The Reddits
ycombinator.com
ycombinator.com
They said they don't do that and will never do that unfortunately.
A couple weeks later they auctioned off tickets to the factory tours as a "special event". I felt incredibly sour from that. I felt like a little more of humanity had eroded.
Are you friends with these people? Why do they owe you anything
If I were the factory owner, I would reserve a ticket for him and give a discounted price to thank for his idea.
Maybe having somebody reach out for a tour was just red flaggy enough. I agree it’s weird and kind of crummy to then offer an auction up.
Man B: "No. Fuck off."
Local News: "Man B wins the lottery after exploiting a free idea."
Yep, you can advocate everything is fine with this scenario. You could instead advocate for a different scenario. You know, when you talk to your kids. Or family. Or friends. Or neighbours. And they talk to their x/y/z/a/b/c. Or you could advocate for being an asshole to, what amounts to, a finite number of people. Like a pebble in the pond, causing ripples. Some are poison. Some are not. But you choose which it is.
Man A thinks he is a genius, and man B never considered a tour. Man A assumes nobody else has ever asked, and they aren't the 10th person this week. Man A thinks the idea is a critical contribution, not having the knowledge, planning, giving the tour, or having a factory.
Why would I, a grown man, be let into a factory based on a bucket list idea out of nowhere? Even if it's something people would have gladly done in this corner of the world 20 years ago.
Why would they, a professional company, talk to me ever again even if I were the straw to break the camels back of "touring". haha
I think it was a really nice service. Right now all similar ones I know of are unpleasant to use and get in your way.
It was really minimal and useful to find new things. One particular area where link sharing makes a lot of sense, yet existing services are not very nice, is academic papers.
Fast forward, and delicious died, only to be acquired by — you guessed it — Pinboard [1]. Because Pinboard was actually serving its paying customers, it just kept trucking along.
[1]: https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...
It sounds like a horrible deal.
Looking forward to see how true this is. The communities I used to frequent, have maybe 20% of the activity they used to, before the API fiasco, even though they're "back online". I also stopped using reddit on the phone after my chosen reddit client was closed down (which I'm grateful for, thanks reddit).
My reddit activity probably dropped way below half compared to before, as the communities I used to be in are now shells of their former glory.
This is the equivalent of /r/all across the lemmy world
It's just a stream of political dreck and virtue signalling. I really don't need to see Trump in every second post and read about people who hate cars, meat, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
Exactly. All I see online is people talking about politics, their jobs, their families, their hobbies, the environment, technology, etc.
You need to curate your homepage a bit to get a good Lemmy experience. The tech side may be like Reddit, but the human aspect is more like a couple dozen vBulletin forums rolled into one.
Some of the instances are (imo) full of straight-up insane and, worse, perpetually angry people. Some instance admins may be power-hungry and prone to drama - but you might not care if the only subreddit you follow from their instance is c/jazz and you just click on Youtube/Spotify links from it.
Is it a pain? Yes. But I still prefer to deal with a couple dozen weirdos than with a single billion-dollar company.
This has been true for every instance of every Fedi thing I've ever tried to use or thought of using. And many instances block single-user instances so forget about running your own unless you only want to interact with the absolute fringest nutjob basement-dwellers -- because the "mainstream" Fedi is already fringe.
I once had the dumb impulse to reply to someone who was mad about fluoride in drinking water with "you probably get more fluoride from your toothpaste" and I deleted my account as I started to receive arguments about brushing your teeth, as it made me realize exactly the kind of people I would be interacting with on this network.
Honestly I think this is grows out of the incentives for operating a homeserver. There's a negative financial incentive so you must have some other kind of motivator, likely a desire for influence or power.
This wasn't on some random Marxist community, this was on one of the big tech communities.
I prefer to know. I want to experience the full spectrum of humanity.
Granted, Lemmy's issue is that the user base is not large enough to have developed a long tail of interesting communities, but hopefully this will change as it grows.
Also, I know that finding the communities is difficult, so I've put together a website to work as a crowdsource of reddit-to-lemmy communities, https://fediverser.network
There have been some right-wing and far-right instances, but they seem to get de-federated by the majority.
Hope that helps.
Similarly, trying to judge the UK on racial issues by US standards gets quite confusing. The common British attitude towards Romani would make even the confederate flag wavers of Texas call them racists.
On the other hand, there's full support for plenty of state intervention and state support, e.g. pretty much no one says they want to abolish the NHS.
Not directly related to Romani treatment in Britain (not familiar enough with that to judge), but sometimes I wonder if the english language needs better words to distinguish between race based bigotry and culture based bigotry.
eg often I notice for a person there will be a difference in how they treat/view "acclimatised" descendants of immigrants vs new immigrants due to being ostensibly the same race but different culturally. Of course racists will still have bigotry for both groups.
Words like this are not bad by coincidence, they're bad because they're incredibly politically important words and thus have their meanings and connotations fought over intensely.
It doesn't matter what new word or words you try and put in place, if they relate to things people have different strong feelings on then the meanings will become messy over time.
I think you are misjudging the confederate flag wavers, what makes you say this?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavengro
Excerpts from the Wikipedia article:
Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest (1851) is a work by George Borrow, falling somewhere between the genres of memoir and novel, which has long been considered a classic of 19th-century English literature.
Theodore Watts, in an introduction to the 1893 edition, declared that "There are passages in Lavengro which are unsurpassed in the prose literature of England".[9] This edition started a run of reprints which produced one or more almost every year for 60 years. Lavengro was included in the Oxford University Press World's Classics series in 1904, and in Everyman's Library in 1906.[10]
I'm always hesitant to make accounts on new sites, so I thought I had waited a long time to join officially, but I ended up being in the first 500 accounts! From the earliest days (the del.icio.us to Reddit influx) it was a very libertarian place. Sometimes annoyingly so.
Reddit has shifted so many times over the nearly 2 decades, but most who stay for a long time have realized that it's great for pocket communities in smaller subreddits, as long as they last and aren't co-opted. The bots are the worst part at the moment.
It's not quite _spam_ but I think it's fair to say it's much more left-leaning than mainstream Reddit.
Some of the biggest communities, even non-political ones, are on instances such as Blåhaj (LGBTQ-oriented), Lemmy.ML (Marxist-oriented), Hexbear (Marxists on meth).
Short of subscribing to a defederated instance, you need to go out of your way to avoid left-wing content on Lemmy. Whereas on Reddit you could get rid of most of it by unsubscribing from the top 100 subreddits - which is something you wanted to do anyway for the sake of quality, even if you were the world's biggest leftist.
very toxic place. kinda like bizarro TwitterX.
They have already started to redirect direct image links to the new reddit garbage which has stopped my usage for reddit for entertainment when bored.
This solved that for me, but yeah it seems inevitable that all these user hostile decisions make the site unusable.
Instead of making old reddit an archive on github, they should have made new reddits front-end open. I'm sure it would be miles ahead if the users were allowed to contribute like they once did with old reddit.
I wonder how much money was spent to build new reddit. Feels like a dumpster fire.
Same is happening again now, entitled moderaters who complain about CEO pay.
If anything is destroying Reddit, it's the mods IMO.
I would like to see numbers myself, though. However, looking at reddit/r/all, I suspect much of that activity is botting.
I mean, no one can seriously post "my gf cheated, AITAH for breaking up with her?".
Come on...
Probably pretty hard to get. Some of the content I found that went away, was quality content. There are still users posting/discussing stuff in the niches I'm interested in, but all the high-quality discussions have gone missing, and the one's who used to engage in it no longer seem to be using reddit at all.
But there is no objective way to measure "high quality content vs low quality", so it'll be short of impossible to get any objective measures of this, it's just my anecdotal experience with a subset of subreddits.
Either way, I don't think compensation swivels the "entitled, power-tripping reddit mod" trope where they ban from their subreddit if you make a comment they disagree with. It's one of reddit's biggest problems.
A number of subreddits I moderate were shutdown by reddit for being unmoderated. It turns out a lot of mods disengaged. None of the subreddits I was a part of were a part of the protests, but banning communities by moderators that disengaged achieved the same outcome as a protest effectively. Maybe someone has numbers for how many communities were banned for being unmoderated, and did this number increase after the API changes?
In the last year, Reddit has pushed localized home pages across the world, and my own example is the default home page for Canada. It's now exclusively sports and right-wing nuttery.
There were good communities, but they were molded by their good moderators, and these moderators are gone.
I think that’s typical for any national sub, because it will be filled with people that live in places that don’t have the critical mass for a local/regional subreddit (or just don’t fit into it).
There are several "main" Canadian subreddits, and the only ones showing up for anon Canadian guests now are the right-wing and far-right subreddits.
I'm not logged in (I don't have a Reddit account), I'm in Canada, and on the Reddit home page I'm currently seeing submissions associated with these Canada-specific subreddits:
6 for r/canada
2 for r/onguardforthee
2 for r/ontario
2 for r/PersonalFinanceCanada
1 for r/alberta
1 for r/vancouver
None of those subreddits look "right-wing" or "far-right" to me in any way.
In fact, I'm surprised at how left-leaning they tend to be, especially r/alberta. Of the current top five submissions there, four are for CBC articles, for example, and there are a few other CBC articles on the first page.
r/onguardforthee seems to be overtly left wing.
The other front page subreddits are broad (like r/AskReddit, r/politics, r/news), or about sports or hobbies (like r/gaming, r/baseball, r/hockey, r/FigureSkating).
None the subreddits I'm seeing on the Reddit front page seem to me to even be right-of-centre, let alone "right-wing" or "far-right".
I found this quite nice. A lot less American politics on the front page and some fun bits of local news.
Can you give some concrete examples of this "right-wing nuttery" you mention?
I've heard other people in Canada make this claim, but whenever I visit the Reddit home page (without logging in; I don't have a Reddit account), I consistently see the opposite.
Right now, for example, two of the top five submissions I see are CBC and Toronto Star articles complaining about Ontario's Conservative government's policies. (For those who are unfamiliar with them, CBC and the Toronto Star are among the most left wing of Canada's mainstream media.)
Still in the top ten, there's an article complaining about how some corporate layoffs at Bell were conducted.
There's an anti-Trump article, a article about Biden cancelling some student loan debt, and a complaint about "the rich" (Musk, specifically) in the top fifteen.
Beyond that, there's a submission complaining about a landlord's behaviour, an article about urban planning in Vancouver, and the front page ends with a submission that's upset about some munitions company executive cutting down some trees in the US.
The rest are about sports, oddities, or otherwise don't seem to be political in nature.
I wouldn't consider any of the submissions I'm being shown to be obviously "right-wing" in any way. A number of them I'd consider to be centrist or neutral, if not left-of-centre. Several are overtly left wing.
I'm very open to being wrong or outdated in my impression, however!
Once they pulled the API I was out. Not terrible since the site's quality has been in steady decline for years. Eventually you realize you are doing the equivalent of having economics discussions in the youtube comments of a taylor swift video.
But it seems that lowest common denominator user is who reddit really wants, so good luck to them.
My own activity dropped like a rock after the API changes killed Apollo, the mobile client I used (and before that reddit had already acqui-killed a previous one Alien Blue). I simply check it out of habit, and mostly for news, don't have much of the joy I had when I had started accessing it back in 2009.
Probably it's just the natural cycle of profit-driven social media getting swallowed by Eternal Septembers after the initial batches of users posting interesting content and making the platform cool leave the place when the platform inevitably becomes user-hostile.
I've noticed some of the same for some communities, but where have they gone? Some claim to be migrating to Discord, which in my mind is even worse than Reddit, and to me is a high-stress environment (I simply cannot stand online chat, I've no patience for it, and if you're not constantly online you miss stuff).
