Reddit raises $410M in new funding
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible. Like 95% lower per user than the other socials.[2] So the real question an investor should ask is whether this is fixable? Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize? Either way, Reddit should be throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive with a track record of juicing monetization.
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily... [2]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...
I liked it around 2008 because it did not have profile pages and a fairly simple, straightforward interface and did not attempt to couple one's real life identity to one's post and encouraged throwaway accounts by allowing users to sign up without providing an email address.
Much of that is changing, and I also find that websites that encourage a link with one's real life identity tend to have an ever more annoying culture.
It also feels like more excessive Americana as time goes on. It did not seem like idiosyncractic U.S.A. social issues were as common in 2008, as well as the typical user that assumes every other user is from the U.S.A..
TikTok and Instagram have been able to grow larger and larger audiences despite the pressure of ads (and honestly I know when I tried TikTok last there weren't any ads yet, I wonder what portion of an hour is taken up by ads and how long is it til it reaches television levels of ~25%) - as long as audience growth outpaces users losing interest, you can keep introducing ads, but you can't do it forever.
and i think reddit is beyond the point at which a digg-style fuckup could kill them. at worst you might see cadres of ideological users depart for something like lemmy, which is already happening to an extent, but there is a lot of space to flee internally, so most users don't feel the pressure. and diffusion to federated media is in the future for every mass audience. reddit has such a huge and active userbase it will dominate for the foreseeable future.
The difference is that when Digg made their mistakes, Reddit was there for the taking.
Nowadays, there's no alternative to Reddit. All the new sites appear to be focused on hateful communities banned from Reddit, and that will never attract the mainstream.
Reddit is more forum than social network, they'll need to get creative to make more revenue from users. Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money
Won't be easy getting older users on a site where "boomer" is a slur.
Isn't the most sought-after demographic 18-35 because they have the most disposable income? Afterwards disposable income drops off because of kids and/or retirement.
Lots of college students are spending their parents money for these kinds of things.
[1] https://resources.datadrivenmarketing.equifax.com/dyks-equif...
For whatever reason, maybe just because they've seen more ads, older demographics are harder to reach.
Fascinating - in my experience older generations are much, much easier to beguile online.
My guess would be the Reddit demographic is much less receptive to ads than the average, say, FB user.
Imagine the person saying "don't believe everything you read in the news" Is that an older person talking to a younger one, or vice-versa?
Reddit is mostly cat pictures and funny memes at scale, even calling it a "forum" is a stretch. More like a glorified image board.
There are a lot of good niche communities that have deep, meaningful conversation on Reddit.
As far as "most cat pictures and memes", maybe it is, by volume. But that doesn't diminish the substantial corpus of more substantive, forum-like, discussion hosted on the site.
Almost every subreddit I see bans any kind of promotion and even posting of links.
Just at a very high level:
- no offsite tracking (so no retargeting - the follow you around the internet ads)
- no separate ad network (you can't buy ads on Reddit that show up on 3rd party sites)
- limits on how granular targeting can be (it's by sub-reddit but they exclude many based on size+sensitivity)
- no demographic targeting (you can't pitch your product to males 18-35)
- no fine grained geographic targeting (lowest they go is major metro areas of millions of people)
Remember those little snooheads where you could 'reblog' about something? or vote on a site while on it?
Seeing the reddit bugs/icons/badges was about when the site started engaging in data collection. You bet your ass they do everything they can to determine a general profile of each user now based on visited subs and patterns.
1) Valuing the company in the hopes of making a profit on the IPO 2) More conservative than public markets
You mean that they should spend as much money as they can on ruining Reddit.
It helps with growth(more options for users to be on reddit) , but definitely hurts ad inventory, ad targeting insights etc.
(What a blessing that HN isn't run to make a profit.)
I'm thinking vintageaudio, lv426, subs like that.
Reddit is also home to an enormous amount of porn and nsfw content in general which probably hurts this. They only just started preventing sexually explicit subreddits/content from appearing on r/all six months ago[0]
https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_...
As for an official paid feature: as soon as they start collecting money for video related features, the video creators will start circling for their cut of the revenue.
Not anymore, they've banned it.
NSFW content can work perfectly fine to get users on the platform, even if it can't be monetized.
is there a market rational reason why this hasn't occurred, or are the primary places that happen to also have adult content just assuming advertisers won't use their platform
sure, big fortune 500 ad spends are lucrative, but so is the aggregate of every single half baked idea that has to test the waters with targeted ads
Can you elaborate further? why is this the marketer's problem?
why isn't the ad campaigner completely agnostic on where the ad network sends it?
to me, it seems like widespread conjecture. out of the things I've seen people talk about boycotting a brand for, showing up in a banner on a porn site hasn't been one of them. People know how targeting works, their session and the ad networks.
is there a case study supporting marketer's skittishness?
> People know how targeting works, their session and the ad networks.
People in your network maybe. If that were widely true you wouldn't see people swearing that FB is listening to you for showing a mattress ad after you spent an hour searching for it on your computer. The average American has no idea what the hell is going on.
I mean, the town hasn't banned the strip club, and you can still visit it any time you want.
Why do you care what's on r/all?
If you are a PC components retailer, users of /r/buildapc seems like an ideal audience to target for advertising. Camera retailer, where better than /r/photography? Cookware - advertise in /r/cooking. Repeat ad infinitum across every niche interest on the site.
They should be able to enable advertisers to do really effective targeting of campaigns. Is this not possible with their current ad tools, or are they not selling the capabilities to advertisers well enough? Or is there not actually that much money in targeted ads, is all the money in generic ads like Coca-Cola & cars?
People are going to those specialized communities to get real information from real users, not lies and misinformation (ads and marketing).
As for other users, they are already seeing incredibly random and irrelevant ads. Seeing actual photography themed ads on a photography themed forum doesn't seem that bad IMO (provided that they are clearly marked as ads, of course.)
Now their new mobile app video player… ho boy…..
I'm curious what you like better in the new design? I personally find the floating bar at the top annoying. Not to mention the fact you have to click another button to actually see all the comments. Not to mention my biggest annoyance, clicking on the empty space on the sides when viewing a post will navigate to the subreddit?? Why?
A/B testing shows it generates more engagement
/s
1. Images open by default on my feed and videos and gifs autoplay as I scroll. It's a massive distraction. I'm trying to find content I might be interested in, but here I'm forced to scan pretty much every post out there.
