Reddit: One of social media's oldest companies is also its most undervalued

This is an absolute joke yeah. The page even has a button overlay "This looks better in the app" which I would take as an insult if I was their web dev but each to their own.

This smells like the brilliant plan of endless A/B testing that a unicorn did once, wrote about it on their company blog once it was used up, then everyone else followed.

These are all growth 'levers' which on paper can drastically improve metrics which is what is needed to get those crazy valuations and huge funding rounds. In reality they make the experience poor for the user, however, outside of the tech world most people are not bothered by these tricks.

I hate the new layout. I find the video player abysmal and I loathe the mobile experience.

Some of the content is still very good, but I feel like it's lessening as the anti-user hostility intensifies. It's a damn shame.

It’s an open secret in the PR industry that if you can get moderators of popular subreddits (for your market) on your side, then it’s easy to throw the conversation in your favor.

Moderators are the invisible hand the sway the conversation on Reddit. They have immense power to remove posts and comments that they disagree with.

PR companies are more than happy to arrange for subreddit moderators to receive free product, chats with company executives, even trips for office or factory tours. It makes the moderators feel like they’re “in” with the company, and they began moderating accordingly.

In some cases, popular subreddit moderators simply start their own businesses selling to particular subreddits. Some of them truly are honest, but others are looking to make a quick buck selling courses, putting affiliate links in subreddit Wikis and other activities.

It's not as if Hacker News is immune to this. Pay attention to some of the posts being pushed to the front page and the associated comments and you may notice similar shenanigans occuring here. This applies doubly so if the post is made during the weekend.[1]

Considering the fact that many users on HN are reddit transplants, there is the inevitable spillover effect. Comments of the lowbrow variety have become more commonplace (e.g. comment threads made of low-hanging puns).

Without strict moderation, this site too will devolve. After all, you can take the redditor out of reddit but you can't take the reddit out of the redditor.

[1]: As one example, a couple weeks ago there was a new account created by a user for the sole purpose of selling their book on HN; they've only been active on that account for that one single post and (I strongly suspect) they used alts to artificially boost their post to the front page.

I follow my favorite youtubers on their subreddit. I have spent countless hours discussing manga, cars, soccer, politics (in a civil way), find prog bands, food science and so much more.

I can say this confidently: "None of those activities would be as much fun if I did not have my fellow redditors to enjoy it with."

The main subreddits are trash, but that's the point. Reddit might just be able to rapidly scale up to letting normies in, without letting the first-adopters feel like reddit has lost its charm. Specifically, there will be 2 reddits. One would be the front page with a tiktok-esque stream of memes, outrage and short videos; and the other would be the niche subreddits that function similarly to hacker news in terms of strict moderation and deliberate inaccessibility.

Now I am not sure if this genius of reddit is intentional or if the founders stumbled into what is probably the only survival plan for a business where scaling up inevitably leads to a huge drop in the value proposition of the platform itself.

Conde Nast made an incredible acquisition; and not having the market pressures of a public company might have something to do with Reddit's success.

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edit: because I must shill for them some more

Reddit is also THE PLACE on the internet for the best surreal humour and organic decentralized art as social experiences. Subreddits like r/196, r/2meirl42meirl4meirl and r/kenm are completely inaccessible without knowing the meta-story around them, but have me rolling on the floor like nothing else. r/place is the most well known reddit decentralized art experience, but r/hqg, and r/youdontsurf create humor and art from a constrained format that can be so meta that the entire front page could be purely self-referential.

r/askhistorians is pure gold. Hobbyist subreddits are extremely valuable - discussions are polite, to the point, high-quality posts get consistently upvoted. r/coronavirus and r/COVID19 have been pivotal in making sense of the situation in early March (though r/coronavirus turned into a parody of the former self once Covid started spreading in the US). r/nottheonion or r/gaming are often hilarious.

There are three important steps to turn Reddit into a useful tool:

- Unsubscribe from the subreddits you find toxic

- Learn to use 'Sort by Top - this week/day'

- On PC, visit old.reddit.com instead of reddit.com. On mobile, use a third-party client like RedReader or Appolo

1. Pseudonymous

2. Location-agnostic

3. Comments are structured as a tree instead of a flattened list, and nodes at the same level are sorted by popularity

Old-school message boards met the first two requirements, but I think the third characteristic is a huge improvement over trying to pick the discussion out of the multiple simultaneous flamewars with which it was interleaved on comp.lang.lisp or any of the old phpBB. On a hobby subreddit generally the top reply and its highest-ranked comment chain are on-topic and informative.

Its biggest competition now is probably something like Facebook Groups, but Facebook is constantly trying to push you towards real-name-focused, location-aware stuff, and its implementation of a comment tree is pretty half-assed because at the end of the day it wants you scrolling a feed, not lingering on a heavily-ramified comment tree. At the moment my wife and I use Facebook for neighborhood groups and Reddit for hobby subreddits (and memes).

1. Sign up once, log in everywhere

2. Follow and interact with all of your communities (and groups of related communities) all on the same platform.

3. Better UX for browsing/scanning and text-oriented conversations (no avatars/signatures, collapsible threads) than traditional bulletin boards.

4. Greater sense of interactivity and participation through upvoting, with a natural flow towards posting. First you read logged out, then you make an account just to upvote and downvote a few things, and finally you make a comment or two. Again, lacking an analogue in other platforms.

No other platform has even come close to this except HN, and HN is still one community, not a network of easily-cross-linkable thousands.

To disrupt Reddit 7 years ago you just needed to recognize this and do the same thing but better. To disrupt Reddit now, IDK good luck, inertia is real.

And Reddit's UI design is truly terrible. I know it's for fitting in more ads, but going from seeing 20 posts per page, and an ad mixed in, to see 2 (sometimes even 1) post that may be an ad is insane.

