What Reddit Got Wrong
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Reddit was always very hands-off. They had lots of very unpleasant and controversial content until their hand was forced. Overall they seem to want a site that runs itself as much as possible and over time content that required interaction and management (eg, AMAs, Secret Santa) got de-prioritized and dropped.
Also, Reddit has quite a lot of mindless consumption content.
Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in.
Such a site would require minimal care, and might even be possible to maintain with AI moderation. For moderating something like r/DebateReligion human brains are needed. But for deciding whether something is a cat or not, probably not.
Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal.
The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect" has grown significantly within the past few years, though has been a problem for a number of years prior.
Reddit won't come back from this stage of may-as-well-be-bots-posting.
Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process.
Eerie was an understatement.
That's at least the explanation I've heard many times.
Account says buy bitcoin - user checks history and sees 7 year old account with thousands of posts, many highly upvoted, so assumes source is sane and not astroturf.
I.e., the thing you have just stated is exactly the thing we’re trying to figure out.
I notice a lot of talking past each other in only tangentially related comments. Lately also here on hn.
For others, they do it because getting upvotes and reddit awards makes them feel good. They see themselves as community pillars. I suppose this kind of feeds into the above reason in some ways.
If you check /r/games today, you'll see one user is responsible for over half of the submissions. Such accounts are what I mean, where unless they have fine tuned a bot to such a degree, they're really just someone with a little bit too much time on their hands.
What's sad is how many of those aren't bots. It's not uncommon for karma farmers to have their bots upvote each other, but it isn't cost effective to have hundreds (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma). The sad reality is that of those hundreds of upvotes, almost all represent a person who fell for it.
As the saying goes "a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on".
Someone who bought a reddit account here, I bought a 2 year old aged account with around 3000 post karma for $10. The karma has lost its value.
I have seen this happen on one of those (former) small niche cozy subs, where it is small enough that people notice their content being recycled. No idea what the goal might be, so I wonder if it is a platform feature to pump-up engagement by automatically reposting content.
They’ll find a comment with upvotes rising above its thread neighbors, but with the entire thread neighborhood buried at the bottom of the comment section. Then they’ll just staple that low comment as a response to some visible comment in a thread much higher up the comment section.
That was after I noticed that cat delivering bot I wrote for internal chat appears to have "infinity supply of cats" according to the users, while all it has is a ~200 long list of imgur links that never changes.
This is what gets me about all the people lately claiming that the only way to get good Google results is to append site:reddit.com - I have spent enough time looking at Reddit threads to know I would never trust them for important information. People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years. New users read the confidently wrong information, take it as gospel and spread it to other new users.
2) It's even more important to have an understanding of the _kinds_ of things reddit is good at answering, and which communities provide good answers to those questions. Reddit is so big that there are good and bad versions of almost everything.
There is a TON of (actually good) community discussion on such topics on "the old internet" as long as it doesn't need to be timely.
For topics that need more timeliness, I don't have a good answer. The internet in general is so enshittified that maybe Reddit is the only good answer when the alternative is AI-generated garbage.
2) In my experience, for factual information, it's just too much of a minefield. Try finding actually accurate information on Reddit about Roundup/glyphosate, for example. Compare what you find to the actual published research on the topic. It is very hard to find correct information on this topic on Reddit, and where you do see it, it will be downvoted to invisibility. [0] https://imgur.com/a/8NNcwTJ
Fascinating.
I've read so many comments here about how people search reddit specifically in order to get better results, but I've never understood this. I don't find reddit to be better enough for that sort of thing to be worth going to reddit as a first choice.
Perhaps this explains it? I stopped using Google search a few years back because I find it hard to get to useful sites using it.
Are people comparing reddit-specific searches to general Google search results? That would be the explanation, because if I had to chose between the two, I'd go with a reddit-first approach, too.
What are you using instead of google search?
> for people who want to scan text and not watch a half hour youtube.
I never use YouTube videos for that sort of thing because I don't really learn well from videos. I'm a text kind of guy. But even for those sorts of things, I never have a problem finding good resources on the web, so I have no reason to have to go to reddit for them.
That's just me, though. It's not a criticism of reddit, just a preference. Reddit is just not my kind of place, so I like to avoid it when I can.
If you're looking for more trustworthy product reviews than the ones on an Amazon product page, or you're looking for how to fix an obscure problem with your 3d printer, it's damn reliable. Having the opportunity for open and anonymous conversation on these things increases the chance of meaningful discussion.
For the former, Google search results are a hodge podge of bought-and-paid for "best of" sites, and for the latter dominated by ancient niche forum posts and shitty Quora answers.
Half of the Internet is now soulless self promotion and devious attempts to advertise without you knowing you're being advertised to.
So two cheers to Reddit, frankly. We could do a hell of a lot worse.
I totally believe that! But since I personally don't look for product reviews on the internet at all (and absolutely wouldn't look on Amazon), I wouldn't really know.
All I'm saying is that for the sorts of things I tend to search for, anyway, finding good resources on the web isn't that hard, so I never really understood why people prefer to search reddit (unless they already are reddit users anyway, of course).
It makes me feel some combination of
1. Reddit is flooded with bots or brigades that seem to have cryptic agendas
2. My own reality is really far afield and the internet is bursting that bubble OR
3. The present young adult generation exists in a seriously orthogonal reality and absolutely sweeping societal changes are on the horizon (as may already be becoming evident)
I still find a lot of pleasant discourse on the smaller subreddits. But it's an absolute shock to visit some of the larger communities sometimes.
Online discussions communities since Usenet always suffer the same problem. They become useful, attract too many users of the wrong kind and die. Reddit will be no exception.
Can you elaborate?
