An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
Obviously old.reddit.com doesn't have these issues, but I'm pretty sure the session on smartphone used the new site, and that let me keep reading without any interruptions too.
Either way, if Reddit does this, that's it. Not returning to the site. The internet doesn't need all these walled gardens, and it's worrying how this is going to affect how info is preserved for future generations.
As you say, its not present on ud. or old.
Hopefully the results of said test show enough of a drop in traffic/conversions for the variation with the 'login requirement' that they drop the idea altogether.
Users will either login or switch to old/ud
There doesn't seem to be any downside to old/ud - it retains users that would otherwise leave whilst being enough of a pain that those who the wouldn't leave just login.
Apollo (iOS) provides a nice and clean design, as does Joey (Android) which copies the style of the former. Even on the desktop, the experience is smooth and manageable, by using uMatrix and RES, whether you are browsing old.reddit or not. I don't understand the hesitancy in using these enhancements to enrich your user experience.
Not your parent, but I know of no mobile app that allows me certain enhancements that are simply standard on my (mobile) web browser: tabs, ad-blocking, & accessibility.
Tabs: because I multi-task, and I compartmentalise my reading. If all I have is an app, then the app either needs to re-invent tabs within it (none I've found so far) or I am forced to have at-most one post/thread I could be reading. The latter is particularly bad. Extra bad when it happens automatically: say I pause reading a post, go to a different app/website, and click on a reddit link there.
Add Firefox's Containers to the mix and the 'Tabs!' benefit becomes even better.
Ad-blocking: Need I say more? Well, more than blocking ads, the general ability to block annoying (highly so in the case of reddit) elements of a page using uBlock Origin or uMatrix. RES doesn't yet work on the mobile web (likely due to the lack of popularity of mobile browsers that _do_ support add-ons), but if it did, I absolutely would use it.
Accessibility: I can print, copy, link to, search in, or have read aloud any page or part of any page on the web. I haven't yet seen a Ctrl+F equivalent in a reddit app, but my mobile browser has Find In Page.
This is compared to the Washington Post mobile app, which is essentially a wrapper around the mobile site that prevents copying text, has annoying ads despite being a subscriber, and has no redeeming functionality.
https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/cfmlca/i_build_the_a...
> some people stick to third-party apps to evade Reddit's tactics
Guess what goes away next.
(My bet is old.reddit first, because no one supports two versions of a site for the same platform—other than for accessibility.)
I’ve been an active member of various communities and forums over the years (excluding reddit), and I never actively left one. It was always just a realization I hadn’t been to the site (or really aging myself, BBS) in a year. Most of them where daily habits at one point.
Side note - I thought Victoria Taylor (/u/chooter) left for that competitor, but it appears that she was at WeWork and now at LinkedIn (as of August - just in time!)
Victoria never worked at Imzy though (and didn't leave for anything - she was fired). She was at Cake (https://cake.co/) for a while, I think that was between WeWork and LinkedIn.
edit: just checking out your project. Looks more like what I'm talking about!
That's how communities get big without becoming cesspools or going over the top on the moderation. See recent examples of Discord and Twitch, which started out targeted to gamers, and have gone mainstream from there.
Alas, it definitely seems to be the direction these services are going in, and (at least in my opinion), seems to be on the verge of outright replacing Reddit for communities about games and media related topics.
The tl;dw is that if your "alternative" platform doesn't launch with unique and valuable features of its own to attract users away from the original platform then you will only attract toxic people who get kicked off the original platform as the first users of your "alternative" platform (because they are the only ones really in need of an "alternative"). This creates a self-reinforcing pattern where non-toxic users are repulsed from your alternative platform by the toxic users so growth only comes from more toxic users. You can clearly see this in the dynamic between Reddit and Voat.
I'd remind you too that a lot of people - including myself - don't see this "toxic" dynamic the way you apparently do. Our stomachs might turn at the sight of much of what is on reddit nowadays just as yours might when you see the front page of Voat.
Maybe userbases are generally dividing as we seek providers with which we are more politically aligned, with decreasing focus on the bells and whistles they have on offer. That's their value.
My observation is the worst aspect of monetization is on the communities themselves. For the first half, say, it was standard spectrum: some trolls and schmucks but for the most part regular folks with something to say. April Fools projects from the admins wowed us year after year at the creativity and cordiality.
Then came the ads and the apps, no picnic but down in the subs was a new problem: site policy. At some point, subs and posts were getting yanked or even altered by admins. Censorship, astroturfing, shilling, kowtowing to foreign investors, the whole political manipulation thing: you couldn't trust anybody's motivations anymore in a conversation. Most lately, the standard disney/youtube-ification has started.
I'm almost done, too.
Both of these violate netiquette!
As a reminder, proper netiquette is to necropost instead of creating a duplicate thread.