There are hobby groups in Facebook, which is also disappointing since Facebook groups have terrible UX.
Adding *.reddit.com to my DNS-blacklist was one of the single-most-productive "lines of code" I've ever added to my personal computer.
Cold-turkey, I quit.
/r/Supermod, 2010-2014, "the pineapple trees guy; erryday"
I've been thinking about this and trad forums witht he ability to bump a topic and keep it going for as long as there is interest really makes it the best venue for hobbies. I spent a good half hour on vwvortex the other day just surfing longer threads and learned more from that than anything reddit can offer.
It can be a little annoying when somebody tries to tack on an unrelated question to a thread but apparently the only alternative is to have 15 iterations of 'I just found out outside exist, what do?' every day.
communities even remotely related to companies (e.g. r/googlepixel) are run by either fervently crazy zealot fans, or which is more likely, filtered by interns in those companies marketing dept in what seem to be reddit best revenue stream.
At least old.reddit.com still works. For now.
Yeah it's all dogshit content, but this is the product now. All the niche communities that made reddit good were dying a slow death well before any of the API stuff.
That old product is dead, the current reddit will live forever as long as they can get costs under control.
They rather consciously decided that jettisoning some hard-core techies, privacy people and other "weirdos" is an acceptable price to pay for more mass appeal and more profitability. Remember, you as a user are not the client of Reddit Inc, you're the product. You or I may not like that direction, but we're not great products anyway. I block ads for Pete's sake, I am literally worthless to them.
Lotta zombies hang on long after their relevance fades for the future. "X is unkillable" is a good way to reveal a limited imagination for future changes. You go from talking about disruption to talking about how things are now disruption-proof!
GM made ten billion in profit in the last year
I think Graham is getting a bit sentimental and overly attached to incumbents in his network.
I would love to have a company that has 1% the success of just Windows 11 which is estimated to be on 20% of all running PCs, let alone the rest of the MS empire.
Selling 6.2 million vehicles in one year (GM) is hardly a zombie company.
Meta had 40 billion dollars of net revenue, and 3 billion MAUs, which is a pretty fierce zombie if you ask me.
IBM measures their profit in the billions too.
Even GE is still spinning off billions in profit.
All of the companies you mentioned have grown in the past 10 years.
Which of those companies still have the influence they did at their peak?
If you've got a startup, growth mindset, you're growing or you're dying. And even growth in revenue, headcount, profit, etc, can lag growth in relevance by decades.
Got any interesting new GE projects on your radar you'd want to work on that you think will be relevant in 20 years?
Do you think Paul Graham of twenty years ago would've called GE unkillable?
It's the difference in ambition and goals that leads to one person loving to take over today's Microsoft (or Reddit) and another - probably much younger person - wanting to start tomorrow's.
Facebook is accused of having way too much influence on society as a whole on a constant basis.
MS is the money and computing power behind the hottest AI technology on earth. With Azure and AI they are arguably more influential than at any other time.
GM runs Cruise, which is busy inventing self driving cars and implementing the rules. They are also the largest manufacturer in the US. Hardly uninfluential.
> Got any interesting new GE projects on your radar you'd want to work on that you think will be relevant in 20 years?
Floating wind turbines, automated grid controls, efficient jet engines, 3d printed jet engine parts, advanced mobile medical imaging at sports events, modular nuclear reactors all seem like they might be relevant 20 years from now.
lemmy is probably to left leaning for my taste but at least the main page still has lots inane and funny things as well as more of a tech focus.
It increasingly feels like Reddit is a breeding ground for various types of extremism (usually left-leaning, with some notable exceptions).
Showing votes is possibly a huge contributing factor. It's well known they gather momentum.
I suspect autism is overrepresented in the Reddit population.
Same here, very grateful for Reddit’s API changes. It made me realize how little value Reddit actually provided vs time spent. I refuse to use their dumpster fire of an app so I quit altogether and deleted my very old account + comments. Good riddance after all, for each “niche” subreddit I was on, I have found very active forums and communities to replace these subreddits. And they’re independent forums that are very old (in internet terms) with lots of passionate people sharing very valuable information.
Turns out I didn’t really need Reddit at all but it took their shortsighted hara-kiri for me to realize.
Oh well, thanks Greeddit!
Sometimes it ends up being a discord chat as this is very popular. Not ideal as I don’t love the discord walled garden but still better than Reddit. And if/when they pull a Reddit in the future, well, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
I should add that in getting much better results for these queries since switching to kagi. Ddg and startpage had more spam/SEO/generated junk in the top results. It was more effort to find these communities on those but not impossible either.
I have deleted my account at least half a dozen times and just tried to use it as a source of useful information, but I inevitably fall into the pit of getting another account because I can't control myself objecting to the nasty stuff on there. I know this is partly my self control problem, but social media in general is just awful. I can get rid of FB easily, there is literally no benefit for me being on there, but Reddit legit has useful content about all of my hobbies and how to do X.
It is unkillable but for some pretty rotten reasons. It's a social media platform mixed in with really useful content. Come for the search result, stay for the drama is what happens to me.
That’s putting it nicely! I’m increasingly seeing it as a breeding ground for fringe-left radicalization.
Loads of pro-Russian stuff that started to slip in, if I watched even one they started to accumulate and take over from what I used to watch for enjoyment. I then noticed these American pundits were using hijacked accounts to game the algo and get reach. Like one account was a vietnamese women's fashion account 2 years ago, now it's Americans talking about how Putin is definitely going to win the war very soon.
One day someone is going to write a history book about the 2020s propaganda and how technology was used as a psy-op, or whatever is going on. I didn't believe this was a real thing until I started questioning my own thoughts.
But here's the thing: prevailing HN sentiments notwithstanding, your average Redditor leans left and is fairly anti-big-tech, so Reddit could have leveraged this angle. They could've said it's a pro-user move to stop OpenAI and the likes from unfairly profiting off your work. And most users would have applauded.
But Reddit didn't say that. They took a PR hit and decided to wait it out. The cynical explanation was that they were actually just trying to get some of that LLM money for themselves. And not long ago, they announced a big deal with Google to give access to user data for training purposes: https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...
Frankly, I was on the fence about the API access thing until the motivation became clear.
It seems like the real intent was to regain control over the surfaces users use to consume the site, especially on mobile.
Hard disagree, they were lying about their motives, plain and simple. Their claimed motiviation doesn't match what they did/didn't actually do.
For example, the biggest companies training LLMs could be dissuaded by simply changing the terms-of-service to prohibit that usage (skipping all that developer-labor and community protest) but Reddit didn't do that. (Dodgy companies that don't care aren't relevant since they'll just scrape the website even without API access.)
In contrast, "Reddit arbitrarily killed third-party apps to force their own app" does match what the company implemented: Abrupt and punishing new fees, mandating that third-party apps can't contain any ads of their own, and making certain categories of content exclusive to their own app.
Is that really true? I have been on reddit since day 0 and have noticed 0 change, absolutely nothing. Some communities went through a "we're now on lemmy" phase. But even that went nowhere. Reddit is still plagued by mods and all the other things, but the userbase is as powerful as ever
It still turns up in search results for me but it’s certainly no community I’m using.
If there is a stereotypical Reddit user, then they’re stagnating.
I wouldn't be surprised if you ran an analysis of the makeup of hot-page content across the biggest subs, if links used to make up 90%, that that number has slowly been dropping for the past 5 years to now be mostly images.
Sure about that? Start looking for bots that repost other peoples comments and we may find that questionable.
But it probably depends on tastes too. If you went to Reddit for pet photos or sports discussions or political debates the difference is likely minimal, while if you went there to talk about astrophysics or history, it's probably a lot more noticeable.
they have been bugging you with the app for years
I posted a little bit and then one day had a big red banner on the top telling me that my account was suspended for violating the TOS (my posts were on a puppetry subreddit about puppets and were very "normal" posts... how I could have violated the TOS was beyond me). I immediately appealed and the suspension was lifted (without any explanation as to what caused my account to be suspended in the first place). But even though my account is able to post and do everything a non-suspended account can, there's still that red banner at the top every time I access the website telling me my account was suspended and to check my inbox messages for instructions on how to appeal.
That user experience kind of killed any desire of mine to ever use Reddit again.
... But it's still shadowbanned and everything I ever wrote over those years is still gone, except now the appeals page doesn't even work because it claims my account is in good standing.
So I went looking for some kind of human help or support, but another old Reddit account (a resurrected job search throwaway from 5+ years ago) got immediately killed the exact same way, the lying "granted" appeal and all!
It certainly revitalized my interest in using personal-blogging for information instead of contributing anything to Reddit's decaying ecosystem.
A month or two after my main account was banned (see my other post in this thread), I logged into a second account which I'd not logged into for months.
Upon logging in, I discovered the account was "permanently suspended", and the reason for this was, and I quote;
"Your account has been permanently suspended for ."
Am I a bot?
Wanna meditate together online at some point? I see you're into it (I'm on HN searching particular comments atm).
My email is in my profile.
When the email dropped that I was one of the early users offered entrance into the IPO, I pretty much ignored it.
I think it’s interesting to see a flagging platform with a user base that will consistently post and upvote “fuck spez” celebrated here as a success, but I suppose the only thing that matters at this level of discussion is the almighty dollar.
The recent very active moves to clean the site up and prep for this IPO have had a detrimental community effect in the sense of disgruntlement, but I would wager have been excellent in making the site more palatable as a business.
Virtually none of the reddit-alternatives that all spun up in the wake of this mop job have taken off. So assuming our gut feeling is right that reddit engagement is down, then overall engagement on all reddits is down and users have entirely moved to other social media styles entirely.
There's the other angle on this, that engagement is down, but it was calculated to get rid of mostly users who cost reddit things, or are of an undesirable user population (troublesome, illegal, etc.) And what's left is mostly a user class that maximizes the monetary value that can be harvested.
There are huge and obvious areas where reddit can better monetize the site if they wished, and I would guess that it's going to happen. Reddit has a very long history of doing a bunch of different experiments with the site, and an influx of investment to properly analyze and then monetize the more successful ones is my guess as to what's going to happen. The recent drive to vacuum up and sell data to LLM companies is serendipitous icing right now.
There's also the huge opening that's happening right now with Twitter, where with a few chess moves, Reddit could very easily turn into or pick up the population of exTwitter users who find the current ownership trends so toxic they don't want to be associated with it any longer, but don't have a platform with a built in non-friends public sphere to turn to -- which is why Facebook hasn't been able to really tap into that market gap.
You forgot about random discords, which is where they went.
Sure, it works to immediately cull a lot of the 'whiners who only cause you problems' but you end up bleeding the people who do irreplaceably valuable work for you for free, and your platform becomes a cesspool of low-effort crap and you can see that happening in real time.
They killed their golden goose.
But they got their IPO and spez is gonna cash out and wash his hands of all of it and get congrats from his silicon valley buddies and go to sleep at night thinking how much those ungrateful idiots used his platform for free and didn't understand reality and how people like him needed to be rewarded for their work. All the while ignoring the fact that he is actually just a terrible businessman who, if he hadn't met Paul Graham and given free money and an idea and hadn't gotten incredibly lucky that digg imploded at exactly the right time, he would be an upper middle class suburbanite making a living wage working as a salesman for a SaaS company or something.
Yes, probably, but the user based changed dramatically before this. Since 2019 MAU more than doubled. I deleted my 11y old account after the last debacle. It was in the ~8th percentile of oldest accounts. That’s mind blowing, because I was by no means an early adopter.
