Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session. Heck, I get my HN updates from Reddit now.
Facebook/Instagram/TikTok are nothing like this in that the info you get is wholly dependent on your social graph. Twitter has very high quality content, but it’s a firehose that is very difficult to curate and keep up with. Reddit is democratizing in a sense, like riding the NYC subway.
An even wilder bet: Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse (as a news outlet of sorts, on steroids) and even potentially minimize the need for Google Search.
Anecdotally, a VERY LARGE percentage of my Google searches end in “site:reddit.com” these days. Reddit posts, especially from smaller subs, tend to be higher quality and don’t have ulterior motives (ad revenue). If Reddit’s Lucene cluster were better, between that and SO, I’d use Google a handful of times a week. Maybe this IPO can help fund that.
If the ad revenue from the whale subs allow me to continue learning about interior design, supply chain logistics, the inner workings of car sales, finance and tax strategies if I become high net worth, and more, I’m here for it.
Stop taking "the metaverse" seriously, please. It's a rich idiots dream, like a digital Fordlandia. I can hardly blame people for trying to follow trends, because following trends can be lucrative. "The metaverse" is just not the one to follow. It's nintendos virtualboy, vision getting ahead of substance, fixing problems we don't have. If it succeeds at all, it will be a testament to societies ability to bend to the whims of rich idiots. In Facebooks case, they should really try their hand at making a 2D world that doesn't lead people to want to die before they try to expand on the whole reality thing.
I'm getting really angry at companies squatting names that are basically common nouns. This practice should be banned. It's something I though was more cyberdystopian-esque not reality, but here we are in the future.
As somebody whose primary intellectual interest is how digital communities conceive of themselves and how cultures are curated online, I am not thrilled about 'Meta' to say the least.
Thanks for stealing the shorthand I had for explaining what interested me.
And never mind what a mess it's going to make for any of us who are interested in metadata versus data.
Perhaps, but scalping in the modern vernacular applies to people buying limited items and then price gouging because of scarcity. And, now that I think about it, "squatting" is also capable of carrying negative connotations when it comes to history in North America.
A land value tax for names? Or well copyrighted ones. I suppose brand reputation could have a value. It could also lead to companies cycling names for cheapness. Imagine say using Toyota-2022 as the offical name for Toyota.
The notion sounds a bit silly on the surface, but good enough at least for serious classroom discussions and evaluation.
Perhaps a land value tax only for dictionary words that relate to the field of use. If Toyota builds a brand reputation, then they should be able to hold on to that brand value without being taxed on it.
One general term, though it's kind of unsatisfying, is "economic land," and it can refer to things like electromagnetic spectrum too. Any finite resource that that is a factor of production and can not be expanded.
For namespaces, there is extra value for particular names that come not from any work the owner of the name performed, but rather that comes from the productive activity of others. If I squat "olives.com" in 1994 and wait for the web to get big, and then sell the domain in 2000 to a hottest new direct to consumer olive startup, then any profit from that should really be taxed away. All that "value" came from the work of others that made the web into a valuable place to own some "land."
I'm pretty sure you're wildly wrong about this. Comparing metaverse to virtualboy is a big mistake. Metaverse is not vision over substance. Substance is already there and driving technology to a more refined vision.
We’re already spending significant parts of our days working, playing, exploring and communicating digitally. Dating is online. Commerce has moved online. Art and creators are online. Entertainment is online. Exercise is an AR experience. Connecting with IRL and new virtual-only friends is online. What is left? Food, sleep, sex, and odors? Important things, but a relatively small portion of what we do during our awake hours.
The substance part of the metaverse is already here and proven. We are in a period of refinement which includes technological advancements in the ways we experience it. More compact wearables (e.g. AR/VR headsets), 3D audio, High res displays and better visuals/graphics and most importantly, bridging these different types of experiences in some way, which is a software problem. These are the areas in which tech is trying to gain control and offer the cohesive experience.
Everything in your second paragraph is right, and the internet is amazing. I also think VR goggles are cool, have a place in providing relatively short term immersive experiences (though not replacing 16 hours of screen time for some people) and am excited to see where the tech goes.
The reason I use quotes is because Zuck has stolen a word to represent his vision of a world people are already incrementally building for themselves, outside his control. His vision, where his Meta company is central to all this stuff, acts as identity provider and general enabler, and a market -- where Meta is central to even the concept of a metaverse, is shit.
Claiming the name as a brand is a scummy move. It's absolutely dripping with greed, hubris and cynicism. They created this problem, where it's difficult to promote or criticize the general idea of the metaverse and the Meta company version independently. It's the latter that I am confident will be a Black Mirror style horror story if come to fruition, and am urging people not to promote. Any major effort by a big tech company to wrangle the frontier into their walled garden is bad news, but Facebook's past behavior says they'd be especially bad.
Zuckerberg has proven extremely effective at predicting future trends. Look at Instagram and Whatsapp, perfectly timed investments.
Zuck has taken long term bets on the metaverse starting with Occulus and now seemingly betting the whole company on it. He could very well be wrong but there are a lot of very smart people at Facebook and on their board I have to think they did some very intensive validation before doing so.
It could all go up in flames but I think they are going to take a very real run at it backed by billions and billions of dollars.
Don't get me wrong I very much dislike Facebook and the oxygen it provides to extreme and uninformed groups but to think that Zuckerberg is an idiot taking a stab in the dark with the fortunes of a publicly traded FAANG company is not a serious take.
"In Facebooks case, they should really try their hand at making a 2D world that doesn't lead people to want to die before they try to expand on the whole reality thing."
No arguments from me, there is a ton of moderation that needs to be added to Facebook.
I think Zuck has a fantastic understanding of systems and where they're headed...and a negative understanding of human motivation and emotion (outside of their quantified metrics). That's why he's smart enough to understand that FB as a platform has a limited lifespan and to get WA and Insta under his belt when they threatened him, and to know that he needs to come up with something else if he wants to continue to accrue wealth and influence. But at the same time, I think his Achilles' Heel is people acting like the irrational apes we are: If you push someone to hate you enough, they will absolutely cut off their nose to spite you, and this works at the cultural level as well. FB as a brand is culturally 'out' now.
Or, as a kid who played Civ online at the same time he did, I'd describe him as somebody who could win every game of Civ through bug exploits and memorizing the mechanics, but is such a dick about it nobody wants to play with him again and that confuses him.
"If you build it, they will come." Only if they don't hate you, and Zuck isn't doing well in the court of public opinion.
The difference is Instagram and WhatsApp were products that had real product value before Zuck acquired them.
Zuck has to build a v1 product from scratch with the Metaverse. When's the last time FB has truly built a revolutionary v1 product? It's not really in their DNA anymore. I'm not saying they can't do it, but I wouldn't point to IG and WhatsApp as examples of why Zuck can pull it off.
Facebook Chat is basically a messaging business on its own. Given that Google has tried and failed to get into this space COUNTLESS times over the years, I'd call that a pretty solid new product offering from them.
Facebook has also innovated significantly in adtech afaik
I always say that if you're interested in the Metaverse, I have many acres of land in Second Life for sale, and as many Linden Dollars as you'd like.
This whole Metaverse thing reminds me of when IBM purchased 12 islands and opened a virtual office in Second Life. Of course, as was tradition at the time, someone inevitably showed up with a flying gentlemen's sausage. Eventually IBM decided the whole thing was too costly and abandoned the project.
The lesson here is that when IBM gets involved, that's probably the top.
There's a difference in Second Life and the whole "metaverse" just as there is a difference between the time and tech then and now.
Not every tech is going to be successful at every time. The same solution can fail once and succeed some other time when there's a change in the market and/or the underlying technology.
There's a much larger number of human beings on the internet now. And they are not just on the internet, but they actively use it for a large amount of time. That's the chance in market right now and what will drive the adoption of metaverse soon.
The thing that we should focus on right now is whether we want a metaverse owned by Facebook or something that is defined by open protocols.
> Look at Instagram and Whatsapp, perfectly timed investments.
What do you mean perfectly timed? If you mean that those platforms shot up in usage/revenue/whatever-metric after their purchase, couldn't that be heavily influenced by the purchase? Neither of those were some small little platform with a groundbreaking new feature before that. Everyone I knew (in highschool at the time) had gotten sick of their parents all joining Facebook and making it uncool, so they moved to Instagram before the purchase.
All that Zuck did was notice the platform all the kids are migrating to and bought it to keep those users. It isn't exactly "predicting future trends." They tried to do it again when everyone's parents joined Instagram so the kids moved to Snapchat, but thankfully that deal didn't go through
"All that Zuck did was notice the platform all the kids are migrating to and bought it to keep those users. It isn't exactly "predicting future trends." They tried to do it again when everyone's parents joined Instagram so the kids moved to Snapchat, but thankfully that deal didn't go through"
I would argue this is exactly what predicting future trends is. See which way the tide is going and make the necessary investments to ride it.
...which everybody does. There is nothing special about that particular smart person's ability to predict the future. Appeals to authority based on selectively chosen past performance... let's see how this ages 10 years from now.
> I would argue this is exactly what predicting future trends is.
It's recognizing current and predicting extremely short-term future trends that lots of other people recognized but didn't have the funds to do exploit in the same way.
I think there's a pretty big difference between buying a rapidly-growing platform and... whatever the hell was shown off in that vaporware announcement video
Buying companies that already have millions of users is different from trying to build a new thing yourself. Many. Of their internally built services and products have failed. Remember the android launcher?
Very much so, but while that is true, one shouldn't overlook the base fact that they did build Facebook themselves which was a very new thing and is now one of the largest tech companies in the world. I'm sure there will be hundreds of small bets and failures with the metaverse concept but I do think that eventually its going to happen.
Hot take but I think you are incredibly wrong. Remember that Today show clip from the 90's where they laugh off this new Internet thing? That's you. Ignorance.
I used to think this but Ben Thompson changed my mind.
This meta verse thing really could be the way we work remotely soon. It works as a working space. It works for companies, it could create good work environments, and companies can afford expensive hardware to get people to work more effecively.
Think of the metaverse as a more advanced slack+zoom, not as a Minecraft/Roblox alternative.
Joking aside, I've stopped using bluetooth in any vehicle that is not mine (actually using a rental this moment since my car is being worked on right now). Pretty much all rental cars have been built in the past 3 years, and for the most part they all have a USB for Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. So much easier to just use a cable and not hope the wireless connection stays working.
Though the cable itself isn't reliable sometimes and will disconnect itself/pause audio upon reconnection. Maybe good ol' FM and CDs are the way to go.
doesn't android auto also depend on BT? not clear to me why, but I believe it has to be on.
in any case, I find Android auto just trades one set of issues for another. voice control is kinda iffy for all but the most unambiguous commands. I also experience deadlocks at least once a week that require restarting the head unit, phone, or both. I've had this issue with two different phones in two different cars. not sure what the root cause is, but it is really distracting when navigation freezes halfway through a trip through an unfamiliar area.
I cannot speak on Android Auto specifically and what the requirements are currently (though I intend on migrating to an Android device in the near future) my '22 Subaru only allows Android Auto or Apple CarPlay to work via the cable, as you can link the phone over Bluetooth to the 'generic phone' controls, but not the phone-specific-display controls.
Though I haven't had issues in regards to the headunit failing just yet - I've had the phone lock up a few times, but I think that is in part due to the age of my iPhone (6s) and the lack of processing power/ram.
I have a project currently deploying a bunch Microsoft Teams Rooms at a client. It tries to create a similar experience in a physical space. People are confused as hell by it — it doesn’t work the way they’re used to / expecting, so they give up within a few minutes and just connect an HDMI cable to the main screen.
We weren’t even going to have HDMI as a fallback, but the executives demanded it because they weren't willing to spend 5 minutes every meeting dealing with the tech when the problem is that it didn’t work the way they wanted it to.
I cannot imagine my users in-office all donning headsets when many attendees in a meeting are just there to listen while working on other things. I personally like to take those kinds of “listening in” calls while doing work around the house. I’m not sticking my face in a VR headset for that.
I'm with you - the "listening in" calls are where it's at.
If we get to a point where we're "forced" to don headsets for meetings, it can't be long before dummy heads with realistic eyes (to fool the inevitable eye-tracking/iris scanning "presence" check) appear on the market.
A bit like those mouse jigglers they're sell to prevent your status moving to "away"
This sounds like my world and yes Execs can't seem to reconcile that their personal laptop cannot control a camera linked to an android app on the other side of the room. That's not what they asked for initially, they asked for the one-touch join the meeting crap that the salesman sold them on. Come hell or high water though once they get in the room they want their personal laptop to drive the meeting.
Yeah the tech is wonderful when there’s a good facilitator who knows how to use it effectively, but the problem is most meeting facilitators are not very good and have their own personal style that might not match up with any given product. Getting to the outcome of the meeting is far more important than using some fancy software, and for 90% of meetings you can get there with Zoom or Teams on a laptop.
What company in their right mind would allow a company with Facebook’s privacy record to have access to all of their most important IP? You would have to be insane.
Virtual spaces for work already exist and (almost) nobody uses them, so I don't know what a different name for the same thing is expected to accomplish.
Nobody uses them because they are clunky and unnatural. The leap of faith is that soon the technology will make these things seamless and natural. Only then will virtual spaces take off in a meaningful way.
There's plenty of companies that are distributed across countries. On my team I have teammates in Macedonia, Costa Rica, USA, and Germany. Even without Covid restrictions, that's going to be expensive and time consuming for us to meet in person.
Idling. The single most important thing I’ve lost since the pandemic started is the capability to overhear conversations.
I can no longer pick up on junior team members talking themselves into trouble and nip it in the bud, I only get exposed to that trouble by the time they’ve invested enough time into it that it becomes a much harder discussion.
When I go grab a cup of coffee I no longer overhear other teams talking about their projects, and ask them if they mind me sitting in to learn more about what they’re doing.
A lot of the organic social interactions that serve as a medium for knowledge diffusion are just gone.
> I can no longer pick up on junior team members talking themselves into trouble and nip it in the bud, I only get exposed to that trouble by the time they’ve invested enough time into it that it becomes a much harder discussion.
Perhaps the environment isn’t right for them to just ask for help?
> When I go grab a cup of coffee I no longer overhear other teams talking about their projects, and ask them if they mind me sitting in to learn more about what they’re doing.
Demo days?
> A lot of the organic social interactions that serve as a medium for knowledge diffusion are just gone.
Yesterday at my work they had a Christmas event where normally they hire a speaker to come to (normally in person, but now on a Teams call), and this year they brought in a lady who's a comedian and minor Canadian celebrity.
She got through the first 25 minutes or so of her routine (which was incredibly awkward -- standup does not work without a crowd, and it's just you telling jokes to your own empty living room) and eventually at one point her audio got stuck as she was saying the word "and" and it literally just kept looping her saying "and and and and and" over and over. They tried to troubleshoot it for about 10 minutes. Her video was still working, but every time they enabled her audio again it was just the looping "and and and and." I felt kinda bad for her. The whole thing felt like a plastic recreation of a real experience, and the technical difficulties at the end were emblematic of it all.
Well, IRC worked well enough as a chat app back the day as well. Besides large group chats, I didn't miss any features compared to Teams. And let's be honest, those group chats aren't that productive most of the time.
Now imagine Zuck being in charge. How could it not be a toxic wasteland?
John on Accidental Tech Podcast (http://atp.fm) has articulated some pretty solid criticisms.
Facebook has historically sucked at hardware. Why would that change?
Whereas other parasocial hosts attempt to protect their users, like MMOPRGs mitigating griefing and cheating, Facebook and Twitter amplify and profit from toxicity.
That is a common social media criticism, "amplify and profit from toxicity". I find the charge vaucous for several reasons.
1. "Give what the numbers say you want." or "Maximize profit * area of instance." are what they actually want. Even if it leads to emergent antisocial behavior it is set by results instead of a goal in itself.
2. The charge itself could be applied to any form of media, and yet there is a blatant double standard. If one accused three letter network of it you would get a response of "well duh"!
3. The implicit idea that negativity is a bad thing is outright dangerous, yet clearly promoted by the accusatory tone. Publishing government misconduct also promotes negativity and a publication may profit from it. So does speaking out against injustice. Crude and callous as it may sound, maybe some outright deserve the negativity.
> 2. The charge itself could be applied to any form of media
Correct. Zuck, Dorsey, and PageBrin just stole the old guard's lunch money. Just like broadcast toppled print, papyrus displaced clay cuniform.
It's an old story. The power elite always seize control of popular communications. Technological progress begets a changing of the guard.
> and yet there is a blatant double standard
By whom?
There is always a resentful cohort moaning about "kids these days".
There is always some cranks (like me) performatively rejecting the whole system. Yesterday's Kill Your Television is today's Delete Facebook.
While the masses keep plodding along, amusing themselves as able, self medicating, seeking some kind of respite from the never ending sting of the human condition. Moo.
What you describe is working in VR. But please stop conflating VR with metaverse. Although, I reckon, they will soon be synonyms if we continue like this.
For real. The last thing I want is to get disciplined or fired because the eye scanners in my work helmet told my boss that I looked at non-work related items for 3.7% of my work day and they only allow for 2.9% of the work day not visually engaged with my screen.
> Think of the metaverse as a more advanced slack+zoom, not as a Minecraft/Roblox alternative.
The next question is why? Followed by the heath issues problems. You’re supposed to look away from a screen every 10 mins for 10 seconds. How can I do that with the screen strapped to my face? And why we’re here, why would I go to my private space inside the metaverse to get away from people? Why not take the damn headset off? The whole idea is forced.
Magic Leap keeps getting GIANT amounts of funding despite not having dropped anything that people can buy (I think they took a DOWN round of $500M this year.)
Apple is investing significant amounts of capital on ARkit and AI/ML optimizations at the die level. Google has been dabbling in this space for years and years.
Second Life, the non-AR version of the metaverse, was hugely popular back in the day despite the tech at the time (i.e. having to carve time to use it on your computer). Pokemon GO (a Google bet) is still wildly popular.
With Facebook doubling-down in this space, yes, I am going to take this very seriously.
AR has a very clear and useful future. Metaverse is a gimmick to get people to work and live in a world where facebook, err Meta, can nickel and dime everything.
Let’s be clear here, the metaverse is useful for separating idiots from their money (see how much people are spending on fake land atm)
Hot take. You're comparing a video game company in the 90's vision and ability to deliver that vision to one of the largest companies in the world ability to deliver?
While you may not want the Metaverse, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "If it succeeds at all, it will be a testament to societies ability to bend to the whims of rich idiots.", plenty of people are happy to try new things. Facebook, the social network, is a estimate to massive amounts of people willing to get on board with an idea that is new, at least to them.
Frankly, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Seems more like because you don’t like Metaverse you don’t want it taken seriously. But it will be serious business.