And shadow banning is not a tool that most moderators should even have, and should only be used against the most horrible trolls!
There's obviously a line to draw somewhere. You don't want 50 posts on the same topic clogging the top of the feed, but zombie threads where the first 90% is out of date or irrelevant are also bad. Locking a thread after it has been idle for a week or two seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
Good forum software makes it less of a sin, but that's pretty rare on the Internet. This isn't the Usenet where people's clients could be fully featured on every topic.
BTW, I prefer decentralized protocols like Usenet, there are plenty of features that would be unthinkable to leave out of "modern" clients, this could be one of them !
Not all of the outcasts can end up on HN
For a while I actually switched to facebook lists, but then facebook got hostile towards allowing people to sort their follows into categories. That one I really cant understand, because it made facebook infinitely more pleasant to use.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2476952/digg-users-are...
Outside, a friend's house, visit family, etc
Well, if they do I'm out. The new is, and always has been, a steaming pile. I mean, people can't even confidently reply to who they think they are and often reply to the OP instead of a comment (I see this every single day in multiple threads) and as a mod I absolutely hate the way new Reddit is set up on the mod side.
New Reddit is also just flat out hideous in appearance. One of the reasons I've paid for Reddit for years is so I could strip custom themes to keep a plain experience not unlike HN. New Reddit is like 'Hey guys!!!!!! We discovered pastels, omg omg omg do you want to see pictures because here are a bunch of pictures loaded rather large that you didn't ask to see, pictures, yay pictures, omg omg pictures!"
Even if it's infinitely better? I have been using the 'reddit is fun' app for years, and it's the best experience by far. I hate even using my computer to browse reddit to be honest, I would rather sit and be comfortable with a phone. Can't say that about most sites.
On the opposite end, I hate browsing hackernews on my phone so I almost never do. I can't click anything because it's so small. So I just end up using it on the desktop, which is fine I guess.. but it limits my interaction with this site.
slashdot-->digg-->reddit-->[?]
But as already pointed out, not everyone on reddit would go here...
(P.S.: For my part, I skipped Digg.)
I use Reddit mainly on phone, via browser because I use tabs and old.reddit.com because its the most content dense view and and is the fastest view (no stupid js loading icon thankyou). I'm not there, like I'm not here, for the design. I'm visiting for the content.
Reddit.com front page takes about three seconds to load with stupid blocking js, old takes about second before I can start consuming. Apps are no better.
I believe this is everyone's experience, even some admins'.
Perhaps they are testing it with a subset of users?
The “view discussion” and “view more comments” buttons are just utter, utter shite. It is near impossible to read all of the comments.
It’s clearly designed to satisfy KPIs other than actually reading a post. More like superficially bouncing from one post to the next, dropping an upboat and off you go.
I sincerely hope all these sign in-only forums with great SEO like Quora and Reddit suffocate on their own rot.
I thought / heard from someone that the View more comments button is a technical solution for preventing overfetching or excessively deep queries. Never crossed my mind for a second to connect it to KPIs.
But then I’d expect a “load more” button to expand a new level, and fetch those comments, leaving the rest in tact. Not to go to a new page and only show a subset of the comments yo want to load and hide the comments it displayed just a click away.
Instead the new page is rather short and has a completely different post at the bottom. It’s all about engagement. And more ads. But I hide em, so no idea where these are.
Maybe they were testing something? or did this as a trial balloon? or canceled it because of backlash?
Reddit is, in the short term, driving more external users towards creating user accounts while in the long term removing one of the major value funnels for why they would (i.e. the quality of comments, particularly in certain niche communities/about niche topics).
This will give them a short term "bump" at the cost of the site's long term relevance (as it falls down Google's search results rankings, due to loss of clicks as people stop looking to Reddit as a source of info). Most of the recent moves on Reddit are like this, it feels like the entire site is being turned into a pump and dump scheme.
As users learn that Reddit links aren't useful sources of information, they'll click less, which means the relevance between the search term and Reddit goes down. Ultimately reducing Reddit's ranking, regardless of if the Googlebot is allowed to index the content.
People often mix up indexing and ranking. Indexing is if you're even in the results set, but ranking is where. Reddit might, technically, still be in the results set but if it isn't on page 1 for a given search it may have well not be.
The internet is becoming a friggin pain in the ass.
A better analogy might be Expert Exchange. A site that put answers behind a paywall, and fell hard out of Google's search results. Then Stackoverflow came along and took whatever remained.
If they initially said that they will be requiring sing-in to read comments, push app over browser, etc. it would be just fine (but then I suspect they would not have any quality content to monetize). Just my 2c.
So now you have a whole bunch of people doing a reenactment of Silicon Valley, only the actual site experience for users has basically not changed since 10 years now (except "corporate innovations" like nagging you to install their app so people playing startup have their hockeystick curve).