The drop in signal-to-noise ratio has been dramatic over the years. The interesting, nerdy and quirky is drowned completely by memes, political rage bait, staged sob stories, etc. Which is fine for short term business, but also makes it replaceable. Attention brokerage is “daily fix” business, loyalty is near zero, and competition is fierce.
So every time someone argues a decision is good for business, it needs to be qualified by time and risk. If you sell your house to buy Nvidia calls, is that good for your personal finance?
Above all the examples you listed: tech-savvy redditors who know how to use adblock and Old Reddit.
My circle & I have stopped reddit on phone almost completely.
So many active posters have left reddit, that it is a shell of what it previously was. Some of my favorite subreddits have become inactive and shallower, to the point that admins are actively boosting up alternate subreddits
From what I can gather, the large majority of the remaining active users in the site are people who use reddit as alternative to 9Gag & Porn sites - prolly hyperbole, but that is what the new r/all felt like
I started reading this cynically curious if Aaron would even be mentioned, but well said.
He pitched in a lot of cash at a do-or-die moment in Tesla's history.
He then served as the CEO and driving force through some extremely lean and tough years, including working like hell to raise capital (which isn't optional if you're making cars)
Would we have Tesla today without Musk? No. Would electric cars be ubiquitous if it was up to the likes of Ford, GM, Mercedes, Toyota to push the tech? No.
It is, of course, entirely OK to dislike him - but at least admit his contributions.
Sounds like some really back breaking labor, was this during his 80 hour work weeks?
Why don't you do it too?
Neither of them FOUNDED the company, they joined in later on.
It is, of course, entirely OK to admire his contributions - but at least admit the dark side of his persona and the means he's used to achieved his ends.
But that's closer to the truth in this case than anything else.
It's not an exaggeration to say that all Musk gained when he joined Tesla seven months after the founding—bringing the first substantial amount of outside capital—was the brand name.
These may all be true, but that doesn't make Elon the founder of Tesla. As for the general sentiment of Elon-hate over the last few years, well, he has only himself to blame...
The reason people like to point this out is because it highlights the fact that Elon's fragile ego is not a new phenomenon. It was always there, even before he decided to go full crazy.
It seems like getting in and operating in a pivotal way within the first 12 months is a valid time frame to still be given a founder title if the other founders agree to it. Since when you decide to incorporate is not consistently/necessarily at the same time for finalizing the foundational team members for a getting a company on its feet.
I found reddit back in 2005 and remember the post announcing that Aaron had joined the team and giving a bit of his background. Reddit was a lot different back then since there were no subreddits.
[0]https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-brilli...
That is true. But a bit later Reddit was joined with a company Aaron Swartz had founded, so he became a cofounder of this new arrangement of Reddit.
His is a story of a self-selected marter. This is an unpopular opinion: he broke the law and refused to plead, then jumped on RT and dissed the prosecution for years. There was no chance they were going to back down.
Why does this hurt me?
Well, Lawrence Lessig and Richard Stallman and the rest of them radicalised me at a young age too. I was their boy. Watching that documentary was like looking into a time-warping mirror!
Maybe every hairy nerd my age feels the same way, I don't know.
If you want NSFW to work, you need to be a mod of a subreddit. Any sub, even one you make yourself with no posts ever.
I don't know if RIF-vanced still gets any "updates" to fix these minor issues? I assume not, but never checked.
For this crowd, you might like my (not my own, but where I joined) instance: lemmy.sdf.org
— Install AppStore++ for TrollStore: https://github.com/CokePokes/AppStorePlus-TrollStore
— Install Apollo from the App Store
— Open AppStore++, tap Apollo, tap downgrade, choose 1.15.11
— Go to your home screen and wait for the older Apollo to finish downloading
— Install this tweak: https://github.com/JeffreyCA/Apollo-ImprovedCustomApi
Open Apollo and it will prompt for your API keys — Stebe Jovs voice “Boom.”
And with those "normies" came the low-effort posts that totally ignored things like stickied posts, subreddit rules, and the overall culture of the community (or site.) Take a look at /r/roms, for example. The sidebar, the top announcement sticky, the rules, and the automod on every single post says "here is where they are" and what is most of the subreddit? "How do I find game" - same thing for BuildaPC, or Tech Support, or Linux.
Then the mods have to remove the low effort posts and get called names, or they get upset that the resources they've taken time to make available to the community are ignored for the 500th time and blow up, just to get called more names or even censured by the admins.
The only way to win is to not play. And that's why I use a combination of HN and an RSS reader now.
Apps were mostly bad at showing sidebars too, they wanted to streamline the main view. They were there but I think a lot of users didn't know.
Anecdotally I seem to notice a trend on how grammatical/spelling corrections are received. If people generally accept them in good grace as a chance to improve, discussion quality can be decent. If they take it as a personal attack, or other people pile on (often with the classic "no one cares") ... well that's Reddit these days usually.
> If Reddit could grow to the size it had with management that was harmless at best, what could it do if Steve came back? We now know the answer to that question. Or at least a lower bound on the answer. Steve is not out of ideas yet.
Does anybody know what "ideas" he's talking about? When I think back to recent developments at Reddit, all that comes to mind is the 3rd-party app fiasco and the "collectible avatars" and "Moons"/"community points" nobody but crypto speculators wanted anything to do with (and are now dead). Oh, and the death of celebrity AMAs after they fired Victoria.
They more or less Streisand'd the conspiracy into plausibility by doing so, which is generally a bad idea. That's the reason I included it.
It just doesn't make sense as a business. You don't need a million devs to run a forum site, you need them to add more and more bloat to convince investors you're growing.
All they have done is pushed ads harder. That is all they really have to offer.
https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1309791/reddit-mau-worldw...
i agree the new version is very busy and buggy on mobile web
Last time I asked someone this question they mentioned some power user stuff that didn't really apply to regular Reddit content consumers / casual posters.
I've seen no evidence that anything they've introduced in the last 10 years has contributed to any of that growth, and my evidence is that just about every feature announced or implemented since then is now either gone or largely ignored by the userbase.
They considered this around the 3rd party app fiasco and it was clear old Reddit has a few years left because mods allhate the new Reddit UI
It's very hard to kill a two-sided market when it gets established. Look at Craigslist or Twitter.
An interesting thing about Reddit to me is many people who look at it see strongly offputting things like being overrun by image memes but when you look at it closely there is so much there about so many subjects. From time to time you find those brilliant social media posts that remind me of some of the emails from the Enron Emails data set where people talk about what they did for training in the army. Perhaps that is what keeps people coming back or maybe they are all about the memes.
The fact that people often append "reddit" to their Google queries is a testament to this. Even if they aren't active participants in these niche communities, they know that they are the easiest place to find reasonably reliable information from other humans on them.
If these types of communities stop flourishing on Reddit for any reason, then the site will become much easier to replace by any other generic meme factory.
Come to think of it that might be a reason why their ban happy, more people you ban who come back looks like a new user signup.
User error.
It's really not hard to not get banned. Site-wide, at least.
I'm pretty active and my account is nearly 13 years old.
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So....deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
- suggesting that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak due to not following safety protocols
- Questioning if the full shutdown of schools for a disease which had a relatively low mortality rate in children was the best decisio and if we fully had considered the impacts.
- suggesting that predators could abuse gender self identification laws to gain access to new victims.
- and one satirical posts advocating "let us grill it all in a beautiful nuclear inferno."
It seems though you are suggesting there are only a narrowly defined opinions that are acceptable to hold and that deviations outside of those are so heretical that should not be allowed to exist.
Only admins can ban you site-wide or shadowban you, and I can't imagine expressing any of those opinions being worthy of a site-wide ban from an admin unless you expressed them in an offensive way. ie, for the first opinion, using a slur when referring to the Chinese lab workers, or basically in any way accusing them of poor standards because they're Chinese. Likewise, for the third opinion, I've too often seen transphobia get disguised as concern trolling.
If it's moderators banning you from specific subs...well...that's just shitty moderators. Some of them are extremely power-hungry and ban happy, but they're not employees of reddit, and their actions should not be reflected on reddit as a whole.
I guess they grew in other countries.
You can run an ad on a subway and get more users. That doesn't mean you're doing a good job. The only reason those users have something to see is because of community health.
It's always been that way.
It really is a pile of shit compared to what it used to be.
And it is ad-supported. People who have partaken in small PHPbb style forums probably can tell the story - moderation and bandwidth cost time.
That's all, a simple, dumb business model based on advertising and market share, or better: mind share.
The last part is Reddit's moat, no more, no less.
My 2 cents.
Reddit has nothing to offer investors but Paul needs a return so he's trying to make sure someone else ends up holding the bags.
But everything is fine, you can just go swap places with any passenger if you want.
Steve was not a big fan of authority, so he also liked the idea of a site without editors.
Mods editing comments was the most standard behavior on every phpbb/vb board I grew up on.
His edits were clearly edited, clearly jokes, and TBH I found them pretty funny. And people were *outraged* that he had the capacity and the temerity to edit their sacrosanct posts...
I took it as a sign of the changing times
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
Just my conspiracy theory of the day
…a.k.a Reddit's "Most-Addicted City" of 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...
The "idea" is "make PG even more money", and that's a great idea if you're PG.
To PG's credit, he has an uncanny ability to pluck out relentlessly resourceful founders (self-fulfilling prophecy and all that, notwithstanding) who have greater chances of outsized success. And he's been more right about startups than almost anyone else. When he praises those founders, it often comes off as an exaggeration, but I am convinced he is being thoroughly honest.
"As someone who went through YC and met PG while he was still actively running it, I can tell you that at least in our batch he was 100% spot on about who was going to do well. He had a tendency to spend his free time with the same individuals who ended up doing phenomenally well. It would be easy to be dismissive about this and say something about doubling down on his best investments, etc. But during our batch many of those companies had not yet become the clear cut winners that they are today, and instead only turned into them a year or so down the road."There's a causal relationship here, but it's not obvious what direction it points.
TBH the obvious conclusion of the causal relationship seems more likely than what you are implying.
“I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” Huffman said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”
Edit: here is the story. I changed "he" to "Huffman" since I took the quote out of context of the full story. It's way down almost at the end. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...
So, It did, either way, victoria being there would not prevent a PR disaster. because that would require censoring.
There are countless things I assumed would have been fixed years and years ago that never have been. For example the trash search engine where you are better off using google with site:reddit.com. I do wonder if it's incompetence or intentional.
Would love to see something in a vein similar to what BlueSky is attempting with twitter clone for reddit. Have a lot of ideas in this area lately.
I follow a whole bunch of developers, artists and some writers. It's such a breath of fresh air compared to what twitter ended up being.
That's because you're a power user.
Reddit owners figured out that even though the service gained popularity as a middle ground between 4chan and Facebook, they can make most money if they kick out weirdos and cater to general audience, so they're consistently making changes to make it appealing to average Joe. You can clearly notice how they're slowly but surely removing controversial content and promoting userbase growth over everything else.
My prediction is that Reddit will keep growing, but it's simply going to be "Facebook, but for people 15 years younger".
- Design that is much less customizable via userscripts/CSS
- More emphasis on users rather than communities (enhancements to user pages, profile pictures that are displayed in comments)
- Garbage native media hosting alongside worse handling of offsite (youtube/imgur) media hosting
- Inline gifs in comments
- Algorithms that emphasize clickbait
- Algorithms that try to guess what you want to see rather than letting you tell it what you want to see
- Suppression of content deemed unsavory by advertisers
- Emphasis on mobile design over desktop design
- Backward incompatible changes
Sounds like a great meeting summary but did it yield results?
Check your account here [1], you probably have removed comments you don't know about. Or comment here [2] to see how it works.
Still boggles my mind at times.
