[HN Gopher] The Reddits
___________________________________________________________________
The Reddits
Author : sandslash
Score : 300 points
Date : 2024-03-21 14:00 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ycombinator.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ycombinator.com)
| meesles wrote:
| Puff piece you would expect from key stakeholders in this whole
| fiasco (conveniently timed, might I add). Respect where respect
| is due, but nothing in this post is worth a grain of salt in my
| opinion.
| kitchi wrote:
| What fiasco? I think I'm missing some context here
| nadermx wrote:
| From my understanding, reddit is losing 100m+ a year and
| their CEO gets paid more than Nvda ceo, or apple ceo.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I think the often-quoted amount that huffmann is going to
| be paid includes stock he owns (will own?), with its
| valuation based on the targeted IPO price. I don't think
| he's getting paid an absurd amount of cash right now.
| mportela wrote:
| It's in his interest to have a small cash compensation
| though since long-term capital gains tax is smaller than
| income tax. Also, he can always take a loan against his
| stock to get liquidity without triggering income tax.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| 193M
| misiti3780 wrote:
| getting downvoted for posting a true, public piece of
| information ... cool
| nineplay wrote:
| That headline has been linked everywhere so of course it's
| untrue. a) He received an large bonus and b) his increased
| salary is still half of NVIDIA's CEO.
|
| "Huffman in 2023 got a salary of $341,346, which is
| relatively low for a CEO of a major public corporation. In
| February, this was raised to $550,000. He also got a
| $792,000 bonus last year based on Reddit's user numbers,
| revenue, and a type of profitability known as adjusted
| EBITDA that excludes certain expenses."
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-
| def...
| mycologos wrote:
| Looking at their SEC filing [1], the CEO compensation
| breaks down into ~$1mil of cash and ~$192mil roughly split
| between stock and options. Both the stock and options
| appear to have further conditions attached to them that
| reduce that number further.
|
| I'm not even a fake accountant, so I don't understand the
| exact nature of the dilution, but the $193mil overall
| number seems to assume a lot of stuff goes extremely well
| in the IPO. I _think_ the stock number assumes a stock
| price of ~$33.
|
| [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/0001628
| 28024...
| bloopernova wrote:
| They weren't making advertising money from 3rd party API
| clients like RIF is Fun or Apollo. They decided to increase
| the price of API calls to an impractically high amount. This
| was uncovered by the Apollo dev, who recorded their meetings
| with the Reddit leadership, which also uncovered that Reddit
| leadership was lying about the interaction (accusing the
| Apollo dev of extortion I believe). Reddit wanted $12,000 for
| something other sites charged approximately $200.
|
| (see the reply to this comment by neilv for information that
| casts doubt on the "reddit leadership lying" part of this)
|
| Instead of charging 3rd party clients $5/month or something
| and retaining them, Reddit banned all 3rd party clients. But
| then went back on that after realizing that people with
| disabilities used 3rd party clients to access the site
| because Reddit's own app was not usable for them. Other 3rd
| party apps were still banned though.
|
| People protested, eventually taking thousands of subreddits
| offline, which Reddit then fixed by replacing the
| moderators/owners of each subreddit.
|
| There's probably more I'm missing, but basically Reddit tried
| to rent-seek but their engineering teams weren't able to
| provide the infrastructure needed to support API
| subscriptions for 3rd party apps.
|
| Edited to add: The initial Apollo developer thread is here: h
| ttps://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca..
| .
|
| And the post that details Reddit leadership lying about the
| Apollo dev: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkq
| rw/i_want_t...
| dncornholio wrote:
| > People protested, eventually taking thousands of
| subreddits offline, which Reddit then fixed by replacing
| the moderators/owners of each subreddit.
|
| Reddit couldn't have handled this better IMO. Mods
| literally held subs hostage, which, when you think of it,
| is just so stupid it made for some good natural selection.
| neilv wrote:
| > _which also uncovered that Reddit leadership was lying
| about the interaction (accusing the Apollo dev of extortion
| I believe)._
|
| I wasted a lot of time going through transcripts and
| recordings at the time, and (to my ear, and knowledge of
| the world) the facts available didn't fully support the
| confident accusations that the angry villagers with
| pitchforks were repeating from each other.
|
| Which injustice is kinda poetic, if you consider how Reddit
| as a venue nurtured thinking like "we did it, reddit!" and
| other collective stupidity.
| bloopernova wrote:
| I've updated my comment with a note about yours. I'll
| admit I haven't gone through the recordings or
| transcripts, thank you for doing that.
| Jenk wrote:
| Reddit is about to IPO. YC are principle investors.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Posts like this timed with the IPO remind me this forum is
| basically a marketing engine.
|
| Let's not ever forget that.
| nyc_data_geek wrote:
| That is, unfortunately, the vast majority of the Internet at
| this point.
| ohyes wrote:
| I have a hard time conceiving of a platform one could
| currently make that would not become closer to a marketing
| platform the more user engagement it receives.
|
| Maybe niche BBs or a platform with enough distasteful content
| that no company wants their brand associated with it. (Ex.
| 4chan)
| uaserussia wrote:
| Reminds me of some very crass thing Slavoi Zizek said. That
| if you want good conversation you have to have a machine
| dildo fucking a pocket vagina in the background. That's
| like so true. Its like an engine has to have an exhaust.
| account42 wrote:
| I think you might need to adapt that strategy for the
| modern world where sexual degeneracy has become
| acceptable for corporate messaging.
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| Explain this normal post you just made. Are you talking
| about how Steve Huffman was a moderator and champion of
| r/Jailbait?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| HN is a social media platform. I think the kind of marketing
| going on in HN is decently acceptable. This post was still very
| interesting to me, which fits the spirit of HN.
| MoOmer wrote:
| I'm anti-spam myself, but I wouldn't draw that conclusion from
| this post. It's a post that links to a blog post on the YC
| primary domain site (that is, their company site), and we are
| on a YC forum hosted on a subdomain of the parent YC domain.
|
| I wouldn't visit Reddit's blog and interpret talk about their
| successes there as indicating that the entire forum(s?) exist
| for marketing the parent.
|
| And although, the HN forum itself definitely is great
| marketing, I mean to say that not all the content is marketing
| for YC.
|
| I also wouldn't draw that conclusion if someone who worked at
| Reddit submitted the blog post to a subreddit and it got
| upvoted there.
|
| Unless it was boosted here, it's only on the front page because
| of others voting it up. It's more likely that it's the PG
| effect!
| meowface wrote:
| Y Combinator is an investment firm, Reddit is a Y Combinator-
| funded company, Paul Graham is an essayist who had Y Combinator
| invest in Reddit, and this is news.ycombinator.com (where
| people often like to read things written by Paul Graham and
| things written about YC companies). It's both an interesting
| recollection and something to help the IPO. Is it really so bad
| if it's both?
| rybosworld wrote:
| > It's an interesting recollection
|
| Replace recollection with "revisionist history"
| meowface wrote:
| What about it is wrong?
| NateEag wrote:
| the clear implication that Reddit just keeps getting more
| and more awesome.
|
| Many people think it's gotten worse.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Wait, I have a javascript framework I want to tell you
| about....
| phone8675309 wrote:
| They've never tried to hide that (to their credit)
| diggan wrote:
| > Reddit the site (and now app) is such a fundamentally useful
| thing that it's almost unkillable.
|
| Looking forward to see how true this is. The communities I used
| to frequent, have maybe 20% of the activity they used to, before
| the API fiasco, even though they're "back online". I also stopped
| using reddit on the phone after my chosen reddit client was
| closed down (which I'm grateful for, thanks reddit).
|
| My reddit activity probably dropped way below half compared to
| before, as the communities I used to be in are now shells of
| their former glory.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Yea, i stopped using it from mobile entirely when that
| happened. I expect them to kill `old.reddit` soon any that'll
| be the end of that for me. ATProto is far more interesting to
| me, if/when someone makes a link aggregator for them rather
| than the Twitter style UI of Bluesky. ActivityPub will do in a
| pinch, if needed. (i already tested this idea, for ~60 days
| with zero Reddit)
| mrmlz wrote:
| Modern Reddit is such a broken experience especially on the
| web. And honestly the community has degraded over the last
| couple of years.
| WA9ACE wrote:
| Old style interface on a development focused lemmy instance
| has completely replaced reddit usage for me
|
| This is the equivalent of /r/all across the lemmy world
|
| https://old.programming.dev/?sort=Active&listingType=All
| europeanNyan wrote:
| It looks like Old Reddit, but the content is New Reddit.
|
| It's just a stream of political dreck and virtue
| signalling. I really don't need to see Trump in every
| second post and read about people who hate cars, meat,
| Twitter, Reddit, etc.
| Goronmon wrote:
| _I really don 't need to see Trump in every second post
| and read about people who hate cars, meat, Twitter,
| Reddit, etc. _
|
| Exactly. All I see online is people talking about
| politics, their jobs, their families, their hobbies, the
| environment, technology, etc.
| piaste wrote:
| Yeah, Lemmy is a pretty decent platform but the
| suggestion of browsing "All" is godawful, if one is
| looking for something closer to pre-smartphone internet.
|
| You need to curate your homepage a bit to get a good
| Lemmy experience. The tech side may be like Reddit, but
| the _human_ aspect is more like a couple dozen vBulletin
| forums rolled into one.
|
| Some of the instances are (imo) full of straight-up
| insane and, worse, perpetually angry people. Some
| instance admins may be power-hungry and prone to drama -
| but you might not care if the only subreddit you follow
| from their instance is c/jazz and you just click on
| Youtube/Spotify links from it.
|
| Is it a pain? Yes. But I still prefer to deal with a
| couple dozen weirdos than with a single billion-dollar
| company.
| dingnuts wrote:
| >Some of the instances are (imo) full of straight-up
| insane and, worse, perpetually angry people
|
| This has been true for every instance of every Fedi thing
| I've ever tried to use or thought of using. And many
| instances block single-user instances so forget about
| running your own unless you only want to interact with
| the absolute fringest nutjob basement-dwellers -- because
| the "mainstream" Fedi is already fringe.
|
| I once had the dumb impulse to reply to someone who was
| mad about fluoride in drinking water with "you probably
| get more fluoride from your toothpaste" and I deleted my
| account as I started to receive arguments about brushing
| your teeth, as it made me realize exactly the kind of
| people I would be interacting with on this network.
