Reddit files to go public
reuters.com
reuters.com
Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session. Heck, I get my HN updates from Reddit now.
Facebook/Instagram/TikTok are nothing like this in that the info you get is wholly dependent on your social graph. Twitter has very high quality content, but it’s a firehose that is very difficult to curate and keep up with. Reddit is democratizing in a sense, like riding the NYC subway.
An even wilder bet: Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse (as a news outlet of sorts, on steroids) and even potentially minimize the need for Google Search.
Anecdotally, a VERY LARGE percentage of my Google searches end in “site:reddit.com” these days. Reddit posts, especially from smaller subs, tend to be higher quality and don’t have ulterior motives (ad revenue). If Reddit’s Lucene cluster were better, between that and SO, I’d use Google a handful of times a week. Maybe this IPO can help fund that.
If the ad revenue from the whale subs allow me to continue learning about interior design, supply chain logistics, the inner workings of car sales, finance and tax strategies if I become high net worth, and more, I’m here for it.
Can you give me an example? I have zero followers/following on Twitter and just use Tweetdeck so I'd like to know what I should be looking for.
(Yes they have ADHD and this helps etc etc, I know).
While I think better search would be great for users, I'm convinced Reddit doesn't actually want better search.
Good search means I can easily find an old post with the answer to my questions. Bad search means I end up going to a subreddit and posting the same question that's been asked 15 times. Even if it's removed by the mods, it'll likely get one or two comments and votes before it does.
Bad search drives more engagement.
You can type that question into google verbatim and find dozens of high production value Youtube videos explaining exactly what an audio interface is. Yet a shocking number of people opt to type this question into Reddit and then wait 8 hours for other users to post answers.
Are people really this incompetent at finding information online nowadays?
The idea that you could get first-hand information for free, instead of relying on second-hand information from others, simply does not enter the picture for them.
I've thought for a bit about the question, and I don't think so.
Rather I think people don't understand how forums work, these questions are often from first-time posters or people that frequent the site very rarely, and still haven't learned asking simple questions a Google or forum search away is bad etiquette, makes for bad reading and will annoy the heck out of the regulars.
In their newbie eyes, the forum is the place where you ask your questions, provided they are relevant, but without considering how inane or oft-repeated they are.
Watching video is inefficient, I can read much quicker. I would search forums (such as Reddit) for an answer, but if I did not find one, I would post a question before I searched YouTube.
YouTube also has annoying product plug ins and ads and I have no idea what people are selling. I assume there is a lower proportion of advertisers to honest people just answering questions on YouTube, although I believe this has changed now due to the popularity of Reddit.
The contextual information you can get to introduce you to a topic is where Reddit really shines. Some subs do this with a wiki, but the redesign tends to hide it.
The only problem is trying to have that question asked few enough times that people don't get tired of answering.
Why do people keep talking about the metaverse like it already exists and is a huge part of our future?
It's vaporware right now.
Are we all so susceptible to marketing that we've just accepted that if Meta is going all-in on a thing it must be both real and a guaranteed win?
More importantly, Meta and Apple are both launching AR glasses next near (or maybe Q1 2023) and at that point AR will start to have its “iphone” moment where it starts our nice then suddenly everyone has one.
Personally I'm waiting for the next gen ones, the current ones are all still too terrible in price to performance.
In that sense, I agree with you we should ignore the marketing, and I also think we should talk about the metaverse as we talk about the web, not as some rigid concept, but more a vague idea of a thing in VR.
They may be some competing metaverses, I doubt one will win out (I kind of doubt any will do well)
So my bet is that there will never be The Metaverse just like there never was The Forum, The MMORPG, The MUD.
We may still have useful/fun stuff in specific VR worlds, of course.
Even Meta's Quest hardware is still not at that point, and the ecosystem is pretty small. I feel like we're not even at the "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad." stage yet.
Ah I see so it's like a space, but on the web. Like some sort of a cyber...
Anyone talking about this "metaverse" like it is anything other than the normal internet we already have (which is equally amazing, btw) would have to have either created or fallen for some sort of marketing material.
My bet is that it becomes like what Clubhouse is now: a home for all kinds of whackjobs, hustle culture bros, "become wealthy" gurus and recruitment channels for MLMs and political extremists.
ERP can also mean Erotic Role Playing.
[0] And, honestly, I see Meta's play here as the Google Plus to Roblox's Facebook.
The internet does
Then after every match I have to spend time opening up some kind of gift that I have no use for. All the while 13 year old kids are being annoying yelling and whining. It’s a pretty rough experience right now.
Meta
Verse
Self referential artistic expression
Artistic abstraction of self; ones ideation, concepts; is not limited to Zoom with Mario64 heads.
Extracting the idea of a web of documents into web 1…
Any concept can be a metaverse. The creator outputs an abstraction arising within self.
Zuckerberg has a specific thing to sell. Don’t go coming up with your own metaverse to play in.
> The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together — and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world. It’s the next evolution in a long line of social technologies, and it’s ushering in a new chapter for our company.
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/facebook-company-is-now-me...
> In the next decade, he thinks most people will be spending time in a fully immersive, 3D version of the internet that spans not just Meta’s hardware such as the Quest, but devices made by others. He’s pushing his teams to build technology that could one day let you show up in a virtual space as a full-bodied avatar, or appear as a hologram of yourself in the real-world living room of your friend who lives across the planet.
https://www.theverge.com/22749919/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-m...
You can play semantics if you want. Meta, the company, have announced that they are building a thing. That thing is what I am talking about. It is vaporware right now. It it not a guaranteed win.
Its nothing more than a way for a few companies to monetize a few extra things and become gate keepers to things that have neither on the internet.
The metaverse is basically what the internet would be if it was invented today
- Mark Zuckerberg
1_player's comment should have replaced both occurrences of metaverse with butt though.
Does there happen to be a browser extension to automate this?
Hey, you gotta give it more credit than that
It's the internet but you'll never be able to use an adblocker!
I wish facebook had never existed we wouldn't have to deal with this garbage. I'd be curious what would have filled the gap.
But don't be fooled. It's Facebook. Don't be fooled by its rename either, it's still Facebook.
Besides most people use a loose definition of metaverse that includes things like gaming (Minecraft, roblox), social media, our phones, etc. which are all multi-billion dollar industries already.
But Mark Zuckerberg doesn't use the loose definition, as I mentioned in another comment. He talks about quite a clear vision of a world in which VR/AR technologies have permeated society and are part of everyone's everyday lives. That vision doesn't exist yet, it's a long way from being realized, and yet people (like the commenter I originally responded to) keep referencing it as if it already exists, is successful, and important. And it's none of those three things yet.
Sounds similar to Twitter and YouTube.
I don't mean that to be patronizing...but I remember being on Digg and Reddit being a weird alternative. And after a series of huge mistakes, almost overnight Reddit was flooded with users and Digg relegated to nothing.
It really opened my eyes to how quickly an empire built only on its users can disappear.
Reminds me of the Freenode IRC network which pretty much stopped existing[1][2] overnight.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_...
[2] https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c164679...
Reddit has banned a number of subreddits too. With hundreds of thousands of active members. None of this curbs its popularity. And not everything they ban is problematic like inappropriate non consensual sexual posts or aggressive bigotry.
Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year
Digg peaked at 30M monthly users.
A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]:
“Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October” “Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion”
These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily...
The only examples that I can think of is Tumblr.
If there’s so many examples before 10 years ago. And maybe 1 example in recent times. Your point can still stand. However it also doesn’t mean much when the resilience of web giants are totally different between the Digg Web time and after that
It was essentially just an infrastructure change, which is the nice thing about open protocols and server implementations. Libera has 40k users and over 1000 foss projects that were on freenode.
the freenode userbase and community is alive and well, just under a new link
Finally people stopped bringing up the old messengers. They had such tiny userbases. The comparisons don’t make sense.
As do all other older sites pale in comparison to absolute mammoths like Reddit now. Digg was so small compared to Reddit. It lasted for such a short period of time. People have finally stopped bringing up MySpace when touting Facebook/Instagram’s fall. MySpace peaked for at most two years 2005-2006. Before being a ghost land before the end of 2008. MySpace’s peak user base was peanuts. It also likely wasn’t very accurate in how they were able to report things. Their revenue and cash flow even smaller. The internet is broader with mobile and desktop usage. Cellular data and wifi. Global. Billions more users.
Comparing Digg to Reddit just doesn’t work. Reddit isn’t the site it was before 2010. During the digg exodus. The few years after that. And to nowadays.
———————- Edit: for some actual numbers. Copy pasting from my other comment:
Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year
Digg peaked at 30M monthly users. A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]: “Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October” “Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion” These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily...
I'm honestly not sure but I think there's an argument for it. The internet was a smaller place as a whole before Digg's collapse. They can't have had users that didn't exist.
On the other hand, maybe turnover can be more rapid when a domain such as the internet itself is rapidly developing.
Just seems to me there's broader factors to consider than Digg per se or reddit per se.
The only examples that I can think of are things like Yahoo Answers, Quora, Tumblr. Leaving Tumblr aside just to see if there’s any other examples, are there? We could expand it to 10 years possibly? I want to stick to the modern smartphone era.
I list many sites that rose and fell as well as apps like IM apps. How many of them had peaks or consistent growth for 10 years?
My thesis is to not look for people’s opinion on changes. Look at the actual numbers. Web giants once they get established in this modern era. Rarely get displaced like Digg did.
> On the other hand, maybe turnover can be more rapid when a domain such as the internet itself is rapidly developing.
Yes whether this is it or not as the reason is what I am saying based on what is happening
> Just seems to me there's broader factors to consider than Digg per se or reddit per se.
Yeah I didn’t intend to say I knew all the reasons why. Just that modern web giants can’t be compared to the web giants of the earlier web.
I think there might be some kind of memory bias in the sense that we're less likely to remember things that have receded into the background or even disappeared but I agree that as more users come on board because of network effects it's harder to let go of a service or to replace what it has to offer.
I'm one of the first people to bail when a platform or service becomes unusable and a new one becomes viable. I have zero loyalty: I started out in Usenet servers and with individual webpages and moved through to blogs/forums, then to Myspace and LiveJournal, and so on. (Including the Digg to Reddit migration).
This option is less available to me now because most new platforms are either bought out (Instagram) or require such high costs due to having to support multimedia bandwidth that there's nowhere for us to go. I'm not happy with the current platform options and I monitor them for meta-discussion fairly frequently and there is a portion of the Reddit and Twitter userbase that is ready to move IF something suitable comes along.
However, my desire for a new platform is directly at odds with the interests of the current companies and, unlike in the Myspace era, Zuck + the people running Reddit are aware of platform death and use their resources to keep their platforms 'alive' as long as they can. This is also why we see things like Instagram Reels and RPAN: The execs of social media companies know about platform death and manage for it. Think of Google's strategizing for the future versus Yahoo's: It's not that platform death can't happen, it's that they've been the ones sliding in that dagger so they want to defend against it.
