On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued. This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms.
The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible. Like 95% lower per user than the other socials.[2] So the real question an investor should ask is whether this is fixable? Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize? Either way, Reddit should be throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive with a track record of juicing monetization.
One thing that they do not seem to be taking advantage of is how specialized many of their communities are. It seems primed for letting advertisers target to specific audiences, but as a user I don't really feel like the ads I get are targeted to what I read at all? Maybe I am uninformed but it seems like an advertising goldmine that hasn't been taken advantage of.
If you are a PC components retailer, users of /r/buildapc seems like an ideal audience to target for advertising. Camera retailer, where better than /r/photography? Cookware - advertise in /r/cooking. Repeat ad infinitum across every niche interest on the site.
They should be able to enable advertisers to do really effective targeting of campaigns. Is this not possible with their current ad tools, or are they not selling the capabilities to advertisers well enough? Or is there not actually that much money in targeted ads, is all the money in generic ads like Coca-Cola & cars?
I tried to advertise a product to a very niche group on reddit. I just wanted to select 4 specific sub-reddits and advertise to anyone that was a member or viewed that reddit.
For some reason, reddit wouldn't let me advertise to 3 of the 4, and the 1 that they did let me advertise was very low volume (less than 100 members). I couldn't even get reddit to show a single ad, let alone have anyone click on it.
Facebook brought in way more traffic, and some of it did convert, but I feel like my advertising costs were too high there, since you can only specify more general interests. It seems like reddit, had their advertising platform actually worked, would have been the perfect place for me.
Yes, this. Google and Facebook make it super easy to advertise. Whenever I've tried to advertise on Reddit, nothing shows up, I have no idea why, and the advertising UI gives me no clues.
Well, they are kind of failing at their job in a big way, likely costing the company billions of dollars in the process. I don’t feel that bad for them. 5% of other socials in revenue per user is comically bad.
Taking in $400M at this stage is already a pretty sure sign of failure and that they don't know how to run a business. Probably too many MBAs busy optimizing their career ascendancy to be concerned with pesky details like competently securing revenue streams. It's not that hard to show ads to self-selecting niche audiences.
For years they delegated their advertising platform to a third party. Last I heard they were trying to build one in house, and I am not sure if they succeeded.
Or not. More adverts and it becomes gross. Paying to avoid adverts might be an option, and while this makes it a protection racket, I’d take it over adverts.
Reddit has gross adverts already: Huel, some self-help thing, naff Adobe ads endorsed by some Reddit superuser from a corner of the site I never read. I’d far rather they were relevant to the subs I do read.
I’d probably pay for a “premium” service that let me generically block stuff on Reddit - /r/popular is infested with a lot of stuff I’ll never be interested in.
I wouldn’t call it a racket though since it’s entirely voluntarily to use Reddit, or not use it. And there’s also the possibility to set up other competing forums, with or without ads.
They are probably too busy fighting against their own users and subreddits that keep them afloat. Too much ideology in there to make sense, business wise.
Ultimately it’s the board and the CEO that’s responsible for such an important issue. So if they are not already aware of it then I’m not really sure they are in a position to blame someone under them in the org chart.
That is truly bizzare. I’m having trouble understanding the motivations of the board, after a Series E and a clearly useful business, they didn’t bother with making more money?
I wanted to run Reddit ads after to target users of a certain game after a big expansion launch. My site had a bunch of time-sensitive information that 1) was useful to the users of a specific subreddit, 2) would be useful for a week or so after the launch, 3) while it had a successful submission, I wanted to promote that submission for about a week afterwards to more people could see it.
I put up a reddit ad for that submission and Reddit took 4 weeks to approve it. At that point, there was no point running the ad anymore.
Another time I wanted to advertise to a new game that had a brand new subreddit to match but it was huge - 100k plus users in a week. Reddit simply wouldn't permit me to advertise to it because it was new.
In my (limited) experience it feels like Reddit isn't making the money it could be because it doesn't want to.
Reddit should charge for all commercial posts. It would clean up spam and generate revenue.
Make a special class of commercial account, include some 'verification' badge thingy. Let subreddits ban all commercial content, unpaid commercial content, or leave open (for commercial-specific subs).
Let mods profit share in commercial posts. (And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer the case)
This is an absolutely bizarre proposal. You want moderators to willingly pollute their subreddit with ads in exchange for personally getting a kickback from reddit? Users would either migrate en masse to competing subreddits with decent mods, or they'd stay due the same old problems with moderator inertia...
"the top 20 most upvoted comments in the subreddit within the last year, with the user having more than X posts per year in the subreddit, Y karma per post and more than 1000 characters per post, are invited to become moderators"
Only really works for the in-depth subreddits, I guess it's not going to get you far on image or other media-based subreddits...
That seems non obvious, the most upvoted comments are just as likely to be memes or jokes than in-depth research, and even if they are that may not correlate to a good mod very much at all.
You can see this in action on ANY subreddit by sorting by "Top of all time". Almost every post is either some in-joke or meme, some random brigade that happened from a sudden temporary influx of users, etc. for at least the first 10 posts.
Do you think having all the members of the subreddit (or the entire site) vote on who the mod should be? I think there are many ways to make this efficient by statistical sampling, proxy votes, and detecting when statistical errors occur. To restrict people to one account you'd need to verify phone numbers.
I'm currently trying to build this but I'm not a programmer so it's slow going. I'm interested in your thoughts as I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.
There is nothing to stop people or groups of people from making thousands of accounts and joining the sub, and then eventually taking control. Even if these user accounts have to be X years old, or subbed for Y months, none of that matters in the long term.
Yes. With this system it would be important to verify identities on sign up. I think verifying phone number would largely resolve the issue (SMS short codes don't work on VOIP phones). There many other levels to reduce fake accounts that can be added if problems begin to occur.
The main issue is the more difficult sign up is, the less people sign up. It's a balancing act.
With any voting system you have to detect the validity of the votes, even upvotes.
My experience is mostly with Google Voice, but I've not found that to be true. Years ago that was the case, but these days, I've encountered by few that don't work.
I think it probably needs to not be fully automatic, but users should be able to vote to nominate a moderator for removal or addition, subject to admin discretion. Ideally, any user of the sub should be able to see the 'case' and contribute why they think the mod would/is doing a good/bad job, and people can upvote and downvote reasons. Maybe kind of use AITA's style of comment voting (but with admins finalizing decisions as a check valve against gaming).
Not fully automating, means humans for each reddit big enough. (What is big enough?)
That is expensive. So this probably means lots of decisions in short time for those administrators ... means lots of wrong decision and lots of drama.
Voting? Who has the right to vote? Anyone? Any socketpuppet account? Only verified real people? (would be a different reddit)
I think eligibility should be based on a minimum karma-within-subreddit (comments and submissions) threshold.
And yeah, this would cost Reddit some in admin labor, but they should be able to use some of this revenue stream towards those few hires. I'd imagine a team of 6 would be plenty for this purpose, maybe could get away with 2 or 3.
> And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer the case
Why do you consider that a problem? As a heavy user of reddit, I don't consider that a problem at all. I would be interested to hear what problems you think exist with that system and what other solutions exist.
I'd be pretty pissed if I created a subreddit, put effort into growing it, and someone could just come along and steal it.
Eh, I'd say most of the hardcore Reddit users have both old.reddit as well as an Ad Blocker, so I'm guessing that slightly better ad configuration tools wouldn't adversely impact the longtime users too much.
As for other users, they are already seeing incredibly random and irrelevant ads. Seeing actual photography themed ads on a photography themed forum doesn't seem that bad IMO (provided that they are clearly marked as ads, of course.)
Naw. The new Reddit design is much nicer than the old. There, I said it. It is much easier to use. It took them a while to iron out the bugs but it is way better.
1. Images open by default on my feed and videos and gifs autoplay as I scroll. It's a massive distraction. I'm trying to find content I might be interested in, but here I'm forced to scan pretty much every post out there.
2. On similar lines, showing a (cropped) summary for text posts. Again a distraction when you're trying to find content. The cropping makes it worse since you have to change the page after reading halfway through.
3. Having to click on view discussion to open the comments each time. This is a forum. The only reason I go there is to discuss.
4. Lack of borders for comments. It looks like one continuous feed and reduces grouping between individual comments.
5. Large avatars, icons on the reply bar compete for attention on every single comment. The reply bar on old reddit is so nicely blended away into the background. You don't see it unless you want to reply.
6. Hover popups on the large icons trigger unintentionally all the time. Very rarely do I need to see somebody's karma. What's the point of this feature even?
This is basis design considerations for a discussion forum. I completely understand where they are coming from though. They are not interested in this being a discussion forum. They want to optimize for post views. The more views a post gets, the more they will be able to monetize. Engaging in discussion is time consuming and that time could be better spent in viewing more posts.
> Naw. The new Reddit design is much nicer than the old. There, I said it. It is much easier to use. It took them a while to iron out the bugs but it is way better.
I'm curious what you like better in the new design? I personally find the floating bar at the top annoying. Not to mention the fact you have to click another button to actually see all the comments. Not to mention my biggest annoyance, clicking on the empty space on the sides when viewing a post will navigate to the subreddit?? Why?
>People are going to those specialized communities to get real information from real users, not lies and misinformation (ads and marketing).
Those specialized communities will cease to exist without something funding them.
Either users get ready to get out their wallets or get used to ads and marketing (which are not wholly lies and misinformation). And more importantly remember it's Reddit's choice how users pay, not the end users.
I'm not sure that's true. No one is paying the moderators currently. It's not like hosting costs of a forum are that high. Not that difficult to migrate all your users to a competing service if the community is un happy with the monetization scheme.
Migrating might not be that hard. Retaining existing users and attracting new users is much harder.
For niche topics I tend to add "reddit" to google search queries, because there's a high likelihood of finding actual information. If those subreddits move to other services, they may not even show up in the sea of blogspam results.
If you will suffer a brief crash course on ad terminology, you are describing "placements".
A placement with an ad in it shown to a user is called an "impression".
I agree that advertisers would pay reddit more for better ad space (also called "inventory") but that doesn't just happen automatically.
Right now, I would assume they are integrating with some third party ad network and probably use fairly generic targeting information.
The cost in time and money to either deepen that integration or rip it out and make a custom ad network is probably significant.
Unfortunately I think the core audience of Reddit is probably somewhat well informed and probably running an ad block. I’d love to see the percentages.
