Can Reddit Grow Up?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I've been a redditor for nearly 5 years. I'm a moderator on many subs and over time i've even been given the privilege of becoming a moderater on a subreddit with over 100k users. I've been given random reddit gold on 3 occasions (a strange revenue system for letting users know you care by paying reddit to give them some minor perks for about $5), so i think i understand the site fairly accurately.
When you move away from the large subreddits, into the niche, you realize that much of reddit is actual adults, with brains, and who aren't too busy to see news, and also have a discussion about it. I've always seen this as a problem for advertisers.
Advertisers want it one way. They want to send a message, and they want that to be the only thing said.
Take this amazing ad from thai life insurance: http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/22jybg/what_does_kin...
The top comment, while jokingly so, brings up the point that this is a commercial... it's not real... it's trying to make you think a certain way on purpose. It's manipulative. Reddit breaks the 4th wall. It calls bullshit, and much of the time, it's right.
Reddit's problem is that when an ad is truly impressive, a great deal, etc., the relevant firm doesn't need to pay reddit to get attention. The users will do that for them. See dollar shave club: http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/qk7xr/dollarshaveclu...
I really don't think there is much of a solution for reddit, but if i were in charge, the way i would generate revenue would be to hold the successful ads hostage. Shadow ban advertisers accounts if they don't play ball. Literally remove viral commercials, but do it quietly. It's an abuse of the system and the users know that, and i think users like me would understand. Make them pay a fee to even attempt to "go viral."
That's my 2 cents.
Remember this is revenue from firms attempting to create content, not paying for ad space. You'd have a shallower river of income, but a much wider one.
I'm not saying it would definitely work, but i think it'd certainly be something worth paying for. Especially when you're watching your ad successfully drive lots of users to your product... it's working! And then suddenly reddit calls your firm up and says:
"Hey, nice successful ad you have there blowing up on our service. It'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it..."
As for the users, if you shadow ban the content, more often then not they wouldn't even know. If they find out, you could simply explain that the relevant firm is abusing the service. Most would even help... a small button (is this an ad?). I'd click it, because i would know clicking it helps reddit. Remember, redditors are adults, with brains (they watch community, not two and a half men). There may be some push back, but i know i'd certainly understand, because big firms cheating the system is bullshit, especially if price discrimination is put in place to protect small firms. Dollar Shave Club pays pennies, Gillette pays hundreds.
And, hey, i really do love the site. If Alexis or Steve are ever in need of a beer in SF, i'd be happy to buy it.
If all advertising were of the subliminal/product placement variety, I might stop trying to block all of it.
Do you mean new submissions, or the media news? If it's the media news, are you trying to say that the "smart" thing to do is to follow the news?
The Frogman is a good example here. He was banned from several of the bigggest subreddits for posting his own material, under the excuse that it was advertising/self-promotion because he technically makes money from his blog (never mind that he barely makes any and literally lives in his parent's basement). Meanwhile, regular redditors reposted his stuff routinely, often without even giving credit or reference. At one point, in retribution, moderators even started banning those after he started complaining about the weird double standard.
I think once you start manipulating what's allowed to appear, it creates an ugly and incestuous effect that will do more harm to reddit than help in terms of the community that actually keeps people coming there.
reddit already has a toxic reputation as the lesser evil to 4chan's greater evil in some parts of the internet, thanks in no small part to it giving voice repeatedly to some really ugly sides of human behavior, does it really need to add "arbitrary and incestuous gatekeepers" to that reputation too?
Here's an idea: there are some companies/services that are genuinely awesome and yet not marketed well. Now one may say they hardly need advertising because reddit promotes them naturally.
However, not all aforementioned companies explode and make it huge on reddit. So, what if you had a system whereby one incentivizes honest disclosure, whilst downplaying overselling?
In other words, a genuinely awesome small startup/service might submit itself and gain exposure (with full disclosure.) Upon a success, they would subsequently make a proportional payment for advertising to reddit, to help sustain the ecosystem.
It has parallels with a freemium model whereby some users (in this case successfully advertised companies) sustain the the others (non-paying users and companies).
Playing whack-a-mole with YouTube/imgur/etc. rehosts of a constantly growing list of content is a losing proposition.
I believe this is a byproduct of advertising evolving in a largely a one-way, broadcast mediums (e.g., TV, magazines).