It's like saying that calvary are irrelevant because somebody came up with anti-calvary tactics and strategies.
We're in this weird situation where those of us who like to explore new social frontiers and build new communities are only being given places to do so that either a.) Have strict social requirements already built in and that just kills our drive to see what happens if we put humans HERE and have them interact like THIS or b.) Are controlled by corporations who want to use that for their own benefit, and I'm NOT teaching, encouraging, or leading any more people to things I think will hurt or exploit them.
It's weird.
I didn’t include the bit in my other comment where Discord and Reddit do ban major communities. So portions of those userbases are forced to at least partially leave. We have seen what that has done to both platforms. Nothing.
Yes platform death can still happen of course. There are many reasons they haven’t happened. Many reasons they did in the Digg days. Not all of the platforms have done equivalent “anti-cavalry” tactics the way some have. Still there is at most one example of a platform death in the past decade. Versus so many before that.
My entire point was to not use the platform deaths of the 00s as a reasonable direct retort to the shakiness of current web giant platforms. Especially when it includes things like wondering if others remember internet history. As if people who remember Digg’s fall are wise to something.
—
Totally agree with your general vibe, sentiment, and your final paragraph.
Absolutely, but in the same way that moderators and admins are also outside the norm but still have a substantial impact on how/if communities grow and develop (provided a community has them). Communities in general rely on a certain percentage of people in them doing community-maintenance work, and at least some of it needs to be done due to love of the community. We're weird, but we're also the people who ran around showing a bunch of people Google in 1998, or who were encouraging people to switch from MySpace to Facebook in the 00s. We're the ones who articulate to the normal people why they should switch platforms, where they should go, and why the new place will solve the problems. Building a platform without us is difficult, and so is maintaining one if you're relying on community spaces.
I definitely think you're right that the situation is more complex than it was, but I think you're overselling the differences. Things are bigger so they take longer now, but that's the main difference. That and the financial interests involved; if anything is constraining platform death I would say it's that platform death costs MONEY now.
> My entire point was to not use the platform deaths of the 00s as a reasonable direct retort to the shakiness of current web giant platforms. Especially when it includes things like wondering if others remember internet history. As if people who remember Digg’s fall are wise to something.
Fair enough. I tend to err on the other side because so much of the Web is built to strip information of context and I adore digital history; there are so many things discussed where anything more than 5 years ago might as well have not happened. Still, there can definitely be an undertone of 'stfu noob' to stuff sometimes that is offputting.
I think if a new site is to succeed, it needs to have a heavy hand with moderation.
There is one other way a new site could succeed, I think: A Reddit competitor with decent search and archive abilities, better mobile/app UX, and (here's the killer) a complete ban on political discussion and brand accounts. Set up a place for people to have groups for hobbies without having to prove their vaxx status (or lack thereof) or whether they like trans people enough. People (regardless of their political persuasion) need breaks, rest, hobby, and connection.
When did you see anyone on TV mention Digg?
Reddit's become mainstream, it's quoted by serious news outlets, joked around on Last Week Tonight (and other politic joke shows), and I'd say it's as likely to disappear as Facebook. Which is to say, surely but very slowly.
While I think you're absolutely right, I think Digg made a number of other missteps with the Digg v4 launch that Reddit did not make. In particular, they shut down the old Digg site to reuse the servers for the new one, a mistake that Reddit was particularly careful not to make.
Digg was also already on the way down before their failed launch, and before the exodus to Reddit - a condition that doesn't apply to Reddit today. People have been making Digg comparisons about Reddit before I worked there, and now long after I've left. I don't think the 2 are comparable.
Will Larson writes about it here: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/
You are seeing a huge demand for more free speech platforms. Youtube is outofcontrol, Google is editing search, twitter is peering over the abyss now that Jack is gone and Reddit is right along them. It may take a while, but in a few years they are going to face steep competition. It may very well be an open source decentralized project like Mastodon.
As far as free speech platforms go you have things like Gab, Voat, etc which prioritize free speech in name. While that may be commendable as a value, the core audience they attract in the beginning is inevitably too extreme for the platform to go mainstream.
By the time Reddit replaced Digg, Digg was already losing users routinely. I don’t think any of the current social media players are in that position just yet.
It can indeed be entertaining from time to time, but consumption of content is extremely passive.
Compared to platforms like Discord they have the advantage that their content is actually discoverable by search engines. I hate the push to Discord since that basically makes you invisible. I get that it is convenient, but it has a lot of negative side effects that aren't obvious at first.
That we are repeating the mistake with discord, is very unfortunate.
That would be the best of both worlds in my opinion.
Not that either of these issues deterred people from using IRC.
That can also be a feature going forward given today's climate. Many people have lost jobs or not been hired after prospective employers did a simple Google search.
Apart from the bit where all of the main subreddits (and therefore the front page) are controlled by completely unvetted, unpaid moderators, who tend to be Extremely Online People.
I don't understand how Facebook are continuously attacked by politicians for not moderating content well enough when they have towers full of paid moderators, while Reddit continues unaffected.
> Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse
Does anyone actually care about the metaverse? Everyone I know thinks it's some kind of joke. It seems like Silicon Valley nonsense.
Reddit doesn't because everyone can see what's going on. You might not like it, but you can see it.
The average Redditor still believes that they're more intelligent and believes that they're seeing balanced information (because how can upvotes and downvotes lie?), while being blind to all of the astroturfing and agendas placed by the people who run subreddits.
The thing that changed was that new generations of users started to use the site, younger millennials and gen z. And their echo chambers differ from the previous generation of reddit users echo chambers and are broadly incompatible because echo chambers usually edge to the extremes on both sides.
I care about VR as a medium and I'm worried that another round of hype will drag the whole of VR/XR down with it when it slumps again.
Still. We've been through this cycle before and it's nice to see some more investment. Hopefully it will leave some residual benefit that outweighs the damage caused by the gold rush.
It's worse this time as the metaverse hype has thrown crypto into the mix so it's not just an investor gold rush - it's an crypto one too.
Don't give them ideas. Content moderation in this form basically dumped down content to the most digestible level and that is some partisan whack because people are already addicted to being outraged. Most affected are somehow news and political subs as well as national subs. You will find nothing interesting there because you don't learn about the respective cultures, you learn about typical redditors.
Any government interference has without exception been pretty bad in my opinion. You won't find quality representatives that could develop protection for online platforms anymore. Don't know why statecraft has become so much more incompetent.
> Does anyone actually care about the metaverse?
The what?
Nothing specific on Reddit, but I'd like to point out that when you go long on a stock, you should at least try to possess some specific knowledge that most people don't have about that company.
Reddit might be great; but if everyone knows about it, then the price is going to reflect that already.
I think that's the wrong way to look at stocks. What you're describing goes along with the common belief that all known information is already "priced in". This is silly.
The price of a stock reflects the consensus/average estimation of the worth of the company. Your personal assessment is going to depend on what you personally believe in, but you could be holding a minority viewpoint. If 95% of investors believe that a company will have 10B in revenue in 5 years, but you interpret the facts differently and believe (correctly) that the company will make 50B in 5 years, then even though you are basing your estimation on the same facts as everyone else, if the majority interprets the facts incorrectly, then the information is not "priced in". As the company proves itself successful, the consensus estimate will shift. People will reassess their belief that certain outcomes are more or less likely. What matters isn't necessarily having information that other investors don't have, it's interpreting that information better than others, and making more accurate inferences.
When it comes to reddit, more specifically, you probably don't have access to any more information than every analyst on wall street, but there's a key difference, which is that most of these people probably have never used reddit, and have a very limited understanding of how it works or its potential. So, in some ways, your understanding of the functioning of reddit, as a reddit user, could actually give you an edge.
Why would you think this?
what is the metaverse? what are you talking about?
The notion sounds a bit silly on the surface, but good enough at least for serious classroom discussions and evaluation.
Perhaps "self-appraisal tax"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_(economics)
For namespaces, there is extra value for particular names that come not from any work the owner of the name performed, but rather that comes from the productive activity of others. If I squat "olives.com" in 1994 and wait for the web to get big, and then sell the domain in 2000 to a hottest new direct to consumer olive startup, then any profit from that should really be taxed away. All that "value" came from the work of others that made the web into a valuable place to own some "land."
Thanks for stealing the shorthand I had for explaining what interested me.
And never mind what a mess it's going to make for any of us who are interested in metadata versus data.
Thanks, Mark. I love it.
I feel like we should be using the term "scalping" instead. It is much more accurate.
The problem is, the "idiot's metrics", that is the engagement time as the ultimate metric of financial success, clearly show that negative content that is bad for your well-being favors them. They literally earn money from your suffering. How could you expect them to give up on that?
This meta verse thing really could be the way we work remotely soon. It works as a working space. It works for companies, it could create good work environments, and companies can afford expensive hardware to get people to work more effecively.
Think of the metaverse as a more advanced slack+zoom, not as a Minecraft/Roblox alternative.
Joking aside, I've stopped using bluetooth in any vehicle that is not mine (actually using a rental this moment since my car is being worked on right now). Pretty much all rental cars have been built in the past 3 years, and for the most part they all have a USB for Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. So much easier to just use a cable and not hope the wireless connection stays working.
Though the cable itself isn't reliable sometimes and will disconnect itself/pause audio upon reconnection. Maybe good ol' FM and CDs are the way to go.
in any case, I find Android auto just trades one set of issues for another. voice control is kinda iffy for all but the most unambiguous commands. I also experience deadlocks at least once a week that require restarting the head unit, phone, or both. I've had this issue with two different phones in two different cars. not sure what the root cause is, but it is really distracting when navigation freezes halfway through a trip through an unfamiliar area.
Though I haven't had issues in regards to the headunit failing just yet - I've had the phone lock up a few times, but I think that is in part due to the age of my iPhone (6s) and the lack of processing power/ram.
What do you think is missing from today's slack+zoom (or discord +jitsi/google meet, or whatever) combo that would make you more productive?
It inevitably turns into an awkward mess. Sure you can use breakout rooms but the social happy hour via zoom/slack is not a solved problem.
She got through the first 25 minutes or so of her routine (which was incredibly awkward -- standup does not work without a crowd, and it's just you telling jokes to your own empty living room) and eventually at one point her audio got stuck as she was saying the word "and" and it literally just kept looping her saying "and and and and and" over and over. They tried to troubleshoot it for about 10 minutes. Her video was still working, but every time they enabled her audio again it was just the looping "and and and and." I felt kinda bad for her. The whole thing felt like a plastic recreation of a real experience, and the technical difficulties at the end were emblematic of it all.
There's a Zoom comedy show my partner has been attending for 1.5 years, and she bawls every week. So, it's possible for a show to work out.
I can no longer pick up on junior team members talking themselves into trouble and nip it in the bud, I only get exposed to that trouble by the time they’ve invested enough time into it that it becomes a much harder discussion.