It makes total sense to be able to target communities and I think they need to just stick a banner on the right hand side and be done with it. Let moderators maybe even take a small cut in exchange for providing info and meta data on their community.
I just checked /r/linux, which I browse on occasion, and the three sponsored posts I saw on the front page were for Intel vPro, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Google Chromebooks. Those all seem at least reasonably relevant.
Really? I'd say they are closer to unreasonably irrelevant. Maybe I could stretch myself to see a Chomebook being interesting and relevant. To me seeing the other two would make me look negatively on the brands/products. If those who sees an add get nothing out of it except wasted time I'd say they are spam. Those sound like 100% spam to me in /r/linux.
Adobe and Chromebook ads are all over Reddit. I don't read any tech or design subreddits yet I get them all the time. I doubt what you're seeing is targetted at all.
I think the problem is that reddit culture is virulently anti-consumerist and throw a fit every time they see an ad. I'll bet they get terrible conversion rates.
Thing is, I see a reasonable number of ads on Reddit, they're just rarely relevant to the subreddit I'm on. I think they could keep the same number of ads and target them better, and the results would improve.
There's a lot of redditors who sense a corporate conspiracy anytime a brand name is mentioned, but there's tons of subreddits entirely about consumption. Media, food, hobbies. I was active on r/homebrewing for years and people talk about products they want to buy all the time.
The trouble with those types is they all have very strong opinions and think most products are crap. They're not opposed to buying things, just shitty things.
This is true. I can easily burn through all my daily ad spend on Reddit at rates of between $0.50 and $1.00 CPMs. And the click through rates are awful.
On Facebook or Google, you've often got to spend at least $5-$10 per mille to be competitive in most verticals. $25 to $50 in some verticals like insurance. And it converts.
> One thing that they do not seem to be taking advantage of is how specialized many of their communities are.
Their default subs are utter crap and full of influence campaigns accounts; in addition to being nearly impossible to post to without punished in some way.
bundle that with a profile that easily identifies cross markets by other interests too. you get to double dip.
millions of targetable demographic profiles all self sorted and prepackaged for whomever.
You asked if there was "something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize?" and the answer is: Yes, they're far less invasive than the other platforms you mentioned.
Just at a very high level:
- no offsite tracking (so no retargeting - the follow you around the internet ads)
- no separate ad network (you can't buy ads on Reddit that show up on 3rd party sites)
- limits on how granular targeting can be (it's by sub-reddit but they exclude many based on size+sensitivity)
- no demographic targeting (you can't pitch your product to males 18-35)
- no fine grained geographic targeting (lowest they go is major metro areas of millions of people)
Reddit has had off site tracking for quite some time.
Remember those little snooheads where you could 'reblog' about something? or vote on a site while on it?
Seeing the reddit bugs/icons/badges was about when the site started engaging in data collection. You bet your ass they do everything they can to determine a general profile of each user now based on visited subs and patterns.
They cannot manage a little chat widget on their website, you think they'll be able to trackbusers? You're right that they are trying but they are definitely not capable.
And now they're taking huge amounts of money, which means they need to succeed as an advertising company, which means they'll start doing many of those things.
Reddit userbase is way more hostile to ads on average, more block ads, a lot of the content is non-advertiser friendly, they have less information on their audience for targeting, etc.
Reddit is more forum than social network, they'll need to get creative to make more revenue from users. Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money
The number of pictures that are actually just ads upvoted to the front page was absolutely astonishing when I used reddit. I didn't understand how people could see a Coke can with a funny name on it and not realize that was an advertisement.
>Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money
Isn't the most sought-after demographic 18-35 because they have the most disposable income? Afterwards disposable income drops off because of kids and/or retirement.
Is it actually true that online ads work better (more conversions?) on that demographic? How do you separate the confounding factor of the effect of age and income on preferences?
Product-Market fit is of course important. No point in marketing Red Bull to older demographics; the product was not designed for them. Aside from products targeted at one demographic or the other, older audiences are more skeptical, and have seen all of the ad gambits in earlier forms before.
Imagine the person saying "don't believe everything you read in the news" Is that an older person talking to a younger one, or vice-versa?
Not by a long shot. Boomers are still the highest in spending[1]. I was a broke college student forever and somewhat broke for the years or so after (no loans I worked through college). I’m in the 30-40 range with kids and I spend much more than my twenties.
Lots of college students are spending their parents money for these kinds of things.
While older consumers do have more money to spend, most advertisers prefer to target younger consumers. The thinking is that boomers already have established brand preferences and spending patterns so it's much harder to convert them into new customers.
I've started to add +Reddit in Google searches to obtain useful information when I need to know something. With all those fake top 10 list sites and paid reviews showing up in searches, Reddit is pretty much the only place left for getting reliable product information, for example. There are friendly and knowledgeable subreddits about all kinds of topics.
I'm not sure I understand your taxonomy. In my mind, an image board is a type of forum (generally anonymous and ephemeral). Reddit is more like a forum than a typical forum than popular imageboards, since users have long-lived identities and posts are permanent by default.
As far as "most cat pictures and memes", maybe it is, by volume. But that doesn't diminish the substantial corpus of more substantive, forum-like, discussion hosted on the site.
>Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize?
Reddit is also home to an enormous amount of porn and nsfw content in general which probably hurts this. They only just started preventing sexually explicit subreddits/content from appearing on r/all six months ago[0]
I wonder if their problem is that the majority of their traffic is unregistered users looking at NSFW subreddits. So they may not actually have that many users they could monetize in the first place.
Simple fix: allow users to save video only if logged in (could prime with a CTA). Right now you cant save any video from reddit, not just nsfw, not even from the app. This would incentivize people to create an account since its easier and less shady than content grabbing sites. If they want they can even limit to the app which would at least have an impact on boosting app users
Reply to a video with a comment mentioning u/savevideo and you'll get a response in a few minutes with a link. I think Reddit Enhancement Suite might also have an option for adding a download link.
As for an official paid feature: as soon as they start collecting money for video related features, the video creators will start circling for their cut of the revenue.
No they haven't. It voluntarily and temporarily shut down. Someone was pretending to represent Reddit threatened to sue u/savevideo, but Reddit admins stepped in and confirmed it wasn't them and that they don't have anything against u/savevideo
That was when I left Reddit. I felt like censoring from r/all is not what I want from r/all. To me that means every subreddit except quarantined subreddits. Once they started down that road I took off and haven’t been back.
to me, this seems like an opportunity for new advertisers that don't care about "their brand showing up next to porn"
is there a market rational reason why this hasn't occurred, or are the primary places that happen to also have adult content just assuming advertisers won't use their platform
sure, big fortune 500 ad spends are lucrative, but so is the aggregate of every single half baked idea that has to test the waters with targeted ads
It made headlines not long ago when Just-Eat I believe was advertising on porn sites, so it's not an impossible ask... but marketers will want to play those campaigns very carefully. It wouldn't take much to accidentally end up next to revenge porn that makes the news or something.
> but marketers will want to play those campaigns very carefully. It wouldn't take much to accidentally end up next to revenge porn that makes the news or something.
Can you elaborate further? why is this the marketer's problem?
why isn't the ad campaigner completely agnostic on where the ad network sends it?
to me, it seems like widespread conjecture. out of the things I've seen people talk about boycotting a brand for, showing up in a banner on a porn site hasn't been one of them. People know how targeting works, their session and the ad networks.
is there a case study supporting marketer's skittishness?
Not the original commenter but it's because the marketer doesn't want to be associated with the content. It may devalue the product, be the wrong target audience, cause some social media backlash, etc. (e.g. Disney wouldn't want to advertise Disney+ on a revenge porn page since it would ruin their family-friendly image).
> People know how targeting works, their session and the ad networks.
People in your network maybe. If that were widely true you wouldn't see people swearing that FB is listening to you for showing a mattress ad after you spent an hour searching for it on your computer. The average American has no idea what the hell is going on.
The only situations I'm aware of of general brand contamination are the @stopfundinghate ones, and that's very different - pointing out to brands when their stuff is appearing next to far right content.
Frustratingly they do this while continuing to not invest into their app - they might have an easier time attracting users if their app didn't break half of their site functions.
Tracking and driving engagement via notifications are some of the most important reasons why app users can be monetized better than anonymous web users (user sees more ads if they're spending more time, and tracking allows better targeted and thus higher paying ads)
It's already happening with the profile pages being implemented.
I liked it around 2008 because it did not have profile pages and a fairly simple, straightforward interface and did not attempt to couple one's real life identity to one's post and encouraged throwaway accounts by allowing users to sign up without providing an email address.
Much of that is changing, and I also find that websites that encourage a link with one's real life identity tend to have an ever more annoying culture.
It also feels like more excessive Americana as time goes on. It did not seem like idiosyncractic U.S.A. social issues were as common in 2008, as well as the typical user that assumes every other user is from the U.S.A..
Reddit is one of the sites I use the most. I hope they can figure out a financially sustainable model without becoming obnoxious or, eventually, being bought up by a private equity firm.
This already happened, Condé Nast bought and then spun off reddit when they failed to monetize it. Reddit has to thread a needle to monetize and not kill its user base. I wager it’s impossible.
I don't think Reddit will ever scale as well as something like Facebook . The bigger Reddit gets, the less usable it becomes due to subs becoming too crowded.
The whole point of reddit is that the crowding issue is self-correcting -- you just move to a new sub. I like to envision it as a malthusian catastrophe -- as the population starts reaching capacity limits, people start grumbling more and more.. until suddenly they far overshoot the capacity, and leave en-masse to new subs. In one fell swoop, the original sub is left near-empty, and out of the many new subs created in that instant, a few survive with healthy populations.
I have been on reddit a long time and I have never seen a popular sub ever die unless it gets banned by admins. Splinter subs emerge but the original one remains popular too
The long-tail subs will never get too crowded. If you have found a niche where like-minded people hang out, there will never be a whole lot more of them, and however many more there are, it's a positive.
Reddit currently supports many third party freemium clients ( Ala Twitter 2012). These third party apps offer a no ad experience too. Unsure how much revenue reddit shares with these apps though.
It helps with growth(more options for users to be on reddit) , but definitely hurts ad inventory, ad targeting insights etc.
I think this is likely why Reddit has heavily pushed direct revenue with an expansion of awards available (cheapest ones are 50 coins now), in addition to the continued ad-free option with a premium subscription.
>Either way, Reddit should be throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive with a track record of juicing monetization.