It's a common phenomena. Look to Strava or Patreon, perfectly successful businesses that are instead exploding headcount and spending like a cancer, while never actually changing the core experience (except for worse).
God, this one baffles me. I feel like you could write that website and app with 5-10 skilled employees and a handful more for support and administrative overhead, skim your 10% of a good chunk of all Internet microtransactions, and retire early. Then they go and nuke all their goodwill trying to milk every cent they can out of the process[1]. What the fuck? Just make a product people want to use and charge a fair price for it; payment processing with a small blog platform is not rocket science. No part of this requires 60 million dollars and 100+ employees[2].
[1] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/12/08/patreon-fees-con...
It's basically impossible to start a YT or Patreon or Twitter alternative without either accidentally or actively pandering to people who have been kicked out of the main competitor, which mostly happen to be neonazis and/or fascists.
As such, most alternatives will immediately have their main pages full of hate speech and nazi propaganda. Even if there is a part of the user base that just wants an alternative to the Big Thing for other reasons, it quickly gets taken over and drowned out. Finally, after some time, the site just gets labeled as 'The Nazi {Patreon, Twitter, ..}' and every member becomes guilty by association, the community is just pure fash, and sometimes even gets dropped by advertisers/payment processors after public outcry.
See: voat (full of hate speech, basically a shelter for all banned reddit communities), gab (actively pandering to alt-right), subscribestar (paypal dropped them after public outrage), ...
I think the only 'alternative' I've seen not evolve into this is Mastodon, and that's probably because of how openly anti-fascist the first adopters (and developers) were, and because they didn't need to turn any profit.
https://twitter.com/shl/status/1160923132984623106
You can already do subscription products, but it's not quite enough to replace Patreon. That's about all I need to start nudging my handful of patrons over.
The typical Silicon Valley Disruptor approach is to just wave away all responsibility except the absolute minimum the law compels you to do.
Also profits pay for non of the things you listed, profits pay for investors.
https://www.businessinsider.com/craig-newmark-craigslist-fou...
/snark since it's mostly invisible on the internet.
Since the web is based around single domains, the source runs behind those domains, this balkanizes what we see and who runs it, creating a winner take all dynamic. Unknowingly, the structure of the web makes it ideal to supplant public protocols for private walled gardens. Sure you can use a "standard" client to connect, but you are relying on the good of the owner, who can _pivot_ at any time.
I think there is a general trend away from user-generated content as a business model, because that content can be a bit salty.
Reddit might just be cashing out because the wave they rode has already crested.
AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you want to get serious about monetization then you need to actively curtail any content that is not "advertiser friendly" which in most cases means alienating your core content generators, case in point, Tumblr.
They really aren't legitimately user-generated subreddits anymore and there's always this constant tension between users and what gets allowed to be 'frontpaged' or commented about.
I know people can create spin-off subs but when it starts happening everywhere it becomes a serious problem.
While hyper active moderation and power mods pushing their agendas on Reddit is a major issue, a fair amount of moderation is key to maintaining the quality of content. r/MurderedByWords is an example when the mods bend a bit too backwards in allowing content, it delved from legitimate smackdowns to childish name calling on Twitter. The sub's a disgrace lately.
Striking that balance is important, forcing your own views of what the sub should be will antogonize people but at the same time maintaining a bare minimum is also important. Even more so for subs that regularly hit r/all and r/popular. A lot of niche subs hit r/all with a thread or two causing a massive influx of users and the rules are relaxed to accommodate the lowest common denominator. The end result of doing that is usually the older regular content creators lose interest and leave the community.
Personally I find that the more strictly a subreddit is moderated, the better it tends to be.
A lot of smaller channels are upset about it, since live streams were one of the ways they were /getting/ to 1000 subscribers in the first place, but you can't fight the platform :(
The sad part about the sub requirement is that many forms of content are valuable but not sub-worthy.
If you create a video on how to fix a ‘93 Hyundai’s brakes and next week how to fix your vintage garage door, I’m not going to sub. It’s not « feedable » content
Maybe I would if it was entertaining in a time-wasting way, but that shouldn’t be a requirement.
ChrisFix isn’t going to make a brake-change video for every car out there.
If someone is using (e.g.) OBS Studio to stitch together a screencap and a facecam, it's easy to have to save to a file for later use.
In the past, YT allowed creators to prevent this behavior and recommended videos in general by appending a ?rel=0 to an embed or via the API. Last year, they removed that option.
It's frustrating that they claim to be explicitly trying to promote educational content, but then they degrade the experience for educational viewers, regardless of the preference of the viewer or creator.
In the DOS days the Pause button on your keyboard would actually stop the text being scrolled (if you had a multi-page output). I wonder if Windows (or well any desktop OS) can have a feature where that button would freeze frame the display.
