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Comment by civilitty | Hacker News Reader

Is Facebook not a network effect business? It’s not only wildly profitable but bigger than those two combined.

Twitter and Reddit are just run by incompetents who can’t figure out how to advertise anything relevant.

Twitter and Reddit are messageboards. Like Hacker News. Every time they do something controversial, someone thinks Usenet needs to be reincarnated.

Trying to monetize that at scale is hardddd.

Facebook has got groups, yes. But they have instagram. Messenger. Whatsapp. They have my friends and family. They have my photos going back 10 years. Facebook is personal to many people.

I don't see Twitter and Facebook being interchangeable.

Agree.

It's not hard. Reddit has every niche community right there. I go to subreddits to find advice on product and there's no reason why reddit can't be selling it.

and i don't get why they can't sell ads in the third party apps. just send it down the feed and have a tos that you need to be feeding that to the users. cut the apps in on it if you think the apps won't game that(could tie the cut with something like clickthrough rate to successful conversion by whatever metric that is... might be impossible who knows).

What did Usenet cost to run?

What does Reddit's core functionality cost? They have annual revenue of half a billion dollars. Tell me that you can't use that money to run a text distribution infrastructure.

I doubt Slashdot in its day cost half a million dollars to run.

Usenet cost was distributed to ISPs, which eventually sank it as they lost interest. And it never solved the moderator conundrum; at one point, a third of Usenet was spam, and another third was "spam cancels" deleting the spam.

I wish there was a Usenet client for iOS that matched the beauty and usability (and accessibility) of Apollo.

I wish there was Usenet servers to back that up - which didn't carry the binaries or unsavory newsgroups.

I feel like reddit could serve better ads than Facebook if they tried. Sure Facebook knows what college I went to and who my uncle is. Reddit knows my hobbies and interests.

The fact that I subscribe to r/woodworking, r/diy, etc, is really useful for targeting but I never see relevant ads.

I’ve literally given Reddit a big list of my interests and the asked to be served content, and the ads are almost completely unrelated.

You nailed it, Reddit ads feel very amateur, close to weekend projects. And I don't know why they complain about third party apps, they never allowed them to display said low quality ads anyways in the first place...

> Trying to monetize that at scale is hardddd.

Good thing nobody is asking for that.

Elon Musk would love Twitter to be profitable and Steve Hoffman would love the same for Reddit.

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