One day, they'll need to squeeze a few extra percentage of revenue to meet their quarterly target and decide that dropping old.reddit.com will move enough people to their revenue optimized new page to get there.
Or there will be a breaking change in the API and they'll decide they don't want to bother supporting the old one anymore.
In any case, the days of old.reddit.com are counted. I already stopped using Reddit on my phone after they shut down third party app. Just waiting on old reddit to disappear to finally say goodbye to this website
One day, they'll need to squeeze a few extra percentage of revenue to meet their quarterly target and decide that dropping old.reddit.com will move enough people to their revenue optimized new page to get there.
Or there will be a breaking change in the API and they'll decide they don't want to bother supporting the old one anymore.
In any case, the days of old.reddit.com are counted. I already stopped using Reddit on my phone after they shut down third party app. Just waiting on old reddit to disappear to finally say goodbye to this website
> remember the 2010's when devs actually added new features for users to apps on a regular basis
I am completely off the update treadmill.
I kind of like that their privacy efforts have been trimming back unnecessary features, at least from 3P hosts.
The history is often overlooked: when digg imploded/shot itself in the foot, Reddit was in the right place at the right time and got lucky. Somewhere for the exodus to go to. Reddit itself was failing fast and on its last legs at the time held afloat by its core users and that's it. They didn't know what they were going to do and rather than being visionaries in any way really they got lucky hosting everyone with a slew of very standard web 2.0 features. And as with any social site, it's the userbase/community that pulls it thru darkness to the where it is now.
1) It was never the hot social media site, and still to this day it's a dark horse with even some of my peers not "getting it." We're finally seeing it get the user base and mass market usage of other social media platforms. But it's been an extraordinarily long process. So it was never a hot place to work that attracted product managers / MBAs / status seekers that would come in and META the site. And I think even the investors and/or owners didn't know what to do with it, and were kinda content to just ignore it and let it do it's thing.
2) General incompetence. Search broken for decades. Videos broken for decades. Limited features for decades. Inability to make a native app that's usable. Not to say that I mind the UI of old.reddit.com. But that the Reddit team moved so slow to do anything. The only time the acted with expedience was when controversies occurred. Yeah, they're finally rolling out new stuff, but it's only been in the past 2-3 years that dev on the platform has picked up.
But the thing is, this is the REASON Reddit has become as important as it is. A "competent" startup would of enshitified reddit and it would of died 15 years ago. Just like Digg. Instead we got almost a decade where the site looked like the frontpage of hackernews. And in that time, users kept creating high quality text content. And that content brought other users. And it slowly snowballed to the point where reddit is now the place to get genuine human text content on any topic. This is not something that could of occurred in the sort of time frame most startups or VCs operate in. And now they're trying to play a game that doesn't exist anymore (social media in the 2010s), and destroying the site with bad UI, hostility to the primary content creators, changes to the algorithm to prioritize engagement vs. nurturing quality content. It's sad, but I'm happy Reddit existed for as long as it did.
This is actually the killer feature that has made Reddit so successful - not much has changed and the content keeps coming in. Same reason HN has still continued to do well.
Germans have a saying for what Reddit has achieved here: "Falling up the stairs".
With a bit of work, it could be a good refresh of the original.
That's what was interesting about the CEO's statement about their IPO, talking about how the future of Reddit is AI. Umm... I think what makes reddit great is you can actual get genuine humans discussing things they are passionate about. AI generated text seems like the opposite of this.
MySpace -> Facebook -> ?
Yahoo -> Google -> LLM?
MySpace -> Facebook -> Instagram/Tiktok
Yahoo -> Google -> LLM
I don't like these developments, but they seem like likely candidates.
Feel like they server different purposes.
A lot of communities are choosing Discord for their homebase location rather than Reddit, which really bums me out because I'm not a huge fan of public Discord servers and I miss seeing the posts from all the niche communities I'm in aggregated somewhere.
- Making a new space for your community is trivial for anyone; it can be done in seconds with a few clicks and all you have to do is choose a name.
- Many people already have an account, so you don't need to convince everyone to sign up for a new platform. (Which scales with the platform's size, like all network effects.)
- Communities have their own space they can adjust to their liking, rather than being a vague cluster of nodes with a similar interest like in other social networks.
- Owners of those spaces have a lot of leeway to run things as they see fit.
Personally, I don't like the growing trend of every community being a Discord server that is going to collect dust in the corner of my chat window unless I commit to keeping up with it every day, but I understand why it's happening. Discord is an adequate social hub for any project or hobby group with a very low barrier to entry, which is more important than the actual functionality being the best IMO.
For example im currently playing though a mod pack for a game more that 20 years old; post about it on reddit and you get nothing; post on the discord and 30-40 active people will quickly get you the info you need.
Search reddit for info (using google because reddit search has never and will never work) You'll end up with post after post of [Deleted]. Its beyond useless.
Yahoo -> Google -> OpenAI -> Microsoft.
LLM is a tech stack, not a company.
I added MS at the end because OpenAI brought it to forefront of the current wave of computing revolution.
Curiously, eyeballing the search engine wiki page [0] for when the engines I know about started it looks like there was a window in the mid 90s (Yandex, Google, MSN Search -> Bing) and another one might have opened in 2010s (DDG, Bing #2, Yandex English).
People found these companies continuously, but there is a temporal component to when these companies take off.
> ... we wanted to fund Steve and Alexis, so if their idea was bad, they'd have to work on something else
> There needed to be something like del.icio.us/popular, but designed for sharing links instead of being a byproduct of saving them. So I called Steve and Alexis and said that we liked them, just not their idea, so we'd fund them if they'd work on something else.
So PG is saying the seminal idea behind Reddit wasn't even conceived by the original founders? If so, it's not clear to me the post's concluding sentence ('Steve is not out of ideas yet') offers much solace.
But I disagree that the idea responsible for Reddit's success is link-sharing. I think Reddit's success has a lot more to do with the ease of creating a dedicated discussion forum for any given topic simply by navigating to `reddit.com/r/[topic]`. Wikipedia already uses this approach for article creation, but there wasn't anything like that for discussion forums (in the US at least[1])
[1] Baidu Tieba preceded Reddit by 2 years, and Reddit is commonly referred to in China as the 'American Tieba' (e.g.: https://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2024-03-21/doc-inapaxhk7062...)
That combination was killer, but also no longer unique.
Reddit was basically Slashdot 4chan, in a meaningful sense.
And rather than addressing that problem, with this IPO they've heaped on another one.
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite , this and other tools make it easy to manage.
Reddit has hamfistedly broken whatever value it once had as a platform for long form discussion, with the interesting and valuable fringe, hobbyist, and obscure niche forums having been banned or moderated into inane milquetoast. Now, its value seems primarily as a customer support resource for companies outside the US, or as a platform for attracting clicks on other platforms.
Reddit's going the way of MySpace. Unless you like burning money, this IPO is one to skip. All the things that made Reddit great, once, are gone now. There are no compelling reasons to use it; it's slow, intrusive, disrespectful to user privacy, performatively moralizing and preachy, caters to the worst sort of moderation and curation power dynamics, and serves no relevant purpose in the ecosystem of the modern internet. The best and only value of Reddit comes from older archives of scraped content now used as training data for AI.
It's so sad. They really had a good thing going. I like to believe that it could have been a sustainable marvel of the internet of the likes of Wikipedia, if they had just stuck to reddit gold and non-intrusive ads for the revenue. How much can it cost to keep the servers going? The source code for the old reddit seems pretty stable and not like it requires tons of maintenance or the attention of many devs.
God, that is just the WORST concept especially nowadays. I was looking for info on water filtes and found a bunch of ChatGPT comments from 3 months ago on an 8 year old thread shilling for some company. Of course, they were all upvoted to the top of the thread.
I even had a notification of someone just commenting "lol" on an offhand comment I made about Firefly in 2011. As if that needed to be said.
Sorting by "controversial" does, though, show new comments that weren't on the main page. So you might be on to something.
My theory was Reddit ran batch jobs on some cadence (daily maybe?) to generate the topN comments lists for each users profile page. Running my script a couple of times over a several days seemed to clear everything.
I'd love to delete old comments on HackerNews but I can't so I'm pretty sure that Reddit could take away the delete button tomorrow and nothing would change.
"You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed."
https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1bfto4a/youre_being_t...
(Notice the "old" in the domain, because the new layout and all the apps are designed not for maximum utility, but for ad revenue).
There is so much more unoriginal content on reddit now. So little that is interesting or inspiring. It takes true effort to find content that is the combination of Interesting AND Original. /r/all is to Instagram what BoredPanda was/is to reddit: stale, shitty content maintained by bots and influencers.
I don't love the way he presented the idea, a bit handwavey and not properly acknowledging the fact that TikTok is only different from other socials because it's a) very good algorithm-wise, and b) Chinese. But the demo of how one would astroturf a protest was very convincing. He should have just done it, it would have been groundbreaking.
We need to train our friends and citizens on how to be effective at changing the world around them and at communicating, and how not to let social media influence them directly.
Sadly, the people who are otherwise smart who I know are further left totally reject mainstream media as "complicit in US government crimes" and so on.
Generalized social media is looking more and more like a mistake. There were previously forums, and they were centered around a topic. Then Reddit and Facebook came around and killed those by making it easy to create and find those communities. Now they're coming back. I want a local equivalent to Reddit, without the rest of Reddit. Beyond that, I don't need more social media that has no link to my IRL activities.
Also, the comparison to MySpace isn't fair. Tom was far cooler than spez ever will be.
<lereddit>We did it, HN! This is exactly what I'm looking for. Take my updoot, kind stranger!</lereddit>
Weird comparison—user-submitted-link-aggregator-forum-combo was well-trod ground by 2005. Fark was founded in ‘99 and wasn’t the first. Slashdot, kinda, though with more gatekeeping. Kuro5hin. Tons of them. This framing makes it seem like a new idea, like there were lists of links but nobody had thought to attach forums to them yet, but they very much had.
[edit] oh man, yeah, another post mentions 4chan and pals. The framing of this as if we had peanut butter and bread but nobody had noticed we might be able to make a peanut butter sandwich gets stranger the more I think about it.
However with growth, it's just full of idiots, you go to any subreddit for something that you are interested in and it's just a toxic mess. I've jumped into subreddits for a particular brand/person before that I hadn't heard about recently or that I enjoyed some output from them, only to find that the people on such subreddits spend there entire time ripping such thing apart 24/7, why even subscribe to that subreddit, if you hate that thing?
There are subreddits for a lot of things that I enjoy, but as I have gotten older, it's become an issue that most of the users are kids and therefore don't know what the hell they are talking about, I wouldn't have such conversations with such people in real life, but the issue with Reddit is I have no idea who these people are.
Reddit certainly has the potential to be one of the most interesting places on the internet to me, connecting you to all sorts of interesting things and ideas, but it's more and more just becoming a toxic cesspool.
But anytime a small community would grow in popularity and hit somewhere threshold, it would be overrun by the greater reddit population The subreddit would quickly lose what made the community special and core users would migrate or just stop.
And volunteer moderation is bothe best idea ever and the worst. When it works it's awesome, but it feels as if it's only a matter of time.
So when the API changes hit last year, I saw it as Reddit handing me my hat. The old reddit was no more. I couldn't use it how I wanted to use it, at least not without paying. And given that my reddit usage was more habit than value, I made the decision to accept how things are.
I miss it. This PG post felt more like a eulogy than a promise, despite the closing. But I think I'm better without Reddit. At this point it seems to primarily be a content farm for AI agents, both producing and consuming. So maybe the dark-forest Internet is starting to arrive.
I think you can still find great communities but they feel like ticking time-bombs.