2. On similar lines, showing a (cropped) summary for text posts. Again a distraction when you're trying to find content. The cropping makes it worse since you have to change the page after reading halfway through.
3. Having to click on view discussion to open the comments each time. This is a forum. The only reason I go there is to discuss.
4. Lack of borders for comments. It looks like one continuous feed and reduces grouping between individual comments.
5. Large avatars, icons on the reply bar compete for attention on every single comment. The reply bar on old reddit is so nicely blended away into the background. You don't see it unless you want to reply.
6. Hover popups on the large icons trigger unintentionally all the time. Very rarely do I need to see somebody's karma. What's the point of this feature even?
This is basis design considerations for a discussion forum. I completely understand where they are coming from though. They are not interested in this being a discussion forum. They want to optimize for post views. The more views a post gets, the more they will be able to monetize. Engaging in discussion is time consuming and that time could be better spent in viewing more posts.
I use Reddit Enhancement Suite and the old design and I find it far superior. It feels more compact and efficient, like HN.
Those specialized communities will cease to exist without something funding them.
Either users get ready to get out their wallets or get used to ads and marketing (which are not wholly lies and misinformation). And more importantly remember it's Reddit's choice how users pay, not the end users.
For niche topics I tend to add "reddit" to google search queries, because there's a high likelihood of finding actual information. If those subreddits move to other services, they may not even show up in the sea of blogspam results.
Advertising is diametrically opposed to information sharing.
And this very article embarassingly shows that after 16 years it is still investors who are funding those specialized communities.
For some reason, reddit wouldn't let me advertise to 3 of the 4, and the 1 that they did let me advertise was very low volume (less than 100 members). I couldn't even get reddit to show a single ad, let alone have anyone click on it.
Facebook brought in way more traffic, and some of it did convert, but I feel like my advertising costs were too high there, since you can only specify more general interests. It seems like reddit, had their advertising platform actually worked, would have been the perfect place for me.
Perhaps not. Honest question though: Have you tried, at scale?
Why pay when you can get the same for free?
[1] https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/linux
Make a special class of commercial account, include some 'verification' badge thingy. Let subreddits ban all commercial content, unpaid commercial content, or leave open (for commercial-specific subs).
Let mods profit share in commercial posts. (And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer the case)
Suggestions?
This is a complex proplem.
Only really works for the in-depth subreddits, I guess it's not going to get you far on image or other media-based subreddits...
I'm currently trying to build this but I'm not a programmer so it's slow going. I'm interested in your thoughts as I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.
The main issue is the more difficult sign up is, the less people sign up. It's a balancing act.
With any voting system you have to detect the validity of the votes, even upvotes.
Imo, moderation logs should all be public. Lobsters does it well:
It's even open source!
My experience is mostly with Google Voice, but I've not found that to be true. Years ago that was the case, but these days, I've encountered by few that don't work.
https://support.google.com/voice/thread/1592118/wellsfargo-s...
Voting? Who has the right to vote? Anyone? Any socketpuppet account? Only verified real people? (would be a different reddit)
The base problem is called politics.
And yeah, this would cost Reddit some in admin labor, but they should be able to use some of this revenue stream towards those few hires. I'd imagine a team of 6 would be plenty for this purpose, maybe could get away with 2 or 3.
A million little HNs.
Why do you consider that a problem? As a heavy user of reddit, I don't consider that a problem at all. I would be interested to hear what problems you think exist with that system and what other solutions exist.
I'd be pretty pissed if I created a subreddit, put effort into growing it, and someone could just come along and steal it.
On Facebook or Google, you've often got to spend at least $5-$10 per mille to be competitive in most verticals. $25 to $50 in some verticals like insurance. And it converts.
The reddit userbase just isn't as monetizable.
The trouble with those types is they all have very strong opinions and think most products are crap. They're not opposed to buying things, just shitty things.
I agree that advertisers would pay reddit more for better ad space (also called "inventory") but that doesn't just happen automatically.
Right now, I would assume they are integrating with some third party ad network and probably use fairly generic targeting information. The cost in time and money to either deepen that integration or rip it out and make a custom ad network is probably significant.
I put up a reddit ad for that submission and Reddit took 4 weeks to approve it. At that point, there was no point running the ad anymore.
Another time I wanted to advertise to a new game that had a brand new subreddit to match but it was huge - 100k plus users in a week. Reddit simply wouldn't permit me to advertise to it because it was new.
In my (limited) experience it feels like Reddit isn't making the money it could be because it doesn't want to.
Their default subs are utter crap and full of influence campaigns accounts; in addition to being nearly impossible to post to without punished in some way.
It makes total sense to be able to target communities and I think they need to just stick a banner on the right hand side and be done with it. Let moderators maybe even take a small cut in exchange for providing info and meta data on their community.
It does seem like a huge missed opportunity.
- younger user base (so less disposable income)
- loose concept of user identity, so can't tailor ads
- more corpoarate and mainstream advertisers tend to stay away due to the nature of the community and content shared
- primary usage is on web rather than mobile apps
All of these are fixable, but the question is can they do so without alienating their use base.
By most, I mean the vast majority (hence my perplexion and need to comment and confirm my understanding)
It's the dark patterns and having to reload pages multiple times to finally see the content.
> and time on site
Again, break your site so addicts have to try harder to get their dopamine hit
The reddit "engagement" numbers are false.
Results: longer time and the user will now actually engage, because they had to "work" to get there.
Complete dark-pattern to "juke the stats". And it's too complicated for their stupid investors to understand why the numbers are bullshit.
Most of the data I have is about heroin and cocaine. And folks are very reluctant to like physically addictive things to these technologic addiction things.
But human nature is very consistent regarding these dopamine releases. We're all fienders.
This usually applies to what posts are in an algorithmic feed, but I guess not having the feed show up at all is a fresh innovation. Twitter and Reddit both do a lot of just giving up and saying "woops, couldn't load that link you just clicked" as if that was a real problem. Really? what, the database wasn't there when you looked? Try again yourself, why make me click refresh?
Another anecdata - search on facebook doesn't work for finding stuff in someone's timeline, so I've spent many minutes scrolling down someone's page trying to find a post. It's frustrating but I don't quit, and I'm sure metrics and impressions look great (no click through tho)
That's far from a perfect way to measure this, but it's around the statistic that 30% of the internet is porn. My intuition tells me Reddit probably reflects the internet as a whole pretty well.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/f94j0y/oc_...