Very confusing when you click on the screenshot though.
Google turned a seemingly benign industry into something people now regularly refer to as "weaponized" messaging.
The pen is mightier than the sword. The spoken word is mightier than both. We need to relearn how to talk to one another instead of relying on what used to be a useful heuristic shortcut in our day to day life.
We got drunk on the convenience of industry automating massaging before we even realized tech would lead to automation could scale at such exponential rates.
Our linear thinking in 3d space time is not able to keep up with all the degrees of separation in play anymore.
Marketing is a joke and everyone knows it. This is the real industry that is "too big to fail". And that they pinned it on the penultimate boogey man (aka money) is just more fuel to that fire.
Why do we accept that such a short-lived company (less than one human generation) is "a good run", just because it's software? If Tesla turned into a "classic pump and dump scheme", nobody would say "Well, Tesla is 16 years old. They've had a good run."
Saying something makes sense doesn't make it make sense. Reddit is not just an application. Reddit is millions of like-minded users exchanging thoughts on a wide variety of subjects. The software or application may affect how those users interact with the other users, but it is the users at the end of the day that define what Reddit (or this site) is.
Reddit was once a community, but now it's an attempt to monetize its users - nothing more, nothing less. It's clearly already dying to anybody that isn't inside the echo chamber. It moved away from value creation years ago and is clearly in the death grip of value extraction.
I suspect it actually has a lot to do with their latest investment round 5 years ago, but this is purely speculation on my part.
https://venturebeat.com/2014/09/30/y-combinator-backers-upvo...
$200M in July 2017: https://www.vox.com/2017/7/31/16037126/reddit-funding-200-mi...
$300M in February 2019: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/
However, this is by no means a replacement for reddit.
In the past few months, I've found that I only check "Today I Learned", and even that only once every day or so.
I find the discussion here to be much more mature and insightful than any of the tech related subreddits. I had written it off as reddit being a young-persons domain and me getting old, but it could just be that reddit is losing it's edge.
I find that the best subreddits are the other kind: real communities with members identifying as "member of community X", not focused on or created "out of" the Reddit community itself, but rather bringing in people from the outside because "the X community" happens to use a subreddit to communicate, rather than using Slack/Discord/Telegram/etc.
In other words, Reddit is IMHO at its best when it's serving as a (shared-infrastructure, shared-registration, shared-administration) host for otherwise-independent forums.
Reddit succeeded at being the thing that e.g. Discourse.org was trying to be—a cloud host for forums—by getting the most attention and virality, by taking advantage of the network effects that come from integrating those forums into one larger meta-forum structure. But that meta-forum, and the random "by Redditors, for Redditors" forums that shoot up out of it, aren't the real value-prop. The individual forums hosted for their own communities' sakes are. The meta-forum is just there so that people are aware that Reddit exists when they're thinking about which cloud forum host to use.
Those independent third-party forums are healthy self-contained communities, because they're planned—they were probably started by a PR effort of a company or nonprofit org, and probably have real, paid "community managers" assigned to moderate them.
Reddit's own random-offshoot forums have none of these advantages. They're just people who wandered into an empty space, sat down, and started talking. Of course they don't have functional moderation. They're cliques!
Next time you're looking at a subreddit, ask yourself: does this subreddit have a website? And could it be said that the website "owns the subreddit" rather than the other way around? If so, then great: it's an independent community that happens to use Reddit to host a forum. If not, maybe don't even bother. (I'd love to see a list of the top subreddits that are left when you apply this filter.)
Also,for me, it's still a great social media site that lets me talk anonymously about almost anything.
The beauty of reddit is that serious decline and toxicity only seems to happen within subs. If a sub becomes really bad, you just move on to other subs that are less toxic. Still plenty of great subcommunities there.
I have never, ever seen a site anywhere near as big as Reddit with such a bad redesign. It seems they could have hired one UX guy and one graphic guy... I could probably pay some people on Fiverr $100 total to create a better design for the entirety of Reddit.
The old design was boring and out of date, but it was everything I needed so I was fine with it.
But I'm mainly a mobile user so I don't really care.
It still wasn't enough to make me stick around. The popups on my phone to use the app on every page load are infuriating. Especially when I use Firefox on my phone, and it tells me to "Continue with Safari." I guess because Google started doing that bullshit on their apps, it's okay for everybody else to copy it.
One of the things the new design has made much harder is the discovery of new subs; in the old reddit you could generally speaking find a list of related subreddits on the right side of the screen. Not anymore (sometimes they're buried in the wiki, but not always). It's a shame, because discovering new and interesting (and weird) topics was one of the best things about it. Also, to echo many users here, my usage of the site has dropped right down after the redesign. It's a shame because it was for many years one of my favourite places on the Internet.