When I go grab a cup of coffee I no longer overhear other teams talking about their projects, and ask them if they mind me sitting in to learn more about what they’re doing.
A lot of the organic social interactions that serve as a medium for knowledge diffusion are just gone.
Perhaps the environment isn’t right for them to just ask for help?
> When I go grab a cup of coffee I no longer overhear other teams talking about their projects, and ask them if they mind me sitting in to learn more about what they’re doing.
Demo days?
> A lot of the organic social interactions that serve as a medium for knowledge diffusion are just gone.
Happy hours?
We weren’t even going to have HDMI as a fallback, but the executives demanded it because they weren't willing to spend 5 minutes every meeting dealing with the tech when the problem is that it didn’t work the way they wanted it to.
I cannot imagine my users in-office all donning headsets when many attendees in a meeting are just there to listen while working on other things. I personally like to take those kinds of “listening in” calls while doing work around the house. I’m not sticking my face in a VR headset for that.
If we get to a point where we're "forced" to don headsets for meetings, it can't be long before dummy heads with realistic eyes (to fool the inevitable eye-tracking/iris scanning "presence" check) appear on the market.
A bit like those mouse jigglers they're sell to prevent your status moving to "away"
It is infuriating.
John on Accidental Tech Podcast (http://atp.fm) has articulated some pretty solid criticisms.
Facebook has historically sucked at hardware. Why would that change?
Whereas other parasocial hosts attempt to protect their users, like MMOPRGs mitigating griefing and cheating, Facebook and Twitter amplify and profit from toxicity.
Etc.
1. "Give what the numbers say you want." or "Maximize profit * area of instance." are what they actually want. Even if it leads to emergent antisocial behavior it is set by results instead of a goal in itself. 2. The charge itself could be applied to any form of media, and yet there is a blatant double standard. If one accused three letter network of it you would get a response of "well duh"! 3. The implicit idea that negativity is a bad thing is outright dangerous, yet clearly promoted by the accusatory tone. Publishing government misconduct also promotes negativity and a publication may profit from it. So does speaking out against injustice. Crude and callous as it may sound, maybe some outright deserve the negativity.
Correct. Zuck, Dorsey, and PageBrin just stole the old guard's lunch money. Just like broadcast toppled print, papyrus displaced clay cuniform.
It's an old story. The power elite always seize control of popular communications. Technological progress begets a changing of the guard.
> and yet there is a blatant double standard
By whom?
There is always a resentful cohort moaning about "kids these days".
There is always some cranks (like me) performatively rejecting the whole system. Yesterday's Kill Your Television is today's Delete Facebook.
While the masses keep plodding along, amusing themselves as able, self medicating, seeking some kind of respite from the never ending sting of the human condition. Moo.
Oh please god kill me now.
The next question is why? Followed by the heath issues problems. You’re supposed to look away from a screen every 10 mins for 10 seconds. How can I do that with the screen strapped to my face? And why we’re here, why would I go to my private space inside the metaverse to get away from people? Why not take the damn headset off? The whole idea is forced.
Zuck has taken long term bets on the metaverse starting with Occulus and now seemingly betting the whole company on it. He could very well be wrong but there are a lot of very smart people at Facebook and on their board I have to think they did some very intensive validation before doing so.
It could all go up in flames but I think they are going to take a very real run at it backed by billions and billions of dollars.
Don't get me wrong I very much dislike Facebook and the oxygen it provides to extreme and uninformed groups but to think that Zuckerberg is an idiot taking a stab in the dark with the fortunes of a publicly traded FAANG company is not a serious take.
"In Facebooks case, they should really try their hand at making a 2D world that doesn't lead people to want to die before they try to expand on the whole reality thing." No arguments from me, there is a ton of moderation that needs to be added to Facebook.
This whole Metaverse thing reminds me of when IBM purchased 12 islands and opened a virtual office in Second Life. Of course, as was tradition at the time, someone inevitably showed up with a flying gentlemen's sausage. Eventually IBM decided the whole thing was too costly and abandoned the project.
The lesson here is that when IBM gets involved, that's probably the top.
Not every tech is going to be successful at every time. The same solution can fail once and succeed some other time when there's a change in the market and/or the underlying technology.
There's a much larger number of human beings on the internet now. And they are not just on the internet, but they actively use it for a large amount of time. That's the chance in market right now and what will drive the adoption of metaverse soon.
The thing that we should focus on right now is whether we want a metaverse owned by Facebook or something that is defined by open protocols.
Zuck has to build a v1 product from scratch with the Metaverse. When's the last time FB has truly built a revolutionary v1 product? It's not really in their DNA anymore. I'm not saying they can't do it, but I wouldn't point to IG and WhatsApp as examples of why Zuck can pull it off.
Facebook has also innovated significantly in adtech afaik
What do you mean perfectly timed? If you mean that those platforms shot up in usage/revenue/whatever-metric after their purchase, couldn't that be heavily influenced by the purchase? Neither of those were some small little platform with a groundbreaking new feature before that. Everyone I knew (in highschool at the time) had gotten sick of their parents all joining Facebook and making it uncool, so they moved to Instagram before the purchase.
All that Zuck did was notice the platform all the kids are migrating to and bought it to keep those users. It isn't exactly "predicting future trends." They tried to do it again when everyone's parents joined Instagram so the kids moved to Snapchat, but thankfully that deal didn't go through
I would argue this is exactly what predicting future trends is. See which way the tide is going and make the necessary investments to ride it.
It's recognizing current and predicting extremely short-term future trends that lots of other people recognized but didn't have the funds to do exploit in the same way.
Metaverse would be something very different.
Or, as a kid who played Civ online at the same time he did, I'd describe him as somebody who could win every game of Civ through bug exploits and memorizing the mechanics, but is such a dick about it nobody wants to play with him again and that confuses him.
"If you build it, they will come." Only if they don't hate you, and Zuck isn't doing well in the court of public opinion.
While you may not want the Metaverse, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "If it succeeds at all, it will be a testament to societies ability to bend to the whims of rich idiots.", plenty of people are happy to try new things. Facebook, the social network, is a estimate to massive amounts of people willing to get on board with an idea that is new, at least to them.
We’re already spending significant parts of our days working, playing, exploring and communicating digitally. Dating is online. Commerce has moved online. Art and creators are online. Entertainment is online. Exercise is an AR experience. Connecting with IRL and new virtual-only friends is online. What is left? Food, sleep, sex, and odors? Important things, but a relatively small portion of what we do during our awake hours.
The substance part of the metaverse is already here and proven. We are in a period of refinement which includes technological advancements in the ways we experience it. More compact wearables (e.g. AR/VR headsets), 3D audio, High res displays and better visuals/graphics and most importantly, bridging these different types of experiences in some way, which is a software problem. These are the areas in which tech is trying to gain control and offer the cohesive experience.
I highly recommend you listen to this podcast episode with Bill Gurley (second life creator): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/invest-like-the-best-w...
The reason I use quotes is because Zuck has stolen a word to represent his vision of a world people are already incrementally building for themselves, outside his control. His vision, where his Meta company is central to all this stuff, acts as identity provider and general enabler, and a market -- where Meta is central to even the concept of a metaverse, is shit.
Claiming the name as a brand is a scummy move. It's absolutely dripping with greed, hubris and cynicism. They created this problem, where it's difficult to promote or criticize the general idea of the metaverse and the Meta company version independently. It's the latter that I am confident will be a Black Mirror style horror story if come to fruition, and am urging people not to promote. Any major effort by a big tech company to wrangle the frontier into their walled garden is bad news, but Facebook's past behavior says they'd be especially bad.
Apple is investing significant amounts of capital on ARkit and AI/ML optimizations at the die level. Google has been dabbling in this space for years and years.
Second Life, the non-AR version of the metaverse, was hugely popular back in the day despite the tech at the time (i.e. having to carve time to use it on your computer). Pokemon GO (a Google bet) is still wildly popular.
With Facebook doubling-down in this space, yes, I am going to take this very seriously.
AR has a very clear and useful future. Metaverse is a gimmick to get people to work and live in a world where facebook, err Meta, can nickel and dime everything.
Let’s be clear here, the metaverse is useful for separating idiots from their money (see how much people are spending on fake land atm)
In other words...social media can really showcase the best/worst of people but Reddit kinda at least can give some intellectual content and discussion. I also kinda just 'get' the snark/culture of reddit as it were, and interestingly enough it doesn't matter my political persuasion as there's enough different corners of reddit to find where I fit in. People are also more willing to share their real thoughts when there's some measure of anonymity whether that's good or bad, who knows.
Reddit + HN is basically my source of news/new thoughts. Best part of reddit is that topics are generally single groups, where there's like 5 yard sale groups on FB JUST for my city in a county with 45k people in rural utah, on FB nothing's stopping there being 2 or 200 SLC groups, but on reddit - everyone just would go to the one w/ the most subscribers/content/activity....
FB is nothing but memes or people trying to sell something. Of course Reddit going public will probably make it incentivized to turn more of a profit and go that way as well.
My only real gripe w/ Reddit is that I can't use the login via Relay on Android because something's jacked w/ my main account... if I go to user/prefs I get an error after a long wait...and it's been reported for a few months and no fix...
I also feel like all social media the there are very toxic aspects to Reddit. I used to be very active on there, but after receiving constant abuse and very few constructive replies I now rarely participate in discussions there. Again with the company going public like Facebook and Twitter, Reddit could come under more scrutiny for this.
Assuming you buy for a fair valuation I don't think it's a bad investment per say, but I think there are a lot of risks there. I find myself wishing for an alternative to Reddit a lot these days because I really miss the high quality discussions I used to have there 10 or so years ago.
In my opinion if you disagree don't upvote, or at least downvote until 0. So people know the overall sentiment is negative, but there's not need to show how negative it is. If it's so bad to be offesive or innacurate, then report it. But downvoting until it's negative feels really overkill and feels like at the moment everyone not only disagrees, but hates you.
The constructive replies you talk about depends on the subreddit. There are subreddits that are literally lifesavers. For example subreddits to overcome emotional abuse and abusive relationships, you'll find support there that is simply amazing and not abusive at all. Or subreddits about certain niches that people are passionate about.
Unfortunately toxic people are sadistic and get a kick out of abusing people, so it's bound to happen. Best way is to report it, so the moderators either warn the person or ban them.
For example, that video by The Verge where that guy builds a PC in the stupidest way - it's got thousands of likes for some reason but 10s of thousands of dislikes because it's not the way you should build a PC
Now the dislike counter is gone, those who see the video think "oh this has thousands of likes. It must be good".
Downvoting does attract idiots and pile-ons, but it does serve a purpose as a a lose indicator of content/comment quality
Rising engagement could also come from content that got linked and from people just visiting the page.
Buying votes for reddit is allegedly quite cheap as well.
One area that seems inevitably would have to change is Reddit’s linking to pirated video clips. I’m sure the clips won’t go away but would be altered in a way so that reddit has deals with copyright owners and unskippable ads are played.