You mean that they should spend as much money as they can on ruining Reddit.
And of course the site will just get worse and worse, but continue onward, because its value is in the audience, and it takes a lot to screw up that momentum.
(What a blessing that HN isn't run to make a profit.)
> This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms.
Most people have one Snap / FB account and one, maximum two Twitter accounts... but throwaways are the norm on Reddit (as well as HN), which means Reddit's user count is inflated by quite a bit. Additionally, Reddit has large nsfw communities that draw lots of members and visitors (again, most with separate accounts!), and these can't be reasonably monetized at all.
It's "slot machine" psychology, sometimes it doesn't work so you have to pull it again. Being unpredictable makes the dopamine rush stronger when it works and gives you what you want. search for "slot machine social media" and you'll find a good deal of coverage.
This usually applies to what posts are in an algorithmic feed, but I guess not having the feed show up at all is a fresh innovation. Twitter and Reddit both do a lot of just giving up and saying "woops, couldn't load that link you just clicked" as if that was a real problem. Really? what, the database wasn't there when you looked? Try again yourself, why make me click refresh?
Another anecdata - search on facebook doesn't work for finding stuff in someone's timeline, so I've spent many minutes scrolling down someone's page trying to find a post. It's frustrating but I don't quit, and I'm sure metrics and impressions look great (no click through tho)
The thing is, which works against intuition, is that when an addict works a little more for the hit, they "deserve" it more.
Most of the data I have is about heroin and cocaine. And folks are very reluctant to like physically addictive things to these technologic addiction things.
But human nature is very consistent regarding these dopamine releases. We're all fienders.
Your comments make perfect sense in light of the fact that Reddit is the world's largest free porn site, with just enough "social" sprinkled on top to keep you engaged between wanks.
The only information I could find claims that about 22% of reddit is NSFW. They calculated the percentage of NSFW subreddits with >100k subscribers. [1]
That's far from a perfect way to measure this, but it's around the statistic that 30% of the internet is porn. My intuition tells me Reddit probably reflects the internet as a whole pretty well.
Doesn't matter the percentage of subreddits (i.e. counting every qualifying subreddit equally), what is the percentage of eyeballs? And don't you think lots of people view porn subreddits without subscribing?
Well, just for the record, that doesn't invalidate what I said. I'm not concerned with what PERCENTAGE is porn. It still is the largest, most-easily-accessible, most searchable, free porn site. And also for the record, yes, I HATE that Reddit (and Twitter, et. al.) allow full-on NSFW content along with all the rest.
digg died fifteen years ago. clearly a lot has changed, and the mistakes that killed digg have not been made.
and i think reddit is beyond the point at which a digg-style fuckup could kill them. at worst you might see cadres of ideological users depart for something like lemmy, which is already happening to an extent, but there is a lot of space to flee internally, so most users don't feel the pressure. and diffusion to federated media is in the future for every mass audience. reddit has such a huge and active userbase it will dominate for the foreseeable future.
The new HTML layout and the obnoxious mobile website are worse than what killed Digg, IMO.
The difference is that when Digg made their mistakes, Reddit was there for the taking.
Nowadays, there's no alternative to Reddit. All the new sites appear to be focused on hateful communities banned from Reddit, and that will never attract the mainstream.
Digg closed before it was defeated really. I can't remember if it was the v3 or v4 that caused the migration but they didn't even try to roll back... or just stick with their new plan. They just gave up it seems.
Perhaps traffic has a reciprocal relationship with monetization and until Reddits management are ready to bite the bullet there is a tendency to focus on vanity metrics such as traffic rather than $.
One of the main reasons their monetization is so bad is that their mobile app is terrible.
Mobile Apps are important for monetization because they are much less vulnerable to ad blockers, people are used to ads taking up more of the screen in scrollable content and in most cases carry more traffic than desktop versions.
I think the disastrous experience buying and targeting ads is bad too, but the lack of a decent mobile app is a huge factor.
Can't tailor ads? Loose concept of user identity? I would think having a list of every subreddit a user subscribes to would give you a good indication of what interests they have! But from reading this thread it sounds like Reddit makes it difficult to choose which subreddits you want to advertise to.
> On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued.
Cause they’re always one drama away from losing tons of people. The platform seems to attract drama involving the platform and decisions made more than say Twitter does
I suspect (without proof) that Reddit's unique user count is far smaller than its actual user count. People proudly use multiple alts and such behaviour is tacitly encouraged by the platform. It's not at all unusual for a user to have alts for gaming, porn and other things. Obvious this phenomenon exists on other platforms but my gut tells me it's far more prevalent on Reddit.
I would say, given a static audience of 1 million people, that user engagement goes down the more you advertise (if 1/4 of my feed is ads, that's 25% less actual content to interact with).
TikTok and Instagram have been able to grow larger and larger audiences despite the pressure of ads (and honestly I know when I tried TikTok last there weren't any ads yet, I wonder what portion of an hour is taken up by ads and how long is it til it reaches television levels of ~25%) - as long as audience growth outpaces users losing interest, you can keep introducing ads, but you can't do it forever.
That wasn't a scientific statement. Just a theory about Reddit. I personally like Reddit because it's not shoving ad's in your face constantly and I think others do as well. Apologies for presenting it without labelling it as a theory. I would edit it now if I could.
As someone who tried to advertise on reddit (though it was > 1-2 years ago, so things may have changed)-- Reddit, along with Twitter, is very advertiser unfriendly. And Im not just talking about the users.
I literally couldnt give them my money. I wanted to target a specific subreddit, but couldnt buy any impressions on it for 3 months. The app kept forcing me to advertise on /all, or all technology reddits, which wasnt what I wanted. I did buy $10 of ads, got zero clicks, surprise surprise.
The thing was hard to setup, hard to run, hard to measure, not to mention, advertisers get treated like any other account. I was shadow banned because I was linking to one domain, and reddit considered me a spammer. But I was like, that *is* the whole purpose of advertising. I was forced to post a few cat pictures, just so I could run my ads.
Never again.
I note they have since revamped their ad site-- now there is a new site, but you have to reregister to run ads, and I dont want the hassle.
Yes, everyone hates ads, but thats how free sites make money.
Some redditors were hostile to ads, but the number isnt that big. Most users were indifferent.
Such an ad-hostile company, I wonder how they make money.
I tried it recently (< 2 months ago) and the experience wasn't too bad. This was the first real ad "campaign" I had ever set up. The targeted group was pretty niche and while Reddit suggested going broader, I was able to stick with the subreddits that I considered relevant.
The most annoying part was the rather opaque period between launching, approving, and actually running the ad. The first real confirmation I had that things were working was a bill.
>Yes, everyone hates ads, but thats how free sites make money.
Maybe a simple user forum site doesn't need to make mega valuation levels of money. Maybe it, and other low effort sites like Facecrook and Twatter, should be run as public benefit corps. These companies aren't selling state of the art tech here - why do they need to be such money makers??
> These companies aren't selling state of the art tech here - why do they need to be such money makers??
You’re thinking of the user facing element as being the thing they’re selling. That’s not what they’re selling. They give that away for free so they can sell extremely sophisticated data and targeting. You’re the product they’re selling. And the access is definitely cutting edge.
Yes, I get that the industry is leveraging its "best and brightest" on stalkertech and the users are getting pennies worth of value in trade for large dollars of value extracted from them in the form of data. The tradeoff is so ridiculous that it is essentially theft. Its like trading trinkets to native populations for land.
Side note: the whole trinkets for land thing is exaggerated. Native populations didn’t have any concept of land “ownership” similar to what the Europeans did. There is a strong argument that they perceived the trinkets as more of a friendly gesture, like a diplomatic gift. Then the settlers proclaimed they owned the land and ran the native populations off. Not so dissimilar than how you’re using the analogy, because users don’t really have a good concept of owning their data or metadata, while the social media empires expropriate it for their own immense gain after confusing the users into thinking they were getting something for free, all the while giving themselves the excuse that it was a fair trade because the users/natives accepted the pittance offered to them.
Similar with me. Also like you this was over 2 years ago.
I looked to advertise on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.
Facebook didn't seem interested in SMBs and I didn't even advertise on them, it seemed very complex just to run a simple ad.
Twitter didn't deliver good value per click etc., but I did get good demographic information on who was and wasn't interested.
Google was the best value, especially if you look for bargains where one group of customers is cheap.
Reddit had no offerings in the way Google had, or even Twitter had. IIRC I bailed on advertising with them at all. With Facebook it was just too complex for a simple ad, with Reddit it didn't even seem they were offering anything near what I wanted.
Something that hasn’t been brought up in this thread is the massive problem Reddit has regarding large scale bot networks.
Reddit allows for unlimited account creation and has extremely poor, if any, detection algorithms. Additionally, its trivial to stream and analyze the entirety of Reddit comments and posts in real time (check out PRAW if you like Python).
Networks pushing COVID narratives and crypto frauds are probably the worst offenders. Here’s an example I just came across in /r/miami: https://reddit.com/r/Miami/comments/p1z6a7/have_you_guys_see.... The networks pushing certain COVID narratives are evening more troubling as, unlike crypto, im not sure what the end game is or who is controlling those networks.
> Something that hasn’t been brought up in this thread is the massive problem Reddit has regarding large scale bot networks.
Well rest assured, Reddit administration does not see this as a problem at all. It's one of the ways marketing companies advertise on Reddit. There's a reason the moderators of /r/all subreddits tend to all moderate the same group of subreddits, and that they all often have super human posting frequencies. These are shared accounts for ad firms. This was discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018
I've come across crypto pumps on Reddit, but might not be on the right subs to have come across the network posts (or just haven't noticed yet). Do you have some links to those posts?
I wouldn't say this isn't a problem at all but the fact that subs have mods which have a lot of power seems to be very effective.
I don't spend that much time on reddit as a whole - but frequent about 5-7 subs every single day. These are mostly medium sized subs and none of them have a problem of spam. And I'm on them enough that it is by far the social media/news site I interact with the most.
> Reddit allows for unlimited account creation and has extremely poor, if any, detection algorithms.
Why don't they put some CAPTCHAs? They have no CAPTCHAs anywhere in account creation + post first time comment + first time thread + first time direct message?
Reddit is on its way down. It's been overrun by power-tripping mods, and there's no way to appeal a perma-ban!
I've been banned from /r/india for just commenting on another sub (/r/chodi, which was recommended by the app itself!); banned from /r/worldnews for disagreeing with the herd.