The older I get, the more I go with #4
For example, if you were to look anywhere on Reddit and found yourself in a thread that just barely, tangentially, almost-not-in-this-plane-of-reality touches on something related to law, a hundred people will show up to give you all sorts of the most inane and dangerous legal advice.
Granted, for something like legal advice you: 1) shouldn’t go Reddit; and 2) should search for an attorney. That said, there are (were?) some places on Reddit where you could find advice or discussion attached to the reality shared by the rest of us. But that isn’t the current draw of the site to the masses.
I’m one of the people who (until this past week) used Reddit in a technical capacity.
That shouldn’t be taken as “I get my solutions from Reddit.” Rather, I posted and consumed niche technical information for unusual problems. There were (are?) a boatload of smaller, vendor specific, etc subreddits that _did_ (do?) have smart people who collaborate or rubber ducky tricky issues.
Most of Reddit is not and was not that.
And as I type that, I realize I must apologize for sort of hijacking your reply with a response to the parent comment. I’ll leave this and have prepended a direct response to the points you raise and added a reasonable segue.
Counterpoint, not everyone has access to an attorney, a mechanic, a doctor (sadly), tradesperson, or any number of expensive professionals when someone just needs to know if they can ignore something, can fix it themself, or if they should seek out professional advice. These communities can be of great help to people who just need to guided to the next step.
Thank goodness that never happens here!
This makes basically anything even remotely controversial within the specific demographic of the site invisible to reddit users.
Google only gives you a million times the same top n solutions iff your keywords are unique enough.
Isn't that just a microcosm of the internet and society in general?
On the other hand I am not sure what the old internet forums I loved would look like if you scaled up the users 100X and then linked all these random forums together so one username interacted across message boards. That would have basically been a disaster and internet points would not have been the major problem.
For those old enough to remember Napster, it worked because it was centralized.
True, but that was easy. It was a bit less convenient than file-sharing systems because you had to search as a separate step, using a different program, but it wasn't hard.
> often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything
I saw that sort of thing with BBSes, but never with FTP sites. I didn't know that was a thing with them.
> Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster?
Those aren't ftp clients. I was questioning the premise that ftp was hard to use.
Finding the songs was no problem. I can remember some kind of web search engine. It was just too hard to get a collection going to even be able to download something though. I guess the idea was to rip your cd collection but that idea simply didn't occur to me at the time.
Napster took off because it was a free record store at a time when everyone was use to paying $13 an album in 2000 USD($23 adjusted for inflation).
Me neither, but it’s worth a shot. I have set up a public Lemmy instance. Registration is open currently. Would be nice to see a handful of people join my instance.
Yes! :D https://zapad.nstr.no/
You couldn't choose your server on the official application, but others allowed you to do you could always meet the same persons. I was on the Orange server.
i mean architecturally it’s nearly as decentralized, but from a user point of view that’s not the part that matters. construct the Napster UI atop a decentralized architecture, and it’s all the same right? heck most large websites today are internally decentralized (sharding, load balancing, …) if you peek inside them: the real difference here is not that a service is distributed across machines, but across machines with different owners. it’s really more of a political distinction, the UX could be identical, it just isn’t (quite) due to preference or limited labor.
Twitter's thing was "giant conversation with everyone" - federation interferes with that.
Reddit was inherently fragmented (subreddits, and heavy redditors tended to describe groupings of related subreddits). Federation seems pretty natural here (community names can just have an @ symbol somewhere in there).
There are UI and discoverability issues, but those seem rather tractable.
I think performance at scale will be a real issue though.
No wonder people are scared of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO2X3oZEJOA
A bunch of those, like " SolidGoldMagikarp" are Reddit users.
Its mind boggling how wrong they've been getting it for as long as they've been getting it wrong. Like how can any company/ CEO be that dense?
It's sad that the place where all the users stored their data is getting burned down because it offered free access.
What the current decision makers within Reddit Inc. want is to make the site look profitable until the IPO, and then they don't care about what happens with it. Be it discussion site with cats, or cats feed with discussion, it doesn't really matter for them, as long as it looks profitable.
the reason we do the "one big omnithread" for everything nowadays is because we have moved to a fundamentally reactive model, where youtube opinion leaders or news articles say a thing and people react to it, most people are the metaphorical AIs who don't have any independent thoughts until prompted by an external stimulus.
Actually in practice any internally-generated questions tend to be smashed down on reddit. Self-posts end up downvoted heavily. Some of that is that they're often low-quality content asking dumb shit that should have been a comment on some other related post rather than a full thread, so it's the "stupid newbie" downvote. But they also don't have anything to consume, and again, the 90-9-1 model applies. 90% of your users are readers, 10% are commenters. And actually beyond being a reader, they usually are not reading the comments either, they're reading the articles. While in fact the commenters often are the exact opposite, they don't read the article/watch the video because they're there to talk.
But the fact that 90% are not there to talk, and actually they don't even care about the comments at all - that's why Reddit is pivoting. Forums discussion is a smaller niche than content drips.
--
when you do a single megathread and content is moving super fast within a single thread (eg - politics debate-night threads), you have to resign yourself to not seeing every single comment in a thread, because it's literally going faster than you can read. And that's also true of reddit - you're not seeing every comments, you're seeing the top 50 comments. And if you sort by "new" it's a similarly torrential feed, and you stand no real chance of reading everything let alone replying to everything - but the "top" and "hot" and "best" sorts do a good job of surfacing the content that readers want to see, and it feels stable, so it cures that FOMO.
Technically there's no reason that's not a feature you couldn't build into a forum though. Surface me a view of a thread that's only comments above 10 karma, or with more than a certain number of replies, and show me a "top threads" view of a given forum. And reply notifications are not a novel feature.
but anyway, your question gets at another tangential point, which is that reddit and reddit-style models have become so dominant over the last 15 years that people literally don't know the ways to interact efficiently on web-1.0 forums anymore. People know how to work reddit, they know how to work twitter, they know how to work discord... does the average user know how to work phpBB anymore? probably not really!