>The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible.
It's possible that these two things are pretty tightly linked.
Most people have one Snap / FB account and one, maximum two Twitter accounts... but throwaways are the norm on Reddit (as well as HN), which means Reddit's user count is inflated by quite a bit. Additionally, Reddit has large nsfw communities that draw lots of members and visitors (again, most with separate accounts!), and these can't be reasonably monetized at all.
Cause they’re always one drama away from losing tons of people. The platform seems to attract drama involving the platform and decisions made more than say Twitter does
This is correct but also bittersweet.
Mobile Apps are important for monetization because they are much less vulnerable to ad blockers, people are used to ads taking up more of the screen in scrollable content and in most cases carry more traffic than desktop versions.
I think the disastrous experience buying and targeting ads is bad too, but the lack of a decent mobile app is a huge factor.
I literally couldnt give them my money. I wanted to target a specific subreddit, but couldnt buy any impressions on it for 3 months. The app kept forcing me to advertise on /all, or all technology reddits, which wasnt what I wanted. I did buy $10 of ads, got zero clicks, surprise surprise.
The thing was hard to setup, hard to run, hard to measure, not to mention, advertisers get treated like any other account. I was shadow banned because I was linking to one domain, and reddit considered me a spammer. But I was like, that *is* the whole purpose of advertising. I was forced to post a few cat pictures, just so I could run my ads.
Never again.
I note they have since revamped their ad site-- now there is a new site, but you have to reregister to run ads, and I dont want the hassle.
Yes, everyone hates ads, but thats how free sites make money.
Some redditors were hostile to ads, but the number isnt that big. Most users were indifferent.
Such an ad-hostile company, I wonder how they make money.
The most annoying part was the rather opaque period between launching, approving, and actually running the ad. The first real confirmation I had that things were working was a bill.
Maybe a simple user forum site doesn't need to make mega valuation levels of money. Maybe it, and other low effort sites like Facecrook and Twatter, should be run as public benefit corps. These companies aren't selling state of the art tech here - why do they need to be such money makers??
You’re thinking of the user facing element as being the thing they’re selling. That’s not what they’re selling. They give that away for free so they can sell extremely sophisticated data and targeting. You’re the product they’re selling. And the access is definitely cutting edge.
Because that's capitalism. Investors want "growth".
This leads me to wonder if the stock market goes down and VC dries up how long will Reddit be around?
I looked to advertise on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.
Facebook didn't seem interested in SMBs and I didn't even advertise on them, it seemed very complex just to run a simple ad.
Twitter didn't deliver good value per click etc., but I did get good demographic information on who was and wasn't interested.
Google was the best value, especially if you look for bargains where one group of customers is cheap.
Reddit had no offerings in the way Google had, or even Twitter had. IIRC I bailed on advertising with them at all. With Facebook it was just too complex for a simple ad, with Reddit it didn't even seem they were offering anything near what I wanted.
Reddit allows for unlimited account creation and has extremely poor, if any, detection algorithms. Additionally, its trivial to stream and analyze the entirety of Reddit comments and posts in real time (check out PRAW if you like Python).
Networks pushing COVID narratives and crypto frauds are probably the worst offenders. Here’s an example I just came across in /r/miami: https://reddit.com/r/Miami/comments/p1z6a7/have_you_guys_see.... The networks pushing certain COVID narratives are evening more troubling as, unlike crypto, im not sure what the end game is or who is controlling those networks.
Why don't they put some CAPTCHAs? They have no CAPTCHAs anywhere in account creation + post first time comment + first time thread + first time direct message?
I don't spend that much time on reddit as a whole - but frequent about 5-7 subs every single day. These are mostly medium sized subs and none of them have a problem of spam. And I'm on them enough that it is by far the social media/news site I interact with the most.
Chunks of it. Don’t think praw and the api can do all live
Well rest assured, Reddit administration does not see this as a problem at all. It's one of the ways marketing companies advertise on Reddit. There's a reason the moderators of /r/all subreddits tend to all moderate the same group of subreddits, and that they all often have super human posting frequencies. These are shared accounts for ad firms. This was discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018
I've been banned from /r/india for just commenting on another sub (/r/chodi, which was recommended by the app itself!); banned from /r/worldnews for disagreeing with the herd.
The moment a decent, democratic discussion forum comes along, I'll jump ship to it.
-----
Edit: I was going to respond to [1], but I'm rate limited. Below is my comment:
> Anonymity really hurts profits.
That's what killed YikYak and continues to beleaguer anonymous message board monetization (well, maybe it's the content).
Reddit at least has an interest graph going for it. If they can figure out how to boost subreddit discovery and encourage users pick the things they'll spend money on, then they'll be golden.
Also, make it hard to perma-ban someone with over 100K karma points, especially in regional subs (like /r/india, etc.); you can change your interests, but you can't really change where you are from. If nothing else, force the mods to actually justify bans; and one subjective offense should not be enough to ban someone.
It took me a while just to figure out that I was banned. When I inquired, it was because because I posted videos that are spammy advertising, which couldn't be further from the truth.
Based on the response, it was clear that I was not dealing with someone in normal state so I just wrote it off as lost cause and stopped visiting.
I had already thought the sub was on decline due to aggressive and unnecessary policing, because despite its huge membership, the content has become very stagnant.
It's a shame because I've been on reddit for 10 years and I joined it the sub since its inception.
___
Looking at the sub now, it's clear that there was change in mod / ownership. https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtisanVideos/comments/oo7oxm/annou...
Quite unusual.
Many forums once they reach critical mass even if they aren't heavy handed with policing still have an unsavory softhanded stiff-arming mechanism that's rife with bad [mod/mob] judgement, IE push everything not condoned by the mods or mobs into the place where few read. I'm sorry what I'm trying to describe is hard to put a finger on, but after being on reddit for 10 or more years yah notice some strange consistent peculiarities that are hard to put in words.
Seems strange to me that a 16 year old company still isn't self sustaining.
Curious to see that even where centralization hasn't financially paid off, people are willing to keep tossing money at the dream of it paying off one day after 16 years.