You say that but... what is an alternative? I literally don't know where to go.
Like sports? /r/nfl /r/nba /r/insertsporthere
Like vr? /r/oculus /r/vive /r/insertothervrhere
And then just all the random stuff that is somewhat interesting...
I have such a love/hate relationship with reddit but I don't see any alternative.. especially if you like to actually discuss about topics.
I don't think that a co-founder would ever make such a short-sighted decision.
Several people I know (me included) refuse to use Pinterest because you can't browse without an account.
#NotMyInternet
The Hustle - Business/Tech
Daily Programming Problems - Interview style questions that are language agnostic (mostly).
I also have language specific news letters for Java, Python and C# that are ok, but nothing special.
Maybe i outgrew the typical user demographic, but i think its just corny (I'm talking about r/all).
The only social media I really like is Pinterest. It always gets ignored in these conversations and besides a few minor things, there development never seems to bother the base.
Digg lessons weren't apparently not learned
It's probably 5x faster than the new mobile site, too
For example, I open a notification (the only reason I have the apo installed - this could be done with web PNs) and then either click back or the X, both wrongly navigate back one time to the same message, then close the app completely. I often have to kill the app to get out of this.
Why the hell can't we stick to documents for reading stuff, and even posting the occasional comment?
Absolutely no value for the HN crowd, and it would piss me off to no end if that sort of thing came here, but I still want it occasionally.
I don't know if that's on purpose or it's just like that. But there seems to be a big difference in the quality depending on whether you are logged in or not.
As for the reddit site itself I wonder what is the ratio of old.reddit viewers vs reddit viewers are. I've used reddit for over a decade and absolutely hate the new style I only go to old.reddit if that changes and only new reddit is available I'll abandon my account (or sell it to Russians ha! Kidding.).
I moderate a top 100 sub and if the built-in stats are to be believed, the recent breakdown is something like:
= Pageviews =
40% apps
28% old reddit
17% mobile reddit
15% new reddit
= Unique visits =
41% mobile reddit
27% new reddit
24% apps
8% old reddit
This doesn't really capture the ratio of contributors who use each (or perhaps, more interestingly, number of contributions per platform), but it's hard for me to guess that accurately since new-reddit detractors are a very vocal group.
I guess I shouldn't be so afraid of old going away soon then :)
I'm using old Reddit, on mobile.
Our community might have a slight old-reddit bias -- we have a core group that doesn't like change -- but I have a hard time believing it could have a terribly large effect once the numbers are in the millions.
--- Monthly uniques (200k total):
New Reddit: 55%
Mobile Web: 20%
Reddit Apps: 15%
Old Reddit: 10%
--- Monthly Pageviews (3M total):
New Reddit: 30%
Mobile Web: 10%
Reddit Apps: 30%
Old Reddit: 30%
So in our case, while the ones using Old Reddit are the fewest in number, they are also the most engaged.
Edit: Just for comparison, I moderate a medium sized sports subreddit. Traffic waxes and wanes a bit based on when games happen, the memeability of recent events, and the activities of Donald Trump. We see a lot more app traffic, and new reddit is about as rare as people using mobile browsers.
Our ~416k page views are distributed like this:
Apps: 62%
Mobile browsers: 7%
Old reddit: 25%
New reddit: 6%
For a month of uniques (48k):
Apps: 54%
Mobile browsers: 12%
Old reddit: 21%
New reddit: 12%
I just checked one of my subreddits and for the Pageviews stats I see graphs for old reddit 3,500 vs new reddit 15,000.
Unique visits: old 1,200 vs new 9,370
I find that much of a difference surprising.
It also feels like social media platforms are starting to die faster than they can be replaced. In the past MySpace died but people could move to Facebook, Facebook shifted to emphasizing the feed over groups but people could move to Reddit, but I'm not sure what people could move to if Reddit becomes non-viable.
Is this just me?
It's happening to imgur and Reddit now. Time to find the next big thing.
Damn, that's a good way to put it.
I assume value includes non tangibles, otherwise open source wouldn't work.
This is more a case of non-open-source software trying to force physical-world business models into a world where physicality has no meaning. Most open source development is paid for by paying for the work to be done. In other words, much open source software is not free; rather, it's already been paid for.
Is this necessarily a bad thing? Or are you saying this is basically an arbitrage opportunity waiting for someone to exploit it?
How would we structure something free that provides value, and keep it free in the long term without degradation?
For example, I bought Words with Friends a long long time ago, and for a while it was great. But now they've added tons of gamification features like powerups that bypass game rules, social, awards, etc... to try to get you to engage more and pay more money. Now, various awards screens pop up and waste seconds of my life after every move.