I guess that's a "good" alternative if your goal is to prevent the evolution of deep discussion and instead get people to move on and scroll over more ads.
It sounds terrible and the opposite of what made Reddit great, and therefore I think your prediction is correct.
Now they have the lowest value user data of any social media company and are firing people from jobs they do for free (lol) to get the site working again.
Now if children and animals are your bag of chips all power to you, its just not a website ill admit to using or potentially invest in if an IPO happened.
Something interesting about the furry community is that it has been welcoming to LGBTQ+ people and folks who are not neurotypical for decades. It's been a safe space for those peole. The furry community has been "ahead" of the rest of us in that regard. I think we could all learn something from them about tempering our impulse to judge with empathy and tolerance.
I had to look up MAP. I'm pretty sure that is against the reddit ToS, and I've never seen it on reddit since jailbait was shut down years ago.
then the last 3-5 years, they are slowly creeping towards a curated model, and with that disrespecitng their userbase
- Kitty/puppy videos
- Exotic street food
- girls with shorts/leggings showing buttcrack or cameltoe acting oblivious or holding a product (i.e. using ambiguous sexuality to sell something)
- Someone doing some kind of weird elaborate craft as a form of spectacle
- Twerking or faux-twerking dances
- A person being kind to the homeless
- "you won't believe" compilations of various things like near car accidents
- Crazy/dangerous parkour
- Some green smoothie brand targeted at young people doing yoga
It's no wonder Reddit has been moving in this direction as well. People eat this shit up, they're more profitable as advertisements, require way less moderation, and are overall less of a hassle than hosting discussions.
But the question is if people will willingly remain on a Reddit which is just like Tiktok or YT shorts or Instagram, etc and has no differentiator
Especially with their lousy mobile experience
How hard would it be to make a thing with the same API as Reddit so the apps that are currently about to shut down can instead change base domain and keep going?
Including existing OSS servers, assuming there already is some (complete!) open source one somewhere — I can google for the attempts ("plebbit" was submitted here for discussion only last week) but I can't trivially tell if they're any good.
- million dollars mansions tours
- asking strangers in the street how much is their rent or what's their salary
- asking strangers in the street to do X for money (e.g. do 10 pull ups for $100)
- tourism videos in "dangerous" places such as South America, Africa, Middle Orient, East Europe, Asia (i.e. everywhere not in NA and West Europe)
- silent walking/driving 4K videos in Japan/China/South Korea
- "one day in the life of a programmer/student/[whatever] at [prestigious company/college name]" videos, showing a person waking up, taking a shower, eating breakfast, etc.
The amount that the market pays to inject adverts into youtube product reviews versus 'proper' content is staggering. A good guitarist is better doing a review on headphones, than actually playing a guitar. A runner is better doing a review on the latest Nikes rather than giving training advice.
That would align with the changes Reddit seemed to have made to their algorithm. They changed something last year that affected what posts were promoted to the top of sub.
In the r/movies sub, text posts were frequently getting to the top, which is fine is these were quality posts. Spoiler: they weren't. They'd be dumb questions like "DAE think X movie is underrated" where X movie is highly rated by everyone or a cult classic, or meaningless observations like "Y movie is now 30 years old!!" as if someone just discovered how time works. In the past, most top posts were links to articles, trailers, posters, etc. Discussion naturally happened in those posts. These low effort posts did spur a lot of discussion, but none of it was new or meaningful.
I think the mods are now filtering out these type of posts, because the sub is more or less back to how it used to be.
I significantly improved my Reddit experience simply by filtering out the word “Trump”. This also had the effect of hiding a good 20% of Reddit, as there were dozens of stories every day about orange man bad. It’s been 3 years into a different guy’s presidency and Trump still gets more attention on Reddit than Biden does.
So when you avoid filtering as much, you end up with something closer to the chans, where you could see a post contemplating bestiality, and the next post proclaiming that pedophiles belong in woodchippers. Not a fan of the former, but you just ignore it and move on. There’s always something fresh and interesting.
This whole operation could be wildly profitable with a team of 50-100 people and no major investors to appease.
Instead they read the room wrong, or just didn't care, and now we're here.
People tell us what they like about craigslist including:
- Giving people a voice
- A sense of trust and even intimacy
- Consistency of down-to-earth values
- Simplicity
- No charges, except for job postings
- Freshness of the material
- No ads, particularly no banner ads
But that probably wouldn't put them on track for a few billion dollar IPO, so of course you can't do it.
And a couple people at the top now have Lake Tahoe vacation homes. That's an important piece to this. It justifies everything.
Did Lars Ulrich ever get his Olympic-sized swimming pool? You really gotta feel for the guy.
This isn't about money...
This is about a shitload of money!
Facebook does this at much larger scale (2B users active in FB Groups), with way more spam, and some FB groups are much larger than most big subreddits
Its not about Facebook or Reddit, its about people being so power hungry they do these things for free. When subreddits post about bringing in more mods, thousands apply, maybe 2 get in. If Reddit deems locked subreddits abandoned, there is already a system to give the abandoned subreddit to anyone else that wants it (within reason). Subreddits also split pretty often due to mod infighting
The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good. The infighting is because some mods love adding arbitrary rules like "no relationship posts" in AITA. Does everyone agree with that? Is that a perfect rule? Why? A new moderation team could be just as good or just as bad as the previous one
There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful community building that must have happened.
Certainly Reddit's setup does incentivize name squatting, but there's been plenty of cases where the obvious name is run by a team so ineffective that it gets outcompeted (r/marijuana vs r/trees, r/lgbt vs r/ainbow, r/moddedmc vs r/feedthebeast are some examples). And plenty of communities get by with non-obvious names, like r/DestinyTheGame, r/Pathfinder_RPG, so it's not purely a name race.