The problem with "independent forums scattered across the web" is that they make discovery (of users and service instances) harder. There are ways around this, like the Fediverse and SOLID standards, but most bulletin-board-like forums do not support them as of yet out of the box.
Etsy, eBay, FB Market, Craigslist, Fiverr, OnlyFans (which was built-up by riding on social media propagation, taking advantage of services like Reddit), and 400 other various types of online markets. There's no reason Reddit could not have have built something substantial in the ecommerce platform space over the years. Taking a small cut from transactions would have eliminated their advertising dependency. Reddit's karma also lends itself easily to forming an ecommerce trust network via transaction feedback, which would form the backbone of buying and selling products or services on there. Reddit figured out to absorb image hosting away from eg Imgur (which also piggybacked off of Reddit to then form a competing social network), and they didn't figure out to do the same thing in the ecommerce space, despite how obvious it was.
I love this.
Not only that, but if Reddit were to strongly disallow any or all of the above we have seen how EASY it is to simply clone the tech and re-host. There have been stories about certain communities being exiled from Reddit only to spring up just as quickly elsewhere with more or less the same exact user experience...
Most users aren't going to do this. Really, the reddit folks should just go all-in on tailoring their official apps towards the most casual, highly "engaged" content consumers, and target most of their monetization towards that kind of user. As a bonus, make it trivially easy to post casual content directly from the app. Who cares about "objectionable" content when they'll have so many cat pictures and cute/funny memes to run their ads next to.
this seems doubtful to me. Reddit has tons of legendary threads, AMAs and is its own library of content at this point, similar to YouTube. Sure the tech could be replicated but the value is all in the content it generated.
Of course, then people might start looking at the fact that they are giving away valuable property to Reddit in return for access to a simple forum site...
It's akin to the "payment per Email" (hashcash as spam prevention) idea that a lot of us have yearned for a long time, which would deter spammers and make people think twice before commenting, so maybe it would increase the content quality.
It would be an interesting experiment.
Based on Reddit's own information, it would appear that they are.
Picking just one frontpage sub, /r/News, you can check the guilded page and see:
> gildings in this subreddit have paid for 142.83 years of server time
pics? 291.80 years.
funny? 364.09 years.
aww? 624.43 years.
askreddit? 724.03 years.
politics? 314.93 years.
That's 6 subs.
According to Reddit's own guildings report, 6 subs on Reddit have paid for a combined 2461.21 years worth of server time.
They're self sustaining. Reddit has bitten the 'growth at all costs' bug.
You're making a huge leap about profitability based on a fraction of their running costs.
And this is before ad sales.
Hell, when it comes to ad sales...
They hit > $100 mil this QUARTER.
https://redditblog.com/2021/08/12/reddit-secures-funding-to-...
Reddit is a 9 figure company. Soon to be 11 figures.
> We will raise up to $700 million in Series F funding, led by Fidelity Management and Research Company LLC. and including other existing investors, at a post-money valuation of over $10 billion.
They're not hurting.
If Reddit were to start looking at charging for these, the platform might change drastically. I'm not sure how, however.
This is the most pathetic slam against mods I have ever seen and shows that you haven't spent two seconds considering what you're criticizing.
Is your point that the mods don't have all these blacklists (including of words), or that the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to? Is the mod system working well, in your opinion?
Of course moderators have blacklists. For words / phrases / domains, they are site sanctioned through the (now) built in function called "Automoderator".
User blacklists are done through the built in ban function.
In fact, one would call these blacklists... moderation. Something a moderator would be expected to do.
> the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to?
They are built into the site. It would logically follow that it is both allowed and expected.
Stepping back, I'm not sure how you can expect a forum, any forum, to survive without moderation.
> Is the mod system working well, in your opinion?
This is really impossible to answer.
From the bird's eye view, users and impressions are growing while reddit doesn't have to pay for moderation. A stunning success.
From a lurker perspective, they never interact with moderators and generally get content that has been reviewed and determined to be within the rules, though this may vary by subreddit.
From an active user perspective, the system may work well, or not well, depending on which subreddit(s) you frequent and how you use the platform. There are many subreddits, and moderators on some may certainly make your life unpleasant. So... don't be active on those subreddits.
However, the number of active users, according to the 90-9-1 principle is quite small, and the number of those that ever meaningfully interact with a moderator, or even a bot moderator, are probably a magnitude smaller than that.
So yes, IMO, the mod system seems to work well overall.
That being said, blacklists on strings have 100% been abused by both the mods and the admins. Blacklists should be used for mitigating spam — e.g. we'll often block a specific attacker by blacklisting certain phrases or regexes and then deal with the inevitable edge case false positives by hand — not generally for censoring ideas or "offensive" words.
Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch and maybe /r/relationship_advice. If a sub is inciting violence or posting CP, there's probably a case for banning it. But when people have to self-censor common curse words and even the word "fart" in a general forum like /r/tifu, clearly something is wrong.
Even that will often lead to the scunthorpe problem.
I remember well once scouring through a post that was rejected on a forum to finally realize it was because it contained the phrase “tardive dyskinesia” which contained “tard” which alone was enough to deny the post, apparently.
In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay.
Do you have any source of this? As far as I know Reddit bans no words site-wide, and I see the term used now and then.
On the very same website a post could not come through because I described someone as having “retarded pubertal development”, in any case.
> In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay.
It's also completely useless because people that want to get through the censor will et through it by other means that will still make their message easily understood.
Word censors are window politics and people that want to get around them will get around them and I assume it's already against the rules on that subreddit to encourage suicide so they would be quite willing to also break a rule to evade word censors.
Not offhand, but I've heard of users getting temporary suspensions for using the word, although I don't believe there's an automated rule site-wide.
It's also completely useless
Not entirely. Sure, if you're a dedicated attacker trying to tell a specific target to kill themselves, there's not much I can do about it; you'll acquire an aged account with decent karma and find a way to do it.
If you're just a regular person going about your day and say something stupid, an automod removal with a warning that circumventing the rule will result in a permanent ban is probably sufficient to make you give up and move on with your life. And of course bots that aren't specifically designed to circumvent my subreddit's rules would be trivially blocked.
Merely for using the word? this seems like a myth to me. Various subreddits would obviously ban for it if used as a direct insult, but banning any use of it side-wide seems unlikely.