I just want to play standard Words with Friends with my wife like I have for the last 10 years. But one can see that folks like me aren't making Zynga any (new) money, hence the other inducements.
So now they add all these unfriendly features, which now makes the app mis-priced for you.
My point is that mis-pricing can be different depending on who's perspective we look at. So in an economic sense, when we say something is mis-priced, from who's perspective is it?
Would be interesting if some rich benefactor randomly decided to run such a community.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/the-1st-thing-alexis-ohanian...
And Stack Overflow: [Why is StackOverflow trying to start audio?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288768) [Ads on Stack Overflow are increasingly \[terrible\]](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/329547/ads-on-se-si...)
I think the most interesting story in social networks is the collapse of core Facebook as the prime mover. I think there is still a lot of room for more Pinterests and Snapchats yet, which could further diversify the space and dilute core Facebook's mind share. The young people not caring about Facebook thing, has clearly graduated to a permanent setting, it's not going back (the next group are not going to suddenly care about FB). TikTok has demonstrated some of what is possible most recently.
I never knew if the interesting people found a new home, or disbanded, but I sure miss when fun stuff happened there.
A lot of these platforms seem VC-funded or publicly traded, and they are based on growth. So they probably see growth slowing down, and this is an effort to squeeze more numbers out of it. Hopefully for them, they can pivot their business plan on to something not growth-based.
This is a common pattern: growth is like a drug for tech startups. Cut it, and they will do all they can to have it again, even if they have to alienate their current user-base for this.
As I often browse reddit in private mode, this probably just means that I'll waste less time on that website; I'm not going to bother logging in if I didn't already.
My $0.02 is that it is a shift from ad-driven approaches (as in showing ads) to consensus shaping approaches that focus on data mining.
The huge quantities of bad actors -- idiots, assholes, paid trolls, blatant propagandists -- also requires mitigation.
We've had locks and walled gardens for hundreds of years, and human nature hasn't changed. No surprise the same thing is happening on the intrawebs.
People always seem to brush off this kind of comment when I see it discussed, usually the argument is "well, you're a software developer / superuser, normal people don't care about these things." It will be interesting to see where the breaking point actually is; I've always felt that platform users deserve a little more respect than that. The linked identity thing is especially frustrating for me.
I stopped posting to facebook in 2010 (still using it to keep in touch via messenger and see event invites, and to avoid alienating extended family), but I used to have an instagram account with a fun theme that I only shared with a few friends. What was fun and relatable for my friends was confusing and obtuse to my family. Even the account username was embarrassing in that context. So I always kept them separate, explicitly saying "no, I don't want to attach this to my facebook account." Then one day, it just sort of happened? I can't remember if I was tricked by a dark pattern or if they just forcibly fused the accounts YouTube-Google style, but that day instagram immediately lost all usefulness to me and I haven't been on since. For me as a user, social media has always kind of felt this way.
I'm curious to see what will happen to reddit and its communities, and even more curious to see whether the next generation sees internet anonymity as a cool feature. When I was growing up, it felt like being able to form an alternate identity online was almost the whole point, but I guess back then there were fewer avenues to cultivating your identity as a personal brand for profit.
I read your comment as a really strong case for platform co-operativism -- multi-stakeholder democracy for online platforms: not just owners making decisions, but users and maybe employees together with owners. Generally, democratic currents (whether government or corporate) only emerge through changes in our collective sense of "how things should be".
I'm hoping we all start to realize we're serfs on all these platforms, and start wondering "hey, we're generating most of this wealth... why aren't we given a say in decision-making?"
It's similar to the argument you here when people say "they youth arent into facebook anymore, now they use xxxx." That's nice and all, but as long as they get facebook when they graduate high school or go to college, facebook wins. It doesnt need to be hip and cool if its the network gluing everyone together. Did the white pages or yellow pages need to be cool to be useful?
I have not doubt Facebook will continue to win for a long time. But I think kids retreated from social media to avoid their parents. Everything is owned by a handful of companies now, so it doesn't really matter where they go I guess.
In the past, a lot of non-technical people posted to usenet newsgroups and connected to IRC for online chat.
IRC and USENET are simpler than that.
"Wordperfect" as a Google Ngram term peaks in the early 1990s:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Wordperfect&ca...
Microsoft Windows 3.1 was released in 1992, selling "over a million copies" in the first two months of the year. That would an annual sales track of ~6 million or so.
In 1980 there were 2 million computers in the US, doubling every 2 years. By 2000, there were 168 million computers, only 6 doublings rather than the 10 the 1980 estimate would have provided. That suggests about 16 million users as of 1990, possibly 24-32 million by 1992.
As of 1995, total worldwide Internet usage (then largely in the US, though also Europe) was 16 millions. As of 2019 it's 4.5 billions.
https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm
That would have been the more educated, wealier, and generally professional class of users, for the most part. For better or worse, computer use has democratised tremendously. The capabilities of the typical user have all but certainly fallen correspondingly.
