Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands
latimes.com
latimes.com
Here the core advertising-related problem is third party advertising. Were Reddit the co. to have some other business of their own that they advertised on Reddit in order to fund the site, there would still be ads, but they wouldn't interfere with the site itself. Here however, Reddit has to be neutered so that it appeals to generic advertisers - any content or communities that they, the third parties may find objectionable must go.
It's hard to a site as Reddit to pivot from the status quo to any of the more reasonable business models, because they were started with third-party advertisements in mind from the get go. The fatal disease was transmitted at birth, but it's only now that it closes on to the terminal stage. Once you get people used to free, it's hard to start charging money, and Reddit the company doesn't have any other business that could fund the site pro bono.
You can leave your core offering free/ad-encumbered, but add additional services (ideally, replicate your complements)
For example, YouTube started off as free / ad sponsored, but look at the incredible revenue streams they have added:
• Patreon-like subscription model
• Merch integration with spring-tee
• Music / Premium / TV subscription <--- this is most likely the largest revenue stream after ads.
Now Reddit could be similar by adding:
• Paid feeds for sexual content (r/sexsells), trading, crypto, art, etc.
• Sponsored "TV mode" streams for major news / sports outlets
• Verified status subscription?
• Ability to post longer, Reddit hosted, videos behind a paywall with a preview.
I'm just spitballing ideas which certainly have their complexities and challenges, but free user-generated content is a great way to acquire users for fractions of a penny.
That userbase is reddit's competitive advantage when building any number of additional services.
Reddit seems to be overplaying its hand, if they do then they'll get hit by the same obliviating exodus that others have been destroyed by in the past.
Ideally the next incarnation will be more decentralised in it's structure.
[0](http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf)
Ad are display several time per page and will be display whatever subreddit the user is currently on.
It's why Facebook ads look identical to posts at a glance. If you don't know it's an ad, you're more likely to click it, share it, like it, etc.
There's no reason to believe upvotes, which are less visible to other users, are bought at lesser scale.
When everybody does it, it's hard to single out any one actor as bad.
My assumption is that McDonalds pays advertising companies to put ads together and distribute them. Why wouldn't they throw a couple hundred bucks at a few low-key ads in a few reddit posts. Doesn't take that many people to buy McDonalds before it pays for itself.
At the ecosystem level this works - groups generating content that is undesirable (perspective being from the advertisers and their stakeholders) are demonetized and -in cases where policing doesn't happen - entire networks.
No publisher or network is immune to this, even Google.
It's the macro digital equivalent to boycotting and lobbying and it's effective. Advertisers have a say in where they put their money, and their money indirectly and in some cases directly enables that content.
Best you can hope for is transparency and consistency in how the policy is governed.
You didn’t update your terms and conditions to meet the regulation date as of 12:01 AM? Lawsuit. You aren’t following accessibility standards? Reported to the human rights tribunal. You gave a perk to some clients but not others? 4,000 calls to the call center. Your ad was pictured next to a post about the nazis? Your brand made the evening news.
We have two rules at my company that guide EVERYTHING we do: don’t cause calls to the call center, and don’t make the evening news. Things get crazy when you have customers that number in the millions, it changes everything about how you operate.
Those reasons are harassment, child pornography, and having to delegate censorship to moderators/people with way too much time on their hands.
You end up back where you started, with a clunky layer of centralized censorship on top of a distributed system.
All posts are stored on the blockchain using the Memo protocol.
I'm old enough to remember reddit before the days of subreddits. It wasn't a magnet for extreme content back then. That happened as a result of subreddits.
Which is a good thing IMO. Not everything needs to be the next (or just another) digg/reddit/whatever. HN deliberately has a more specific focus than that of reddit, it is a feature not a flaw (if you watn everything to be reddit, then perhaps you would consider it a flawed feature).
> You can't even have decent political discussion here
Again, this is very deliberate. While there are some specific circumstances where significant political discussion is on-topic here, it generally isn't. See the very first section of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for official word on the matter.
Complaining that you can't have the political discussion that you want on a forum where politics is officially off-topic, is like complaining that you can't have the bacon cheese burger (with real pig and cow involved) that you want in the vegan restaurant you've decided to take lunch in.
Except this is disingenuous. There are political discussions found here, but one side is generally downvoted.
You can, for example, debate pro-vs-anti nuclear power without necessarily getting downvoted. You can't post straight up climate change denial.
You can argue that the stackexchange moderator fiasco was incredibly badly handled. You can't post straight up homophobia.
Please don't post ideological flamebait to HN or take threads further into flamewar.
"The rule is already broken in one direction, so it should be right to break it in another" isn't a helpful take IMO.
You said that you saw one side being downvoted. I took that as meaning you thought it should be left alone like the other side is, when IMO that is not the solution. If both are off-topic (which they usually are, by my reading of the guidelines) both should be down-voted. The fix for the imbalance is not to encourage more but from other angles, it is to enforce the desired topic limits evenly.
(using the word "side" above may be ill-advised on my part, I know most matters are far more complex than a binary this-side-and-that-side, but better wording did not spring to mind)
There is room for reasoned debate but many are incapable of it, especially on an internet forum.
I have never seen that on reddit. Every thread with politics in it seems to only allow one side of the discussion be heard, with the other being downvoted to oblivion. Which side is heard depends on the subreddit, but either way there is no discussion to be had.
This.
And it's not just reddit. As long as you can create subgroups within communities you're eventually going to attract some problematic people. While something like CP on tumblr really brought it to light, tumblr was and still is home to some insanely extreme ideologies. Ideologies that some people find completely idiotic but which others truly believe in.
It's the same with other places, in case you weren't aware, Instagram has a ton of CP as well. With tags you can find dedicated groups of various different ideologies, a lot of them extremely problematic.
Same with Facebook and its tags/groups/whatever.
And of course Reddit and its subs.
This all stems from the fact that separating content into categories and tags that people can freely define, means that for people looking for extreme ideologies, it's trivial to find an echo chamber with just a tag or two.
Without extreme views you can't have progress: in a lot of countries, being for homosexual rights or abortion is extreme.
I think you might find that dealing with the legal consequences isn't a lot of fun. And I wonder if you'd really be so blasé about enabling that kind of content once you were actually looking at it on a daily basis.
Maybe that's where the real problem is.
Social media has added a new dimension to complexity in society, by adding a number(upvote/click/like/view/retweet etc) next to every thought and utterance.
Those numbers amplify behaviors both good and bad.
People who say social media exposes the real mess, make it easy for social media companies to deny their contribution to the mess.
When they start removing like counts (and it's taken way to long for this move) they are basically admitting their contribution to the mess.
As data of the last 15 years gets analyzed, on the impact of these numbers on individual and group psychology, expect major class action suits against these companies.
You only see loud, minority groups. It becomes evident that they 're a minority in every election
??? After the recent cleanups, there is basically only porn, video games and democratic talking points left. There is nothing even remotely provocative that isn't framed by huge warning signs
Perhaps the most important factor in these communities is that most content is junk anyway, requiring mental effort from the reader to remove and avoid. That's what the whole voting thing is for. An advert would be "superjunk" - unwanted content that also has editorial control. It might be an illusion that a community is full of value to be skimmed off, when reality is that the junk is at barely maintainable levels and a little more might push it over the brink.
That fact that reddit is starting to delete instead of doing public education is suspicious to me.