|
| Honestly I think this is grows out of the incentives for
| operating a homeserver. There's a negative financial
| incentive so you must have some other kind of motivator,
| likely a desire for influence or power.
| mardef wrote:
| Similarly, I replied to someone suggesting they pay for a
| service and I received multiple replies suggesting I kill
| myself.
|
| This wasn't on some random Marxist community, this was on
| one of the big tech communities.
| bombcar wrote:
| Internet death threats are so common and boring that I
| only notice the amusingly new ones, like "I hope you can
| take advantage of Canadian healthcare."
| ctrw wrote:
| The way to save the internet is to force everyone to have
| a recent picture of themselves next to any post they
| make.
| chownie wrote:
| That would almost certainly end up with the internet
| becoming one gigantic linkedin and everyone leaving it to
| flock to whichever underground 4chan-esque service pops
| up with a promise of pseudonymity.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Is that why Facebook is such a nice and balanced website?
| ctrw wrote:
| You uncle McRacy doesn't have 200,000 followers. Your
| cousin McFatt does.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| Hate is keyword here. I really wanted to like Lemmy, but
| almost all instances are full of frustrated hateful
| people. Even if sometimes rightfully it's still to toxic.
| Wild tankies appearing here and there are no help either.
| rglullis wrote:
| Sorry to say "you are holding it wrong", but browsing by
| all is just terrible. Much like reddit, things improve a
| lot if you subscribe to the communities that interest you
| and ignore everything else.
|
| Granted, Lemmy's issue is that the user base is not large
| enough to have developed a long tail of interesting
| communities, but hopefully this will change as it grows.
|
| Also, I know that finding the communities is difficult,
| so I've put together a website to work as a crowdsource
| of reddit-to-lemmy communities,
| https://fediverser.network
| account42 wrote:
| How's the built in censorship and cultural bias with Lemmy?
| runjake wrote:
| It definitely seems to lean left, from my (American)
| view. That might be because most of the western world
| would classify as left by my (American) standards?
|
| There have been some right-wing and far-right instances,
| but they seem to get de-federated by the majority.
|
| Hope that helps.
| concordDance wrote:
| "Left" and "right" tend to decoher once you move outside
| a particular political space into another (e.g. one
| country to another). The UK right wing party introduced
| gay marriage, but even the most left wing part of the
| country (Scotland) isn't particularly progressive (e.g.
| majority disapproval of allowing gender self
| identification to 16).
|
| Similarly, trying to judge the UK on racial issues by US
| standards gets quite confusing. The common British
| attitude towards Romani would make even the confederate
| flag wavers of Texas call them racists.
|
| On the other hand, there's full support for plenty of
| state intervention and state support, e.g. pretty much no
| one says they want to abolish the NHS.
| antod wrote:
| _> Similarly, trying to judge the UK on racial issues by
| US standards gets quite confusing. The common British
| attitude towards Romani would make even the confederate
| flag wavers of Texas call them racists._
|
| Not directly related to Romani treatment in Britain (not
| familiar enough with that to judge), but sometimes I
| wonder if the english language needs better words to
| distinguish between race based bigotry and culture based
| bigotry.
|
| eg often I notice for a person there will be a difference
| in how they treat/view "acclimatised" descendants of
| immigrants vs new immigrants due to being ostensibly the
| same race but different culturally. Of course racists
| will still have bigotry for both groups.
| concordDance wrote:
| > sometimes I wonder if the english language needs better
| words
|
| Words like this are not bad by coincidence, they're bad
| because they're incredibly politically important words
| and thus have their meanings and connotations fought over
| intensely.
|
| It doesn't matter what new word or words you try and put
| in place, if they relate to things people have
| _different_ strong feelings on then the meanings will
| become messy over time.
| huytersd wrote:
| Good, it leans left, but not so far left that it's just
| LGBTQ/feminist spam. It doesn't have a bunch of right
| wing trolls so far. It's like the early days of Reddit.
| ecshafer wrote:
| The early days of Reddit was heavily libertarian, if only
| reddit voted in 2008 and 2012, Ron Paul would have been a
| two term president.
| thereticent wrote:
| That's correct. When people speak of the early days of
| Reddit it seems like they are talking about whatever time
| long ago they initially joined.
|
| I'm always hesitant to make accounts on new sites, so I
| thought I had waited a long time to join officially, but
| I ended up being in the first 500 accounts! From the
| earliest days (the del.icio.us to Reddit influx) it was a
| very libertarian place. Sometimes annoyingly so.
|
| Reddit has shifted so many times over the nearly 2
| decades, but most who stay for a long time have realized
| that it's great for pocket communities in smaller
| subreddits, as long as they last and aren't co-opted. The
| bots are the worst part at the moment.
| huytersd wrote:
| It was a pretty left leaning libertarian though. As soon
| as those racist papers he authored came out he quickly
| fell off of Reddit's radar. Not to mention, he co-opted
| at lot of the left's iconography with his re"love"ution
| campaign.
| crmd wrote:
| I remember in the early days of reddit there was a guy
| who would post links to his Austrian economics / Murray
| Rothbard blog every day, and they would end up on the
| front page because they had like 50 upvotes.
| piaste wrote:
| > Good, it leans left, but not so far left that it's just
| LGBTQ/feminist spam.
|
| It's not quite _spam_ but I think it's fair to say it's
| much more left-leaning than mainstream Reddit.
|
| Some of the biggest communities, even non-political ones,
| are on instances such as Blahaj (LGBTQ-oriented),
| Lemmy.ML (Marxist-oriented), Hexbear (Marxists on meth).
|
| Short of subscribing to a defederated instance, you need
| to go out of your way to avoid left-wing content on
| Lemmy. Whereas on Reddit you could get rid of most of it
| by unsubscribing from the top 100 subreddits - which is
| something you wanted to do _anyway_ for the sake of
| quality, even if you were the world 's biggest leftist.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| it's awful. it's like a single reddit. the instances are
| atomic, so you get world-moderators, who are all
| "tankies" in lemmy own parlance (left, communist, heavily
| sided with russia as ussr continuity)
|
| very toxic place. kinda like bizarro TwitterX.
| diggan wrote:
| Isn't it federated? How could global moderators decide
| what's visible on all instances?
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| federated is a meaningless word.
| thereticent wrote:
| If you use lemmy.ml, sure. Or if you don't curate a
| frontpage of your own topics, sure. But I joined through
| some unaligned Scandinavian instance, found topics I
| like, and stay away from the /r/all equivalent, and it's
| just as tolerable as Reddit, if less populous.
| jcrash wrote:
| Thanks for this link, this is great
| account42 wrote:
| > I expect them to kill `old.reddit` soon
|
| They have already started to redirect direct image links to
| the new reddit garbage which has stopped my usage for reddit
| for entertainment when bored.
| agmater wrote:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/load-
| reddit-i...
|
| This solved that for me, but yeah it seems inevitable that
| all these user hostile decisions make the site unusable.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| What kills me about old vs new reddit is feature parity is
| just not there. There's also a huge lack of tooling for
| reddit modding, but what really kills me is how long new
| reddit has been in development for and still no feature
| parity.
|
| Instead of making old reddit an archive on github, they
| should have made new reddits front-end open. I'm sure it
| would be miles ahead if the users were allowed to contribute
| like they once did with old reddit.
|
| I wonder how much money was spent to build new reddit. Feels
| like a dumpster fire.
| aerhardt wrote:
| I'm on a similar boat, but for all we know, for each of us
| there might be ten new users who have recently flocked to the
| site and don't give a damn.
| jtriangle wrote:
| Not all users are created equal. Reddit's lost a ton of
| valuable contributors, via enshitification, and I only expect
| that to get worse.
| dncornholio wrote:
| I would like to see some hard number from people that claim
| Reddit was hurt from the "API Fiasco". My theory is that this
| is a very small number of users with a very loud voice.
| Entitled mods were the only people that closed down subs. Most
| users did not even support this decision.
|
| Same is happening again now, entitled moderaters who complain
| about CEO pay.
|
| If anything is destroying Reddit, it's the mods IMO.
| piva00 wrote:
| At the same time, good moderation is what made reddit what it
| is, if there weren't mods doing free work for reddit in 2009
| it would be flooded with YouTube comments style of content
| since that's what low friction posting without moderation
| achieves.
| dncornholio wrote:
| Yeah but Reddit doesn't owe the mods anything, the users
| do.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| What? Reddit owes their entire platform to their
| volunteer moderators and users who contribute content.
| Reddit the company adds almost nothing of value, the tech
| isn't exactly special -- if anything it's so bad as to be
| hindrance.
| Starman_Jones wrote:
| The dog doesn't owe anything to the hand that feeds it,
| but it would still do well not to bite it.
| nullindividual wrote:
| The hypothesis without data is that users [mods/power users]
| who cared about reddit, who contributed to reddit, have
| largely left or disengaged to an extent.
|
| I would like to see numbers myself, though. However, looking
| at reddit/r/all, I suspect much of that activity is botting.
|
| I mean, no one can seriously post "my gf cheated, AITAH for
| breaking up with her?".
|
| Come on...
| badwolf wrote:
| So many endless repost-bots :-/
| diggan wrote:
| > I would like to see some hard number from people that claim
| Reddit was hurt from the "API Fiasco".
|
| Probably pretty hard to get. Some of the content I found that
| went away, was quality content. There are still users
| posting/discussing stuff in the niches I'm interested in, but
| all the high-quality discussions have gone missing, and the
| one's who used to engage in it no longer seem to be using
| reddit at all.
|
| But there is no objective way to measure "high quality
| content vs low quality", so it'll be short of impossible to
| get any objective measures of this, it's just my anecdotal
| experience with a subset of subreddits.
| Balvarez wrote:
| Entitled mods... you mean the people who work for free to
| make reddit work? I'm not a mod and I don't have very strong
| opinion of reddit moderators one way or another (many do),
| but I think reddit would do well not to make mods angry. They
| are an unpaid work force.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Anyone who has run a forum knows that mods are paid,
| usually with ego or duty or power, but they certainly get
| something from it. Else hundreds of people wouldn't want to
| be moderators of small phpbb forums much less thousands of
| people on reddit.
|
| Either way, I don't think compensation swivels the
| "entitled, power-tripping reddit mod" trope where they ban
| from their subreddit if you make a comment they disagree
| with. It's one of reddit's biggest problems.