> If you're just a regular person going about your day and say something stupid, an automod removal with a warning that circumventing the rule will result in a permanent ban is probably sufficient to make you give up and move on with your life. And of course bots that aren't specifically designed to circumvent my subreddit's rules would be trivially blocked.
In which case it would be just as effective to simply give a warning based on detected words that various conduct with it will not be tolerated and that a moderator will be automatically informed of the post, and to remind users to make use that their usage of the word falls within the guidelines.
This would eliminate scuntorpe false positives, and have about the same effect of stopping the intended behavior.
It does seem possible they may have banned an individual user for using that word.
If you don't like how moderation done, go start your own reddit.
This is actually what makes reddit great, that anyone can start their own subreddit, mod it however they want, and compete with all the others based on the merits of its own content, community and moderation style.
It is impossible to compete with the first one that claims the obvious name for the subject, such as, say r/startrek
The competing ones also censor heavily, so all it does is that one can now choose what particular opinions one can't express.
Competing on the merits of moderation style is insignificant compared to having the most straightforward name that everyone will try first; the subreddit with such name will always be the largest.
Moderation often improves quality. It can also be bad, but is not universally so.
There is a site that shows you your deleted comments[1] and its pretty shocking. I found out every single one of my comments in one sub had been auto deleted with the reason being I did not have any link karma (because I only comment). What a waste of time and it turns me off from the platform.
[1] www.reveddit.com
There are almost no actual lawyers on that subreddit for two reasons: A) actual lawyers would like to see compensation for their expertise; B) in many jurisdictions, lawyers are not allowed to give legal advice without establishing a formal attorney–client relationship.
/r/legaladvice is so bad there is actually a subreddit dedicated to discussing what's posted there, /r/bestoflegaladvice. There's more attorneys in that sub than the actual legal advice sub, where a surprising amount of advice is either blatantly wrong or essentially "just tell the police everything, they'll help."
/r/audiophile and /r/wine are two other well moderated subreddits, where the discussion has remained relatively focused and high quality even as the communities have grown, because the moderators aggressively prune low-effort and unrelated content. There was big drama, once upon a time, when /r/audiophile banned anything headphone related.
Based on all that, it seemed pretty solid to me. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if I had to guess it's probably more a case of being hit-or-miss than entirely bad. Even a minority of bad advice would stand out to a lawyer in the same way that >=1% of wrong information in a tech publication would stand out to most of us here, particularly if the victims of said bad advice were in serious situations.
(IANAL or an active user of /r/legaladvice. I just pop in every so often when an interesting thread hits my front page, so whatever I'm exposed to is presumably better quality and more actively moderated than what's average for the sub.)
This is especially prevalent on events that are still relatively recent (last 40-50 years).
Second, it really is /r/AskHistorians ONLY, you are not allowed to mention any personal anecdata (ie participating in the fall of Berlin Wall etc.)
Even worse you are not allowed to attempt to provide official primary sources.
There was a question on WW2 Soviet tank production and German preparedness. I was not allowed to link in secondary comment Hitler-Mannerheim talks where they talked about this very issue!
Mod reasoning: not enough context...
For large subs like /r/politics, a select few people get to control what's fed into the eyeballs of millions of people. And we don't even know what content wasn't allowed to be posted, how can we trust they're unbiased?
Why? You're free to make your own subreddit with a different bias or no bias. No one really assumes it's unbiased and they go there because of the bias that they agree with. People like communities of like minded people.
By that logic any large scale media (tv, newspapers, magazines, etc.) should not be allowed to have bias even if the only reason people went there was for the bias.
I understand the idea that subreddits are user-run communities and should be able to self-moderate, but there are a couple problems with this:
1. Reddit claims to be the "front page of the internet" and promotes many of these top subreddits with front-page rankings, user suggestions, and push notifications. Therefore, reddit mods have immense power in controlling the flow of information to those who believe they're interacting with a reputable source, and Reddit corporate has washed their hands of any responsibility to have a say in this, despite the profit they receive from it.
2. Reddit corporate certainly is willing to get involved with subreddits, by banning or quarantining certain subs for spreading "misinformation", but this seems selectively applied to one particular side of these issues. Anti-lockdown subreddits are banned for downplaying Covid, but major Covid subreddits openly feature fear-mongering posts that overplay, say, the risk of the virus to kids. Both are misinformation, but one is allowed and and the other is banned.
Look no further than Facebook's handling of COVID "misinformation". From the start of the pandemic, they have enshrined the current statements of the CDC as "information" and everything else as "misinformation". For example, when the supposed "scientific consensus" was that COVID-19 100% came from nature, anyone who suggested it could have been manmade was called a conspiracy theorist and banned from the platform. Now, a year later, those scientists are backtracking, and some are even admitting that they took the natural-origin stance simply to not be associated with Trump, who was taking the other side. That's not science.
It was never a crazy idea. Anyone who could think for themselves knew that. But Facebook declared themselves the arbiter of truth, and decided that anything that wasn't said by the CDC needed to be censored.
When reasonable, logical ideas about important global health challenges are considered "fringe" simply because the authorities have declared them to be fringe, we have a serious problem.
Obviously real scientists and social media platforms didn't want to be associated with or help to promote that at the time.
Big emphasis on "was".
Free speech is a fundamentally protected right in the US. From the Founder's perspective, the greatest threat to that right was clearly and obviously government, because what other entity could possibly have that much reach into one's life? Up until the internet age, no one could imagine a private company or a private individual having the capacity to infringe upon free speech at scale.
So, we have a Constitutional right to free speech, protected against infringement by the government, which is great, but there is another threat to the free flow of information and ideas, and that is private corporations who can now infringe upon this right at scale. And we don't have the tools or framework to defend it, because private companies can do what they want? Thats not good enough for me. The situation is dire when private companies appoint themselves to be the arbiters of truth, because even with the best intentions, there are bound to be mistakes, as we've already seen. And they don't all have the best intentions.
Are you just not paying attention?
Your reading comprehension seems a bit lacking, casting doubt on your other statements. To be clear I am asserting that your claim censorship by private companies is unjust; that is banal, annoying, and ignorant.
Do or do you not think it’s a good thing for private individuals to be able to unilaterally censor what can be said in what really is the new public square?
Its where people go to get news and share ideas.
Hacker news, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc. are private properties surrounding the public square.
You can do what you like (within the bounds of the law, because even public squares have rules) with your own property on the web, but you also have to follow the rules of any other establishment if you enter.