Only a matter of time before they became too big and issues from large communities begin to spill in.
It's not every sub, but any diet related subs are a good example...keto/vegan/carnivore/the one for bryan johnson
I remember people on Reddit (10 years ago) used to be knowledgeable and when new information appeared, that would matter. There's just so much ignorance now.
monkey brain see upvotes, monkey brain assume group consensus correct, monkey brain follow [0]. repeatedly banning or blackholing anything that goes against your desired narrative leads to a smaller and smaller percentage of users willing to speak out against the consensus, so these opinions become even more marginalized, repeat until desired level of radicalization is achieved.
it even happens on HN - heavily downvoted comments are presumed to be barely worth reading because multiple people went out of their way to downvote. you could control the public opinion of a small country with <$50k worth of black market upvotes per year. that kind of power doesn't and hasn't gone unnoticed
[0] see 1951 Asch conformity study
Not a single one of the 3 parties in Canada have a likeable head, it's shocking to see the people on there go nuts for this random goon.
Reddit is the same as it always has been, but once a social media network reaches a certain scale, you can't really deal with the problems in the same way, or any way.
ex: Social network has 1000 active users. 1% (10) are disruptive: spammers, flamers, trolls, maybe just plain morons. That's fairly easy to handle, even if you only have 1 or 2 people with moderation powers.
Alternate scenario: Social network has 10,000,000 active users. 1% are disruptive. That's 100,000 people you need to regularly moderate. Which means instead of having a few "benevolent dictators" who can handle all of the content moderation, you need a team of moderators. Who probably have their own disagreements and agendas (like, I don't know, maybe a moderator of the largest picture/meme subreddit using their power to funnel traffic to a site they control while blocking competitors to slurp up ad revenue[0]). So now you need super-mods for the mod team.
It's like building out a business. You can have a high-performing 20-person team where everyone is a strong, valuable contributor. But the likelihood of your 10,000 person corporation, or even your 250 person department, having every single person be a valuable contributor is 0%. The percentages don't change as you grow, but the absolute number does.
The % of HN readers who want to make dumb reddit-style jokes here may be low, but if HN were 100x more popular, it would be as bad as Reddit. It's just the way things go.
[0] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/reddit-quickmeme-banned-miltz...
My only regret is that I didn't remove all of my comments before deleting my account.
I'll never forgive them.
don't beat yourself up about this, because they are the kind of scumbags that spend time and money on detecting these deleted/removed comments and then backfilling them.
> I'll never forgive them.
we got too attached and they exploited it. they are abusive assholes, but we need to let it go, heal, find/create new and better online/offline communities (and platforms).
Mastodon is quite nice!
I’m talking about this: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/reddit-will-let-users-buy-it...
It was an option offered. Nobody's hand was forced.
> So it was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19 years later.
Weird take. Doordash/Uber eats/deliveroo are huge companies and it's absolutely the same idea they had, they just had it too early
It was certainly a surprise that he thought it was a good idea to edit a user's comment as a form of trolling when he's the ceo.
I'm pretty sure the article is just an attempt at revising history in front of the IPO.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...
not out to defend reddit here, it also feels to be going donwhill to me, but this is not something I've personally experienced on the site yet
A whole paragraph for something I figured didn't need expounding.
And it's much easier to hide this problem on a site where the users are anonymous.
Reddit wouldn't be the first company to juice the numbers before an IPO. They've also admitted to taking advantage of fake accounts in the past: https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/
Its very cleary an IPO strategy is to hire "marketing companies" that are really botnet controllers to create users for your site to make it more attractive to investors. Then leadership gets to play dumb when these "marketing companies" are filling their user roster.
Maintaining plausible deniability is all that's necessary to avoid the legal issues. Add very minimal bot detection just to claim you aren't doing nothing about the problem.
I've stopped using reddit for a lot of reasons. But a big one was that more and more of the content being posted was from fake users. I had an account for ~11/12 years and this was always an issue. But it seemed to really ramp up in 2023. I also started receiving direct messages from bots in 2023. That had never happened before.
This is an anecdotal experience. But there are quite a few users saying the same thing lately: there's a bot problem like there wasn't before.
Sell me. How do they usually do that? Any concrete example?
You prefer them to create real looking accounts or they start stealing them.
If it gets harder only affects the price.
Or it could just be bots.
After the API thing, I stopped using for a few months, converting to Lemmy instead.
Then I got booted from Lemmy for not being communist enough, I started looking at Reddit again maybe once a day.
At first, I was so happy to see a lot of activity on my small subreddits that never had much activity before.
But after a few weeks I realized it's just bots basically rephrasing popular posts from the past. And bots rephrasing responses to those posts.
Where is the next Reddit? I miss it.
I didn't used to see these copy pasted posts regularly at the top of subreddits but it happens frequently now.
In fact, the biggest innovation of Reddit vs Digg and Slashdot before it, isn't mentioned here at all; you could create and moderate your own communities on Reddit. I guess that is hard to square with Reddit seizing control of so many communities in recent years.
This also completely ignores the fake traffic and posts that the Reddit founders admitted to in the early days and certainly seems to be going on still today. Most subreddits seem to be a shadow of there former selves and feel like ghost towns. The front page and /r/all clearly have the books cooked on what appears there. Brand friendly posts jump up with barely any votes. One or two posts from popular subreddits almost seem to be chosen daily to appear there.
I remember years ago reddit was a lot more like HN. The comment section (even for the main subs) was much more intellectual and critical.
People appeared to actually read posted articles. It was a thing where people would read the comment section before the article because everyone knew headlines were generally clickbait, and you could rely on some internet stranger to have analyzed the article and demonstrate the headline wasn't all as it seemed.
But now it seems that no one reads the articles at all or care for any sort of discourse with people with different opinions. Comments are filled with just jabs and pitchforks. No different than comment sections on news sites. Yet Redditors still seem to have the arrogance that it had developed over the years that their communities are better than those sites. And well, they used to be, but now they're just as bad.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Plenty of pretending that running a "successful" startup wasn't 90% scamming. The actual tech and programming didn't matter, all that mattered was that your `hello world.proj` was a money pump from users to shareholders or from shareholders to founders.
Just find all the old posts that say Uber/WeWork/Theranos/Tesla/SpaceX/etc will all make bajillions in 10 years and their tech is amazing and the problems are actually not that hard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852
Whatever the poison is, to quote Voltaire, "it must be very slow".
Much of reddit is, as they say, a cesspool. I have filtered over 200 subs from /r/all on my browser due to being nothing but spam, or being hatefully divisive on race or identity, or being a political echo chamber. If it burned down, little would be lost, and it would simply be replaced by another spam content farm.
Example spam submission:
https://old.reddit.com/r/FuckImOld/comments/1bk3ovp/what_els...
Example user submitting spam:
https://old.reddit.com/user/NaturallyFlashy
Notice account age compared with post history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4
Reddit is on the same path, but it's more of a slow burn.
Sounds like Reddit. When I go to reddit, I use "old.reddit.com". I hate the new version, once old.reddit disappears, I disappear too.
You've got your Lemmys and Lobsters and so on, but none of them are a centralized catch-all. I can't (for example) go to Lobsters and talk about Star Trek in a /r/DaystromInstitute equivalent, and the official equivalent running on Lemmy is far from equivalent to what the subreddit was before all this chaos.
It's kind of the same deal with Twitter. Twitter was the place ~everyone went to as forums collapsed. Now there's [Discord, new forums, Reddit, 9000 different ActivityPub platforms, Bluesky, Cohost, ...] and none are quite a match for what even the narrowest niche used Twitter for. You could easily go from your forum chat threads and topical threads and recreate that experience on Twitter with a high level of fidelity. Digg->Reddit was similar.
There's no obvious match for the centralized platforms because they sucked up all the energy for creating new centralized platforms that existed before.
To say that product is going to replace twitter is -imo- just wrong.
When Reddit started to do stupid things, some people moved to lemmy but it wasn't as clear cut... I guess distributed networks are always a bit harder to get traction.
Before anyone replies with "the fediverse"… I've heard people talking about Mastodon etc. for years now and afaict it's still a fringe nerd thing that most people outside techie HN-adjacent circles haven't heard of. It doesn't seem remotely comparable to Reddit in terms of popularity, or potential popularity.
Mastodon recently blew past 15m users, though, so not nothing.
Ads make the signal to noise ratio degrade. That works for spending a few minutes on FB, skimming to see what's up with friends or family, but not for reading long forum threads on reddit.
Reddit on the other hand has a bunch of anonymous users whose preferences are much harder to figure out.
At least for Twitter and Reddit, these could be profitable. There's so much fucking garbage done on both platforms... remember the hexagon NFT profile pictures on Twitter or Reddit's NFT avatars? Who in their right mind other than cryptobros would/did buy these, and how much developer attention got sucked in by these projects? Reddit has around 2.000 employees, what are they doing all day long, given that most moderation is being done literally for free?
Having said that, and being perhaps too negative, do we know how alive Reddit actually is? Because once you factor the power users that left, the bots reposting top comments on reposted stories, the auto-generated content and the shills it is possible that Reddit has already started its decline but hasn't noticed yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#AACS_encryption_key_contr...
The sub appeared to be working normally, I posted about the Amazon Redshift Serverless PDF, and then Reddit began behaving oddly.
After some investigation, and some guesswork, I concluded my account had been silently shadow-banned, and the sub banned (and then shortly after, deleted).
(Shadow-banning means when you log in as yourself, you see all your posts, and you see them in the threads where they were made. If you view Reddit when logged out, you then see all your posts have been deleted.)
Two years of posts and the sub disappeared, instantly, abruptly, without warning, reason, appeal process or notification, and Reddit is trying to lead me into thinking my account is still active. Make of that what you will.
Having had that experience, I concluded Reddit is not a safe place to invest time in.
I guess they want to hide it from users so their admins aren't flooded with users complaining or something? Or so spam bots keep running in circles? But it's ripe for abuse and false positives. Most users wouldn't know what "shadow banned" even means or that it exists.
It's a very different situation from say, TikTok vs. Facebook, in which I think TikTok is simply a superior product.
Yes, that's the network effect in action.
It's like having a bar you don't like that all your friends go to. You can try going to another bar, but your friends aren't there. You can try to talk your friends into going to the other bar with you but their friends are still at the first bar.
Communities are incredibly sticky.
> It's a very different situation from say, TikTok vs. Facebook
That's largely because Facebook has gradually shifted away from being a community-oriented product and largely to a media-consumption one.
If you're getting on Facebook to see pictures of your friends' kids, then some other app with a beautiful UX that has very nice pictures of strangers' children is not at all compelling. You're not there for the quality of the kid pics, you're there because it's your friends' kids.
But if you're just getting on Facebook to scroll through memes and videos made by strangers (but perhaps incidentally reposted by people you know), then another app that shows you funnier memes and more entertaining videos will easily snap you up.
The fact that Facebook transitioned away from extremely sticky community-oriented features towards mass popular media consumption seems like a shitty business strategy to me, but that's what they've done.
Reddit is definitely going in that direction too. The mobile app in particular pushes you towards image and video subreddits, and it's inevitably harder to comment when using a phone where typing is a chore. Maybe that hardware transition is the root cause leading us away from more community-oriented apps.
But, so far, Reddit still has enough community interaction to be very sticky. We'll see how long that lasts given the direction it's headed.
I wonder if that was his play, but, again, it should have been equity. I don't care who you are, the odds of you having an impact versus someone else to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year are miniscule. Good for you if you get to join the club, I guess. But if we have learned anything the last few decades (Musk, Welch, Fiorina, Schwartz, Lay, Ebbers) is that the louder they are the more likely they believe their own legend and screw up. We don't like Jobs around here, but he's maybe the last CEO that was probably worth the hundreds of millions/billions. My perspective (due to my job) is probably different than a lot of peoples, I see leadership failures all day every day.
