? What do most of them do?
Beyond that you have community managers, people to run AMAs, people to manage ad accounts, HR, etc... 230 people to run the one of the largest and most dynamic sites on the Internet doesn't seem out of line.
Data: - Ranking timelines - Ad performance - Recommendations - Business analytics - R&D
Product: - Coordinating across the above 2 and adding/measuring (new) features
Sales: - Ads
Finance/HR/Admin/Accounting/Office Manager(s)/Recruiting: - Running a company
To fair, five wasn't enough. We spent too much time firefighting and not enough time innovating.
I honestly don't mean this in a back-handed manner, but what innovations have come about since that time? Reddit is great because of its momentum and user generated content. That model does best when the admins stay out of the way for the most part. Many (including myself) are not at all a fan of the more recently emerging dark patterns or the site redesign. I don't see those as innovations.
And externally the biggest one was mobile support, which is light years ahead of what it was back then.
Sure you could argue you don't need 100 engineers for that, but if you factor in on-call rotations and how they're constantly refactoring everything...
I worked at an avionics manufacturer that had a dozen or so products (things like physical displays and map systems that go into airplanes) that had less than 10 full time engineers. A few software devs, a few EE’s and an industrial engineer who did the chassis. Sure it’s not an apples to apples comparison but wow. Does it really take that many people to maintain an already-working web site? Isn’t the promise of “cloud” that your staff can scale far slower than your user base?
Craigslist has what, 50 people? Better comparison. Even that seems to be a lot.
Probably. Unless you want to get shut down/sued for all the child pornography, narcotics trading, violent threats, doxing, etc, etc which people will use your site for. Not to mention all the other attempts to directly exploit, hack or manipulate your site. And larger scale tends to attract more bad actors.
I'm sure Reddit justifies it to themselves somehow.
They're not making 100K / month. So how is 10M / month not slightly crazy? I realize we're not talking anything but staff here, but 8M / month in sales/marketing/office space/infrastructure? Maybe my notion of what it costs to run a site as large as reddit is just way off.
It's been 15 years. I think it's just a ponzi scheme at this point.
I'm sure their hosting and server costs are huge considering the traffic they get everyday (#5 in US according to Alexa).
They could also feasibly curtail the custom styling on subreddits to reduce the space burned on hosted images there for backgrounds and headers.
Besides that all Reddit ever was was a lot of text.
I mostly spend my time moderating r/CrohnsDisease and making sure the people who post there get at least one thoughtful reply. I browse r/all most days but rarely do I post content or comments outside of my main subs because there’s just so much toxicity on the platform.
I wish Alexis had been able to influence the core values of the company before leaving the second time, he seems like one of the few genuinely good people at that level of major tech companies these days. It’s a shame he’s moved on to other things.
Unobtrusive ads don't make investors enough money, Facebook has already shown that. To derive maximum revenue per user, you need to drive your users to the edge of not enjoying the site anymore. With these investments Reddit will be walking that line, and who knows if Reddit is too big to digg?
For reminder, Tencent owns
- Riot Games (League of Legends, one of the most played game in the west)
- Epic Games (Fortnite, another one of the most played game in the west)
- and now Reddit (one of the most visited social network in the west)
Not my money, so I don't care, but I do really have to wonder what their plan is.
The way I see it, Google, Apple, and Facebook won't buy them because they're not competitors and they already have more users. And 99% of Reddit users probably use 1 or more of those 3 already anyway.
An IPO seems unlikely because they're not making enough money.
So maybe they're hoping for a buyout from a media company?
For the second time, of course: https://techcrunch.com/2006/10/31/breaking-news-conde-nastwi...
Reddit has an interesting corporate history of being a startup --> acquisition --> subsidiary --> spinout --> "startup" --> ??
I guess they're all playing hot potato until it goes bust.
People seem to treat commenting like a game instead of a forum for discussion. I often see the same patterns from Twitter there (i.e., inciting outrage to get upvotes, virtue signaling, or just pointless jokes on serious articles). The introduction of Reddit Gold has made this substantially worse, as now there’s an additional point system which awards single comments instead of points of discussion.
There are communities that moderate very heavily and don't allow the joke/sarcastic/low-effort comments (askhistorians, politicaldiscussion, etc).
This sounds like greater fool theory if the investors in the latest round think they'll be able to peddle it for greater than $3 Billion without it ever bringing a dime of actual profits.
Mastodon is not currently an alternative to Reddit though, but I think it could be, if it got significant contributions towards forum functionality. Perhaps by treating each tag, or each of a certain type of tag, as an individual forum. A 'Trunk'?
