Louis Rossmann calls community to leave Reddit
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I've worked in tech with a lot of people like this. They will tell you straight up they don't care about users or employees. CTO I've worked with said that developers are like "machines working in a factory" that they shouldn't think above their level and should just do the same thing over and over.
I'll tell you one thing you'll never change the reddit managements minds, never ever ever. Same as I was never able to change any of these other peoples minds.
This shows how important it is to learn about a company, it's culture, philosophy, and values before joining. I can see how some people operate like this, and I don't want to work with them.
For anyone reading this who thinks all companies are like the one that parent described, I want to share that it is not true. There are plenty of companies who based their collaboration with their workers on other mental models than cogs-in-the-machine.
I may sound dumb, but how does one do this? What question would you ask in an interview in order to determine whether the management are apathetic to their users or employees?
The three interviews I did at my current company gave me a glimpse into the culture, but only a surface-level "first impression" kind of knowledge. With that said, I think I successfully ascertained the company's vision with the product I'm working on, but that's way easier to learn than culture IMO.
Open-ended questions like that.
If the CEO can tell you about how engineering changed the product, but the dev can't, then your experience is going to match the dev's. And the part of "engineering" that changed the product was almost certainly not a dev.
Besides, it is common for CEOs to think that they are more responsive than they really are. And they are generally better at marketing than truth. So for both reasons, I would not trust their answer unless it is backed up by the rank and file.
There is no single approach. It's a soft skill. I don't think there is a single magic question you can ask and you'll get a black-and-white answer.
Here are some ideas:
- read about the company on glassdoor. Try to read between the lines. Are the reviews fluff? Are there any veiled criticisms. Read the high praises and the vulgar criticisms with a grain of salt. They are a signal, but people often have an agenda or are led by emotion when they post like that. Pay attention to the mixed reviews who give you the good and some bad. See if there are any patterns between reviews.
- I hope you will have an interview with either the hiring manager, or one or more peers. Ask them questions about how it is to work there. Find way to ask without asking "How is it working there?" directly. Some ideas:
- Am I joining because the team is growing, or am I replacing someone? If replacing, why did the person before me leave?
- How long have the people on the team I am joining been there? You're looking to get a feel for tenure and seniority.
- How often do you speak with your manager? Their manager? The CTO? The CEO? In general, the more often, and the more approachable leadership is, the less likely you're thought of as a cog and seen more as a human.
- Ask if they could give a concrete example of how their values or principles have been used in practice recently. Make sure you read these ahead of time. If they can't tell, then their values might be bullet points on a glossy brochure that have no application in reality. If they don't know their values, that means no one cares about them.
- How often do you have to work overtime? Is it normal? Is it occasional? How is that recognized? How is that seen?
- Ask how they define and recognize excellence on their team. Listen to the story they tell. Is it mechanical? Do you get a non-answer? A blank stare?
Read reviews on Glassdoor.com. Take them with a grain of salt, but if you see a lot of reviews all saying similar things about the management, it's probably true.
Because otherwise you are always fighting an uphill battle and get boiled like a frog when things inevitably start to go south.
Every tech company I know of grants workers options/stock. What more is fair? What is it about worker status that should grant them outsized influence on a company and not, say, customers?
Of course a joint-stock company allows customers to put skin in the game too (which a worker does not simply by being a worker) and giving them influence in addition to their ability to “vote with their wallet”.
It solves all these problems and avoids the adversarial relationship issues.
It's even more complex. While top management might give a rough direction, even within a single company different managers may create way different environments.
I can't recall the exact quote so paraphrasing here, I recall the gist of someone saying:
> When deciding whether or not to join a group of people, take a long hard look at people already there, how they work, how they think, and if there's something that you see and don't want to turn into, bail out. Because you're going to join a group of, say, 10 people, and in all likelihood these 10 people will change you, whereas the chances of a single individual changing 10 people are slim at best, and more realistically and bluntly put, nonexistent. So the three choices are a) run away, b) join and embrace (or cave in, depending on how you put it, which may or may not be toxic for you), and c) join but resist (which will be toxic for everyone)
While a talented and motivated individual can indeed create a lot of value, this will inevitably also create a lot of dependency on said person. Now this person has become a liability, and HR doesn't like liabilities.
Not exactly. I do agreed about the value destroying part. But unless the knowledge mentioned is standardized, it's not really easy to transfer them to the succeeding team members.
Some highly successful products (or features in these products) was created because the effort from one or two employees who got the idea based on their knowledge from life. Without these key employees, the product/features will never be implemented, and the success will never happen (and nobody will know it's possible).
It's the same way how CEO/CTO works, really. Some CEO lead the company to success while others failed, not because they're incompetent, but because the knowledge is not there, which lead to (for example) the lack of imagination and growth.
But unlike the leaders, employees usually don't receive nearly enough reward for their insight, if their effort is noticed at all. That's the dilemma.
Yes, I'm currently working for such a client (not as a dev though) and it's amazing how absolutely convinced even so-called "technical" people think developers are like interchangeable factory workers (which are themselves also probably a myth).
Apparently, the inability to code is some badge of honor, and proof that one is a "thinker"(?!?).
This view seems to be more pervasive in Europe than in the US... Maybe it's an artifact of social classes / hierarchical societies, and more egalitarian societies have an edge to overcome those prejudices.
I'm not sure. I don't really know.
What I know is that it's terrible.
Absolutely, a diploma is needed and self starters are view with skepticism.