Look, it's not my job on this planet to decide what people should make. But I do think the vast majority of CEO's lack vision, true leadership skills, etc. We can point to a few exceptions at the largest companies, but there are millions of CEOs.
Hell, Musk proves the point for us, supposedly CEO is is the hardest, most challenging and unforgiving job there is, yet somehow that clown is CEO/president/chief architect of 5 or 6 companies (and he spends more time on social media in a day than I do in a month, and I'm only running one very very small firm).
Reddit is the Craigslist of content discovery, in so many ways.
""A Securities and Exchange Commission filing said Huffman in 2023 got a salary of $341,346, which is relatively low for a CEO of a major public corporation. In February, this was raised to $550,000. He also got a $792,000 bonus last year based on Reddit's user numbers, revenue, and a type of profitability known as adjusted EBITDA that excludes certain expenses."
"The bulk of his compensation package is now in restricted stock units and stock options. A lot of this compensation is based on Huffman staying at Reddit through late 2028, and some is triggered by completing Reddit's initial public offering, the SEC filing said.
Half of the stock options vest at $25.29, a relatively easy bar to reach. The other half vest only if Reddit shares reach $45, $60, and $90 in public-market trading over 10 years, the SEC filing says — that's a higher bar and aligns the CEO's interests with shareholders."
It would be good to go back to a real user driven approach instead of "user driven, when values and priorities are in-line".
I've had many memorable years there, but after leaving I haven't felt I am missing anything special anymore. It's a lot of recycled content, bot heavy, power drunk mods.. I'll cross my fingers for an improvement but not so confident.
It was at that point that I realised all the protests that were happening weren’t going to go nowhere, and indeed that is what happened. Reddit has lost its way ever in a major way in the pursuit of profit.
I definitely would’ve been a different person today if I hadn’t found reddit, sad to see it is a shallower former-shell of what it was
Kills my iPhone XS Max daily though.
The navigation is completely broken as well. Some things don’t close, back button might or might not work, never seems to remember where I was before, frequently rescrolling stuff.
This is all after ad blocking.
Without it, endless spam of embedded ads distracting me, wasting my time. Janky loading, page hangs on clicks.
I’m not sure wtf their engineering team is doing but the site’s basically broken. Maybe it’s the normal state of things. Before I was using some third party app that was working great until Reddit killed api access.
My usage of it has dropped as well. It’s just unpleasant to use now.
On the one hand, thanks reddit, I got a ton of free time back. On the other hand, that time was previously spent generating value for your website, so not sure that was a good move for you.
Edit: Also, and this is strictly second-hand info from the Apollo dev who obviously is far from an unbiased source, but I have to admit alongside the thing just being objectively worse to use, my views of the reddit corporate structure also soured significantly. I think what they did with the API changes was a boneheaded move to be sure, but the way they went about it was so uniquely shitty to the people who had built small businesses around theirs that it truly boggled the mind. The dev for Apollo posted quite a bit around the "negotiations" if one wants to be generous and call them that in the lead up to the API changes, and the CEO just blatantly lied about him numerous times, in obvious ways, trying to paint him as this entitled kid in such a way that as a millennial, I have to admit I am THOROUGHLY sick of. Reddit as a company simply jacked the price, with barely any notice, refused to negotiate on a single point throughout and made numerous bad-faith claims about the developers who were (understandably) caught off guard.
Like if you just want to close the API, fine, close it. But then that would paint reddit as the obvious bad guy, so instead they went round the back way with this "api price change" that was so ludicrously expensive that no app could possibly cover it, and then reddit gets to PR speak the thing as "well we tried to work with developers" in a blatantly bullshit way without technically lying. It's gross and tiresome and frankly, insults the intelligence of every reddit user.
I can't say for certain if this wasn't the case that I'd still be using it more, as the app and mobile experiences are truly shit even without that. But this certainly has cooled my fervor to try to find ways to use it.
This is what I'd like to believe, but I fear it does not really make a difference. Reddit's audience has grown far beyond its initial tech roots and the quality outside a small subset of subreddits is... let's just call it devoid of content. It's barely a blip on the radar if the early adopter drop out, because they are by now a tiny subset of the population.
And I guess that's fine. Platforms have their lifecycle. And when a social media network is for-profit, the early adopters are often only important for the initial bootstrapping. Luckily there are nice places like LWN, HN, Lobste.rs and other more niche communities.
The thing is, when people append 'reddit' to their search query, who writes the posts that get linked? When someone is looking for a home wifi router and types 'mesh wifi6 reddit' in google and a post comes up from /r/homenetworking, it is almost certainly a response to a question from someone about setting up a wireless network, or it is a guide or a review by someone who just posted to get their knowledge out there. Who writes those? Not the people who upvote videos of dudes getting into a fight in Burger King.
The fact that Reddit keeps growing despite it's flaws and terrible management, let alone moderation, says a lot about the combination of a simple but effective product and critical mass.
That too. I'd like to thank whoever was responsible for Reddit's mobile redesign, because they cured my Reddit addiction. I can't count how many hours I've saved by not using their obnoxious, spammy new mobile UI.
Good luck with the "current" new design. The one that superseded old.reddit.com and got pretty decent is now on new.reddit.com, and the steaming pile of bull dung that is the current reddit.com if you're unlucky enough to get it forced upon you. And of course notifications on new.reddit.com will link to the bull dung version.
I forgot what he did when Apollo closed down but it was another big moneygrab.
The app itself always stayed pretty great, but the steady ramp up in monetization got increasingly annoying over the years.
I mean, people still use it despite a complete cluster-bombed design, intense push towards monetization at the cost of user experience, atrocious management and clear dictatorial tendencies from the top muffin, etc. It seems not even Reddit itself can kill Reddit despite their best tries.
It's in the nature of their moat: millions of tightly focused small forums, each easy to duplicate on their own, but together making the Reddit account a gateway to an enormous chunk of the user-generated internet. You open a Reddit, and not, say, a Telegram channel, because that's where the users are, ready to form a coherent community around your topic.
What might finally do Reddit in, or at least open vast markets for copycats, is its intense need to fit inside the narrow Overton window of American politics, in order to be palatable as a publicly traded company. This has already led to extremely heavy handed bans of major reddits and things can only get worse. If it reaches the breaking point, you will see a mass migration of not only the ideology driven communities, but also the neutral ones like fandoms, hobbyists etc., because they will move to where the users are.
On a tangent, what is the deal with the word moat and why is everybody using it all of a sudden? What does it mean?
To offer one more example out of my butt, take Apple. The Apple brand makes up at least some of their moat. You could build an exact clone of an iPhone that even runs latest iOS (assume for the sake of argument that there's a way to get the OS on your hardware). Doesn't matter, unless you're ready to infringe on trademarks by putting an Apple logo on there, few will buy it because they want Apple, not a functional work-alike.
If there's a new game launched, where is the forum likely to be? Reddit. What search term do people add to try to bypass genAI content farms? Reddit.
I suspect that if reddit loses its more bespoke content, adding 'reddit' to searches will be far less useful. However, even if not, I think those days are numbered as AI becomes more useful and more integrated into search; and as it replaces traditional search.
This really does not match my experience of the site. Citations are vanishingly rare and myths get repeated endlessly.
But now? Almost every comment here talks about how much they hate it. I honestly agree with the hate, and again that’s really sad to me.
I truly think it’s the moderators that destroyed it. Reddit didn’t do a good job of defining their roles, and they power tripped their way into community destroying behavior.
Half the people I know who used to run and attend meetups for my city’s subreddit are now banned from even participating in it, always from some stupid petty fight the moderators had with them[1]. It makes me wonder what types of people are still posting there?
[1] there was a big push a while ago to replace the community mods with people who do “social media” professionally. The old mods that live in my city and people know got semi-threatened with doxxing (hey nice job you have there do they know your Reddit account?) and removed themselves to be replaced by “professionals”. Such pathetic internet drama.
Anyway: we all collectively pour one out for the Reddit that once was. It can go to internet heaven with fark, slashdot, digg, stumbleupon, delicious, etc.
And it doesn't help that all major subs are modded by the same narrow group of people. How reddit the company has no problems with that is beyond me. Apparently that's exactly what they want.
It’s quite alarming how reddit has made no effort to encourage a higher quality of moderators.
The admin are kinder to banning the opposing Red team people who congregate there. I don’t mind this, but it selects for annoying people.
This is further confusing when the site has many European users who are not even aware of the US political game.
(look at the frontpage any day, it’s all Blue tribe with maybe 3-4 neutral animal posts. Why can’t it be 20 neutral things with 3-4 political posts?)
The voting system that glorifies posts that are voted by the community and hides posts that don't go with majority's opinion creates that one-sided effect.
I don't spend a lot of time on Reddit but whenever I do, I always see the most left-leaning naive takes being upvoted massively.
Since Reddit demographics is mostly young and educated, no wonder it's leaning Blue.
(The amount of tankie delusion on Reddit baffles me as well though)
1. Trying to destroy democracy how?
2. Trying to outlaw human beings how?
Be specific. Because you are parroting mainstream media nonsense, but you are likely just ignorant as a European.
I really love it when people think there's a "real" left anymore on Reddit. It was thoroughly decimated in 2016 and most left for Lemmy, Hexbear or Yesterweb
If you excised the startup founder culture from HN (which you cant) you'd be left with a bunch of straight forward Dem party politics guys and a handful of libertarians.
>a way to order fast food on your cellphone.
>[...]So it was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19 years later.
How does this not exist?? If there was a further problem with their idea why did he describe it in the way of something that not only exists but is super popular? Has he grown completely out of touch or what's going on?
i.e. texting or calling a number in a specific way based on some standard tons of fast food places provide to make fast food orders without human interaction.
https://www.usfoods.com/our-services/business-trends/text-to...
It gave me pause though, as it's a weird way to phrase it.
That model absolutely has taken off, just not in places where everyone has smartphones. USSD services - driven by basic text menus - powers everything from microtransactions to ordering food to accessing government services in many parts of Africa to this day:
You could even charge customers food orders indirectly via premium SMS texts. Without having to sign up for an account.
> Steve is not out of ideas yet.
Could this refer to the hugely innovative Reddit live chat (/s), or the idea to alienate many of it's most dedicated users by killing their favorite clients?
Any "innovations" Reddit has made in the past decade have been making the UI worse and borderline unusable in poor attempts to monetize the site. It offers video hosting that it does poorly, an "improved UI" that it does poorly, chat that it does poorly, some nebulous web3 things that it also did poorly, and now is going to pretend that using Reddit as a training set won't result in a very unskilled, and exceedingly confident of its own correctness, chatbot. Spez has no vision for Reddit, and clearly neither does Paul. The way to make Reddit great is to empower the communities and moderators, and instead Reddit has done the opposite, because - let's be real here - Steve Huffman doesn't want to create a cool website or a useful tool, he wants to IPO and become a billionaire and ride off into the sunset.
Yada yada yada. Look if anything you should learn from this, its this. User experience doesn't have to be terrific. API after a good growth trajectory is less advantageous. There are no competitions for moderators because moderators are a dime a dozen. And you don’t have to make money if you’re growing or are a game changer (wallstreetbets).
You just have to be here for the long run. The run when digg failed. The run when twitter went all the way into the hole. The run when facebook becomes friendster. The run when instagram becomes exhausting. The run when threads starts losing interest. The run when google stops giving good results so you keep going to reddit. The run when Microsoft office has bad help articles and so you must ask reddit. The run when stack exchange becomes a cesspool of tired experts but they find Reddit more enjoyable. The run when all of the memes words like AmA and OP and poopstick are not just geek words but real life issues that pervade every platform… like HN.