Clever brands are learning the importance of having an online identify & bi-directional communication. It's a big change, but the brands that get their first are going to find a big advantage.
“People on Reddit want to be anonymous, and at some point these brands want to have a real relationship with their customers"
I find it hard to take an article seriously when it includes quotes like this in a non-critical context. Advertisement is about bullshit, not about "relationships with customers". The job of advertisers is to trick you into think you need whatever they are being paid to sell. They and the companies they work only care about their customers in regards to how much money they can wring out of them.
And the parallel is that advertisers don't give a shit about Reddit as well. They are just looking for a way to maximize their ability to wring every cent out of Reddit's userbase regardless of whether the advertising completely destroyed the community.
The problem is that advertisers think of their job as "relationships with customers." It's the lie they willingly swallow in order to be able to continue looking at themselves in the mirror. I mean, let's face it, no advertiser thinks, "sweet, I suckered ten thousand people to click my ad!" Rather, they think, "I built relationships with ten thousand customers today!"
They type of advertisers that would buy ad-space on a site like Reddit today are definitely thinking "sweet, I suckered ten thousand people to click my ad!" even if not in that language, but they are the ones pouring over CTRs and impressions.
The advertisers who actually care about "relationships with customers" are life style brands like, Nike, Coke, Apple, Budweiser, Louis Vuitton, and others, who don't actually care if you click through (what does a click mean to Budweiser? Its not like the market of people who want a bud light via. online is particularly large). They are more concerned with the "relationships with customers" and take a great deal of care on how the product received and how the message is delivered.
The goal of these advertisers is to deliver a message, with the confidence that their message won't be warped by content around it. You just can't get that with Reddit. Therefore you are left with these other "unsavory" type of advertisers whose only goal is to convert and will do that until they can wring out every cent out of Reddit's user base.
Their behavior would be unacceptable in any social relationship. They exist in a space were we largely have to put up with them just because money.
I don't see how you can't not take a cynical view of the people who's primary goal is to manipulate you towards their own ends, just because those ends might once in a while be mutually beneficial.
(Though I think it's rare to be explicitly aware of ads as corporate propaganda. Some are.)
Maybe not: https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/2bswrv/user_...
Any design decision, be that of a software system, an engineering project, of a product, etc., etc. is nothing more, than an opinion of the designer. And since there are literally infinite possibilities, how something can be designed, the skill of the designer is to chose the one objectively correct solution.
What you are talking about, is that there are no absolutely objective opinions, which is true, although any application of this statement would lead to trivial conclusions.
And saying, that any opinion is valid, since there are no absolutely objective opinions is wrong. Especially if the opinion is just prejudiced bashing unworthy of HN.
I would want to be informed if/when somebody made a cheap razor that actually works for me. I would want to know if somebody made a better vaccum robot, or made it cheaper. I don't objectively need a new smart phone, but I would want to know about it so that I could anticipate what my users would want to get.
I too care about cheap razors, vacuum robots or newer smartphones. But I find it intrusive when a program I'm watching is interrupted with a fast paced 30 seconds clip of sexy naked people telling me to go buy their new product right now.
If I want information, a subscription model to some sort of info periodical is almost always available. But this is much closer to what we consider "journalism" than "advertisement". (I realize the limit between the 2 is sometimes difficult to define).
Arguably, the whole reason the big name companies get away with 5-blade nonsense is marketing. Meanwhile, on Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/wicked_edge
(I'm speaking as someone who has switched to a double-edge razor and couldn't be happier)
As is discussed elsewhere in this thread, the whole concept of specialist sub-reddits makes it easy for enthusiasts to share information on their own. Mods with an iron fist, combined with comments and upvotes can be quite a decent makeshift version of democratic peer review among hobbyists. Of course, this has lots of issues of its own, but the point is that it subverts (the in my opinion ethically icky) aspects of marketing - the only thing you can really do against that is either genuinely make a good product, or be evil and subvert a community from the inside somehow.
For now I do electric and then finish up with a Gilette battery powered something.
In my case, I guess I'm pretty lucky - the morning shower is enough to soften the hairs and stubble, and if I shave immediately after leaving the shower it only takes only a few minutes.
But that only goes to show how ridiculously expensive and wasteful a 5-blade cassette would be in my situation.