> they should really try their hand at making a 2D world that doesn't lead people to want to die
The problem is, the "idiot's metrics", that is the engagement time as the ultimate metric of financial success, clearly show that negative content that is bad for your well-being favors them. They literally earn money from your suffering. How could you expect them to give up on that?
1000% this. "Metaverse" is just fancy re-branding of "Facebook but with VR". They want you to buy an Oculus and go to their internet property when and if people start interacting with the internet via VR, just like you buy a phone and go to their internet property. But it's just Facebook. It's going to be an app you run (or site you visit) on whatever hardware you happen to use to connect.
Meta has made a full announcement of vaporware, but the metaverse is specifically not Meta's property, nor do they get to define what the metaverse is/will become.
In that sense, I agree with you we should ignore the marketing, and I also think we should talk about the metaverse as we talk about the web, not as some rigid concept, but more a vague idea of a thing in VR.
> Metaverse as we talk about the web, not as some rigid concept, but more a vague idea of a thing in VR.
Ah I see so it's like a space, but on the web. Like some sort of a cyber...
Anyone talking about this "metaverse" like it is anything other than the normal internet we already have (which is equally amazing, btw) would have to have either created or fallen for some sort of marketing material.
My bet is that it becomes like what Clubhouse is now: a home for all kinds of whackjobs, hustle culture bros, "become wealthy" gurus and recruitment channels for MLMs and political extremists.
my thought exactly. We've had virtual worlds and communities as long as we've had the internet, and the idea of carrying "stuff" from one to the other never worked out.
So my bet is that there will never be The Metaverse just like there never was The Forum, The MMORPG, The MUD.
We may still have useful/fun stuff in specific VR worlds, of course.
But interestingly there is The Internet. But perhaps because that exists, there's no need for the interconnectedness promised by the other things because the internet already delivers it. Or perhaps the future holds multiple internets (especially with political regions doing their best to balkanize the legality of various uses of the internet)?
Interestingly we don't yet have a player coming it with a "we made it cheap and simple" solution.
Even Meta's Quest hardware is still not at that point, and the ecosystem is pretty small. I feel like we're not even at the "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad." stage yet.
There are some people that consider various aspects of the Oculus and Vive ecosystems to be the metaverse. Some people think The Sandbox and Decentrland are metaverses. There are others, and they're all here now. So, I guess it's a matter of opinion whether you believe any of these can be considered a metaverse.
Since we’re talking about Reddit, my take is that Roblox is Digg and Rec Room (which is VR-native and has much better tech even though it currently has lower user numbers) will end up being the “Reddit” of the space.
You may be right. I hated how ugly and dorky Reddit was compared to digg, but then digg self destructed and now I’m on Reddit. Recroom is like that, it’s annoying it has a terrible interface, it is a giant pain to get a group together to play, the audio is janky to get working right, and then when you finally get to your game it’s almost impossible to play on the same team.
Then after every match I have to spend time opening up some kind of gift that I have no use for. All the while 13 year old kids are being annoying yelling and whining. It’s a pretty rough experience right now.
I suggest giving the oculus rift 2 a try. It is the farthest thing from vaporware.
Besides most people use a loose definition of metaverse that includes things like gaming (Minecraft, roblox), social media, our phones, etc. which are all multi-billion dollar industries already.
And there's the "genius" of their rebrand. By the loose definition the metaverse already exists, so Facebook (a company focused on building software that helps connect people via the Internet) rebranded to Meta (a company focused on building software that helps connect people via... gaming, social media, phones, and... the Internet? -- all of which they were already doing). If what you're setting out to build already exists, you can't fail.
But Mark Zuckerberg doesn't use the loose definition, as I mentioned in another comment. He talks about quite a clear vision of a world in which VR/AR technologies have permeated society and are part of everyone's everyday lives. That vision doesn't exist yet, it's a long way from being realized, and yet people (like the commenter I originally responded to) keep referencing it as if it already exists, is successful, and important. And it's none of those three things yet.
> Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.
> The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together — and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world. It’s the next evolution in a long line of social technologies, and it’s ushering in a new chapter for our company.
> In the next decade, he thinks most people will be spending time in a fully immersive, 3D version of the internet that spans not just Meta’s hardware such as the Quest, but devices made by others. He’s pushing his teams to build technology that could one day let you show up in a virtual space as a full-bodied avatar, or appear as a hologram of yourself in the real-world living room of your friend who lives across the planet.
You can play semantics if you want. Meta, the company, have announced that they are building a thing. That thing is what I am talking about. It is vaporware right now. It it not a guaranteed win.
I have 1 Friend that has var goggles, and he does not like the chat funktion it just seems like its dead in the water unless var Prices come down hard..
Quest is under $300 and is fantastic for what you get and is completely self-contained and portable.
More importantly, Meta and Apple are both launching AR glasses next near (or maybe Q1 2023) and at that point AR will start to have its “iphone” moment where it starts our nice then suddenly everyone has one.
Yeah if you like ads and like all your movement being data mined. It also has the worst FoV of any headset on the market, which basically equals the amount of immersion you get out of it. You're better off with a smartphone cardboard thing or saving up for a real headset.
Personally I'm waiting for the next gen ones, the current ones are all still too terrible in price to performance.
Genuinely curious...are you old enough to remember Digg and what happened to it?
I don't mean that to be patronizing...but I remember being on Digg and Reddit being a weird alternative. And after a series of huge mistakes, almost overnight Reddit was flooded with users and Digg relegated to nothing.
It really opened my eyes to how quickly an empire built only on its users can disappear.
I’ve done posts before. As have others. The scope, popularity, and longevity of the fallen past top sites like Friendster, MySpace, Digg, Slashdot, Altavista, Excite. Or web builders like Geocities, Angelfire. Other social networks like Bebo, Hi5. Other messaging apps like Viber. Or older ones like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ.
Finally people stopped bringing up the old messengers. They had such tiny userbases. The comparisons don’t make sense.
As do all other older sites pale in comparison to absolute mammoths like Reddit now. Digg was so small compared to Reddit. It lasted for such a short period of time. People have finally stopped bringing up MySpace when touting Facebook/Instagram’s fall. MySpace peaked for at most two years 2005-2006. Before being a ghost land before the end of 2008. MySpace’s peak user base was peanuts. It also likely wasn’t very accurate in how they were able to report things. Their revenue and cash flow even smaller. The internet is broader with mobile and desktop usage. Cellular data and wifi. Global. Billions more users.
Comparing Digg to Reddit just doesn’t work. Reddit isn’t the site it was before 2010. During the digg exodus. The few years after that. And to nowadays.
———————-
Edit: for some actual numbers. Copy pasting from my other comment:
Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year
Digg peaked at 30M monthly users.
A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]:
“Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October” “Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion”
These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M.
But should those numbers be normalized for total numbers of internet users?
I'm honestly not sure but I think there's an argument for it. The internet was a smaller place as a whole before Digg's collapse. They can't have had users that didn't exist.
On the other hand, maybe turnover can be more rapid when a domain such as the internet itself is rapidly developing.
Just seems to me there's broader factors to consider than Digg per se or reddit per se.
My best argument to this that I would gladly be proven wrong so I don’t look silly being wrong. Is there any example in the past ~7 years of any major cultural use content sites that had precedence like Digg losing influence the way Digg and others did?
The only examples that I can think of are things like Yahoo Answers, Quora, Tumblr. Leaving Tumblr aside just to see if there’s any other examples, are there? We could expand it to 10 years possibly? I want to stick to the modern smartphone era.
I list many sites that rose and fell as well as apps like IM apps. How many of them had peaks or consistent growth for 10 years?
My thesis is to not look for people’s opinion on changes. Look at the actual numbers. Web giants once they get established in this modern era. Rarely get displaced like Digg did.
> On the other hand, maybe turnover can be more rapid when a domain such as the internet itself is rapidly developing.
Yes whether this is it or not as the reason is what I am saying based on what is happening
> Just seems to me there's broader factors to consider than Digg per se or reddit per se.
Yeah I didn’t intend to say I knew all the reasons why. Just that modern web giants can’t be compared to the web giants of the earlier web.
I agree there's few if any examples of more recent entities. I also am pretty unfamiliar with actual numbers of active users per se, though. Tumblr may be the closest, maybe Quora although I'm not sure even Quora compares to Reddit. Maybe Snapchat? Flickr? Probably not; I'm not sure about those for several reasons.
I think there might be some kind of memory bias in the sense that we're less likely to remember things that have receded into the background or even disappeared but I agree that as more users come on board because of network effects it's harder to let go of a service or to replace what it has to offer.
I think you're missing something important in this analysis: Awareness of the cycle and outside interference.
I'm one of the first people to bail when a platform or service becomes unusable and a new one becomes viable. I have zero loyalty: I started out in Usenet servers and with individual webpages and moved through to blogs/forums, then to Myspace and LiveJournal, and so on. (Including the Digg to Reddit migration).
This option is less available to me now because most new platforms are either bought out (Instagram) or require such high costs due to having to support multimedia bandwidth that there's nowhere for us to go. I'm not happy with the current platform options and I monitor them for meta-discussion fairly frequently and there is a portion of the Reddit and Twitter userbase that is ready to move IF something suitable comes along.
However, my desire for a new platform is directly at odds with the interests of the current companies and, unlike in the Myspace era, Zuck + the people running Reddit are aware of platform death and use their resources to keep their platforms 'alive' as long as they can. This is also why we see things like Instagram Reels and RPAN: The execs of social media companies know about platform death and manage for it. Think of Google's strategizing for the future versus Yahoo's: It's not that platform death can't happen, it's that they've been the ones sliding in that dagger so they want to defend against it.
It's like saying that calvary are irrelevant because somebody came up with anti-calvary tactics and strategies.
We're in this weird situation where those of us who like to explore new social frontiers and build new communities are only being given places to do so that either a.) Have strict social requirements already built in and that just kills our drive to see what happens if we put humans HERE and have them interact like THIS or b.) Are controlled by corporations who want to use that for their own benefit, and I'm NOT teaching, encouraging, or leading any more people to things I think will hurt or exploit them.
I believe you and some other HNers are exceptions to the vast norms of how people operate.
I didn’t include the bit in my other comment where Discord and Reddit do ban major communities. So portions of those userbases are forced to at least partially leave. We have seen what that has done to both platforms. Nothing.
Yes platform death can still happen of course. There are many reasons they haven’t happened. Many reasons they did in the Digg days. Not all of the platforms have done equivalent “anti-cavalry” tactics the way some have. Still there is at most one example of a platform death in the past decade. Versus so many before that.
My entire point was to not use the platform deaths of the 00s as a reasonable direct retort to the shakiness of current web giant platforms. Especially when it includes things like wondering if others remember internet history. As if people who remember Digg’s fall are wise to something.
—
Totally agree with your general vibe, sentiment, and your final paragraph.
> I believe you and some other HNers are exceptions to the vast norms of how people operate.
Absolutely, but in the same way that moderators and admins are also outside the norm but still have a substantial impact on how/if communities grow and develop (provided a community has them). Communities in general rely on a certain percentage of people in them doing community-maintenance work, and at least some of it needs to be done due to love of the community. We're weird, but we're also the people who ran around showing a bunch of people Google in 1998, or who were encouraging people to switch from MySpace to Facebook in the 00s. We're the ones who articulate to the normal people why they should switch platforms, where they should go, and why the new place will solve the problems. Building a platform without us is difficult, and so is maintaining one if you're relying on community spaces.
I definitely think you're right that the situation is more complex than it was, but I think you're overselling the differences. Things are bigger so they take longer now, but that's the main difference. That and the financial interests involved; if anything is constraining platform death I would say it's that platform death costs MONEY now.
> My entire point was to not use the platform deaths of the 00s as a reasonable direct retort to the shakiness of current web giant platforms. Especially when it includes things like wondering if others remember internet history. As if people who remember Digg’s fall are wise to something.
Fair enough. I tend to err on the other side because so much of the Web is built to strip information of context and I adore digital history; there are so many things discussed where anything more than 5 years ago might as well have not happened. Still, there can definitely be an undertone of 'stfu noob' to stuff sometimes that is offputting.
In my opinion reddit banning toxic communities has helped cement their dominance. I've tried to jump ship to sites like Voat early on in their life cycle, but whenever reddit banned racist / toxic communities, the people from those communities would jump ship to the most viable alternative. This caused the new site to take on the character of the banned communities. Voat got to the point where nearly every thread had someone lobbing derogatory terms at jews / black people.
I think if a new site is to succeed, it needs to have a heavy hand with moderation.
It has, but I think that's on accident on Reddit's part. So far, pretty much everywhere they've banned has been out of the Overton Window enough that the results are what you see. Voat, Saidit, etc. There has been one semi-successful small alternative in Ovarit (in that it's a stable community that slowly gains people), but the radfems set up an invite system + a lot of their beliefs are less 'crazy' + their ideology encourages them to discuss 'normie' things with each other.
There is one other way a new site could succeed, I think: A Reddit competitor with decent search and archive abilities, better mobile/app UX, and (here's the killer) a complete ban on political discussion and brand accounts. Set up a place for people to have groups for hobbies without having to prove their vaxx status (or lack thereof) or whether they like trans people enough. People (regardless of their political persuasion) need breaks, rest, hobby, and connection.
Not sure why Viber is on your list of fallen messaging apps. In the past few years I've seen more and more "X has joined Viber. Say hi!" notifications about my contacts (based in the US, which if anything makes me think it's growing).
(Disclaimer: I used to work at Reddit but left in 2018)
While I think you're absolutely right, I think Digg made a number of other missteps with the Digg v4 launch that Reddit did not make. In particular, they shut down the old Digg site to reuse the servers for the new one, a mistake that Reddit was particularly careful not to make.
Digg was also already on the way down before their failed launch, and before the exodus to Reddit - a condition that doesn't apply to Reddit today. People have been making Digg comparisons about Reddit before I worked there, and now long after I've left. I don't think the 2 are comparable.
Reddit is on the way down. They may be gaining users, but the platform is a lot less interesting. The quality of content is way down, the spam and clickbait way up, and censorship by dictatorial moderators is out of control. Its a big echo chamber now.
You are seeing a huge demand for more free speech platforms. Youtube is outofcontrol, Google is editing search, twitter is peering over the abyss now that Jack is gone and Reddit is right along them. It may take a while, but in a few years they are going to face steep competition. It may very well be an open source decentralized project like Mastodon.
Reddit was always a feudal system, from the moment they introduced subreddits. Simply being the first to land-grab a name makes you the king. Your chosen loyalists become moderators, and the serfs farm content for you.
I don’t particularly buy this idea since Mastodon has already existed for several years - and in that time, all the major social media players have only increased their market share.
As far as free speech platforms go you have things like Gab, Voat, etc which prioritize free speech in name. While that may be commendable as a value, the core audience they attract in the beginning is inevitably too extreme for the platform to go mainstream.
By the time Reddit replaced Digg, Digg was already losing users routinely. I don’t think any of the current social media players are in that position just yet.
Similar to my response to the OP, the comparisons don’t work because IRC as a whole, no less one network, are not empires. Reddit did a god awful redesign. Then piled on forcing their official mobile app usage by limiting the site more and more. Unlike the small geeky IRC world, none of this did anything to curb Reddit popularity. While it’s entirely possibly an equivalent move in IRC or some other niche geeky place would have an exodus or major consequences.
Reddit has banned a number of subreddits too. With hundreds of thousands of active members. None of this curbs its popularity. And not everything they ban is problematic like inappropriate non consensual sexual posts or aggressive bigotry.
Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year
Digg peaked at 30M monthly users.
A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]:
“Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October”
“Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion”
These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M.
My best argument to this that I would gladly be proven wrong so I don’t look silly being wrong. Is there any example in the past ~7 years, even ~10 years of any major cultural user content sites that had precedence like Digg, losing influence the way Digg and other contemporaries did?
The only examples that I can think of is Tumblr.
If there’s so many examples before 10 years ago. And maybe 1 example in recent times. Your point can still stand. However it also doesn’t mean much when the resilience of web giants are totally different between the Digg Web time and after that
the freenode irc network disappeared overnight, but everyone just updated their links to point at libera.chat instead, which has almost all of the same projects, active users, etc.
It was essentially just an infrastructure change, which is the nice thing about open protocols and server implementations. Libera has 40k users and over 1000 foss projects that were on freenode.
the freenode userbase and community is alive and well, just under a new link
I was a Freenode user for a decade, many more IRC networks in the preceding decade, since 1999 or so.
I enjoy chatting with my friends and participating in projects realtime on IRC.
I left freenode when all the bitcoin/monero related projects moved to Libera.
Update your links, drop your nick registrations on the old network, register on the new - keep on trucking.
Reddit's become mainstream, it's quoted by serious news outlets, joked around on Last Week Tonight (and other politic joke shows), and I'd say it's as likely to disappear as Facebook. Which is to say, surely but very slowly.
Apart from the bit where all of the main subreddits (and therefore the front page) are controlled by completely unvetted, unpaid moderators, who tend to be Extremely Online People.
I don't understand how Facebook are continuously attacked by politicians for not moderating content well enough when they have towers full of paid moderators, while Reddit continues unaffected.
> Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse
Does anyone actually care about the metaverse? Everyone I know thinks it's some kind of joke. It seems like Silicon Valley nonsense.
I'd have agreed with you 10 years ago when the average Redditor was arguably smarter than your typical social media user and each subreddit's alliances were clear. These days I completely disagree and feel Reddit is more dangerous than other forms of social media.
The average Redditor still believes that they're more intelligent and believes that they're seeing balanced information (because how can upvotes and downvotes lie?), while being blind to all of the astroturfing and agendas placed by the people who run subreddits.
Reddit was never and has never been about balanced information, I think the entire purpose of the site was never balanced information it was what was most popular with a particular subs hive mind, 10 years ago we just had different echo chambers.
The thing that changed was that new generations of users started to use the site, younger millennials and gen z. And their echo chambers differ from the previous generation of reddit users echo chambers and are broadly incompatible because echo chambers usually edge to the extremes on both sides.
> Does anyone actually care about the metaverse? Everyone I know thinks it's some kind of joke. It seems like Silicon Valley nonsense.
I care about VR as a medium and I'm worried that another round of hype will drag the whole of VR/XR down with it when it slumps again.
Still. We've been through this cycle before and it's nice to see some more investment. Hopefully it will leave some residual benefit that outweighs the damage caused by the gold rush.
It's worse this time as the metaverse hype has thrown crypto into the mix so it's not just an investor gold rush - it's an crypto one too.
Don't give them ideas. Content moderation in this form basically dumped down content to the most digestible level and that is some partisan whack because people are already addicted to being outraged. Most affected are somehow news and political subs as well as national subs. You will find nothing interesting there because you don't learn about the respective cultures, you learn about typical redditors.
Any government interference has without exception been pretty bad in my opinion. You won't find quality representatives that could develop protection for online platforms anymore. Don't know why statecraft has become so much more incompetent.