| kbolino wrote:
| As far as I can tell, the business model of modern social
| media is to make money by selling advertisers access to
| children, gamblers, addicts, and profligates. The content
| and moderation that people _think_ is the purpose of social
| media doesn 't actually make any money and never has.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Well, my experience is only anecdotal, but after the third
| party apps shut down (RIF in my case) I checked reddit less,
| maybe once every few days. This wasn't a conscious decision
| or a protest. I tried the main Reddit app and hated it. One
| of the key draws to my active participation in Reddit had
| been killed.
|
| A number of subreddits I moderate were shutdown by reddit for
| being unmoderated. It turns out a lot of mods disengaged.
| None of the subreddits I was a part of were a part of the
| protests, but banning communities by moderators that
| disengaged achieved the same outcome as a protest
| effectively. Maybe someone has numbers for how many
| communities were banned for being unmoderated, and did this
| number increase after the API changes?
| spelunker wrote:
| As an opposite anecdote, I probably use it as much now as
| before the API stuff.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| Yeah, that's an affirmation from someone who's in a very
| pampered US-centric group of Reddit users (if he is that at
| all). "My investment is very good!"
|
| In the last year, Reddit has pushed localized home pages across
| the world, and my own example is the default home page for
| Canada. It's now exclusively sports and right-wing nuttery.
|
| There were good communities, but they were molded by their good
| moderators, and these moderators are gone.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > and my own example is the default home page for Canada.
| It's now exclusively sports and right-wing nuttery.
|
| I think that's typical for any national sub, because it will
| be filled with people that live in places that don't have the
| critical mass for a local/regional subreddit (or just don't
| fit into it).
| Lalabadie wrote:
| I'm not talking about the /r/Canada subreddit, I'm talking
| about the complete front page feed for Canadian visitors.
|
| There are several "main" Canadian subreddits, and the only
| ones showing up for anon Canadian guests now are the right-
| wing and far-right subreddits.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| Can you be specific about these "right-wing and far-
| right" subreddits you're seeing on the front page?
|
| I'm not logged in (I don't have a Reddit account), I'm in
| Canada, and on the Reddit home page I'm currently seeing
| submissions associated with these Canada-specific
| subreddits:
|
| 6 for r/canada
|
| 2 for r/onguardforthee
|
| 2 for r/ontario
|
| 2 for r/PersonalFinanceCanada
|
| 1 for r/alberta
|
| 1 for r/vancouver
|
| None of those subreddits look "right-wing" or "far-right"
| to me in any way.
|
| In fact, I'm surprised at how left-leaning they tend to
| be, especially r/alberta. Of the current top five
| submissions there, four are for CBC articles, for
| example, and there are a few other CBC articles on the
| first page.
|
| r/onguardforthee seems to be overtly left wing.
|
| The other front page subreddits are broad (like
| r/AskReddit, r/politics, r/news), or about sports or
| hobbies (like r/gaming, r/baseball, r/hockey,
| r/FigureSkating).
|
| None the subreddits I'm seeing on the Reddit front page
| seem to me to even be right-of-centre, let alone "right-
| wing" or "far-right".
| omginternets wrote:
| It's quite common for redditors to consider anything
| short of far-left as being far-right.
| concordDance wrote:
| > In the last year, Reddit has pushed localized home pages
| across the world, and my own example is the default home page
| for Canada.
|
| I found this quite nice. A lot less American politics on the
| front page and some fun bits of local news.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| > my own example is the default home page for Canada. It's
| now exclusively sports and right-wing nuttery.
|
| Can you give some concrete examples of this "right-wing
| nuttery" you mention?
|
| I've heard other people in Canada make this claim, but
| whenever I visit the Reddit home page (without logging in; I
| don't have a Reddit account), I consistently see the
| opposite.
|
| Right now, for example, two of the top five submissions I see
| are CBC and Toronto Star articles complaining about Ontario's
| Conservative government's policies. (For those who are
| unfamiliar with them, CBC and the Toronto Star are among the
| most left wing of Canada's mainstream media.)
|
| Still in the top ten, there's an article complaining about
| how some corporate layoffs at Bell were conducted.
|
| There's an anti-Trump article, a article about Biden
| cancelling some student loan debt, and a complaint about "the
| rich" (Musk, specifically) in the top fifteen.
|
| Beyond that, there's a submission complaining about a
| landlord's behaviour, an article about urban planning in
| Vancouver, and the front page ends with a submission that's
| upset about some munitions company executive cutting down
| some trees in the US.
|
| The rest are about sports, oddities, or otherwise don't seem
| to be political in nature.
|
| I wouldn't consider any of the submissions I'm being shown to
| be obviously "right-wing" in any way. A number of them I'd
| consider to be centrist or neutral, if not left-of-centre.
| Several are overtly left wing.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| My experience of cookie-less Reddit (and the reason I don't
| go anymore) is getting served default subreddits like
| /r/Canada_sub.
|
| I'm very open to being wrong or outdated in my impression,
| however!
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I had (have?) a twelve year account, coming on the tails of the
| digg fallout.
|
| Once they pulled the API I was out. Not terrible since the
| site's quality has been in steady decline for years. Eventually
| you realize you are doing the equivalent of having economics
| discussions in the youtube comments of a taylor swift video.
|
| But it seems that lowest common denominator user is who reddit
| really wants, so good luck to them.
| piva00 wrote:
| Quite similar experience, the communities for hobbies I used to
| check out almost daily are quite dead, they've become mostly a
| gear-showoff or beginner questions forum, the real content in
| longer form that some old posters used to create is mostly
| gone.
|
| My own activity dropped like a rock after the API changes
| killed Apollo, the mobile client I used (and before that reddit
| had already acqui-killed a previous one Alien Blue). I simply
| check it out of habit, and mostly for news, don't have much of
| the joy I had when I had started accessing it back in 2009.
|
| Probably it's just the natural cycle of profit-driven social
| media getting swallowed by Eternal Septembers after the initial
| batches of users posting interesting content and making the
| platform cool leave the place when the platform inevitably
| becomes user-hostile.
| the_af wrote:
| > _Quite similar experience, the communities for hobbies I
| used to check out almost daily are quite dead_
|
| I've noticed _some_ of the same for _some_ communities, but
| where have they gone? Some claim to be migrating to Discord,
| which in my mind is even _worse_ than Reddit, and to me is a
| high-stress environment (I simply cannot stand online chat, I
| 've no patience for it, and if you're not constantly online
| you miss stuff).
|
| There are hobby groups in Facebook, which is also
| disappointing since Facebook groups have terrible UX.
| account42 wrote:
| Discord is probably the biggest black hole sucking up all
| kinds of communities right now but that doesn't mean that
| there aren't others. Old-school forums are still a thing
| even if less visible these days.
| simonmic wrote:
| Some communities move to discourse forums.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| >I simply check it out of habit
|
| Adding *.reddit.com to my DNS-blacklist was one of the
| single-most-productive "lines of code" I've ever added to my
| personal computer.
|
| Cold-turkey, I quit.
|
| /r/Supermod, 2010-2014, "the pineapple trees guy; erryday"
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| You can pretty much graduate yourself beyond the expertise of
| any outdooring subreddit by walking through a city park and
| any car-based subreddit by actually owning a car.
|
| I've been thinking about this and trad forums witht he
| ability to bump a topic and keep it going for as long as
| there is interest really makes it the best venue for hobbies.
| I spent a good half hour on vwvortex the other day just
| surfing longer threads and learned more from that than
| anything reddit can offer.
|
| It can be a little annoying when somebody tries to tack on an
| unrelated question to a thread but apparently the only
| alternative is to have 15 iterations of 'I just found out
| outside exist, what do?' every day.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| shells? they are more likely crap filled boxes of their former
| glory.
|
| communities even remotely related to companies (e.g.
| r/googlepixel) are run by either fervently crazy zealot fans,
| or which is more likely, filtered by interns in those companies
| marketing dept in what seem to be reddit best revenue stream.
| holoduke wrote:
| I quit last week with Reddit. I thought it might be a good idea
| to write a controversial opinion in a sub reddit. Received a
| perma ban. Well thanks. The content, the way the site works,
| dark patterns and its just not nice anymore. Happy to be loose.
| mderazon wrote:
| Have you moved somewhere else?
| holoduke wrote:
| No not really. Its maybe also a good time to get rid of
| that annoying addiction. Lots of time is wasted by browsing
| and using reddit. At least for me.
| ralfd wrote:
| Was it r/comics?
| omginternets wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what was this fringe opinion? I think this
| is the elephant in the room when it comes to Reddit: it's
| been captured by a certain kind of radical ideologue.
| vwoolf wrote:
| I liked it better before the modern Reddit censorship machine.
|
| At least old.reddit.com still works. For now.
| dogleash wrote:
| It'll shamble on forever. Look at the front page in a private
| tab right now.
|
| Yeah it's all dogshit content, but this is the product now. All
| the niche communities that made reddit good were dying a slow
| death well before any of the API stuff.
|
| That old product is dead, the current reddit will live forever
| as long as they can get costs under control.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| I don't notice this at all. Old communities die off and new
| ones spring up all the time, and the new ones are still
| springing up alright. The local subs are doing well, there are
| still plenty of "less popular" subs to have great discussions
| in. The app is not great not terrible, no biggie.
|
| They rather consciously decided that jettisoning some hard-core
| techies, privacy people and other "weirdos" is an acceptable
| price to pay for more mass appeal and more profitability.
| Remember, you as a user are not the client of Reddit Inc,
| you're the product. You or I may not like that direction, but
| we're not great products anyway. I block ads for Pete's sake, I
| am literally worthless to them.
| majormajor wrote:
| "Killed"/"killable" is one of those terms that changes with
| age. Was GM unkillable? Well, they aren't dead, but... Was
| Windows unkillable? Well, it's not dead, but... Is Facebook
| unkillable? Well, it's not dead, but... So the old fogies who
| would tell you GE, GM, IBM are all unkillable aren't _wrong_
| but neither were the younger folks they were responding to.
|
| Lotta zombies hang on long after their relevance fades for the
| future. "X is unkillable" is a good way to reveal a limited
| imagination for future changes. You go from talking about
| _disruption_ to talking about how things are now disruption-
| proof!
| FredPret wrote:
| All the examples you mention, GM, Facebook, and Windows, pump
| out a ton of money on the regular.
