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>the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care

No, they're just flailing.

The problem with Reddit is that its product is ideological conformity; but its owners are too busy pretending (or actually believing) that's not true to sell it honestly. Mods are, to put it bluntly, mostly replaceable, and charging for the ability to moderate an established large subreddit would go a long way provided whoever buys that power must go out of their way to plausibly deny that.

And ideological conformity is worth a lot of money- Twitter was fairly valued in the tens of billions for a very good reason- but much like Twitter, that sort of thing sells "at a loss" because having the kind of content which enforcement of ideological conformity upon is meaningful necessarily means major companies won't want to put their products next to that content. Reddit is not a product that can generate a concrete return on investment, which is partially why it can survive operating at a net loss for a long, long time; capital directly funds political power.

Cheap capital drying up means money is tighter- so financiers are getting harder to come by- and if you're in straits that dire and don't want to downsize you have to look for other sources of revenue. In Reddit's case, this will completely kill their main product, but they have a mental block that prevents them from dealing with that honestly so they might be screwed.

>Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks)

Mastodon has the same kind problem that Reddit does but massively amplified- server operators have power over user networks (the same thing happens on Reddit with bots) which is a no-go for honest communication.

[flagged]

“Reddit is a shitty web consolidation play that helped kill the internet. They rolled up a sea of phpbb and somehow made it worse.” I don’t know why I never thought of it this way, but that is 100% accurate.

no system is perfect but twitter is much better now. i'd rather support "not progressives" than progressives.

>And ideological conformity is worth a lot of money

Why? I would think it's the much simpler "having a ton of users is worth a lot of money".

The porn/memes/5 jokes on reddit are far more valuable than any ideological conformity you might perceive. Sometimes we all need to take a step back from our entrenched political positions - the recent history of the internet clearly shows that misinformation is targeting a particular side of politics and it's proving to be the fast track to 1930s Germany in the US at least.

Rather unfortunately, the position that "my opinion is unpopular, therefore contrarian and correct" is something that is easily manipulated. The demographic that falls for conspiracy theories loves to amplify the idea that they have some secret / esoteric knowledge. Again, a great way to manipulate people, encourage violence etc.

This seems like a very convoluted way of saying "advertisers like to know what they're going to be displayed next to, unmoderated UGC makes that difficult." A group of people could be talking about sports without sharing any non-sports-related ideologies or rules beyond "keep it PG" and advertisers would have no issue with that. While that same group of people but in the context of sharing porn would be very advertiser-unfriendly.

That's an ancient (in internet terms) problem, framing Reddit as some sort of intentional ideology-spreading-loss-leader-for-powerful-capitalists doesn't correspond with their actions - after all, Reddit has been deeply involved in the spreading of all sorts of ideas on all ends of political spectrums.

They're just running into the same issues all these "give something cool away then hope you can make it profitable later" business do of trying to turn the revenue knobs slowly enough to not drive everyone off.

I’m sorry, who is buying “ideological conformity” for it to be worth so much? Everything you’ve said sounds great but I’m trying to dig under the surface and I’m honestly confused.

Reddit’s product is ad-supported message boards. It has a high valuation because it gets an incredible number of eyeballs every day and investors want to monetise them. Reddit is flailing because those users aren’t as monetisable as investors hoped. I don’t think it’s a whole lot more complicated than that, not everything has to be a political conspiracy theory.

I think Twitter and Reddit are somewhat disadvantaged here in knowing less about their users than Facebook or Google do.

Why do you believe Reddit (or Twitter) knows less about its users? Users on Reddit literally self select into interest groups by visiting, (and with 100% confidence) subscribing to a subreddit. Someone not interested in surfing is not going to subscribe to r/surfing. But someone who casually browses r/surfing, or subscribes to r/surfing is very likely to have, at least casual, interest in it.

Twitter is similiar in that you’re self selecting who to follow, and who to engage with. Things you engage with have hashtags, have observable topics and categories that they generally post about, etc. If you’ve ever looked at the categories that you’re in after doing a Twitter data dump, you can see they know a _ton_ about you. What I don’t remember seeing in there is “confidence,” but it might just be that those numbers aren’t surfaced to users, or that it’s encoded in the ordering (and I don’t remember it).

The point is, Twitter and Reddit have largely the same types of signal that Facebook does, but certainly way less than Google. Facebook’s user engagement might be higher, but I’m willing to bet that the number of people using Facebook to follow their friends, and not random businesses and other accounts is greater, thus limiting confidence in understanding about someone’s preferences. What I mean is that my friends might never post about politics, and I might not follow political figures, or other talking heads, that suggest my affiliation…

In Google’s case, they drop a “pixel,” for tracking purposes, on 75% of the web (inflated estimate for effect), and analyze every accessible page on the internet with the goal of understanding what it says. As a result, they have far greater reach in what they can and do know about you…

Facebook and Google a real name and some demographic data and encourage people to upload hundreds or thousands of photos of themselves and their friends, making it easier to tie all their Web activity to a real person. Twitter and Reddit make throwaway accounts without personally identifying information was to create. Plus more interactions with people you know in real life.