Nobody is going to go from Reddit to usenet/IRC. That's a massive UX downgrade and the modern layperson isn't going to deal with that when the next Tiktok or other social media craze is a tap away.
Just because it was a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf software package with a home-user license that any individual could buy, doesn't really mean that they were targeting the "layperson" market in the way that e.g. Windows Home Editions ever were. They were targeting professionals who had home computers, who had already learned the software due to previous corporate-sponsored training. Big difference.
The equivalent today would be the sort of software used by Hollywood screenwriters to format their scripts. Even if you buy a single-seat license of it, that's not because you're a layperson/hobbyist; that's because you're a freelance professional who works from your home-office.
And HN is social media too.
So the common use case of wikipedia, reading about things, is not. But digging deeper into the editors\editing section there is definitely social media happening both in forming networks and creating content for others
I don't think email qualifies. While you can share content and network with it, it seems to be more of a delivery mechanism than a destination that users would seek out.
"AOL" is too ambiguous.
I always though of Compuserve as a service provider but maybe they did have some social media features
BBS might be the original social media
Finger is interesting as you could create a "profile". myspace and other social media seem to be a combination of finger and bbs packaged into an endpoint
Facebook and Twitter are social networks because I share stuff and there's a definite social graph that I'm part of.
"websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking."
So having a user account doesn't make it social media.
Stackoverflow seems like a "no" but you can definitely promote yourself and there is a "community" there.
LinkedIn is virtually all about social networking, so yes.
Twitter, Instagram - social media. Reddit, Stack Overflow, HN - Not social media.
- The ability to use one login and interface across multiple boards/subject areas.
- The ease of communicating between different boards either via links, cross posts, or some form of aggregation.
- Features that over time allow a post to become one that can be recognized as well regarded by the community. These could include good support for listing important posts in the subreddit information, the ability to tag posts, and the ability to archive posts.
- The natural support for media and links. Although to be fair, the media support is actually provided by sites that grew up around Reddit like Imgur.
Reddit may not be social in the sense that, as another poster points out, it is built around following topics rather than users. However, the degree to which it allows different topics and communities to interconnect allows relationships to form that function as a society. For example, a post on the Male Fashion Advice subreddit on how to be more presentable might link to a series of posts on the Male Hair Advice subreddit that have become well regarded in the community.
By way of comparison, on conventional forums there is often little interaction even between sub-forums in the same forum let alone between different forums. Support for media also tends to be more limited.
Very well can be. Social media in their current form belong to corporations rather than users. Therefore sooner or later they start making decisions that are hostile to users. To make an analogy, these online societies are not stable because they resemble a monarchy, where a corporation (the monarch) must use its own judgement on how to govern its online society. Which proven to be a rather unsustainable governance model.
Until online societies switch to self-government similar to modern democracies (elected government, elected judges, payment collection, public expense reporting, etc.) they will likely continue to be unsustainable and rather short-term.
I think the demand is still there. There's a power vacuum just waiting for someone to fill it. But the replacement can't just be "like Facebook but run by people slightly less creepy". You've got to fix some other root issues.
I've been a user since 2006. When reddit blew up in popularity, many subs massively declined in quality as is to be expected. Niche subs, however, remained pretty great.
But reddit as an organization is beyond repair at this point. Changes like this are now par for the course.
Worse even, reddit is now engaged in censoring subs. The most obvious and possibly most disturbing example is the quarantine of r/the_donald on political grounds.
We tried every single open or alternative Reddit and they were all garbage. And trust me when I said we tried everything.
They are either awful early-2000s PHP-clone style sites, some stupid fringe political communities which push away mainstream users, or some weird moderation rules.
https://saidit.net/ was the closest clone but they had some bizarre "Pyramid of Debate" [1] moderation thing that seemed culty among their hardcore members, which our sub members got turned off from.
But ultimately it's the lack of good mobile apps for these sites that pushed us away and we never managed to rebuild the community.
Recreating a better Reddit is a project I've long been interested in doing myself.
[1] https://infogalactic.com/w/images/thumb/e/ef/The_Pyramid_Of_...
I mean, I agree they should have been banned from day one basically.. but to say it's a slap on the wrist is odd because absolutely no one has to read any of their trash unless you specifically go there. Most random reddit users probably don't even know of td, let alone would actually go there voluntarily.
That being said.. I think it's unconscionable that reddit allows that subreddit to exist.. it's literally a breeding ground for violence and hate thought/speech.
and no, they are not a 'breeding ground for violence and hate thought/speech'
Reminds me of 'wrongthink' and you're advocating for its censor?