Regardless, advertisers won't "inform" you about the best life insurance for you, they'll lie to make you stop thinking and trick you into buying their life insurance, which most likely will be subpar. Good products tend to advertise themselves.
I, ironically enough, don't have a need for life insurance as I have nobody who depends on me.
I think I lost interest in Reddit as a whole when I found HN. Curious if any others had the same experience.
But there seem to be some strong communities in some subreddits. /r/personalfinance is one example off the top of my head. AskScience aggressively prunes bad comments and the net result is good discussion (sometimes surrounded by a ton of deleted comments).
Once you start exploring the smaller focused subreddits, discussion gets much better. Although even then, the poop can creep in.
Prune your subscriptions brutally. Once a sub goes bad, it doesn't go back. Report spam & inflammatory comments etc.. The community is only as good as its members!
However, I just wasn't doing it right. Reddit is now a new tool, and you have to learn how to use it. This took me a long time to adapt to.
Remember at one point you figured out that you could search youtube for anything and find someone trying to share how they did it? (how do I change the steering pump on a '92 pontiac sunbird) Reddit is like that now.. for any interest or hobby of yours, visit reddit.com/r/hobbyname. Woah. There is a group of people talking about growing kefir. Large caliber air guns. Building decks. Kiln making.
It's almost like the new Usenet, in some ways. The difference is we have a huge ball of greatest common denominator shit that you have to figure out how to sidestep.
Really makes you appreciate the team here at HN keeping things on lock after a while
A subreddit is as good as its moderators are at managing it. In almost all ways, HN is just one of the subreddits I frequent.
This is pretty much it. There are some important cases I could point out to this as well. For example: http://www.reddit.com/r/redditgetsdrawn/comments/1z9fco/atte...
This particular subreddits mods wanted to get more subscribers (their reason being they were almost at 30k subscribers). They made an advertisement of sorts and put it in another, larger, mainstream subreddit. They prepared for it. And all the new content and comments were heavily moderated. The regulars also helped the moderators with reports for those comments against the rules.
Another good example of heavy moderating is http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience . They don't tolerate any crap. Jokes, anecdotes, or off-topic posts are quickly reported, downvoted, and deleted. Most questions are labeled to the pertinent field. They are also a default subreddit.
You're right, you have to be brutal about your subscription maintenance. Once you stop liking a sub, unsubscribe immediately. Can't find a sub you like? Make your own.
I think Reddit has taken that too far... You can have 500 points inside a reddit, but if the mods don't like what you have to say you'll log in and get a banned message.
I lost interest in Reddit the moment I wrote a long-winded suggestion for someone asking advice, and was banned for it. Went through the hassle of actually taking to the mod who banned me... came down to, "I just didn't like the way you said what you said, I didn't care that you had 30 upvotes..."
When it was community powered it was fun for me, now it's just a vessel for whatever mod is up that week.
It seems like an intractable problem. If you want moderated conversation, there is the potential for moderator abuse. The same is entirely possible on HN, 4chan, or any moderated forum.
In good subreddits, moderators will make sure eachother don't go too far; other moderators can see all actions you do in a nice interface.
I wish, though, that the moderator actions log was open to the public. That way, people could see which one is abusing their power and get some traction to get that mod removed.
In any case, you can always go create your own competitor.
I recently logged into Reddit for the first time in over half a year. My personalized frontpage was filled with garbage- in the 8 or 9 months since I'd stopped using the site, a bunch of small, awesome communities had grown past critical mass into Low Effort Content Zone.
Then I remembered why I stopped using the site- this is all it is. You just watch good communities burn when they get too big, or fizzle out and die when they're too small. One must prune one's subscriptions brutally, and then search for new communities that haven't descended into the Eternal September. But the effort is Sisyphean and I despair of it.
Of which I'm quite aware for having been caught in it more than once. With non-meme posts.
I've been engaging in online communities for over a quarter century now. The ones which have no effective gates die.
There are a lot of other ways to die. But at Web scale, achieving even six-sigma levels of good content to start sorting from is a tremendous win over the base state. You've got to come up with ruthlessly effective discrimination systems for ridding yourself of crap content. At scale even the least offensive stuff, for simply being noninformative, is hugely net negative, simply on account of scale.
Find small focused good subs with absolute assholes for moderators. But principled assholes.