Ultimately all these media funded platforms under-weight advertising to begin with to build a user-base so become worse to use once established.
I agree. But first they'll have to get on the blockchain, and then build up their autonomous vehicle division. No big deal, just use CRISPR.
https://reddit.com/r/lawncare/comments/fb1gjj/a_beginners_gu...
If I am querying something technical for work or hobby development I use the HN Algolia search.
Twitter is the only other social network I keep an account on, but barely ever visit because of the firehose of noise despite having a painstakingly selected list of accounts followed. E.g. lots of journalists doing great work, but also posting a lot of personal life updates that are not relevant to me.
HN might become what Reddit is now. On the flip side the difficulty of removing posts here/simple upvote system/other limiting features may prevent that from ever happening. There have been attempts to clone Reddit, all have been terrible. Its clear that to create an equivalent, its going to take more than a weekend project.
For now. Just watch what happens to it under constant pressure from Wall Street to grow and grow and grow...
Doing so will first require the Reddit team to develop a competent search engine. Searching Google or DDG with site:reddit.com is far better than native Reddit search for topics. The Camas Reddit search is what you need for a power search to find that one post that you swear you've read five years ago. Neither use case is well-served by the current search implementation on Reddit itself.
That seems strange to me. Most of my search results don't lead there. This seems like something worth investigating on your part. Maybe google knows you like reddit, tend to follow links there, and hence puts them higher in your search rankings? Is that a thing with google? I think it may be based on my own past experience too.
I do this sometimes too, because it's one of the ways to get actual opinions on something, and not just worthless blog spam.
I also find searching Reddit, especially for introductory advice, to be very commonly useful. Since Reddit's search sucks, I usually use duckduckgo or Google to search it.
- political extremism
- very flimsy segregation of NSFW material (and usernames are basically not censored)
I doubt they would be dumb enough to do a Tumblr, but it can't be ruled out entirely.
But for how long I wonder. Those niche communities continue to use Reddit because they can circumvent the dark-patterns and ads usually with a custom client.
And those clients depend upon reddit API. We've seen in the past that once the community-focused Internet platforms get large, Especially when they go public then the API restrictions are soon to follow as advertiser's interest becomes primary and the majority users don't care as they're not in for those niche communities.
For that matter, if you don’t believe in Reddit’s long term success, there are both investment opportunities and opportunities to build something better.
It's the same thing as people used to say about Wikipedia. Oh, they shouldn't take volunteers and just pay for encyclopedia editors. But if you want content at scale, you need to provide power to people so they can say what they want, and they are going to abuse it. But the alternative as never worked, and in fact, people get really mad here when people try to implement the alternative.
Information requested: Thoughts on the big oft-theorized thing in the last book and how it’ll affect the story going forward.
There are some subreddits that I found because they were cross referenced. I consider that to be a core feature.
Make a minimum requirement of 1000 characters, all spammers evaders are banned.
Make blocking hide the person you blocked’s posts.
Bring back visible downvotes.
Ban politics. It will not actually work and they’ll do it covertly but it would significantly improve the site.
Ban abusive mods. If some no life power tripper is being an asshole or bans you for posting in another sub, fuck them.
That's a political statement.
Just like real life social scenes, or city neighborhoods, too, now that I think about it.
- Stop being like quora and restricting content if you're not logged in
- fix the video player on the new site
- support the native video player on the old site & polls
- remove the supermod system, where senior mods control half the site, old mods should not be able to invite new mods past a certain point but they'll just create sockpuppet accounts so
- remove more subreddits from the default list
- remove the "influencer" aspects of the site. People don't need a profile with a custom picture, don't need to post to their /u/ board when they should be posting on a subreddit.
- go back to reddit gold, get rid of the 50+ awards
- custom comment backgrounds from certain awards are fine, let people purchase colored borders or something
- go back to showing the progress bar for how close the site is to earning enough to pay for servers that day from gold purchases
- when you end up hiring extremely controversial staff, avoid auto deleting criticism about them
- don't edit other user's comments
- integrate more of RES's features into reddit
- bring back live threads
- RPAN is a fine way to try to introduce more social stuff (imagine r/games hosting a pov stream of blizzcon) but the current users are weird
- bring back AMAs with famous people, not B or C list actors that are promoting their new book (so bring back someone in Victoria's role)
- get rid of the moon currency feature
- encourage mods to delete threads with inaccurate titles / clickbait until a link is submitted with an accurate name
> - remove the "influencer" aspects of the site. People don't need a profile with a custom picture, don't need to post to their /u/ board when they should be posting on a reddit reddit.
I think this was added for the OnlyFans pipeline. There is a massive porn community on Reddit, and the entirety of it thrives on this feature. Whether either of us want that, Reddit's decided it is a good and reliable monetary way forward.
In any case, these three bans were many years ago.
I think the VCs that invested in Reddit did it for the very specific purpose that you just decided wasn't important anymore.
Investors(which includes VCs/angels,etc. AND employees) should be rewarded, whether that's the risk they take (ex. VCs) or the work they put in (employees). I'm confused where this viewpoint came from, given every business works this way -- a company gets investments (either through money or employee time) and if that business grows, so do the investments...
VC investors indeed try to get VC returns but sometimes their bets fail and that's part of their portfolio theory.
The early investors have definitely done well already.
there's a chance I think, that creating more "obscure" spaces might actually be the better option for preserving these kinds of communities, or at least letting them thrive more easily, reddit survived this long I think by being slightly difficult to navigate and having weird communities that could self police and there are still spots on there I enjoy, but none I really socialize in the way I originally did on finding the site.. anyways those are just musings and not really helpful to the question of how to fix it, just more of why I think it's broken...
I'm not aware of instances where people join a community BECAUSE they banned something. There's plenty of evidence for the reverse, such as when the removal of fat people hate and other subs led to an exodus to Voat.
From there you only have to do a decent job like TikTok has done of content discovery to allow new content to thrive, and from comments on that content allow people to find better communities.
Then who prevents totally-unrelated trash from being deliberately misfiled under popular tags?
Subreddits are a way to farm out moderation without paying employees to do it.
The other way to do this is to have just as good support for +tags in queries as -tags in queries. When adding a tag for no reason is making it less visible to the people who are filtering out that tag, they stop doing it.
Can’t block ads when they’re disguised as user content. Viral marketers have had a heyday hawking their products on Reddit
No, ad blocking
Example:
Last time I read /r/funny for a period I noticed a wave of "look at what funny thing I did with these Coke bottles" posts that were so obviously part of a marketing campaign that surely reddit admins noticed it too.
I don't think they would allow that if they weren't in on it. In that case they may have even helped with the upvotes so no external service where you can easily buy votes (easily found through Google, [1]) would have been needed.
Some examples for upvote services:
- https://www.soar.sh/service/buy-reddit-upvotes/
- https://reddit-marketing.pro/
(top three search results when I googled "buy reddit votes")
Surely, given how visible such services are, monetizing reddit buy selling upvotes would be one of the first things anyone wanting to monetize reddit comes up with. The only difference to the 3rd party vote sellers is that they will have to hide it better and/or find justifications because the company itself doing it causes a bit more outrage.
I also don't think the more niche sub reddits will be (are?) safe. Anyone who wants to sell something more specialized has a target audience much better than anything Facebook can create by selecting the right subreddit, because the audience is self-selecting. Same as for the Coke campaign, since it's hard too hide what's going on from the admins they could stop much of that, so paying reddit to have your posts even boosted by them is safest for any marketer.
They might not have noticed a few isolated cases, but they sure would have noticed the phenomenon as such by now. The company would have an even bigger incentive now to try to get such monetization for themselves instead of letting others make the money with their site.
Beyond that I stopped using mainstream reddit as a value source.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/loco-motive/
It's similar to how the Nazis claimed the Autobahn as their success, even though they were started under the Weimar Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsautobahn
https://files.catbox.moe/szanpo.jpeg
https://files.catbox.moe/j9qerx.jpeg
I don't mind them trying to fund themselves, but those aren't exactly vetted "ethical ads", are they?
Edit: Your comment really bothers me. At no point did I suggest that websites should not ask their users for money. I was wondering about and criticizing their apparently heavy use of user-abusive ads, while still asking users directly for money. Usually on the Web we see one or the other but not both.
Snopes probably gets a lot of bandwidth (and probably attacks) just due to them being very mainstream.
It's really too bad that the StackExchange "OpenID" thing never went anywhere. Otherwise we'd get the same kind of "one login, many communities" benefits of Reddit without forcing everyone to use a centralized platform like Reddit (even if authentication is still centralized in OpenID).
There are times when I argue that "apps" or sites must be thought of differently than the Internet itself, but this is not one of them. Reddit has no monopoly on hobby chat, or on tiktok garbage, or on local communities, or on news commentary. It is not the same kind of network-effect trap as, say, Facebook.
If ever someone asks me about reddit or if it's useful, I say to stay off any community greater than about 100-150k. Use it for discussing specific video games or hobbies, or on tightly moderated subs with focused discussion.
If any sub has posts from "karma farmers", accounts with super high karma like 500k or more, then it's probably a place worth being suspicious of from either a utility OR an astroturfing standpoint. Lots of agenda-pushing.
i can see the API becoming more restrictive in the coming years, like Facebook and Twitter’s before it.
Slow reddit now supports markdown code blocks with 3 `’s instead of 4 spaces, which gets rendered as normal inline-text on old.
Using the editor to insert links with _ in them on slow, will escape the underscores (…/this_is/ => …/this\_is/), breaking the links for users of the fast version.
The worst part (for me) is, that I actually like the new reddit. In compact mode it’s cleaner than old while not wasting any space compared to old. But sadly their performance targets were something like "Uh, I guess pages should probably load in under 500ms" which is in no way acceptable for me.
Reading through advent of code solutions has been a mess because of this. Some people just won't 4-space it.
Reddit's official app is very poor and they've broken the mobile web experience by choice.
The day Sync stops working will be my final day on the platform.
I've said it before, but old.reddit.com and Apollo are the only methods I use to browse the site. If either dies or the API becomes private/non-existent then I'm out.
I just checked: the API does not (seem to) allow to retrieve items by date. Which means that a major fault of the site cannot be fixed through the API: reading the post history through random access, e.g. the posts of a specific date in a section.
(Although, one could probably harvest through the API an index of "fullnames" (IDs) and associate them to their dates or use them directly for random access in the queries - "list starting with the newest, fill DB of IDs and give me the last; list from that last, fill DB of IDs and give me the new last; loop until end". Not really the most practical way to use a repository.)
> downvote
The worst attack against civilization after - (I can't think of anything) - is an encouragement to vote according to "how does that make you feel".
If they kill off old Reddit, there's no way I'll be able to tolerate using the site. Surely I'm not alone in this, or perhaps 99% of the traffic is mobile users on recent phones?
/r/Askwomen: What are 100% effective ways at turning you on?
/r/Teenagers: Every1 who wears their PJs to bed, I'll tell you your favourite band.