> Anecdotally, a VERY LARGE percentage of my Google searches end in “site:reddit.com” these days.
Compared to platforms like Discord they have the advantage that their content is actually discoverable by search engines. I hate the push to Discord since that basically makes you invisible. I get that it is convenient, but it has a lot of negative side effects that aren't obvious at first.
And in addition even if you're in the server and find what you're looking for, it's very hard to concentrate all the responses to a specific post, so you might find the question but need to scroll for ages to see if someone answered.
Not that either of these issues deterred people from using IRC.
There are solutions to problems hidden in these chats that will never be found. Personally, I've been using Discord as a powerful search engine. Luckily, the search functionality works well enough to where I can often find what I'm looking for. But this might only be a short term solution to an issue that needs an archive.
> I hate the push to Discord since that basically makes you invisible.
That can also be a feature going forward given today's climate. Many people have lost jobs or not been hired after prospective employers did a simple Google search.
I'm so split on Reddit. While I agree with most of what you said the decline in quality of both content and comments, and the extreme moderation which has occurred over the last 4-5 years would really worry me if I was an investor. Presumably as a public company they would come under even more scrutiny for edgy content and feel the need to moderate content even more. And in general as the size of a social site's user base increases, the quality of the content drops as content starts to reflect the common denominator of its users.
I also feel like all social media the there are very toxic aspects to Reddit. I used to be very active on there, but after receiving constant abuse and very few constructive replies I now rarely participate in discussions there. Again with the company going public like Facebook and Twitter, Reddit could come under more scrutiny for this.
Assuming you buy for a fair valuation I don't think it's a bad investment per say, but I think there are a lot of risks there. I find myself wishing for an alternative to Reddit a lot these days because I really miss the high quality discussions I used to have there 10 or so years ago.
I agree with you about the abuse aspect. That's one thing this could change. I would for example change the voting system to not allow a negative score. It doesn't happen often, but it still doesn't feel good that people disagree and not only do they not upvote, but they downvote until you get negative score.
In my opinion if you disagree don't upvote, or at least downvote until 0. So people know the overall sentiment is negative, but there's not need to show how negative it is. If it's so bad to be offesive or innacurate, then report it. But downvoting until it's negative feels really overkill and feels like at the moment everyone not only disagrees, but hates you.
The constructive replies you talk about depends on the subreddit. There are subreddits that are literally lifesavers. For example subreddits to overcome emotional abuse and abusive relationships, you'll find support there that is simply amazing and not abusive at all. Or subreddits about certain niches that people are passionate about.
Unfortunately toxic people are sadistic and get a kick out of abusing people, so it's bound to happen. Best way is to report it, so the moderators either warn the person or ban them.
Wouldn't that present the same issues that removing the "dislike" counter on YouTube videos did?
For example, that video by The Verge where that guy builds a PC in the stupidest way - it's got thousands of likes for some reason but 10s of thousands of dislikes because it's not the way you should build a PC
Now the dislike counter is gone, those who see the video think "oh this has thousands of likes. It must be good".
Downvoting does attract idiots and pile-ons, but it does serve a purpose as a a lose indicator of content/comment quality
Based on previous IPOs of internet giants I think Reddit is a good bet but obviously lots of dynamics about the inner workings of cash flow etc that a layperson is only guessing about.
One area that seems inevitably would have to change is Reddit’s linking to pirated video clips. I’m sure the clips won’t go away but would be altered in a way so that reddit has deals with copyright owners and unskippable ads are played.
Ultimately all these media funded platforms under-weight advertising to begin with to build a user-base so become worse to use once established.
I would want to take a closer look at their engagement metrics. Of course they will officially show rising engagement, but in what form? Because for niche subs the engagement (active users) is reducing in many subs. People run to discord mostly, which is only partially better, but doesn't suffer power mods yet.
Rising engagement could also come from content that got linked and from people just visiting the page.
Buying votes for reddit is allegedly quite cheap as well.
I have less rosy predictions about what this IPO will do. I doubt it will fund better search. In fact, I’m thinking it will push it more into the ‘relevancy’ territory where you get a slurry of slightly related results, incoherent reco sys content curation, and deviation from vote and time decay ranking in favor of inscrutable algorithmic content feed ordering. All these things will make Reddit more successful from a mass market perspective.
While I think better search would be great for users, I'm convinced Reddit doesn't actually want better search.
Good search means I can easily find an old post with the answer to my questions. Bad search means I end up going to a subreddit and posting the same question that's been asked 15 times. Even if it's removed by the mods, it'll likely get one or two comments and votes before it does.
What really gets me is people who don't seem to understand how to search for information online. If you go to something like /r/wearethemusicmakers (a sub for music making, mostly based around computers and software) you'll see people asking questions like "what is an audio interface and why do I need one?"
You can type that question into google verbatim and find dozens of high production value Youtube videos explaining exactly what an audio interface is. Yet a shocking number of people opt to type this question into Reddit and then wait 8 hours for other users to post answers.
Are people really this incompetent at finding information online nowadays?
> Are people really this incompetent at finding information online nowadays?
I've thought for a bit about the question, and I don't think so.
Rather I think people don't understand how forums work, these questions are often from first-time posters or people that frequent the site very rarely, and still haven't learned asking simple questions a Google or forum search away is bad etiquette, makes for bad reading and will annoy the heck out of the regulars.
In their newbie eyes, the forum is the place where you ask your questions, provided they are relevant, but without considering how inane or oft-repeated they are.
> You can type that question into google verbatim and find dozens of high production value Youtube videos explaining exactly what an audio interface is.
Watching video is inefficient, I can read much quicker. I would search forums (such as Reddit) for an answer, but if I did not find one, I would post a question before I searched YouTube.
YouTube also has annoying product plug ins and ads and I have no idea what people are selling. I assume there is a lower proportion of advertisers to honest people just answering questions on YouTube, although I believe this has changed now due to the popularity of Reddit.
Not incompetent, they just don't think of the Internet as a place to get information. Most people, from what I observed, view Internet as a place to buy stuff, be entertained, and perhaps to talk to people.
The idea that you could get first-hand information for free, instead of relying on second-hand information from others, simply does not enter the picture for them.
On the other hand, asking that question would open very useful discussion, and create a place for clear helpful introduction.
The contextual information you can get to introduce you to a topic is where Reddit really shines. Some subs do this with a wiki, but the redesign tends to hide it.
The only problem is trying to have that question asked few enough times that people don't get tired of answering.
Problem with Reddit is being very replaceable. People don't want to lose their facebook/instagram/linkedin page because it has their content and also personal connections. Profiles on Reddit are more like Digg / Slashdot / Kuro5hin - few care about losing their post history and connections so when a competing site comes in with better features (fewer ads / different site-wide moderation approach / not looking so awful by default ) people will just move there.
Nope, any competitor just becomes a dumping ground for all the nasty shit that reddit has banned. If it were that simple, it would've been done by now, it certainly has been tried multiple times.
> Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session.
But for how long I wonder. Those niche communities continue to use Reddit because they can circumvent the dark-patterns and ads usually with a custom client.
And those clients depend upon reddit API. We've seen in the past that once the community-focused Internet platforms get large, Especially when they go public then the API restrictions are soon to follow as advertiser's interest becomes primary and the majority users don't care as they're not in for those niche communities.
Agreed, one sub in particular is /r/lawncare. There is a very helpful post for beginners that puts together the whole process from spring through fall. This is the kind of non-paid for content shill that makes niche communities really interesting.
You are correct in that it's not based on an explicit social graph (i.e. who I tag as my "friend"), but it is based on an implicit social graph (i.e. who I like watching/listening to).
> Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session.
Twitter really depends on who you follow. I've no idea how I got to the point where I have an interesting feed and attempts to follow the same process on Instagram have so far failed.
There is some, but it is mostly not the popular content or anything that trends. It is people orientated, so for me it is mostly a curated list of links.
I feel like there's some of the most foul...obnoxious...people on Reddit...but at least they're not the same people in FB groups... which is to say they're my obnoxious sycophant people.
In other words...social media can really showcase the best/worst of people but Reddit kinda at least can give some intellectual content and discussion. I also kinda just 'get' the snark/culture of reddit as it were, and interestingly enough it doesn't matter my political persuasion as there's enough different corners of reddit to find where I fit in. People are also more willing to share their real thoughts when there's some measure of anonymity whether that's good or bad, who knows.
Reddit + HN is basically my source of news/new thoughts. Best part of reddit is that topics are generally single groups, where there's like 5 yard sale groups on FB JUST for my city in a county with 45k people in rural utah, on FB nothing's stopping there being 2 or 200 SLC groups, but on reddit - everyone just would go to the one w/ the most subscribers/content/activity....
FB is nothing but memes or people trying to sell something. Of course Reddit going public will probably make it incentivized to turn more of a profit and go that way as well.
My only real gripe w/ Reddit is that I can't use the login via Relay on Android because something's jacked w/ my main account... if I go to user/prefs I get an error after a long wait...and it's been reported for a few months and no fix...
Everything you described makes this public offering a potential bad thing. Whats going to happen when activist investors want a certain subreddit/post removed? What about ad companies not liking some content/subreddit? Moderation is going to get very strict. The relative anonymity of reddit may disappear. We have already seen the establishment supposedly co-opt the big subreddits like /r/politics. Now they will focus on snuffing out all the little guys on the platform. Everything you listed as a positive may disappear over time.
HN might become what Reddit is now. On the flip side the difficulty of removing posts here/simple upvote system/other limiting features may prevent that from ever happening. There have been attempts to clone Reddit, all have been terrible. Its clear that to create an equivalent, its going to take more than a weekend project.
Nothing specific on Reddit, but I'd like to point out that when you go long on a stock, you should at least try to possess some specific knowledge that most people don't have about that company.
Reddit might be great; but if everyone knows about it, then the price is going to reflect that already.
> Reddit might be great; but if everyone knows about it, then the price is going to reflect that already.
I think that's the wrong way to look at stocks. What you're describing goes along with the common belief that all known information is already "priced in". This is silly.
The price of a stock reflects the consensus/average estimation of the worth of the company. Your personal assessment is going to depend on what you personally believe in, but you could be holding a minority viewpoint. If 95% of investors believe that a company will have 10B in revenue in 5 years, but you interpret the facts differently and believe (correctly) that the company will make 50B in 5 years, then even though you are basing your estimation on the same facts as everyone else, if the majority interprets the facts incorrectly, then the information is not "priced in". As the company proves itself successful, the consensus estimate will shift. People will reassess their belief that certain outcomes are more or less likely. What matters isn't necessarily having information that other investors don't have, it's interpreting that information better than others, and making more accurate inferences.
When it comes to reddit, more specifically, you probably don't have access to any more information than every analyst on wall street, but there's a key difference, which is that most of these people probably have never used reddit, and have a very limited understanding of how it works or its potential. So, in some ways, your understanding of the functioning of reddit, as a reddit user, could actually give you an edge.
> but there's a key difference, which is that most of these people probably have never used reddit, and have a very limited understanding of how it works or its potential.
I love reddit as a user. But, I would not have considered investing in them since it seems like they've struggled to make money... but according to the article, Q2 ad revenue was $100 million (3x YoY).
> An even wilder bet: Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse (as a news outlet of sorts, on steroids) and even potentially minimize the need for Google Search.
Doing so will first require the Reddit team to develop a competent search engine. Searching Google or DDG with site:reddit.com is far better than native Reddit search for topics. The Camas Reddit search is what you need for a power search to find that one post that you swear you've read five years ago. Neither use case is well-served by the current search implementation on Reddit itself.
Whenever I need to query the hive mind I just search directly on Reddit now, after a long period of searching in google with the keyword "reddit" included.
If I am querying something technical for work or hobby development I use the HN Algolia search.
Twitter is the only other social network I keep an account on, but barely ever visit because of the firehose of noise despite having a painstakingly selected list of accounts followed. E.g. lots of journalists doing great work, but also posting a lot of personal life updates that are not relevant to me.
I had a Reddit account for five years but never logged in. Until about six months ago when I rediscovered Reddit. I now spend more time on Reddit than the rest of the internet combined. I have a personal account and a work account. For work stuff, it's catching up with Stackoverflow in my technical discussions. For personal stuff, I don't even know of a comparable site. I am a small BI consultancy and I would definitely spend ad money on Reddit once they get their shit together.
I would certainly bet on them going up in the short term. However, going public carries more scrutiny, and that means their two existing problems will be catapulted into the public eye at some point, just as they have been for Facebook:
- political extremism
- very flimsy segregation of NSFW material (and usernames are basically not censored)
I doubt they would be dumb enough to do a Tumblr, but it can't be ruled out entirely.
> Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session.
For now. Just watch what happens to it under constant pressure from Wall Street to grow and grow and grow...
Yeah Reddit’s different because it’s not public. Fuck this news is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard. The only thing I could imagine worse is if Wikipedia went public or got bought by saudi Arabian investors
I rarely Google without using site at first, reddit, SO/exchange, and two French forums (teaching related queries). Anything else from Google /search engine is garbage.
>> Anecdotally, a VERY LARGE percentage of my Google searches end in “site:reddit.com” these days.
That seems strange to me. Most of my search results don't lead there. This seems like something worth investigating on your part. Maybe google knows you like reddit, tend to follow links there, and hence puts them higher in your search rankings? Is that a thing with google? I think it may be based on my own past experience too.
I think you misunderstand, OP is purposefully adding "site:reddit.com" to their search query, to only get results from Reddit. Google isn't adding it for them.
I do this sometimes too, because it's one of the ways to get actual opinions on something, and not just worthless blog spam.
OP is adding `site:reddit.com` to tell Google to find results from reddit instead of elsewhere. If their workflow is like mine, it goes 1. enter search, 2. get frustrated with spammy / marketing / ad results, 3. limit to reddit, 4. find thoughtful human with genuine answer / feedback.
If Reddit were higher in their search rankings, they wouldn't need to add site:reddit.com to their search words.
I also find searching Reddit, especially for introductory advice, to be very commonly useful. Since Reddit's search sucks, I usually use duckduckgo or Google to search it.
I think it would be worth investigating on your part as well. Next time you do a Google search that will be heavily populated by blog spam and listicles, append “site:reddit.com” to instead get long user-rank-sorted discussions among actual human beings.
Reddit has been steadily going to shit. They became incredibly trigger happy censoring anything and anyone outside of the echo chamber there. I still visit it, but I am short on them.
The Reddit of 2006 where tutorials on generating HTML in Lisp rocket to the top of the homepage is long gone. I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is. Plus, some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize. However, my brain works very differently from other people's, so I could be wrong.
My personal last strands of hope for Reddit are - their API which is still available to public without hoops to jump through. The downvote button. And the usabillity of old.reddit. Some communities that are still well moderated and strikes a good balance between open to questions and not open to stupid questions.
Beyond that I stopped using mainstream reddit as a value source.
This is a moral conundrum. Yes, some of the smaller sub-reddits are good, but by participating, you legitimize the conflict/fakenews/horrorshow that is the main website. It's like saying you enjoy the trains running on time in Nazi Germany whilst ignoring the rest of what the regime is.
Is Snopes having a hard time with money? The article (on mobile) had two huge full-width ads that you had to scroll past, and a persistent banner ad at the bottom, and they're still asking for donations:
But the page isn't covered in user-hostile ads that rely on intensive surveillance and sharing your personal data with dozens of shady companies.
Edit: Your comment really bothers me. At no point did I suggest that websites should not ask their users for money. I was wondering about and criticizing their apparently heavy use of user-abusive ads, while still asking users directly for money. Usually on the Web we see one or the other but not both.
I sorry to disturb you. It was not my intent. I just disagree about the seriousness of the ads displayed in your example. An ad for Whisky and/or Walgreens(a pharmacy) don't seem too bad compared to other ads I have seen.
Snopes probably gets a lot of bandwidth (and probably attacks) just due to them being very mainstream.
Those smaller communities will realize (mostly too late) that they've built themselves on a platform that can't be trusted and one day will probably not be archivable.
It's really too bad that the StackExchange "OpenID" thing never went anywhere. Otherwise we'd get the same kind of "one login, many communities" benefits of Reddit without forcing everyone to use a centralized platform like Reddit (even if authentication is still centralized in OpenID).
It's not a moral conundrum, and reddit is nothing like a genocidal fascist government.
There are times when I argue that "apps" or sites must be thought of differently than the Internet itself, but this is not one of them. Reddit has no monopoly on hobby chat, or on tiktok garbage, or on local communities, or on news commentary. It is not the same kind of network-effect trap as, say, Facebook.
If ever someone asks me about reddit or if it's useful, I say to stay off any community greater than about 100-150k. Use it for discussing specific video games or hobbies, or on tightly moderated subs with focused discussion.
If any sub has posts from "karma farmers", accounts with super high karma like 500k or more, then it's probably a place worth being suspicious of from either a utility OR an astroturfing standpoint. Lots of agenda-pushing.
Are you sure you don't want to veer into /r/popular.
/r/Askwomen: What are 100% effective ways at turning you on?
/r/Teenagers: Every1 who wears their PJs to bed, I'll tell you your favourite band.
/r/ <<literally every subreddit>>: I HAVE A CAT, NAME IT FOR ME.
/r/NoStupidQuestions: If a woman shakes my hand is that code for sex?
/r/Askmen: What's your one perfect way to get a girlfriend?
/r/Pics: Here's 10,000 photos of people being gross on airplanes, what's something passive aggressive that I can do instead of just asking them to stop?
/r/Antiwork: I donated my heart to my boss and he fired me
/r/TooAfraidtoask: How to get girlfriend????
/r/explainlikeimfive: Do girls get horny too? how?
I use reddit all the time and look at none of these things. Despite some obnoxious or downright terrible subs, it's still a useful or entertaining site for folks of many interests.
There’s a lot of kids and teens on Reddit. I’m glad I was a teen on the Internet in the walled garden of AOL, so all the dumb and hormone-driven things I said there are probably lost on a hard drive in a landfill somewhere.
I'm glad to be part of the pre-internet generation where the limit to our cringe is a fleeting feeling of embarrassment while hazily remembering it, rather than having it played back in high definition at some inopportune moment.
I think as adults we should be able to recognize that we all went through this and look at it with a little compassion and understanding instead of holding it up for ridicule. As you say, people will feel embarrassed about it enough in the future.
/r/pics: Blatant political grandstanding mixed in with images meant to be evocative and establish mental association. Here's a smiling photo of Obama. Remember Obama? Picture of rednecks in pickup trucks with Trump flags, next to a photo of Taliban in trucks with flags.
/r/politics: wanton hyperbole, plain and simple.
"Screenshots of Tweets" Subreddits
/r/Antiwork: Literally every problem, shortcoming, or thing you don't like is ultimately because of capitalism.
/r/LateStageCapitalism: Same as above, but we need at least two subreddits about this to really hammer the point home.