Censorship is evil, censoring that sub was evil to supress information
That community does not directly behave in violence, hate, etc. How ridiculous of you to make that assertion. You're likely buying into the bullshit about the excuse Reddit made to censor them to begin with..."Anti police rhetoric" ...it is laughable that you're buying that.
End of story: Political Censorship
They should have never been censored, it was a politically inspired move, and a disgusting one to have made.
Perhaps we will see a diaspora of such clones?
This is totally backwards. Valuing pure signup rates over the user experience of hundreds of millions, who may already have accounts but dont feel like logging in, or just simply want to read content and sign up another day, is what happens when marketing/business people hijack a business over product/UX people.
This is a very obvious vanity metric issue to anyone who has run a popular website. And most people do it to appease VCs/investors... Reddit is already mature, so there's no justification to artificially increasing growth at the expense of the wider product.
I dont use FB at all because of in part the barrier to entry.
I like this one:
We have to pay for quality. If we're not going to pay with dollar bills, we pay with privacy.
> If we're not going to pay with dollar bills, we pay with privacy.
Paying with ads is also possible.
So: not sure.
Reddit does this, but no idea how successful it is.
All of the hard work is done for free by the mods of each subreddit. But they have no piece of the pie when Reddit goes IPO. The entire value is predicated on an Army of free workers that get nothing when the site IPOs.
I already had an account when Quora did it, and that made me use it less (wasn't always signed in, wasn't always willing to sign in - e.g. incognito sessions). For a long while, I started going back less and less - was only brought back occasionally by their emails which were still pretty good.
Recently the emails got so bad that I unsubscribed (I kinda expect to stop visiting the site completely). So I'm guessing I'm not alone in reducing my engagement - the quality of the whole site seems to have gone dramatically down.
When a service puts its core usefulness behind an unnecessary login then they are forcing me to sign in, they are not making me want to. There is a key difference.
I liked it before that kind of activity proliferated the space.
Now it demands I pay.
I wonder if there is a way to permanently exclude medium.com from all my search results.
A month ago I ended up getting the app again because the web version became essentially unusable (they did some strange change where clicking on a link gave you the top three/five comments and then other posts from the same subreddit, wtf?).
I wonder what short term pipe they're smoking in the product department.
Vanilla reddit is unusable.
(yeah, I know, someone else make what I want . . . )
(or, we should have just fixed spam on Usenet . . . )
I appreciate the correction.
For context on them attempting to catalog subs about a month ago a Reddit admin messaged me unsolicited (apparently a lot of people). I have no problem sharing this since they randomly contacted me via the site, I've never done contract work for them, and there was no request to keep it private (and apparently hey just randomly mass messaged people):
>Hey there! I work at Reddit and I’m reaching out because we’re looking for experienced redditors who might be interested in taking on some paid contract work for us. I have no idea if you’d be interested, but I figured I’d drop you a line.
I replied requesting more info
>Great! Essentially, this work would be reviewing lists of subreddits to help categorize what they are about and what content is in them. This would probably be maximum 10h/wk (no minimum) over a couple of weeks, though if it goes well there’s likely to be more. It pays $15/hr.
I said sure and was told this
>Can you send an email to redacted@reddit.com with your resume and your experience on Reddit and we can work on scheduling a time to chat about the opportunity? (No worries if your profession or line of work isn’t related to Reddit. We're looking for reliable people with existing Reddit knowledge; reviewing your resume will help us better understand your background.) Upon reviewing the resumes, we will schedule 30-minute phone calls with selected candidates to share details on the project work and conduct interviews.
I did about 20 minutes later and within an hour got an email saying thanks but no thanks, there were tons of people interested and they're already full.
That, or impersonate a search engine to access. They wouldn't block that, would they?
And that system will also follow the same path (unless it is started by an already-very-rich group of techies who value status more than money).
Just think: if you were fabulously wealthy, then burning a few million a year to have a completely free, non-commercial social site would be perfectly reasonable. Of course, eventually you would die and someone would then begin the usual path with your legacy...
And Usenet even included posting a single message to multiple groups, and people from both can respond.
Any resources you can point me to? I’m really interested in these concepts.
I am able to read threads just fine without an account, in this case safari on my Mac. Safari on the iPhone is fine too.
(G) Google way to restrict search to signed-in users: If you're on Chrome (biggest market share) and you're signed into Chrome (big share also) then you auto-sign into your google account. PS: Not sure if they rollback on this change.
Why the (G) way works? Because it's non-obtrusive way to force user to login.
And:
1. If you don't mind being constantly redirected to www by arbitrary links.
2. Having old blocked by robots.txt from search-engine indexing.
3. The likelihood of old disappearing at some point in the future.
I saw that future a couple of years ago and noped the heck out.
UX is everything, Hackernews told me.
Where is your god now?