|
| GM made ten billion in profit in the last year
| majormajor wrote:
| Which of them would you call unkillable?
|
| I think Graham is getting a bit sentimental and overly
| attached to incumbents in his network.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| You have a strange definition of dead.
|
| I would love to have a company that has 1% the success of
| just Windows 11 which is estimated to be on 20% of all
| running PCs, let alone the rest of the MS empire.
|
| Selling 6.2 million vehicles in one year (GM) is hardly a
| zombie company.
|
| Meta had 40 billion dollars of net revenue, and 3 billion
| MAUs, which is a pretty fierce zombie if you ask me.
|
| IBM measures their profit in the billions too.
|
| Even GE is still spinning off billions in profit.
|
| All of the companies you mentioned have grown in the past 10
| years.
| majormajor wrote:
| "Strange definition"? Isn't that literally what I said,
| that it changes definitions with age (and focus)?
|
| Which of those companies still have the influence they did
| at their peak?
|
| If you've got a startup, growth mindset, you're growing or
| you're dying. And even growth in revenue, headcount,
| profit, etc, can lag growth in relevance by decades.
|
| Got any interesting new GE projects on your radar you'd
| want to work on that you think will be relevant in 20
| years?
|
| Do you think Paul Graham of twenty years ago would've
| called GE unkillable?
|
| It's the difference in ambition and goals that leads to one
| person loving to take over today's Microsoft (or Reddit)
| and another - probably much younger person - wanting to
| start tomorrow's.
| segasaturn wrote:
| The site really took a nosedive in about the last 6 months in
| my experience, I think a combination of the API fiasco +
| current world events has really done a 1-2 punch on the site.
| The front page of reddit is a nightmare zone, it's all
| ragebait, clickbait, shit political memes and posts clearly
| made by marketing interns and boosted by bot accounts. Every
| comment section feels intensely ideological and any comment
| that strays from the majority opinion is downvoted to hell.
| Also loads of those tacky "badges" on comments everywhere
| making for a lot of visual clutter. Just an all around
| unpleasant to use site. PG calls the average reddit user
| "curious, skeptical, ready to be amused" which feels almost
| like the exact opposite of my experience.
| bonton89 wrote:
| I still use some tech subs but I used to dumbscroll the main
| page for inane things to laugh at. What was on there changed
| over time and it was well past the high point, but maybe a
| year or six months ago I just couldn't do it. The stuff you
| describe was always part of the /r/all mix but now that is
| all there is. There's nothing fun on there anymore, at all.
|
| lemmy is probably to left leaning for my taste but at least
| the main page still has lots inane and funny things as well
| as more of a tech focus.
| omginternets wrote:
| I've felt it too. I can't fight the feeling that it happens
| to attract a certain kind of mentally ill person.
| Specifically, the preponderance of anxious, neurotic persons,
| often with a persecution complex and a militant ideology, is
| _enormous_. The result is a climate of unbridled vitriol and
| outright hate for whatever group they hold responsible for
| their woes.
|
| It increasingly feels like Reddit is a breeding ground for
| various types of extremism (usually left-leaning, with some
| notable exceptions).
| ornornor wrote:
| > I also stopped using reddit on the phone after my chosen
| reddit client was closed down (which I'm grateful for, thanks
| reddit).
|
| Same here, very grateful for Reddit's API changes. It made me
| realize how little value Reddit actually provided vs time
| spent. I refuse to use their dumpster fire of an app so I quit
| altogether and deleted my very old account + comments. Good
| riddance after all, for each "niche" subreddit I was on, I have
| found very active forums and communities to replace these
| subreddits. And they're independent forums that are very old
| (in internet terms) with lots of passionate people sharing very
| valuable information.
|
| Turns out I didn't really need Reddit at all but it took their
| shortsighted hara-kiri for me to realize.
|
| Oh well, thanks Greeddit!
| omginternets wrote:
| Have you found any generalizable methods for finding non-
| Reddit communities for niche interests?
| TheIronMark wrote:
| We need something to replace it. Lemmy isn't quite there yet.
| mderazon wrote:
| It could already but doesn't have enough users
| monkeynotes wrote:
| Reddit is a cesspit of its former self. The OG reddit is far
| from what it used to be. It's no longer an innocent link
| sharing platform, it's a socio-political platform with so much
| slime in between the subs that I find useful. Try and use
| Reddit daily and ignore all the drama, political shit, and
| covert rage click posts. It's emotionally exhausting not to get
| pulled in and have to constantly triage your home feed.
|
| I have deleted my account at least half a dozen times and just
| tried to use it as a source of useful information, but I
| inevitably fall into the pit of getting another account because
| I can't control myself objecting to the nasty stuff on there. I
| know this is partly my self control problem, but social media
| in general is just awful. I can get rid of FB easily, there is
| literally no benefit for me being on there, but Reddit legit
| has useful content about all of my hobbies and how to do X.
|
| It is unkillable but for some pretty rotten reasons. It's a
| social media platform mixed in with really useful content. Come
| for the search result, stay for the drama is what happens to
| me.
| omginternets wrote:
| > socio-political platform with so much slime in between the
| subs that I find useful.
|
| That's putting it nicely! I'm increasingly seeing it as a
| breeding ground for fringe-left radicalization.
| quatrefoil wrote:
| The API situation seemed baffling to me at the time. The timing
| wasn't coincidental and it was clear that they were responding
| to people training LLMs on the Reddit corpus.
|
| But here's the thing: prevailing HN sentiments notwithstanding,
| your average Redditor leans left and is fairly anti-big-tech,
| so Reddit could have leveraged this angle. They could've said
| it's a pro-user move to stop OpenAI and the likes from unfairly
| profiting off your work. And most users would have applauded.
|
| But Reddit didn't say that. They took a PR hit and decided to
| wait it out. The cynical explanation was that they were
| actually just trying to get some of that LLM money for
| themselves. And not long ago, they announced a big deal with
| Google to give access to user data for training purposes:
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...
|
| Frankly, I was on the fence about the API access thing until
| the motivation became clear.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| This doesn't track. They spent a lot of time and energy
| coordinating with the authors of popular mobile clients, and
| could easily have extended some means of letting them
| continue to operate given that they were clearly not
| harvesting content for themselves. Meanwhile, content can
| still be harvested for LLM training without the API (by using
| the HTML site).
|
| It seems like the real intent was to regain control over the
| surfaces users use to consume the site, especially on mobile.
| quatrefoil wrote:
| Scraping is a lot more dicey than using an official API.
| Why did Google enter that partnership? They have the data
| in their index. The only conceivable reason is that they
| prefer to pay Reddit to avoid the risk of litigating it and
| ending up with some unfavorable precedent.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Avoid litigation and possibly of getting some injunction.
| And on other hand money can go to fund Reddit litigating
| others. As now they have proven someone paid so they
| could stop others using data. Slowing them down in
| process. And the sum is peanuts for Google, they waste
| that amount regularly...
| threeio wrote:
| Stopped going to the site/app completely... they were so far
| off base with the API war it wasn't worth it.
| bun_terminator wrote:
| > have maybe 20% of the activity they used to, before the API
| fiasco
|
| Is that really true? I have been on reddit since day 0 and have
| noticed 0 change, absolutely nothing. Some communities went
| through a "we're now on lemmy" phase. But even that went
| nowhere. Reddit is still plagued by mods and all the other
| things, but the userbase is as powerful as ever
| bombcar wrote:
| I used to be a heavy user, I rarely read it now and then. I
| certainly never post, and my accounts are deleted or
| inactive.
|
| It still turns up in search results for me but it's certainly
| no community I'm using.
|
| If there is a stereotypical Reddit user, then they're
| stagnating.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Anecdotal of course. I used to read for hours each day and
| post from time to time - I haven't even looked at it for
| months except a couple of days ago where I had to prep for a
| business meeting where reddit was relevant. I had been
| feeling for a long time that it was declining and also that
| my social media usage wasn't really adding anything positive
| so the API thing was just a convenient excuse to rip off the
| band-aid.
| diggan wrote:
| Maybe it's because my user is "only" 12 years old, but there
| is definitely a big difference in quality of the discussions
| and the activity today compared to 2-3 years ago, at least in
| the communities I hang around mostly (music production, 3D,
| animation and adjacent creative areas).
| rd wrote:
| Quality discussions and activity don't drive normie usage,
| and that's what Reddit's optimizing for at this point.
| Feels like they want to be TikTok, but for links and
| images, and even the links part is slowly dying.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if you ran an analysis of the
| makeup of hot-page content across the biggest subs, if
| links used to make up 90%, that that number has slowly been
| dropping for the past 5 years to now be mostly images.
| Pokerface777 wrote:
| > > Reddit the site (and now app)
|
| they have been bugging you with the app for years
| gspencley wrote:
| I was very late to the Reddit party and created my first
| account a year or two ago.
|
| I posted a little bit and then one day had a big red banner on
| the top telling me that my account was suspended for violating
| the TOS (my posts were on a puppetry subreddit about puppets
| and were very "normal" posts... how I could have violated the
| TOS was beyond me). I immediately appealed and the suspension
| was lifted (without any explanation as to what caused my
| account to be suspended in the first place). But even though my
| account is able to post and do everything a non-suspended
| account can, there's still that red banner at the top every
| time I access the website telling me my account was suspended
| and to check my inbox messages for instructions on how to
| appeal.
|
| That user experience kind of killed any desire of mine to ever
| use Reddit again.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I have a similarly buggy experience: My 13-year old account
| with _zero_ history of problems (and incidentally 500k
| comment karma) was randomly shadowbanned. I used their appeal
| page, got a message apologizing and saying my appeal was
| granted...
|
| ... But it 's _still_ shadowbanned and everything I ever
| wrote over those years is _still gone_ , except now the
| appeals page doesn't even work because it claims my account
| is in good standing.
|
| So I went looking for some kind of human help or support, but
| another old Reddit account (a resurrected job search
| throwaway from 5+ years ago) _got immediately killed the
| exact same way_ , the lying "granted" appeal and all!
|
| It certainly revitalized my interest in using personal-
| blogging for information instead of contributing anything to
| Reddit's decaying ecosystem.
| Max-Ganz-II wrote:
| Rather the same here.
|
| A month or two after my main account was banned (see my
| other post in this thread), I logged into a second account
| which I'd not logged into for months.
|
| Upon logging in, I discovered the account was "permanently
| suspended", and the reason for this was, and I quote;
|
| "Your account has been permanently suspended for ."