/r/WhitePeopleTwitter: Leftist hot-takes du jour, as well as well-trodden reposts.
/r/BlackPeopleTwitter: Leftist hot-takes but posted by 'verified' reddit users.
/r/MurderedByWords: Tomi Lahren and Strawmen being mocked via tweet
/r/MurderedByAOC: Pretty much any AOC tweet posted by u/IrlOurPresident
/r/AOC: Just in case you haven't seen u/IrlOurPresident's post on the front page yet.
The new largest share holders will likely coerce the removal of all three along with any other vestigial remnant that is enjoyable and is still maintained in the name of eventually maximizing their profits. For me the biggest loss will probably be when the board of directors demand that the RSS feeds stop working.
Tencent was/is big on funding Reddit. Around the time they soaked $150m, privacy policy has changed, some functionalities were added that do not work on old.reddit w/o JS, www.reddit started resembling other social media sites and the site became more profit-oriented and - for me - user-hostile.
Reddit Sync is amazing and so is Apollo. The official app feels too much like tiktok. But Reddit doesn't get any ad revenue from the third party apps, so I wonder if they're really going to last that long.
Anyone on an iOS device using Reddit that doesn't have this application is missing out.
I've said it before, but old.reddit.com and Apollo are the only methods I use to browse the site. If either dies or the API becomes private/non-existent then I'm out.
I just checked: the API does not (seem to) allow to retrieve items by date. Which means that a major fault of the site cannot be fixed through the API: reading the post history through random access, e.g. the posts of a specific date in a section.
(Although, one could probably harvest through the API an index of "fullnames" (IDs) and associate them to their dates or use them directly for random access in the queries - "list starting with the newest, fill DB of IDs and give me the last; list from that last, fill DB of IDs and give me the new last; loop until end". Not really the most practical way to use a repository.)
> downvote
The worst attack against civilization after - (I can't think of anything) - is an encouragement to vote according to "how does that make you feel".
if facebook can maintain mbasic, then reddit can maintain old. the onboarding funnel is towards new reddit anyway, old is mature and _appears_ stable, and most folks new to the platform will use their official app.
i can see the API becoming more restrictive in the coming years, like Facebook and Twitter’s before it.
The fabricated issues with old are starting to appear, though.
Slow reddit now supports markdown code blocks with 3 `’s instead of 4 spaces, which gets rendered as normal inline-text on old.
Using the editor to insert links with _ in them on slow, will escape the underscores (…/this_is/ => …/this\_is/), breaking the links for users of the fast version.
The worst part (for me) is, that I actually like the new reddit. In compact mode it’s cleaner than old while not wasting any space compared to old. But sadly their performance targets were something like "Uh, I guess pages should probably load in under 500ms" which is in no way acceptable for me.
I don’t care much about mobile, and even if I didn’t have a gif-animation-blocker extension installed, it wouldn’t be that much of an issue as they barely get used in the subreddits I read in ;)
I honestly don't know how people use new Reddit. On my 2017 laptop with a quadcore i7, SSD, and 16GB RAM, using Ubuntu 16.04 and either Chrome or Firefox, and with a 100Mb/s fiber connection, it just loads glacially slow and causes my fans to come on at full speed. And that's just with a single tab - with Reddit I usually end up scrolling through and opening quite a few tabs.
If they kill off old Reddit, there's no way I'll be able to tolerate using the site. Surely I'm not alone in this, or perhaps 99% of the traffic is mobile users on recent phones?
I personally wouldn't invest in Reddit, those with a memory longer than a few weeks will note that they go from one self-induced crisis to the next.
Their upper management is directionless and the result of battlefield promotions and they've demonstrated time and time again that they have no vision for the service.
Reddit exists in the same way that digg and slashdot before it has: it's the incumbent, the default choice. It could lose it all in a year and no one would be surprised - because it's happened multiple times already and the userbase is already highly cynical.
That wasn't helped by making the site unusable on mobile; a change made to entice (read: force) users to the more lucrative app. However this merely led people to alternatives such as Apollo, which remove the ads, the reddit value-generating nonsense and introduces useful features such as the ability to download video content. Perhaps counter-intuitively these kinds of apps are likely to keep users on reddit. However with an IPO I would not be surprised to see Reddit pull 'an Instagram' and invest efforts in preventing 3rd party apps from functioning correctly.
I recently noticed the same posts popping up and they contained the exact same comments but instead of the comment saying 1month old it would say like 3 hours. I asked and some suggested it is karma farmers and they use the same posts and same comments that generated a lot of likes in the past to get karma and once they have a lot of karma their posts are more likely to hit the front page. I wish I could block posts from reappearing but they just slap a new title and don’t show a proper thumbnail and trick users to watch it again.
Last time I read /r/funny for a period I noticed a wave of "look at what funny thing I did with these Coke bottles" posts that were so obviously part of a marketing campaign that surely reddit admins noticed it too.
I don't think they would allow that if they weren't in on it. In that case they may have even helped with the upvotes so no external service where you can easily buy votes (easily found through Google, [1]) would have been needed.
(top three search results when I googled "buy reddit votes")
Surely, given how visible such services are, monetizing reddit buy selling upvotes would be one of the first things anyone wanting to monetize reddit comes up with. The only difference to the 3rd party vote sellers is that they will have to hide it better and/or find justifications because the company itself doing it causes a bit more outrage.
I also don't think the more niche sub reddits will be (are?) safe. Anyone who wants to sell something more specialized has a target audience much better than anything Facebook can create by selecting the right subreddit, because the audience is self-selecting. Same as for the Coke campaign, since it's hard too hide what's going on from the admins they could stop much of that, so paying reddit to have your posts even boosted by them is safest for any marketer.
There's actually a good incentive for moderators to be in on this, as they aren't paid by reddit for their (in sometimes massive) unpaid labour. If a marketing company comes along and says, 'hey, you've done this so long, don't you think you should deserve some money? just let us run our campaign on your subreddit and we'll pay you!' quite a few moderators would agree. Admins might not notice.
They might not have noticed a few isolated cases, but they sure would have noticed the phenomenon as such by now. The company would have an even bigger incentive now to try to get such monetization for themselves instead of letting others make the money with their site.
Reddit to me is the kind of thing where monetization methods feel like they run counter to what I consider the main value of the website is. People visit because of the communities, but advertisements and astroturfing erodes that by making the communities more and more inauthentic. The problem is that advertising is where the money is, they aren't going to survive on reddit golds. So it seems like the path they have been on for the past decade has been to both grow enough and change their demographics such that the majority of their demographic is less discerning to advertisements and astroturfing, and to generate engagement through communities that enable that sort of advertisement.
Now I suspect they are trying to transition towards somehow deriving value as a hub for what are now cult like communities that stan and provide PR for powerful groups like various corporations, media conglomerates, sporting leagues and franchises, political ideologies and so on. Those are the communities that feed off drama and hype that social media has learned will drive the most engagement. They sprinkle it in with other innocuous things like cute pets or viral tik tok reposts (and the other subreddits that are actually very good) to make it not seem as egregious as it really is and hope that most people continue to believe that it is the same organic "front page of the internet" that it had become ever since Digg decided to kill itself many years ago.
Much like almost everything else from that time, they simply just outgrew and replaced their core demographic with a group that are much easier to exploit.
I agree with you in the context of ads, but I do wonder if they could monetise these communities in a more high-value way which plays into their primary purpose.
For instance, I am a member of /r/synthesizers, but all trading/buying happens on eBay or reverb.com. Can reddit provide the way for this community to transact in a more high-value/trusted way? Maybe I'm missing something and that is a terrible business.
Main downside is this they already have you as a customer. A lot of these efforts are buffoonish and try to sell you shoes/eyeglasses/appliances after you just bought what you wanted from them.
High value honest and transparent ads can work, like say "Will it blend" or providing field related instructions good enough to essentially be the canon to say synthesier configuration and maintenance.
That is hard and bespoke. Meanwhile crap ads are very easy and adaptable. So long as there is a positive return being a menace or nuisance to the commons can pay. As spam infamously shows.
>Much like almost everything else from that time, they simply just outgrew and replaced their core demographic with a group that are much easier to exploit.
I assume they found much more insular communities either in the form of obscure subreddits or other communities (like here for example). It might not be the case of them actually leaving, it is just that for every user like that, there are 10000 new users who came from some place like facebook.
Ok I’ll bite. How would you fix Reddit? I have been using online forums for the past 20+ years and I know what you mean about communities like Reddit going from nerd heavy topics to primarily being the free advertising platform for onlyfans accounts and political hacks. But how would Reddit at this point stuff the genie back into the bottle?
For that matter, if you don’t believe in Reddit’s long term success, there are both investment opportunities and opportunities to build something better.
- Reddit should not be a company to grow 1000x & exit with all employees being millionaires, it should earn enough to pay the staff hefty six fig salaries and that's enough
- Stop being like quora and restricting content if you're not logged in
- fix the video player on the new site
- support the native video player on the old site & polls
- remove the supermod system, where senior mods control half the site, old mods should not be able to invite new mods past a certain point but they'll just create sockpuppet accounts so
- remove more subreddits from the default list
- remove the "influencer" aspects of the site. People don't need a profile with a custom picture, don't need to post to their /u/ board when they should be posting on a subreddit.
- go back to reddit gold, get rid of the 50+ awards
- custom comment backgrounds from certain awards are fine, let people purchase colored borders or something
- go back to showing the progress bar for how close the site is to earning enough to pay for servers that day from gold purchases
- when you end up hiring extremely controversial staff, avoid auto deleting criticism about them
- don't edit other user's comments
- integrate more of RES's features into reddit
- bring back live threads
- RPAN is a fine way to try to introduce more social stuff (imagine r/games hosting a pov stream of blizzcon) but the current users are weird
- bring back AMAs with famous people, not B or C list actors that are promoting their new book (so bring back someone in Victoria's role)
- get rid of the moon currency feature
- encourage mods to delete threads with inaccurate titles / clickbait until a link is submitted with an accurate name
> - remove the "influencer" aspects of the site. People don't need a profile with a custom picture, don't need to post to their /u/ board when they should be posting on a reddit reddit.
I think this was added for the OnlyFans pipeline. There is a massive porn community on Reddit, and the entirety of it thrives on this feature. Whether either of us want that, Reddit's decided it is a good and reliable monetary way forward.
It's rare that Reddit bans nsfw content, the only major porn ban I'm aware of is r/jailbait and that one was banned for very good reasons. r/TheFappening and r/creepshots weren't porn but sexual exploitation.
In any case, these three bans were many years ago.
Reddit has more recently banned NSFW subreddits that were considered excessively violent (/r/struggleporn) or pedophilic (/r/ageplaypenpals, which was just text based).
> Reddit should not be a company to grow 1000x & exit with all employees being millionaires, it should earn enough to pay the staff hefty six fig salaries and that's enough
Investors(which includes VCs/angels,etc. AND employees) should be rewarded, whether that's the risk they take (ex. VCs) or the work they put in (employees). I'm confused where this viewpoint came from, given every business works this way -- a company gets investments (either through money or employee time) and if that business grows, so do the investments...
They don't mean that it should never happen, they mean that given the growth prospects of Reddit they should just become a regular business instead of continuing to try to get a VC return.
VC investors indeed try to get VC returns but sometimes their bets fail and that's part of their portfolio theory.
The early investors have definitely done well already.
I personally think the fix is to let it be separate communities; kill/deemphasize the "all" feed, emphasize separate subreddits, and make it easy for users to curate what they see. The problem, of course, it that this runs counter to maximizing engagement.
You should still have a front page, but there's nothing but the subreddits you opt in to. All I want to kill is the site pushing content at you that you didn't explicitly ask for.
It is very easy to use reddit that way. I use it multiple times a day and only ever visit the subreddits I have subscribed to, and that's all that appears on my main page.
I didn't see where he said it could be fixed. You are right when you draw comparison to the genie out of the bottle. Online communities evolve and it's one way. You can't "fix" them, you can only move to new and different ones.
Just like real life social scenes, or city neighborhoods, too, now that I think about it.
When Reddit became a sanitized social media platform rather than a free speech platform, it brought in a swathe of users who liked the sanitized social media platform, so you can't undo it.
I'm not aware of instances where people join a community BECAUSE they banned something. There's plenty of evidence for the reverse, such as when the removal of fat people hate and other subs led to an exodus to Voat.
Split the site. Forums were good because they had culture. Reddit’s subreddits leak into other ones. They will split it to one that is NSFW and SFW soon for advertising reasons.
Make a minimum requirement of 1000 characters, all spammers evaders are banned.
Make blocking hide the person you blocked’s posts.
Bring back visible downvotes.
Ban politics. It will not actually work and they’ll do it covertly but it would significantly improve the site.
Ban abusive mods. If some no life power tripper is being an asshole or bans you for posting in another sub, fuck them.
Shut it down. It’s toxic and shouldn’t be fixed. It’s perpetuating a echo chamber, slippery slope. All echoed ideas are bad as they discourage critical independent thought.
you know an odd realization I've had lately is that "discoverability" is a two edged sword, communities with their unique flavor built over time are great, however there comes a time when some place (in online or meat space) becomes too "popular" and the stories about the place start taking over the actual environment and behavior of the place, which then draws people expecting the story... basically a feedback loop.
there's a chance I think, that creating more "obscure" spaces might actually be the better option for preserving these kinds of communities, or at least letting them thrive more easily, reddit survived this long I think by being slightly difficult to navigate and having weird communities that could self police and there are still spots on there I enjoy, but none I really socialize in the way I originally did on finding the site.. anyways those are just musings and not really helpful to the question of how to fix it, just more of why I think it's broken...
They messed up when they made sub-reddits. Sub-reddits are a harmful combination of community and content. Popular content becomes a huge community, and all of the issues based on Dunbar's number happen as a result, which includes abuse of powers from the admins. Instead of using sub-reddits for content you should have tags. Communities should never be bigger than 150 people, and should not be limited to a single idea, in much the same way that Hacker News is aligned generally towards hackers. You would then build up communities of communities, where you would be beholden to your own community and the communities could only moderate outside of their community at the community level.
From there you only have to do a decent job like TikTok has done of content discovery to allow new content to thrive, and from comments on that content allow people to find better communities.
If another community is mis-filing tags, your community can apply moderation against their community such that your community does not use their tags.
The other way to do this is to have just as good support for +tags in queries as -tags in queries. When adding a tag for no reason is making it less visible to the people who are filtering out that tag, they stop doing it.
This is a bad take. You are asking for the forum and sub forum/tag approach. A community that small will simply not be engaged with frequently enough to avoid seeming “abandoned”. This is exactly the set of circumstances that led to content aggregation sites like Reddit.
Sub-forums are a usability nightmare, but reddit already solved the sub-forum issue. You would be showed content in a flattened manner, but in the hierarchy where the closest to you is shown first.
My personal opinion is that large, impersonal online communities which use voting systems are doomed to become toxic echo chambers run by people who dedicate the time and resources to do so(and therefore participate less in the "real world"). I may be biased because I'm old and grew up with a large part of my social experience as a kid coming from BBSes.
Get rid of the current moderators and pay professionals. Automate the universal rules and use these folks to steer content back to when it was most meaningful. Also dedicate as many resources as possible to identify and prevent astroturfing and shills.
Ok, one of my favorite subreddits is about an specific American book series based on a modern genre of Chinese fiction. Do you think that Reddit can scale to manage that kind of content without volunteer mods?
It's the same thing as people used to say about Wikipedia. Oh, they shouldn't take volunteers and just pay for encyclopedia editors. But if you want content at scale, you need to provide power to people so they can say what they want, and they are going to abuse it. But the alternative as never worked, and in fact, people get really mad here when people try to implement the alternative.
Those tutorials can still rocket to the top of YOUR homepage. That's the power of reddit. That everyone can craft their own experience by subscribing to subreddits. So subscribe to the lisp subreddit and you'll see the content you want.
* They continually "improve" the default (and Hot, New, Top, and Rising) sort and filter algorithm(s). Every day it contains less relevant content for you, and more content peppered with ads and outrage. All of these options are slowly morphing into the same sort and filter set.
* They are aggressively shutting down interesting communities which don't fit their advertiser profile, and using the above algorithms to ensure no one ever sees them. These include, for example, discussion of covid or vaccines from a critical perspective; assisted suicide; Donald Trump; guns; trans controversies; etc.
* They are aggressively policing language. There is a growing list of words which, if used, will earn the user a ban.
* They stopped work on old.reddit.com, which gave users more transparent control over sort and filter. I predict they will kill it soon.
* They currently allow API access for third party aps. These aps don't serve ads and can employ their own sorting and filtering. I predict open APIs will be shut down, just like all the other major platforms have done.
Long story short, Reddit is going to turn into Facebook. They've made that intention clear. It's only a matter of time before they demand Facebook-like verification for users.
Just disable all the subreddits but the few that you follow.
And also disable the trending option in your preferences
Its the (show trending subreddits on the home feed (a list of popular and notable subreddits to check out)) in your preferences.
And then your home page is normal, sure that should be the default, but it's not hard to do
Even the most notorious "chans" banned some things/topics.
If you are dealing with controversial topics you best bet is to own your own platform, and don't grow to big.
That's just how this world works, and its not even limited to online. Look at silk road. There are tones of dark web places like it, but once things get too popular, people will go to extraordinary lengths to shut it down.
The only controversial site that somehow still tags along is the pirate bay. And it's more shadow of its former self.
Reddit a grotesque toxic website, that makes money by creating conflict, divisiveness, fake news and the deliberate degradation of society. Like Facebook, but so so much worse. I hope that going public gives it the scrutiny it needs. In a few years time you won't be able to find anyone admitting to have ever worked for this company (in fact it's almost impossible to find people admitting it today). Some of the smaller sub-reddits are good though, but that's not what the website has been about for years.
Reddit divides US society into 2 halves and makes them scream divisive hate at each other, 24 hours a day. What can possibly go wrong?
I’m not sure if Reddit is so much worse. With Reddit you see toxic groups out in the open, with Facebook those groups are hidden and only Facebook knows the true size and content of all toxic groups.
I think that's a very unfair assessment. Reddit is as diverse as the internet itself. There are plenty of good subreddits there and the toxic stuff is easy to avoid.
Do yourself a favour and unsubscribe to any subreddit that deals with the news or politics. Some subreddits have become too big to properly moderate, unsubscribe to them too.
Diversity certainly decreased massively in the last years just by content restrictions and overbearing moderators. But true, you have to find the niche subs and pray that they aren't discovered by people that have a moderate to high degree of problems with internet comments.
Reddit may have had a diverse user base in the past but in the last three years they enacted the same heavy censorship we have seen elsewhere and basically have no diversity of thought now in any major subreddit
The vast majority of people browsing reddit do not leave the default subs or filter news and political posts. Individually opting out of the toxicity and astroturfing does not address the problem on the website as a whole.