/r/ <<literally every subreddit>>: I HAVE A CAT, NAME IT FOR ME.
/r/NoStupidQuestions: If a woman shakes my hand is that code for sex?
/r/Askmen: What's your one perfect way to get a girlfriend?
/r/Pics: Here's 10,000 photos of people being gross on airplanes, what's something passive aggressive that I can do instead of just asking them to stop?
/r/Antiwork: I donated my heart to my boss and he fired me
/r/TooAfraidtoask: How to get girlfriend????
/r/explainlikeimfive: Do girls get horny too? how?
/r/politics: wanton hyperbole, plain and simple.
"Screenshots of Tweets" Subreddits
/r/Antiwork: Literally every problem, shortcoming, or thing you don't like is ultimately because of capitalism.
/r/LateStageCapitalism: Same as above, but we need at least two subreddits about this to really hammer the point home.
/r/WhitePeopleTwitter: Leftist hot-takes du jour, as well as well-trodden reposts.
/r/BlackPeopleTwitter: Leftist hot-takes but posted by 'verified' reddit users.
/r/MurderedByWords: Tomi Lahren and Strawmen being mocked via tweet
/r/MurderedByAOC: Pretty much any AOC tweet posted by u/IrlOurPresident
/r/AOC: Just in case you haven't seen u/IrlOurPresident's post on the front page yet.
When you combine this with the fact that moderation on the site is unpaid, it's literally a land mine: anything done on it is open to litigation, and all of the counter-measures are "we rely on unpaid volunteers." It's a nightmare for a public offering, really. It'd be like investing in Facebook, except if Facebook's stances were "well, vaccination is a choice" and "we can't pay people to remove inappropriate content; we just rely on unpaid volunteers for that."
Reddit has effectively monetized outrage in a way Facebook could only ever hope to: instead of primarily presenting your friend circles, and the outrage there, Reddit presents the outrage of the social media cloud itself, weaponized in the form of upvotes. The worst part of browsing Reddit is the level of smugness you see around its users: they act like Instagram/Facebook is the worst parts of humanity, while actively engaging with a different corporation selling the same thing but more effectively.
0. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debat...
First of all, the part about the "right to dissent" I think was later retracted; and importantly, a witch hunt was in fact carried out - starting from r/aww ("the cute pets" or similar).
I have just red on The Coversation the article "Shaming unvaccinated people has to stop. We've turned into an angry mob and it's getting ugly" (Julian Savulescu, MCRI, Uni Melbourne and Oxford), https://theconversation.com/shaming-unvaccinated-people-has-... , which reports that
> a whole Reddit channel is devoted to mocking people who die after refusing the vaccine
Does "going to public" increase the liability for legal action?
Reddit divides US society into 2 halves and makes them scream divisive hate at each other, 24 hours a day. What can possibly go wrong?
Reddit has immense staying power - it is addictive. I find myself mindlessly scrolling it and putting up with most of its awfulness. But I attribute that to the users and not the product... as Digg showed, once greener pastures appear, there's not much left to brag about.
You can safely assume that many people will not be proud of participating to a dubious product.
You can not even assume that one in general will be especially proud of wide adoption - the weight given to "general/generic approval" is a personal variable.
Normalizing the expression to «some people already don't want to admit to working there», you get a pretty basic truth, that products change and enthusiasm in the project contributors swings accordingly. That is surely not eliminated by the idea they can hold, "Yes but the product is popular": popularity does not fix projectual lacks, it is not necessarily valid as a consolation. Some will try to steer the culture and encourage fixing the fault, some will be just embarassed.
Some members here are noting that this piece of news about going public may exacerbate some of the faults (i.e. toxic hooking) - some presume that this will put more weight on the idea of maximizing revenues, psychopathically ("Whatever it takes").
In fact, gambling has some people «spend hours on a day», and you cannot suppose that "developers of gambling machines will be proud". And this is very relevant to a number of current social networks. Spending time is not a value - investing time is.
Do yourself a favour and unsubscribe to any subreddit that deals with the news or politics. Some subreddits have become too big to properly moderate, unsubscribe to them too.
Now I suspect they are trying to transition towards somehow deriving value as a hub for what are now cult like communities that stan and provide PR for powerful groups like various corporations, media conglomerates, sporting leagues and franchises, political ideologies and so on. Those are the communities that feed off drama and hype that social media has learned will drive the most engagement. They sprinkle it in with other innocuous things like cute pets or viral tik tok reposts (and the other subreddits that are actually very good) to make it not seem as egregious as it really is and hope that most people continue to believe that it is the same organic "front page of the internet" that it had become ever since Digg decided to kill itself many years ago.
Much like almost everything else from that time, they simply just outgrew and replaced their core demographic with a group that are much easier to exploit.
For instance, I am a member of /r/synthesizers, but all trading/buying happens on eBay or reverb.com. Can reddit provide the way for this community to transact in a more high-value/trusted way? Maybe I'm missing something and that is a terrible business.
High value honest and transparent ads can work, like say "Will it blend" or providing field related instructions good enough to essentially be the canon to say synthesier configuration and maintenance.
That is hard and bespoke. Meanwhile crap ads are very easy and adaptable. So long as there is a positive return being a menace or nuisance to the commons can pay. As spam infamously shows.
Where did the core demographic go?
* [Your default sort and filter list no longer only contains content you are subscribed to.](https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/m1pb9u/comment/gqgh82...)
* They continually "improve" the default (and Hot, New, Top, and Rising) sort and filter algorithm(s). Every day it contains less relevant content for you, and more content peppered with ads and outrage. All of these options are slowly morphing into the same sort and filter set.
* They are aggressively shutting down interesting communities which don't fit their advertiser profile, and using the above algorithms to ensure no one ever sees them. These include, for example, discussion of covid or vaccines from a critical perspective; assisted suicide; Donald Trump; guns; trans controversies; etc.
* They are aggressively policing language. There is a growing list of words which, if used, will earn the user a ban.
* They stopped work on old.reddit.com, which gave users more transparent control over sort and filter. I predict they will kill it soon.
* They currently allow API access for third party aps. These aps don't serve ads and can employ their own sorting and filtering. I predict open APIs will be shut down, just like all the other major platforms have done.
Long story short, Reddit is going to turn into Facebook. They've made that intention clear. It's only a matter of time before they demand Facebook-like verification for users.
And also disable the trending option in your preferences Its the (show trending subreddits on the home feed (a list of popular and notable subreddits to check out)) in your preferences.
And then your home page is normal, sure that should be the default, but it's not hard to do
Anything popular will have this problem.
Even the most notorious "chans" banned some things/topics.
If you are dealing with controversial topics you best bet is to own your own platform, and don't grow to big.
That's just how this world works, and its not even limited to online. Look at silk road. There are tones of dark web places like it, but once things get too popular, people will go to extraordinary lengths to shut it down.
The only controversial site that somehow still tags along is the pirate bay. And it's more shadow of its former self.
This is news to me - any examples?
edit: add the link [0] https://join-lemmy.org/
Since I already have an account on a mastodon instance I first thought I can just connect to lemmy instances using that but that is apparently not possible.
Because of your own outrage? Or because of financials of the business model. If the former, how different are you than the stubborn anti-vaxxers? I believe the business model is a proven one. I'll withhold my judgement til when I see the first 10Q.
Your comment itself is designed to fuel outrage. What a scummy company!
Reddit exists in the same way that digg and slashdot before it has: it's the incumbent, the default choice. It could lose it all in a year and no one would be surprised - because it's happened multiple times already and the userbase is already highly cynical.
That wasn't helped by making the site unusable on mobile; a change made to entice (read: force) users to the more lucrative app. However this merely led people to alternatives such as Apollo, which remove the ads, the reddit value-generating nonsense and introduces useful features such as the ability to download video content. Perhaps counter-intuitively these kinds of apps are likely to keep users on reddit. However with an IPO I would not be surprised to see Reddit pull 'an Instagram' and invest efforts in preventing 3rd party apps from functioning correctly.
Edit your homepage.
I run agressive ad blocks and I'll still get pictures on r/aww/ of a kitten next to a freshely delivery KFC - with a title like "Kittens first every KFC delivery to investigate".
What I'd like to know is how Reddit monetizes those ads that make it through to everyone.
I wouldn't discount their success and future success (as much as I'd like to).
What's odd is they haven't stopped growing. It's just been linear user growth.
They could literally do nothing and the site would still grow. It's closer to Wikipedia than a social network in some respects. And by that standard, we should try to judge it.
I look forward to the next forum site as much as the next person. But I don't know what it would look like. If anyone does, I definitely urge you to build it if you can.
Substack has every incentive to build a community. Discord as well. So there's definitely opportunities, but from where I sit, I don't have any insight as to what you could do to beat this behemoth.
Sadly, many of the bigger subs have less and less quality.
There’s a post I remember from about 2010 that blew my mind in the /r/philosophy subreddit. Now /r/philosophy is all crap, and I can’t event find that article.
The more specific and concrete (and smaller, above a certain minimum) the sub is, the better the content. Indeed the same - absent the size qualification - could be said of hacker news discussions.
I suspect it may have something to do with the tendency for those with little knowledge of a complex, abstract and highly nuanced subject to upvote or downvote based on some combination of popular bias and sentiment contrasted with the decreased likelihood of those with knowledge to do the same (because they know more, they are less confident in their opinion). Combined with the fact that invariably growth means more users in the former group joining than the latter.
More concrete subjects where comments can be based on specialized experience (rather than just knowledge) help individuals without that experience to exclude themselves from voting and those with to step in. That hn is based around such a concrete topic is what saves it (combined of course with the paid and highly skilled and dedicated moderation).
Most growth is driven by Google Search. It accounts for almost half of their traffic. At this point, SEO is their moat. The problem they have had is that they cant get most of the traffic to convert ie. create accounts and engage in those subreddits. That is still done by a small fraction of the traffic.
As an experiment, if you create an account on Reddit, you see that you are automatically added to r/announcements. (It does not even offer you a choice). That sub has grown very slow compared to their DAUs and MAUs. It still has about 127M subscribers (lifetime)
Is that really a problem? Any site like this is going to see the same dynamics. e.g., the vast majority of Stack Overflow users never make an account either.
Stack Overflow is not the best comparison. In some cases yes, they are very similar, but mostly the reason for users to land on stack overflow is very different (solving a problem while working) than for users to land on a subreddit/post (looking for more info and satisfying curiosity via Google search - not always solving a problem)
And again, you cant see that they are even visiting a page. All the signals - upvotes, comments, etc. are only available when logged in. (except for video views)
Now it's like a red flag in your resume if you worked for reddit
Then they made a whole mess on the homepage. This is what happens when you hire mediocre engineers. Its like junior engineers who cant write code. Reddit mobile is not bad, but stop trying to make me install it. There are people who only wants to use web. But your web engineers are garbage
their ads is incredibly bad.
there are dark patterns everywhere. Now they're even trying to mess up the old.redit.com
The site always crashes.
