Sunsetting Secret Santa and Reddit Gifts
reddit.com
reddit.com
I can't blame them too much for trying to monetize, but I wish their strategies were more inclusive of the way I use reddit
I find that for various special-interest, hobbyist forums, you need some kind of friction to prevent low-effort posters from taking over, and ensure more people are participating from desktop/laptops. I have gone back some phpBB fora I have neglected after Reddit's ascent, and while there are fewer people around and they skew older, I am amazed at how substantial and competent discussions are compared to their subreddit counterparts.
As I read on a site on with no images or video and entirely in the form of thoughtful responses via mobile device.
After my last laptop broke I simply decided I didn’t need another one. Like most people on this site I have a beast of a desktop computer I write code on all day and then like to get away from to write my novel.
I’ve been able to maintain 2k words per day with some 5k days when I am really jiving with the scene I am writing. All from my iPhone. Times they are a changing.
I find the avatars extremely obnoxious and wish I could disable those. But besides that, it does look a bit better to me.
I reported this as a bug about a year ago and never got a response.
I used to have "Compact Reddit Redirect"[1] on my phone browser. But it got more and more broken in the last two years.
Now, I use RedReader[2][3] on my phone which is open source and gives "an 'old' reddit feel".
It is really sad to use an app to access a website :( . I need to accept that I'm not the target audience of that website anymore...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/compact-reddi...
[2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/
[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.quantumbad...
Yes, it'd be nice if I could auto-open reddit links in my client of choice, but it's like a two-or-three tap thing. I use it increasingly often.
The best gift my wife got (she is an avid dead tree book reader) was a book she had on her list. But the secret santa bought the book and illustrated it magnificently (using the book's empty pages) before sending it to her.
That's the type of gifts you just cant price.
I have no birthday, and I don't celebrate gift giving holidays. I don't want any presents, and I won't reciprocate.
I do apprechiate postcards and holiday cards though, but I don't generally send them and I'll feel a little bad about that. Maybe one day, my heart will grow three sizes and I'll start sending a handful of cards.
This seems to cause friction though, and maybe represents some kind of personality issue. I don't know why I'm like this or what it might mean though.
For the record, I did secret Santa a couple of times. First time went to a ton of effort to send a nice, appropriate thing (House of Leaves colour hardback) and got nothing. Next time though I sent some crappy thing and received a giant box of Simpsons socks. That was actually really cool.
Maybe I'm biased, but if expressing your non-consent of celebrating something about you that you didn't chose causes friction, that's not your personality issue. A desire to give everyone presents even if they don't want them is the personality issue.
Receiving a present creates a social obligation to deliver a present later and may also be a conflict of interest. My spouse was an elected official (board of supervisors of a tiny government agency) and it was great because I had a concrete reason to refuse gifts; anything from not close family over a tiny threshold had a reporting obligation, and anything over a not so big threshold was prohibited; nobody wanted to participate in reporting, so no gifts.
Gift giving is not about changing a person's life forever, or shouldn't be. Its making them smile on the day. That's it. If they're entertained or please I knew what they liked or just hungry, I've succeeded and the gift has succeeded.
It's like I got scammed by one of those indian grandma-targeting call centers, but only out of like 50 bucks instead of a few grand in iTunes cards.
I haven't thought about that in a long time.
Though it still sucks, and hopefully whomever got that charity can grow from it and eventually 'pay it forward'.
Which should make the change from Reddit even worse :(
I always just looked at it as a gift - something given freely and willingly without any demand for anything in return.
Sure, I was bummed because I love seeing what people send me, but I didn't get bent out of shape over it. I signed up because at the time I was financially stable and wanted to do something nice and fun for someone. Mission success.
Their App Store privacy report, as well as the app developer's explicit privacy policy, directly contradicts you. Could you kindly back that up with some evidence, or is this more FUD from you?
My information is coming directly from its app store privacy label.
The developer specifically states that they perform no user-linked tracking with their app. Their monetization model also supports this conclusion.
Is there an equivalent today?
I enjoyed using Reddit for years, then used it without (tbh) enjoying it much for probably a couple of years, and finally have almost fully disconnected. There’s no denying it has many more years worth of genuinely useful information on it, so I’ll still use it as a resource for community recommendations when searching.
However, the actual _news_/curated feed mechanic I’ve long sworn off. Is there anything new coming up atm that isn’t just a Reddit knock off?
Edit: side note, thinking about how long ago the Digg —> Reddit shift was has actually filled me with a bit of existential dread. When you stop and think, Reddit has had an incredible run as a popular platform so far.
Interesting that you want something that is specifically not just a reddit knock off. I actually think that a Reddit knock off focussed on discussion (say, like hacker news, but with subreddits) would do well.
This comment isn't using these labels incorrectly - the people on most of the alternatives post blatantly anti-Semitic and/or legitimately racist content (not ambiguously or twitter-classified racism, but full-on, hard-R et al, good old fashioned racism), anti-vaxxer mobs, doxxing, calls to violence, etc.