France is extreme with that for instance. Banks will lend you money to starts a specific business only if you have a related diploma ( hair dresser, butcher, boulanger … )
I mean; they won’t flat out refuse if you dont. But passing thought those trade schools will open doors.
I was just talking it with a friend very qualified in education in both the US and France.
He’s a certify teacher with experience in both countries.
He’s starting a business of teaching music exclusively. He has like 8 years of relevant experiences doing that.
France is still asking him to do a 2 years training if he want to access the government contracts of public schools.
And that’s in a context of teacher scarcity.
Silver lining, the training will cost like $1000/year but that borderline insulting to have him do that and I find the 2 years timeline insane.
So, yeah, long story short crendentism indeed.
I think it was coming from a good place originally. But at this point it’s silly.
This being said, companies that really do provide added value and grow are usually the ones valuing their engineering staff highly.
As for myself, I outright refuse to work with traditionally structured French companies.
Less than a year after this guy started, a lot of the best people in the company have left the company. I still have several good contacts there and it is really bad. The company had good revenues and a lot of potential, but they are really struggling right now and they already had to let a lot of people go that they actually needed. There is one very good developer left who basically built most of the company's software and who is still performing like crazy because he really identifies with the company and he tries to keep it alive, even though it is literally destroying his health and family. Guess what, the CTO wants to get rid of him because he "doesn't like his attitude". He tried to force the previous Head Of Software Development to get rid of this guy until he quit himself, now he is trying to get the new Head of (one of the Iranian guys) to find a way to get rid of him. It is not easy to fire someone in Germany btw. You either need a good reason (like validated documentation that they violated the terms of their contract) or get the person to quit themselves. The Head Of knows that this guy leaving would be the worst thing to happen to this company, so he is basically just stalling.
Of course the CTO gets more than triple the money of the best paid developer, plus bonuses like a car that's worth ~140k.
Which is quite weird, since at every Not Software engineering company I've interacted with in Europe (mostly the nordic and germanic countries to be fair), the majority of the top management are experienced senior engineers who have worked their way up from 'the floor' as it where.
They build the machines that sit in the factory and churn out the product/service
After I worked a few years in the industry, I came to the following conclusion: The main difference between a factory and a knowledge business is that in a factory, the smartest, most knowledgable people are at the top (not completely the case, but mostly). In knowledge work, the smartest (=experts) are at the bottom. If you move up as a smart person, you will for sure lose up-to-date knowledge.
This has a few consequences of course. In knowledge work, managers should not say "First do this, then do that". Managers should be at the service of their team, making sure they get the focus and freedom to work on their stuff.
Now back to the factories: I'm no expert, but one of the key elements of Lean Manufacturing is that the people on the floor are able to provide feedback to the upper layers. Why them? Because they have the hands-on knowledge and see things management can't. So even in factories, either you listen to the lowest level employees or you're not optimising your process.
And finally, if users and employees can be replaced, so can companies, products and services. The thing is that having great retention in users saves you a lot of investment on acquiring new ones. And having great retention in employees saves you a lot of investment in hiring and training. The leaders that realise this will outperform anyone that doesn't.
The personality of the leadership will determine whether they think of workers as self-motivated (will actively look for work) or externally motivated (will wait for work and try to avoid it). Those who don’t think workers are self-motivated will build management structures where people are discouraged from thinking beyond their station and have all kinds of reporting and incentives to make them do their work.
I was for a long time hard in the self-motivated camp, but eventually realized that’s me and not everyone, and maybe not even most people. A multi-modal management approach that leaves room for both works better but is harder to pin down.
Thanks for the info, fellow Flemish guy (your name gave it away :D)
My experience tells me you should just assume everyone is going to need the external carrot/stick arrangement.
You'll save a lot of pain by realizing that no one cares about the product as much as the people spending 14 hours a day on it.
Programming can fail much harder.
If this communication goes wrong it can result in deaths and giant profit leaks until eventual bankruptcy.
If you listen to programmers, the app has technical debt, and needs to be rewritten on [next tech stack needed on the developer’s resume]. I’ve hear that on a 6-month-old app written in SpringBoot/React in 2020.
Leader-blaming is a nice sport, but actually working together with full responsibility on both sides is a much rarer skill. Including being fired with damages if you summon KubernPyKafka in Scala and your team doesn’t produce features during 6 months.
Getting flashbacks from my own time working on what I like to call Cthulhu Architecture. KubernPyKafka in Scala is probably the most reasonable part of it.
The parts that needed to be fast were in python. The parts that could afford to be slow were in Go or LuaJIT. Ops in C++. And the parts that required well defined carefully controlled business logic to be encoded were in JavaScript if you were lucky, but more likely embedded in a DSL constructed over YAML. ACID built over top of NoSQL. Still only scratching the surface of the insanity. I’m sure there are many of us carrying these scars; some of the intent on bringing this dysfunction into their next organization.
> And finally, if users and employees can be replaced, so can companies, products and services.
Now ask the same CTO (or, hell, most HN users) what they think of tech support, or QA, or tech writers.
Developers are like gods in the pecking order compared to these other professions.
The very definition of a factory is that it manufactures the same thing, or a limited range, of items over and over and over again.
That's not software development: you're either doing something new, or working on an existing codebase but, of course, because each part of that codebase is quite different to the others, there's no real uniformity to what you're building. Sure, there are processes that are similar (writing tests, debugging), etc., but it's much more like the design and testing phase of engineering a product rather than the manufacturing phase.