| jeffwask wrote:
| Same thing as Twitter, they think the power of these sites is
| the tech. It's not. It's the community and when you turn that
| into an EBTIDA growth engine it's going to rebel.
| jherdman wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. I only ever log in periodically to see
| what's going on with r/AskHistorians, and then promptly run
| away.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Agreed, I was thinking that the API protest and the crackdown
| Reddit perpetrated wouldn't end up actually doing much (did
| still delete my account though, partly as an excuse to break
| the habit), and while to an extent that's true, I've noticed
| many more deleted or edited comments than I used to pre-
| crackdown. It really did drive off a lot of positive
| contributors.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| It's a great time to do an ipo so people can cash out if they
| can (or just take a ridiculously sized salary). It's a terrible
| time to be a Reddit user. It seems like there's almost nothing
| left of content. And if you look at the front page then you see
| mostly just rage bait, relationship advice requests that can't
| possibly be true, and whatever video games are currently the
| most popular. There's almost no content more engaging then
| anything in a tiktok or Instagram feed. Nothing is memorable or
| filled with discussion. It's mostly filler. Sad really. I used
| to quite enjoy having discussions on various topics there.
| These days it's all noise.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| Reddit sells the illusion of meaningful discussion in an
| online forum. Too bad that illusion is transparent, but where
| else can you get one - besides maybe here?
| swed420 wrote:
| Agreed. I only tolerate reddit (for now) because it's
| always been better than Twitter/X and the alternatives
| haven't matured yet.
| vanadium wrote:
| After they killed Apollo, my usage after 15 years went from
| hours a day and tanked to a few minutes a month at present.
| They showed their hand, and I showed myself the door for the
| most part.
|
| When the email dropped that I was one of the early users
| offered entrance into the IPO, I pretty much ignored it.
| jeffcox wrote:
| I was an active and fairly early Reddit user for many years,
| but the brutal changes to satisfy financial goals drove me away
| as well.
|
| I think it's interesting to see a flagging platform with a user
| base that will consistently post and upvote "fuck spez"
| celebrated here as a success, but I suppose the only thing that
| matters at this level of discussion is the almighty dollar.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| How much of that is Reddit and how much of it is that all
| online communities have a definite lifecycle. Either they age
| out, or they become too popular and become useless.
| bane wrote:
| I think Paul's right in the sense that reddit seems to thrive
| as a community when the smallest amount of effort is put into
| running it. The series of leadership horror shows that all
| mostly left the site alone demonstrates that.
|
| The recent very active moves to clean the site up and prep for
| this IPO have had a detrimental community effect in the sense
| of disgruntlement, but I would wager have been excellent in
| making the site more palatable as a business.
|
| Virtually _none_ of the reddit-alternatives that all spun up in
| the wake of this mop job have taken off. So assuming our gut
| feeling is right that reddit engagement is down, then overall
| engagement on all reddits is down and users have entirely moved
| to other social media styles entirely.
|
| There's the other angle on this, that engagement is down, but
| it was calculated to get rid of mostly users who cost reddit
| things, or are of an undesirable user population (troublesome,
| illegal, etc.) And what's left is mostly a user class that
| maximizes the monetary value that can be harvested.
|
| There are _huge_ and obvious areas where reddit can better
| monetize the site if they wished, and I would guess that it 's
| going to happen. Reddit has a very long history of doing a
| bunch of different experiments with the site, and an influx of
| investment to properly analyze and then monetize the more
| successful ones is my guess as to what's going to happen. The
| recent drive to vacuum up and sell data to LLM companies is
| serendipitous icing right now.
|
| There's also the huge opening that's happening right now with
| Twitter, where with a few chess moves, Reddit could very easily
| turn into or pick up the population of exTwitter users who find
| the current ownership trends so toxic they don't want to be
| associated with it any longer, but don't have a platform with a
| built in non-friends public sphere to turn to -- which is why
| Facebook hasn't been able to really tap into that market gap.
| paxys wrote:
| Translated: "Buy this garbage stock so I can finally make some
| money from this damn company" - Paul Graham
| pm90 wrote:
| Does he actually have a financial stake though? It was sold to
| Conde Nast...I just assumed all the equity transferred over to
| them.
| paxys wrote:
| It's complicated. Reddit was founded and funded by YC in
| 2005, then acquired by Conde Nast in 2006, then spun off
| again in 2012. Since then it has attracted ~8 more rounds of
| funding. Advance Publications (parent of Conde Nast)
| currently only owns 30% of the company, Tencent 11%, Fidelity
| 9.5%.
|
| Notably, Sam Altman also invested in Reddit in 2014 when he
| was president of YC, and now his "investment properties " own
| 8.7%. What the composition of that investment vehicle is, and
| how YC/Paul Graham are involved, I can't say.
| hersko wrote:
| Reddit has completely destroyed their mobile website to drive
| users to their (bad) app. They also destroyed most of their app
| competitors with the whole API fiasco.
| badgers wrote:
| I remember Digg being more popular than Reddit more than a decade
| ago. What happened that caused Reddit to succeed where Digg
| failed?
| Kye wrote:
| Digg was more self-immolation than failure. Reddit succeeded by
| being the place people fled to from Digg.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4
|
| Reddit is on the same path, but it's more of a slow burn.
| jmclnx wrote:
| > Many users, upon finally reaching the site, complained
| about the new design
|
| Sounds like Reddit. When I go to reddit, I use
| "old.reddit.com". I hate the new version, once old.reddit
| disappears, I disappear too.
| Kye wrote:
| The lack of an obvious place to go seems to be all that
| stands between Reddit and total collapse. Instead of an
| obvious Digg->Reddit type path, it's more like Reddit->a
| bunch of less than equivalent options.
|
| You've got your Lemmys and Lobsters and so on, but none of
| them are a centralized catch-all. I can't (for example) go
| to Lobsters and talk about Star Trek in a
| /r/DaystromInstitute equivalent, and the official
| equivalent running on Lemmy is far from equivalent to what
| the subreddit was before all this chaos.
|
| It's kind of the same deal with Twitter. Twitter _was_ the
| place ~everyone went to as forums collapsed. Now there 's
| [Discord, new forums, Reddit, 9000 different ActivityPub
| platforms, Bluesky, Cohost, ...] and none are quite a match
| for what even the narrowest niche used Twitter for. You
| could easily go from your forum chat threads and topical
| threads and recreate that experience on Twitter with a high
| level of fidelity. Digg->Reddit was similar.
|
| There's no obvious match for the centralized platforms
| because they sucked up all the energy for creating new
| centralized platforms that existed before.
| adamc wrote:
| The obvious place is discord, but discord sucks in lots
| of other ways. Great for voice chat, but not great as a
| reddit replacement.
| lee-rhapsody wrote:
| I can't understand the appeal behind Discord for general
| communities. Everything is one giant persistent group
| chat--there's no discrete threads or posts to search, at
| least not in the servers I'm in. Sad that so many
| companies are opting for Discord for building
| communities.
| the_sleaze9 wrote:
| I've tried multiple times to use discord, and the
| fundamental blocker for me seems to be in it's name.
| Every one feels just like a private slack channel for a
| company I don't work for. Discordant.
|
| To say that product is going to replace twitter is -imo-
| just wrong.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Same, Discord is useless to me
| account42 wrote:
| I think less centralization is actually a good thing but
| yes it does mean that reddit can hang on a little longer
| because it's less obvious to people what they can replace
| it with.
| the_duke wrote:
| If old.reddit didn't still have a very sizeable user base
| they definitely would have killed it by now, so you are not
| alone.
| nickelpro wrote:
| It's only about 5% of users, which is sizable but not
| unkillable by any means. The third-party mobile apps had
| way, way more than that and they proved very killable.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I wonder how much those 5% contribute compared to the
| folks using the new interface.
| eloisant wrote:
| When Digg started to do stupid things, everyone switched to
| Reddit.
|
| When Reddit started to do stupid things, some people moved to
| lemmy but it wasn't as clear cut... I guess distributed
| networks are always a bit harder to get traction.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| So the question is, if Digg users fled to Reddit, where are
| Reddit users fleeing to now?
|
| Before anyone replies with "the fediverse"... I've heard
| people talking about Mastodon etc. for years now and afaict
| it's still a fringe nerd thing that most people outside
| techie HN-adjacent circles haven't heard of. It doesn't seem
| remotely comparable to Reddit in terms of popularity, or
| potential popularity.
| dflock wrote:
| I think the issues is that there isn't an obvious successor
| place - rather lots of different ones - lemmy, etc...
|
| Mastodon recently blew past 15m users, though, so not
| nothing.
| paxys wrote:
| Internet forums are fundamentally not companies that can grow
| infinitely and where investors 10-100x their money. Digg was
| unprofitable. Tumblr was unprofitable. Twitter is unprofitable.
| Reddit is unprofitable. When VCs/investors ramp up the pressure
| the company has to change in ways the community doesn't like,
| and that is what normally kills it. Whether that happens with
| Reddit as well is TBD, but I can personally say that the
| quality of the forum has been steady declining over the last
| few years.
| Ekaros wrote:
| How does Facebook succeed making stupid amounts of money in
| this context? Is it the reality that they just have enough of
| data to make targeting effective enough?
| adamc wrote:
| They serve up a ton of ads, which is also gradually driving
| people from Facebook. But if reddit served as many ads, it
| would be completely unusable.
|
| Ads make the signal to noise ratio degrade. That works for
| spending a few minutes on FB, skimming to see what's up
| with friends or family, but not for reading long forum
| threads on reddit.
| mordechai9000 wrote:
| Facebook doesn't just serve ads. They have high quality
| identity and market data on their users that is very
| appealing to advertisers looking to spend their money on
| specific targets. I don't think reddit is currently able
| to supply advertisers with data of that quality. I assume
| forcing people to sign up with an email or use the app
| instead of the website are attempts at bridging that gap.
| account42 wrote:
| Network effects mostly. If your relatives or friends are on
| facebook then you will either have to put up with it or
| miss out on social contacts. This does apply to other kinds
| of forums too to some extend but limited to a more abstract
| numbers game where the biggest forum is the place to be
| rather than more personal direct connections that you don't
| want to cut.
| paxys wrote:
| You cannot use Facebook without creating an account and
| giving them a shit ton of data about yourself and your
| entire network. That data is what is used to show ads on
| all their properties and all over the internet. Reddit's
| user base on the other hand is mostly anonymous.
| rchaud wrote:
| Facebook has best-in-class behavioral advertising tools,
| and can be used to create highly specific segments for ad
| targeting. You can sell pretty much anything on Facebook,
| so that attracts advertisers.
|
| Reddit on the other hand has a bunch of anonymous users
| whose preferences are much harder to figure out.
| lupire wrote:
| Reddit users pour their personalities and interests into
| their comments. They are highly targetable.
| rchaud wrote:
| Like I said, Facebook has better tools. Reddit is rock
| bottom when it comes to their ad product. They should
| have swallowed Twitter's business when their advertisers
| started fleeing, but they haven't.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Twitter is unprofitable. Reddit is unprofitable.
|
| At least for Twitter and Reddit, these _could_ be profitable.
| There 's so much fucking _garbage_ done on both platforms...
| remember the hexagon NFT profile pictures on Twitter or
| Reddit 's NFT avatars? Who in their right mind other than
| cryptobros would/did buy these, and how much developer
| attention got sucked in by these projects? Reddit has around
| 2.000 employees, what are they doing all day long, given that
| most moderation is being done _literally for free_?