(I'm unfamiliar with this.)
The head mod did not agree, and after a couple of years of the sub being basically unmoderated and 90% US politics, and generating user complaints as a result, threw a tantrum and said anything goes, and posted a load of anime porn.
Since the subreddit named world politics was now full of anime porn, and a little inspired by the subreddit r/marijuanaenthusiasts (the subreddit about Botany, since r/trees was taken by the weed people), a bunch of users decided to create a subreddit called r/anime_titties for discussing non-US politics.
And yes, I'm familiar with /r/trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts, a couple of favourite examples.
Yeah but they need to be BAD. "Mediocre enough that users don't want to migrate elsewhere" (like /r/games) seems to be enough to keep it running and gaining subs just fine
I've never visited r/games and now I'm glad I never have.
The existing sub-subreddits organically evolved from disputes between more primary subreddits about the type of content users wanted to see; e.g. r/atheism decides they don't want low-quality meme posts, so r/atheismmemes is created. If reddit were to simply remove the mods from thousands of subreddits, it could easily sour those communities.
r/fragrance for example decided to stay open, but the mods just would quit doing anything. That'll show us!
What happened: no spam. A few silly posts. A lot of good posts. A lot of people remarking how much better the sub is without mods. Mods returned, promising to 'consider community feedback' once they realized they lost control of the narrative.
It's like taking your hands off the wheel when driving. A few seconds and you're probably okay. An hour? You're in a ditch!
Sure, but modding is something you don't need...until you absolutely do. Just takes one person who wants to spam porn/gore/etc to a subreddit/forum/etc and without a human able to ban/limit those actions, it's trivial to takeover a smaller community.
To be specific, I'm referring to in non-crazy western countries with something resembling freedom of speech, not PRC "Winnie the Pooh is banned" places.
I moderate a few small, and mostly inactive, subs. They don't see a whole lot of activity.
On the odd moments I do drop into mod mode (a few times a year, if that), what I see is a fair bit of flagged spam ... and a lot of off-topic posts. One sub in particular seems to have had its topic (a software application of use to Google+ users saving data, which was last relevant on 1 April 2019) with an exam of some sort in India.
Topic drift, relevance drift, and lightweight content displacing substantive posts are far more likely without dedicated, mission-aware mods. AskScience and AskHistorians would be most especially subject to that, as well known examples. I can think of numerous others.
The other issue would be various forms of abuse and brigading, below the thresholds which Reddit's automated systems would detect. Unmoderated forums would far more likely become unpleasant places to participate.
Reddit should boot up another letter, /d/ or something, and give the communities numbers or hex identifiers, (which they already sort of do with the short urls) and make the names irrelevant. Communities can choose to port over and redirect. Over time, the ones that don’t fade to disappearing from all and eventually go private.
Tying name to community url makes discoverability of replacement communities shitty for new users. Politics is easy to understand. Whatever people come up with as a substitute word for a forked community, will be less clear. Of forked communities, maybe only trees and rainbow came up with a better name.
Hacker News is interesting in that it somewhat splits the difference. Post and comments are both represented by "itemID" (and there's no distinction between What Is a Post and What Is a Comment that can be made simply based on the contentID). For example, I'm currently replying to itemID 36329954.
But profile identifiers are semantically-sensible strings. In your case "blehn", in mine, "dredmorbius".
(There may well be, and all but certainly is, an internal userID or similar, but it's not exposed at least through the Web interface, I've not looked at the API in detail for this.)
This means, amongst other things, that it's possible to traverse all extant HN posts either sequentially (beginning with <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1>) or randomly (say, by generating a list and sorting it randomly, or by algorithmically calculating itemIDs without repetition).
Google+ did this for both posts and profile IDs, assigning each what appeared to be a hash, which was not sequential, and was sparsely filled. Profile names / labels could be reassigned independently of that identifier (with limits as to how frequently this was allowed), and multiple profiles with the same name were permitted, addressing the "John Smith" or "Maria Gonzalez" problems (commonly-occurring names where all but the first-arriving party must choose something different). It was not possible to trivially traverse the (large, hashed) namespace, though Google being Google these were itemised in some 50,000 or so sitemap files, a fact I exploited to some benefit.[1]
In the case of a discussion site in which forum identifiers are arbitrary but labels are semantic, issues such as discovery, relevance, and trust would be mediated by some other mechanism. Note that the extant Reddit practice already has numerous issues, e.g., /r/ClimateChange is a sub devoted to denialism (under the pretext of "rational" discussion and skepticism) whilst the scientific consensus is far better represented at /r/climate.[2]
What the intermediation of arbitrary identifiers vs. descriptive labels provides is defence against squatting or appropriation of high-value, high-salience identifiers by malevolent actors. If your label is independent of your description and reputation, it's less tractable as a means of disinformation or propaganda.
________________________________
Notes:
1. "Estimating G+ User Activity: 4-6 million active posters in January 2015 to date" <https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq>
2. And regards the present Reddit Blackout, I'll note that the denialist subreddit is available, the consensus subreddit is blacked out. Which raises interesting points about the challenges of adhering to moral principles in an immoral world. I also note that ClimateChange's long-standing moderator appears to have been inactive for the past 9 months, though they are still listed as chef moderator. It's possivle, though uncertain, that former characterisation of that sub may well have changed.
But not /d/, you don't want that implication.
Isn't that exactly what people have been doing for well over a decade?
if you volunteer at a dog shelter, and find you don't agree with some of their practices anymore. do you stop volunteering? or do you just set all the dogs free
For example: Optionally requiring a questionnaire before being able to post to a Facebook group significantly cuts down on spam. Reddit doesn't really have an equivalent. If a Reddit mod wants to implement similar? They could use the API to write something that blackholes new members' comments until they respond to an automated message. Not a great user experience and what happens if Reddit pricing changes now make that integration prohibitively expensive?