Overall, "factory" is an incredibly vapid analogy that simply needs to die in our industry.
You can pay someone to work but you can’t pay them to care and the difference between a product where people cared and one where they did not is extremely tangible.
pg says there's probably no one who understands reddit's userbase better than Huffman... https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1654769759399845888
so, there's hope? /s
The entire industry is infected with management (CXO, VP, Directors, Managers) that think engineers can be pushed to produce "more". And they do this without any idea what "more" is, and how the "more" will bring revenue.
At least in a factory, producing "more" units is likely to return more income. But engineering is not like that at all. There is a creative aspect to it and there is a maintenance aspect to it.
But management ignores it to protect their own stock awards.
Honestly, I find this a very repugnant way of dealing with the user base. A business that never tried to earnestly generate enough value to be sustainable can only be classified as a scam in my book.
It was the dot-com bubble and its couple of resurgences that really fucked things up here and made everything off-kilter. The finance bros were drawn like vultures to “easy profit,” and brought with them attitudes like treating Google’s chef getting rich too as a “problem” to be “solved” rather than the system working as designed.
I am not sure how civilization was dupped into the mass delusion of our current economic systems but I do believe we are seeing them unwind right now... the Fed and other controllers have been attempting to catch a falling knife for at least 15 years if not longer... at some point they will loose that battle
Something like Spotify is a good example of this working as intended. It's not without its problems, especially their blatant rent-seeking within the podcast sphere, but at the core it's VC working well.
That's not what Reddit and indeed many other VC funded enterprises are doing. Reddit was never going to make a profit without upending its entire value proposition. They may or may not successfully cash out, but what's in store for them if they don't flame out immediate is essentially turning into Facebook. Not cool 2008 facebook, but lame minions memes and grandmas Facebook.
>Something like Spotify is a good example of this working as intended.
Spotify is a 26 year old business with zero moat. It’s most valuable to the 3 major record labels as a negotiating tool against Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon. That means the 3 record labels need to price their music just low enough to keep Spotify limping along, resulting in a cap on the profit margin Spotify can earn.
Spotify’s only move is to try to become a record label themselves, but due to excessively long copyright terms and cultural longevity of music, they basically have to keep buying from the 3 major record labels.
Their profit cap is mostly the result of actual competition. That's a healthy market, which is fundamentally a good thing for the consumers since it means they need to innovate and provide a good service.
I feel like there's irony to be found in Facebook holdovers posting minions memes amongst themselves, but I'm going to hold off on explicitly trying to find it in fear that I don't actually know what irony means.
Not every product / market is a trillion dollar business. Trees dont grow to the sky.
This isnt to say dont innovate. If they invented a new product; the VR Meta TikTok Shorts iPhone Satellite Headset Watch (TM), then one can reevaluate what "reddit the product" means, but charging for your API or introducing a paid verified badge isnt changing that definition.
Sounds to me like they're just bad at running a business.
Server costs went up in order to keep the site alive, and investors saw the potential and subsidized those costs, and everything ticked along swimmingly until the investors became impatient. Again, this is just speculation.
Imgur also became a community of its own. I don’t remember when it happened, but perhaps Reddit thought they were becoming a true competitor and opted to pull away.
I think there is a point to be made about a smoother user experience, but youtube is a great example where their embeds can still be monetized.
Reddit not pushing ads through the API is like if youtube didn't give you ads on embedded videos.
my brother in christ, no man is an island; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promentory were.
nobody wants their website to be a linkfarm to content that's all 404'd, it's not that complex. How do you keep that from happening? Host it yourself.
It’s stupid and premature in my opinion; they should have bought Imgur instead.
And the Reddit video player:host was notoriously crappy.
In that case, wouldn't they still be paying for the hosting?
So many suitable options were voiced for the 3pa such as profit shares or just reasonable priced API fees.
It baffles me that Reddit didn't already turn a profit. So over bloated and the shit they have actually paid people for such as the official app and desktop site, is just sub standard
And they are operating worldwide, processing take down notes, handling court orders alone, is a big deal.
How do people live on only 500k a year.... They dont buy a private jet and a $50million house.
Reddit does not have to spend half a billion dollars every year to satisfy their users (which is what its entire valuation was in 2014).
Depends on whose profits you care about. Growing WeWork at all costs was wildly more profitable for Adam Neumann than trying to slowly grow a sustainable commercial real estate company ever would have been.
The core problem is that no one in charge at Reddit HQ 'wins' if reddit where to become a much smaller, but profitable, company.
Their infrastructure costs can't be much different than archive.org, but archive.org doesn't try to get huge profits and doesn't have many employees.
There's zero value in Reddit Gold. It's such a meme. Access to a private subreddit.
Give posts badges? Who cares. They're ephemeral. Up today gone tomorrow.
They need to rethink this bullshit instead of just selling more ads.
The trouble is, Reddit is not such a business.
I think people underestimate this. I'm always much happier for my cash to go to a business that I like. Where "like" includes both quality of product and their ethics/attitude.
Discord Nitro's perks seem just as valueless as Reddit Gold to me. The top listed features are ephemeral stuff like custom emojis and stickers and super reactions. You could argue stuff like 50+ MB uploads and HD streaming is more valuable but few users would really use those features often.
Like Discord, Reddit is a community, there's limitations to what you can charge for because you don't want to raise the barrier to entry. I suspect Reddit Gold and custom emojis actually earns Reddit and Discord quite a fair bit, I think a key difference is that Discord has 750 employees to feed while Reddit has 2000.