And yes, much of the time this sort of content is the majority.
I don't mind people having whatever views or even irrational and harmful biases, as long as they don't shoehorn them into everything they say. I'm happy to have an interesting discussion with someone who stays on topic and says interesting things, it doesn't matter to me (right then) if I wouldn't think much of other aspects of their life. You don't have to "bring your whole self" to hn or new-reddit or wherever else.
Oh, enhancing user experience sounds good: so they'll reinstate the old reddit UI back as the default, the one that doesn't block viewing threads in a mobile browser half the time?
You also make the strong assumption that executive staff/founders actually care about the survival of the company or the product: If they cash out at some point, they still win in the transaction.
The cycle is always predictably the same:
1. Found the company
2. Get an initial round of investment
3. make it seem valuable (i.e. growth at all cost)
4. Second investment round (people now have FOMO "this could be the next Facebook!")
5. Continue growing (by now initial investors and founders have cashed out with profit)
6. Another investment round/sell/go public.
7. After going public, people notice that you don't make any money and have no way of ever making money (think WeWork)
8. Company's stock tanks/Company goes bankrupt.
At no point in that process has the product or the company ever mattered: As long as you can make it seem like it works, you can make a profit.
This is why venture capital is almost always a red flag: The investors make money not through quality product, but through growth. They can sell a great product that nobody knows about or they can sell well marketed crap that grows fast and makes them billions. By chance one or two of these companies will survive despite this and have a lasting impact, which breeds even more hype for the next round.
Have people pay a membership fee for a share in the project. Non-members still have access but with basic ads.
I remember the shutdown thread on netslaves where the owner asked for money and multiple community members offered to run it or chip in and the owner said no. They wanted the amount they wanted because they also wanted to run their other projects.
I don’t fault them as it’s their site and they can run it as they wish. But just to point out the difficulty of community projects that require money.
Even with food co-ops, there is frequently drama.
Maybe the closest would be to have some sort of online kibbutz.
1. Innovate and make nice things
2. Get paid tons of money
1. Get paid tons of money
2. Innovate and make nice things
I also fear they will pull what Twitter did and severely limit their API which will essentially kill third party apps and everyone will have to use their official apps.
I mean, the new UI is not to my taste, but it is also just really buggy, slow, and full of things that straightforwardly don't work (videos, search, etc).
Now, I'm not an MBA, but I don't really get how you make money by paying developers to degrade your service.
That's the trouble I've encountered when trying to install one.
Getting teenagers in high school addicted to Reddit is a huge part of their strategy, and it's very evident in the way the front page content has shifted in the last decade.
The bigger issue is that while a lot of older users remain in the niche subs, I find that there aren't great alternatives to Reddit for threaded sub-specific commentary.
I think I first saw the usage of this term either from Yahoo (wrt either GeoCities or Flickr) or Google (wrt Reader). Definitely around that era. IIRC it was on some company roadmap presentation that basically say "These services are scheduled to be sunset by <date>". Heck I even think those slides were leaked and not officially presented.
I like to think the first audience to encounter this usage of the word was similarly perplexed. "When you say 'sunset' you mean 'termination', right? What about the teams assigned to them?"
"'Termination'? Oh goodness, no. When we say 'sunset' we mean we leave them alone to naturally drive into a beautiful sunset."
No less perplexed, they put emphasis on their second question. "What about the teams then?"
With the cadence of a well-rehearsed actor, the facilitator responds, "Hey, sunsets. Very peaceful, very relaxing---who doesn't want those? You won't get that from staring at your computer screen all day!"
Only makes sense in that context though.
Truth.
It's amazing how much goodwill Reddit had as just a "dumb host" for forumlike communities, before things like the comically bad single-page-app redesign and the stupid decision in the OP article.
Before that it was the community doing something fun together. After that it was just yet another advertising opportunity and I noped right out.
It’s a shame because this was what endeared me to Reddit among other things a long time ago. They should think of this as an investment just like Netflix throws money at content to get users. Someone over there is not making good decisions, first the new UI, definitely takes away user experience and now this.
On a much smaller scale, I was in a similar position once.
Ran a very active online community. Each year we had a big (well, for us) in-person meetup. Everybody loved it, looked forward to it, etc.
In retrospect I'm not sure it was the best use of our extremely limited people-hours.
On the plus side, the gathering/convention was great the 0.1% of our active users that made the trek each year and I believe there was a harder-to-measure positive "halo effect" from it that benefitted the community in general.
On the downside, the "staff" for this site was basically "me working part time, plus community volunteers." The site's infrastructure needed major work and I lacked time to properly market the site, etc.
TL;DR --
Given our limited resources, a LOT of necessary work went undone, in favor of this yearly event that directly benefitted only a tiny fraction of our users. I suspect Reddit just came to the same conclusion.
> So you took over someone elses project years ago, made some money off of it and then killed it. Yikes.