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Comment by jackcosgrove | Hacker News Reader

Nothing lasts forever. Reddit is 14 years old. They've had a good run.

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.

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> because that content can be a bit salty.

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.

I do believe Reddit admins heavily influence the culture of the hyper-modding but at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content because it doesn't fit their view of what the subreddit should be.

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.

> at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content

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.

I still am very upset about /r/politics becoming super partisan. Reddit as a whole has always had biases, but there was a time when /r/politics was fairly centrist and genuinely useful as an aggregator with intelligent commentary. It's now a reposting of vox/buzzfeed more or less.

I don't remember this time at all. But I've never found much value in the big subreddits because of the incentives to game them for karma and traffic. The most interesting communities have always seemed like the small ones since there are more people interested in a conversation vs. a popularity contest.

agreed. I have voted Democrat for a long time, but I can't stand how partisan it's become. The comments are always so low-effort too. The top voted comment in almost any thread will be something like, "fuck trump".

Some people mistake catharsis for activism. It burns a lot of energy while not leading to any progress, or even to building a foundation for making progress.

It almost gives me an uncanny valley feeling. There's a certain pattern to every comments thread that makes me feel like I'm watching a 'conversation' between lazy teenagers, vote-manipulation bots and a handful of (paid?) adult political activists. (I know that sounds paranoid, but fwiw if I were an American I would vote Democrat, and if you applied a hundred randomly-chosen negative adjectives to Trump I would strongly agree with most of them. So this isn't a shocked reaction to seeing an echo chamber populated by the wrong team.)

I wouldn't necessarily mind it being partisan, if not for the extremely low quality commenting standard. I'm sure there's a causal link: most of us are less likely to call out bullshit from our own team, and when there's nobody to call you out on your bullshit (so long as it's directed at the correct targets), it's tempting to go ever cheaper and ever dumber in search of easy approval. But it would at least be possible to have a forum where people had a lot of opinions in common, but still cared about truth and intellectual integrity and basic logic.

The moderators are just users though, oftentimes ones who just got there first. If you don't like the vision for any given subreddit you can create your own with more lax moderation. There's plenty of stories where subs split off because of moderation differences and ended up becoming bigger than their parent. See /r/gameofthrones vs /r/freefolk for an example.

Personally I find that the more strictly a subreddit is moderated, the better it tends to be.

I think /r/PoliticalDiscussion is a great example of this. Up until 2016 there was a lot of active debate and ~50k subscribers. Now there are ~750k subscribers and only ~2 posts allowed per day. Must be exhausting for the mods.

YouTube is starting to do this as well. For example they've made it so that accounts with less than 1000 subscribers can't do live streams any more. Not coincidentally, 1000 subscribers is the threshold for monetization (i.e., when ads start getting shown on all the account's videos).

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 :(

I wonder how much it costs to get a thousand bot accounts to subscribe to your account.

About $90ish after some cursory searching. I wouldn't do it, though, seems like a great way to get a nasty surprise in the future when the bots get terminated.

There’s also an hours of viewing requirement.

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.

That's playing with fire. If/when Google figures out what you're doing, they'll nuke your entire Google presence- YouTube, Gmail, everything- with no recourse.

YouTube is definitely doing this. If you watch a video without being signed in, it now displays a popover (over the video) that says "You're signed out of YouTube. Sign in to like videos, comment, and subscribe. [GOT IT]"

I know of a few gaming channels that tend to stream on Twitch and then post on YT later (often in 30 minute segments for easier consumption).

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.

Another YT issue I personally find annoying as someone who has recorded a LOT of programming tutorials is all the garbage that pops up on the lower part of the screen whenever the viewer presses pause. A lot of times they're hitting pause because they want to read what I'm typing in the terminal.

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.

> A lot of times they're hitting pause because they want to read what I'm typing in the terminal.

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.

Could probably do it today with autohotkey or similar; take screenshot and display full screen borderless.

Very confusing when you click on the screenshot though.

I'm not sure if it's YT or the channel creators, but I've noticed a lot videos are popping up the 'Also check out these videos' thing at the end of their videos (as an overlay, not part of the video), and it covers up the actual video content with no way to hide/remove it.

YES. Video recommendations covering the screen while I pause to try and read something. Is it really that niche of a use case that the user is pausing the video to better view something in said video?! How many more places do we need to shove recommendation systems down the users throat.

It makes sense if you consider the possibility that through the anonymity of analytics YT is optimizing it’s website to keep children glued to tablets/smartphones. When a user pauses, show them something else to watch, they might be bored and about to start playing roblox. Also, if they switch videos it gives you more views to give to your creators, and you can lead the next vid with an ad. Need to get more ads to those impressionable little eyes!

