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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
* [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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Edit your homepage.
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!