The moment a decent, democratic discussion forum comes along, I'll jump ship to it.
It isn't immediately obvious, but r/btc is full of trolls and shills for a bitcoin hard fork and other scam coins. I just checked it out and 2 of the 3 top posts were conspiracy videos about John McAfee.
"Stop using the website in the way it was intended; you must learn the bias of each subs or get banned. And by the way criticizing the bias of mods will also get you banned"
Been on that website for a decade, and being political was not its intention. It’s been established time and again that Reddit is not full free speech, they will ban (what they consider to be) harmful subreddits. That’s the expected outcome in Reddit. The only reason Chodi isn’t banned is because the admins probably don’t give a crap about Indian sub (just 60k members) and half the stuff written there is in broken illiterate hinglish anyway so they probably can’t even police that.
But the fucking sub was recommended to me on the app! I clicked, went in there, posted a comment or two to enlighten people, and bam! Banned from /r/india! W.T.F.!!
ArtisanVideos used to be my favorite until the mod unfairly banned me.
It took me a while just to figure out that I was banned. When I inquired, it was because because I posted videos that are spammy advertising, which couldn't be further from the truth.
Based on the response, it was clear that I was not dealing with someone in normal state so I just wrote it off as lost cause and stopped visiting.
I had already thought the sub was on decline due to aggressive and unnecessary policing, because despite its huge membership, the content has become very stagnant.
It's a shame because I've been on reddit for 10 years and I joined it the sub since its inception.
So here's a conundrum. People like free discourse, but they also like quality content. Having a quality content safe haven usually involves some tyrannical or mob rule filtering mechanism in the form of weird idiosyncratic rules and policing + banning of offbeat posters. This same filtering mechanism is anti-free discourse. Is there a successful implementation that maximizes free discourse and quality content simultaneously(IE preventing spam, shallow comments, & offtopic stuff which inundate a forum turning it into a maze to find the good stuff) without the bad modding?
Many forums once they reach critical mass even if they aren't heavy handed with policing still have an unsavory softhanded stiff-arming mechanism that's rife with bad [mod/mob] judgement, IE push everything not condoned by the mods or mobs into the place where few read. I'm sorry what I'm trying to describe is hard to put a finger on, but after being on reddit for 10 or more years yah notice some strange consistent peculiarities that are hard to put in words.
I'm a Danish guy who has never posted anything on r/India but I was banned from both r/worldnews and r/India for calling out the racism against Indians on r/worldnews.
What do you mean by democratic? Are you thinking of some kind of election system to replace mods, and if so have you seen such a mechanism work anywhere else on forums?
Give people votes proportional to the karma in that sub.
Also, make it hard to perma-ban someone with over 100K karma points, especially in regional subs (like /r/india, etc.); you can change your interests, but you can't really change where you are from. If nothing else, force the mods to actually justify bans; and one subjective offense should not be enough to ban someone.
StackOverflow is HEAVILY moderated. And still has lots of garbage. I have questions constantly taken down for being too vague, offtopic, not the right stackexchange, or not technical enough. I've even responded to takdowns with links to questions with hundreds of points that were almost the same, and ... nope. At least mark it redundant.
Slashdot also had a great moderation system. Way ahead of its time.
-----
Edit: I was going to respond to [1], but I'm rate limited. Below is my comment:
> Anonymity really hurts profits.
That's what killed YikYak and continues to beleaguer anonymous message board monetization (well, maybe it's the content).
Reddit at least has an interest graph going for it. If they can figure out how to boost subreddit discovery and encourage users pick the things they'll spend money on, then they'll be golden.
Reddit seems to me like a very hard product to monetize. As a daily user I get a ton of milage out of Reddit Enhancement Suite (desktop) and Apollo (iOS), in combination with typical ad-blockers. Combine that with the low friction of sign up (disposable e-mails allowed, no confirmation needed, sitewide bans rare) and the tacit allowance of "objectionable" content (porn, gore, hate speech, harassment, etc.)... you don't really have fertile ground for meaningful engagement from an advertiser perspective.
Not only that, but if Reddit were to strongly disallow any or all of the above we have seen how EASY it is to simply clone the tech and re-host. There have been stories about certain communities being exiled from Reddit only to spring up just as quickly elsewhere with more or less the same exact user experience...
But every time you take more money you have to make more money. It’s like they’re trying to give themselves permission to do things they haven’t dared to do so far.
> if Reddit were to strongly disallow any or all of the above we have seen how EASY it is to simply clone the tech and re-host
this seems doubtful to me. Reddit has tons of legendary threads, AMAs and is its own library of content at this point, similar to YouTube. Sure the tech could be replicated but the value is all in the content it generated.
Maybe that points to a way they could make $: curate and make anthologies of the actually valuable content. /r/askhistorians content could be turned into a few history books.
Of course, then people might start looking at the fact that they are giving away valuable property to Reddit in return for access to a simple forum site...
There are plenty of Reddit archiving and mirroring services. Pay one of those for a database dump and you’re off to the races (copyright issues be damned)
> As a daily user I get a ton of milage out of Reddit Enhancement Suite (desktop) and Apollo (iOS), in combination with typical ad-blockers.
Most users aren't going to do this. Really, the reddit folks should just go all-in on tailoring their official apps towards the most casual, highly "engaged" content consumers, and target most of their monetization towards that kind of user. As a bonus, make it trivially easy to post casual content directly from the app. Who cares about "objectionable" content when they'll have so many cat pictures and cute/funny memes to run their ads next to.
FYI you can actually still create a new reddit account without giving any email address (not even a disposable or fake one). Just leave the email text box blank and click "next".
The cost is fascinating. Is the value of a single place for all these conversations that much higher than having a bunch of independent forums scattered across the web? For users, there's a high discovery value... but at the cost of apparently far more expense running the site than has been able to be recouped yet.
Curious to see that even where centralization hasn't financially paid off, people are willing to keep tossing money at the dream of it paying off one day after 16 years.
> Is the value of a single place for all these conversations that much higher than having a bunch of independent forums scattered across the web?
The problem with "independent forums scattered across the web" is that they make discovery (of users and service instances) harder. There are ways around this, like the Fediverse and SOLID standards, but most bulletin-board-like forums do not support them as of yet out of the box.
Reddit should just shift to a paid model where there are no adds across the entire site and the subs you sub to get a portion of your revenue to manage the sub.
It is strange. The obvious solution to Reddit's revenue problem was to build a marketplace into the foundation of the network, and they should have done that more than a decade ago.
Etsy, eBay, FB Market, Craigslist, Fiverr, OnlyFans (which was built-up by riding on social media propagation, taking advantage of services like Reddit), and 400 other various types of online markets. There's no reason Reddit could not have have built something substantial in the ecommerce platform space over the years. Taking a small cut from transactions would have eliminated their advertising dependency. Reddit's karma also lends itself easily to forming an ecommerce trust network via transaction feedback, which would form the backbone of buying and selling products or services on there. Reddit figured out to absorb image hosting away from eg Imgur (which also piggybacked off of Reddit to then form a competing social network), and they didn't figure out to do the same thing in the ecommerce space, despite how obvious it was.
Reddit even has communities where sales are made like r/MechanicalKeyboards and those communities use karma and transaction tracking to rank sellers - the communities have done the proof of concept for them.
Now that they are setting up Cryptocurrencies in some subreddits (donuts in r/ethtrader and a couple of others that I don't recall right now) they should experiment with reddits where you initially "pay" for posting, commenting, up/down voting. Then somehow if your post gets upvoted or is heavily commented on, you get some of those tokens (shared revenue) as well as moderators in the subreddits that adopt that dynamic.
It's akin to the "payment per Email" (hashcash as spam prevention) idea that a lot of us have yearned for a long time, which would deter spammers and make people think twice before commenting, so maybe it would increase the content quality.
You do realise that TWO THOUSAND YEARS worth of server time just from six (of about 138,000 active subreddits) pays for more than just a handful of employees?
Reddit is a 9 figure company. Soon to be 11 figures.
> We will raise up to $700 million in Series F funding, led by Fidelity Management and Research Company LLC. and including other existing investors, at a post-money valuation of over $10 billion.
Well it's been multiple years and hn still needs multiple pages, ironic considering they claim to deal with the best people in tech. So I guess things take time?
Reddit's user base is poor and disaffected young men. Those might be valuable eyeballs to a warlord or a revolutionary but corporate America isn't buying.
All you need is an imagination. Paid only-fans links for example would be a huge winner when targeted at virgin men in their 20s with no real life friends (AKA Reddit userbase). These subtle advertisements are already happening all over Reddit through user posts, it's just Reddit stupidly does not charge for it.
I used to have a similar impression. Gradually my view has changed. I now see it as one of the best sources of information on the internet on specific topics.
Reddit is a marketeers dream. Every corporation, product, game, movie studio and consumer device has a big team dedicated to using Reddit for free. Submissions memes and comments are posted by the teams, often out in the open. Reddit gets no income from this advertising.
If Reddit were to start looking at charging for these, the platform might change drastically. I'm not sure how, however.
Reddit is already packed to the brim with product shilling and yet it keeps getting bigger. I doubt the majority of users will be turned off from this. The reddit user base has changed as well. Most users of reddit probably never used the old design at this point.
the mods are even worse than admins in many respects. mods for popular subs have considerable control over what is allowed or not. Many subs have enormous blacklists of users,domains,and even words. As well as stupid, arbitrary content guidelines pertaining to length, the title, the body, and other stuff. Reddit admins have the most power but they tend to not get involved unless a sitewide rule is broken.
I've been permanently banned from almost all of the top COVID related subs for daring to discuss disallowed topics, like the Wuhan lab, as well as expressing anti-lockdown sentiments. My appeals have been instantly denied as well.
I understand the idea that subreddits are user-run communities and should be able to self-moderate, but there are a couple problems with this:
1. Reddit claims to be the "front page of the internet" and promotes many of these top subreddits with front-page rankings, user suggestions, and push notifications. Therefore, reddit mods have immense power in controlling the flow of information to those who believe they're interacting with a reputable source, and Reddit corporate has washed their hands of any responsibility to have a say in this, despite the profit they receive from it.
2. Reddit corporate certainly is willing to get involved with subreddits, by banning or quarantining certain subs for spreading "misinformation", but this seems selectively applied to one particular side of these issues. Anti-lockdown subreddits are banned for downplaying Covid, but major Covid subreddits openly feature fear-mongering posts that overplay, say, the risk of the virus to kids. Both are misinformation, but one is allowed and and the other is banned.