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I believe the difference is that when Digg screwed up the
| redesign Reddit was ready to take its refugees. When the Reddit
| fiasco happened last year there was no clear place to migrate
| to.
|
| Having said that, and being perhaps too negative, do we know
| how alive Reddit actually is? Because once you factor the power
| users that left, the bots reposting top comments on reposted
| stories, the auto-generated content and the shills it is
| possible that Reddit has already started its decline but hasn't
| noticed yet.
| darkerside wrote:
| Back to Digg? :)
| BeetleB wrote:
| There was also this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#AACS_encryption_key_contr...
| westmeal wrote:
| Posts about the reddits on orange reddit :)
| gingerrr wrote:
| is reddit not already orangered?
| westmeal wrote:
| cant really argue with this logic...
| adamc wrote:
| Reddit has become steadily less useful to me; the UI is awful.
| The endless pressure to use their app is irritating.
|
| So I dunno that I buy this adulation of Steve.
| rideontime wrote:
| Steve = spez, right? Not seeing a lot of adulation of him these
| days.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| his best idea was to "make the use-the-app popups in the
| browser so annoying that people will finally give up and move
| to the app they hate"... so all of reddit was full of hate-
| memes for spez recently.
| rideontime wrote:
| A glance at his profile shows he hasn't posted anything
| since the intense backlash against the API changes:
| https://old.reddit.com/user/spez/
|
| Doesn't exactly inspire confidence!
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| oh yeah, the api changes were because everyone moved to
| 3rd party apps, because the official one is garbage, and
| he had just killed the site with the use-the-app
| popups... so they changed the api to kill the 3rd party
| apps lol.
| ttepasse wrote:
| He posts in other peoples posts. ;)
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Does he still edit comments in the database if the don't
| align with his political preferences?
| halfjoking wrote:
| Reddit mobile web homepage started freezing for me a couple
| months ago. It happens about 1/3rd of page loads.
|
| That was the final straw. I haven't been to the site for weeks
| for the first time in 12 years.
| nullindividual wrote:
| As of yesterday, the logged out mobile experience got much
| worse for me. There is now a bottom-of-screen popup prompting
| you to login, advertise on reddit, or shop 'collectable
| avatars' (who the hell would do that...).
|
| Every time you navigate back from a post to the feed, yet
| another popup. But I've come to recognize this is an intended
| feature and not a bug.
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| It's downright unusable to me without old.reddit.com. If they
| ever got rid of the old interface, I'd probably stop using it
| completely.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| > Aaron was younger, a college freshman, and even more anti-
| authority than Steve. It's not exaggerating to describe him as a
| martyr for what authority later did to him.
|
| I started reading this cynically curious if Aaron would even be
| mentioned, but well said.
| abadpoli wrote:
| The NPR piece on Reddit this morning stated it was founded by
| Steve Huffman and Alex Ohanian, and didn't even mention Aaron
| Swartz.
| sparky_z wrote:
| He wasn't really a founder though. He was brought in months
| later because his own startup idea hadn't got any traction.
| He's a founder only in the same way that Elon is a "founder"
| of Tesla - a retroactive title that was the result of a deal.
| FredPret wrote:
| The Elon-hate is so crazy to me.
|
| He pitched in a lot of cash at a do-or-die moment in
| Tesla's history.
|
| He then served as the CEO and driving force through some
| extremely lean and tough years, including working like hell
| to raise capital (which isn't optional if you're making
| cars)
|
| Would we have Tesla today without Musk? No. Would electric
| cars be ubiquitous if it was up to the likes of Ford, GM,
| Mercedes, Toyota to push the tech? No.
|
| It is, of course, entirely OK to dislike him - but at least
| admit his contributions.
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| >working like hell to raise capital
|
| Sounds like some really back breaking labor, was this
| during his 80 hour work weeks?
| FredPret wrote:
| You're right - it's super easy to bounce around from one
| rich person to the next, trying to get fat cheques from
| them for your unproven and almost-certainly-going-to-fail
| hardware startup that would only work if enough other
| rich people also give you big cheques, based on nothing
| but a pinky-promise that you'll try your darndest to
| invent, manufacture, and sell cars well enough to get
| them their money back, one day, maybe, if all goes
| perfectly.
|
| Why don't you do it too?
| HaZeust wrote:
| Raising capital in a new industry sucks, lol. A cushy job
| is still a job, and the human brain does a REALLY good
| job at building the same amount of attrition across roles
| in relativity - whether you're breaking your back in the
| mine or cold-calling 400 people a day from a Herman
| Miller chair.
| jyxent wrote:
| How is this Elon-hate? Is a founder someone who founded a
| company or someone who joined it later? Calling someone
| not a founder doesn't change their contributions to the
| company.
| joshmanders wrote:
| I agree with you on your comments about his
| contributions, but that doesn't mean he deserves the
| title of Founder of Tesla (Nor does Aaron, RIP).
|
| Neither of them FOUNDED the company, they joined in later
| on.
| thefaux wrote:
| The whole point is that it isn't enough for him to be
| recognized for his contributions. He must rewrite history
| to paint himself as the singular genius while discounting
| the work of others who were also a part of the story.
| There is a messianic figure that he presents in his own
| self-mythologizing that I find dangerous and troubling.
|
| It is, of course, entirely OK to admire his contributions
| - but at least admit the dark side of his persona and the
| means he's used to achieved his ends.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >He must rewrite history to paint himself as the singular
| genius
|
| But that's closer to the truth in this case than anything
| else.
|
| It's not an exaggeration to say that all Musk gained when
| he joined Tesla seven months after the founding--bringing
| the first substantial amount of outside capital--was the
| brand name.
| babypuncher wrote:
| > Would we have Tesla today without Musk? No. Would
| electric cars be ubiquitous if it was up to the likes of
| Ford, GM, Mercedes, Toyota to push the tech? No.
|
| These may all be true, but that doesn't make Elon the
| founder of Tesla. As for the general sentiment of Elon-
| hate over the last few years, well, he has only himself
| to blame...
|
| The reason people like to point this out is because it
| highlights the fact that Elon's fragile ego is not a new
| phenomenon. It was always there, even before he decided
| to go full crazy.
| jjulius wrote:
| None of that makes him a founder, simple as that. You're
| blowing that comment out of proportion.
| sparky_z wrote:
| I'm not on the Elon hate train (not a fanboy either, but
| I mostly agree with the positive things you said about
| him.) However, I did think pointing out the comparison
| would head off any "how dare you, Aaron deserves to be
| called a founder" comments.
| rifty wrote:
| I suppose to make the title legitimate Elon should've
| formally started another company, and then acquired the
| other?
|
| It seems like getting in and operating in a pivotal way
| within the first 12 months is a valid time frame to still
| be given a founder title if the other founders agree to it.
| Since when you decide to incorporate is not
| consistently/necessarily at the same time for finalizing
| the foundational team members for a getting a company on
| its feet.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| This is probably because PG encouraged spez and kn0thing to
| pivot from their original idea and become founders of reddit
| in June 2005 and Aaron Swartz joined reddit in November 2005
| after a conversation with PG, who suggested he work with spez
| and kn0thing on stabilizing the code since reddit had an
| early tendency to crash.[0]
|
| I found reddit back in 2005 and remember the post announcing
| that Aaron had joined the team and giving a bit of his
| background. Reddit was a lot different back then since there
| were no subreddits.
|
| [0]https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-
| brilli...
| sampo wrote:
| > it was founded by Steve Huffman and Alex Ohanian
|
| That is true. But a bit later Reddit was joined with a
| company Aaron Swartz had founded, so he became a cofounder of
| this new arrangement of Reddit.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20241
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Entrepreneurship
| avs733 wrote:
| Same...I honestly am furious at the effort to link Steve and
| Aaron here. Having known Steve, not well but for a LONG time I
| would struggle to label him anti-authority in any way. I think
| he wears many of the trappings of antiauthoritarianism - but
| only as a path to what he wants.
| shubhamjain wrote:
| > There needed to be something like del.icio.us/popular, but
| designed for sharing links instead of being a byproduct of saving
| them.
|
| I am kind of surprised that the idea was Paul Graham's. I always
| assumed that it was Steve and Alex who came up with it.
| Considering HN was also started by PG, which has survived and
| grown with just a few changes every year, I think he has a unique
| talent for creating lasting online communities. It's not an easy
| task, btw.
| mportela wrote:
| > I think he has a unique talent for creating lasting online
| communities
|
| And, most importantly, money
| _Marak_ wrote:
| Now that Reddit is a public company, will information about the
| "maxwellhill" account be released?
| jtriangle wrote:
| That'd be bad for the shareholders, so, no.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Social media as a concept is in big trouble: Facebook, Tiktok,
| and others are constantly explaining themselves in Washington.
| Twitter has transformed into Elon Musk's media toy. Reddit is
| full of echo chambers that produce very little original content.
| observationist wrote:
| You can incrementally delete your posts and interactions while
| backing them up. Once done, you can request your user data to
| verify that deletion has taken place, and then cancel the
| account.
|
| https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite , this and other tools
| make it easy to manage.
