Comment by Jonnax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jonnax | Hacker News Reader

I used Reddit a lot back in 2013ish but went off of it.

Looking at it now, it feels like that in general the site is really mean spirited.

Also upvoting means that you're just seeing whatever the majority of voters want you to see. It works on a smaller community like HN because comments get 10s of upvotes at most. It's not a site for good discourse.

However there's communities where there is interesting discussion still and often if you want an opinion of a product or an issue you might find a thread on it from a real user.

But generally they've done nothing to stop the nurturing of racist/sexist/bullying content over the years.

Now you can argue about free speech being important for an internet platform.

But Reddit trying to change the community attitudes of their site now seems a little late.

Also there is a real sense that some users believe that Reddit is the Sheppard of society and they're fighting on the forefront of society. Which I think stems from the millions of apparent subscribers to subreddits.

But it's just a fancy internet forum.

Like this linked post is on a subreddit called Watch Reddit Die. Apparently something about free speech being stifled in Reddit.

People need to realise they shouldn't waste their life on a website they don't like.

The internet hasn't been fully consolidated by Facebook and Google just yet, they can find or make a different community.

I have been a redditor for a decade and have a few remarks based on my experience.

I feel like reddit has always had recurring and overlapping cycles of mean spiritedness. For instance, during the summer holiday period it becomes notoriously harder to have a reasonable exchange of ideas there (don't ask me why; I'm not quite sure). This year, since the beginning of the COVID19 isolation period in March, we've been in a period of very high mean spiritedness. It could be a consequence of users' high stress levels.

Reddit does still have several excellent communities. I find that there's one thing in common between them: They have real, dedicated, human moderators enforcing strict, rational policies. Also: There are some weird cliques of power moderators on reddit who control dozens if not hundreds of subreddits. A good subreddit is usually not run by those cliques. Not to discount the hard work that some grunt moderators put into trying to run the large, clique-controlled communities, but the commonalities are hard to ignore.

On upvotes: Reddit should have clear policies enforced equitatively and transparently at the company level, by a human staff, and downvotes shouldn't be presented as the opposite of an upvote. I don't see a complete alternative system that can replace the upvote, though. They do provide different sorting options; what else could they do, there?

On alternatives: People attempt to leave on a regular basis. The problem is that there's a much higher incentive for the people who are ostracized not only by reddit as a platform but by the associated community to leave than for people who are, for the most part, comfortable, even if the administration acts a little weird on occasion. All alternatives are quickly colonized by people that the majority of the reddit community (if there is such a thing) would rather not be immersed in: White supremacists, conspiracy theorists, fanatic nationalists, etc. For the more moderate people to be willing to move, they want to feel surrounded by a majority of people like them, not a minority.

The phenomenon you are describing is called "Summer Reddit", and that term comes about yearly because schoolchildren are home for the summer, with the average age of Redditors participating during this time lowering from 24 to 16. It also heavily correlates with an increase in edgy commenting and shitposting.

Reddit's issue is the issue of so many ad supported websites. Clicks sell ads and controversy draws more clicks than anything else.

It's been clear over the last few years that the popular subreddits are the ones that have the most dramatic content.

Smaller subreddit do tend to have better discourse though until eventually, they get large enough to become popular and start to become the same echo chambers.

First, big brands don't want controversy displayed next to their ads. This is likely behind some moves Reddit has made in the past to clean things up.

Second, I'm curious what % of revenue comes from user-purchased post and comment awards from gold. I've noticed those in use quite a bit in some more inflammatory subs like /r/politics. I wonder how they vet payments from users to avoid providing a way for hostile actors to buy visibility while flying under the radar. Ie. Avoiding conflicts of interest from accidentally monetizing trolls.

Big brands don't want to be advertised on r/watchpeopledie but probably have no issue with being advertised on r/relationshipadvice which is almost entirely a sub about controversy and thus drives clicks and revenue.

I've done some searching and it seems that reddit gold is a pretty small piece of the reddit revenue. Campaigns start at $50,000 with Reddit Ad's.

Oh I just found this: https://www.feedough.com/reddit-make-money-reddit-business-m...

Reddit made close to 1 million in revenue from Reddit gold in 2016.

That's pretty old data. And I realize I said Gold when what I meant was Reddit Coins, ie. the currency that lets people gild posts with various things like flames, and other colors.

I'm deeply interesting in learning what % of revenue that is for them and how quickly it is growing.

A recent heavily awarded post was broken down by cost per award. The money spent to award that post what it got was over $24,000, and that was just in the new award types and not the older medal/coin types. Adding the latter in pushed the total to just under $36k for that single post.

As for advertising on Reddit, I view it as a fool's errand on the part of advertisers given the extensive popularity of PiHoles and adblocking software among the userbase.

Do you have a link to that breakdown? I'd love to dig in further. I suspect that there's a lot of Coins in circulation from Reddit seeding the system. The marginal cost to them is roughly $0. Without being able to confirm if users paid the list price for those awards, I'm not sure we can confidently say Reddit banked ~$36k revenue for that post.

That said, my concern is that it creates an environment for misaligned incentives. If say, hostile foreign governments have their troll farms buying awards to increase visibility of divisive and inflammatory posts in key threads, that furthers their agenda and creates a revenue stream for Reddit that is fueled by creating an environment where that flourishes.

I'm NOT saying Reddit is actively trying to do this as I think they'd be horrified to find this happening, but they have a fine line to walk here from a product and business standpoint.

Re: your other point, I do digital advertising for a living. I can assure you that the vast majority of users on Reddit are not using PiHoles. While many may be using ad blockers, those largely don't work for native ads in the mobile app.

> It works on a smaller community like HN because comments get 10s of upvotes at most.

I think you underestimate the size of this place. It’s basically a busy Subreddit.

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