They've cleaned it up a lot honestly. Kind of feels like the whole Ellen Pao thing was just like, her serving as a scapegoat for changes they wanted to make.
I think people already don't want to admit to working there, but not for moral reasons, but for how awful the stability and product actually is. I can't say I'd blame them.
Perhaps. But to me it's more an anomaly that such an unreliable product can remain so popular. Can you imagine Google showing you a weird image saying you broke it multiple times a day, or youtube resembling any single thing about the video player?
Reddit has immense staying power - it is addictive. I find myself mindlessly scrolling it and putting up with most of its awfulness. But I attribute that to the users and not the product... as Digg showed, once greener pastures appear, there's not much left to brag about.
That is only valid in general, outside "real world application" of that idea... Or, in fact, of the very product. Product quality is a component supposed to override the "value for pride" of widespread adoption.
You can safely assume that many people will not be proud of participating to a dubious product.
You can not even assume that one in general will be especially proud of wide adoption - the weight given to "general/generic approval" is a personal variable.
When original poster silisili states «people already don't want to admit to working there», said poster uses a gross generalization not using a proper quantifier. That use of «people» entails by default describing at least a median, "over 50% of the developers". That's just exaggerating rhetoric.
Normalizing the expression to «some people already don't want to admit to working there», you get a pretty basic truth, that products change and enthusiasm in the project contributors swings accordingly. That is surely not eliminated by the idea they can hold, "Yes but the product is popular": popularity does not fix projectual lacks, it is not necessarily valid as a consolation. Some will try to steer the culture and encourage fixing the fault, some will be just embarassed.
Some members here are noting that this piece of news about going public may exacerbate some of the faults (i.e. toxic hooking) - some presume that this will put more weight on the idea of maximizing revenues, psychopathically ("Whatever it takes").
In fact, gambling has some people «spend hours on a day», and you cannot suppose that "developers of gambling machines will be proud". And this is very relevant to a number of current social networks. Spending time is not a value - investing time is.
Well, sure, no place ever has 100% people who are satisfied or proud of working there. I don't think there's much to be ashamed of though. I certainly would hold my head high if I worked there.
I've been following lemmy [0] for a while, a federated reddit alternative in the same spirit as mastodon. It's still very small, but I think as monetization pressure on reddit increases, people will look for other places to post and this might be one of them :)
Their website mentions the Fediverse. lemmy is a federated network that is completely separate from the mastodon/diaspora/... network, right?
Since I already have an account on a mastodon instance I first thought I can just connect to lemmy instances using that but that is apparently not possible.
Yes, you can. After their last release you can follow Lemmy communities with Mastodon and add comments to posts. Just enter the URL of a Lemmy community in your search bar to find the account profile. And in case that doesn't work you might try search for @[CommunityName]@[lemmy.instance] (there are some issues to be wrinkled out still).
On top of that: reddit makes tons of traffic with porn or borderline porn subbreddits, like GirlsGoneWild.
It’ll be fun to watch the investors-driven purge when that inevitably happens
Reddit said, not six months ago, that they weren't going to ban anti-vaccine rhetoric. The lead admin stated: "We appreciate that not everyone agrees with the current approach to getting us all through the pandemic, and some are still wary of vaccinations. Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy." [0]
When you combine this with the fact that moderation on the site is unpaid, it's literally a land mine: anything done on it is open to litigation, and all of the counter-measures are "we rely on unpaid volunteers." It's a nightmare for a public offering, really. It'd be like investing in Facebook, except if Facebook's stances were "well, vaccination is a choice" and "we can't pay people to remove inappropriate content; we just rely on unpaid volunteers for that."
Reddit has effectively monetized outrage in a way Facebook could only ever hope to: instead of primarily presenting your friend circles, and the outrage there, Reddit presents the outrage of the social media cloud itself, weaponized in the form of upvotes. The worst part of browsing Reddit is the level of smugness you see around its users: they act like Instagram/Facebook is the worst parts of humanity, while actively engaging with a different corporation selling the same thing but more effectively.
About your example, some points are not clear, with relevance to the outcome of litigation land mine.
First of all, the part about the "right to dissent" I think was later retracted; and importantly, a witch hunt was in fact carried out - starting from r/aww ("the cute pets" or similar).
I have just red on The Coversation the article "Shaming unvaccinated people has to stop. We've turned into an angry mob and it's getting ugly" (Julian Savulescu, MCRI, Uni Melbourne and Oxford), https://theconversation.com/shaming-unvaccinated-people-has-... , which reports that
> a whole Reddit channel is devoted to mocking people who die after refusing the vaccine
Does "going to public" increase the liability for legal action?
You can't really ad-block from astroturfed ads, for example a 'viral' video of Amazon delivery driver dancing on a Amazon Ring doorbell get to the top of a video subreddit. That can't be blocked against.
I run agressive ad blocks and I'll still get pictures on r/aww/ of a kitten next to a freshely delivery KFC - with a title like "Kittens first every KFC delivery to investigate".
What I'd like to know is how Reddit monetizes those ads that make it through to everyone.
It's not really gone though. There are plenty of subreddits you can subscribe to if that's your interest. Or there are others to subscribe to for almost any interest you may have.
> I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is.
Because of your own outrage? Or because of financials of the business model. If the former, how different are you than the stubborn anti-vaxxers? I believe the business model is a proven one. I'll withhold my judgement til when I see the first 10Q.
Your comment itself is designed to fuel outrage. What a scummy company!
The larger subreddits have problems, but Reddit has done a remarkable job of collecting people with niche interests into one area.
I wouldn't discount their success and future success (as much as I'd like to).
What's odd is they haven't stopped growing. It's just been linear user growth.
They could literally do nothing and the site would still grow. It's closer to Wikipedia than a social network in some respects. And by that standard, we should try to judge it.
I look forward to the next forum site as much as the next person. But I don't know what it would look like. If anyone does, I definitely urge you to build it if you can.
Substack has every incentive to build a community. Discord as well. So there's definitely opportunities, but from where I sit, I don't have any insight as to what you could do to beat this behemoth.
Reddit is my go to place for local news. There is so little coverage of local news outside big cities. The coffee-house atmosphere of the local sub I’d very refreshing and informative.
Sadly, many of the bigger subs have less and less quality.
There’s a post I remember from about 2010 that blew my mind in the /r/philosophy subreddit. Now /r/philosophy is all crap, and I can’t event find that article.
I don't know about r/philosophy, but if it's grown too large to be usable, as many do, look for subsets of philosophy (by genre, philosopher, etc). I'm sure there are more niche subs with decent communities.
Sadly the niche subs end up following the same path, and as someone who has done that Reddit is starting to feel like it's lost its charm. I think it boils down to upvote/downvote system steering discussions to a particular kind of consumer that doesn't align with what I'm there for and it gets worse over time. It's so rare for me to find insightful comments there anymore, it's really turned into intellectual junk food. And it's not that it's not valuable, I need that sometimes too, but it seems like that's crowded out everything else
I've found it virtually impossible to find a sub organized around an intellectual topic or person that isn't virtually unreadable for anyone who knows anything about the topic.
The more specific and concrete (and smaller, above a certain minimum) the sub is, the better the content. Indeed the same - absent the size qualification - could be said of hacker news discussions.
I suspect it may have something to do with the tendency for those with little knowledge of a complex, abstract and highly nuanced subject to upvote or downvote based on some combination of popular bias and sentiment contrasted with the decreased likelihood of those with knowledge to do the same (because they know more, they are less confident in their opinion). Combined with the fact that invariably growth means more users in the former group joining than the latter.
More concrete subjects where comments can be based on specialized experience (rather than just knowledge) help individuals without that experience to exclude themselves from voting and those with to step in. That hn is based around such a concrete topic is what saves it (combined of course with the paid and highly skilled and dedicated moderation).
> What's odd is they haven't stopped growing. It's just been linear user growth
Most growth is driven by Google Search. It accounts for almost half of their traffic. At this point, SEO is their moat. The problem they have had is that they cant get most of the traffic to convert ie. create accounts and engage in those subreddits. That is still done by a small fraction of the traffic.
As an experiment, if you create an account on Reddit, you see that you are automatically added to r/announcements. (It does not even offer you a choice). That sub has grown very slow compared to their DAUs and MAUs. It still has about 127M subscribers (lifetime)
> The problem they have had is that they cant get most of the traffic to convert ie. create accounts and engage in those subreddits. That is still done by a small fraction of the traffic.
Is that really a problem? Any site like this is going to see the same dynamics. e.g., the vast majority of Stack Overflow users never make an account either.
A definite problem from a company's perspective when their model is ads and gold/donations, both of which require users to be logged in. This directly affects the number of users willing to participate in discussions - both in big subreddits and niche ones - and it risks some active users becoming dormant because they dont see enough reaction/response to what they have posted.
Stack Overflow is not the best comparison. In some cases yes, they are very similar, but mostly the reason for users to land on stack overflow is very different (solving a problem while working) than for users to land on a subreddit/post (looking for more info and satisfying curiosity via Google search - not always solving a problem)
I think it is similar in this sense: those users are in a funnel as long as they visit regularly. Not everybody who walks into a store buys something, but if the store is busy that’s a good sign.
There is a distinct possibility that those users arent visiting regularly. They visit via Google search, explore a bit, don't create an account. Next time they come in, it's again via Google search. Reddit may or may not be able to track them.
And again, you cant see that they are even visiting a page. All the signals - upvotes, comments, etc. are only available when logged in. (except for video views)
If I want to search reddit content on my phone, I use google search because reddit's search sucks. But then I look like a non-converted user because I'm only logged in on the app not the mobile site.
you also count as one of the DAUs and MAUs - minimum 2, as one logged in and one not logged in, and maybe more if you use incognito to search for those comments, because reddit will treat that as a separate visit from a separate user I guess.
You know what makes for a good user experience? Not using a website that hosts white supremacists, but staying in your little corner that doesn't deal with them (you hope).
Everything is moving to Discord. Even subreddits. I finally installed the app yesterday because the Minecraft server I hang out on is down while updating to 1.18.1 and it's the only place to get updates. I had a sense this was happening when I found out several forums I thought died off (while still being up) had just moved the bulk of activity to Discord, but it seems to have accelerated in the last year.
Now it's like a red flag in your resume if you worked for reddit
Then they made a whole mess on the homepage. This is what happens when you hire mediocre engineers. Its like junior engineers who cant write code. Reddit mobile is not bad, but stop trying to make me install it. There are people who only wants to use web. But your web engineers are garbage
their ads is incredibly bad.
there are dark patterns everywhere. Now they're even trying to mess up the old.redit.com
The site always crashes.
It's like the early founders did a really good job, and the vultures who could barely pass as a PM or as an engineer took over.
I mean if they wanted to save this site, they would prob have to lay off all the fat and start rehiring.
I was excited for reddit back in the day, i thought they had a shot of saving the internet. now they're trying to get into everything, and can barely execute
So the trillion dollar question is, what's next to replace reddit
Reddit has possibly the worst mobile experience I've ever seen. I've never seen a company try to force its (awful, slow, buggy) app down people's throats harder if you try to use the mobile web version.
The entire mod culture needs to be reworked too. They need mods because more people brings more trolls, but aggressive banning and simultaneous muting so people can't ask why just leads to more trolling. Not to mention most mods just cite every ban in the coverall "read the rules / figure it out" so they have to spend no effort, even though those rules don't cover the actual ban reason.
I just can't believe how many consistently bad decisions are made there. The biggest of all was probably removing the separated and accurate upvote / downvote counters which is a massive feature to show the strength of otherwise downvoted comments.
Aside from these feature complaints, how does a company of this size and importance have such an astonishingly badly coded interface? I always have to use the Old site. It reminds me of an intern coming in and on day 1 marking all code as "legacy" and saying "Electron is the greatest thing ever made, because it's easy and just works. There's literally no reason to use anything except Electron for any project."
Removing downvotes is largely something advertisers demand. Advertising is still stuck in some old ways. I know some in corporate ad departments that feel the need to respond to every negative comment on the internet. That is implementing hell for anybody that has that task.
Taking shots at the engineers is too far. Reddit is about a million times more stable than it used to be a few years ago. Also I don’t think Reddit or the Internet needs “saving”. They’re both more successful than ever by any common metric whether we like the direction they’re going or not.
I'm going on 2 months now, where I cannot login to my account on 3rd party android apps. I can using an alt account. I'm not banned, or anything. It's just a known problem -- probably dealing w/ a cookie, or setting, or variable...
I've tried turning on/off 2fa, resetting my password, etc... nothing works.
i've contacted reddit and submitted to their help sub, crickets.
So yeah, taking shots at the engineers imho is fair game, this is a major issue. I can't even go to /user/prefs/apps to enable/disable apps attached to my account which seems like it could be a security vulnerability. I always get "You broke reddit"..
when I try logging in on Relay or ANY other 3rd party mobile app it hangs after I'm logged in and can't handle the token exchange part of the oauth flow where the data is passed back to the app.
If you call this stable.... I'd hate to see unstable. The mobile app is a no go... I like to be able to change views between small cards, gallery, and large-card depending on what I'm using reddit for...
I have a 10-year-old reddit account. When it was static pages served out of lisp, it was rock-solid. Their rewrite got to the instability you're describing, and it never really recovered.
The Python rewrite happened 16 years ago. 10 years ago, there was probably an order of magnitude (or more!) less traffic and this is probably what causes most of their instability.
10 years ago was about the time when they first moved to Cassandra and that was a pretty rough period. Lots of rose tinted glasses around here. Reddit has had plenty of stability and scaling problems during the early years.
The Twitter account named Reddit Status was started in 2010 to track Reddit’s downtime. It has always been unstable. I’ve always thought it was strange how often Reddit was crashing or going down for scheduled maintenance when no other websites ever seemed to do so.
What’s on the front is inexcusable though. This is not just dark patterns: shit straight up doesn’t work. Good engineers don’t ship that.
The video player has sucked for years so much that I built a service that fetches the raw hls URL and plays that directly in the browser. Night and day. How do you mess up something that works out of the box?
My experience only having used old Reddit is that it’s stupidly slow all the time and it goes down at least once a week for me (I’m not looking at it all the time…)
I can’t think of a single website with that many backend problems.
It sounds like you're mad at explicit decisions made by product owners, like the content on the frontpage or dark patterns that push mobile app usage. I guarantee none of the rank and file engineers are responsible for those decisions, and they almost certainly detest them just as much as you. The problem is if they don't implement them then they don't get a paycheck and can't put food on the table. It's silly to paint them with blame.
They’re all Bay Area engineers. So switching jobs is an inconvenience with a raise on the other side. The changes aren’t their ideas but it’s not like they can’t refuse. They can just work anywhere else. They probably don’t care.
I mean… browse through HN for the day. According to its users you shouldn’t work at any company that pays well because they are all evil. At a certain point you just don’t care what people are writing on forums.
I hate making a ton of money and giving everyone in my family a better life. Really sucks.
The things you are holding people accountable for are very questionable in almost all cases. In most cases it just comes off as jealousy that someone is doing better than you.
I’m all for being held accountable. But i put very little weight in public opinion being something that we should even think about at this point.
Your last argument can be applied to about anything regarding performing unethical tasks to stay afloat. I don’t find it convincing for engineers that work for Reddit. They can start work at any other tech company, too, so by absolving all the blame is a bit much, in the end they choose to implement it right?
> This is what happens when you hire mediocre engineers
Nope. It's the result of perverse incentives and poor management. I can imagine the developers (even the designers) had a good vision of what to build and how to build it, only to be overruled by management with ideas like "make it janky as hell so we can force all our users to our mobile app to track them better".
I hope that no single organization replaces Reddit. Let a billion independent forums bloom. For the sake of discoverability, it would be nice if a decent subset of them implemented more or less the same API that search engines could call from the outside and that their UIs could expose to users so that users could easily move from forum to forum. But discoverability is double-edged - it builds size but it also brings Eternal September and homogeneity.
As for structure, I think that forums and image boards that are basically just chronologically ordered items of text where each item of text can have either implicit or explicit links to previous items of text are in a sense superior to tree-based forums like Reddit anyway because directed acyclic graphs are a superset of trees.
As for upvote/downvote mechanisms, I have never seen a forum that was improved by them. Such mechanisms are probably good for driving engagement but from the point of view of stimulating thought, I think that as opposed to having an outside algorithm preference certain comments over others, it is better when users have to either manually go through a flat chronologically ordered list of comments or implement their own search functionality on top of that list in order to find comments that they want to engage with. If a forum provides advanced tools to search and sort comments, that is good, but I would prefer that a forum not build any given sorting other than chronological into its default UI.
Reddit, at least, still allows users to sort in ways other than by "best". In my experience and according to my taste, large subreddits usually are often pretty useless unless I sort by "new" or "controversial". Sorting by "best" all too often - not always, but all too often - just brings the least common denominator up to the top. Another good method for using Reddit is to make note of any individual users whose writings you find interesting and to then just read through their Reddit histories - this can also be a good way to find interesting subreddits that you might not have come upon otherwise.
They did. Your first paragraph describes Reddit perfectly.
> it is better when users have to either manually go through a flat chronologically ordered list of comments or implement their own search functionality on top of that list in order to find comments that they want to engage with
> now they're trying to get into everything, and can barely execute
I feel like this happens to a lot of organizations/products that start off being really neat.
Fast forward 10 years, and most/all of the people responsible for the good stuff have moved on. The brand ambles on like a relative with dementia. The lights are on, but you know nobody's home.
Amazon the web store used to be good. It had good search and it was nigh impossible to get something counterfeit from it. Nowadays it's all people talk about.
I think Amazon is very much a victim of its own success and rapid growth.
They started out as a bookstore but Bezos had experience in finance, they quickly sold media, and the warehouses were nothing like other bookstores and it looks like it was more a base for larger operations that didn’t anticipate staying a bookstore, the same way their online functionality didn’t stop at a website, AWS and selling other stuff came fast.
Sure they were a bookstore first but they over engineered it to scale.
Ah the myth of the mediocre engineer. It’s always the other team at the other company, too. Those engineers sit in their open floor plans, designing reddit?
I always find it useful to compare reddit to imgur. IMO the future of reddit is the present of imgur. The value proposition of imgur in large parts is the same as reddit IF we ignore the part where imgur was hit with a deadly blow when reddit launched in-platform media hosting.
Imgur's push for mobile app and the desparate attempt (I will say plea) to form a loyal community around the product really shows how internet platforms fails to innovate and think community is the only to tool growth and survival.
On the other hand we see another example of Tumblr where communities get in the way of operating a business.
After everything I say I find Facebook and YouTube is successful because community driven platforms work in niches but to scale up you must establish yourself as a monopoly and focus on running a business while juggling all the negativity.