It's not mere possibility, it's reality. The service's incentives do not align with the users', they are pursuing engagement as opposed to utility. It is actually counterproductive to YouTube's bottom line for the content to be deep and meaningful, they make more money when it's fleeting and superficial. This is the natural outcome of the attention economy.

Ugh it makes me so sad to see glassy-eyed toddlers glued to their tablets. This has to have some kind of long term cognitive impact on their attention spans. We're basically doing an experiment on an entire generation by turning them into dopamine addicts with the attention span of a goldfish. I know my attention span and ability to focus has absolutely tanked in the last decade because of the modern internet.

Yeah that's one of the reasons I download most content I intend to study from YouTube and watch it with a decent media player. Another major reason is ability to go frame-by-frame forward and back which is implemented in the YouTube player but doesn't work reliably.

mpv can stream directly from youtube (and tons of other websites) using youtube-dl. Combine that with a browser plugin to play a link or the curent page in mpv. Infinitely better experience than watching in the browser.

I get more and more frustrated by YouTube's monetization attempts every day. Educational and other serious content creators need to start moving to more quality-focused platforms like Vimeo (which unfortunately isn't free, but at least it doesn't have ads!). Leave YouTube for the teenage influencers and inane children's content.

Just want to say I cannot agree with these sentiments more.

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.

It's possible to migrate software without driving off all your users. It's soft, after all. When the 8-bit wave crested, that didn't mean Apple was done as a company.

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."

It makes sense to think of Reddit as an application rather than a company. Reddit the application depends on network effects to grow, and without growth, decay will be inevitable. Facebook the company has been able to create other applications that grow, even while Facebook the application is starting a network effect-triggered death spiral. Reddit Inc. has not created any other growth applications like the Reddit app, so will die.

> It makes sense to think of Reddit as an application rather than a company.

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.

This ignores astroturfing, abusive mods, user hostile tactics (forcing v.reddit on users and disallowing converting it to gifs - even banning a bot that did it at the website level), and a lot of other serious systemic problems with reddit's "community."

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...

You've missed two more investment rounds. They raised $500M more after that one:

$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/

Perpetual growth is good only in a business sense. Social software has an optimal amount of users. Too few and there isn't enough signal, too many and there's too much noise. Both make people lose interest and leave.

Without researching traffic stats over time, what gives you the impression that reddit is dying? I'm under the impression it's only become bigger and bigger over the years. It's one of the top sites on the internet.

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'm not parent, but the very fact that they keep degrading the UI and implementing dark patterns and doing crap like requiring login to read comments is exactly what gives the impression that reddit is dying. It is hard to assume that people on top care about their users when every single news about any kind of change looks like to a downgrade to my Reddit experience.

I'm still baffled about the UI "improvement." It's comically bad. It's so busy and I can't find anything I want.

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.

You can still opt out of the redesign, which I do. I find the new desktop design to be intolerable.

I worry that eventually they're going to force everyone onto the new design, though.

old.reddit.com, my account is even set up to redirect me to it automatically.

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.

My presumption is the choice of name ("old.reddit.com") says something about the permanence of the original design (I'd feel better about "classic" or similar)

They are just following the Digg roadmap. We all know how that turned out.

I'm mainly a desktop user, so for me the new design is, how shall I put it politely, utter shite?

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.

The only thing I can find in my reddit feed is a bunch of annoying ass TripleByte ads.

On my todo list is a HN style reddit PWA

Echoing this, even just a year or so ago, I'd follow five or six different subreddits and check in on them multiple times a day.

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.

It sounds like you're talking about "channel" subreddits, the ones that just form as arbitrary sets of people gather to—however ephemerally—discuss a topic, without ever really self-identifying as "members" of that place.

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.)

Yes, but they don't _need_ to do this to stay afloat and relevant. How's their ad revenue? They could keep the stupid app, keep the dumb messages trying to convince me to switch to the app, and I'd still use it. But this is just a slap in the face to the average user.

>They've had a good run.

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.

What comes next? Don't say Discord.

HN subgroups ;)

Does anyone give Discord as a serious answer to that question? I'm really struggling to figure out how a glorified IRC replacement is going to fill the same niche as Reddit.

I think Discord is great for chats. They've been adding a lot of improvements and features recently. The only thing I wish they had was an IP ban.

However, this is by no means a replacement for reddit.

Curious Cat

Hopefully people don't say snapchat/instagram. Ugh I hate those. I hate the suggestion that we can't have proper social websites anymore because people only want to share pictures from their phones lol.

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