It's like the early founders did a really good job, and the vultures who could barely pass as a PM or as an engineer took over.
I mean if they wanted to save this site, they would prob have to lay off all the fat and start rehiring.
I was excited for reddit back in the day, i thought they had a shot of saving the internet. now they're trying to get into everything, and can barely execute
So the trillion dollar question is, what's next to replace reddit
The things you are holding people accountable for are very questionable in almost all cases. In most cases it just comes off as jealousy that someone is doing better than you.
I’m all for being held accountable. But i put very little weight in public opinion being something that we should even think about at this point.
That is certainly a very convenient way of dismissing something you find uncomfortable.
There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly unethical about any work Reddit engineers have done.
I feel like this happens to a lot of organizations/products that start off being really neat.
Fast forward 10 years, and most/all of the people responsible for the good stuff have moved on. The brand ambles on like a relative with dementia. The lights are on, but you know nobody's home.
I think Amazon is very much a victim of its own success and rapid growth.
They started as a bookstore.
Sure they were a bookstore first but they over engineered it to scale.
It used to be written in lisp. It used to be good before eternal September. Being a redditor was a nerdy virtue signaler. Now? You can be seen as a white supremacist, a commie, a clout chasing loser trying to get upvotes, or an incel when you mention it.
What’s on the front is inexcusable though. This is not just dark patterns: shit straight up doesn’t work. Good engineers don’t ship that.
The video player has sucked for years so much that I built a service that fetches the raw hls URL and plays that directly in the browser. Night and day. How do you mess up something that works out of the box?
I can’t think of a single website with that many backend problems.
I've tried turning on/off 2fa, resetting my password, etc... nothing works. i've contacted reddit and submitted to their help sub, crickets.
So yeah, taking shots at the engineers imho is fair game, this is a major issue. I can't even go to /user/prefs/apps to enable/disable apps attached to my account which seems like it could be a security vulnerability. I always get "You broke reddit"..
when I try logging in on Relay or ANY other 3rd party mobile app it hangs after I'm logged in and can't handle the token exchange part of the oauth flow where the data is passed back to the app.
If you call this stable.... I'd hate to see unstable. The mobile app is a no go... I like to be able to change views between small cards, gallery, and large-card depending on what I'm using reddit for...
I always find it useful to compare reddit to imgur. IMO the future of reddit is the present of imgur. The value proposition of imgur in large parts is the same as reddit IF we ignore the part where imgur was hit with a deadly blow when reddit launched in-platform media hosting.
Imgur's push for mobile app and the desparate attempt (I will say plea) to form a loyal community around the product really shows how internet platforms fails to innovate and think community is the only to tool growth and survival.
On the other hand we see another example of Tumblr where communities get in the way of operating a business.
After everything I say I find Facebook and YouTube is successful because community driven platforms work in niches but to scale up you must establish yourself as a monopoly and focus on running a business while juggling all the negativity.
That said, I agree with you: it feels like Imgur makes the Reddit move about twelve months before it, every time. From gif hosting to discovery to live feeds to requiring logins for NSFW content, Imgur basically leads Reddit. It honestly makes me wonder why I bother with Reddit at all...
As for structure, I think that forums and image boards that are basically just chronologically ordered items of text where each item of text can have either implicit or explicit links to previous items of text are in a sense superior to tree-based forums like Reddit anyway because directed acyclic graphs are a superset of trees.
As for upvote/downvote mechanisms, I have never seen a forum that was improved by them. Such mechanisms are probably good for driving engagement but from the point of view of stimulating thought, I think that as opposed to having an outside algorithm preference certain comments over others, it is better when users have to either manually go through a flat chronologically ordered list of comments or implement their own search functionality on top of that list in order to find comments that they want to engage with. If a forum provides advanced tools to search and sort comments, that is good, but I would prefer that a forum not build any given sorting other than chronological into its default UI.
Reddit, at least, still allows users to sort in ways other than by "best". In my experience and according to my taste, large subreddits usually are often pretty useless unless I sort by "new" or "controversial". Sorting by "best" all too often - not always, but all too often - just brings the least common denominator up to the top. Another good method for using Reddit is to make note of any individual users whose writings you find interesting and to then just read through their Reddit histories - this can also be a good way to find interesting subreddits that you might not have come upon otherwise.
They did. Your first paragraph describes Reddit perfectly.
> it is better when users have to either manually go through a flat chronologically ordered list of comments or implement their own search functionality on top of that list in order to find comments that they want to engage with
Which website(s) are you thinking of?
Nope. It's the result of perverse incentives and poor management. I can imagine the developers (even the designers) had a good vision of what to build and how to build it, only to be overruled by management with ideas like "make it janky as hell so we can force all our users to our mobile app to track them better".
Discord is taking some of their traffic. But it sucks as a replacement since the threading model doesn't match a true forum.
The entire mod culture needs to be reworked too. They need mods because more people brings more trolls, but aggressive banning and simultaneous muting so people can't ask why just leads to more trolling. Not to mention most mods just cite every ban in the coverall "read the rules / figure it out" so they have to spend no effort, even though those rules don't cover the actual ban reason.
I just can't believe how many consistently bad decisions are made there. The biggest of all was probably removing the separated and accurate upvote / downvote counters which is a massive feature to show the strength of otherwise downvoted comments.
Aside from these feature complaints, how does a company of this size and importance have such an astonishingly badly coded interface? I always have to use the Old site. It reminds me of an intern coming in and on day 1 marking all code as "legacy" and saying "Electron is the greatest thing ever made, because it's easy and just works. There's literally no reason to use anything except Electron for any project."
Instagram and Twitter do this as well, FWIW.
I have clone but it needs little more polish and timing :)
I also like that they've kept discussions text oriented, instead of allowing for embedded tweets, images, or videos to clog up comment threads (I like this about HN, as well). They might renege on this in the future, but I like the distinctly 2000s feel to discussions.
https://old.reddit.com/r/InsanePeopleQuora/comments/kip08x/w...
I wish that was my experience too.
Generally I'll avoid the subreddits for anything I'm interested in, as they're frequented by "experts" who feel the need to ruin everyone's fun.
It's great for things I'm not interested in, though, as it's a quick way to get genuine information on what is considered a good brand of bike shorts or hair curling products.
Mind giving an example? I'm just curious because to me the high point of reddit is learning way more about interests I already love. For example I don't think I would've gotten nearly as into mechanical keyboards without /r/mechanicalkeyboards around.
Not trying to be a dick here, but this line of reasoning just isn't clicking so asking.
This got me to thinking though...almost every news outlet flubs covering deeply technical things folks here would be familiar with, and we all have a laugh. But we get our news from them and generally believe it, so do we all suffer from it to some extent?
The underlying presumption of it is every person working at a paper is equally wrong about the topic they write.
However, most newspapers are focused on politics and so those might be better.
I would not expect a good analysis on the Palestinian conflict from Linus Tech Tips nor a good analysis on the latest graphics cards from Foreign Affairs.
I know you were just making an extreme comparison, but I genuinely think they'd do a good job of it if push came to shove. Linus and the people who work for him are beyond professional.
No, but such analysis would be informative when you stop to analyze just how persuasive he manages to sound when he's talking about something he obviously knows nothing about. His tone, cadence, body language.. it would reveal to you how good he is at mimicking the superficial characteristics of being an expert. If he's bad at those things when speaking outside his wheelhouse, that's a good thing! But if he's really good at seeming like an expert when you have good reason to think he isn't one, that's a huge warning sign that he might not actually be so proficient in the things you previously believed him to be good at.
Essentially, whenever I look into communities of things that I'm interested in, I'll see a dedicated core of people insisting that it must be experienced a specific way, and any other way is wrong. Basically wine snobs, but for everything.
However, if I'm an outsider looking to get information for a gift or something I have a passing interest in, this can be quite often useful. If the snobs acknowledge something as legit, then I know that it's likely to be good.
Edit: Karrot_Kream put it perfectly with their use of the phrase "gatekeeping". Special interest groups have this problem, and Reddit fails to solve it.
This kind of gatekeeping was pretty common in the old days on niche-interest forums too btw. I don't know what a good solution for this is. You even see this kind of behavior in academia.
Doesn’t mean it won’t do well but its just another flavor of facebook.
No, reddit has threads/subjects. Facebook posts organization almost does not exist, it is unusable to read anything there.
The senseless outrage on this site sometimes measures up completely.
Because these services are so all-encompassing, they are bound to have some amount of well-curated content, or at the very least content that holds one's interest. By virtue of that minuscule amount of content being hosted on the massive aggregate site, that predisposes some people to affirm or at least ignore the idea of the overarching site as a whole, along with the SEO mechanisms, influencers, etc. that always get so much flak in certain circles.
In other words, because the site is so massive there will always be a population of consumers in their own niches that never encounter any outrage or issues. There will also be a population exposed to the "rage generating" content. The subset of people aware of the toxicity and how it relates to the workings of the platform itself may or may not overlap with these groups. But in the end, because the site has become so massive that content creators have caused it to encompass literally everything that can be thought of as a topic of interest to general humanity, all of these groups, whether harmful or harmless, contribute to the site's continued growth and prosperity, and more and more people participate as a result.
If you don't believe me, go browse /r/popular or some such and see how long it takes to see right-wing posts. The right-wing posts are usually heavily downvoted, so you'll see one with 100 upvotes between two posts with 20k upvotes; that's by design.
I guess good things can’t stay free forever and the bills need to be paid somehow. Wish they went to a donation model like Wikipedia instead.
They didn’t learn.
Most recently they’ve switched image galleries to using their new desktop design, so simply trying to view images often pops up this new and totally incompatible experience. Earlier today the left/right nav icons stopped working so I just gave up on trying to view those images.
I use mobile safari on mobile, which this extension doesn’t work for.
Where will people head from the reddit exodus?
I'm also seeing various communities simply making their own websites. rdrama.net, for example, is surprisingly successful. kotakuinaction2.win is also doing quite well. I'm sure there are other, even better examples. At first I was resistant of this fragmentation, but I quickly came to embrace this reversion to the internet of yore. It wasn't so long ago that we would go to individual sites to discuss certain things. It's a relatively recent phenomenon that we've embraced monolithic communities for all of our media and social consumption. I don't think it's healthy, and perhaps this fragmentation is exactly what the internet needs right now. Less algorithm-generated outrage in the dystopian "news feed," and more user-driven experiences based on choosing which sites to visit. A crazy concept for many today.
Big yikes from me, dawg.
Anyone know of any that aren't? Most things around that I know of are from people getting banned from reddit and building their own.
Just checked out tildes.net, that one seems pretty ok at a first glance.
Prior to ads and the current dark patterns you see on the site, Reddit primarily tried to monetize through Reddit Gold. It didn't work, and users never purchased it in any meaningful volume to keep the site afloat. So while you wouldn't give them money for the decisions they've made recently, they weren't making enough money when they were (ostensibly) making better decisions.