Reddit was a bastion of free speech but it's suffered a steep decline in quality and content. It's a toxic place with heavy handed dark UI patterns: they've lost their minds over there.
This seems more like a Silicon Valley issue than a Reddit one. And Silicon Valley generally doesn’t have much motivation to get people doing actual stuff, people sitting at home is where the cash is.
The nice thing is as alternative tech platforms rise up (communities.win, ovarit.com, ruqqus, rumble, etc) we will see a more decentralized web and these tech giants will soon be forgotten. Hopefully, they'll take their toxic VCs with them, but I think that may be a pipe dream.
I was going to say, there are plenty of subs for pedaling that kind of content, but looks like the major one, r/NoNewNormal was just quarantined (ironic) today, which is often the first step towards a total ban. Reddit's a private company, and if they don't want that kind of content on their site, shouldn't that be their choice?
The problem with the "private company" line that, yes, they're a private company, but censorship is definitely still bad!
Free speech is a fundamentally protected right in the US. From the Founder's perspective, the greatest threat to that right was clearly and obviously government, because what other entity could possibly have that much reach into one's life? Up until the internet age, no one could imagine a private company or a private individual having the capacity to infringe upon free speech at scale.
So, we have a Constitutional right to free speech, protected against infringement by the government, which is great, but there is another threat to the free flow of information and ideas, and that is private corporations who can now infringe upon this right at scale. And we don't have the tools or framework to defend it, because private companies can do what they want? Thats not good enough for me. The situation is dire when private companies appoint themselves to be the arbiters of truth, because even with the best intentions, there are bound to be mistakes, as we've already seen. And they don't all have the best intentions.
You post about free speech but appear to be quite ignorant about the topic. Example why is it considered a crime to yell “fire” in a crowded theater? Educate yourself and stop posting annoying banal rhetoric.
That’s all you have to say? The fire in a theater example (and you call me banal)? You really can’t think of any other form of speech that has been unfairly censored by social media sites?
Your reading comprehension seems a bit lacking, casting doubt on your other statements. To be clear I am asserting that your claim censorship by private companies is unjust; that is banal, annoying, and ignorant.
Do or do you not think it’s a good thing for private individuals to be able to unilaterally censor what can be said in what really is the new public square?
The fact you perceive any particular message posted to any particular for profit social media site as being a “public square” is more the result of successful marketing and ignorance than reality.
Hacker news, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc. are private properties surrounding the public square.
You can do what you like (within the bounds of the law, because even public squares have rules) with your own property on the web, but you also have to follow the rules of any other establishment if you enter.
I’m not sure why this is so hard for pageandrew to grasp. I assume they think since anyone can register and use these sites, they think that makes them “public” when in fact people who register with and use these sites are paying for the privilege; with their personal data, their attention, their clicks, and their manufactured outrage that drive engagement, precisely what pageandrew is trying to do here.
User pageandrew can set up their own stall by the web public area and publish whatever they wish, discuss whatever they wish with whomever they wish, also censor whoever they wish. It’s their stall, their property. Just as twitter etc are the property of others. Pageandrew.com will most likely not have the views or clicks though, and that’s what they need to peddle their outrage.
I'm not calling pageandrew out personally - it seems like many people on this site can't seem to see the forest for the trees in this regard. The narrative that a few FAANG sites have completely centralized and commoditized the web to the point that they have de facto become the web is necessary for the fear narrative of a vast leftist conspiracy controlling the media and persecuting free thinkers, but also completely wrong.
Look at Youtube. The platform has been demonetizing and deplatforming accounts for obscure and opaque reasons for years, and not just Conservatives and gun videos. The result has been people advertising their non YT content on alternative platforms. If enough people are upset with the way a platform does business, they go elsewhere.
People get kicked off of 4chan, they move to 8chan. They get kicked off of Reddit, they go to Voat. Plenty of platforms serving the persecution complex of modern Conservatives, Trump supporters, incels and the alt-right have shown up on Hacker News. Gab and Parler still exist, and are still cesspools of free speech. And that's just on the open web.
Censorship at the platform level is not a problem, because there can always be alternative platforms. Censorship at the network level is a problem. That's why I'm vehemently opposed to arguments that the government should step in and regulate all social media platforms, or force them to publish content against the will, or require a judge to sign off on any moderation action. I'd rather have parts of the web play by rules I don't agree with than have the whole thing play by one set of rules at the point of a gun.
Giving fringe viewpoints a megaphone and that kind of validation is a terrible idea. We have seen it be abused and fail us consistently over the last decade in both mainstream and social media.
I don't trust large corporations to decide what is fringe and what is not, because not only is it a slippery slope, it has been abused consistently especially over the last few years.
Look no further than Facebook's handling of COVID "misinformation". From the start of the pandemic, they have enshrined the current statements of the CDC as "information" and everything else as "misinformation". For example, when the supposed "scientific consensus" was that COVID-19 100% came from nature, anyone who suggested it could have been manmade was called a conspiracy theorist and banned from the platform. Now, a year later, those scientists are backtracking, and some are even admitting that they took the natural-origin stance simply to not be associated with Trump, who was taking the other side. That's not science.
It was never a crazy idea. Anyone who could think for themselves knew that. But Facebook declared themselves the arbiter of truth, and decided that anything that wasn't said by the CDC needed to be censored.
When reasonable, logical ideas about important global health challenges are considered "fringe" simply because the authorities have declared them to be fringe, we have a serious problem.
Because the "man made" conspiracy was not based on any evidence or research. They were promoted by media personalities with no scientific backgrounds spreading a false narrative deeply rooted in white nationalism and helped to promote anti-Chinese hate crimes.
Obviously real scientists and social media platforms didn't want to be associated with or help to promote that at the time.
Theres a difference between curating the best recipes or cutest cat pics, and censoring certain ideas about pressing global health crises because they don't fit a certain narrative.
I'm glad you're here. If there's any chance that connecting would be helpful, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll send you my personal email.
I understand how alarming it is when people post on such an extremely painful topic, but probably this is a place to recall the site guideline that says "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." I can think of other things bserge might have meant.
It would be stupid of me to do that. Besides, death is easy, living in suffering is where the real hell is. And it's much easier to achieve, would you look at that.
This is actually what makes reddit great, that anyone can start their own subreddit, mod it however they want, and compete with all the others based on the merits of its own content, community and moderation style.
I think the worst part is how things are silently removed. On many sites you get a message saying 'your content has been removed for violating rule x'. On reddit you almost always get nothing. Often you don't even get a ban message and will just be added to a shadow ban list so you end up wasting your time commenting but no one can see it.
There is a site that shows you your deleted comments[1] and its pretty shocking. I found out every single one of my comments in one sub had been auto deleted with the reason being I did not have any link karma (because I only comment). What a waste of time and it turns me off from the platform.
Disagree - most city subreddits are pretty hands off and they get overrun by people coming from alt-right subs who don't even live in the city talking about crime.
Moderation often improves quality. It can also be bad, but is not universally so.
It is impossible to compete with the first one that claims the obvious name for the subject, such as, say r/startrek
The competing ones also censor heavily, so all it does is that one can now choose what particular opinions one can't express.
Competing on the merits of moderation style is insignificant compared to having the most straightforward name that everyone will try first; the subreddit with such name will always be the largest.
Offhand, /r/legaladvice, /r/AskHistorians, and /r/AskScience stand out as being heavily moderated to the benefit of overall content quality. I don't see how any of those would be political propaganda (left-wing or otherwise).
I have never tried the latter two, but the first one is a very good example of a notoriously bad advice subreddit that almost all lawyers dislike for spreading constant misinformation, and often even seeing people that say the correct thing be banned by the moderators.
There are almost no actual lawyers on that subreddit for two reasons: A) actual lawyers would like to see compensation for their expertise; B) in many jurisdictions, lawyers are not allowed to give legal advice without establishing a formal attorney–client relationship.
Interesting, this is the first I'm hearing about that. Typically users will state whether or not they're lawyers, and if so the degree to which they're familiar with the OP's jurisdiction, and threads will often be locked and/or littered with removed comments for the reason "bad advice". Often, the only advice users will receive is to go see a lawyer.
Based on all that, it seemed pretty solid to me. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if I had to guess it's probably more a case of being hit-or-miss than entirely bad. Even a minority of bad advice would stand out to a lawyer in the same way that >=1% of wrong information in a tech publication would stand out to most of us here, particularly if the victims of said bad advice were in serious situations.
(IANAL or an active user of /r/legaladvice. I just pop in every so often when an interesting thread hits my front page, so whatever I'm exposed to is presumably better quality and more actively moderated than what's average for the sub.)
The latter two subreddits really do have excellent content, they are worth checking out.
/r/legaladvice is so bad there is actually a subreddit dedicated to discussing what's posted there, /r/bestoflegaladvice. There's more attorneys in that sub than the actual legal advice sub, where a surprising amount of advice is either blatantly wrong or essentially "just tell the police everything, they'll help."
/r/audiophile and /r/wine are two other well moderated subreddits, where the discussion has remained relatively focused and high quality even as the communities have grown, because the moderators aggressively prune low-effort and unrelated content. There was big drama, once upon a time, when /r/audiophile banned anything headphone related.
I stopped going to /r/AskHistorians because often the only allowed answers were badly sourced.
This is especially prevalent on events that are still relatively recent (last 40-50 years).
Second, it really is /r/AskHistorians ONLY, you are not allowed to mention any personal anecdata (ie participating in the fall of Berlin Wall etc.)
Even worse you are not allowed to attempt to provide official primary sources.
There was a question on WW2 Soviet tank production and German preparedness. I was not allowed to link in secondary comment Hitler-Mannerheim talks where they talked about this very issue!
I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations.
For large subs like /r/politics, a select few people get to control what's fed into the eyeballs of millions of people. And we don't even know what content wasn't allowed to be posted, how can we trust they're unbiased?
It's shown time and time again that the alternative, with a radical free-speech approach to content moderation, is that the community attracts users who post trash content (e.g., white nationalism, screwball conspiracy, glorification of violence, misogyny), who then gradually drive away everyone else. That's why they never attract much of a following and end up withering and dying.
As a former mod of /r/politics the reality is quite mundane. The bias you see on the front page of that subreddit is pretty much entirely due to the users upvoting. The mod team is really careful to ensure nothing gets removed simply due to political differences and is internally transparent, and includes mods from a wide spectrum of political beliefs and backgrounds. Interestingly the mod team is simultaneously accused of being biased towards left and right wing politics at once!