User pageandrew can set up their own stall by the web public area and publish whatever they wish, discuss whatever they wish with whomever they wish, also censor whoever they wish. It’s their stall, their property. Just as twitter etc are the property of others. Pageandrew.com will most likely not have the views or clicks though, and that’s what they need to peddle their outrage.
Look at Youtube. The platform has been demonetizing and deplatforming accounts for obscure and opaque reasons for years, and not just Conservatives and gun videos. The result has been people advertising their non YT content on alternative platforms. If enough people are upset with the way a platform does business, they go elsewhere.
People get kicked off of 4chan, they move to 8chan. They get kicked off of Reddit, they go to Voat. Plenty of platforms serving the persecution complex of modern Conservatives, Trump supporters, incels and the alt-right have shown up on Hacker News. Gab and Parler still exist, and are still cesspools of free speech. And that's just on the open web.
Censorship at the platform level is not a problem, because there can always be alternative platforms. Censorship at the network level is a problem. That's why I'm vehemently opposed to arguments that the government should step in and regulate all social media platforms, or force them to publish content against the will, or require a judge to sign off on any moderation action. I'd rather have parts of the web play by rules I don't agree with than have the whole thing play by one set of rules at the point of a gun.
Is it?
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
As a mod, they've put a lot of work recently into flagging trolls and astroturf accounts, and still have a lot of work to do. I run r/sanfrancisco, and wow there's a ton of bots and trolls flooding our sub about the Newsom recall.
They also seem to really want to find a way to monetize content in a new way. They've flirted with crypto and awards, but I imagine they have strong ambitions around how they can reward creators and moderators in a healthy, non-ad-based-way. (Their ads are the worst of all the big social networks, given how anonymous their base is. So they're forced to innovate, which I think is good for everyone.)
Plus the usual suspects (infrastructure, traditional demand gen marketing, paid moderation, etc).
The oddity is that their user's aren't that anonymous -- in fact, they very directly tell reddit what their interests are. Like a trade magazine, reddit really doesn't have to do any analysis at all to figure out how to map ads to the right target audience.
It confounds me how they haven't managed to do a much better job of targeted advertising -- just showing woodworking tool ads on the woodworking sub would be a dramatic improvement over the current setup.
However, ads at other social networks have evolved way past this level of targeting (which is a bad thing, in my opinion, but alas). Social networks like Facebook know so much about not just your likes but the people you're friends with and how much your income is and what stores you've been to and what you do on Instagram and what your age is and what state you're in and... the list goes on.
I think most subreddits are tough to monetize. What do you sell to r/funny or r/politics or r/sanfrancisco? What does r/choosingbeggars want to buy? There's a few obvious ones (diets, hobbies), but I think eeking out $100M from that is already impressive.
Plus, Reddit's audience is way more against ads than Instgram/Facebook/etc.
So let's say their annual revenue is 3-4x since ad spend is usually weighted heavily towards Q4. At 300-400M per year and growing that's actually pretty solid.
The endless crime-posting is exhausting, it is rapidly turning into nextdoor.
Reddit is the only website in the Alexa top 15 (US) that runs completely on the cloud. Everyone else has figured out datacenters save a bucket load of money.
Every time i watch a video there it flashes and reloads at least two times before playing.
Not to mention its excellent habit of downgrading the sample rate just as the video gets interesting.
I guess you could use the browser built in one but you likely lose features like dynamically switching video quality.
But that's not true; the browser has built in support for Media Source Extensions! Did you mean the ability to choose the quality, perhaps?
From my amateur perspective I've got,
2 web devs, 1 backend engineer, 3 devops. Pay them very generously and that's $1.2 million spent.
I have no idea what I would do with the rest..
I would know how to run a high-quality reddit on $5M/year, and perhaps as much as $20M. I would not know how to run a high-quality reddit on $100M/year.
The term is 'overcapitalized.'
At some scale, people focus on climbing corporate ladders over the core business, on pet projects, and communications becomes a bottleneck (and the number of potential links grows as a square law with the number of people).
The right scale depends on the complexity of the product. A car requires an army to engineer and produce.
Reddit? That benefits from a small team, where people can holistically understand the whole system, and everyone involved. That's at most 20 SWEs.
You couldn't keep Reddit going with 10x that team. Just the tooling around keeping up with GDPR regulations and Trust & Safety alone could easily eat $10m a year.
I really don't know what they should do with the money other than make reddit more reliable. It was down last night. The value of reddit is the users/community. Technically, it's a modern message board/link aggregator. There are already many clones.
Remember the point of a company is to make money for the people that invest in it, being in the top 25 globally doesn't mean that much if you need to take half a billion in cash 15 years into your existence. it's a weird narrative for a tech company.
also money for rubber ducks
But seriously they could invest in some content discovery/recommendation features. There are probably a lot of small subreddits that go unnoticed by people that just check /all or /popular.
Their video player needs some major work.
They could decentralize the site. Shard off subreddits by some category system. The homepage would then be an aggregation of the shards. If the main site is down you can potentially still reach some shards.
Of course they would still have a ton of money left over. With a stack this high they could convert the office heater to run directly off cash for a few years.
Reddit awards, payments, ad analytics, SRE is probably 100+ engineers right there without even talking about the core experience, mobile app and security folks.
The platforms that run 8 figure companies need tons of redundancy in both application code/infrastructure and people.
For sure, hence my question!
I don’t know the details but I think the core base of Reddit would be into a project like that.
See the post by the reddit admin below.
https://www.reddit.com/community-points
https://reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/opi5rg/scaling_reddit...
Most of it probably goes straight to AWS.
Build an integrated market, initially aimed at competing with Craigslist, and maybe expanded to target other markets later (Ebay, etsy, etc). Craigslist first because its similarly simple UI and design is the easiest to recreate within Reddit.
There's tons of subreddits for connecting buyers and sellers of niche goods, but the actual buying and selling has to happen elsewhere. It's stupid that Reddit hasn't capitalized on that yet.
Data Scientist who can use seasonal and news virality patterns to predict hourly load and load balancing
Data Scientist for Ads targeting by subreddit
CDN person to improve content delivery and caching
A person to build a half-decent video player and native integration of widgets/content from commonly linked websites
Data Scientist that provides a more curated experience to first time visitors. Shadow profiles exist. Or just a 1st visit 10 sec poll.