The long run.
Now we have a website where all the content seems to be from bots, right before they sell.
I like reddit because it has every topic on it but it’s trash now. It’s not unkillable. Fundamentally it’s just a forum where users create their own subforums.
And, I fear the beatings will continue until morale improves. I just don't think the incentives are aligned with building a good community, anymore, so there's nothing pushing reddit toward becoming good again and many things pushing toward exploitation of the near two decades of conversation found there.
Let’s not ever forget that.
Maybe niche BBs or a platform with enough distasteful content that no company wants their brand associated with it. (Ex. 4chan)
I wouldn’t visit Reddit’s blog and interpret talk about their successes there as indicating that the entire forum(s?) exist for marketing the parent.
And although, the HN forum itself definitely is great marketing, I mean to say that not all the content is marketing for YC.
I also wouldn’t draw that conclusion if someone who worked at Reddit submitted the blog post to a subreddit and it got upvoted there.
Unless it was boosted here, it’s only on the front page because of others voting it up. It’s more likely that it’s the PG effect!
Startups literally "launch" on here whether they're Y Combinator affiliates or not.
The content of any forum cannot be mostly marketing, because that literally means there's a lack of organic impressions and the money / time /effort is better spent elsewhere.
>It’s more likely that it’s the PG effect!
You've described a marketing phenomenon.
Replace recollection with "revisionist history"
Many people think it's gotten worse.
With Alexis: in the early days of Reddit. First was to ask him some general questions, probably. (Don't fully recollect.)
Then he mentioned that they have just created this new feature called subreddits, and that any user can create a subreddit. I was into Ruby at that time, so I created one for Ruby. Didn't use it much, though, after that. I don't know if the current Ruby subreddit is the one I created or not.
With Steve: years later, I was consulting to a new fintech SaaS startup, in it's earliest stage, so was helping them with requirements, high level app design and database design, and forms (UI). I pinged Steve with a few questions about architecture and technology, since Reddit was already at scale, and he replied with some suggestions.
Don't read meanings or motives into statements where none exist. No one should, and you in particular are very poor at it.
I said "anecdotes", right at the start. I didn't make any claim to fame, or think of it, even. Don't judge others by how your mind works.
Even your judgement is poor. If anything, I would say the Steve anecdote is more interesting than the Ruby one, because it shows a somewhat famous guy willing to give advice to an unknown person.
Now, go back under your rock.
In the absence of usefulness, I'm left to surmise the other possible motivations for you to be posting it. One of those being that you want to let others know that you personally interacted with these famous people, or you see yourself as important to the story. This would give you some gratification, so it's not entirely illogical to consider this as a motivating factor. Apart from the technical subject matter, the value of your original comment is akin to a Taylor Swift fan saying they met Taylor once, and they talked about the weather. It's a nice reflection on Taylor to have set the time aside, just like it's a nice reflection on Steve to have answered questions, but neither is groundbreaking enough to be interesting to strangers.
Not that my comments are particularly useful. But my comments aren't top-level discussion starters, they are direct replies to you in absence of a direct message feature.
1 point by fuzztester 0 minutes ago | root | parent | next | edit | delete [–]
>Not that my comments are particularly useful.
Going by your own logic, why comment, then? To put down others? Won't work, dork.
Right on. Your comments are worse than useless, actually.
Wow, such a pious, holier-than-thou and long-winded comment, Priscilla, er, Prudence, er, Pathetica. :)
Exactly as you presume to judge me and comment about me, without sufficient basis or knowledge about me, I will now do the same to you. Let's see how you handle it:
I hereby declare your novitiate status successfully ended. You are now officially a nun of the Convent of No Reason but Full of Bile and Weakness, Envy and Hate, in the Year of Our Lord, 2024.
Enjoy the rest of your miserable nunnified life.
Wow, you're riled up. Even got the "I'm not raging, look I'm brushing it off" smiley emoticons.
> Priscilla, er, Prudence, er, Pathetica. :) [...] You are now officially a nun of the Convent of No Reason but Full of Bile and Weakness, Envy and Hate, in the Year of Our Lord, 2024.
Either I don't get the reference, or that's just... unhinged. It seems like you also slipped and pasted some of the comment header at the start of the reply. Maybe take a break from the internet for a bit, I'm sorry my comment upset you so much.
Who said anything about raging? This issue is not important enough for me to rage about :)
Maybe it is, for you. You are probably raging internally about me, but trying to express it in what you, a troll, but a scared one, think is a socially acceptable form, here, even though you are using a throwaway name. That shows your stupidity.
Everyone recognises a troll when they see one.
No, the smiley at the end of that sentence indicates my sneering at you, just as my use of those specific girls' names do, like Cyril and Claude in the case of boys. You know both of those points very well, but are pretending not to, like the fake and loser that you are.
>Either I don't get the reference, or that's just... unhinged.
Yes, that's right, you are unhinged. :)))
>Maybe take a break from the internet for a bit, I'm sorry my comment upset you so much.
No, you are not sorry, because you are a troll, so that's the only thing you are capable of even trying (unsuccessfully) to do. Also, it did not upset me. I was just shitting back on you. I am very good at that.
I was wrong about your address, it's not a rock.
So go back into the pond slime under the bridge, where you belong, troll.
Edit: Can't resist a last shit on you, you slime.
Do come out of your slime, from time to time, and beg for a dime, or for a lime, to give us an entertaining time. How's that for a rhyme?
Hardeharhar. Mwahahahahaha!
Couple that with their constantly pushing their own (objectively inferior) client and killing the best ways to browse the site, I've really dropped off on how much I use reddit.
LifeProTip: If the idea you pitch is obviously nonviable, be just so adorable.
VCs: "Ooo... Little baby founder so cute, I just want to fund you right up... Oh yes, I do! Yes, I do!"
New Techbro: "I'm the special little baby."
Same Techbro a Few Years Later: "Why are the special little babies in charge?"
Newer Techbro: "OK, boomer."
They called this "circumventing a ban", take it very seriously (as they should, I guess, but COME ON!) and it triggers a ban across every identifiable account that is connected to you, which they achieve via AI heuristics and fingerprinting. And this is VERY effective.
If you create a new account because you can't reach anyone about this (because you won't) just to get back to anyone who sent you messages or comments or whatever, they will call this "circumventing a ban AGAIN" and that will be strike 2 and when you THEN try to get help they will say "it says here that you have multiple circumvention attempts" (to an initially unjustified ban)... etc...
Do you see where this is going? Once Reddit (in the form of a mod having a bad day) has decided you are a "bad actor" (whether true or not), it's completely a slippery slope to a sitewide ban.
If anyone could help me unlock my Reddit accounts, I'd appreciate it (you can use my rep here perhaps) because it's honestly been a horrible development- example- most of my health issues had support forums there that are now read-only for me.
The really unfortunate thing is that I spent much of my time trying to help other people on it, and not being able to do that has felt bad. For some evidence of this, see my HN comments (although this is not really a support forum, per se).
I've been on Reddit since it was new (my original and oldest account dates to its earliest days: https://old.reddit.com/user/lectrick) and I'd appreciate any help!
It's not like their costs go up because you access via the API vs the website/the official app.
/. still exists, and I still go a few times a week out of habit. The level of discourse varies widely, but at least I know I'm usually talking to a human and not an Asian bot farm.
I can't wait for reddit to go public, it's going to generate a lot of drama
we are in the decade of internet moderation, I don't understand why the world doesn't care enough about this problem
Reddit's CEO and COO made $193M and $93M in 2023 but their CFO "only" made $6.6M
So if you eliminate the CEO and COO, they have a profitable business. Given those two have tried to kill the community over and again, why keep them?
ChatGPT gives me most what I got on Reddit without the weirdos and constant speech policing. Which is to say, half baked information and random wastes of time digging into some historical or scientific thing.
Reddit 10 years ago was fun and weird, Reddit now is a safe space meant for a wide audience and so it’s lost most the edge and fun to me. Or maybe I got old.
I am kind of surprised that the idea was Paul Graham's. I always assumed that it was Steve and Alex who came up with it. Considering HN was also started by PG, which has survived and grown with just a few changes every year, I think he has a unique talent for creating lasting online communities. It's not an easy task, btw.
And, most importantly, money
Because, he is not a user of Reddit, or, has completely missed the zeitgeist of the community
Users are outraged with Reddit
The UI is continually getting worse, and is iterating on worse
The Epstein/Maxwell relationship is insane, and previous political coverups evidences corruption at the highest levels of Reddit meant to ensure that only certain things frontpage.
The Admin Mafia is a very real thing
The pay levels of Reddit execs is nausea inducing
Reddit is likely a great example of value destruction.
I hash every string with a SimHash and perform a Hamming distance query against those hashes for any hash that belongs to more than 3 accounts, i.e., any full string (> 42 characters) which was posted as a post title, post body, comment body, or account "description" by more than 3 accounts.
Regularly, this exposes huge networks of both fresh accounts and what I have to assume are stolen, credentialed "aged" accounts being used to spam that just recycle the same or very similar (Hamming distance < 5 on strings > 42 characters) titles/bodies. We're talking thousands of accounts over months just posting the same content over and over to the same range of subreddits.
I'm just some random Laravel enjoyer, and I've automated the 'banning' of these accounts (really, I flag the strings, and any account that posts them is then flagged).
This doesn't even touch on the media... (I've basically done the same thing with hashing the media to detect duplicate or very, very similar content via pHash). Thousands and thousands of accounts are spamming the same images over and over and over.
From my numbers, 59% of the content on Reddit is spam, and 51% of the accounts are spam, and that's not including the media-flagged spammers.
They don't seem to care about the spam, or they're completely inept. With the resources at their disposal, there's such a huge portion of this that should be able to be moderated before it ever reaches the API/live.
Not sure if this list all, but should be a good start.
Oh, I don't want to give the wrong impression. I'm not cataloging anywhere near _all_ subreddits. Or all of anything. More or less I started one day with one subreddit and built a system that just churns through what's there. The API is limited and there's only so many creative ways to request the data (while staying within TOS) - as I've wanted to remain able to function I've made sure to stay within the boundaries set forth.
Rather than try to get _everything_ (there's services out there that have databases of a lot of past/current reddit data) that ends up stale data (which may be useful for a content farm) I'm interested instead in a relatively accurate picture.
This project initially grew out of an interest in building an automated moderation bot to help out subreddits being spammed with content from accounts that are so obviously spam when the content was posted that it's astounding it ever makes it live. A few months into developing the initial crawling/database/hashing setup and getting things all tuned up they announced the API changes and I lost all interest in the moderation aspects but had enjoyed using it as a test bed for learning new things. (I came into this having no idea what a hamming distance was)
And have you accounted for reddit-isms, such as posting huge chains of "Cat" or "nice"?
I did eventually have to build a process to function as an 'allowlist' for legitimate strings that would otherwise have all the characteristics of spam.
A few years.
> And have you accounted for reddit-isms, such as posting huge chains of "Cat" or "nice"?
Like others have said, the 42 character limit is a bit of a sweet spot that I've found where basically everything is spam.
I do take a look at strings under 42 characters but have to take a bit of a manual approach there as natural repeated strings start breaking through.