>I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations.
Why? You're free to make your own subreddit with a different bias or no bias. No one really assumes it's unbiased and they go there because of the bias that they agree with. People like communities of like minded people.
By that logic any large scale media (tv, newspapers, magazines, etc.) should not be allowed to have bias even if the only reason people went there was for the bias.
This is quite true too. If you don't feel like politics is conservative enough for your tastes, worldnews is right there for you. And there are countless smaller communities catering to nearly any perspective imaginable.
I'm not going to shed any tears over them shutting down communities devoted to hate speech because the site has become noticeably more pleasant to read and participate in as those users went elsewhere.
I don't totally agree with this argument when applied to something like Twitter, but I can at least see the logic in it. When we're talking about something like a subreddit, I find the notion that you have to let anyone come and post whatever they want in your community because it's popular rather hard to swallow.
I get where you're coming from, as I created /r/relationship_advice. The existence of such blacklists, even "enormous" ones, isn't inherently bad; it's just a reality of dealing with an enormous flood of spam on a $0 budget.
That being said, blacklists on strings have 100% been abused by both the mods and the admins. Blacklists should be used for mitigating spam — e.g. we'll often block a specific attacker by blacklisting certain phrases or regexes and then deal with the inevitable edge case false positives by hand — not generally for censoring ideas or "offensive" words.
Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch and maybe /r/relationship_advice. If a sub is inciting violence or posting CP, there's probably a case for banning it. But when people have to self-censor common curse words and even the word "fart" in a general forum like /r/tifu, clearly something is wrong.
> Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself"
Even that will often lead to the scunthorpe problem.
I remember well once scouring through a post that was rejected on a forum to finally realize it was because it contained the phrase “tardive dyskinesia” which contained “tard” which alone was enough to deny the post, apparently.
FWIW, I think it's silly that reddit has banned the term "retard" site-wide, although I also acknowledge that the term may be becoming broader and more offensive than I personally understand it to be.
In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay.
> FWIW, I think it's silly that reddit has banned the term "retard" site-wide, although I also acknowledge that the term may be becoming broader and more offensive than I personally understand it to be.
Do you have any source of this? As far as I know Reddit bans no words site-wide, and I see the term used now and then.
On the very same website a post could not come through because I described someone as having “retarded pubertal development”, in any case.
> In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay.
It's also completely useless because people that want to get through the censor will et through it by other means that will still make their message easily understood.
Word censors are window politics and people that want to get around them will get around them and I assume it's already against the rules on that subreddit to encourage suicide so they would be quite willing to also break a rule to evade word censors.
Not offhand, but I've heard of users getting temporary suspensions for using the word, although I don't believe there's an automated rule site-wide.
It's also completely useless
Not entirely. Sure, if you're a dedicated attacker trying to tell a specific target to kill themselves, there's not much I can do about it; you'll acquire an aged account with decent karma and find a way to do it.
If you're just a regular person going about your day and say something stupid, an automod removal with a warning that circumventing the rule will result in a permanent ban is probably sufficient to make you give up and move on with your life. And of course bots that aren't specifically designed to circumvent my subreddit's rules would be trivially blocked.
> Not offhand, but I've heard of users getting temporary suspensions for using the word, although I don't believe there's an automated rule site-wide.
Merely for using the word? this seems like a myth to me. Various subreddits would obviously ban for it if used as a direct insult, but banning any use of it side-wide seems unlikely.
> If you're just a regular person going about your day and say something stupid, an automod removal with a warning that circumventing the rule will result in a permanent ban is probably sufficient to make you give up and move on with your life. And of course bots that aren't specifically designed to circumvent my subreddit's rules would be trivially blocked.
In which case it would be just as effective to simply give a warning based on detected words that various conduct with it will not be tolerated and that a moderator will be automatically informed of the post, and to remind users to make use that their usage of the word falls within the guidelines.
This would eliminate scuntorpe false positives, and have about the same effect of stopping the intended behavior.
Ironically, your comment itself also lacks any detail of countering or clarifying information, and is itself just a content-free slam on the person you replied to.
Is your point that the mods don't have all these blacklists (including of words), or that the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to? Is the mod system working well, in your opinion?
> Is your point that the mods don't have all these blacklists (including of words),
Of course moderators have blacklists. For words / phrases / domains, they are site sanctioned through the (now) built in function called "Automoderator".
User blacklists are done through the built in ban function.
In fact, one would call these blacklists... moderation. Something a moderator would be expected to do.
> the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to?
They are built into the site. It would logically follow that it is both allowed and expected.
Stepping back, I'm not sure how you can expect a forum, any forum, to survive without moderation.
> Is the mod system working well, in your opinion?
This is really impossible to answer.
From the bird's eye view, users and impressions are growing while reddit doesn't have to pay for moderation. A stunning success.
From a lurker perspective, they never interact with moderators and generally get content that has been reviewed and determined to be within the rules, though this may vary by subreddit.
From an active user perspective, the system may work well, or not well, depending on which subreddit(s) you frequent and how you use the platform. There are many subreddits, and moderators on some may certainly make your life unpleasant. So... don't be active on those subreddits.
However, the number of active users, according to the 90-9-1 principle is quite small, and the number of those that ever meaningfully interact with a moderator, or even a bot moderator, are probably a magnitude smaller than that.
So yes, IMO, the mod system seems to work well overall.
Funny enough paying for professional moderation will actually help Reddit. The quality of almost every major subreddit is trash due to mods on a power trip (or paid by a third party to push an agenda).
It's not easy to run a company with as many users as they have.
As a mod, they've put a lot of work recently into flagging trolls and astroturf accounts, and still have a lot of work to do. I run r/sanfrancisco, and wow there's a ton of bots and trolls flooding our sub about the Newsom recall.
They also seem to really want to find a way to monetize content in a new way. They've flirted with crypto and awards, but I imagine they have strong ambitions around how they can reward creators and moderators in a healthy, non-ad-based-way. (Their ads are the worst of all the big social networks, given how anonymous their base is. So they're forced to innovate, which I think is good for everyone.)
Plus the usual suspects (infrastructure, traditional demand gen marketing, paid moderation, etc).
>Their ads are the worst of all the big social networks, given how anonymous their base is. So they're forced to innovate, which I think is good for everyone
The oddity is that their user's aren't that anonymous -- in fact, they very directly tell reddit what their interests are. Like a trade magazine, reddit really doesn't have to do any analysis at all to figure out how to map ads to the right target audience.
It confounds me how they haven't managed to do a much better job of targeted advertising -- just showing woodworking tool ads on the woodworking sub would be a dramatic improvement over the current setup.
My quick Google-ing shows that they make about $100M/year on ads. So they do this and it works decently well.
However, ads at other social networks have evolved way past this level of targeting (which is a bad thing, in my opinion, but alas). Social networks like Facebook know so much about not just your likes but the people you're friends with and how much your income is and what stores you've been to and what you do on Instagram and what your age is and what state you're in and... the list goes on.
I think most subreddits are tough to monetize. What do you sell to r/funny or r/politics or r/sanfrancisco? What does r/choosingbeggars want to buy? There's a few obvious ones (diets, hobbies), but I think eeking out $100M from that is already impressive.
Plus, Reddit's audience is way more against ads than Instgram/Facebook/etc.
Reddit knows all the subs you subscribe to though. They don't have to give all users of a sub the same ad, just give everyone ads based off their most valuable interests.
So let's say their annual revenue is 3-4x since ad spend is usually weighted heavily towards Q4. At 300-400M per year and growing that's actually pretty solid.
Reddit is the only website in the Alexa top 15 (US) that runs completely on the cloud. Everyone else has figured out datacenters save a bucket load of money.
Building a functional video player seems to be one of the hardest problems in web tech. Youtube and maybe Vimeo seem to be the only sites that have an actual functioning video player.
I guess you could use the browser built in one but you likely lose features like dynamically switching video quality.
Employees cost more than just their salary, but I see your point. So far, their attempts to make reddit more profitable have made the user experience terrible. "New" reddit is way worse than old, and is full of nagging you to use the app on mobile, to the point where you can't even view the content. I've never used the official reddit app because I've heard it's terrible, and there are many great alternatives.
I really don't know what they should do with the money other than make reddit more reliable. It was down last night. The value of reddit is the users/community. Technically, it's a modern message board/link aggregator. There are already many clones.
As an amateur you probably don't have enough context to know, but what you see on a superficial level of the product is probably about < 10% of the total engineering effort.
Reddit awards, payments, ad analytics, SRE is probably 100+ engineers right there without even talking about the core experience, mobile app and security folks.
The platforms that run 8 figure companies need tons of redundancy in both application code/infrastructure and people.
Maybe they finally upgrade the 486sx based server everything runs on?
But seriously they could invest in some content discovery/recommendation features. There are probably a lot of small subreddits that go unnoticed by people that just check /all or /popular.
Their video player needs some major work.
They could decentralize the site. Shard off subreddits by some category system. The homepage would then be an aggregation of the shards. If the main site is down you can potentially still reach some shards.
Of course they would still have a ton of money left over. With a stack this high they could convert the office heater to run directly off cash for a few years.
Build an integrated market, initially aimed at competing with Craigslist, and maybe expanded to target other markets later (Ebay, etsy, etc). Craigslist first because its similarly simple UI and design is the easiest to recreate within Reddit.
There's tons of subreddits for connecting buyers and sellers of niche goods, but the actual buying and selling has to happen elsewhere. It's stupid that Reddit hasn't capitalized on that yet.
Instagram and Whatsapp had very small teams even with hundreds of millions of users. Reddit has more features but honestly the amount of money pumped in is crazy given that it's well, basically a collection of web forums.
Remember the point of a company is to make money for the people that invest in it, being in the top 25 globally doesn't mean that much if you need to take half a billion in cash 15 years into your existence. it's a weird narrative for a tech company.
The biggest problem is that their revenue per user is atrociously low compared to other social platforms. That money should be thrown at poaching as much ads talent as possible from Facebook or Twitter.
The problem is that throwing money rarely leads to the outcome desired.
I would know how to run a high-quality reddit on $5M/year, and perhaps as much as $20M. I would not know how to run a high-quality reddit on $100M/year.
The term is 'overcapitalized.'
At some scale, people focus on climbing corporate ladders over the core business, on pet projects, and communications becomes a bottleneck (and the number of potential links grows as a square law with the number of people).