I think discords model is fundamentally better because however useless the paid features are,2 there actually are features to speak of. HD streaming, higher upload limits and global emojis are fundamentally not that important, but you do get something out of paying. You also feel like you're sponsoring several free users, while paying for reddit gold just puts a shiny badge on a post, gives you access to a useless private club that has no direction (which is by design) and removes ads for a month.
And I agree on the company size: it is hard for me to understand what those employees are doing to make reddit run, considering the nature of the platform.
After all, it's a list of links and for years Reddit operated exactly like that - a skeleton crew running bare bones infrastructure to serve up basic pages full of links. Yeah, you need more now because of regulation and more sophisticated bots etc. But not that much more.
1. Same thing, but with 80% lower API pricing, keeping "NSFW" content, and 3 months notice
2. Start serving ads via the API and don't charge for API calls, revoke keys for apps that strip out ads
3. Limit API usage to premium accounts (beyond some nominal threshold of calls per day to let people play with the API)
I’ve listened to the Apollo guy on a Vergecast interview and he went out of his way to compliment the Reddit CEO and never took any of the opportunities given to fuel the fire. Maybe this Canadian thing is real? =)
Thinking out loud… or my latest random thought…
Reddit Premium users can use 3rd party apps effectively unrestricted and with no ads. In turn, Reddit would pay the 3rd apps say 25 to 35% of the premium fees they collect to the 3rd party app.
Non-premium users can use 3rd party apps but ads must be pushed through and NSFW related material is blocked.
You'd have to be nuts to use a credit card and your real identity to pay for that ... And then in effect consent to being tracked around their website with a key
Your bank and all their friends will have a record of that till the end of time
But I would think, the majority of reddit users would not.
In theory you could offer anonymous payment, paysafe and co. but more and more governments implement age restriction for porn anyway. No one cares for small sites (yet), but reddit could be pressured to not accept anonymous payments as the are big.
Update the standard user ToS to allow for only non-commercial use. Introduce paid plans for commercial usage. Introduce terms that allow for legal remedies to prevent companies from opening accounts only for the one month they want to host an AMA. Just like mods can decide whether or not a particular post is wearing a "mod hat", let commercial accounts decide whether or not users can wear the "commercial hat". Etc.
Price the plans such that the revenue reddit generates scales alongside the value that the commercial entity gets from the account.
Reddit is an ad business. Increasingly a mobile ad business. 3rd party apps do not fit that business model and never has. Everyone is blowing it out of proportion because Spez didn't want to be honest about it.
AI/LLM is just a sweetner on top but probably not a billion dollar API business.
What Reddit should be doing is making a better mobile app (and web app at that). Design and software dev in general has not their strong suit and hasn't been for the last decade.
Discord understands its not about comments, its about communities. Give users a way to boost/upgrade the subreddits they love, so users have a better experience on those subreddits.
They could have focused on fixing their app and only charging a fair amount to api access so they had a slight advantage over their data. It reminds me of iPhones to be honest. All the best jailbroken apps and features were slowly added to the iPhone over time. Reddit could have been following the same route and slowly killed off their competitors. There are many ways they could have added value to their app and thus get ad revenue and data but ignored it this entire time.
Wow that sentence was hard to write with a straight face.
These
Sam Altman is a Reddit investor and was until recently a board member.
Feeling really sad for the all the lost communities.
Discord isn't indexed or searchable by folks (or search engines) outside of the server, and even then, it's a real-time chat application that just doesn't lend itself to the type of content that makes reddit special. Discord also has investors who will want payback on their investment...so users on Discord may find themselves in the same boat some years down the line.
But people use it because the barrier to entry is so low. Even non-technical people can set up good looking and functional communities.
But now, Reddit has gone and shot itself in the foot and the communities are trying to understand what it means for them.
The difficulty to find a new home is likely political. So many users migrating to a single new network is a lot of power afforded to any one entity. In an age where so many visionaries have claimed to want a good future for humanity, but ended up either selling that dream away, or revealing their own dystopian version of it, who are you going to trust? Short of the enduring brand and gravitas of something like the Wikimedia Foundation, or Craigslist, who are you going to entrust such a responsibility?
Nobody aka ourselves, which is why we need to get the fediverse working instead of standing on the side bitching about how it's not good enough yet.
Edit: People have been participating in federated networks since ages. But it is hard. Especially if you want to give users the same experience as with non federated sites.
And I am not sure, if for example lemmy has solved it
https://programming.dev/post/50696
So it is an open question, if a federated network can work as stable and easy as a centralized instance.
I would think so, but so far it is only a hypothesis.
Reddit doesn't really have network effects the same as Whatsapp and Facebook.
When I say "network effects" I mean two things:
1, A self-fulfulling draw
2, An increase in the utility the more people exist
So, having everyone on whatsapp means you can have group chats.
Having everyone on facebook means you can plan events.
Reddit kinda doesn't do that, in fact it optimises for a loose coupling of many independent and semi-isolated communities.
It doesn't really take advantage of any network effects; and like Lois Rossman mentions: there is next to no benefit being on reddit than using private forums except having a single login. Which is essentially a solved problem these days because SSO is easy and ubiquitous (thanks google/github!).
I'm looking for a set of binoculars? Check the discussion on Reddit. Looking for some info in flashing Tasmota? Check the discussions on Reddit. Need some info on debugging my 3D printer? Same.
