Comment by romwell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by romwell | Hacker News Reader

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>Still, better than letting it all get burnt by the shareholders

You wish. By the looks of it, it will be burned down by yet another "redesign" when they inevitably shut down the sane UI of https://old.reddit.com because it's not pushing ads and "social" "features" strongly enough.

(If you don't use https://old.reddit.com/ instead of the "new", aka default, reddit, treat yourself to some sanity. Imagine if Reddit was more like HackerNews. Wait, you don't need to imagine, that's what the link goes to.)

I really like how they are pushing so hard for video, while struggling to display more than a thousand text comments or even links.

Feels like reddit is digging it own grave with these moves, and the shareholders' money with it.

I really hope to revisit this comment in 10 years and say how utterly stupid and wrong I was, because I've got an incredible amount out of the communities on reddit, and poured a lot into them to. Particularly, support groups.

Their video player is also garbage, especially on mobile. I'll have to open and close a video multiple times to get it to play, the quality will take a nosedive midway through and just stay that way for the rest of the video, and they take forever to load.

> I really like how they are pushing so hard for video, while struggling to display more than a thousand text comments or even links.

I don't know that this is the case of course, but can I blame Facebook? They "pivoted to video" while lying about their metrics and it wouldn't surprise me if the rest of Silicon Valley is like "Hey, they're making lots of money, why don't we do what they're doing?"

I really don't think you can blame Facebook for the idiotic decisions of others who're cargo culting its strategies.

It's not like Facebook held a gun to Reddit and forced them to have videos.

The answer to the "why" question should be obvious: it's the same in every case. "We" shouldn't do what FAANG is doing because we are not FAANG".

On that point, just because Floyd Mayweather makes a ton of money in the ring, you probably should not, even though you also have fists and can throw a punch.

Same with the framework/platform hype. You don't have Google scale, means you don't have Google's problems that they have deviced solutions for. A megatanker perhaps isn't the best boat for a weekend fishing getaway.

But I digress.

They are going to get popped by journos.

Twitter got popped left and right by journos and this was despite the platform being a huge source of revenue for the media, and the owner's politics.

The week they go public, the stories will start getting published about the content on there, the weak moderation (community moderation...lol), journos sending emails to companies asking whether they like their ads appearing along X or Y figure, etc.

The line that Huffman has taken before on this stuff (basically live and let live) works if you are private. It will go down extremely badly after the IPO.

Sorry. Reddit is already dead.

(Btw, I have no idea why this is...it makes no logical sense because being a public company changes nothing. But the media seems to understand that they can print something, that thing can potentially move the stock, and then they can bounce management into doing something).

To be fair to reddit, their combo of admin + community moderation has improved a lot in the past 5 years or so.

Remember /r/TheDonald? Or /r/jailbait? /r/coontown?

I mean, yes, it's a very low bar, but they deserve some commendation for making an effort that, I feel, paid off.

As far as being popped by journos, I feel like reddit has been on the radar for quite a while, and fared well under fire. Take /r/HermanCainAward, which got some pretty negative (and, I feel, misguided) press. The sub is not only still there, it's (quite sadly) thriving. (Sadly because nobody should receive that "award", but given quite a surplus of qualified recipients, something like that sub serves a purpose. Everyone there will be happy the day the sub stops being active because of lack of submissions, but alas, that day is yet to come).

So after catching flack, /r/HermanCainAward told people to cross out faces and names if they are not a public figure - and that seems to work fine with everyone. Like, the journos are not vultures: they picked on that sub, and the outcome was that it improved. When people are civil to each other, the journos don't a hot scathing article to print.

Getting popped by journos can be a good thing. Maybe some of them will write a hit piece on how waiting for 7 seconds for a text page to load is shameful in 2021.

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