How would you go about solving this problem? It's a genuine question without snark - if social media companies are unable to stay sustainable through direct user funding, then they're going to look to ads or other sources eventually.
I thought Reddit gold was just some meaningless emoji thing.
Can you talk about your work there? It’s cool if you don’t want to, how was it? You left obviously so I can guess.
I sincerely believe that the leadership tried to avoid the ads revenue stream and all the ills that come with it for as long as possible, and searched for a lot of ways out (see things like Reddit Notes in the past). But I don't think I'll work in the social media domain again, because the experience really soured me on the sustainability model as a whole. People are generally unwilling to donate/pay for the content, and it's impossible to operate a site where there's no subscription revenue coming in.
I don’t disagree with you though, if it’s given to you free it’s expected to be free forever. They’ll try to get money somehow but nobody will like it. I definitely liked it at first too, but it’s become so much different.
I'm not sure where the P2P interactions will go - it's possible that they stay centralized on the major platforms of today, or we see a return to smaller forums as we had back in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Whenever a new user creates an account, she automatically gets added to r/announcements. It's not a choice, they dont even show it as an option.
The current subs of r/announcements is 127M. It was 124M at the start of this month. Just shows that reddit - with newer design or not - has not found much acceptance in the upcoming generations. They tend to visit the site, yet are hesitant to create an account. For reference, their MAUs for month of Dec 19 alone were 430M. They got a lot of help from SEO for everyone of their threads being indexed, and hence the high traffic, but regular users and personalized ads isnt there. Likely low ARPU.
Edit: This is probably the reason for those dark patterns too. If I can see that low conversion rate, so can people inside, and they would try and improve that via different UX patterns. Because it seems like a low hanging fruit when it is not really one.
What I am trying to say is that, reddit is attracting a lot of new users through SEO, yet they have not been able to convert them like at all. The existing userbase is sticking and has been very active, but the site is not as appealing to new users who are just finding out about reddit.
I've never really looked into it. It's an interesting thing that they managed to get un-acquired somehow.
In fact, there are so many questions. Does YC get a payday out of this, or was their stock acquired during the acquisition? 2% of $5B is $100M, so it's a lot of money at stake.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/31/reddit-just-raised-a-new-r...
* spend 9 figures for a redesign
The choice was obvious
Wow, time has not been kind to this paragraph. The redesign is still hated by a large portion of the userbase and the Reddit video player is infamously unreliable.
I'm curious what happened behind the scenes here.
It hasn't worked for some time.
But they might of course try to shut them down as well.
Being able to chose to use a different front end only solves part of the problem.
If they then do the logical thing and block third party apps then I will just stop using reddit completely, because using the official app just isn't worth it.
- Pop-up to download app
- Pop-up has been un-clearable on a number of occasions
- Having to click "read more" to see more than two posts
- Having to click a link to a new page to follow a thread more than two / three replies deep (and often finding that it's only a single, useless reply)
- Other progressively more trivial annoyances
I would love to get Dang's perspective but it would be difficult for him to say anything.
But more specifically there is no nexus between the decline, or behaviour, and a desire to IPO and realize profit. Not all things co-relate, they can be contemporaneous and un-related.
Whatever Dan has, and he has a lot of "it" -it includes tolerance and forbearance, and an ability not to buy into the paranoia at large. I don't think he'd be part of an IPO decision logic which went "yea it's boring: lets profit and run" -there might be a "profit" and there might be a consequential "run" and there might be "its boring" but I don't personally see them as causally connected.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
The actual quote has a bunch of links that I worth looking at. People were echo'ing your comment 7 years ago.
As to your comment itself, I don't think HN is degrading that fast? The low-quality "meme" responses usually get downvoted and while polarization is alive and well, most of it leads to interesting arguments so it's not necessarily a bad thing.
I've only been here for 2-3 years though so maybe it was different before.
I feel pretty strong about this. Usually, if I’m not convinced, I wouldn’t put it in such strong terms.
A few years ago, trying to have the same conversations on reddit, everything degraded into personal attacks eventually.
Sometimes things get flagged incorrectly, but usually within a few days issues get fixed. Sometimes you see a flurry of unneeded downvotes.. but scores don't matter much and things get worked out.
My sarcastic comments generally score poorly, my helpful ones do well - which is about the desired outcome.
The goal is not to prevent inflammatory takes or have scores reflect some ideal of values, just to keep the signal above the noise threshold.
I still get odd emails from other HNers and still have interesting conversations.
I first realised this back in the 1990s when shitty default monitor resolution and refresh rate would literally inflict pain (headaches and eyestrain).
MS Windows 95 / 98 shipped with a default of 800x600@60Hz. This was on CRTs, many viewed under office flourescent lighting, which gave rise to a bloody awful flicker that people mistakenly attemtped to correct with "glare screens" and other useless crud.
The solution was simply to crank up refresh rate slightly. Bumping up resolution also gave more useful area and clearer, easier-to-read fonts. (This was also before Cleartype / sub-pixel rendering.)
And yet something like 90-95% of systems monitored ... somehow (possibly an early Web tool) revealed 800x600, and I believe 60 Hz refresh. This on systems which could easily be bumped to 1024x768 or better.
And this was literally a click away off the desktop.
Lesson Younger Me learned: users won't change any default.
So:
- Pick really good defaults. Autoconfigure for best experience if possible.
- If you want to cram things down users' throats, you can just change the default experience, especially on a SAAS app.
Well, on a 14 inch CRT with no DPI scaling it’s debatable whether a higher resolution was ‘better’.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130321082317/http://www.bbc.co...
Font selection dialogue: https://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/0c3b043fb25425d17444ff8e...
https://neurologicexam.med.utah.edu/adult/cases/windows_disp...
The effect would still be finer resolution AND readable fonts. Less eyestrain.
Unlike, say, on present-generation MacOS, which does effectively limit upper-end display resolution.
It's possible that standards were still too rough, but the statistic left a strong impression on me. I believe the general concept is validated elsewhere as well --- I'm pretty sure Jacob Nielsen has a similar finding.
You can have the old UI with the base site given the correct settings/cookies.
old. and RES is my method as well
There's also https://i.reddit.com which is a similar but slightly different experience.
EDIT: per commenters below correcting my mistake, this is "the same" experience AFAWCT
Often .compact and i.reddit.com will interchange in my experience. (I forget which switches to which.)
Turns out I had at some point set an 80% zoom while visiting there on this particular browser. Sorry for the confusion!
https://old.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/8lv96l/feedback_pleas...
I think we've seen this pattern play out. The HN crowd is really not the right crowd to source opinions when it comes to business matters.
And you can see it in the comments, it's mostly about how the UI sucks, the app is slow, the dark patterns, etc...
The reality being missed is there's a ton of value being created in the forums regardless, and MAUs are up like crazy. The bad UI and ads don't seem like they're getting in the way of that.
Yep, there could've been so many HN Bitcoin bill/millionaires, but being so logical, many HN folks here are grumpy buttcoiners.
But I think the points about Reddit being toxic to advertisers because of the hate/porn/gore/mysogny are correct. It just takes one bad story and advertisers will flee the platform. There has been no mainstream examinination and investigation of what Reddit is. Once it starts, it's all over.
It just takes one newspaper to highlight that and it's over for Reddit as an advertising platform. And it can't be stopped because the moderation is local.
Hopefully, they'll be able to remove it after they go public.
I had over 40k useless internet points on that site before the ban and an 11 year old account but they refuse to help. Oh well.
Their anti-abuse is really bad. I once reported a serious doxxing with a death threat towards another user and after three weeks received a canned message saying something along the lines of 'Sorry, there's nothing we can do about the post. It will stay up.' This was circa 2019, when they already had a formalized 'anti-abuse' team. What exactly they do, I have no idea.
FWIW I actually like reddit for the specific communities but tough to see how it isn't going to get further diluted and mods are increasingly going to be less interested is my take - further eroding its value proposition.
The fact that Reddit is public or private doesn't change a thing. Why would working for free for a privately owned company would be easier on the mind? Do you prefer to be explored by a few wealthy individuals rather than the whole open market?
Other than that it is almost guaranteed now that its buggy (feels like its held together with tape) and ad-ladden overall experience will be locked-in and get worse (like it happened with facebook)
People might want to hedge their bets and look into open source lemmy and federated versions of the reddit concept https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
Fortunately I still have a setting for my account to do so. I would stop using it without this setting.
And yes, this is how the process works with every company
A flippant remark, but Reddit is a not insignificant facilitator of pornography alongside many great safe for work subreddits and we will probably see them trying to stop this before or after going public. That or changing the terms of use for users to be 18 from the current 13.
Not even close.
> Reddit is a huge publisher of pornography
No, they aren't. Section 230 says so.
"not insignificant facilitator of pornography" to be more relative.
What a publisher is, today, is a bit muddy imo.
A year ago, they even implemented a follow mechanism so that streamers' fans could get push notifications when they went live. But when the admins decided to make manual manipulation of the top broadcast mechanism a priority, they removed the notifications for Reddit Live altogether because it was too easy for the Reddit community to upvote "riff raff" into the top spot. They changed their story about why bringing back notifications "was impossible, but we're working on it" a dozen times or more. In reality, they just need certain broadcasts to receive the most views to generate the most money through their awarding system.
On top of hundreds of lies at this point, they've been actively banning anyone who discusses this. They ban streamers who ask questions about how the ranking mechanism works, including an autistic streamer with a large following on the site, simply for making note of how certain streamers get special treatment. They even banned a user for making a notifications replacement and discussing why they made it.
In fact, if you get banned from the r/pan subreddit for asking any of these questions (which happens often), you have to be careful about the content you interact with on Reddit as a whole. Since they forcefully inject the Reddit Live top broadcast into every desktop page view (and most mobile ones) without actually labeling it as r/pan content, if you click on that broadcast and vote or make a comment, they ban you from the site.
It's completely out of control, and that's how every level of the site operates these days. The influxes of cash and IPO hyping paint a rosy picture, but peeling back just one layer of the Reddit onion quickly reveals a company which is flailing, and desperately grasping at anything that will help maintain the charade until crossing the IPO finish line.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pan/comments/rejfsa/what_in_the_f_i...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pan/comments/rcvi52/according_to_th...
Reddit's been like that for at least a decade. I remember arguing with Huffman and later Pao about their awful corporate newspeak ("enabling authentic conversations") and how reddit is being actively gamed by advertisers and has been for years. The same goes for every user-hostile change they've made (and there have been many). It's always under some noble pretense but really it's about making reddit more palatable to advertisers. When confronted, the admins either avoid responding or else claim Big Tobacco-levels of ignorance.
It's all so patently obvious to anyone who chooses to look, and I think the blatant contempt the admins display towards their users (without whom, let's not forget, reddit would never have taken off) contributes to the toxicity on reddit, or at least it did years ago when reddit was smaller and the toxic culture is now self-perpetuating.
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/theres-another-abusive-...