I've resorted to appending 'Reddit' to my Google searches whenever I'm looking for experiences people have with products or services, because it's a pretty sure bet for getting useful answers. It's also well indexed by search engines as opposed to Facebook groups and it has a much lower barrier for asking questions than Stack.
The only reason all of this content is there, is the network effect of those loose communities all being attached to the same domain and having a single account to interact with all of them. And of course, not having to search all over to find the best community / private forum for whatever thing you're interested in. As a man of many hobbies, Reddit is great and I really hate that Discord is starting to become the alternative, because searchability is crap and discussions are impossible to follow.
I'm going to take a leap and say it's not by typing reddit.com/r/binoculars or by using reddit search (which has been terrible since inception and shows no signs of improving).
I'd guess instead you use DuckDuckGo or more likely Google.
So what you say you really get from Reddit is a site that has a modicum of trustworthiness that it won't ruin your computer and that maybe there's an opinion here that reddit is the canonical place where all binocular enthusiasts will also participate.
Am I right in this assumption?
If I am, doesn't that completely break down the moment a decent chunk of communities decides it must not be on reddit?
As in, it's not really network effects, it's more "all or nothing" because anything other than everything brings doubt into the trustworthiness of the site/communities.
If there's a very popular and well known community (Linus Tech Tips for great example): then their forums are more trustworthy and have much richer densities of information. And you would find that information the same way as you would on reddit if I'm not mistaken.
That's exactly what I did. Most of those subs have either a pinned guide or a wiki with recommendations and considerations. And often I do use search, because it's fine for simple things like searching for model numbers.
> If I am, doesn't that completely break down the moment a decent chunk of communities decides it must not be on reddit?
That's the point of it being a network effect, right? Like, when people collectively start using Facebook in stead of Myspace, so Myspace died?
> Am I right in this assumption?
No, I don't exclusively use Google to search Reddit and when I do, I explicitly mention site:reddit.com.
> And you would find that information the same way as you would on reddit if I'm not mistaken.
So, no, you are mistaken. Because I didn't even know those forums existed and they don't seem to show up on Google often.
Recently, I was looking for a monitor for example. Say I'd want to know more about the 'G95SC' entering 'G95SC review' in Google shows mostly review sites like CNET. I want to see regular people's opinions so I look on Reddit and see those. And I can do the same thing for 3D printers, cars, brake pads, track tires, laptops, android car stereos and pretty much anything else. In stead of having to find the relevant forums.
Of course it does. We only search with Google and site:reddit.com because it works. But it works VERY well right now. Remove that site:reddit and you don't instead get quality content from lots of other community forums. Instead you get garbage and ads. Reddit's only "moat" right now is that I, as a rational human being, will add site:reddit.com if I want to find an answer to a question.
There are other specialized communities that I will search using site:xyz.com. And there will be many more if communities leave Reddit and setup elsewhere. Time will tell if this will happen.
Reddit may be different, but only in the sense that its overall value is less tied to individual relationships, but rather to the communities themselves. Each is a treasure trove of searchable, moderated, insightful, and trusted (if sometimes opinionated) information.
One obvious similarity is how difficult it is to migrate communities. I've seen so many attempts. None convincing. All such successful migrations that I've witnessed were actually slow organic growths of new networks that progressively made the older ones obsolete or redundant. I don't recall a successful one that was a mass exodus from one platform to another. The fine prints never made the unanimity (new moderation rules, etc). It seems that you really need to have a new destination that people can agree to gradually join and use concurrently with the old one, before abandoning the latter altogether.
During the blackout I made an honest to god attempt to use other things. I tried Lemmy. I tried Discord. I tried Mastodon. I hated them all. It's definitely partly just critical mass - the communities just aren't there - but it's not only that. Nobody has managed to replicate the classic / old Reddit UI/UX either. I hate all the new UIs. I don't know what's so hard about it. It's a list of links with some upvote / downvote buttons.
I'll be more ready to believe there's no value in Reddit when I see that somebody has actually successfully cloned it and made a place for these communities to go to that's anything like as good as what Reddit offers.
Discord is a fundamentally different platform to Reddit so I am not surprised it didn't compare.
What reddit has is a network effect and good enough technology, given their tech is already available as open source clones ready to be deployed, their only edge is their network effect. Kill off the community and all you are left with is some easily reproducible code and a server bill.
As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, moving text around on the Internet has been a solved problem ever since NNTP. And that was 1986!
The only problem is that there’s not a lot of money in it, which is why having the ability to federate a bunch of smaller services together is such a good solution (at least on a technical level).
I‘m more afraid about the backend side of things, apparently those decentralized services are not at all ready to scale to a lot of users.
Again, it was more of a joke than anything, but it quickly made me realize that the core of reddit is pretty easy to quickly toss together. If anyone wants to take that mess of code and do anything with it, by all means, feel free to.
Text forums have effectively been solved ever since NNTP was invented. All HTTP forums are pretty much just centralized recreations of various components of Usenet. With modern databases, load balancing, and infrastructure management, the cost of building, hosting, and maintaining a web forum is effectively negligible.
The only real selling point of Reddit is having all of your forums in one place, with the ability to easily and instantly create your own forum if you want to. Everything else on Reddit is just a random collection of social media features bolted on to appease investors/advertisers/stakeholders, and the vast majority of Reddit users (or at least the ones I interact with) never touch any of them.
The only thing keeping people on Reddit are network effects. Which, admittedly, is a lot, given that’s what’s allowed Facebook to weather its seven quintillion controversies with minimal damage, but a well-designed successor with enough server capacity (this is very important, crashing under the initial migration load has been what sunk a number of previous high-profile “Reddit killers”) could easily take Reddit’s place.