Some mods certainly power-trip but ultimately the role isn't a glamorous one: You're a volunteer customer success agent. Most of the work isn't hard or controversial, but at the scale of Reddit there's a _lot_ of it. The hardest part of recruiting new moderators is finding people who'll remain even minimally engaged. Replacing them certainly isn't impossible but the process of replacing proven-engaged moderators with newcomers that need to be vetted can be a ton of work in itself.
Regardless of how high-quality the replacements might be under ideal conditions, I think it would be very surprising if average quality didn't suffer when trying to replace hundreds or thousands of them very quickly, versus the slower, incremental growth that resulted in the original bunch.
In fact it is well known that current Reddit moderators are often very bad and contribute to the worst parts of Reddit culture. It has been discussed here, and on Reddit, how big of a problem current moderator practices are. Yet due to this protest we seem to have developed a collective amnesia and now we're all pretending that the current set of moderators are the heroes of the Reddit story. Baffling. Most of Reddit would be improved by a large-scale shake-up of moderators.
It's like the British Empire, Soviet Union, and United States in World War II - it's not that they don't have a long and storied history of crimes against humanity (or the internet as the case may be) themselves; it's that their opponents are so despicable we're happy to see anyone picking a fight with them. If the moderators (respectively allies) want to call themselves the heroes of that story... well, in strictly relative terms they are.
Though I think a lot of the most notoriously awful moderation cliques (r/ukpolitics for example) have eschewed the blackout.
They evaluated themselves and found that they were actually excellent moderators.
Even counting just large groups, there likely several thousand subreddits which have individually-specific focuses and moderation criteria. Reddit reports 100+ million active subreddits.[1]
The two problems with moving to an in-house, wage-labour moderation team are that this is expensive and wage labour at prices Reddit is likely willing to pay will not meet the standards of dedicated volunteer teams.
From various sources I've encountered over the years, human-based moderation peaks at somewhere between 500--1,000 items/day (multiple sources put a peak at about 700--800, though that's with very thin review). Reddit ... doesn't seem to offer stats on daily / monthly comment volume, though it claims ~60m DAU and 13 billion posts and comments overall. I'm going to SWAG[2] and assume roughly half of those have occurred in the past five years, which would mean that there are ... about 3,300 posts / comments day. Which seems low, so my SWAG's probably wrong. If 13 billion items are posted per year, then there are ~35 million items posted per day. That seems possibly high, though Facebook's claim is 5 billion items/day, so ... maybe? shrug
One criteria I've suggested for moderation elsewhere is based on prevalence, which is the number of times an item is viewed. Short version: prevalence follows a power-law distribution, and as the views threshold is raised, the number of items falls off drastically. With some tuning and adjustments (e.g., risk-rating comments to raise or lower estimated harms), it's possible for a finite moderation team to offer an SLA[3] that content with a given prevalence threshold will be reviewed. It's also possible to set holds such that content reaching that threshold is withheld from further visibility until it is reviewed (say, if some specific item starts taking off), which effectively throttles visibility of content and scales it to the limited moderation resource.
(I'm not aware of any UGC[1] service applying this model to moderation, but it is one which strongly suggests itself. It is effectively what a gate-kept editorial model applies, e.g., where an editor specifically reviews all incoming entries from a "slush pile"[5].)
Going back to my content numbers above, a 35 million items/day content stream and a moderation team capable of reviewing 500 items/day (roughly 1 minute per item on average) ... would requite a 70,000 member moderation team, which is likely prohibitive for Reddit.[6] A prevalence set such that 10% of all items require human review reduces that to 7,000, still likely high, and a 1% review which would still cover the overwhelming majority of all content presentations) a somewhat more tractable 700. From third party and my own sources there's a roughly inverse relationship between content items* and prevalence, such that increasing prevalence 10x reduces the number of individual content items by a factor of 10. For reference, looking at Hacker News historical front pages and votes and comments of the 1st and 30th ranked stories, we see about 6.3x more votes, and 3.8x more comments on the 1st-ranked story.[7] For Google+, a near-logrithmic scaling of number of communities vs. size was noted.[8]
________________________________
Notes:
1. As of January 2021: <https://www.redditinc.com/>
2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_wild-ass_guess>
3. Service level agreement, basically a guaranteed minimum service level.
4. User-generated content.
5. <https://www.writersdigest.com/getting-published/what-is-the-...>
6. The somewhat better-capitalised Facebook is reported to have 7,500 moderators: <https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwk9zd/how-facebook-content-...>
7. Own data based on a crawl of all HN front page "past" listings from 2007-2-20 through 2023-6-13, with 178,642 stories.
8. Own data based on a crawl of all extant ~8.1 million Google+ Communities, data provided by Friends+Me creator. The data actually show far fewer large communities than a strictly log-log relation would suggest, for reasons that are unclear. See: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/ab6a5470f57001368d4002...>
A discussion elsewhere had me looking at how much front-page HN activity is attributable to what number of profiles. Using my crawl data mentioned above:
- 2 submitters with > 1,000 stories
- 170 w/ >= 100
- 2,812 w/ >= 10
- 19,165 w/ >=2
Half of all HN front-page stories since 2007 were submitted by just 2,092 profiles, of 43,598 represented in all front-page stories. As of 2021, Whaly.io found 767,496 active profiles since 2005: <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>. (Post or comment activity.)
Or they work for 3rd party groups who have an agenda they want to push
I agree they made awful decisions, my usage patterns will definitely be changing due to a re-enable /etc/hosts entry. However, what is the impact on a broader scale? This is like Twitter firing a ton of engineers - we can't really evaluate until much further down the road.