/r/AskHistorians, /r/AskScience, and a few others. I mod a couple of subs myself, I aspire to being an asshole.
I disagree. I'd even argue there really isn't a focus after all. It's a massive site with an even larger userbase.
For example, once you leave the top 10-20 subreddits, you encounter places like /r/askscience, /r/books, /r/hiphopheads, /r/dataisbeautiful etc.. All primarily discussion based subs with consistently in depth threads on esoteric topics, even by HN means.
That's not even mentioning the live updated threads on huge news stories, or all the sports subs with their game threads and on the second updates. It's a viable resource that's looked down upon because of the front page, and that blows.
I dont understand why you would try to generalise a site with 110 million users and billions of pageviews. It's a very narrow point of view to hold.
If you go through the top 125 subreddits [0], I think you would find that a small number of them can be categorised as you say - but the vast majority would all hold their own nuances and generalisations
[0] - http://redditlist.com/
In general blogs are abandonded after their first post.
In general does not really make sense on a place as big as reddit.
A lot of hackers have a libertarian bent, and that really started to come out in Reddit's political discussions, which started attracting more people interested mostly in politics and some of the various 'outrage' stories being posted about police abuse and things of that ilk.
IIRC, that was the trigger for PG to create HN, which is much more focused in its approach.
Yet another reason why I loathe politics on this site.
And suddenly you have a relatively high quality Reddit :)
- Charge $10 a year to keep a subreddit name registered. 500k subreddits, say one half to two thirds pony up, thats $2.5 - 3.3 mil/year.
- There is a "trending subreddit" section. Implement a bidding system for a daily "featured subreddit" section similar to this (implement a N day cooldown so larger subs can't buy everyday)
- Implement a rev-share system with sub-reddit owners. Paying for a subreddit name could mean no ads, however if the owner wants, they can turn on ads and split the commission with reddit.
- Advertise (a little heavier than now) to only non-signed in users.
Basically I'm thinking you try and get the subreddit owners to help foot the bill since they are generally the ones getting the most value from the community engine that is reddit.
If Reddit considered this strategy for monetization, they'd be much better off shooting off their foot, then shooting their other foot.
He wrote nowhere that mods should pay. I as a user would certainly pay $10/yr to keep subreddits I care most about going on.
No way as a user i would pay $10/yr when there are multiple sites that will do the same thing as Reddit for free.
Im not interested in paying any website for the privilege of expressing my opinion and reading others.
Do you think users would pay for this? besides, do you think the 2nd point has a scope of creeping in poop?
Yes, i see point b) having a scope of creeping in poop.
I'm pretty sure that point b) was a large part of the reason for the downfall of Digg.
> I as a user would certainly pay $10/yr to keep subreddits I care most about going on.
How many subreddits and how many years would you be willing to do this for? This might be feasible for subs like r/AskReddit, r/iama, and the other big ones, but as many other people in this thread have mentioned, "powerhouse" Reddit users are the ones that don't follow the terrible front page subs, and have found their niche. One of my favorite subs to go to, r/tabbletennis, has only about 2k subscribers, and I'm sure that there are more subs that certain people love, but have even less subscribers.
My point is that the logical point for payment would be through a mod, and I'm sure that outside of the larger subs, mods would be the ones footing the bill. This is a very dangerous game as mods are the pillars upon which Reddit stand, and aggravating them would pretty much be the death of Reddit.
That system on its own is atrocious, but reddit admins also will leave subreddits suffering from moderator abuse to rot, suggesting to split the userbase by having those not happy with the status quo create a new subreddit. While this is common practice on IRC networks, too, they have more differentiated systems.
Rizon provides a channel takeover policy, which is based on people with minimal access actively requesting foundership over a channel[2], implying that they do care. reddit has /r/redditrequest, but it has intransparent times for how long a reddit request is allowed to stay unanswered, and you can't "skip" moderators higher in the moderation list[3], unlike Rizon's takeover policy, where you can do so if nobody else claims the channel during the three-day grace period. Undernet has a very strict timeout on channel managers (or founders), 21+ days of inactivity allows for a vote by the highest-ranking ops for a new manager[4].
reddit is thus intentionally staying in the past, refusing to deal with a long-standing issue, for which proposals have been made numerous times.