The VAXbb clone I wrote in 1999 would beg to differ. :)
The unsolved problem is moderation. Reddit mods are partly protesting because the official app's moderation features suck. And Lemmy just had some defederation drama because their moderation tools can't handle the spam bots.
Powerful moderation tools will be the killer feature of Reddit's killer.
Yes, and you should use that. I even have NNTP service with newsgroups for my own projects but they are not used much, so far. I would hope that other people can easily set up their own forum (like you say is possible with Reddit), possibly with any number of remote services which have NNTP access as well as HTTP perhaps, and if you set up an account then you can set it up and it can also be federated. ActivityPub and other HTML-based forums are not very good I think, and NNTP is much better in my opinion (although bridging can be implemented if it is desirable, some things might not work very well in all protocols e.g. ActivityPub only works with Unicode). (There is one change to the protocol which I think should be useful, which is to allow 63-bit article numbers instead of 31-bit article numbers. My own server and client software implements this feature.)
Becuase its a money losing model. Nobody is competing because in Reddit's 18 years of operation its yet to get even remotely close to turning a profit.
The alternatives that have popped up (Lemmy for example) arent even close to being at the same level from a software point of view.
Not the mention overhiring the past 3 years.
Reddit could have been a lean text based forum, it doesn't need to host images and video.
I went to Reddit during the Digg exodous and remember scoffing at Reddit's terrible UI. I stuck with it because that's where the content was. Then I got used to it and still browse old.reddit.com to this day. What makes a UI suck or not is highly subjective and moreso based on familiarity.
But for Discord, it's good when you need to interact with someone, but otherwise it's overwhelming with chat flows. And it's also a blackhole of information.
Actually, subreddits being mapped as lemmy instances makes more sense to me than the "single identity" of reddit.
If you move everything to Lemmy, that won't happen much and as a result fewer people will join the community that don't already know about it somehow.
the human internet is probably doomed. long live the llm generated internet
oh which gives me an idea: fake users as a service: using llm to generate comments for reddit after the dark
I cannot imagine, that this is not already being offered/in use.
Cold start problem: initially the new community has no content archive and only a few users, most people are lazy, it takes time to relearn the ui and set up subscriptions(there is no good way to export/import subscriptions and saved posts)
Transfer of moderation: some people are going to take the opportunity to seize ownership of the new community, and the community will split up
Discoverability: reddit gets a lot of user traffic from google since google search quality has gone down and people add site:reddit.com to their search
We need a new form of social media where users and communities can easily export their content and data. A reddit clone with a similar UI is not enough.
Why not a reddit clone with the API data and some sort of claim for accounts via proof of ownership? Just make them comment a special string on reddit to claim your account on the new clone. Clone content and subreddits of the last X days. Shouldn't be toooo hard. Maybe use the reddit links for images and video for the first POC until you can serve them yourself.
Moderators could claim their subreddits, people dont lose too much - maybe also migrate your subreddit subscriptions.
Sounds like a 1 month job for a good team.
If a site allowed imports how would it work? It could work for all of a user's top level tweets, but for something with threads like reddit I don't see any solution.
Lemmys far too immature to take over Reddits position. Even with 24/7 development (Which isnt happening) its not going to get to a strong enough position to take over for a long time.
It'd have been like Mastodon trying to step in to take over Twitter in 2017.
I also don't think Lemmy is too far from the prime time. Based on my usage over the last week, its perfectly usable and I think it needs two things for it to get to the point where I could just tell a non-technical friend to join without a long explanation of things they need to know:
* A better approach and advice for which instance to register on. https://join-lemmy.org/ is OK but isn't the ideal landing page for someone who isn't a SW engineer * Better handling of links to posts/communities on other instances, so that you end up on the view from your instance and you can more easily upvote, reply etc. There's a few options here, but one would be to fully adopt the !community@instance notation, rewrite links in posts into that form, and when displaying posts generate the link to your instance.
There's also the more general federation problem (that Mastodon also has) of finding something via Google or similar, and then if you want to follow you have to go back and search in your own instance. Browser extensions can solve this, but I don't know if that is sufficient.
The other Reddit is one of small niche communities with hundreds or thousands of subscribers, but where a lot of experts of that niche hang out and comment. Pretty much like old web forums. Lemmy looks (I have only joined yesterday) good enough to serve that type of Reddit. And I think at least tech niche subreddits are somewhat inclined to jump ship, since they are more principled about third-party client, etc.
It's similar to Mastodon and Twitter. Twitter hasn't collapsed (yet) and Mastodon hasn't taken over its role. However, many tech folks have jumped ship. My Twitter feed (especially with recommendations) is now mostly tech bros and influencers with hot takes on LLMs. My Mastodon feed is mostly high-quality, insightful tech posts. And in contrast to before Elon took over Twitter, it's not a ghost town anymore.
People expect a public utility to, perhaps, not be that innovative and maybe a little poorly run at times. What they do expect from a public utility is long-term reliability. They expect it to be there, doing what it does now, five or ten years from now. For some people (e.g. the blind), all of reddit is going dark on July 1st.
Reddit is not a public utility. It's owners have decided that short-term profits are more important than serving as a long-term non-profit public utility. I can't fault any business person for making this decision, but it's the key reason why we need publicly controlled infrastructure to do what reddit does now.