Reputation.

If Toyota and Kitchenaid started selling dead bloated racoons with their respective badges on them people would still be buying them 20yr from now because a bunch of people on Reddit (who already bought in based on prior Redditors' commentary) and don't want to feel like fools) told them to buy that brand.

It's no different than any other company selling out its brand name.

I fully agree that the userbase is just politness colored lipstick on the old 4chan pig (every "platform" where riff raff from one niche can easily show up and crap all over another niche has this problem) but that doesn't really impact their ability to make money as a business.

https://i.imgur.com/YwHTQWa.png: I have highlighted what actually matters to me as user.

There's just so much noise in this new UI. All I want to see is the title, the source, the subreddit the post belongs to, how many comments it has, and MAYBE the upvote count. Put all the navigation stuff in a hidden drawer - it doesn't need to be on the screen all the time and let me switch off these silly awards (or at least tone them down). The rest of the screen is taken up by elements that simply don't need to be on the screen all the time. The search bar can be put in a menu to free up space for more posts. The thumbnails don't need to be there all the time. I don't need an immediately available button to buy Reddit coins / awards. The new awards system (while lucrative) is a complete eyesore and often takes up as much space (if not more) than the title of the post itself.

I cannot express how grateful I am that HN as opted to remain with this simple UI. It's all we need.

Now, to answer your original question: the value Reddit provides is having a single account for all my communities, instead of registering to umpteen PhpBB. This allows for a much more efficient antispam. Also more efficient ads, so they do have a business out of this.

I agree about reddit's value being elusive. AFAIK this is because it arguably isn't so valuable. They don't seem to monetize excessively. It's not like Facebook that really feels like an advertising and data shilling firm. There's just a jpeg on the side panel. I imagine they sell some data, maybe even pay to win? (or they will soon)

Reddit is very valuable in that it essentially controls society and "influences" people's behavior. It remains to be seen how much of that can be turned into money, and how it'll effect the site. I wouldn't be shocked to see another exodus, sale, and rebranding as a new media company, like Digg in the next 5-10 years... I wouldn't predict it, but I wouldn't be surprised either.

Because mobile keyboards are so annoying to type on length on, that has resulted in posts getting shorter and shorter, down to one-line Twitter-like replies that are almost information-free and don’t provide much of the skillsharing that people used to turn to hobby forums for. If you post a couple of solid paragraphs, the same length of text that was normal on Reddit just a few years ago, you look weird and out of place among the one-line posts. You might even get some mockery: "haha wall of text bro".

I would love to leave Reddit entirely and return to the phpBB forums of yore where substantial conversation could continue. The problem is that Reddit has eaten their userbase, leaving only a handful of elderly people or cranks, and the feeling of a ghost town.

Checking out what people in /r/country suggests for turists before you visit is pretty valuable. So is advice in /r/slowcooking, /r/yourhobby and so forth. Basically it allows people to create communities even if they have on technical skills.

Definitely the same experience here. Holding a conversation on reddit is usually not a pleasant experience. There's tons of great information on reddit, but it's a diamond in the rough sort of situation.

I find myself accidentally tapping something that either opens something new or closes what I was looking at. The back button behavior is bad with the post pop overs. The home page doesn't even preserve scroll position when going back from a post (Safari iOS)!

It is not a website I visit regularly anymore. Someone should do a github1s equivalent for reddit, even if it is read only.

The Reddit app’s push for live-streaming and their recent acquisition of DubSmash makes me suspect they’re looking to compete with TikTok as well.

It comes down to the fact that Reddit isn't really a social media site - it's a link aggregator with the trappings of social media, or a slightly fancier network of forums (fora? fori? I forget the declension...). I think it is perfectly valued, and fits a niche that maybe only Pinterest comes close to filling. If it tries to expand its social media elements, it will be trying to be something it isn't and users will respond accordingly (one would hope).

HN always moans about reddit, they've moaned about it for near a decade at this point, it still just grows bigger.

Now, are those the people you're talking about? No idea, I haven't seen who you're referring to and it'd be case-by-case. But point being, the existence of "ex-Redditors" isn't necessarily a bad thing.

but I think they'd decline hard if they turned off old.reddit e.g now.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the "downvoting comments I don't like" phenomenon that seems to have taken over HN these past few years.

With paid-off moderators, astrosurfing and propaganda I'd say it's unethical at best.

If you make the search functionality work efficiently then it is easy to see that many common questions on hundreds of subreddits have already been answered in detail so that anyone who can find that post only needs to engage long enough to read one post and its comments.

If search works, there is less need for anyone to become a redditor and to remain engaged with the site. It becomes like a blog post that gave you the information you needed but offered no incentive to read earlier entries or to subscribe for updates.

So, if Search really worked a majority of the time, there would be less need for new posts and therefore less user engagement and fewer eyeballs on the ads they push.

New users come because they heard that there is a subreddit where lots of knowledgeable people discuss the product, hobby, etc that they are interested in.

Subreddits in general are that bomb pizza joint that everyone raves about where the pies are burned at 600* in a wood-fired oven to produce that awesome thin crusty goodness with just the right amount of char. Reddit itself is the soggy disappointment that you get when the middle of the slice slumps flaccidly on the way to your taste buds because the vegetable pieces were too thick and moist and under-cooked for that delicious thin crust to support.

The highly focused subs are the crust, the main subs are the disappointment.

EDIT: Downvoted. Pretty funny. I have been a redditor since 2006. Reddit today is a fantastic but disorganized accumulation of the knowledge and experiences of people from all over the world. Search has never worked reliably though they have had more than a decade to fix or improve it. That's all the evidence that I need to conclude that broken search is a feature intended to drive new content creation. Functional search would make many new posts and comments unnecessary.