The right scale depends on the complexity of the product. A car requires an army to engineer and produce.
Reddit? That benefits from a small team, where people can holistically understand the whole system, and everyone involved. That's at most 20 SWEs.
You need a mobile team, you need a spam team (or 10), you need people working on a portal for advertisers and the analytics they need, need more than 3 devops for full 24/7 coverage, etc.
Maybe a Reddit coin? Use that money to mine it and then seed the Reddit ecosystem at first with coin upvotes/awards, build a merch market for subreddit specific merch, allow advertisers to list items on the marketplace funneling sales there from Reddit ads/promoted posts, original content -> NFT…
I don’t know the details but I think the core base of Reddit would be into a project like that.
I would invest in B2B. Reddit should have just as much of an easy-to-use marketing suite like Facebook or Google have. A team of 10 engineers can do that in a year, then the rest of the money goes to sales.
Free food to keep people in the office and a giant building in the tenderloin with just enough security gaurds to keep your developers safe inside but unable to safely leave.
They need more than that for the sole purpose of making the mobile website experience as horrible as possible (and constantly iterating to make it worse and worse)
I'm 60% you're joking, but on the chance you're not.
You couldn't keep Reddit going with 10x that team. Just the tooling around keeping up with GDPR regulations and Trust & Safety alone could easily eat $10m a year.
In the hn tiktok thread, I saw a salient comment that said: "When I visit reddit I just leave angry".
Tiktok doesn't have this problem. I always have fun on that app, and leave feeling like it was a good time. Reddit is the total opposite. Nothing but people screaming and mods power-tripping, forever.
Never experienced a website that objectively has such terrible impact on peoples lives. Are they going to use this money to turn it around?
That's all dependent on the subs you visit. I have learned so much on reddit. News and leaks before it breaks anywhere else. How to 3D print stuff. Extremely complicated laws and how to avoid going to prison for stuff I knew nothing about.
Reddit is the ultimate "it is what you make of it" website. If you spend your time in the subs that make you angry then yeah, but if you narrow it down to only things you like you'll have a great time.
That has not been my experience, and I've browsed some _really_ niche subreddits for a "famous" group of bodybuilders in Delray beach if you catch my drift.
Cool. I remember when Reddit launched and everyone was trying to figure out how they would make money. It looks like they made $100m last year so as long as they keep engagement up and optimize I think things will go well. I was surprised at only 50m DAUs.. that means there is a lot of growth left especially internationally.
One thing to ask is, what problem does Reddit solve?
And to stretch an anthropomorphism: if Reddit was a person, I would ask them, who is Reddit?
Also just to ponder for a minute, what makes reddit and say facebook so different?
After ~2014, nothing. Reddit drove off it's original user base and replaced them with the exodus of people who want to use Facebook but think Facebook is bad for various reasons. Reddit corporate has obliged them.
Well it certainly amplifies it but apart from comments it’s not an original content producer. Polarization in the US is manufactured by politicians and monetized by big business donors. This is why it’s Fox News entertainment. In the past we had yellow journalism etc…. It has certainly reduced the cost and effort to reach a lot of people and achieve critical mass. But any community has this. My local school board meetings are filled with covid deniers, anti maskers. These are akin to book banners and the whole critical race theory conspiracy. It’s all manufactured for political aim.
There's no doubt that the media are thought leaders and I think for the most part set the narratives for the public to divide itself over, but I really think the Reddit hivemind is the base for the emergence of novel phenomena, the stuff your read on there certainly isn't all manufactured by the media.
This is my biggest gripe with Facebook Groups, along with finding old content, but it seems that Facebook is much more niche than Reddit.
For some topics, say a speific car model, I've found that Reddit may have a general subreddit for the manufacturer, or maybe a specific subreddit with a few posts a week, but on Facebook there's a group that has 50 or so posts a day. And then there's often even more specific groups, for say modding or regional groups.
The reddit outage yesterday was the worst one I have seen in years. Reddit used to go down multiple times a day 3+ years ago but it seems pretty solid now.
They also used to shut the site down for hours at a time to run updates.
Reddit is the only major social media company that gives you the tools to build something resembling a human community online, yet it seems dwarfed in popularity and clout by products like Facebook and Twitter, which seem to me much less capable.
But to be honest, even I don't use Reddit, although I do sometimes search "reddit X" when I want detailed opinions on product/service/business X. Their UX doesn't draw me in at all, especially on mobile. Hope they do something about this with all the cash. They seem to have a lot of unrealized potential.
Key line for me: "Reddit is also enhancing its video products with an eye toward more advertising."
They are already moving videos to their awful self-hosted solution. Adding pre-roll definitely makes sense. If they can guarantee premium brands 0% play on porn....
Why does Reddit need funding? Legitimate question. What are they going to spend this money on? A direct ad sales team? I would assume it takes a somewhat small engineering and DevOps team to keep it running. Is there a huge roadmap of features that requiring $100m in engineering?
Sort of reminds me of this girl I see on Facebook. She is an "entrepreneur". Her business? Helping other people start their own businesses! Yes, but what kind of business is she helping them start? Same as her own business - paid training sessions on how to start a business!
Yeah, I know someone who did the exact same thing. I guess it's similar to a pyramid scheme in that the more people you "coach" or "mentor", the bigger your personal brand will get and the more opportunities you will get.
I think this is hilarious because reddit is so obviously dead on the vine to me. I can't wait for reddit to give me even the remotest reason to delete my account. ngl, been pretty close to deleted it since they hid the nsfw, was practically the only thing of value the site had left.
If Reddit doesn't get this funding it will become insolvent it's valuation will be seen as the obvious BS it is, companies like Pinterest, Tiktok, Twitter, maybe even YouTube will collapse overnight. Reddit MUST show growth, even if it's just buying clicks and junking the stats, if it doesn't all our jobs go out the window.
But I'm pretty sure they will, the big thing now is to have a big e-commerce advertising component to "unknowingly" facilitate money laundering. Expect spam to explode and be repeatedly ghettoized, it already happening on their porn subs. Entirely fake traffic with bots talking to bots.
Yes, Google is mostly spam now. Digg went out of business, Enron went out of business, Google could just as easily. They are forcing a lot of activity now by just allowing people to abuse their site by allowing fake traffic that's just bots. The SEO for every search is noticeable worse each year, it's always pointless to check every anything past the 3rd result, I can't even find stuff I remember being able to find in the past.
THIS is the question. My guess is that leadership has been working on something that isn't public - but VCs saw it and liked it.
All comments I've seen on here assume they "keep doing things the same way" - but the fact is that they need to PIVOT to something new to make real money, and that pivot could be mostly a secret.
Ads are not their future - stop complaining about the user interface and poor targeting. That isn't their path to success.
I would imagine most of these investments will go to three places:
* Sales - start generating revenue from all these eyeballs, leveraging your interest graph for targeting. this requires way more headcount than you'd expect, especially to chase enough revenue to justify a $10b valuation
* Safety - beyond all the well-discussed dangers of large-scale user forums, this also impacts monetization. you don't want to subject the average new user to extreme/alt/adult content (though you can still offer space for those communities) or else you may scare them off. major advertisers want "brand safety" and want to avoid being associated with upsetting or even mildly profane content
* Regulatory - dozens of countries and states are rolling out unique regulations around privacy, data usage, and user rights. this is a nightmare to navigate from both a product and legal sense
Reddit is 16 years old. It's one of the largest sites on the internet by views, users, time on site, any metric you would care about. They have something like 500 FTE's, which is tiny compared to lots of other sites with far less traffic.
It's basically the perfect combination of high traffic and low costs, and they have raised close to a billion dollars in funding. If they aren't profitable now, they are very unlikely to ever be profitable. I think it's likely they will sell to one of the big players (I would guess FB) in the next 5 years or so. If that goes the 'usual way', whoever acquires them will immediately let the site fall apart and eventually shut it down, and in the meantime a new hot reddit/digg/slashdot like site will emerge to take it's place almost overnight.
My instinct is that Reddit as an organization and as a set of employees are B players, and for that reason a place like Facebook would not want to acquire them. We’ve seen Reddit “execute” a new site design, we see people complaining about being unable to buy ads, and we’ve seen the board’s competence level in finding CEO’s. For the acquisition to break even, you would have to burn down the organization you just acquired, and fix it with your own people. It’s like a bar of gold wrapped in poop. Do you really want to clean off the poop? It might be fool’s gold.
It's been going downhill. There's not enough talk about its decline of original content. That's what it was known for in its earlier days. Now it's mostly recycled old memes, reposts of Tiktoks, and reposts of tweets.
Is it just me, or is Reddit broken in some way about 10% of the time now?
Overall, the site just seems janky. It used to be reliable and fast, say 3 years ago, but now it seems to choke on the higher load. I frequently encounter issues with comments not loading, karma not displaying, etc.
For as popular as Reddit is traffic wise, it's weirdly not a big player in monetization internally or as a platform. That is, Reddit themselves aren't monetizing much compared to their traffic and peers (who are some of the biggest publishers in the world) but also there are not many, if any, third parties openly monetizing off of Reddit, either.
Google, Facebook, Twitter have an entire ecosystem built around them of ad-tech companies, agencies, marketing-tech integrations all involved in driving more revenue or traffic their way so long as the participants get a cut too. This strikes me as a still yet-to-be-tapped market opportunity.
> The first priority on the product is just making Reddit awesome
> We want to build what is best for new users, because over time it will be best for everyone.
I wonder if they’re ashamed of lying like that or just doing it naturally. They’ve been doubling down on user hostile bullshit recently. I don’t man new Reddit (it’s not great but a redesign was long overdue), I mean pictures with silly bars on the bottom and not easily being able to save videos, the stupid app/browser popup on every damn page on mobile, not being able to browse or even view comments without an account anymore.
I sure wonder what Aaron Swartz would think about that.
I find it puzzling that most comments in here don’t even reference the original premise of Reddit.
> Reddit is largely a community of anonymous users that provide web content for each other.
The communities and the anonymous bit is totally the draw for most users. Most technical suggestions for monetization I read in here seem to completely ignore that (outside of marketing to a subreddit instead of directly to users, which some subreddits don’t even allow because that’s not the point of Reddit).
Suggestions I’ve read like not allowing multiple accounts, no anonymous users, etc. seem like suggestions that would kill the platform.