|
| Reddit has hamfistedly broken whatever value it once had as a
| platform for long form discussion, with the interesting and
| valuable fringe, hobbyist, and obscure niche forums having been
| banned or moderated into inane milquetoast. Now, its value seems
| primarily as a customer support resource for companies outside
| the US, or as a platform for attracting clicks on other
| platforms.
|
| Reddit's going the way of MySpace. Unless you like burning money,
| this IPO is one to skip. All the things that made Reddit great,
| once, are gone now. There are no compelling reasons to use it;
| it's slow, intrusive, disrespectful to user privacy,
| performatively moralizing and preachy, caters to the worst sort
| of moderation and curation power dynamics, and serves no relevant
| purpose in the ecosystem of the modern internet. The best and
| only value of Reddit comes from older archives of scraped content
| now used as training data for AI.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| > Reddit has hamfistedly broken whatever value it once had as a
| platform for long form discussion, with the interesting and
| valuable fringe, hobbyist, and obscure niche forums having been
| banned or moderated into inane milquetoast. Now, its value
| seems primarily as a customer support resource for companies
| outside the US, or as a platform for attracting clicks on other
| platforms.
|
| It's so sad. They really had a good thing going. I like to
| believe that it could have been a sustainable marvel of the
| internet of the likes of Wikipedia, if they had just stuck to
| reddit gold and non-intrusive ads for the revenue. How much can
| it cost to keep the servers going? The source code for the old
| reddit seems pretty stable and not like it requires tons of
| maintenance or the attention of many devs.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| That's because Wikipedia isn't run by a Silicon Valley swamp
| creature. It provides a decent living for those who run the
| corporate side of things, but was never intended to create
| millionaires. Keeping the servers running isn't a cost that
| will grow exponentially; you need a lack of focus on the
| product by incompetent people who think they should be
| unfathomably wealthy to get the revenue demands that Reddit
| has now.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| Fair warning, I used PowerDeleteSuite and Reddit seems to have
| backfilled a bunch of deleted comments while keeping them off
| my user page. Every now and then I'll read an old thread and
| see my username and have to manually delete the comment.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Same. Also happened to my brother's account after we
| _thought_ we 'd nuked everything.
| dorchadas wrote:
| I used to use Shreddit and other tools and the same thing
| has happened. Even worse, they give me notifications if
| someone replies in a sub that didn't opt-in to archive mode
| (another dumb decision; should've been opt-out), but I can
| delete them.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| >Even worse, they give me notifications if someone
| replies in a sub that didn't opt-in to archive mode
| (another dumb decision; should've been opt-out),
|
| God, that is just the WORST concept especially nowadays.
| I was looking for info on water filtes and found a bunch
| of ChatGPT comments from 3 months ago on an 8 year old
| thread shilling for some company. Of course, they were
| all upvoted to the top of the thread.
|
| I even had a notification of someone just commenting
| "lol" on an offhand comment I made about Firefly in
| _2011_. As if that needed to be said.
| duskwuff wrote:
| If you were doing this during the protests, comments on
| closed (protesting) subreddits were hidden from users'
| profiles until the sub reopened.
| callalex wrote:
| This seems very illegal in some places.
| calfuris wrote:
| I don't think that reddit is "backfilling." I don't have
| time to check right now, but I suspect that
| PowerDeleteSuite goes through your profile to find things
| to delete. Your profile is limited to showing 1k entries.
| IIRC that's the top 1k according to whatever ranking you're
| using, so you could get some more comments by re-running it
| sorting by top, controversial, etc, but if you made a lot
| of comments PowerDeleteSuite just won't be able to find
| everything.
| nosrepa wrote:
| Profile is 2k as it is a combination of both the 1k
| comment/post listings, iirc.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| It may not be backfilling, but I can confirm that my user
| profile is not showing comments that exist elsewhere on
| reddit.
|
| Sorting by "controversial" does, though, show new
| comments that weren't on the main page. So you might be
| on to something.
| aeyes wrote:
| I bet that their TOS covers that anything you submit
| belongs to them.
|
| I'd love to delete old comments on HackerNews but I can't
| so I'm pretty sure that Reddit could take away the delete
| button tomorrow and nothing would change.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| One of the most valuable long-form posts I have seen in the
| past year was a few days ago, about the absolute dangers of
| reddit and other social media sites due to nation-state
| disinformation. Ironic.
|
| "You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are
| vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you
| more hateful and depressed."
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1bfto4a/youre_being_t...
|
| (Notice the "old" in the domain, because the new layout and all
| the apps are designed not for maximum utility, but for ad
| revenue).
|
| There is so much more unoriginal content on reddit now. So
| little that is interesting or inspiring. It takes true effort
| to find content that is the combination of Interesting AND
| Original. /r/all is to Instagram what BoredPanda was/is to
| reddit: stale, shitty content maintained by bots and
| influencers.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Related video I saw yesterday: TikTok is a Cyberweapon[0].
|
| I don't love the way he presented the idea, a bit handwavey
| and not properly acknowledging the fact that TikTok is only
| different from other socials because it's a) very good
| algorithm-wise, and b) Chinese. But the demo of how one would
| astroturf a protest was very convincing. He should have just
| done it, it would have been groundbreaking.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7WzqUq4Nk
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Agreed. It's a problem across the board. Insta can do the
| same thing. It's just that one is US agitprop, one is
| Chinese.
|
| We need to train our friends and citizens on how to be
| effective at changing the world around them and at
| communicating, and how _not_ to let social media influence
| them directly.
|
| Sadly, the people who are otherwise smart who I know are
| further left totally reject mainstream media as "complicit
| in US government crimes" and so on.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I'll have to check out that tool.
|
| Generalized social media is looking more and more like a
| mistake. There were previously forums, and they were centered
| around a topic. Then Reddit and Facebook came around and killed
| those by making it easy to create and find those communities.
| Now they're coming back. I want a local equivalent to Reddit,
| without the rest of Reddit. Beyond that, I don't need more
| social media that has no link to my IRL activities.
|
| Also, the comparison to MySpace isn't fair. Tom was _far_
| cooler than spez ever will be.
|
| <lereddit>We did it, HN! This is exactly what I'm looking for.
| Take my updoot, kind stranger!</lereddit>
| breischl wrote:
| Isn't the local equivalent of Reddit just NextDoor? Which
| seems to mostly be worse, from what I can tell.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Congrats to Reddit and YC. An example of the adage that all
| successful businesses succeed despite themselves and why product
| market fit is so important.
|
| I remember the early days.. I deleted that early account b/c
| reddit was _so_ addictive. And it arguably still is. I remember
| receiving a few replies from Aaron. He was a kid who was living
| in the future way ahead of his time.
|
| I migrated here though when reddit diversified subreddits.. kinda
| like when Facebook opened up to the world reddit became less
| useful for conversation.
|
| And I've gone through a few accounts/handles for the same reasons
| here as reddit.
|
| Downvotes and even distributed slashdot moderation work to
| discourage conversation and ultimately engagement unless you
| garner a critical mass to break out of the algorithm. I imagine
| post engagement follows Zipf's law. This probably explains why
| people buy upvotes and followers etc...
|
| No site is immune to this as far as I can tell. Niche subbreddits
| help but then those tend to be actively moderated. Very specific
| forums also tend to be better for specific things (like car
| forums).
|
| Good advice is to never read the comments to the things you post
| and I guess that means replies as well :) .. It's a weird dynamic
| because what all humans really need is to be heard..
|
| And yet magic internet points are not quite the correct filter.
| Maybe AI will save us.
| baal80spam wrote:
| Argh - the font is nigh-unreadable on a FullHD monitor. Why on
| earth does the modern web UI insist on the SUPER-THIN variants of
| fonts?
| RIMR wrote:
| This is Paul Graham we're talking about. The man who on
| 12/23/2023, for the first time ever, installed a valid SSL
| certificate on his website.
|
| Once you adjust browser settings enough to read the content he
| publishes, you'll notice that he praises the recent
| developments at Reddit, so let's just say he's not a guy that
| follows best practices or understands good UX.
| SSLy wrote:
| there's an ongoing flagging tug of war on this post.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| You're right. Many old comments that may have attempted to shed
| light on the skeletons in someone's closet related to
| prosecution of Aaron Swartz are gone.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| This is something I noticed in the past few months here. Gang-
| flagging clearly intensified on HN but it doesn't look like any
| of HN moderators care.
| neilv wrote:
| > _The Reddits were the "Cell food muffins." "Muffin" is a term
| of endearment Jessica uses for things like small dogs and two
| year olds. So that gives you some idea what kind of impression
| Steve and Alexis made in those days. They had the look of
| slightly ruffled surprise that baby birds have._
|
| LifeProTip: If the idea you pitch is obviously nonviable, be
| _just so adorable_.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| As a successful VC, this is the core of my investment thesis.
| neilv wrote:
| At last, techbro ageism explained.
|
| VCs: "Ooo... Little baby founder so cute, I just want to fund
| you right up... Oh yes, I do! Yes, I do!"
|
| New Techbro: "I'm the special little baby."
|
| Same Techbro a Few Years Later: "Why are the special little
| babies in charge?"
|
| Newer Techbro: "OK, boomer."
| lubesGordi wrote:
| Seriously! Can these people not even read what they write or
| are they so out of touch with reality. Jesus.
| rideontime wrote:
| > when Steve came back in 2015, I knew the world was in for a
| surprise.
|
| > If Reddit could grow to the size it had with management that
| was harmless at best, what could it do if Steve came back? We now
| know the answer to that question. Or at least a lower bound on
| the answer. Steve is not out of ideas yet.
|
| Does anybody know what "ideas" he's talking about? When I think
| back to recent developments at Reddit, all that comes to mind is
| the 3rd-party app fiasco and the "collectible avatars" and
| "Moons"/"community points" nobody but crypto speculators wanted
| anything to do with (and are now dead). Oh, and the death of
| celebrity AMAs after they fired Victoria.
| relaunched wrote:
| I think he's talking about Yishan Wong and Ellen Pao. BTW, true
| or not, that's a hell of a way to refer to them, respectively.
| rideontime wrote:
| I guess it was unclear, I meant what's improved at Reddit
| since spez's return?
| iends wrote:
| As far as I can tell it's gotten worse from a user
| perspective.
| Macha wrote:
| Honestly neglect sounds more like the pre-Yishan era where
| Reddit was effectively a few people in the metaphorical
| corner of a conde nast office.