Now, the nice thing about paying money for a subreddit name (which, given the current size of reddit, cannot possibly hold worth comparable to a good domain name) is that it requires a commitment. At least someone on the moderation staff will have to actually shell out money, a limited resource. Instead of solving the moderation/subreddit squashing issue through the way of administrator intervention/software development, which has repeatedly been ignored (search for "mod" on /r/ideasfortheadmins for a bit), it could be solved through requiring active commitment.
Similarly, IRC networks are all run by volunteers who don't get paid for their work, and there are people paying money to keep servers running. While this completely breaks the subreddit <-> IRC channel analogy I've been making above, it still needs to be said. It's not like doing things for free implies that you get things for free.
As for reddit getting backlash over changes? Just check the last two /r/changelog posts, full of angry comments[5]. I don't think they're going to care, so what's there to stop them from charging money for subreddit names?
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/1wvx09/subreddi...
[2] http://forum.rizon.net/showthread.php?3850-Channel-Takeover-...
[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/wiki/faq
[4] https://cservice.undernet.org/docs/guidelines.html
[5] http://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/2a32sq/experiment... and http://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/27f3a3/reddit_cha...
> Basically I'm thinking you try and get the subreddit owners to help foot the bill since they are generally the ones getting the most value from the community engine that is reddit.
From my own perspective, as a moderator of a subreddit of 40,000 subscribers, the community get the most value from the moderators. We work for nothing because we want to help the community. If there is a good, ethical way to profit off of this I am missing, please let me know.
I would point out that, at least for the sub I run, nobody is really considered the owner. The original registrant is inactive, and there's no head mod.
In the process, that tiny $250k you yield, would destroy Reddit by shutting down at least 95% of all subreddits.
[1]http://www.kunocreative.com/blog/bid/89711/Leveraging-Reddit...
Also, It feels like it's giving a place the people who are in for lulz, circle jerk and "bro" things. In the end everyone finds something (except advertisers apparently), and I think it's great.
Reddit is too adult for ad networks. Can they grow up?
Having purchased more than a few ads, I can tell you that their platform needs serious help. They're already a step behind because users don't give location or age. To an advertiser who knows the customer, this results in blanketing people you know aren't interested.
The real problem is that targeting ads to interested audiences results in very few interactions. When you target to a sub, you have a good chance of showing up on that sub's home page - but no one really goes to a sub home. You need to get people on their front pages. The front page is hyper-competitive: you are bidding against people who are willing to serve ads to ANYONE (ahem, Hipmunk). I've still had some success, but it varies a lot depending on when people buy ads. Their planning tool cannot be relied upon.
If reddit were a grown-up advertising company, they'd run it on a cost-per-click bidding basis for link/comment/share/save interactions. Votes would be free to the advertiser, but they'd use recent upvotes and downvotes as a quality score to push ads that people hate off the site and encourage ads people don't mind by giving them a competitive edge. They'd also create more sophisticated targeting options, e.g. people who subscribe to /r/A AND /r/B. Or people who subscribe to /r/A AND either /r/C OR /r/D.
but no one really goes to a sub home.
Not arguing with your larger points, but this is completely untrue for me — I only use Reddit via subreddit home pages, i.e., I never go to the "front page". I don't even know what a "front page" is. Is that where you just go to http://reddit.com/? I must have visited that once, way back when I first started using Reddit, but since then, never.
I have a dozen or so subreddits I'm interested in and when I will occasionally get a whim to check up on one of them, I navigate directly to the subreddit (autocomplete in the browser makes this easier). I also subscribe to RSS feeds for my subreddits.
Apparently I'm using Reddit in an unusual way.
Basically it will be like looking at your subreddit RSS feeds, but sorted by votes in addition to recency.
Another idea which I saw the Whirlpool forums do in Australia is to only advertise to those who aren't logged in.
If the sub-communities continue to thrive I can't see Reddit fade into obscurity any time soon.
On the other hand, there are a good number of non-default subs that have strong themes that I'm certain advertisers would want to tap into. For example, city-specific subs, or /r/bodyweightfitness (105,212 subscribers), or /r/bicycling (126,713 subscribers). These communities are so specific that advertising seems like it would be more effective in those areas than any other. Of course... it needs to be done in a way that isn't intrusive or damaging, and that's probably a bigger challenge in a smaller community.
You can't predict which will be a hit or for how long. What you can predict is that eventually when enough people show up that it will lose that quality that made it so interesting to begin with, and the people that made it special will move on.