Tiktok doesn't have this problem. I always have fun on that app, and leave feeling like it was a good time. Reddit is the total opposite. Nothing but people screaming and mods power-tripping, forever.
Never experienced a website that objectively has such terrible impact on peoples lives. Are they going to use this money to turn it around?
Reddit is the ultimate "it is what you make of it" website. If you spend your time in the subs that make you angry then yeah, but if you narrow it down to only things you like you'll have a great time.
One thing to ask is, what problem does Reddit solve?
And to stretch an anthropomorphism: if Reddit was a person, I would ask them, who is Reddit?
Also just to ponder for a minute, what makes reddit and say facebook so different?
Seems like a good place for finding discussion on broad topics (news) and niche ones (small indie games, etc).
For some topics, say a speific car model, I've found that Reddit may have a general subreddit for the manufacturer, or maybe a specific subreddit with a few posts a week, but on Facebook there's a group that has 50 or so posts a day. And then there's often even more specific groups, for say modding or regional groups.
Possibly more interesting to ask: what problems might Reddit plausibly create?
My first instinct for answers: social polarization and mass distortion of reality perception.
After ~2014, nothing. Reddit drove off it's original user base and replaced them with the exodus of people who want to use Facebook but think Facebook is bad for various reasons. Reddit corporate has obliged them.
Crazy.
They also used to shut the site down for hours at a time to run updates.
But to be honest, even I don't use Reddit, although I do sometimes search "reddit X" when I want detailed opinions on product/service/business X. Their UX doesn't draw me in at all, especially on mobile. Hope they do something about this with all the cash. They seem to have a lot of unrealized potential.
They are already moving videos to their awful self-hosted solution. Adding pre-roll definitely makes sense. If they can guarantee premium brands 0% play on porn....
I still use old Reddit. If they get rid of old Reddit I’ll never go back.
I wish Kevin Rose had managed to keep Digg a competitor.
I am the hugest fan of reddit. . . it will be interesting to see if they can increase revenue without impacting the user experience negatively.
But I'm pretty sure they will, the big thing now is to have a big e-commerce advertising component to "unknowingly" facilitate money laundering. Expect spam to explode and be repeatedly ghettoized, it already happening on their porn subs. Entirely fake traffic with bots talking to bots.
All comments I've seen on here assume they "keep doing things the same way" - but the fact is that they need to PIVOT to something new to make real money, and that pivot could be mostly a secret.
Ads are not their future - stop complaining about the user interface and poor targeting. That isn't their path to success.
* Sales - start generating revenue from all these eyeballs, leveraging your interest graph for targeting. this requires way more headcount than you'd expect, especially to chase enough revenue to justify a $10b valuation
* Safety - beyond all the well-discussed dangers of large-scale user forums, this also impacts monetization. you don't want to subject the average new user to extreme/alt/adult content (though you can still offer space for those communities) or else you may scare them off. major advertisers want "brand safety" and want to avoid being associated with upsetting or even mildly profane content
* Regulatory - dozens of countries and states are rolling out unique regulations around privacy, data usage, and user rights. this is a nightmare to navigate from both a product and legal sense
It's basically the perfect combination of high traffic and low costs, and they have raised close to a billion dollars in funding. If they aren't profitable now, they are very unlikely to ever be profitable. I think it's likely they will sell to one of the big players (I would guess FB) in the next 5 years or so. If that goes the 'usual way', whoever acquires them will immediately let the site fall apart and eventually shut it down, and in the meantime a new hot reddit/digg/slashdot like site will emerge to take it's place almost overnight.
Overall, the site just seems janky. It used to be reliable and fast, say 3 years ago, but now it seems to choke on the higher load. I frequently encounter issues with comments not loading, karma not displaying, etc.
Google, Facebook, Twitter have an entire ecosystem built around them of ad-tech companies, agencies, marketing-tech integrations all involved in driving more revenue or traffic their way so long as the participants get a cut too. This strikes me as a still yet-to-be-tapped market opportunity.
> We want to build what is best for new users, because over time it will be best for everyone.
I wonder if they’re ashamed of lying like that or just doing it naturally. They’ve been doubling down on user hostile bullshit recently. I don’t man new Reddit (it’s not great but a redesign was long overdue), I mean pictures with silly bars on the bottom and not easily being able to save videos, the stupid app/browser popup on every damn page on mobile, not being able to browse or even view comments without an account anymore.
I sure wonder what Aaron Swartz would think about that.
> Reddit is largely a community of anonymous users that provide web content for each other.
The communities and the anonymous bit is totally the draw for most users. Most technical suggestions for monetization I read in here seem to completely ignore that (outside of marketing to a subreddit instead of directly to users, which some subreddits don’t even allow because that’s not the point of Reddit).
Suggestions I’ve read like not allowing multiple accounts, no anonymous users, etc. seem like suggestions that would kill the platform.
Reddit develops it's own narratives, and those narratives end up being all that gets visibility (because of the comment upvote model). Ideas like 'all conservatives are MAGA losers, look at the idiots on /r/conservative', 'AOC and Bernie are God's gift to Earth' and 'minimum wage should be $45 and all student debt should be forgiven' are the only opinions upvoted. This directly leads to reactionary places like /r/The_Donald getting created. Then, when those communities get banned, it creates even more hostility and resentment. The best part of Donald Trump losing the election was that 80% of the front page wasn't articles shitting on him anymore.
I have to constantly remind myself that the people commenting on reddit are not an accurate representation of the real world, but I worry most people don't do that and legitimately believe people on the other side hate them. They react to this (inaccurate) belief with their own hostility and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I had to put my conspiracy hat on - I think nurturing this hostility between ideologies would be the best way for a foreign power to destabilize the US; they're probably already doing it to some extent.
Honestly, I'd like to give it up entirely but it still remains one of the best resources of really useful, non-marketing knowledge on the internet.
$ per user revenue is pathetic compared to most social media platforms.
> Reddit is also focused on expanding internationally. Most of the site is U.S.-centric, Mr. Huffman said — something he hopes to change.
When it comes to advertising, other platforms offer a much more lucrative user base. Reddit users aren’t worth very much to advertisers. International users will probably be worth even less. And there is no guarantee that Reddit would hit it off with an international audience.