We will see in few months what is the situation and if someone manages to advertise an alternative for millions of people.
Then, Reddit IPO is doomed. If there is no new significant alternative where people will go, then IPO will probably continue as planned and API change went well from the Reddit’s perspective.
Because there are a great many people that have legitimately used Reddit as their "frontpage of the internet" for years and don't enjoy the form factor that other websites / apps provide. Places like Twitter and TikTok aren't everyone's cup of tea, especially if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content.
My take is that this type of person is more likely to not need to replace their feed fix with another feed and is more likely to pursue fulfillment in other areas of life.
Worthless under their current model. What if their new model is to simulate other users with ChatGPT? Many users don't engage with comments beyond voting/reading. How long would it take them to notice, and if they notice would they care?
Can Huffman coast to IPO, grab the money, then bail?
We (and reddit) also don't know whether users will return, ie: will this just blow over?
From Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
Nothing blew up in their face. It's almost as if the vast majority of users simply don't care about this kind of drama.
This is the funniest because it shows how little they're actually able to generate from people using their product
No, they're charging exorbitant rates for API access lol. I honestly can't understand how people can look at $2.50 / month per user for a few JSON responses and think "wow now that's reasonable."
If their infrastructure is that bad that it costs even on the order of a dollar per month per user to serve API requests, then I'd be horrified to imagine how much it costs them to send entire HTML pages to the millions of people that use desktop exclusively.
He did not say that, he said
> Apollo's price would be approximately $2.50 per month per user
which is an estimate of how much they'd have to pay Reddit for each user in API costs alone. But it doesn't take into account cost of Apollo's own servers and infrastructure, Apple's fees, or the fact that there are people with paid for yearly subscriptions that'd have to be served:
> Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5/month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple's fees that would just be enough to break even. > > Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible.
(quoted from https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...)
All in all it's a much different thing if Reddit said they want to charge the users $2.5/mo for API access, given them their own key and let use whatever 3rd party app they want. They want to charge the 3rd party apps directly, which is a whole different story that can't really be summed up as to "$2.5 is not that high if people really want to use third party apps"
Of course the CEO during an IPO year is going to downplay the shutdown. That said, there's no way the shutdown is going to change reddit in this case. They will replace the mods on the bigger subs.
And yes, due to these kinds of numbers, the shutdown will do nothing. Hell, many subs opened up today and r/all is back to normal.
> Amir Shevat, Twitter’s former head of product for the developer platform, who
> lives in Round Rock, was responsible for ensuring that the tools Twitter
> provided independent software developers using the platform met their needs.
> He said about 17 percent of engagement on Twitter, historically, was through
> third-party apps, which played a vital role in defining Twitter’s identity.
That's 17% of _engagement._ I strongly expect that with both Twitter and Reddit there's a sort of double Pareto distribution going on: the majority of _users_ go through the first-party site/tools/clients, but the majority of _valuable_ users go through the third-party site/tools/clients. The users who are invested enough in the platform to have strong opinions about how things should be done and who use the platform enough that they seek out tools that actively meet their needs rather than just taking the default tools, are also users who are worth, at the very least, _placating_ because those are also the users most able to cause problems if the platform stabs them in the face the way Reddit and Twitter have done.
Apollo et al are different in that they are packaging up the entire experience wholesale, they are not ancillary. There is no way for Reddit the company to show ads through third party clients (the client could simply block ad posts if they wanted to).
They could have changed NOTHING about the move except their messaging and attitude and things would've gone a lot better.
But what I'm more curious about is that this memo went out not even a day after the protests started. Both revenue indicators and impact itself might be delayed, especially now that many subreddits chose to extend the protest indefinitely
It was all about getting the message out.
Real "shutdown" comes when the good moderators decides they had enough and stops being active, so reddit becomes run by shitty mods.
Only then will the users leave. So it will take many months before the effect is visible in user count.
Well...
I'm not even saying he's lying. He could be telling the absolute truth. However, that post would not constitute evidence for him telling the truth, because it is what he would say if it was the truth, and it is what he would say if traffic dropped 98%.
This sort of thing is true of a lot of corporate and political communications. The only thing that carries information content is things they didn't have to say and couldn't be predicted in advance.
In this case, the only tidbit of information in that post is that they still intend to ignore the community(/communities).
Had*. Ever since Aaron died, it's become a censorious bubble.
Aaron Swartz had very little involvement with Reddit for several years before his death, and also some of Reddit's most notorious (at least at the time) "censorship" actions took place before his death.
It's a little unfair to his memory to conflate the two things, especially given that he spent the last five years of his life doing things he deeply cared about (and which had nothing to do with Reddit corporate strategy or policy).
All have definitely not been reinstated. They banned my 13 year old account without warning because I dared to make an alternative API for Reddit[1]. Even after agreeing to suspend the service they are still yet to unban my account.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are others in the same boat.
So you created an API to bypass the official APIs, promoted it on Reddit itself, and wonder why you got banned? Color me surprised.
If you saw that title a month ago, you might read "Reddit" there as "the people talking on Reddit".
Whether it was people's emerging consensus/behavior on a noteworthy incident, a more general zeitgeist or Reddit Hive Mind exhibited over time there, or whatever.
Reading "Reddit" in the title instead as "Reddit, the company" is less familiar to me.
We can't expect profit motivated companies to provide a true public shared space with shared public values. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Google -- all of them naturally have their own interests at heart -- not yours -- and as Doctorow explained in the "Enshittification" article, they all go through it. Their shareholders will demand it.
We evolved traditional state run postal services for a reason; but I won't enrage the libertarians here by suggesting we need the same for online forums and suffer the downvotes. I would submit that it's delusional to expect private corporations to provide these kinds of services on the terms we expect once they've gone beyond initial market capture.