I wonder how investors will react to having horrible people moderating their investment.
One of the first useful things I ever programmed was a Greasemonkey script to collapse comment threads on Reddit before they had the ability to do that. They implemented the collapse feature a few weeks or months later and made it useless. I still like the way my script worked better though, it left the top comment visible.
I wish I hadn't deleted my original Reddit account. It would probably be one of the older ones around by now.
I saw yesterday that gilding in /r/AskReddit have paid for 868 years of server time. It seems like they might be able to make a vanity payment model instead of just advertising. That would be nice. If they made the old.reddit.com interface available by subscribing to Reddit Gold only, they might make a fortune off of just that...
Ironically enough, the vast majority of people never used the website pre-2014, so they don't have anything or comparison besides "it's a different community-building website, therefore it's better".
It's not: their website on mobile is cancer, forcing people to install an app is not an argument, censorship(!= moderation, though i'm sure people will start pointing out how it's privately owned) is probably higher than even on places like FB when you compare the last few years(mainly because FB in the west has been somewhat watched), and the core principle of system on which the website functions is polarizing, even more than FB/Twitter.You add on top of that the scandals of (quite literally) 'corruption' between community moderators, staff, etc and the socially-obedient karma system, you end up with a gamified social network, except it's worse because everyone wants to comfortably stay in their own bubble.
Then again this same downstream phenomenon started applying to HN, you already see the cracks, and bullshit is more and more frequent here, a place where people know you can't avoid talking politics as the discussion length increases, knew to remain civil and discuss even the touchy subjects, detached.
Porn subs can have content that is female only, but subs for women and lesbians have to include men who think they're women and feminist subs get banned. The biggest lesbian sub is so overrun by men it's a joke.
I can’t imagine the ways it will change as a public company once numbers are public to scrutiny and the shareholder makeup shifts.
It seems the intrinsic problem with platforms like Reddit (at least from what’s been witnessed over the last 8 years) is that they will inevitably “hit a wall” in a way that will become incompatible with shareholder interests.
By that I mean at some point that hockey-stick growth is going to inevitably taper off and reach terminal velocity before declining as the platform reaches unsustainability. Then, Reddit is going to have to throw shit at the wall and hope something sticks to please investors, or grow by acquisition, which is like a Tylenol level solution. I just don’t see how an advertising and virtual badges driven social platform is ever going to be compatible with the expectations of running a public company to produce returns like in some other industry or sector.
OTOH the freshly printed money look for returns, so the stock market is more likely to be bullish even in relatively near term; maybe they are trying to catch this trend?
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/VIX:INDEXCBOE?safe=off&...
Anyway, the person I was responding to said volatility and that is the metric I cited.
VIX is back under 20, volatility is settling down.
Some unprofitable growth stocks have been sold off lately, but the rest of the market is chugging along just fine, at least until rates start to go up.
Here’s a way to keep an eye on the probabilities the market is assigning to rate hikes at future Fed meetings: https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/interest-rates/countdown-to...
Since I am not paying, and I am not bidding for shares, I must be the product. This is merely a statement of my value (1/500,000,000th) to them as a BI source.
on $6nm value: $1200 per user, $60,000 per community. Thats not annual, presuambly at a sane ROI its some sub-multiple of that as extracted/notional value, but I lack the fu to say what that is.
I have to say, I don't feel worth $1200 in reddit views. Gosh, I wonder if selling my read impressions is a breach of GDRP and/or CCPA
1. They will most likely start making their API unusable similar to what Twitter did. Their Chat is already not available via the API and they are no longer open sourced.
2. They will most likely start banning porn or make it very hard to access (though Twitter seems to still allow porn accounts so maybe I am wrong here?).
3. MORE dark patterns in design. Their website is already super slow, tons of white space requiring extra scrolling (so more ads), needs extra clicks and too many ads which look like posts. Their site on mobile is useless and keeps asking to open in app. Ad blocker and 3rd party app solves this which gives them more incentive to break the API.
4. More censorship of anything remotely offensive.
And it's nothing more than a large collection of forums basically. With all the mod challenges, UI/UX hurdles etc that come with that. Happy for it to exist/find it useful for niche communities etc but with freaking Alexis Ohanian would stop waltzing around like he had any genius foresight or any insight into anything social/web.
It's like saying "Facebook will die if they start charging users to post to their wall".
Like, okay, sure. But Reddit has repeatedly said that they will not depreciate old.reddit.com. They have zero reason to, as many of their powerusers rely on it.
In fact, I don't think Reddit has a history of deprecating anything! Freaking. .compact is still around from god knows when!
Let’s be honest. Every company says this. Some actually try to stand by their statement. Public companies very often wipe those statements from existence because some MBA found a way to increase profits 27% this quarter (who cares if it the company borders on bankrupt in 2 years) or some intern found a way to double clicks.
If someone demonstrates that old Reddit results in fewer ad views, shutting it down is a matter of when and not if.
They've basically stopped adding new features to the old UI, so a lot of account settings require you to go to the new UI if you want to change them (and of course the most annoying settings typically default to "on" when the toggle is added). The markdown handling has also changed. That's why on old Reddit you'll sometimes see broken URLs with superfluous escape characters.
And “ton of demand”, there isn’t really. Just some loud critics, but nowhere near a big enough mass to make a difference. Just as Mastodon will never beat Twitter, despite fixing a lot of its shortcomings.
You could make an incredibly niche website, but then you're effectively competing for users with reddit.
Looks like they really need to be disrupted but i guess investors don't think there s enough money in building another forum. And they may probably be right.
What is a reason to invest in reddit's future?
I thought that reddit's source code (files) would be published and free again. By the way, reddit used to be open source: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
Too bad.
really happy for them, for a long while they were languishing with no growth whatsoever. Their monetization strategy is still really unclear/unproven but clearly some investors saw enough to go ahead and bet big. good for them.
I need BaconReader to stay alive
Of course they want to make some individuals rich, but other than that?
i hate the CDN they use, it's slow af, you notice a lot on the gifts hosted on the reddit hostname
Happy about the IPO, but PLEASE invest in some engineering and infrastructure work.
(Edit: weird that this comment was sitting at the top of the page for an hour and then suddenly moved to the very bottom. Someone on the HN team must really like Reddit.)
Reddit's product managers very much want me to check out my 'Reddit Recap'.
Well I've navigated to my recap about 30 times now in the last week, from multiple links, in app and desktop, and it's still totally broken.
On desktop now, it doesn't show anything except a "retry" button which is incorrectly stuck to the left side of my screen (CSS fail).
I can understand things being broken, but its really bad form to funnel a user to a prominent feature, have that feature be broken, and then have a broken and terrible error state.
I do wonder what kind of engineering team bungles a big feature release like this.
Also, I just discovered that the built-in screenshot generator for Reddit recap is broken as it only captures the rendered portion of each card, leaving out the scrollable overflow.
This case alone offers a strong testament to the poor quality of most Reddit features.
I'd wager $1 that over the next few years Reddit becomes even more of an Attention-Vampire (or tries to)
It's almost feeling Reddit, Facebook, Twitter -- these "social" echo chamber sites are all getting to the contempt phase of life -- the next disruptor cannot come soon enough.
Already the real action is happening on chat apps these days. These are your discords and slacks and clubhouses. In them I see the vitality of the old IRC and forum culture eras.
To me, Hackernews is what Reddit was 10 years ago, just without subreddits. Clean top quality content.
It's 2021, I don't want to see a "Loading..." icon like I'm on dial-up in the 90s.
Compare with https://old.reddit.com — open them side by side, refresh, click around.
We can have a serious discussion about what sucks in the "new" UI, but I really hope it's obvious.
Whereas about 80% of other sites on the Internet were unbrowseable until I installed an adblocker.
My main driver isn't the fastest (skylake i5) but it's much slower than any of the other sites I use. And on my gaming pc (Ryzen 5 5600) it's slow too. And I have 1gbit fibre.
Ps serious question, isn't it difficult being a UX designer when you've been off the internet for 8 years? Stuff has really changed a lot.
I really don't think the Web has changed very much at all in the time I was gone. Pages are much better at being responsive. Bloat is 100X worse, but was solved by installing an adblocker. The cookie pop-ups can fuck themselves. But, fundamentally, nothing is different. I like that CSS and HTML have advanced to the point where it is simpler and cleaner to write good code if you are a decent human being.
1. Stability: videos rarely play for me. Sometimes I break Reddit too (their words, not mine).
2. Slow: if I want to read the comments, I have to wait 3-5 seconds for them to load. I know that the comments could load instantly because the i.reddit.com interface can do it.
3. Unhelpful interface: it is not easy to identify how to expand a comment thread. But more important, the interface often won't tell me that a comment chain keeps going - it looks as if it just ended, even though it keeps going several levels deep. You can keep reading the chain if you click on the last comment, but again, why would you click on it if you don't know whether it keeps going?
3b. In relation to the previous point: I saw your comment because I was scrolling pretty deep into this thread. In the new Reddit UI it would have been cut off.
4. Annoying: if you're not logged in, content is kept from you just because. Again, the i.reddit.com interface shows everything, but the "regular" interface keeps pestering you with "Log in to see this content" or "Open in app". These popups cannot be dismissed.
All of these changes are pro-metrics and anti-user. Sure, the interface itself looks fine (once it rendered, if it renders). But interaction-wise? It sucks.
Reddit is lightning fast, and is very stable...
...oh. I got it! You might be trying to use the dumpster fire that's https://reddit.com
Ignore that, and head over to the actually functional Reddit at https://old.reddit.com
It's like HackerNews in terms of performance. You can still set it as default.
The "new" UI they have is unusable, and may God have mercy for the poor souls that walk into it.
This would be reasonable if there weren’t subreddits that are totally broken on old.reddit.com and proclaim loudly in their sidebar that they no longer support it.
Could you link to an example? In curious :)
The clock is ticking on that. I'd wager we see it shut down within the next 2 years. There will be insane pressure to increase ad revenue now, even more pressure than was already there. 3rd-party clients are a "leak" in this regard.
IMO this has dual meaning. Of course, the (new reddit) UI is not my preference for sure. But the content on (not logged in) reddit.com is just so unbelievably different from what I see when logged in (to old.reddit.com). Therein lies the dumpster fire. I've had thumbnails disabled since forever ago, and picked a handful of subreddits across a couple of multireddits. I never really understood why people would think Reddit was anything like Facebook or any such similar site. Until one day I saw what it looked like to everyone else.
Reddit for me looks a lot like it looked back in ~2004, but with comments :)
All you have to do is learn to type "old" instead of "red" in the address bar, and your browser will do the rest.
Kind of like typing "n <Enter>" probably brings you here, and typing "p <Enter>" brings up, erm, Pinterest.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
I've posted on own blog on Reddit and found that a search for the exact title has, as the first hit, that reddit post. And my blog itself is on page three. It's infuriating.
So I am afraid Reddit won't care about the web UI much now.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2021/11/web3-explained-crypto-n...