They don't care, at least that is the conclusion I've reached after repeatedly reporting content farms. I think they drive engagement anyway so it's good for business at the end of day. I did not do a thorough study like you apparently did, but anecdotally from the popular subreddits, I've spent enough time on Reddit (unfortunately) to recognize rehashed content that's reposted periodically to 'mine' karma. At some point, Reddit will be just a bunch of spam bots talking to each other and upvoting each other's content while humans will be spectators, or their content will be buried. Either way, this will be great for Reddit as it's good for business (ad impressions). It will be bad for Google as they're training their AIs based off spam and they will notice..
They probably have a slush fund to pay the spammers to boost traffic numbers
Couldn’t Reddit solve this simply by making karma worthless, like HN?
> Couldn’t Reddit solve this simply by making karma worthless, like HN?
Why would they solve this? These bots create engagement. Until some bot farm is weaponized to organize some sort of IRL 'bad thing', I bet nobody at Reddit actually gives a fuck.
Astroturfing. Say you're on the /r/AppleWatch and you see a post asking for some watch band recommendations. People start posting said recommendations and you check to see who's posting what. You will instinctively trust the 3 yo account with 10k karma, very popular on /r/pics vs the 2 month old account with 100 karma. That's one example for why some of these accounts are actually bought and sold https://www.epicnpc.com/forums/reddit-accounts.1277/
Political activism is another scenario for these sockpuppet accounts with heavy karma. I've noticed A LOT of pro-Palestinian and pro-Russian propaganda from accounts with huge amounts of karma quickly gained from a handful of posts on mainstream reddits like /r/pics or /r/funny which are reposted content from 3-4 years ago.
They want to hide certain correlations around controversial posts from long held accounts who otherwise have a good post and comment karma. If one had access to timestamps too then one could essentially see some of the astroturfing and intentionally directed bot spam clearly. Too much data would allow one to see such corruption in very clear ways. And even analyze the rhetorical anti-communication hostility tactics.
Simultaneously this gives them an excuse to ban all accounts productive in communication (via some slight breaking of some rule) with the explanation that they are too swamped to make discerning decisions.
I rarely read Reddit, but when I do I rarely see outright spam (I see plenty of noise).
I suspect that the objective of these bulk spamming operations isn't to promote stuff on the platform, but to mess with other apps. LLMs trained on Reddit content, search engines that rank Reddit posts highly, etc.
Now... so much onlyfans. The onlyfans spam dwarfs the rest (I should mention that there's quite a few political/news subreddits I just flat out ignore due to the amount of spam and astroturfing - so likely there's quite a bit there that I'm not seeing)
Then there's lots that are just spammed into the abyss, accounts banned or suspended shortly after.
Once you adjust browser settings enough to read the content he publishes, you'll notice that he praises the recent developments at Reddit, so let's just say he's not a guy that follows best practices or understands good UX.
Notably, Sam Altman also invested in Reddit in 2014 when he was president of YC, and now his "investment properties " own 8.7%. What the composition of that investment vehicle is, and how YC/Paul Graham are involved, I can't say.
Harmless at best wasn't enough, so let's bring in actively harmful!
I'm being hyperbolic but Reddit doesn't really seem to have grown in any meaningful way for a long time; frankly, it has regressed in many ways since Steve has regained the reins.
Steve is operating with more info than I am, so maybe all his decisions are sound from a business perspective, but as a user I've only seen Reddit become less useful, less novel, less active, and less enjoyable. As a result I use it less, and I know others use it less as well. There is no real moat to Reddit outside of it's user base, if they continue to push too hard I don't see how they survive.
Note: they don't even let you escape the reddit app browser for external links anymore - no copying url (or any page content/links), no "open in external browser". Absolute pure evil UX.
> What's the best "long con" you ever pulled?
>> Here's one.
>> In 2006, reddit was sold to Conde Nast. It was soon obvious to many that the sale had been premature, the site was unmanaged and under-resourced under the old-media giant who simply didn't understand it and could never realize its full potential, so the founders and their allies in Y-Combinator (where reddit had been born) hatched an audacious plan to re-extract reddit from the clutches of the 100-year-old media conglomerate.
>> Together with Sam Altman, they recruited a young up-and-coming technology manager with social media credentials. Alexis, who was on the interview panel for the new reddit CEO, would reject all other candidates except this one. The manager was to insist as a condition of taking the job that Conde Nast would have to give up significant ownership of the company, first to employees by justifying the need for equity to be able to hire top talent, bringing in Silicon Valley insiders to help run the company. After continuing to grow the company, he would then further dilute Conde Nast's ownership by raising money from a syndicate of Silicon Valley investors led by Sam Altman, now the President of Y-Combinator itself, who in the process would take a seat on the board.
>> Once this was done, he and his team would manufacture a series of otherwise-improbable leadership crises, forcing the new board to scramble to find a new CEO, allowing Altman to use his position on the board to advocate for the re-introduction of the old founders, installing them on the board and as CEO, thus returning the company to their control and relegating Conde Nast to a position as minority shareholder.
>> JUST KIDDING. There's no way that could happen.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...
The best part is all the responses by Steve Huffman, Sam Altman, and Ellen Pao, all related to the Reddit leadership at one time or another.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
same thing with Twitter and Mastodon, except I feel Mastodon was far more successful a transition for me.
At the same time, it's glaringly obvious that while the site was build for analytical, idealist, content contributor folks like me (i.e., the type of people who have contributed to wikipedia at least a few times), the site is being converted to focus on content consumption in order to reach a broader audience.
I don't want to be mad. I still use old.reddit and tend to stick to the smaller subs I know and love (e.g. /r/RainbowEverything, /r/flashlight, /r/knolling, /r/ShittyDaystrom), but whenever I click on /r/all, I die a little bit inside, because it feels like I'm staring a reflection of the worst instincts of humanity (both the awful and the cliché), rather than the best of humanity I saw on the first days of /r/all when it was a way to add more blogs to my google reader feed.
We all built a cool website together, and it was fun. I'll keep using it, but I probably wont ever actively moderate again, simply because it's obvious that they have a different vision. I've always found reddit to be the best of all the social media networks, simply because it actually requires people to engage instead of using it as a megaphone. I may even invest in it somewhere down the road if the financials make more sense.
> whenever I click on /r/all, I die a little bit inside, because it feels like I'm staring a reflection of the worst instincts of humanity (both the awful and the cliché),
It really is awful. Maybe worst of all are the “snark” subreddits for celebrity gossip and catty bullying.
But as you also point out, that is, like it or not, broad, and broad is where the money is.
For example, the top post on /r/all right now is:
>TIL that singer Dionne Warwick, upset with misogyny in rap lyrics, once set up a meeting with Snoop Dogg and Suge Knight at her home, where she demanded that they call her a “bitch” to her face. Snoop Dogg later said “I believe we got out-gangstered that day.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1bk944c/til_...
I mean... what? It obviously didn't influence him substantially, as he still used "bitch" in his songs. I just don't get the point of something like this. It doesn't make me feel good, it just makes me confused at why this is a popular post.
My hobby is better than your hobby.
Their numbers look really good with consistent growth in MAU and revenue year over year: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/
And IIRC they are larger than such properties as Pinterest and Linkedin. I use the app daily, and it is full of activity on a huge number of subreddits.
It seems like the only people who don't like Reddit are middle aged men on programming forums who nevertheless use old.reddit.com every day. They've basically created the TikTok of text content.
Reddit Data API Update: Changes to Pushshift Access - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776848 16 comments
Reddit's proposed API changes and the continued existence of RedReader - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35767700 109 comments
Reddit comments and submissions collected by Pushshift - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36038684 294 comments
Since they disabled the ability to search effectively using pushshift, I haven't been back to Reddit myself.
"Huffman in 2023 got a salary of $341,346, which is relatively low for a CEO of a major public corporation. In February, this was raised to $550,000. He also got a $792,000 bonus last year based on Reddit's user numbers, revenue, and a type of profitability known as adjusted EBITDA that excludes certain expenses."
https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-def...
I'm not even a fake accountant, so I don't understand the exact nature of the dilution, but the $193mil overall number seems to assume a lot of stuff goes extremely well in the IPO. I think the stock number assumes a stock price of ~$33.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...
(see the reply to this comment by neilv for information that casts doubt on the "reddit leadership lying" part of this)
Instead of charging 3rd party clients $5/month or something and retaining them, Reddit banned all 3rd party clients. But then went back on that after realizing that people with disabilities used 3rd party clients to access the site because Reddit's own app was not usable for them. Other 3rd party apps were still banned though.
People protested, eventually taking thousands of subreddits offline, which Reddit then fixed by replacing the moderators/owners of each subreddit.
There's probably more I'm missing, but basically Reddit tried to rent-seek but their engineering teams weren't able to provide the infrastructure needed to support API subscriptions for 3rd party apps.
Edited to add: The initial Apollo developer thread is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
And the post that details Reddit leadership lying about the Apollo dev: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_t...
Reddit couldn't have handled this better IMO. Mods literally held subs hostage, which, when you think of it, is just so stupid it made for some good natural selection.
I wasted a lot of time going through transcripts and recordings at the time, and (to my ear, and knowledge of the world) the facts available didn't fully support the confident accusations that the angry villagers with pitchforks were repeating from each other.
Which injustice is kinda poetic, if you consider how Reddit as a venue nurtured thinking like "we did it, reddit!" and other collective stupidity.
I’m guessing disaggregation will hollow them out by taking away many of the high-engagement subreddits, and only then will one website be able to come in to start the reintegration cycle.
I’m guessing something similar to Discord, but discoverable via search, will be the Reddit killer.
De-centralized, self-moderated, payment options available, the company optimizes the tool rather than the content, etc.
A system like that removes most of the headaches that the current Reddit ecosystem causes.
I didn't know this is true. That's mind blowing.
* Mods dont get paid - Facebook Groups has niche groups much bigger than niche subreddits. I subscribe to both FB and Reddit for the car models I own, the FB groups are 10x bigger with 20x posts. Those mods dont get paid either, and Facebook as a much bigger spam/fake account problem to work tirelessly to defend your group against
* No API / 3rd Party access - well, just try asking Meta for a free API to build an adless wrapper around the Facebook wall, good luck
But spez is the bad guy here and zuck is a saint. Or they're both bad guys but if you think that, then spez is on the right trajectory to easily have a $20b company in 5 years
People seem to be confusing - high potential for profits with building an adless platform that also has succesfully passed the network effect
> This was before smartphones. They'd have had to make deals with cell carriers and fast food chains just to get it launched. So it was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19 years later.
What does he mean here, since Uber Eats, Door Dash, Postmates, Grub Hub, and a bunch of similar startups all do some version of that.
So I dunno that I buy this adulation of Steve.
Doesn't exactly inspire confidence!
That was the final straw. I haven't been to the site for weeks for the first time in 12 years.
Every time you navigate back from a post to the feed, yet another popup. But I've come to recognize this is an intended feature and not a bug.
I remember the early days.. I deleted that early account b/c reddit was so addictive. And it arguably still is. I remember receiving a few replies from Aaron. He was a kid who was living in the future way ahead of his time.
I migrated here though when reddit diversified subreddits.. kinda like when Facebook opened up to the world reddit became less useful for conversation.
And I've gone through a few accounts/handles for the same reasons here as reddit.
Downvotes and even distributed slashdot moderation work to discourage conversation and ultimately engagement unless you garner a critical mass to break out of the algorithm. I imagine post engagement follows Zipf's law. This probably explains why people buy upvotes and followers etc...
No site is immune to this as far as I can tell. Niche subbreddits help but then those tend to be actively moderated. Very specific forums also tend to be better for specific things (like car forums).
Good advice is to never read the comments to the things you post and I guess that means replies as well :) .. It's a weird dynamic because what all humans really need is to be heard..
And yet magic internet points are not quite the correct filter. Maybe AI will save us.