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Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Reddit can, at this stage, have big hairy ambitions for what they might still become.

Thinking back about 8 or 10 years when "social networks" and online communities were becoming something obviously substantial there were a lot of excited ideas about what they would become. Ning's idea of basically extending forums and creating lots of online communities seemed attractive. When they're first taking on online communities are exciting. But, they seem to age. It's almost like being in the same conversation forever.

What can Reddit still accomplish?

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I don't believe Reddit will be the last big social news website but I don't expect them to accomplish much more. They seem afraid of making changes and losing users like what happened to Digg.

It leaves the whole market open to whoever else can do a better job. I doubt anyone is going to leave seemingly overnight like Digg -> Reddit but if someone was to start small and grow.. there's a lot of room to accomplish better things.

I'm working on something like this with a couple of others but it's too early to say whether we'd ever be a viable competitor. There's certainly a possibility though.

The next challenge to solve is anti-abuse, and it's much harder than anti-spam.

Just curious, what do you mean by anti-abuse?

Something similar to what Jeff Atwood meant by "civilised discourse": http://blog.codinghorror.com/civilized-discourse-constructio...

There are problems both of the form of abuse within services, and use of services as an organising platform for abuse campaigns.

Reddit is host to some brilliant stuff. Reddit is also host to some terrible stuff. It semi-deliberately makes no delineation between the two beyond a thin figleaf of "NSFW". Some of the stuff behind NSFW is merely porn, some is a useful safe space for sex discussions, and some is well into the "cannot unsee" category. The "randNSFW" button is rather dangerous. Users aren't bounded either, so you have a lot of people with obscene usernames commenting in otherwise sensible subreddits. And posters themselves encourage cross-pollination. The "creepshots" people eventually got banned, but the only thing you really can't post anywhere on reddit is child porn. Racism is widespread.

Twitter is a brilliant platform for both entertainment and protests. However, it has very poor anti-abuse features, so users may be subjected to large volumes of abuse (Caroline Crialdo-Perez, for example) about which they can do little.

Hacker news prefers to flag "controvertial" topics off the front page, which at least causes arguments to be starved of pageviews and die down. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458865

It leaves the whole market open to whoever else can do a better job.

I think social news/discussions/etc. is in weird place where it's not entirely clear what the job is. I kind of have a hunch that the deterioration many people feel takes place is a consequence of realizing we're going around in circles. before you've completed your first couple of orbits you feel like its heading somewhere, then when you feel like it's not you're disappointed.

If you're working on this are, what are your thoughts on the the centerpiece of something like Reddit (or HN). I don't think it's a list of links primarily. Do you?

Perhaps job wasn't the best word to use but I think you understood what I meant anyway. As for going round in circles, I think browsing Reddit is like being stuck in the same conversation day in, day out.

Our centerpiece is the discussion system/self posting. We're still working towards a mvp so it doesn't offer much more than what Reddit/HN does at this moment in time.

The site does still revolve around a list of stories, we toyed with the idea of having a grid-like view but ultimately we think that a list is still the most efficient way of finding something you want to read. I'm open to suggestions but I really can't stand are websites that try to be smarter than the user by trying to anticipate what the user would want to read.

This seems to be often done through really basic methods such as a "What are you interested in?" tickbox questionnaire. If the recommendations suck the first time, I'm not going to keep using the site to even begin improving those recommendations.

I believe the real centerpiece would eventually be the community though. Hopefully we'd attract a similar level of interesting and thoughtful users as on HN but cover a wider range of topics.

good luck :)

I think you touch on an interesting issue. If I look at myself and my life, or at my friends and acquaintances and their lives, there seems to some inherent transience and change in my and their social world. This change can be prompted by entering new stages of life, or moving from one place to another, or simply a result of a changing environment. But it's there. I think for a large amount of people, maybe the majority, social life always changes over time.

This, of course, can pose (and has posed) a problem for companies that have 'social' as their core mechanism. Where companies like Apple can rely to a certain degree on the continuity of lifestyle of an Apple customer (well-off, relatively, for one), 'social companies' have to deal with a constantly shifting landscape.

If such a company aims at a particular demographic, they face the problem that merely being popular among another demographic (previous generation) is a big reason for them to be 'uncool' (snapchat/facebook).

I don't know if there are companies that instead focus on a particular generation, but perhaps that'd be an interesting business model. Grow with your customers.

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