In short, I just don’t see them doing well if they go public.
oh look at: r/norway and their users are even more wealthy than average us redditors
non-political subs with very obvious political agendas.
The illusion of popularity-based ranking of articles when in reality it is mostly curated
Zero transparency on the moderators the big news and political subs
Control freak moderators on special interest subs.
Some big investors don't seem to be able to accurately gauge what an internet property is worth. Look at Verizon buying tumblr for $1 billion
as someone who has used reddit for 7+ years now, the culture is definitely very different (not necessarily good) - but it has only continued to grow in terms of users
For example r/linux has "679169 readers", but if you go to the /new page you'll see it has only had 16 submissions in the past day.
New users are automoderated and shadowbanned to hell. There are subreddits where the experienced users with new accounts go and users upvote each other until they have enough karma to post where they want.
accounts, yes - but how many of those are users? versus bots and marketeers?
That's because I make a new account everytime I'm doxxed, banned, or censored.
Now that you mention it, I realize that the reddit blocking, censoring and quarantining system basically is a free way to drive up their 'new user' count.
What a joke of a website and a company. Cannot wait til it dies.
But Reddit the platform seems to entirely ignore this dynamic. New users are dropped into the default subreddits, and there's very little tooling or onramps to help them find small interest-matching subs.
For example I love Formula 1. But the /r/formula1 subreddit (1.6 million subscribers) is absolute unmitigated trash. There are decent articles posted there, but the comments are a total wasteland of low-effort memes, regurgitated jokes and total morons with zero understanding of the sport. So where do I go for F1 content? How do I find one of these supposed small subs with good communities?
Reddit will die when there is something better (for the user experience) available. Right now, I do not see a better general-purpose forum alternative.
I feel the choice of Ellen Pao as interim CEO revealed what direction reddit was headed. Moves towards a more sanitised, advertiser friendly Reddit - but with slap-dash choice of how to apply the new era of censorship.
2014 Nov - Pao became interim CEO
2015 July 2nd - large sections of Reddit were set to private to protest the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, Reddit's director of talent, known for co-ordinating the Ask Me Anything interviews
2015 Jun/July - Pao was the subject of criticism and harassment by Reddit users after five Reddit communities (subreddits) were banned for harassment and Reddit's director of talent was fired
2015 Aug 13th - "Watch reddit Die" was Created
I can't help feel that there is a trend of selling of online communities as "assets" to commercial buyers that have opposite incentive to the members of that community - just look at StackOverflow. The problem is that websites come to own the "commons" they inspire, and then sell it off as if the community are happy to work for free. We need stronger community data-rights; like a GPL for website content.
reddit (in general) has a clear and obvious political/social agenda apparent to anybody with a functioning brain.
It's a natural reaction to change.
I've been on Reddit for 11 years, and all your comments could apply to 2010 Reddit as well as they apply to 2021 Reddit. At least edgy memes on /r/atheism aren't a core part of the site anymore.
___________
The incompetent UI rehaul has meant that most users continue staying on old.reddit.com, which makes it impossible to sunset. This means that old.reddit.com works in the most familiar manner of early-2000s forums without much in its way. The incredibly late and terrible 1st party app, has meant that significantly superior 3rd party apps (without the same large scale profit motives) have gained prominence and cannot be pushed out. The ads are bad enough, that they don't have a large variety of advertisers to specifically target compatible subreddits. Imagine having simultaneously the most most engaged users and the worst ads. The censorship is amateurish, and gets beaten by a motivated bunch of idiots on a regular basis. The fear of a competitor being just around the corner (due to their own digg origin story) makes them too scared to censor beyond an unperceivable breaking point, lest they face mass exodus. Good teams are analytically user obsessed. They know their target audience very well. To be fair, worse teams ban users for what used to be the central purpose of their platform cough tumblr cough.
Its public perception is tied to the Boston marathon, pedophile-defending employees and the rise of Trump. So, there isn't sufficient adoption among 'normies'. While that's bad for monetization it slows down the rate of decline in content quality and keeps it far away enough from the public eye, that you can get away with 'better' content.
Every feature they attempt to release (Chat, live stream, video hosting) is done so badly that users refuse to bulge on previous user flows. Thus, it maintains a certain purity.
_________
Reddit is the most ironic victor due to the 'don't fix what's not broken' rule.
Reddit in 2015 was a pretty good website. The devs have been unable to get adoption for any new feature past 2015. Thus, they never fixed what was not broken.
Facebook frequently messes with user flows to maximize earnings. Most successful social media websites have figured out how to guide their users down an 'intended' user flow such that they can maximally profit without losing any users. Reddit doesn't know how to do either.
With that, I hope that Reddit's leaders never wisen up and start making real money. The day reddit figures out monetization, will be the day that I set forth looking for a new badly-monetized platform.
Is it 8% of all users, or 8% of PC users ?
I personally use the reddit.com address, but have opted out of the redesign. I wonder if you can track that with reddit.
Is the long death of reddit, really the TikTok-isation of reddit into yet another vapid commercial meh-space?
Will this actually succeed, or is this the pump before the dump?
You mean the valuation? It's a simple formula of ([money raised] / [shares issued]) * [total shares outstanding]
Ok, fair enough. feels overvalued though.
The latter two are part of Reddit's official tokenized community points project, which is going to expand to more communities, and which will be adopting Ethereum L2 solution, Arbitrum, for scalability:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/opi5rg/scaling_re...
In all three communities, you can purchase special monthly membership with the community tokens, and use them to vote on polls that can also be used for governance decisions.
As the community points are on the blockchain, and map to user contributions in each community, they give Reddit communities the ability to migrate to other platforms, or leverage their karma reputation for other purposes (e.g. voting on other platforms). This decoupling of reputation from the platform will go a long way to making social media more open and geared toward the end user.
It'll also distribute economic power, by giving ordinary people, all over the world, a new means to earn income:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/l9dye7/i_so...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/kqrikd/sold...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/n371id/how_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ly79uw/as_a...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/l9bdtn/guys...
It is akin to social networking what Craigslist is to marketplaces.
A magical magical place.
I would have liked if it was easy to federate, I.e. make a new subreddit that is just like this other subreddit and posts show up in both. You can make multireddits with plus signs but you can’t create a new one that is just like the old one except you don’t censor the word “pumpkin” or whatever.
Would be interesting but maybe a bad idea since it fragments the user base.