Somehow the message needs to get out to stop trusting and embracing these kinds of fake public spaces.
The EFF article submits that "Content moderation doesn’t work at scale"; I'd take a stronger position: social networking does not "work" at scale. It degrades into "social media" and/or walled gardens and/or automated mob manipulation. I hope one of the results of the last year -- with Twitter and now Reddit going through this kind of crazy -- is the partial return of some smaller scale more intimate spaces to replace their use.
Addendum: With LLMs and automated "content" production going seriously"webscale", I expect things to get worse before they get better
There's the fundamental problem. The bills need to be paid.
They want to completely control the experience, so they an extract as much user data as possible to drive ads.
So long as user's are in 3rd party apps those 3rd parties control the relationship, which Reddit has deemed is unacceptable.
It might have stuck a chord with some users, but I think overall it would have been net positive for Reddit and the narrative from leadership much more palatable
This is less about ad revenue than it is jealousy over closed communities like Instagram and tiktok where you are locked into their app.
Right now they are sticking their head in the sand, middle finger in the air and daring people to leave. Poor community relations and messaging for a community based website.
They made their bed by accepting VC money. There is more than one way to skin a cat and I think they choose poorly.
I don't see the point.
Everything you can do on the web I guess.
Could Reddit not have gone the 501(c)(3) route like the Wikimedia Foundation? Wikipedia has an immense amount of content, moderation, high traffic, open API, and they manage to keep the lights on.
But I haven't heard of any place like that so far. No real competitor for users to jump ship towards.
If they're craving content and don't want to spend the time going to distinct sites, they're likely not going to all of a sudden pick up a new hobby. I hope I'm wrong.
And yet, very many people are terminally online in one way or another. Even if the term "terminally online" has very strong stigma and most people would not consider to be a part of that group, they still spend hours every day on social media, and have no means of quitting it even knowing the harmful effects.
For example... let's talk about The_Donald, shall we? (inb4: I'm not from USA, "Trump" and "Biden" for me are just "some leaders from some tacoland", so I'm not emotionally attached into this matter.)
Some users were protesting that The_Donald should be banned on the grounds of hate speech. Some said that it should be allowed to exist, for the sake of free speech.
What did Reddit do? Quarantined it, showing that it doesn't care about hate speech _nor_ free speech, while paying lip service to both. And using a bullshit reason to do so (a single post encouraging people to beat cops, or crap like that.)
Why doesn't Reddit outright tell its users its values? Why is it always lying? Why does it put a CEO to disdain the community, with a "we snoos" (something redditors never use)? A: because it doesn't fucking care about its users. That issue predates the 3rd party apps killing, and it will postdate it.
By the way: there are talks that Reddit might finally implement limits on how many subs a mod can moderate. An old request from people concerned about power mods. Why now? (A: because it happens to align with Reddit Inc.'s interests - userbase be damned.)
I'm fucking glad that I've migrated.
[[And the fediverse is nice, the fediverse is great, but if you're a Reddit user and can't stand the fediverse: migrate elsewhere. Don't stay in that sinking ship.]]
In general they want to do as little policing as possible, and only do the least amount they can when their hand is forced. But there's also some signs of the higher ups actually being okay with things that are icky and of very doubtful appeal to advertisers, like r/jailbait
I'd say overall the leadership is just not good. It neither has any sort of moral center, nor is even properly business oriented because their efforts on that regard seem very lacking as well.
Eg, I think this API move makes little economical sense. If one were to be ruthlessly profit oriented I think an approach might be to introduce an API price and gradually raise it little by little. Milk the market for all it's worth. Rather than killing it from the start, either extract every dollar people are willing to pay, or kill it by squeezing all the profit that can be had from the maneuver by doing it slowly and gradually.
Was almost assuredly a false flag, given the other content in T_D.
And ironic, given the contemporary ACAB fervor in the others.
The real answer is that everyone asking this question is just revving up for a fight. It's like apologizing for something that you said as a teenager that was found on social media: the only people asking for the apology don't really care whether or not you apologize.
The right approach in this situation is always to walk the path where no one can tell what's up. Do not define the situation. You're going to get raked over the coals anyway, so get the best you can out of it.
It's more like apologising for something that you kept doing, since your teenager times, and that you keep doing. In this case at least some people asking for an apology want to see a difference, not just "revving up for a fight".
That said, even not saying your values would be better than lying about them. And worse than lying - lying in an obvious way, that is bound to be interpreted as "you're such braindead trash that we can throw any bullshit on your snouts and you'll eat it".
If it was possible to uphold every fundamental human right and be commercially successful at the same time, we wouldn't need a government.
Which is not to say that the amount of hatred and bile she received wasn't - unsurprisingly - wildly excessive and disgustingly misogynistic.
Some might say this approach would result in echo chambers, but guess what...echo chambers are going to happen anyway, whether it's restricting your intake of news to certain news networks, restricting internet browsing to only specific websites, or your local/offline real world community gatherings. There is no way to stop echo chambers.
the_donald also promoted the white supremacist Unite the Right rally (the tiki torch KKK one) in an official manner with a stickied post from mods.
The article brings up a good point regarding how Reddit relies a lot on free labor to work. The incentives for operating the communities are primarily built on good will.
I've been working on a Reddit/Discord/Patreon style hybrid community platform that puts a focus on the community owner/admins getting paid. It feels like the people running the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.
Important to remember some of the people moderating this stuff have had to deal with spam/bot activity severe enough to make the news (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wallstreetbets-reddit-bot-activ...). It's unsurprising some ended up dependent on external apps.
The problem with federated networks ("Fediverse"?) like Mastodon and Matrix is that you still rely on a (sub)domain and someone running a server. That someone could be yourself, but that's just an option for a small minority. That domain could be shut down.