You sure about that? Tracking cookies work, and the average person doesn't know what that means.

There are plenty buying conformity. Especially those that see it as a political tool.

Again, what does that statement actually mean? What does it mean to “buy conformity”? Who is doing it?

This thread feels full of vague insinuations that some powerful political lobby is paying to use Reddit to manipulate opinions or something but no actual detail.

Are we arguing whether astroturfing is a real thing?

Perhaps you should have used that term instead.

Ideological conformity is their product? Uh, anything to back that up?

> I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million

HN has about 5M unique monthly users depending on how you count them.

Really? How many users perform any writes monthly?

I only see a couple thousand people actively comment or vote.

The usual ratio is pretty crazy, like 99 to 1.

The way I've usually seen it states is that 10% of your users will comment, and 10% of that 10% will start new threads/posts.

Easier to just say 10% comment, 1% posts.

That describes my usage pretty well. Dang, no comments from me on the next 9 articles.

Can't comment on 9 in an hour anyways. You get rate-limited on HN. :)

I'm not the one that you responded to, but I had no idea that HN had rate-limiting -- shows how little I comment or post!

Yeah, I lurk and comment on here far too much.

why should I comment when everyone just downvotes me.

People don't downvote for no reason, especially not on HN.

The 1% rule:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule?wprov=sfla1

Thank you for sharing this, dang!

Any stats you can share on registered user engagement?

I'd love to see a breakdown or writeup on this subject in general.

Hasn’t a significant amount of those users only started here in the past several months? Someone shared a chart a while back and it was striking.

Bots gonna bot

Not the case, no.

I don't recall seeing that chart - if anyone can link me to it I'd be interested in taking a look.

how do you distinguish bots and real users?

> Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)

You’re describing Reddit ten years ago. There’s not really a “typical Reddit user” at this point it’s so big. All kinds of people are on it and most of them are not techies with a particular ideological bent.

You can still be anonymous on Reddit, unlike facebook, which comes with good and bad.

I think it's true that Reddit leans more towards supporting internet privacy initiatives, net neutrality, etc. whereas facebook users often have no awareness of these issues in the first place.

But at the same time, no requirement to associate with a real-world identity means there are more sockpuppet accounts, more astroturfing, etc.

I've always thought it would be neat if there were loosely affiliated communities that host as an API only with a standard front end for the UI.

So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users.

The API side could moderate their own content and restrict access to UIs that play nice and the UIs could refuse to surface content from API sides that suck.

The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.

I’m building it with both web and native Mac/iOS, on top of mostly rss for static friendliness. White labeled web and Apple App Store native SwiftUI deployments. Offline friendly

This is kind of more or less what ActivityPub and/or 'Mastodon compatible API' is to be honest.

You just described the ActivityPub universe. There are quite a few servers that are minimal ux or api only, and there are a ton of clients that allow you to use multiple servers on whatever platform you want, with mobile, desktop, and web clients.

> So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users.

Reddit has something like this, but definitely not as intentional,

- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.json

- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.rss

- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.xml

>The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.

Old reddit had stylesheets and they could be very interesting. I still prefer that over the current thing they built.

Did you just reinvent RSS feeds? :-)

If I remember correctly, those end points are going away with the api changes.

Yes stylesheets were great fun :D https://old.reddit.com/r/ooer

> I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit.

I have to heavily disagree with this. Reddit content is way better in both quality and quantity. The only thing worse is maybe the Signal to noise ratio, and even that is questionable. For example, askHistorians is a gem. Many subreddits are very useful. Moreover, for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google. Not once have I needed it to find useful content on hacker news.

>For example, askHistorians is a gem.

Ask about anything remotely controversial, and you'll see how quickly it's an echo chamber.

> you'll see how quickly ~~it's an echo chamber.~~ requires sources

I'm convinced askHistorians is mostly for the same people asking and answering their own questions

Just in case you're not joking: if that were the case, there would be few-to-no questions with no responses, but there are plenty of those. I won't deny it's possible there is some of that, but I doubt it's all that common.

>for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google.

I do it more out of necessity than because reddit is a good site. You get into a niche enough subject and your choice is either a small subreddit or delving into the artifacts of the early internet like GameFaqs, Deviant Art, or some new site forums (the ones that still exist). I Still need to take a grain of salt and check if the redditor isn't blowing hot air or isn't on some unhinged rant.

HN is great but focused on very specific, technical contetnt. Not gonna be much oppurtunity to talk about media or craft hobbies here.

