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Comment by Freskis | Hacker News Reader

Reddit a grotesque toxic website, that makes money by creating conflict, divisiveness, fake news and the deliberate degradation of society. Like Facebook, but so so much worse. I hope that going public gives it the scrutiny it needs. In a few years time you won't be able to find anyone admitting to have ever worked for this company (in fact it's almost impossible to find people admitting it today). Some of the smaller sub-reddits are good though, but that's not what the website has been about for years.

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?

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I’m not sure if Reddit is so much worse. With Reddit you see toxic groups out in the open, with Facebook those groups are hidden and only Facebook knows the true size and content of all toxic groups.

I think that's a very unfair assessment. Reddit is as diverse as the internet itself. There are plenty of good subreddits there and the toxic stuff is easy to avoid.

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.

Reddit may have had a diverse user base in the past but in the last three years they enacted the same heavy censorship we have seen elsewhere and basically have no diversity of thought now in any major subreddit

Diversity certainly decreased massively in the last years just by content restrictions and overbearing moderators. But true, you have to find the niche subs and pray that they aren't discovered by people that have a moderate to high degree of problems with internet comments.

The vast majority of people browsing reddit do not leave the default subs or filter news and political posts. Individually opting out of the toxicity and astroturfing does not address the problem on the website as a whole.

They've cleaned it up a lot honestly. Kind of feels like the whole Ellen Pao thing was just like, her serving as a scapegoat for changes they wanted to make.

I think people already don't want to admit to working there, but not for moral reasons, but for how awful the stability and product actually is. I can't say I'd blame them.

I very much doubt they do not want to admit to working on one of the world's most popular Web sites.

Perhaps. But to me it's more an anomaly that such an unreliable product can remain so popular. Can you imagine Google showing you a weird image saying you broke it multiple times a day, or youtube resembling any single thing about the video player?

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.

The reliability has grown a lot better than it used to be.

You seem to imply that "popular" entails "pride". Normally, "good" entails "pride".

We’re engineers, so “I work on a product that has to handle lots of users” entails pride.

That is only valid in general, outside "real world application" of that idea... Or, in fact, of the very product. Product quality is a component supposed to override the "value for pride" of widespread adoption.

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.

OK, well not only does it handle large volumes but it's a beloved site many people spend hours on a day.

When original poster silisili states «people already don't want to admit to working there», said poster uses a gross generalization not using a proper quantifier. That use of «people» entails by default describing at least a median, "over 50% of the developers". That's just exaggerating rhetoric.

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.

Well, sure, no place ever has 100% people who are satisfied or proud of working there. I don't think there's much to be ashamed of though. I certainly would hold my head high if I worked there.

What! Man I was just on there getting tips on fixing my shower.

Can't wait for a Behind The Bastards episode on Spez

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