I remember when Imgur was launched as a free image hoster for Reddit users. It was jarring to me, years later, to see it had attempted to become some weird Reddit/9gag mash-up. Not because it was a bad move, business-wise, but because it became clear how unmonetizable the plan was to start with.
That said, I agree with you: it feels like Imgur makes the Reddit move about twelve months before it, every time. From gif hosting to discovery to live feeds to requiring logins for NSFW content, Imgur basically leads Reddit. It honestly makes me wonder why I bother with Reddit at all...
It used to be written in lisp. It used to be good before eternal September. Being a redditor was a nerdy virtue signaler. Now? You can be seen as a white supremacist, a commie, a clout chasing loser trying to get upvotes, or an incel when you mention it.
I’ve been reading Reddit for fifteen years. (A sentence that should never be written.) Their engineering has always been terrible. Even when they were much smaller than they are now, their site constantly crashed. It’s remarkable how little improvement they’ve made in over a decade. There are quirks, like how you can only see a maximum of 1,000 results, whether on subreddits, searches, or user profiles. This limit is apparently unalterable because of legacy decisions.
Congratulations folks! I'll say that Reddit has become one of my favorite sites to visit occasionally and I feel they've earned their success. I honestly feel it is a positive factor in my life, for the little I use it. There's really excellent content to be had, like well moderated educational content at subreddits like r/AskHistorians and r/COVID. I've learned a lot from hobby communities that are hard to find elsewhere (like for pizzamaking).
I also like that they've kept discussions text oriented, instead of allowing for embedded tweets, images, or videos to clog up comment threads (I like this about HN, as well). They might renege on this in the future, but I like the distinctly 2000s feel to discussions.
Reddit is now a rage generating machine outside of the small niche subreddits. The business is built on rage and some stupid investors in WSB who are enjoying a long bull market.
Doesn’t mean it won’t do well but its just another flavor of facebook.
In general, this is what bothers me with a lot of modern online services. Some people might use the same platforms harmlessly to watch cooking videos or share family photos while remaining relatively free from neurosis, or they might be trapped in a rut of entirely different algorithmic content. The only unifying factor is that they both happen to be hosted on the same platform, and it is becoming harder to detach the content on the platform from the mechanisms driving viewership that come with the platform. The platforms encompass both the best and worst of us, attracting both the susceptible users and relatively ordinary persons, and that's why they have staying power.
Because these services are so all-encompassing, they are bound to have some amount of well-curated content, or at the very least content that holds one's interest. By virtue of that minuscule amount of content being hosted on the massive aggregate site, that predisposes some people to affirm or at least ignore the idea of the overarching site as a whole, along with the SEO mechanisms, influencers, etc. that always get so much flak in certain circles.
In other words, because the site is so massive there will always be a population of consumers in their own niches that never encounter any outrage or issues. There will also be a population exposed to the "rage generating" content. The subset of people aware of the toxicity and how it relates to the workings of the platform itself may or may not overlap with these groups. But in the end, because the site has become so massive that content creators have caused it to encompass literally everything that can be thought of as a topic of interest to general humanity, all of these groups, whether harmful or harmless, contribute to the site's continued growth and prosperity, and more and more people participate as a result.
Frankly Reddit is more like HN if it had feeds for every thing known to man and a few million more users. It started out almost exactly the same way as HN is right now, except for somewhat better site usability. You eventually outgrow the dev community and have to start catering to normal people and the results are predictable.
The senseless outrage on this site sometimes measures up completely.
It is, frankly, _weaponized_ facebook. It literally shows you content that is the most-engaging and most-interacted, across the entire site (not just your friend group). Which is ironic, given how often users there was philosophical about the evils of facebook.
If you don't believe me, go browse /r/popular or some such and see how long it takes to see right-wing posts. The right-wing posts are usually heavily downvoted, so you'll see one with 100 upvotes between two posts with 20k upvotes; that's by design.
>I've learned a lot from hobby communities that are hard to find elsewhere (like for pizzamaking).
I wish that was my experience too.
Generally I'll avoid the subreddits for anything I'm interested in, as they're frequented by "experts" who feel the need to ruin everyone's fun.
It's great for things I'm not interested in, though, as it's a quick way to get genuine information on what is considered a good brand of bike shorts or hair curling products.
Genuinely confused by this statement. You don't visit things you know about, because fake experts ruin it. Then you visit things you don't know about, because you believe the information to be genuine.
Not trying to be a dick here, but this line of reasoning just isn't clicking so asking.
Essentially, whenever I look into communities of things that I'm interested in, I'll see a dedicated core of people insisting that it must be experienced a specific way, and any other way is wrong. Basically wine snobs, but for everything.
However, if I'm an outsider looking to get information for a gift or something I have a passing interest in, this can be quite often useful. If the snobs acknowledge something as legit, then I know that it's likely to be good.
Edit: Karrot_Kream put it perfectly with their use of the phrase "gatekeeping". Special interest groups have this problem, and Reddit fails to solve it.
This got me to thinking though...almost every news outlet flubs covering deeply technical things folks here would be familiar with, and we all have a laugh. But we get our news from them and generally believe it, so do we all suffer from it to some extent?
The underlying presumption of it is every person working at a paper is equally wrong about the topic they write.
However, most newspapers are focused on politics and so those might be better.
I would not expect a good analysis on the Palestinian conflict from Linus Tech Tips nor a good analysis on the latest graphics cards from Foreign Affairs.
>I would not expect a good analysis on the Palestinian conflict from Linus Tech Tips
I know you were just making an extreme comparison, but I genuinely think they'd do a good job of it if push came to shove. Linus and the people who work for him are beyond professional.
> I would not expect a good analysis on the Palestinian conflict from Linus Tech Tips
No, but such analysis would be informative when you stop to analyze just how persuasive he manages to sound when he's talking about something he obviously knows nothing about. His tone, cadence, body language.. it would reveal to you how good he is at mimicking the superficial characteristics of being an expert. If he's bad at those things when speaking outside his wheelhouse, that's a good thing! But if he's really good at seeming like an expert when you have good reason to think he isn't one, that's a huge warning sign that he might not actually be so proficient in the things you previously believed him to be good at.
> Generally I'll avoid the subreddits for anything I'm interested in, as they're frequented by "experts" who feel the need to ruin everyone's fun.
This kind of gatekeeping was pretty common in the old days on niche-interest forums too btw. I don't know what a good solution for this is. You even see this kind of behavior in academia.
> Generally I'll avoid the subreddits for anything I'm interested in, as they're frequented by "experts" who feel the need to ruin everyone's fun.
Mind giving an example? I'm just curious because to me the high point of reddit is learning way more about interests I already love. For example I don't think I would've gotten nearly as into mechanical keyboards without /r/mechanicalkeyboards around.
I can’t help but think this is the end for that site. It started off with a very old school minimalist designed forum vibe and has been devolving into dark patterns and advertisements as of late.
I guess good things can’t stay free forever and the bills need to be paid somehow. Wish they went to a donation model like Wikipedia instead.
Same. I only use old mode for both mobile and desktop. It’s super annoying that about once a week they drop me back into their utterly awful mobile web experience. Then have to go back to settings and choose request desktop site yet again.
Most recently they’ve switched image galleries to using their new desktop design, so simply trying to view images often pops up this new and totally incompatible experience. Earlier today the left/right nav icons stopped working so I just gave up on trying to view those images.
Unfortunately this extension is basically useless. If I’m on a real desktop, I don’t need to visit old.reddit.com. I have that set in the user preferences. (Currently using Chrome on desktop.)
I use mobile safari on mobile, which this extension doesn’t work for.
There are lots of interesting potential new homes popping up, including SaidIt.net, Tildes.net, Gab.com, even Parler.com and/or whatever Donal Trump has announced. Problem for all of them is their lack of critical mass. Reddit is slowly squeezing users and communities out to appeal to advertisers, but they haven't had their Digg moment yet. That would be something like killing old.reddit.com. Such a catalyst would cause a huge portion of their userbase to leave. So far, they've been too smart to do that, but I can foresee a bunch of new management entering the business after IPO and making those "tough" changes.
I'm also seeing various communities simply making their own websites. rdrama.net, for example, is surprisingly successful. kotakuinaction2.win is also doing quite well. I'm sure there are other, even better examples. At first I was resistant of this fragmentation, but I quickly came to embrace this reversion to the internet of yore. It wasn't so long ago that we would go to individual sites to discuss certain things. It's a relatively recent phenomenon that we've embraced monolithic communities for all of our media and social consumption. I don't think it's healthy, and perhaps this fragmentation is exactly what the internet needs right now. Less algorithm-generated outrage in the dystopian "news feed," and more user-driven experiences based on choosing which sites to visit. A crazy concept for many today.
They have been touting MAUs and DAUs a lot over the last one year. Turns out their numbers are very very public.
Whenever a new user creates an account, she automatically gets added to r/announcements. It's not a choice, they dont even show it as an option.
The current subs of r/announcements is 127M. It was 124M at the start of this month. Just shows that reddit - with newer design or not - has not found much acceptance in the upcoming generations. They tend to visit the site, yet are hesitant to create an account. For reference, their MAUs for month of Dec 19 alone were 430M. They got a lot of help from SEO for everyone of their threads being indexed, and hence the high traffic, but regular users and personalized ads isnt there. Likely low ARPU.
Edit: This is probably the reason for those dark patterns too. If I can see that low conversion rate, so can people inside, and they would try and improve that via different UX patterns. Because it seems like a low hanging fruit when it is not really one.
Yeah, “Reddit is going down because they only converted three million new users in the last month.” Is probably not the argument that will convince anyone who’s ever built a b2c of your point.
That is not my argument. A standalone number of 3M is good, especially when 3M new users combined with 100M existing ones demonstrate huge stickiness.
What I am trying to say is that, reddit is attracting a lot of new users through SEO, yet they have not been able to convert them like at all. The existing userbase is sticking and has been very active, but the site is not as appealing to new users who are just finding out about reddit.
Well, they tried. For a very long time they asked people to donate. They even tried to gamify it with reddit gold and the like. I suspect it just didn't work.
Disclaimer: I worked at Reddit prior to when ads were a major revenue source and left in 2018
Prior to ads and the current dark patterns you see on the site, Reddit primarily tried to monetize through Reddit Gold. It didn't work, and users never purchased it in any meaningful volume to keep the site afloat. So while you wouldn't give them money for the decisions they've made recently, they weren't making enough money when they were (ostensibly) making better decisions.
How would you go about solving this problem? It's a genuine question without snark - if social media companies are unable to stay sustainable through direct user funding, then they're going to look to ads or other sources eventually.
I remember 4chan did it by donate or die. They needed server money and they got it because it wasn’t working as long as they didn’t have a server. That was a much smaller scale though.
Can you talk about your work there? It’s cool if you don’t want to, how was it? You left obviously so I can guess.
I honestly don't have any hard feelings or ill will towards Reddit - I liked my coworkers and my time there was fun overall. I worked on mostly backend/data stuff during my time there, but over time it became painfully clear that there was no way Reddit would make it as a business without resorting to the kinds of shady tactics that you see today.
I sincerely believe that the leadership tried to avoid the ads revenue stream and all the ills that come with it for as long as possible, and searched for a lot of ways out (see things like Reddit Notes in the past). But I don't think I'll work in the social media domain again, because the experience really soured me on the sustainability model as a whole. People are generally unwilling to donate/pay for the content, and it's impossible to operate a site where there's no subscription revenue coming in.
What do you think of substack? I like it as decentralized news. Medium dropped off the face of a cliff but substack has freedom of speech, email lists that is controlled by the writer, and they made it a subscription based long form article model.
I don’t disagree with you though, if it’s given to you free it’s expected to be free forever. They’ll try to get money somehow but nobody will like it. I definitely liked it at first too, but it’s become so much different.
Substack is good, and certainly much better than Medium! But I think it serves a different purpose, since it lets content creators monetize their audience rather than managing P2P user interaction like most social media.
I'm not sure where the P2P interactions will go - it's possible that they stay centralized on the major platforms of today, or we see a return to smaller forums as we had back in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Interesting - I never knew that was the purpose of Reddit gold. I feel like a donation drive with direct acknowledgement that it would keep the site private and free of external financial interests would have provoked me to donate.
I thought Reddit gold was just some meaningless emoji thing.
The meaningless emoji stuff was added later to boost sales (think of it similar to skins in video games). You used to not get any of that, and the clear thing you did get was no ads (IIRC, this is still the case and if you have Reddit gold you get no ads on the site).
I don't use Wikipedia any more, they wouldn't leave me alone with their constant begging. I could just set up a block for the things, but I'd rather just be edgy and never use the site again. The content has been going downhill for years anyway. A lot more fun to find specific resources on cooler websites.
How is Reddit IPO'ing after they were bought by Conde Nast?
I've never really looked into it. It's an interesting thing that they managed to get un-acquired somehow.
In fact, there are so many questions. Does YC get a payday out of this, or was their stock acquired during the acquisition? 2% of $5B is $100M, so it's a lot of money at stake.
> The capital will be used to redesign Reddit’s famously cluttered homepage, co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman tells Recode. The company also plans to pour more resources into user-uploaded video.
Wow, time has not been kind to this paragraph. The redesign is still hated by a large portion of the userbase and the Reddit video player is infamously unreliable.
I don't think a lot Gen Z don't like the old.reddit.com because it looks kind of old fashioned vs say react "modern" pages and they're afraid of lookign old-fashioned. However, that is what keeps me coming back along with relative anonymity and content on topics that I like.
information density is too low. Why would I spend 2.5x time scrolling through www.reddit.com/r/fantasyfootball when I can read all the important headlines faster at old.reddit.com ... the redesign also loads fewer posts at a time so you constantly wait for a spinner to fetch new content
Really interesting thing about the Grateful Dead is back in the 90s their tour was the distribution network for the Bay Area organization that made virtually all of the US market’s LSD. Back then the DEA actually published their internal research on the Internet. Their research conclusively showed it was a single lab making it all. It even discussed how impossible it was to infiltrate the network because they were spiritual zealots and not mercenary drug dealers. I miss those days.
That's correct. I'm the author of Reveddit. A few things like user pages and the desktop extension work entirely without Pushshift. Threads can function somewhat without it. I maintain a FAQ with details of how it works in case anyone's interested,
This is not good. The only reason I am still using Reddit is because of the old.reddit.com interface. Feels like an IPO will make them retire it at some point.
I only use teddit.net to access reddit these days. On those odd occasions that I follow a link to the actual reddit site I'm reminded why I avoid it:
- Pop-up to download app
- Pop-up has been un-clearable on a number of occasions
- Having to click "read more" to see more than two posts
- Having to click a link to a new page to follow a thread more than two / three replies deep (and often finding that it's only a single, useless reply)
The old interface actually solves all those issues. I used to be in disbelief how anybody could survive using the new design for more than 15 seconds but then realised that the way people use Reddit is completely different nowadays. It turned into some sort of 9gag/instagram amalgamation where people scroll through an endless feed of images, enabled by the instagram-like format that is the default with the new interface.
I cyncially feel like your third point is to save them on egress data. Better to send two comments for a post that quite a few people will never read the comments of.
Serving a few more lines of text is trivial, even at Reddit's scale. It is absolutely about making the mobile user experience worse for those who do not wish to download the app.
If they retired old.reddit then the only time I would browse reddit would be when I use my phone, which I only do when I have no computer to interact with or before bed.
If they then do the logical thing and block third party apps then I will just stop using reddit completely, because using the official app just isn't worth it.
Right there with you. There are a LOT of us. This is ostensibly why they've allowed old.reddit.com to live for so long despite almost no development and maintenance anymore. This IPO will probably be the catalyst for some "house cleaning." I imagine old.reddit.com is not long for this world.
Among many bad features and bad coding, I somewhat recently found out the "new" reddit on desktop has a live chat option for some reason. I put in a 4/10 effort in looking to disable it but couldn't find it. It appears its only use is to receive real-time death threats, and to harass women from some of the screenshots I've seen.
old.reddit.com with redditenhancementsuite.com extension is still the best way to browse. I'm impressed that they've kept the old UI for so many years. The usage must be significant to keep it around.
They keep it around, but I've noticed recently I just randomly get opted back into the new design. When I go to settings to opt back out, it shows that I'm already opted out. Then I just click it, which going by the button state would opt me in, but it opts me back out again. It's weird, and it seems clear that they're just auto opting me in on the back end and hoping I'll just deal with it, which I can't because the new design is impossible to navigate.
One of the most important lessons about mass-use computer tools is that overwhelmingly people use defaults.
I first realised this back in the 1990s when shitty default monitor resolution and refresh rate would literally inflict pain (headaches and eyestrain).
MS Windows 95 / 98 shipped with a default of 800x600@60Hz. This was on CRTs, many viewed under office flourescent lighting, which gave rise to a bloody awful flicker that people mistakenly attemtped to correct with "glare screens" and other useless crud.
The solution was simply to crank up refresh rate slightly. Bumping up resolution also gave more useful area and clearer, easier-to-read fonts. (This was also before Cleartype / sub-pixel rendering.)
And yet something like 90-95% of systems monitored ... somehow (possibly an early Web tool) revealed 800x600, and I believe 60 Hz refresh. This on systems which could easily be bumped to 1024x768 or better.
And this was literally a click away off the desktop.
Lesson Younger Me learned: users won't change any default.
So:
- Pick really good defaults. Autoconfigure for best experience if possible.
- If you want to cram things down users' throats, you can just change the default experience, especially on a SAAS app.
I agree with your general point, but the specific example isn't as egregious as you make it out to be. In the mid-90s, protocols for determining supported monitor resolutions were just coming out. The first widely-adopted protocol was DDC2, which wasn't standardized until mid-1996. Had Windows 95 or 98 defaulted to 1024x768@72Hz, a significant fraction of users would upgrade and find their display didn't work. To get a usable system, they'd have to figure out how to boot into safe mode and manually tweak the display settings.
I'm pretty sure this was 1999--2000 or thereabouts.
It's possible that standards were still too rough, but the statistic left a strong impression on me. I believe the general concept is validated elsewhere as well --- I'm pretty sure Jacob Nielsen has a similar finding.
That's how I browse, but I think you need to have an account to be able to set the old theme. I was assuming that scenario was included in old.reddit.com traffic. If it's not, then 10-15% of traffic hitting the old.reddit.com domain seems really high.
Oh, so they are! So what happened here, IYI: I did a paranoiac double-check that both domains resolved and showed content before commenting, but my (...)/.compact result was with smaller text/more "squeeze". I thought it odd but it made sense because, y'know, "compact."
Turns out I had at some point set an 80% zoom while visiting there on this particular browser. Sorry for the confusion!
Strongly agree. Those who are skeptical and have recently joined HN just need to rewind, read a few threads from 2015, let alone 2010. The quality of discussion, the disagreements, the back and forth, the deep respect for each other - all those are eroding away on HN, albeit slowly. Still there is good discussion, especially on deep technical topics (e.g. Semiconductors). It may not be the fault of HN - today's internet is full of toxicity and pretty much everything is politicized. I naturally like to play devil's advocate and it is basically impossible on HN without getting flagged or worse - called names and get insults thrown at you.