I actually think that Reddit is more "mass market" than tech-savvy. I never associate Reddit with techies in my entire life, unless you mean the people who move into tech for money.

How about "literati" instead of "tech-savvy"?

A recent link on HN was the archives of Reddit comments from pushshift.io; of the first year of Reddit (December 2005 to December 2006), the comment counts on subreddits with >100 comments were:

       115 ru
       129 de
       215 tr
       380 nsfw
       765 ja
       932 freeculture
       985 request
      1487 joel
      1784 lipstick.com
      2022 features
      4208 science
     31266 programming
    322776 reddit.com

Where "joel" was Joel Spolsky's programming blog. That's quite programmer-heavy. Some of the comments on "reddit.com" in 2005 were:

> "One thing I've noticed is that the bulk of reddit's content is usually IT-related or at least culturally related, while digg is more generalized in its content (perhaps this is a product of time?). My point is that it seems to me that the fact that the "who" uses the site has a greater influence on usability than "how" the site is used." -

> "In the beginning, digg was pretty much all tech-related links, and whenever someone posted anything else you'd get a flurry of "this is a tech news site"-type comments. As the userbase grows and you get a more diverse demographic using the site, it becomes less "elite" and expands into other areas."

I'm dying for this, and would happily throw in some free dev work. HN is the only community I still actually enjoy, social media is a cesspool. I'd love a "Lichess of social media," something centralized but robust and user-respecting, and for communities other than tech.

>prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan

The two forums in my top level comment do compare similarly as 4chan and reddit. The old one was previously known as the epicenter of shenanigans and memes in my language which has lost its shine, the new one being increasingly astroturfed and becoming more of an echo chamber day after day.

Something awful?

They are not in English. The old one is HKGolden while the new one is LIHKG. I think a similar pattern of movement happened from PTT to DCard too. I think these all have a Wikipedia page, and I hope translation tools work well enough to make them understandable.

To be honest, the pattern is not quite similar. The main reason for PTT's decline can be boiled down to political issues. The PTT operators were unable to effectively deal with the issue of water armies, resulting in a decision to halt new user registrations for nearly three years.

>We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)

TBH, 4chan these days are nowhere near the days when it was known as the boogieman of the internet. Still stuck with language that wouldn't last 10 seconds on Twitter or even Reddit, but we're not talking about a doxxing/harassment hub anymore. Or at least, no more a hub for that than Twitter/Reddit.

4chan is indeed not the ideal but the current reddit isn't ideal either because it leans too much progressive. i would like to prune both extremes.

>i believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the

What? Id say max 50k

I don’t do 4chan, but I know people IRL who do. They seem to think it’s pretty good.

Is there a chance it’s getting better?

I’ve used it off and on since 2005 and /b/ has always been bad, while the tech and music boards have been pretty good.

Seems tech neighborhoods are pretty good everywhere.

Twitter and Reddit tech neighborhoods have good reputations.

4chan will never "get better" because if that happens it'll cease to be 4chan as we know it. /b/ has always been an open pit sewer that the occasional nugget of gold flows through. /trv/ is where I like to hang out, but /pol/ can't help itself and likes to crap-post in there on the regular. /gif/ and it's blue board, "safe for work," version /wsg/ are fun to browse, but the 4chanX extension and some filters are needed to hide a lot of the trolling and truly awful stuff while browsing.

Are these things like subreddits?

Yes. On 4chan they're called boards. Some boards are focused on particular content. Other boards are focused on the type of media posted.

/b/ = random /trv/ = travel /pol/ = politically incorrect /gif/ = .gif and .webm files /wsg/ = the work safe version of /gif/ (its toned down but still not actually safe for work)

I remember my /b/tard days, in the mid 2000's. I drifted away from it many years ago, but I remember ir fondly.

4chan was horrible and excellent at the same time. A sea of garbage that was also full of gold.

Probably the only online community I ever enjoyed to be a part of. All else was shit.

It was a good time for the internet, back then. I do miss those days. I've tried to visit 4chan a few times in the last decade, but the community is... different now.

I had the same experience.

But I'm also much older now. I wondered if the community changed, or if I was the one that changed and can't appreciate it for what it is anymore. Maybe both I and the community changed in different directions.

I probably will never have an answer. But I still remember the old times there fondly.

In a sense, 4chan in the mid-2000's was probably my final experience with the old web, in a time before walled gardens, before social media trying to lock everyone in and tracking the shit out of everything to shove ads down the collective throat. A place still not neutered by contemporary political correctness and value systems. Full of extremely smart people and extremely dumb people in equal measure. It was maybe the ultimate form of the prior iteration of internet forums and irc chat rooms.

Nothing lasts forever, entropy dictates that on a long enough timeline all things become shit. Oh well.

Mid 2000s - that was pre-Facebook. Did other social media companies draw folks away?