Comment by malwarebytess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by malwarebytess | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is coming up now because of changes like removing porn from /r/all. They're introducing an age-rating system and filtering porn from /r/all, which was one of the intended purposes of /r/popular. [0]

reddit is trying to make their platform even more palatable to investors and advertisers. I just wish they were honest about it.

> But there's another aspect that's empowering. And these are people sharing stories of themselves, pictures of themselves. And we are perfectly supportive of that."

This is such a horseshit take I know he doesn't believe it. Porn is a commodity, and he's hosting one of the largest (for him, free) repositories of pornography that he leverages to try to make money. "Empowerment." please.

I really dislike the way reddit's leadership is trending. They're becoming less and less honest about why they're doing things. Take a look at this post full of corporate doublespeak nonsense. They're removing the option to disable their clickjacking and ad tracking and claiming it's intended to "reduce user confusion." [1]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lqtecn/update_to...

> reddit is trying to make their platform even more palatable to investors and advertisers

Pretty much. Especially advertisers. They essentially ruin everything by reducing the scope of what can be posted in order to appeal towards the broadest audience. We end up with lowest common denominator stuff everywhere.

For many of us, this already happened in 2010 with Digg's redesign and failure. Perhaps you can find some sanctuary on appropriate subreddits. Hckrnews is okay for now.

They've failed to remove porn from /r/all if they attempted to do so. When free time and boredom show their head, I will randomly go there and inevitably see porn when all I want is the opportunity to see something fresh on the internet.

I suppose reddit is the wrong place to go for such a thing after 2010 and I should have known better!

EDIT: Somewhat related? I've noticed a trend of many OnlyFans-linked accounts participating in random niche subreddits with enticing names like "juicyBODYPART" or whatnot. When you click on their account, you are met with a load of NSFW content and posts asking for you to check out their OnlyFans.

I'm far from a prude, but if I want to view niche content and see what other communities posters are involved in to discover more subreddits, it sucks to be met with this blatant advertising. I have NSFW content unfiltered so I can find it when I want to look for it, but dang.

Usually, their posts in the niche communities feature primarily pictures of themselves doing activities related to the community. The very stereotypical "female body in front of the object" sort of pictures.

I use the "reddit is fun" app and filter nsfw content and images/video (by blocking a bunch of domains). It's alright like that, although it's still not a great use of time. I do find it annoying how much NSFW content gets close to the top of /r/all though. I don't want to be one of those "think of the kids" people, but I'm sure tons of very young kids use reddit and are introduced to extreme content (including gore) way earlier than they otherwise would have.

> It's alright like that, although it's still not a great use of time.

I don't understand why you go through this effort at all. A filtered view is why r/popular exists.

They never even admitted that bots were present in WSB despite the evidence. This whole Gamestop saga just gave them a lot of publicity and a lot of traffic from people who never would have visited Reddit before.

> EDIT: Somewhat related? I've noticed a trend of many OnlyFans-linked accounts participating in random niche subreddits with enticing names like "juicyBODYPART" or whatnot. When you click on their account, you are met with a load of NSFW content and posts asking for you to check out their OnlyFans.

There is an extreme amount of product placement on Reddit now, and people hawking their onlyfans is part of it. I’m basically down to searching very specific topics via DuckDuckGo or Google, but it’s basically ad central if you’re casually browsing.

I'd suggest maintaining two accounts. One that allows NSFW and one that doesn't. This is what I do, because you are on a user generated content site.

I don't mind NSFW content at all but if I'm surfing reddit in line at the bank or something I don't want that content to pop-up with people around me.

I don't believe its reddits job to filter the content out though. They already warn you if you click on someone's profile that is an NSFW profile so you have to agree you want to see their posts.

In a highly contextual platform like Reddit, advertisements would always be frowned by its original users because getting contextual advertisement is hard.

That's what makes Facebook successful for the advertisers, Majority of it's users don't mind seeing/clicking 'Earn $10,000 in 10 days' ad after 'Baby gender reveal party photos' post by a family member. Where as the same ad has no place in r/programming(But it is), naturally the advertiser wouldn't find much conversion.

I think that's why Reddit is now making all the required changes to attract users & advertisers from Facebook type platform i.e. Bloated website, App, Changes to T&C, Privacy Policy etc. I bet API restrictions would be next.

But then how can a platform like Reddit in its original form make money? I guess making it a fully paid platform is the only solution, which means foregoing the scale; Which is considered a bad word in today's startup ecosystem.

> But then how can a platform like Reddit in its original form make money?

Ultimately it means aligning the incentives between the platform owners and their users.

Because of scale and that software is cheap, it's relatively cheap to run a platform like Reddit. Per-user, the cost would be less than a dollar per month.

A two-tier system where basic features are free and premium features are paid (where the premium tier is used to subsidize free usage) would work. Some restrictions on commercial content (such as posting on behalf of a brand) forcing brands to pay for a more expensive, business account (that could also give them extra features like analytics) could work.

I always found it baffling that most modern social media platforms allow and encourage blatantly commercial content while it was a major no-no in forums of the old days. This seems like an obvious monetization route - the platform is free for personal entertainment & non-lucrative purposes, and if you want to use it for commercial purposes then you should pay (and have the money to pay).

What other Forum would be an alternative to reddit?

I find it strange that Reddit still gets advertisers and investors with the vast amount of porn on the site. They are getting good at hiding it from people unless you actually look for it. Meanwhile, places like pornhub get visa and MasterCard banning their service for the same things you can find on Reddit.

> even more palatable to investors and advertisers. I just wish they were honest about it.

They’re trying to make it more palatable for women, they’ve been trying for more than 6 years now. How woke can Alexis Ohanian really be if he makes one of the largest places men objectify women? I think it’s personally very important to him and it’s not an anti free speech, morality or pro advertising crusade at all.

They are struggling to overcome a perception that women are only welcome on Reddit if they’re nude, pretty or adjacent. The site is probably 90% male visitors. Clearly it has something to do with nudity especially, because while Instagram definitely is a place where women are scantily clad, the lack of nudity, the hilarious specific ban on even just women’s bare nipples, has something to do with why the app is more than 50% female users.

Eh, I've known Ohanian a bit.

You're definitely looking into it a bit much on that line of thought.

Something like 34% of reddit users are women according to at least one survey.

> The site is probably 90% male visitors.

I saw some actual stats on this a few years ago and IIRC it was 60% male / 40% female. There’s plenty of subreddits which are mostly women.

>Clearly it has something to do with nudity especially, because while Instagram definitely is a place where women are scantily clad, the lack of nudity, the hilarious specific ban on even just women’s bare nipples, has something to do with why the app is more than 50% female users.

Twitter and Tumblr are very popular with female users, and both have had a significant amount of porn on them.

I feel like it's just as dangerous to assume that the internet is still this male dominated. Just because people don't have a preface before every comment stating that they're women doesn't mean they're not women.

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