This happened with slashdot, digg, and maybe a bit to Hacker News too. I think Reddit's subreddits have made it more of a community of communities instead of one monolithic thing, with a monolithic front page. That certainly helps it have some legs.
However, I really don't see how any fad can sustain itself over the long term and anything that is built on social communities is at the whim of the movement of social opinion and interest. People change, get older, and what made something cool for one generation doesn't necessarily work for another generation.
There is no reason that Reddit should be popular as opposed to any other community site other than it's where people are congregating right now.
In 5 or 10 years, where will people congregate online?
It'll keep happening, year after year as most people age out. But year after year more people join up, I'm sure there's a net again. Enough of a momentum that it will just take decades before the decay happens. Radical changes also risk a Digg implosion.
Tough nut to crack. They've been taking every trick from the old forum (SomethingAwful, General Mayhem, OffTopic, GaiaOnline) days other than literally charging for membership. Which is always the final cashing out death knell.
Common refrain in the past when positing how the community is turning and reducing value the default rah rah answer has always been to hit the edgy subreddits rather than the mainstream ones. That changes the value of the reddit product from a community to community software.
My small business projects rely on subreddits for customer service. Give me customization tools and I'll eagerly pay. After all, it's like vBulletin but better and people out of the wazoo for that.
...
>My small business projects rely on subreddits for customer service.
k.
Why is a site struggling with journalism (NY Times), and a subscription model, and a paywall (that will become permanent in 3 months), and possibly an advertising problem, advocating that another site (Reddit), with more users, without a subscription model, no paywall, and possibly no advertising problem, is about to change?
Why did I make this mistake? Did I subconsciously associate the initials NY with evil intentions? It wouldn't be surprising if The New York Times become a casualty of the The New Yorker's policy by accidental association.
The top comment is usually useful no matter what the topic is, and I usually never leave disappointed when I read a thread I'm curious about.
It would be a shame if they ruined the site a la digg by trying to monetize too aggressively.
The first thing you should do when giving advice is acknowledging reality and then work with that. That is, you should accept reddit for what it is. But all those "experts" giving their opinion in the nyt article are mere bullshit-bingo players pushing reddit to become like every other company:
> “People on Reddit want to be anonymous, and at some point these brands want to have a real relationship with their customers,” "“Can Reddit deliver that over time?”
> “Reddit is a 1998 product, trying to have a 1998 business model,”
I think reddit should come up with a monetizing strategy that capitalizes on the trust users have in it (without abusing it) They would have a massively sustainable competitive advantage. Is there any other web company of that size that you would trust more? Could any one copy this trust within a short amount of time? It's rather tragic that in our society this has so little value that you have to think really hard to come up with a monetizing strategy.
Also, I think the idea of a "just self-sustaining" reddit, as some people here have pointed out, is rather interesting. Why does it need to grow? Isn't it enough that it is usefull to their users and poses a stepping stone for entrepreneurs like Mr. Ohanian but also external guys like, for instance, those from imgur or Mr ShittyWaterColour?
Reddit is becoming bigger and bigger. Which is somehow bad as a quality point of view (look at HackerNews, and people there are already complaining that it got too big like reddit).
1
Reddit did a very smart thing to counter that: subreddits. So now you can still dislike reddit as a whole but find what you want in a subreddit.
Now I think that if reddit has a way to monetize its website, somewhere, it is through subreddits. You could put a free2play kind of system. Customize your subreddit but pay to unlock features. Create subreddits where you have to pay to get in (it already kind of exists with the lounge).
2
Advertisement. Reddit is really, extremely, reluctant to advertise on reddit. It's nice from a user point of view. But from an advertiser point of view, why? Reddit is the perfect place for ads. Users click and click and click and they read text before clicking. Google ads would make them profitable in a few days. It's important to think about it.
EDIT: I'll add that the subscription system makes and the subreddits make it an excellent way to know someone's tastes. It's even better than facebook imo.
Compared to Reddit, that Power Glove film is a masterpiec
Why not just match development/maintenance with use? Reddit is well past it's exponential growth phase and is big enough to sustain the community with basically no growth in userbase - so unless I am missing something, this seems like a pure greed play.
It's mentioned in the article and known elsewhere, Reddit is not profitable and has not been profitable to date. Not bleeding out all of your money seems like a specific push for further monetization.