I'm so worried about what Reddit is doing to the world. Online communities like that only lend themselves to toxicity and echo chambers as they grow, and with most of us stuck at home during the pandemic those communities have become a primary source of human interaction - and not in any sort of healthy way. I sincerely think it is one of the top three factors (along with CNN and Fox News) in the dangerous level of polarization we're seeing between people in the United States.
Reddit develops it's own narratives, and those narratives end up being all that gets visibility (because of the comment upvote model). Ideas like 'all conservatives are MAGA losers, look at the idiots on /r/conservative', 'AOC and Bernie are God's gift to Earth' and 'minimum wage should be $45 and all student debt should be forgiven' are the only opinions upvoted. This directly leads to reactionary places like /r/The_Donald getting created. Then, when those communities get banned, it creates even more hostility and resentment. The best part of Donald Trump losing the election was that 80% of the front page wasn't articles shitting on him anymore.
I have to constantly remind myself that the people commenting on reddit are not an accurate representation of the real world, but I worry most people don't do that and legitimately believe people on the other side hate them. They react to this (inaccurate) belief with their own hostility and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I had to put my conspiracy hat on - I think nurturing this hostility between ideologies would be the best way for a foreign power to destabilize the US; they're probably already doing it to some extent.
Honestly, I'd like to give it up entirely but it still remains one of the best resources of really useful, non-marketing knowledge on the internet.
Reddit CFO sold the idea to investors that the business of promoting toxic ideological warfare to keep users engaged with the platform is big business.
Not sure how Reddit is worth that much... Are the 50 power mods in charge of 90% of the top subs selling access to state propaganda departments? Actually don't answer that, its painfully obvious.
$ per user revenue is pathetic compared to most social media platforms.
> The company will use the new funds to improve product features, focusing on how to make it easier for newcomers to explore and quickly understand the site, Mr. Huffman said. Reddit is also enhancing its video products with an eye toward more advertising. And the company is building its self-service advertising system, which could help appeal to small and medium-size business marketers.
> Reddit is also focused on expanding internationally. Most of the site is U.S.-centric, Mr. Huffman said — something he hopes to change.
When it comes to advertising, other platforms offer a much more lucrative user base. Reddit users aren’t worth very much to advertisers. International users will probably be worth even less. And there is no guarantee that Reddit would hit it off with an international audience.
In short, I just don’t see them doing well if they go public.
no guarantee? look at r/de biggest community of german people I've ever heard.
r/europe gigantic subreddit, all national subreddits r/italy r/polska r/belarus (known for international protests) r/hongkong also
oh look at: r/norway and their users are even more wealthy than average us redditors
The gems on Reddit are almost all small subreddits with a community feel. I'd be virtually certain that its high user engagement is primarily driven by users who've matched into smaller subreddits that closely align with their interests. The big, default subreddits are largely wastelands.
But Reddit the platform seems to entirely ignore this dynamic. New users are dropped into the default subreddits, and there's very little tooling or onramps to help them find small interest-matching subs.
I hear this a lot but I've never found a good small subreddit either. Perhaps there's a discoverability problem but I'll be damned if I can find one of these mythical small subreddits with a great community I keep hearing about.
For example I love Formula 1. But the /r/formula1 subreddit (1.6 million subscribers) is absolute unmitigated trash. There are decent articles posted there, but the comments are a total wasteland of low-effort memes, regurgitated jokes and total morons with zero understanding of the sport. So where do I go for F1 content? How do I find one of these supposed small subs with good communities?
Discord lol. If you want quality discussion you're not going to find it on reddit. Mostly the same regurgitated ideas said a thousand times on every post.
reddit should just be killed off at this point. The only good thing about it are the smaller subreddits. The self-proclaimed "front page of the internet" has become the "cesspool of the internet" catering to the lowest common denominator of people out there. Tiktoks, tweets, fabricated AITA posts and more of the low brow variety abound.
reddit (in general) has a clear and obvious political/social agenda apparent to anybody with a functioning brain.
As a reddit user for more than a decade: Reddit has always been dying (for me personally, it was the digg exodus). Everything you describe has been around for at least 5 years.
Reddit will die when there is something better (for the user experience) available. Right now, I do not see a better general-purpose forum alternative.
I feel the choice of Ellen Pao as interim CEO revealed what direction reddit was headed. Moves towards a more sanitised, advertiser friendly Reddit - but with slap-dash choice of how to apply the new era of censorship.
2014 Nov - Pao became interim CEO
2015 July 2nd - large sections of Reddit were set to private to protest the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, Reddit's director of talent, known for co-ordinating the Ask Me Anything interviews
2015 Jun/July - Pao was the subject of criticism and harassment by Reddit users after five Reddit communities (subreddits) were banned for harassment and Reddit's director of talent was fired
2015 Aug 13th - "Watch reddit Die" was Created
I can't help feel that there is a trend of selling of online communities as "assets" to commercial buyers that have opposite incentive to the members of that community - just look at StackOverflow. The problem is that websites come to own the "commons" they inspire, and then sell it off as if the community are happy to work for free. We need stronger community data-rights; like a GPL for website content.
Every website or internet community that I've used for over a year feels to me like it's dying, including HN.
It's a natural reaction to change.
I've been on Reddit for 11 years, and all your comments could apply to 2010 Reddit as well as they apply to 2021 Reddit. At least edgy memes on /r/atheism aren't a core part of the site anymore.
reddit has always been dying to people who have been using reddit for a long time, but don't see how that's even remotely true
as someone who has used reddit for 7+ years now, the culture is definitely very different (not necessarily good) - but it has only continued to grow in terms of users
For example r/linux has "679169 readers", but if you go to the /new page you'll see it has only had 16 submissions in the past day.
New users are automoderated and shadowbanned to hell. There are subreddits where the experienced users with new accounts go and users upvote each other until they have enough karma to post where they want.
> but it has only continued to grow in terms of users
That's because I make a new account everytime I'm doxxed, banned, or censored.
Now that you mention it, I realize that the reddit blocking, censoring and quarantining system basically is a free way to drive up their 'new user' count.
What a joke of a website and a company. Cannot wait til it dies.
Reddit is simultaneously the most usable and most incompetently run (now that tumblr is dead) social media website on the internet. My hunch is that both phenomena are connected.
___________
The incompetent UI rehaul has meant that most users continue staying on old.reddit.com, which makes it impossible to sunset. This means that old.reddit.com works in the most familiar manner of early-2000s forums without much in its way. The incredibly late and terrible 1st party app, has meant that significantly superior 3rd party apps (without the same large scale profit motives) have gained prominence and cannot be pushed out. The ads are bad enough, that they don't have a large variety of advertisers to specifically target compatible subreddits. Imagine having simultaneously the most most engaged users and the worst ads. The censorship is amateurish, and gets beaten by a motivated bunch of idiots on a regular basis. The fear of a competitor being just around the corner (due to their own digg origin story) makes them too scared to censor beyond an unperceivable breaking point, lest they face mass exodus. Good teams are analytically user obsessed. They know their target audience very well. To be fair, worse teams ban users for what used to be the central purpose of their platform cough tumblr cough.
Its public perception is tied to the Boston marathon, pedophile-defending employees and the rise of Trump. So, there isn't sufficient adoption among 'normies'. While that's bad for monetization it slows down the rate of decline in content quality and keeps it far away enough from the public eye, that you can get away with 'better' content.
Every feature they attempt to release (Chat, live stream, video hosting) is done so badly that users refuse to bulge on previous user flows. Thus, it maintains a certain purity.
_________
Reddit is the most ironic victor due to the 'don't fix what's not broken' rule.
Reddit in 2015 was a pretty good website. The devs have been unable to get adoption for any new feature past 2015. Thus, they never fixed what was not broken.
Facebook frequently messes with user flows to maximize earnings. Most successful social media websites have figured out how to guide their users down an 'intended' user flow such that they can maximally profit without losing any users. Reddit doesn't know how to do either.
With that, I hope that Reddit's leaders never wisen up and start making real money. The day reddit figures out monetization, will be the day that I set forth looking for a new badly-monetized platform.
I think it's a common misconception that old.reddit.com is still extremely popular. As a mod of a medium-large sub which should skew highly towards old.reddit.com (developer-focussed content, created at around the beginning of reddit itself), the percent of pageviews on old.reddit.com is right now around 8%.
I figured the "made us an offer we couldn't refuse" was "they offered money even though we're killing the site off so we cashed in just in case, my salary is a cool milly a month now"
No, gruez was talking about how to take the new cash infusion and turn it into market cap. Literally just price of new share times share outstanding. You wanted to know how they decided on the market cap to accept money for. It's a totally different, complex, and non-public process.
I hate reddit with a passion though I still visit it. Largely a consequence of despite having clicked a thousand times on the greyed-out 'continue in browser' button I still get the "see reddit in" dialog take up half my screen every damn day I visit.
Tokenized karma in Reddit communities is going to change everything. It started with r/EthTrader and DONUT (which you can currently use to rent the banner space in the subreddit to display your ad), and extended to r/CryptoCurrency and /r/FortNiteBR, with MOON and BRICK, respectively.
The latter two are part of Reddit's official tokenized community points project, which is going to expand to more communities, and which will be adopting Ethereum L2 solution, Arbitrum, for scalability:
In all three communities, you can purchase special monthly membership with the community tokens, and use them to vote on polls that can also be used for governance decisions.
As the community points are on the blockchain, and map to user contributions in each community, they give Reddit communities the ability to migrate to other platforms, or leverage their karma reputation for other purposes (e.g. voting on other platforms). This decoupling of reputation from the platform will go a long way to making social media more open and geared toward the end user.
It'll also distribute economic power, by giving ordinary people, all over the world, a new means to earn income:
Reddit is such an amazing platform. It is the practice of freedom made real. Don’t like the mods? Make your own subreddit. Don’t like someone? Block them and you’ll never see them. Universal SSO across thousands of communities makes it a trusted source for reviews.
It is akin to social networking what Craigslist is to marketplaces.
A magical magical place.
I would have liked if it was easy to federate, I.e. make a new subreddit that is just like this other subreddit and posts show up in both. You can make multireddits with plus signs but you can’t create a new one that is just like the old one except you don’t censor the word “pumpkin” or whatever.
Would be interesting but maybe a bad idea since it fragments the user base.
The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible. Like 95% lower per user than the other socials.[2] So the real question an investor should ask is whether this is fixable? Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize? Either way, Reddit should be throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive with a track record of juicing monetization.
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily... [2]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...