I would love to get Dang's perspective but it would be difficult for him to say anything.
I’ve been here for a while. Maybe we can break the rule in a thread about Reddit going for an IPO? :-) Also, I am not saying HN is turning into Reddit. We are just degrading.
FWIW, I didn't mean to imply that you shouldn't comment on it. Just that in HN's "lore" saying that it's turning into reddit is a common theme.
As to your comment itself, I don't think HN is degrading that fast? The low-quality "meme" responses usually get downvoted and while polarization is alive and well, most of it leads to interesting arguments so it's not necessarily a bad thing.
I've only been here for 2-3 years though so maybe it was different before.
I've been here 8+ years and I don't feel like it has changed much. It probably has in some way that hasn't been very noticeable to me. Just my personal observations.
These things are subjective but I find old HN substantially and irrefutably different (and better) for the reasons I said earlier. It is so obvious to me. I wonder why so many people disagree. Something wrong with me?
I feel pretty strong about this. Usually, if I’m not convinced, I wouldn’t put it in such strong terms.
Yeah, I’ve been here a few months only and there is a very different attitude than on better-known websites like Reddit. HN is the only forum I’ve seen where anyone who argues in obviously bad faith will get downvoted to invisibility, and most well-made arguments get upvoted, no matter which side they’re on.
A few years ago, trying to have the same conversations on reddit, everything degraded into personal attacks eventually.
I migrated here in 2016 a couple of months before the American presidential election because the comments on Ars Technica kept derailing into American politics or culture war, even when the article was about science or technology. The problem seems to have followed me. I recognize your name as one of the numerous people using HN for discussing American politics and culture war.
I'm not dang (or spartacus) but I want to say, I think the logic here is fallacious. Quality may or may not be going down, overall I tend to think not, its distortions of size effects, not absolute decline.
But more specifically there is no nexus between the decline, or behaviour, and a desire to IPO and realize profit. Not all things co-relate, they can be contemporaneous and un-related.
Whatever Dan has, and he has a lot of "it" -it includes tolerance and forbearance, and an ability not to buy into the paranoia at large. I don't think he'd be part of an IPO decision logic which went "yea it's boring: lets profit and run" -there might be a "profit" and there might be a consequential "run" and there might be "its boring" but I don't personally see them as causally connected.
Since you're getting a lot of contrary viewpoints, I'll be the one to echo your opinion. I'm seeing a lot more people more interested in "winning" an argument/discussion than in engaging in a discussion.
Nah, HN is reasonably healthy as far as I can tell.
Sometimes things get flagged incorrectly, but usually within a few days issues get fixed. Sometimes you see a flurry of unneeded downvotes.. but scores don't matter much and things get worked out.
My sarcastic comments generally score poorly, my helpful ones do well - which is about the desired outcome.
The goal is not to prevent inflammatory takes or have scores reflect some ideal of values, just to keep the signal above the noise threshold.
I still get odd emails from other HNers and still have interesting conversations.
There's maybe one positive comment thread in here and all the rest are thoughtfully negative to borderline "hater", wishing for Reddits demise for some obscure reason.
I think we've seen this pattern play out. The HN crowd is really not the right crowd to source opinions when it comes to business matters.
And you can see it in the comments, it's mostly about how the UI sucks, the app is slow, the dark patterns, etc...
The reality being missed is there's a ton of value being created in the forums regardless, and MAUs are up like crazy. The bad UI and ads don't seem like they're getting in the way of that.
You are spot-on about the HackerNews tech criticisms being irrelevant.
But I think the points about Reddit being toxic to advertisers because of the hate/porn/gore/mysogny are correct. It just takes one bad story and advertisers will flee the platform. There has been no mainstream examinination and investigation of what Reddit is. Once it starts, it's all over.
Have you been on Reddit lately? They purged all that crap and aggressively censor the entire platform now. The censorship has increased tenfold in the last couple of years.
One of the top stories on Reddit right now is about Nancy Pelosi, and one of the top comments is calling for her death. No moderation, only praise for the murder comment.
It just takes one newspaper to highlight that and it's over for Reddit as an advertising platform. And it can't be stopped because the moderation is local.
not the parent commenter, but my sense is the argument is that all-the-more-so as a public company, user/engagement growth will be king, so the notion that dark patterns and growth hacks will go away is wishful thinking at best.
Agreed. The pressure to push numbers before an IPO will be even stronger after. Especially as control of the company/board shifts more towards returns focused shareholders.
Reddit has me on some sort of ban that causes accounts to be permanently suspended within 24 hours of account creation regardless of what I do with that account, even if it's just make it and leave it alone. Also, anyone that comes to my home and connects to my wifi and then their reddit account will find their account permanently suspended within 24 hours. I've reached out to them multiple times to see what is happening and what can be done about it but get a boilerplate "your ban will be upheld" message from them with a link to the content rules so I can "prevent future bans".
I had over 40k useless internet points on that site before the ban and an 11 year old account but they refuse to help. Oh well.
Reddit routinely shadowbans me and roommates because we'll see a post on /r/all and comment on it. It was way worse when I lived in a dorm. My upvotes/downvotes and submissions were completely broken. Took months for whatever anti-abuse system they have to unflag me.
Their anti-abuse is really bad. I once reported a serious doxxing with a death threat towards another user and after three weeks received a canned message saying something along the lines of 'Sorry, there's nothing we can do about the post. It will stay up.' This was circa 2019, when they already had a formalized 'anti-abuse' team. What exactly they do, I have no idea.
Have your ISP cycle/release->renew your IP address. Don’t attempt to sign in to any of the previous accounts from the new IP. Should avoid their anti evil team’s tooling as long as you’re not causing trouble.
That's a whole other can of worms. I assumed that and asked ATT to do so and got the phone support equivalent of blank stares. I miss the old cable modem days where you could change the MAC address of the primary device attached to the ethernet port and force a new IP but not so with this Fiber ONT they gave me.
Better yet, don't give them an email address at all. The UI would make most people think it's required, but it can be left blank. It will nag you for a while to add one too, but that banner can be removed with uBO.
Yes, despite how Reddit has gotten worse over the years, it will be a huge loss for the web once it finally fully jumps the shark. Already it’s pretty much the last place to find real human opinions in a sea of content marketing garbage.
yes, i only visit reddit directly a 1-2 times a day now as opposed to 100+ from maybe 2010-2017, but i still often append 'reddit' to certain searches with great effect.
What happens to all the work from the moderators once they realize they are working for a public traded company for free? Doesn't this break peoples willingness to build those communities once they realize their hard worked time is getting squeezed to investor dollars? I understand it was a private company beforehand but now it must really feel bad to know how much people are making off your goodwill. Totally effed up model.
FWIW I actually like reddit for the specific communities but tough to see how it isn't going to get further diluted and mods are increasingly going to be less interested is my take - further eroding its value proposition.
Moderators have always been working for "free" (or for their own reasons, there are monetized subs).
The fact that Reddit is public or private doesn't change a thing. Why would working for free for a privately owned company would be easier on the mind? Do you prefer to be explored by a few wealthy individuals rather than the whole open market?
I think a lot of moderators don't realize they're working for a multi billion dollar company atm. It's much harder to hide that when you can google reddit's stock price.
I think a substantial number of powermods are either paid by some influence agency, or they do it for free because they're activists who believe they're fighting for a righteous cause.
The main data point from the success of reddit is that quality interactions in large scale online platforms require an interest based user interface.
Other than that it is almost guaranteed now that its buggy (feels like its held together with tape) and ad-ladden overall experience will be locked-in and get worse (like it happened with facebook)
People might want to hedge their bets and look into open source lemmy and federated versions of the reddit concept https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
If you thought site performance is bad now, wait a few quarters when there are grey beard investors pressuring leadership to wring out the last shekels from this carcass.
Will they be banning porn like tumblr? I know they removed it from "All" and then I believe they hid it in other ways. Just wondering when the Digg 4.0 / Tumblr will happen to Reddit. So far it's been a slow burn but I'm waiting for the great purge to bring down the house. It always seems to happen around an IPO.
I deleted my 14-year account when an admin suspended me for speaking my mind. Never had an issue up to that point. The content quality has declined dramatically over the years and the astroturfing is out of control. I just got sick of it.
Eh there are zealots everywhere, I got a suspension and sent in a request for them to review and I got a message the next day it should never had happened and it was unfair. Pretty sure someone just didn't like my opinion (there was no "hate" in the comment as per the original complaint, it just had a bit of libertarian bent and some admin/moderator pushed a button somewhere to get me banned)
I use old reddit on mobile too. It's legitimately a better experience (just make sure to turn off the font size boosting feature of mobile Chrome which interacts poorly with the layout).
The new design gets worse every time I try it. There's always a new thing trying to lure me into a conversion funnel. Latest attempt: I had to ad block the little bouncing coin thing in the top right just to focus. Then I was hit with auto-playing ads on the main page. That was as far as I got.
Yeah I think people will have a diaspora to discord/matrix which only sorta fills the same itch with very limited history. The day they require emails is the day I quit.
The funny thing about the r/all porn removal is it's only gone if you ARE logged in. If you aren't logged in and hit r/all the porn will appear once you get to the 4th or 5th page. It isn't nearly as prevalent as it was and I haven't seen it hit the front page as it did years ago but it's certainly there, I suspect to entice people to make accounts.
Didn’t they start requiring you to be logged in? I can’t imagine how awkward that must be. “Please log in to watch your embarrassing porn so we can track you and sell the data and connect it to your real identity”
It means that the company has started the review process with the SEC. The company is going to go back and forth with the agency to make sure their filings, audits, disclosures, etc. are up to par before the company files publicly in a few months. Once the filing is public the company will wait for 15 days before launching their roadshow.
And yes, this is how the process works with every company
This is accurate. They have lead left for their syndicate selected if they’re going the traditional underwriter route. They’ll pick all the banks for their syndicate with help from their advisors, and then teach sell side research about the company and use this as a trial period for fielding questions while everyone is under NDA’s before the public flip. Once the roadshow is launched it’ll be something between 1-2 weeks before pricing, though that’s been compressed towards ~1 week since everyone is doing digital meetings now vs in person.
A flippant remark, but Reddit is a not insignificant facilitator of pornography alongside many great safe for work subreddits and we will probably see them trying to stop this before or after going public. That or changing the terms of use for users to be 18 from the current 13.
Plenty of hardcore pornography on Twitter, and not just legal one, which got me wondering why their app is getting a pass on IOS when Tumbler didn't. At least Facebook does not permit any form of pornography.
I just logged in to my oldest Reddit account. It was opened in 2006. I have kept it around just to be able to read some of the posts I made over the years. I'll delete those now, close the account, and move along. I have had so much fun but I think the time is right for a change.
Reddit is operating on the shakiest house of cards, and their investors are being swindled, along with their advertisers. For one of many examples, they're grossly inflating viewership numbers on Reddit Live by injecting the top broadcast into the front page of 25,000 users every ~30 seconds -- largely against their will[1] or without knowledge[2] -- and then selling those as "video views" to record labels, Adobe, League Of Legends and others. The administrators and moderators have repeatedly lied about this to the community, going as far as claiming they "don't even have the ability to manipulate the top broadcast mechanism," and yet they have a list of streamers who receive special treatment, along with the paid ads (which are not marked as ads, and instead offered as "user content.")
A year ago, they even implemented a follow mechanism so that streamers' fans could get push notifications when they went live. But when the admins decided to make manual manipulation of the top broadcast mechanism a priority, they removed the notifications for Reddit Live altogether because it was too easy for the Reddit community to upvote "riff raff" into the top spot. They changed their story about why bringing back notifications "was impossible, but we're working on it" a dozen times or more. In reality, they just need certain broadcasts to receive the most views to generate the most money through their awarding system.
On top of hundreds of lies at this point, they've been actively banning anyone who discusses this. They ban streamers who ask questions about how the ranking mechanism works, including an autistic streamer with a large following on the site, simply for making note of how certain streamers get special treatment. They even banned a user for making a notifications replacement and discussing why they made it.
In fact, if you get banned from the r/pan subreddit for asking any of these questions (which happens often), you have to be careful about the content you interact with on Reddit as a whole. Since they forcefully inject the Reddit Live top broadcast into every desktop page view (and most mobile ones) without actually labeling it as r/pan content, if you click on that broadcast and vote or make a comment, they ban you from the site.
It's completely out of control, and that's how every level of the site operates these days. The influxes of cash and IPO hyping paint a rosy picture, but peeling back just one layer of the Reddit onion quickly reveals a company which is flailing, and desperately grasping at anything that will help maintain the charade until crossing the IPO finish line.
>On top of hundreds of lies at this point, they've been actively banning anyone who discusses this.
Reddit's been like that for at least a decade. I remember arguing with Huffman and later Pao about their awful corporate newspeak ("enabling authentic conversations") and how reddit is being actively gamed by advertisers and has been for years. The same goes for every user-hostile change they've made (and there have been many). It's always under some noble pretense but really it's about making reddit more palatable to advertisers. When confronted, the admins either avoid responding or else claim Big Tobacco-levels of ignorance.
It's all so patently obvious to anyone who chooses to look, and I think the blatant contempt the admins display towards their users (without whom, let's not forget, reddit would never have taken off) contributes to the toxicity on reddit, or at least it did years ago when reddit was smaller and the toxic culture is now self-perpetuating.
Despite the fake viewership numbers, RPAN is actually the best marketing tool on the internet for content creators. It's the only site that gives you a built-in audience without any effort, and musicians in particular have used it to build massive followings outside of Reddit, on the order of tens (and even hundreds) of thousands of followers. There's honestly no better way to find an initial fanbase -- even if you never get top broadcast.
Also for any of you non-lame-lurkers out there that never log in and insist on using old.reddit instead of setting prefs to use the old look, all the crap that is the default on the homepage of reddit, /r/popular etc whatever, you never have to see at all and can enjoy your niche subreddits without any exposure. I haven't looked at any of the main top level reddits/memes/incels/funny/pics in like 5 years
Man, what a ride Reddit must have been. I wonder if any of the original team are still there, or if they still have any equity.
One of the first useful things I ever programmed was a Greasemonkey script to collapse comment threads on Reddit before they had the ability to do that. They implemented the collapse feature a few weeks or months later and made it useless. I still like the way my script worked better though, it left the top comment visible.
I wish I hadn't deleted my original Reddit account. It would probably be one of the older ones around by now.
I saw yesterday that gilding in /r/AskReddit have paid for 868 years of server time. It seems like they might be able to make a vanity payment model instead of just advertising. That would be nice. If they made the old.reddit.com interface available by subscribing to Reddit Gold only, they might make a fortune off of just that...
So does an IPO make their dark patterns ("download the app or we will annoy you forever") better or worse? It's either money for continued operations or the pressure to milk active users for cash.
A censorious echo-chamber going public, what else is new?I just find it funny how people migrated from FB/Twitter to a somewhat more usable website and reddit is anything else besides garbage.
Ironically enough, the vast majority of people never used the website pre-2014, so they don't have anything or comparison besides "it's a different community-building website, therefore it's better".
It's not: their website on mobile is cancer, forcing people to install an app is not an argument, censorship(!= moderation, though i'm sure people will start pointing out how it's privately owned) is probably higher than even on places like FB when you compare the last few years(mainly because FB in the west has been somewhat watched), and the core principle of system on which the website functions is polarizing, even more than FB/Twitter.You add on top of that the scandals of (quite literally) 'corruption' between community moderators, staff, etc and the socially-obedient karma system, you end up with a gamified social network, except it's worse because everyone wants to comfortably stay in their own bubble.
Then again this same downstream phenomenon started applying to HN, you already see the cracks, and bullshit is more and more frequent here, a place where people know you can't avoid talking politics as the discussion length increases, knew to remain civil and discuss even the touchy subjects, detached.
I can't imagine this change making Reddit any better. Things have been going downhill ever since Swartz's unfortunate demise. Maybe it will take some of the control away from the chinese investors, but that's about it. Problems like powermodding, censorship and curated approach to their public image (r/undelete).
Whatever is needed to please the investors and advertisers.
Reddit has become so heavy-handed with censorship, especially towards feminism, I stopped using it a long time ago. Reddit is a great example of how awful the internet is for woman.
Porn subs can have content that is female only, but subs for women and lesbians have to include men who think they're women and feminist subs get banned. The biggest lesbian sub is so overrun by men it's a joke.
Honest question, do you feel like the lgb community has been hijacked by the t? As an outsider it sure appears that way and seems like there is some low boiling resentment brewing
Reddit has definitely had noticeable changes over the past 5+ years as they’ve gone through further VC rounds of funding that demand more ROI-centric changes.
I can’t imagine the ways it will change as a public company once numbers are public to scrutiny and the shareholder makeup shifts.
It seems the intrinsic problem with platforms like Reddit (at least from what’s been witnessed over the last 8 years) is that they will inevitably “hit a wall” in a way that will become incompatible with shareholder interests.
By that I mean at some point that hockey-stick growth is going to inevitably taper off and reach terminal velocity before declining as the platform reaches unsustainability. Then, Reddit is going to have to throw shit at the wall and hope something sticks to please investors, or grow by acquisition, which is like a Tylenol level solution. I just don’t see how an advertising and virtual badges driven social platform is ever going to be compatible with the expectations of running a public company to produce returns like in some other industry or sector.
I wonder how the original founders of Reddit feel about selling out so early. They sold to Conde Naste for $20m. Now, it's worth 1000x more. I'm sure there are ways to rationalize it as a good decision -- i.e. $10m is a life changing sum of money. But, I wonder if, as a general rule, it's better to only sell half your stake to avoid upside regret.
A strange choice of time, to me. With such intense market volatility, it's easy to both leave money on the table by setting the IPO price too low, or to have trouble selling stock by by setting it too high.
OTOH the freshly printed money look for returns, so the stock market is more likely to be bullish even in relatively near term; maybe they are trying to catch this trend?
Market predictability is at an extreme low. Rug pulls are happening on a regular basis, and spy is regularly being propped up by a few random, overvalued stocks.
That’s because there was an FOMC meeting today, it’s always more volatile before one. The market was told that what it expected would happen is going to happen, and it was pleased. It expected more bond purchase tapering and 3 rate hikes (75 bps total) next year.
VIX is back under 20, volatility is settling down.
Some unprofitable growth stocks have been sold off lately, but the rest of the market is chugging along just fine, at least until rates start to go up.
I actually don't know what "market predictability" means. Like, the market is never predictable, right? That's why most money managers don't consistently make big profits. Is this a notion that can be quantified? Can you cite some evidence for what you've said?
Anyway, the person I was responding to said volatility and that is the metric I cited.