Nostr may solve this: instead of usernames the user has a private/public key. And instead of relying on a specific server your data can flow through many servers (relays).
The moderators of some of the political subs work for certain parties or political groups and it is blatantly obvious.
The only reason people are protesting api pricing is because they want to protest. The actual concern here isn't what they are protesting.
They want to quit but they can't. They likely even realize they are addicted. They likely even realize the content they view is censored and curated to manipulate them.
Just quit reddit already and be happy.
If you mean want to quit but can't in the sense that there is no other place on the Internet to have a like-minded community forum around fountain pens or a particular bank or third-tier game shows, yes, this is true.
But if you mean in a broader sense, of "I just can't quit you!", then no. Reddit steamrolled all of the older forums--and, before that, Usenet and Echomail groups--I used to participate in. Much like how so many sellers of niche products have moved to Amazon, Reddit is where the quirky forums have moved to.
I don't use Reddit as a general-purpose site. It's simply the place where the community that discusses the topics I want to gas on about live. And, yes, I object to what Reddit is doing so I will leave it if the changes come to pass.
For me, it absolutely was a sign to evaluate my usage. I may go back, I may not. The local city subreddit is a good counterpart to my local newspaper, but the real dangers for reddit are twofold: individuals will be less likely to provide free labor (on which Reddit depends both for content generation and moderation), and it gave its most passionate users a timeout on which they started evaluating alternatives.
No...? It's a decision that impacts millions of people that rely solely on third-party apps to have any decent experience on Reddit at all. The "official" app is a hot dumpster fire and lacks incredibly basic accessibility features, among other shortcomings. The official app is a joke but instead of making it better to entice more users onto it (and thus see more ads), they just exploded the entire community.
I specced out a decentralized spam-resistant reddit alternative a while ago, and posted it here a few months ago. Please build this, happy to sign away non-exclusive IP rights if you have an idea of how to monetize. ---
I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone please take this and build it. Let me know if you try, would love to spectate and advise on development.
The key is there shouldn't be a globally consistent front page. Sorting should be done on an individual basis. Upvotes boost signal signal to peers and downvotes squelch. By propagating content scores transitively through the network proportionally to trust scores, users can moderate their own feeds by voting and managing their friend list.
Users have a peer list, containing a list of server/users on it. Each peer has a user-managed 'trust weighting'. Each user has a list of "good content" (ideally hash identified for content addressability), with each item having a score based on that user's votes and votes from peers, weighted by that users trust in that peer.
Periodically, your server contacts all of your peers, and asks them for their good content list. The scores from peers are multiplied by your own trust weight for that peer, and you build a personal "good content" list that merges the lists from each of your peers together (and drops insufficient scores).
You are presented with a score-descending-sorted page of content. Whenever you upvote something, it increases your score weight for that content as well as the trust weight for each peer who sent you the recommendation, and vice versa for downvotes. Votes are transmitted to peers as a crypto signature of the content hash, but when retransmitted to peer-of-peer, they only see the intermediary's aggregated and trust weighted merged scores.
The specifics of the algorithms on how you calculate and adjust weights can be configurable by each individual user, the protocol only cares that peers are able to produce some kind of score list.
Dividing content into topics is a bit trickier, could just label content with tags. I think it may be preferable for each user to have multiple topic focused 'personalities' that are basically distinct user accounts with unique peer lists and votes. In that way, I could follow Dave-gardening without having to follow Dave-sports.
For this example I'm using 1 user per server for simplicity, though not required. All users could be on same server, which is probably best for MVP to avoid implementing p2p networking stuff until validated.
Ex.
Alice follows Bob with weight of 0.5, Dave with 0.1
Bob scores content A as 0.8, B as 0.2
Dave scored content A as 0.4, B as 0.9
Alice downloads both lists.
Alice score content A as avg(0.8 * 0.5, 0.4 * 0.1) = 0.22
Alice scores content B as avg(0.2 * 0.5, 0.9 * 0.1) = 0.095
Content A gets sorted higher than B.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21011645 (previous discussion)
I think there could be different clients for different kinds of users - do you want to curate your follow list and transitively republish? Or do you mostly want to only consume and only publish your direct upvotes?
But I haven't gamed out the network effects very deeply, could be some pernicious scaling problems I have handwaved away.
Attention is the reward for moderation.
Personally, I think they got focused on one particular thing (AI firms and any other content vacuums) and lost sight of other options for making money. In that context, trying to do volume-based charging to the third party apps makes sense, because in a lot of ways you're just treating them like all the new customers you're targeting.
I think this completely misses the potential for monetizing their users beyond ad impressions, but maybe they did analysis and decided it just couldn't happen - or maybe they just dismissed it because they had different customers in mind.
It still seems to me that they could (now could have?) converted a significant percentage of mobile app users into paying customers - perhaps not at the Premium price point of $50+/year, but likely at a lower price point of $18/year (still way more than they were getting from ads) they'd have taken a ton of free users and turned them into paying customers, and they'd have done it while keeping the lion's share of the money themselves instead of having app devs and app stores thrown into the mix. In addition, once you've got them paying you have plenty of options to try to steer them to higher plans - someone wants to have multiple accounts for family or privacy reasons? That's only available with Premium, or with a Family plan. Want higher API limits? We can sell you that. Spending time moderating a popular subreddit? Thanks, would a free subscription make that easier for you?
But maybe potential investors don't actually care about having paying clients.
I just don't think either side has the moral high ground. The mods like the convenience of 3rd party apps. I get it. It's not a real moral issue.
Why not embrace the "subreddit simulator" meme and simply make users argue with GPT-X, trained on previous Reddit posts? No moderation required — every user is corralled into a tiny bubble, perhaps consisting of a single real person, all while consuming ads.