Reddit is many beneficial things. Just for one example, it's a new foundation of journalism. How many professional journalists rely on reddit to find and research news stories? If you read your local city's sub and then read your local newspaper the following day, there will be a surprising amount of repeated material.
Governments in many countries run public broadcasting corporations, public news programs, and even subsidize privately owned news companies, although in many cases that's mere corporate welfare. They do this because they realize that journalism is a cornerstone of free society.
The functions that reddit now performs are too important to leave in the hands of short-sighted corporate executives who have absolutely zero interest in anything beyond their next quarterly report and the bonuses tied to it. We must not jump from reddit into the hands of yet another corporation or this will simply happen again.
Public funding has produced things like lemmy.ml, but such projects aren't ready to scale nor, arguably, interested in doing so. This is something the UN should tackle to prove they still have relevance in the modern world. Instead of simply issuing non-binding warning after warning, perhaps it's time for international organizations to build the kind of public infrastructure that provides a benefit to all of humanity.
That would be very unprofessional journalists. At least with the issues of the current war the flow of information is as follows: small telegram channels -> large telegram channels -> translation -> twitter -> reddit.
Exactly this. And the same applies to Twitter and Facebook as well. And probably increasingly Discord.
In the end, both sides lose because of this misunderstanding (well, except the investors on the business side win). There is demand for both, and there is space for both, and I think the society at large is going to slowly realize that the two things - utility-like social media and regular private business - are different, and learn to differentiate between them - and maybe then, finally, the utility-like social media will be created.
Water, Sewage, Electricity, District Heating, Waste management, Internet etc. All have real monthly payments. But we have gotten too used to be subsidised on online... Bills have to be paid somehow and time of free content is coming to pause.
That's a good summary of the problem, and I would extend that to say that public utilities should be in control of the public, which means federated services.
My hope at this point is that Reddit massively doubles down (and that Twitter goes back to trying to eat itself) so the migration to Lemmy and Mastodon continues. Neither has quite crossed the chasm out of the early adopter/tech sector users. It looked like Mastodon got close at one point and then Twitter ran out of completely idiotic ideas.
There's no such thing as a free lunch! Even if we were to somehow (miraculously) get the public to pay for a free utility-scale Reddit-like site, there would still be huge problems.
For one, making it public causes it to be thrust into the political spotlight. Conventional utilities (electricity, running water) are just about as boring and uncontroversial as anything you can imagine, yet there are still political fights over them. I cannot even imagine how ugly the political fights over something like Reddit would be.
People would be out in the streets protesting over the kind of content that goes on there. They would demand an extreme level of moderation which would alienate all but the most anodyne users. It just wouldn't do to have the government pay for a free-speech zone like that.
One statement that fell outside of my agreement was him balking at how people leaving Reddit could cause it to crash. Fewer people should mean less load :O
That position reminds of me of the Simpsons episode where Homer runs for mayor. At a debate, Homer's opponent shows up late because someone cut his car's break lines, and Homer goes - "Well then you should have been here early!"
Any sufficiently large irregular site activity will cause issues. The people who are 'leaving' aren't being inactive. They're either disabling accounts, or disabling sub-reddits, all of which causes activity on the servers. It's absolutely to be expected that outages occur.
Whatever happened is going to be more complicated than that, but I can believe people leaving, and subreddits going dark, could cause a crash.
Typically, this means caching everything as much as you possibly can.
This is the same reason why Wikipedia can’t just roll out a cookie-based “revert to old look” option for logged out users. It would require caching every page twice since you’d need a file prepared for both skins. The reason they can have skins for logged in users is because they already bypass the cache for logged in users (to allow for individual user scripts and stylesheets to be run, among other things). Even then, things like article text and category lists are still stored in various database caches, hence why there’s a “Purge cache” option available to logged in users.
Maybe if I wanted to send a message by deleting? But I think most people would just trail off and move on.
And the more helpful comments might help someone one day.
That or some other black swan shift in user behavior makes the most sense why it would paradoxically crash during a boycott.
All the stuff that went down over the last month, the outrageous API pricing, the smearing of Apollo's developer, the gaslighting, corpospeak and non-answers in Huffman's "AMA", his complete tone-deaf memo, the ouster of mods, they have left such a foul taste in my mouth that even if they were to reverse course, which seems unlikely at best, I'm not sure if I'm sticking around after July 1st.
Huffman's killing Reddit and I think it's a colossal loss for the Internet. I hope a better alternative will rise from its ashes, one that isn't beholden to shareholders or the whims of one misguided CEO.
Was looking for an excuse to remove myself from that time-sink website anyway, but can't lie, the changes they made in the last decade have progressively ruined my experience.
And you bring up the most important issue anyway: every single Reddit community I've participated in has become noticeably worse over the past decade. They don't care because we're not the meme-and-ad-slurpee sipping target audience who will mindlessly scroll pictures and videos on the official Reddit app.
This way you're not only removing yourself, but also burning the content you provided.
That leads to the question: What would it take to create a website that is similar enough, to make user instantly feel at home, but different enough to not get into legal trouble?
Reddit is a trademark but that’s another story
I am not a lawyer, but that’s my reading of the license on that repo.
If they could shut that one down, they probably would try.
There are multiple instances of Lemmy. https://programming.dev/ seems like a good place to start for people on hackernews. Once you have signed up you can read and interact with other Lemmy instances as well.
The main problem they need to solve it to make it more user friendly and simple. I think a barrier for many users is to understand what ActivityPub and Fediverse is. They should put all that info in an about page, and present the login as any other web 2.0 app.