On the other hand, Discourse [https://www.discourse.org/about] might be a better candidate for an alternative, in some ways. With Discourse though each "Reddit" would be a Discourse board on a specific server. To do a true Reddit alternative you'd need to plug individual Discourse servers into a P2P mesh.
Ideally I'd like to see a Discourse-like or Reddit-like UI on top of a Mastodon back-end (which would be using ActivityPub).
If you want to work on this as well please let me know and maybe we can work together on it (@BillBarnhill on Mastodon.technology or Twitter).
The code is open source and on github: https://github.com/Faleidel/moontreeproject
That and the fact that now so many comments keep getting deleted and posts locked makes me wonder who the target audience is these days.
Also the overzealous moderators are annoying.
The track record does look okay:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit
There is continued growth in engagement. But still, shouldn't the actual product - the website - be built out by now with all the content coming from users, therefore not much of a business case for investment? How can they have this continually growing audience and not be making enough bucks to pay the bills and grow organically?
That's exactly what it is. A land grab of people's attention.
I use it through 3rd party apps or my PC, so have mostly avoided their dark patterns.
I love HN, but the limited scope of the discussions here (for obvious and good reasons) makes it far less frequented than reddit.
Reddit is like a slightly worse HN for everything else apart from CS/Tech.
I also love how everyone I meet in the US seems to feign ignorance about Reddit, despite it being the Alexa #5 website here (behind Google,Amazon,FB and YT) It is almost as if people don't want to be called a redditor despite using the website a lot.
It is also the site with the 2nd greatest daily time per visitor (behind only salesforce), above YT, Facebook, Twitter or ...... pornhub ....
What? Moderators don't get paid at all to moderate.
The new website is a usability disaster, and one that they don't mind shoving down your throat at every turn.
Moderators are increasingly beating anyone who isn't politically correct enough over the head with their moronic code of conduct and banning users for simply disagreeing.
Most of the people who still hang around are very negative individuals who seem to be there more to project their hatred in general than to learn and/or share. Oppose their abuse and they'll invariable mob up on you and make sure your posts never see the light of day.
If I was Aaron Swartz, bless him; I would be turning in my grave by now.
Somehow Facebook managed to do it, but you still hear grumbling about how big of a mess the news feed is and people searching for something that can replace it.
If you don't think this is something they might do, just hop on over to their mobile site real quick. It's full of banner ads and misleading layouts (clicking the image in a image post takes you to a download the app page, you have to click the tiny link below it).
150-300mln is probably small amount for Tencent and they are not looking for a quick return, I guess.
The clocks ticking on reddit. It used to be such a different beast back in 2005.
This represents an opportunity, but also a risk. Opportunity to grow in these countries, or see another company offering similar service arise and gain momentum.
If @spez give me 10 horses with food for 20 days walk I could come back with more than 30 million users from Brazil alone.
So...take Reddit, make it easier to install on-prem, charge for this enterprise version, and change the name and default look of this on-prem version to distance itself from the traditional Reddit. Then watch the money roll in as I and others would pay to have more than just a forum (sorry discourse).
I would not be surprised if Reddit is an ML/AI dataset gold mine.
I'm sure there are plenty of paid shills but my sense is that most people who post on reddit aren't trying to sell you something.
On the data science end, you can do a lot to gauge important topics and user behavior: https://minimaxir.com/2018/09/modeling-link-aggregators/
On the silly AI-end, I made a subreddit consisting only of text-generating RNNs: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditNN/
Reddit's internal data is even more robust.
assuming that the users generating the data are humans and not bots....
* Must make something like $0.01 - $0.007 ROI per active user per year to justify that valuation without growth.
* If user base grows, you can reduce those numbers accordingly
* If you take into account the risk that comes with new competition, valuation should go down. 20 years from now Reddit can be as valuable as Slashdot, Myspace or Usenet.
Personally I think Reddit has limited lifespan. $3B valuation is based on dot-com type hype. World changes and Reddit's is very basic technologically. When popularity goes away and next big social media innovation comes, Reddit's value plummets. It's never going to die completely off, of course.
Their new design is hideous, but other than that it doesn't seem like they're doing anything tech-wise.
So is all the money just going into hosting fees? Or am I missing something?
How much does it cost to run a website like Reddit per year?
One such recent feature for the program they are trialing is nicknamed the "Deadbeat map". https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-24/new-wechat-app-maps-d...
They are putting their money literally anywhere there are eyeballs and attention.
It's easy to block ads on a browser but not as easy on a mobile app so they keep pushing these dark patterns to get to you to download the mobile app which personally am not a fan since there's an irrelevant 'promoted' post with every page scroll.