What are some examples of rug pulls? All of the ones I can think of are ICOs, not IPOs. I can, however, think of dozens of IPOs that have gone gangbusters.
My first thought was that the interest rate hikes coming next year may have spurred it, but I'm guessing this sort of thing has been in the works for quite awhile now.
there's been a bit of back and forth in tech lately and there are some signs it is nearing or passing a peak valuation. Get the money while you can and don't look back. Reddit's getting old too
500 million users, 100,000 communities. Since I don't pay to use it, presumably the value proposition lies in the small cohort who do pay for ephemeral karma and style additions, value added services, and of course the advertising BI which fuels the internet at large.
Since I am not paying, and I am not bidding for shares, I must be the product. This is merely a statement of my value (1/500,000,000th) to them as a BI source.
on $6nm value: $1200 per user, $60,000 per community. Thats not annual, presuambly at a sane ROI its some sub-multiple of that as extracted/notional value, but I lack the fu to say what that is.
I have to say, I don't feel worth $1200 in reddit views. Gosh, I wonder if selling my read impressions is a breach of GDRP and/or CCPA
There has been some recent changes to reddit and it is becoming aggressively annoying. Trying to make me look back on my top posts and comments and flashy buttons on the top. They are aiming for that dopamine hit by showing you your top posts so you can reminisce in all the likes you got that day. On top of that they have a banner across the bottom you can close but it forever comes back nagging you to verify your account. The whole reason I do kind of use reddit is because I am anonymous to others and can speak freely. I can create burner accounts and say one thing and never go back to it. It feels very facebooky with the big push for engagement happening right now but I guess this public offering is why the big push.
I can see this as a bad thing in the following way:
1. They will most likely start making their API unusable similar to what Twitter did. Their Chat is already not available via the API and they are no longer open sourced.
2. They will most likely start banning porn or make it very hard to access (though Twitter seems to still allow porn accounts so maybe I am wrong here?).
3. MORE dark patterns in design. Their website is already super slow, tons of white space requiring extra scrolling (so more ads), needs extra clicks and too many ads which look like posts. Their site on mobile is useless and keeps asking to open in app. Ad blocker and 3rd party app solves this which gives them more incentive to break the API.
4. More censorship of anything remotely offensive.
Reddit has come some ways as far as mainstream acceptance etc but man if I will die on the hill that it only survived/became "successful" because of the legendary Digg slip up and exodus. It was on its deathbed before that happened. I know there are enough of us out there that remember this and tire of the having to remind of the history.
And it's nothing more than a large collection of forums basically. With all the mod challenges, UI/UX hurdles etc that come with that. Happy for it to exist/find it useful for niche communities etc but with freaking Alexis Ohanian would stop waltzing around like he had any genius foresight or any insight into anything social/web.
I'm a big fan of their monetization strategy. Instead of relying on advanced advertising tracking they use micro-transactions to buy digital goods. It's a lot cleaner and doesn't ruin the experience of using the site.
Half the comments in here boil down to "I would stop using Reddit if they discontinued old.reddit.com" and it really rubs me the wrong way.
It's like saying "Facebook will die if they start charging users to post to their wall".
Like, okay, sure. But Reddit has repeatedly said that they will not depreciate old.reddit.com. They have zero reason to, as many of their powerusers rely on it.
In fact, I don't think Reddit has a history of deprecating anything! Freaking. .compact is still around from god knows when!
> But Reddit has repeatedly said that they will not depreciate old.reddit.com. They have zero reason to, as many of their powerusers rely on it.
Let’s be honest. Every company says this. Some actually try to stand by their statement. Public companies very often wipe those statements from existence because some MBA found a way to increase profits 27% this quarter (who cares if it the company borders on bankrupt in 2 years) or some intern found a way to double clicks.
If someone demonstrates that old Reddit results in fewer ad views, shutting it down is a matter of when and not if.
Reddit also used to say "We won't use your email address for anything except password resets", and we all know how that went.
They've basically stopped adding new features to the old UI, so a lot of account settings require you to go to the new UI if you want to change them (and of course the most annoying settings typically default to "on" when the toggle is added). The markdown handling has also changed. That's why on old Reddit you'll sometimes see broken URLs with superfluous escape characters.
I keep wondering, why hasn’t someone made a new Reddit that’s pretty much just the old Reddit? It seems like there’s a ton of demand for it. Disrupt what Reddit has become by creating what it used to be.
It's too easy to end up with the types of people who are no longer welcome on reddit. See Voat, Ruqqus, the entire win network, etc. Nobody wants to post pictures of their dog next to memes complaining about the Jews.
You could make an incredibly niche website, but then you're effectively competing for users with reddit.
Because network effects. Even if you clone Reddit you still need to convince people to come use your clone, that’s where the actual hard work is.
And “ton of demand”, there isn’t really. Just some loud critics, but nowhere near a big enough mass to make a difference. Just as Mastodon will never beat Twitter, despite fixing a lot of its shortcomings.
voat.co tried. when the last reddit exodus happened in 2017, the site crashed all of the time. you need A LOTTTTTTTTTT of resources to run reddit, and reddit 10x’ed the “unified forum with image and video hosting” problem.
I built whoaverse during my studies which went on to become voat. You do not need a lot of resources to run such a site, but you do need a way to monetize it. We ran on donations and the ads that we ran were never profitable. Donations are not profit either, so it was working purely because we could afford some time off to work on it. This does not work in the long run, if you can no longer justify working for free. I am currently building 20-things.com, but I doubt that there is any interest for redittors to jump off at this point.
Reddit is very old, with old unpaid moderators that moderate arbitrarily and a user base that has now been trained to devolve everything to their lowest common denominator which is politics. There are few niches that are useful as aggregators, but moderating those subreddits must be exhausting (e.g. covid19).
Looks like they really need to be disrupted but i guess investors don't think there s enough money in building another forum. And they may probably be right.
I am a fan of reddit, but I'm not a fan of what public markets do to companies. I want to be optimistic, but I'm realistic -- the sort of content that gets posted in many subreddits isn't often the sort of content lives long when faced with public market scrutiny. Then again I guess Twitter has become rife with that sort of content too. Maybe I should be cautiously optimistic.
Reddit in the last 2-3 years was ruined by itself. The homepage became more and more polarized and I'm sure it's by tweaking the algorithm to create more traffic and clicks.
The killing of Secret Santa and Reddit gifts showed that the company doesn't care about the community at all, but it's focused on maximizing revenue for the future IPO.
Really sad about this as the site was being able to stay out of the toxic environment of the social media giants for a long time.
1) A nice clickbait title.
2) Just some general grammar problems that appear in many languages, including English.
I thought that reddit's source code (files) would be published and free again. By the way, reddit used to be open source: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
never thought i would see the day. I guess congrats to YCombinator’s first golden child? They were first cohort of YC I believe?
really happy for them, for a long while they were languishing with no growth whatsoever. Their monetization strategy is still really unclear/unproven but clearly some investors saw enough to go ahead and bet big. good for them.
So long as they keep the API available for apps like Apollo then I'm fine. Honestly that's the only way I browse Reddit now, but I can't help but feel weird when the only way to enjoy a site is to use something else entirely to view its content.
I'll try to get a piece of this one as it is a great platform to watch diverse content. There's a lot of subreddits ranging from shitposts to high-value content that is available within the site's reach.
Good luck explaining to shareholders that the most popular subreddits are occasionally held hostage by extreme left activists abusing their power by shutting down the subreddits as a political statement.
Well that explains their inexplicably stupid and horrible attempt to increase the number of their users. From the crappy new design to the fucking insistent push to use their app.
If they don’t do a direct listing maybe they’ll let some old timers get in on the IPO like Airbnb did for hosts. Lurking for 16 years has to count for something right? :)
My first reaction was "Oh no, here comes the the paywalls and the ads and all that". I sincerely hope that my initial reaction is wrong here, but the constant desire to please investors is unlikely to have a positive impact on the communities, no?
Moreover, who would buy that stock? What is the growth prospect of an Internet forum that has been around for 10 years. Not even advertisers use it because it so bad at targeting. I would rather put $1000 in Tesla or something more tangible.
I'll go against the tide here and say Reddit I still think Reddit is great! sure I don't think the big subs, greater emphasis on monitization, and some of the other big changes they've made over the past few years are great - but I still love the smaller subs I participate in, and the I think the new UI quite nicer than the old one
Content aside, Reddit is possibly the worst performing large commercial website I have ever seen. Like half of all page loads and requests end with “something went wrong”. Search has been unusable from day 1, and somehow getting worse. Their new video player makes me want to throw my computer across the room. I have been using it on and off for a decade now and I can’t think of one aspect of the site (whether in terms of performance, reliability, UI, usability, features) that hasn’t degraded in quality.
Happy about the IPO, but PLEASE invest in some engineering and infrastructure work.
(Edit: weird that this comment was sitting at the top of the page for an hour and then suddenly moved to the very bottom. Someone on the HN team must really like Reddit.)
> You might be trying to use the dumpster fire that's https://reddit.com
IMO this has dual meaning. Of course, the (new reddit) UI is not my preference for sure. But the content on (not logged in) reddit.com is just so unbelievably different from what I see when logged in (to old.reddit.com). Therein lies the dumpster fire. I've had thumbnails disabled since forever ago, and picked a handful of subreddits across a couple of multireddits. I never really understood why people would think Reddit was anything like Facebook or any such similar site. Until one day I saw what it looked like to everyone else.
Reddit for me looks a lot like it looked back in ~2004, but with comments :)
I was thinking exactly the same thing, till you mentioned old reddit, and I remember I've never actually used new reddit. I just opted out in Preferences when it was first released and have been using old reddit ever since. It's still the same good reading/content experience it was 10yrs ago.
There's actually a mobile web view which works even better than old.reddit.com - it's i.reddit.com , and it's even faster, cleaner, and less javascript, with the added benefit that it doesn't display any of the custom CSS or customizations from the subreddit (like the header banners etc).
And at least for now, there's a multitude of third party parties with all the features one could care about, minus all the bloat. But who knows how long the api will last?
The clock is ticking on that. I'd wager we see it shut down within the next 2 years. There will be insane pressure to increase ad revenue now, even more pressure than was already there. 3rd-party clients are a "leak" in this regard.
I've used the old site exclusively since the rewrite (and for a long time before it), and https://old.reddit.com specifically is still the most unreliable large commercial website I can think of by a wide margin. It's fast when it works, but I get orders of magnitude more 5XX errors on https://old.reddit.com than on any other site I can think of.
> The "new" UI they have is unusable, and may God have mercy for the poor souls that walk into it.
This would be reasonable if there weren’t subreddits that are totally broken on old.reddit.com and proclaim loudly in their sidebar that they no longer support it.
I use Reddit daily, and for the last ~week their UI has added multiple things to click and be taken to my 'Reddit recap', which I think is supposed to be like Spotify's 'your year in review' feature.
Reddit's product managers very much want me to check out my 'Reddit Recap'.
Well I've navigated to my recap about 30 times now in the last week, from multiple links, in app and desktop, and it's still totally broken.
On desktop now, it doesn't show anything except a "retry" button which is incorrectly stuck to the left side of my screen (CSS fail).
I can understand things being broken, but its really bad form to funnel a user to a prominent feature, have that feature be broken, and then have a broken and terrible error state.
I do wonder what kind of engineering team bungles a big feature release like this.
This is all their attention grabbing tricks -- by MBA style middle managers to juke the stats for their OKRs and KPIs. Reddit is to that part of their life-cycle where the soul gets crushed out for the capital (it's a re-run, you've seen it before).
I'd wager $1 that over the next few years Reddit becomes even more of an Attention-Vampire (or tries to)
It's almost feeling Reddit, Facebook, Twitter -- these "social" echo chamber sites are all getting to the contempt phase of life -- the next disruptor cannot come soon enough.
I don’t know if there will be a “next” one. I think these vampires will be with us for the foreseeable future. There will be a separate “enthusiast web” (maybe out of the fediverse but I’m not gonna hold my breath) but it’ll never get big enough to go fully mainstream.
Already the real action is happening on chat apps these days. These are your discords and slacks and clubhouses. In them I see the vitality of the old IRC and forum culture eras.
I experienced a somewhat comical bug where the Reddit recap chose my most downvoted comment as my "Comment to end all comments" (probably because its absolute value was greatest). Seems unlikely that this was an intentional easter egg (it was accompanied with "Out of all the comments you made in 2021, this one sure got a lot of upvotes").
Also, I just discovered that the built-in screenshot generator for Reddit recap is broken as it only captures the rendered portion of each card, leaving out the scrollable overflow.
This case alone offers a strong testament to the poor quality of most Reddit features.
The second old.reddit.com goes offline, I'll probably never visit the website again. I haven't used the new version once (what is it 4 years old now?) - they toyed with literally the perfect UX for what? For a PM to have something to do?
Oh god the recap is hilariously broken. Doesn’t work on my iPad or my iPhone browser. Haven’t tried the app because fuck the app. Sorta works on my desktop browser. Kinda.
I'm beginning to see why they banned several subreddits and accounts, began forcing people to use the app, had tons of front page content re-upped as bootlegs from tiktok, and then turned the place into a Frankenstein of all the other social media sites.. Finally the truth comes to light... Whelp... Thanks for the fish, it was nice until it tanked about 2 years ago.
New reddit is scary... Almost like IG with boxes around everything, and all the controls are hidden in places you'll never find them. It's like driving a poorly serviced 92 Fiero through a hidden curve on the autobahn. But even old reddit has the same recycled content and reposts, so there's that... :\
At least you have the giant stickied Covid Misinformation comment on on every single post on .... r/funny. The place I go for all of my up to date covid information.
This is the thing, i hate their new ui... and if ever they get rid of their 'old' ui I would leave reddit. Their "New UI" was brought in in 2018, and to me was like a digg moment.
To me, Hackernews is what Reddit was 10 years ago, just without subreddits. Clean top quality content.
It's weird. I was a huge user of Reddit from its launch to 2013 when I fell off the Internet. I didn't use it again until 2021, so I had a big jump in UI. As a UX designer I really don't get all the hate about the current interface. It works great for me.
It's literally 10x slower on all devices that I have, shows less content (particularly, long comment threads), and 100 other reasons they I'd sure hope you understood as a UX designer.
It's 2021, I don't want to see a "Loading..." icon like I'm on dial-up in the 90s.
Honestly, I have seen no performance issues for new Reddit on any of the devices I own. And I own some really shit devices. I'm broke, so I bought the cheapest laptop on Amazon. My phones are the lowest free Android devices.
Whereas about 80% of other sites on the Internet were unbrowseable until I installed an adblocker.
It's just a sucky pile of JavaScript libraries.. I'm always stuck looking at the "pulsing gray bars as a placeholder for text" for way too long. They should focus on making it perform so it doesn't need tricks like that.
My main driver isn't the fastest (skylake i5) but it's much slower than any of the other sites I use. And on my gaming pc (Ryzen 5 5600) it's slow too. And I have 1gbit fibre.
Ps serious question, isn't it difficult being a UX designer when you've been off the internet for 8 years? Stuff has really changed a lot.
My only driver is a $300 Acer Windows 10 laptop and new Reddit works great for me on Chrome.
I really don't think the Web has changed very much at all in the time I was gone. Pages are much better at being responsive. Bloat is 100X worse, but was solved by installing an adblocker. The cookie pop-ups can fuck themselves. But, fundamentally, nothing is different. I like that CSS and HTML have advanced to the point where it is simpler and cleaner to write good code if you are a decent human being.
Fair point. For contrast, here's a list of reasons why I think Reddit's new UI sucks:
1. Stability: videos rarely play for me. Sometimes I break Reddit too (their words, not mine).
2. Slow: if I want to read the comments, I have to wait 3-5 seconds for them to load. I know that the comments could load instantly because the i.reddit.com interface can do it.
3. Unhelpful interface: it is not easy to identify how to expand a comment thread. But more important, the interface often won't tell me that a comment chain keeps going - it looks as if it just ended, even though it keeps going several levels deep. You can keep reading the chain if you click on the last comment, but again, why would you click on it if you don't know whether it keeps going?
3b. In relation to the previous point: I saw your comment because I was scrolling pretty deep into this thread. In the new Reddit UI it would have been cut off.
4. Annoying: if you're not logged in, content is kept from you just because. Again, the i.reddit.com interface shows everything, but the "regular" interface keeps pestering you with "Log in to see this content" or "Open in app". These popups cannot be dismissed.
All of these changes are pro-metrics and anti-user. Sure, the interface itself looks fine (once it rendered, if it renders). But interaction-wise? It sucks.
The actual visuals and layout are fine imo. I don’t need to see a billion posts at once. The problem is it runs like shit, gives errors all the time, and has a billion nag popups.
The UI is fine. It’s nothing special in terms of design but it’s not outright offensive except to people used to the old one. The issue is that it’s dog slow.
No, it isn't. The information-dense old style is useful, doesn't force scrolling (the forcing of which appears to be the intent, for whatever reason), and does not aid in quick scanning of material & moving on. It's intended to keep people desperate for content engaged while not giving them anything useful.
The content density of old reddit is much higher than new Reddit. Additionally, I've always been deeply unhappy with endless scroll. Pagination just feels much more stable to me.
Aren't every one of those facts supposed to be the sort of thing that gets you downranked on Google? Slow pages, pages that don't load, pages appear in Google but when clicked present a logon wall?
I've posted on own blog on Reddit and found that a search for the exact title has, as the first hit, that reddit post. And my blog itself is on page three. It's infuriating.
Completely agree – search is absurdly poor considering the resources available to any solo developer these days. The mobile app is generally usable, if all you want to do is doomscroll without interacting with a single piece of content. Even normal interface interactions induce ridiculous UI delays that I haven't seen in any level of software product for years.
Nice, I hadn't heard of that [1]! I'm pretty indifferent towards owning a Blockchained micro-share of a publicly listed company, but I'd be very interested if reddit were to end up user-owned akin to the Packers
Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session. Heck, I get my HN updates from Reddit now.
Facebook/Instagram/TikTok are nothing like this in that the info you get is wholly dependent on your social graph. Twitter has very high quality content, but it’s a firehose that is very difficult to curate and keep up with. Reddit is democratizing in a sense, like riding the NYC subway.
An even wilder bet: Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse (as a news outlet of sorts, on steroids) and even potentially minimize the need for Google Search.
Anecdotally, a VERY LARGE percentage of my Google searches end in “site:reddit.com” these days. Reddit posts, especially from smaller subs, tend to be higher quality and don’t have ulterior motives (ad revenue). If Reddit’s Lucene cluster were better, between that and SO, I’d use Google a handful of times a week. Maybe this IPO can help fund that.
If the ad revenue from the whale subs allow me to continue learning about interior design, supply chain logistics, the inner workings of car sales, finance and tax strategies if I become high net worth, and more, I’m here for it.