Hacker News Reader

Comment by DantesKite | Hacker News Reader

The larger subreddits have problems, but Reddit has done a remarkable job of collecting people with niche interests into one area.

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.

View on HN

Reddit is my go to place for local news. There is so little coverage of local news outside big cities. The coffee-house atmosphere of the local sub I’d very refreshing and informative.

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.

I don't know about r/philosophy, but if it's grown too large to be usable, as many do, look for subsets of philosophy (by genre, philosopher, etc). I'm sure there are more niche subs with decent communities.

Sadly the niche subs end up following the same path, and as someone who has done that Reddit is starting to feel like it's lost its charm. I think it boils down to upvote/downvote system steering discussions to a particular kind of consumer that doesn't align with what I'm there for and it gets worse over time. It's so rare for me to find insightful comments there anymore, it's really turned into intellectual junk food. And it's not that it's not valuable, I need that sometimes too, but it seems like that's crowded out everything else

I've found it virtually impossible to find a sub organized around an intellectual topic or person that isn't virtually unreadable for anyone who knows anything about the topic.

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).

I’m pretty sure /r/philosophy was a default sub back then.

> What's odd is they haven't stopped growing. It's just been linear user growth

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)

> 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.

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.

A definite problem from a company's perspective when their model is ads and gold/donations, both of which require users to be logged in. This directly affects the number of users willing to participate in discussions - both in big subreddits and niche ones - and it risks some active users becoming dormant because they dont see enough reaction/response to what they have posted.

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)

I think it is similar in this sense: those users are in a funnel as long as they visit regularly. Not everybody who walks into a store buys something, but if the store is busy that’s a good sign.

There is a distinct possibility that those users arent visiting regularly. They visit via Google search, explore a bit, don't create an account. Next time they come in, it's again via Google search. Reddit may or may not be able to track them.

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)

Right. My point is that after you get there by search results or shared links enough times some percentage of users will create an account.

If I want to search reddit content on my phone, I use google search because reddit's search sucks. But then I look like a non-converted user because I'm only logged in on the app not the mobile site.

you also count as one of the DAUs and MAUs - minimum 2, as one logged in and one not logged in, and maybe more if you use incognito to search for those comments, because reddit will treat that as a separate visit from a separate user I guess.

Small ones have problems too (like raids and low amount of mods). They don’t stop growing because they ate all the small forums.

You know what makes for a good user experience? Not using a website that hosts white supremacists, but staying in your little corner that doesn't deal with them (you hope).

Everything is moving to Discord. Even subreddits. I finally installed the app yesterday because the Minecraft server I hang out on is down while updating to 1.18.1 and it's the only place to get updates. I had a sense this was happening when I found out several forums I thought died off (while still being up) had just moved the bulk of activity to Discord, but it seems to have accelerated in the last year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com