There has not been one compelling change to the site in years. Quite the opposite, every change seems to be made by someone hell-bent on driving every potential visitor away, and frustrating the rest.
It’s frustrating, too, because content shouldn’t be hamstrung by the way you reach it but that’s the “modern” web. User interaction is a crucial part of any product.
Reddit has changed so much over the years but I still like Reddit enough to do an auto-donation every month. I think I support Reddit more out of sentimental reasons because I don’t spend too much time anymore on their site but I enjoy it much more than, for example, Facebook that I only spend a few minutes a month on.
I have started to lose interest in Reddit too. I never thought I'd say that but it's way more noise than signal these days too.
I have also grown to prefer reading books and time away from screens more and more.
A tech backlash is underway for millions of people in the developed world. A sense of burnout seems to be common among under 40 year olds.
The article doesn't mention plans. Are they just getting while the going's good, or is there something expensive that they plan on doing?
However, for those who prefer old.reddit you may still not enjoy this more modern approach.
All these moderators do spend considerable time and effort on reddit.
And now reddit is going public, do the moderators get paid going forward? why would someone want to volunteer for a profit making company?
People volunteer to moderate communities because they care about the value of that community. Not dissimilar from running a small forum.
Perhaps a reddit alternative would be just a reddit hoster that hosts the platform for X$ and moderators find a way to get paid.
Email me at chris_alder@berkeley.edu if you're interested in seeing a demo. We're looking for skilled devs to join the team.
No thanks.
If old reddit ever gets taken away, I can only hope that they'll keep the APIs stable so that 3rd party clients can continue to live on.
Is this heresy here?
That said, they're the first thing to pop into my browser bar when I press R.
Control-F: peer (0 results)
Control-F: p2p (1 result)
Can we seriously not come up with a way to make a distributed reddit?
I imagine running a client on sandstorm.io which is pulling content from subreddits that are each hosted in a sandstorm.io instance.
Is the problem with that that it becomes too easy to doxx someone? That we like having a centralized authority that we can "trust" for authentication / authorization / pseudo-anonymity?
One problem with P2P these days is that you need people to run servers, which they don't typically want to do. I made a small RaspPi box they could run, and planned to run a public instance for people who didn't want to go that far.
One problem I ran into is how to stop terrible posts. Freenet/etc have a problem with people sharing illegal and harmful material, and I didn't particularly want to help with that.
Additionally, when you create an alt-platform, it gets used be people who are kicked off of mainstream platforms. I didn't really want to end up creating a service primarily used by pedophiles and nazis.
I think there are ways to solve the technical challenges, but it's still difficult to solve the community-management in a distributed/sane way.
(The solution I came up with btw was opt-in mods. People could publish a ban list, and you could subscribe to whomevers you want. But I don't think that's a great long-term solution)
I still think there is some good work to be done in this space, and I may circle back to it someday, but the community elements are vexing.
You can see my version at https://github.com/e1ven/Tavern
Dox, send child pornography through, use to sell narcotics, plan hitman assassinations with, etc, etc. Not to mention all the fun stuff organized bands of miscreants can do to other people. Just look at Wil Wheaton's adventure with Mastodon for an example.
I'm not trying to egg you on, I'm genuinely curious what you think our attitude should be.
As for the government, I believe the government is fallible, corruptible and that privacy has value. The government can keep up but in doing so you tend to lose more freedom than you had before. For example, Australia's new laws on encryption which would, combined with mass traffic surveillance, lets them know everything you say. So I'd prefer the government not care enough to actually solve the speed regulation problem because doing so puts dangerously much power in it's hands.
If support for that ever gets removed, I'll be gone as well.
[Some snarky oversimplified political tweet]
Top Comment:
"It's almost as if [some snarky oversimplified, edgy-teenager-take they stole from John Oliver]."
Seeing the news that reddit was bringing in more investors just now made me want to take a peek at what the competition was up to. I remember Voat.co being set up when Reddit started banning a bunch of subreddits, so I figured I'd go check that out...Don't do it. The content is just straight racist desires for ethno-states, and an extremely popular conspiracy that Democrats favor abortion because they drink the blood of children. I'm not kidding: https://voat.co/v/news/3016128. The top comment is literally "Every article I've read on this has omitted WHERE THEY GET THE GODDAMN BLOOD FROM."
So, ya. Guess we're stuck with reddit for now...
https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/an6vek/video_from_t...
You have to be some special sort of special to think Reddit Inc isn't complicit in the censorship going on. That's not a long term sustainable position. They're far too obvious about it.