There is a side issue, that I don't think a company that wants to be successful should take business advice from either a legacy newspaper in general, or specifically the NYT, which makes the whole thing comical. It would be like a telegram company demanding that an ISP make core business changes, because they're the experts, or at least they were back in 1890, LOL.
Please pardon an off-topic comment: I got to meet Alexis Ohanian when he spoke at Google last year and I really enjoyed his book "Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed." I am an old guy, in my 60s, and I worry a lot about the future our kids and grandkids will have, but then when I meet young people like Alexis who have such a strong attitude about helping society, I feel better :-) If you have a chance to hear him speak, don't pass up the opportunity.
When you try hard to commercialize and squeeze profits, things change and you lose audience. This is exactly what it is limiting the lifespan of Facebook.
Facebook has over a billion users and has been around for ten years. No other social network can claim both of those things. Don't know if it qualifies as an example of a "limited lifespan"
The concern seems to be offensive/weird user created content might be displayed near an advertisement. Well, the mods have control over the content.
Mods could chose whether or not to enable advertising and could chose whether to curate content to maximize click-throughs or not.
Ads could be programmatically targeted towards subreddits and individual comment threads rather than users.
Well, it wouldn't take that long, given that the entire Reddit code base is open source: https://github.com/reddit
Really, anybody can literally clone Reddit anytime they want to.
But not only is it likely impossible for a competitor to attract a significant portion of the Reddit user base, what would a competitor do assuming they did manage it? All a competitor would have done is bought themselves a money-losing operation. Unless you're a charitable billionaire or a well-funded non-profit organization, why would anyone want to do that?
Almost 10 years, the same as YouTube.
Redditors have basically developed and distributed a set of rules for what they find funny/cool/interesting, and endlessly repeat these same jokes/memes. If you follow the frontpage for any reasonable amount of time, you see the same few ideas over and over. Just about everything is somehow referential to a previous post. It almost feels Pavlovian after a while. Someone will post a picture with an attractive female in it. Someone else will comment with a Gif of a bunch of hotdogs being thrown in her face. Someone else will point out that hidden amongst the hotdogs is a finger. Someone else will point out that every time an attractive girl is posted, all of these things occur. This happens over and over, countless times every day. To call it derivative would be generous, because it's a carbon copy.
Advice Animals (Image Macros with text) seemed to take this to its extreme. The same 10 images are posted thousands of times per day, with a sentence about how some event in the posters life relates to the meme. If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's got 1000 upvotes.
Most of the material on the frontpage of reddit is not interesting on it's own merits. It's only interesting in the context of the thoroughly homogeneous userbase that has been conditioned to respond to the same 15 memes.
It seems to me like an advertiser's dream demographic. A clearly delineated set of rules to engage millions of potential customers. Flip this switch, turn that knob, show this meme, reference The Big Lebowski, and Bob's your uncle.
IANA Literary Anthropologist, but: when you tell a story from your life by itself, you're presumably telling it about you. People don't care about you: they've never met you, and after they read your words they'll probably never hear from you again. They don't have any previous impressions of you to pattern match their expectations against, so nothing you say can make them go "oh, yeah, that's just like her" or "ha, I knew it" or "oh god, it's going to happen to him again, isn't it?"
In the context of an image macro, on the other hand, your story is paraphrased into a sort of shared mythology: there's this one platonic Awkward Penguin/Insanity Wolf/Scumbag Steve, doing all of these things, and acting as a larger-than-life moral symbol of the effects of doing these things in the process. People know what to expect of the character, and so people can seek out these stories when they want something with that "feeling" to it.
Presuming you were living in Ancient Greece, you'd see these same people taking various minor heroic moments from their day-to-day lives, exaggerating a bit, and turning them into stories about Hercules.
(You can do this for a living, too, creating characters from whole cloth who are larger-than-life molds to match up to various day-to-day stories. The result is called a sitcom.)
Or maybe there's a trade-off - a long story needs a new main character, but a short joke works best with a stock character. Compare War and Peace to "little Johnny" jokes.
It does not describe smaller niche subreddits, though, that's true. They still have their own unique personalities.
I think it has a fair claim to be called theory of reddit, because it seems like any subreddit can go downhill in that way if it becomes popular. They converge on a point of mediocrity.