Lemmy and Kbin are the future I'd like. As siblings have said they're federated - you have an account on one, but you can subscribe to and interact with communities (subreddits) on any. This is the same way that Mastodon works - it's actually the same underlying protocol (ActivityPub).
Maybe you could export all your posts to your blog first for any ones that may contain useful info (probably less than we’d like to think).
Apparently the whole site is 2TB, so you can probably fit all your subreddits on a tiny cloud instance somewhere.
I've stopped using discourse forums so i'm forgetting a lot of the complaints i would have while using them.
Honestly. Does Reddit even cost that much to run? If you ran it like wikipedia what would that look like?
Will 90% of Redditors move over? Not immediately, and likely not ever. But if maybe 10% leave -- largely comprised of enthusiasts, moderators, and power users who benefited the most from old.reddit and third party apps -- then we've got a community the size of 2007 Reddit anyway. Which everyone seems to agree was a better-sized community than Reddit today anyway.
HN is "good Reddit for nerds". You have to find alternate sources of your cat video discussion, however.
I wonder if my YC submission for "HackerNudes" as a NSFW clone will fly? I just need to find someone named Don G. to moderate it ... (/sarcasm)
You need two things for an exodus: a push <Tick Emoji here> AND a viable alternative <Question mark Emoji here>
Where is everyone to go?
At the time I left Digg for Reddit, Reddit already had a strong community that offered me better content and discussion than Digg.
As far as I can tell, with the exception of perhaps Discord, the alternatives being proposed to Reddit are asking users to _build_ their community on an alternative platform, not join an existing strong community.
That seems like a bar too high at the moment, though I hope I’m wrong.
That said, I expect it’ll take time. Reddit’s C-Suite have lost the plot, and lost sight of the value of their service and their relationship with their community. I don’t expect them to be supplanted in the next week or two, but I’d be shocked if they were still around at anything like Reddit’s current size and active userbase in a year or two.
If a few big good subs do the same, it could start an avalanche. By "good" I mean subs that have actual substantive content, not just people looking at lefunnypost.
I'm not sure why his appeal to authority should matter for most people.
There are plenty of reasons to leave Reddit.
The Right to Repair stuff gives him an interesting perspective on how big tech operates, which is relevant to the Reddit thing.
I love him for the right to repair and his troubleshooting lives are interesting, but I've stopped watching most of his videos because the format of "dude films himself while reading an article " is really boring and a waste of time.
You can still have a 3rd party app, and it can still use the API. You just pay for it.
Right to repair is because you cannot buy a 3rd party screen, and you cannot use it. You have to have Apple/John Deere/etc do it.
Yes, but can is not will.
The practical effect of this pricing will mean that almost all 3rd party apps for reddit will die, and Reddit won't get significant revenue from this change. Management knows all this, which means they are in fact trying to kill 3rd party apps, not salvage API operating costs.
Specially the users should like that. It is making their products last much longer...
It's a bit weird that someone could be famous for his strong ethics, but just watch some of his videos and you'll get it. The guy is relentless in both demanding ethics from others as reflecting on his own actions. It's really inspiring.
edit: If you want an example of this, here's a video where he apologizes for something he did, and in his apology he plays a recording of a conversation with his lawyer where his lawyer recommends to do the thing, and he relents, which he later regrets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGd_Ixy9Mzc You don't have to watch the whole thing, you'll see his character come through in the first minute of the video.
Some others might argue that the Victoria firing is what did it, but at least the admins were still showing up publicly at that point in random threads and trying to justify it to the community.
For Secret Santa, they basically just said “this doesn’t make us money, so we’re not putting any resources into it anymore.” It was made even worse by the fact that it was originally a community thing that Reddit corporate willingly took over to help manage better. And they just killed it as soon as it wasn’t generating value anymore.
sudo echo "127.0.0.1 reddit.com # The real blackout" >> /etc/hosts
perhaps: echo "127.0.0.1 reddit.com # The real blackout" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts ?
# Block Reddit Experiment
||redd.it^
||redditblog.com^
||reddit.com^
||redditinc.com^
||redditmail.com^
||redditmedia.com^
||redditstatic.com^
||redditstatus.com^
Do you want to be fed "content" or participate in some communities you care about?
If the former, anywhere you go will f- you over, like digg, like reddit now. It should be clear.
If the latter, who cares if those communities are centralized or not?
By identifying and charging commercial users it will clean up reddit for the normal user and increase income.
I think the bigger concern is that most of their user base simultaneously decided they can’t trust the company moving forward.
Powerful advice.
I do not see why there couldn't be moderated usenet groups again.
Then again, last time I read a newsgroup was some 12 years ago when I created a simple newsgroup client (with built in Python nntplib) and qt.
There was some active news groups but very few.
Lately he's just a person on a recliner whining about the world. This doesn't discredit his ideas, mind you, I actually agree with a lot. But there's no more special sauce...anyone could make ranting videos from their recliner. I find the whole format incredibly bizarre and unprofessional...
Mind you, I don't disagree with you, I feel the same way, I'm exploring why the format is just off somehow.
Just... Odd.
Much like many meetings should be an email, many youtube videos should be 400-800 word essays. If you're going to present that sort of information in an audio-visual form you need add some value above and beyond just the words you say, and I don't feel he does that.
I feel the same way several channels I subscribe to, like Gamers Nexus. Every time I watch one of their videos, I always come away thinking "that was some pretty useful information, I'm really glad they put in the work to make it available, I really wish I could have read it in a blog post"