| jtriangle wrote:
| Not to mention Steve editing users' posts, Ellen Pao being in
| the same social circle as Epstein, Maxwellhill conspicuously
| going silent when Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, promising and
| then failing to deliver on direct user funding and adrev
| sharing, and flatly ignoring user feedback for the better part
| of a decade.
| segasaturn wrote:
| What is this "Maxwellhill" thing refer to? I vaguely
| recognize the username as an old reddit powermod, is the
| implication that reddit power users are involved in human
| trafficking?
| rideontime wrote:
| There's a theory that account belong to Ghislaine herself.
| I'm personally uninterested.
| jtriangle wrote:
| I'm uninterested inasfar as her having a reddit profile
| and posting things. I'm much more interested as to why
| reddit inc refuses to answer the simple quandary that
| many people have as to if she was behind the account in
| question or not.
|
| They more or less Streisand'd the conspiracy into
| plausibility by doing so, which is generally a bad idea.
| That's the reason I included it.
| enimodas wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is
| _...
| koofdoof wrote:
| I think the connection between u/maxwellhill and Ghislaine
| Maxwell is dubious. The account is named after the town
| Maxwell Hill in Malaysia, and they had posted in Malaysian
| subreddits years before any of these theories came out. It
| seems more likely to me that the similar names are a
| coincidence and that the account owner quite reasonably
| stopped using the account when they became suspected of being
| involved in a major international conspiracy.
| WatchDog wrote:
| Didn't they only become suspect, because they stopped
| posting at the exact time Ghislaine was arrested?
| yellow_lead wrote:
| No idea either. They haven't changed much in years.
| stevekemp wrote:
| They added a chat application, so you can get daily spam from
| onlyfans promoters, or cryptocurrency schills, before you get
| so annoyed you disable it.
| darkhorse222 wrote:
| That's the issue. The thing that made them worthwhile was a
| very basic set of functionality. Every single other feature
| they've tried to add was poorly implemented and not picked up
| by users.
|
| It just doesn't make sense as a business. You don't need a
| million devs to run a forum site, you need them to add more and
| more bloat to convince investors you're growing.
|
| All they have done is pushed ads harder. That is all they
| really have to offer.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| They are growing every year.
|
| https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1309791/reddit-mau-
| worldw...
| queuebert wrote:
| And they still have one of the worst apps (and website) in
| the game. Seems like that would be some low-hanging fruit.
| tempsy wrote:
| i still use the old version on web and it works great
|
| i agree the new version is very busy and buggy on mobile
| web
| __rito__ wrote:
| Yeah, I have Old Reddit redirect on all of my devices,
| and I won't touch the official app with a ten foot pole.
| dmix wrote:
| Never got the complaints with the official app. What's
| the issue?
|
| Last time I asked someone this question they mentioned
| some power user stuff that didn't really apply to regular
| Reddit content consumers / casual posters.
| tempsy wrote:
| imo it's just unnecessarily busy and can be buggy. if you
| spend some time using the old web version, which feels
| very HN like, you'll wonder why you'd ever use the new
| one.
| weaksauce wrote:
| the app is absolute trash and the new.reddit is almost as
| bad. if they remove old i'm out
| babypuncher wrote:
| That growth is predicated on a feature set that has been
| more or less untouched for over a decade. That core feature
| set is still very good.
|
| I've seen no evidence that anything they've introduced in
| the last 10 years has contributed to any of that growth,
| and my evidence is that just about every feature announced
| or implemented since then is now either gone or largely
| ignored by the userbase.
| jsheard wrote:
| Even the overhauled UI has gone ignored by many users,
| thanks to the old UI remaining available as an option,
| but I imagine it's only a matter of time before they pull
| the plug on that so they can "enhance the sponsored post
| viewing experience".
| trogdor wrote:
| I have no evidence for this, but my hunch is that an
| inconsequentially-small percentage of Reddit users go out
| of their way to use Reddit's old UI.
| VHRanger wrote:
| Those users are disproportionately mods and active users
| though. Reddit can't easily do away with it.
|
| They considered this around the 3rd party app fiasco and
| it was clear old Reddit has a few years left because mods
| allhate the new Reddit UI
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Yes but what percent of active posters use it? It's going
| to be much higher and the site will die without new
| content.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There is nothing special about Reddit unless you mean
| Reddit was in the right place and the right time to
| establish a two-sided market.
|
| It's very hard to kill a two-sided market when it gets
| established. Look at Craigslist or Twitter.
|
| An interesting thing about Reddit to me is many people
| who look at it see strongly offputting things like being
| overrun by image memes but when you look at it closely
| there is so much there about so many subjects. From time
| to time you find those brilliant social media posts that
| remind me of some of the emails from the Enron Emails
| data set where people talk about what they did for
| training in the army. Perhaps that is what keeps people
| coming back or maybe they are all about the memes.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I firmly believe that niche content like what you mention
| is the life-blood of the site, and the biggest
| contributor to it's longevity. People come for the memes,
| but they stay for the litany of small communities that
| cater to their very specific tastes
|
| The fact that people often append "reddit" to their
| Google queries is a testament to this. Even if they
| aren't active participants in these niche communities,
| they know that they are the easiest place to find
| reasonably reliable information from other humans on
| them.
|
| If these types of communities stop flourishing on Reddit
| for any reason, then the site will become much easier to
| replace by any other generic meme factory.
| gustavus wrote:
| Now show us the percentage of those that are real people
| and not bots, and the number of accounts that are from
| previously banned users. I mean heck I've gotten to the
| point where I can only go 2 or 3 months before my account
| gets banned and then I have to spin up a new one.
|
| Come to think of it that might be a reason why their ban
| happy, more people you ban who come back looks like a new
| user signup.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > I mean heck I've gotten to the point where I can only
| go 2 or 3 months before my account gets banned and then I
| have to spin up a new one.
|
| User error.
|
| It's really not hard to not get banned. Site-wide, at
| least.
|
| I'm pretty active and my account is nearly 13 years old.
| 9991 wrote:
| Pretty easy if you have no controversial opinions.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| This reeks of "Oh you know the ones"
|
| https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267
| 174...
|
| Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative
| views
|
| Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
|
| Con: LOL no...no not those views
|
| Me: So....deregulation?
|
| Con: Haha no not those views either
|
| Me: Which views, exactly?
|
| Con: Oh, you know the ones
| realusername wrote:
| Interesting, I used to be a member of the French community
| which peaked around 2017/2018 and kept decreasing ever
| since. I wouldn't say it's a ghost town now but it became a
| minor forum.
|
| I guess they grew in other countries.
| darkhorse222 wrote:
| Ah, but I would guess those are low quality users, i.e.
| they don't vote, they don't comment, they don't post. While
| that doesn't matter to advertisers, it does matter to the
| health of your content network. And their features have had
| zero positive effects on their community health.
|
| You can run an ad on a subway and get more users. That
| doesn't mean you're doing a good job. The only reason those
| users have something to see is because of community health.
| dageshi wrote:
| I would guess they're no different to any other users in
| the past decade. In other words a percentage will comment
| and a small percentage will post.
|
| It's always been that way.
| dwringer wrote:
| LLM's-at-home are in a vastly different place than they
| were 10, 5, or even 2 years ago, so I'm not sure the
| assumptions about typical traffic from then hold true
| now.
| dmix wrote:
| What are you basing this on?
| pipes wrote:
| I rarely use it now because of the web front end. Yeah
| old.reddit.com and plugins to redirect to it help a bit. Also
| why on earth would I want to use an app instead of a web
| browser for a site that lists wen links. Oh yeah they stopped
| making the site about links and more about internal content.
|
| It really is a pile of shit compared to what it used to be.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| Reddit is the forum to end all forums, with a spice of
| imageboards.
|
| And it is ad-supported. People who have partaken in small
| PHPbb style forums probably can tell the story - moderation
| and bandwidth cost time.
|
| That's all, a simple, dumb business model based on
| advertising and market share, or better: _mind share_.
|
| The last part is Reddit's moat, no more, no less.
|
| My 2 cents.
| RIMR wrote:
| Those are the ideas that he's talking about. Paul Graham is a
| dinosaur. He thinks that spez's rampant monetization is a great
| idea, despite the fact that it has outraged the community that
| gives Reddit any power at all.
| clhodapp wrote:
| Perhaps that's the meaning of "almost unkillable": Look at
| how much room there is to enshitify without losing all the
| users!
| nvy wrote:
| pg is just trying to use his audience to drum up interest in
| the reddit IPO.
|
| Reddit has nothing to offer investors but Paul needs a return
| so he's trying to make sure someone else ends up holding the
| bags.
| epolanski wrote:
| Astonished people don't see the link with the timing.
| bevekspldnw wrote:
| Getting drunk and editing production database to delete mean
| comments is certainly innovative CEO behavior.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| And people want to invest in this IPO? Seems like two trains
| moving towards each other but can't tell if they are on the
| same track yet
| marcosdumay wrote:
| There is only one set of tracks.
|
| But everything is fine, you can just go swap places with
| any passenger if you want.
| bevekspldnw wrote:
| You'd have to be a total moron, but if there's one thing I
| learned from Reddit it's that there are far more morons out
| there than I realized.
| WatchDog wrote:
| * Editing people's comments critical of him.
| bevekspldnw wrote:
| Which is actually worse.
| WatchDog wrote:
| Indeed
| brobinson wrote:
| Hah, I saw this: Steve was not a big fan of
| authority, so he also liked the idea of a site without
| editors.
|
| and remembered him getting prod database access to censor
| comments criticizing him. I guess it's true what they say
| about power corrupting you.
| RSZC wrote:
| The controversy around this one was always wild to me.
|
| Mods editing comments was the most standard behavior on every
| phpbb/vb board I grew up on.
|
| His edits were clearly edited, clearly jokes, and TBH I found
| them pretty funny. And people were *outraged* that he had the
| capacity and the temerity to edit their sacrosanct posts...
|
| I took it as a sign of the changing times
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked
| popular:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Basically this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-W0CBOGnnI
| grepfru_it wrote:
| I always wondered if they continued this behavior while GPT
| and ML started picking up. I saw a lot of suspicious posts
| especially around bitcoin and crypto related subreddits start
| around 2013. This massively increased with the_donald and
| trump running for office. Covid and the disinformation
| policies seemed like a way to cause divisiveness and attract
| viewers to the site while providing a reason to cull some
| bots (whether internal or external). The API change and the
| resulting moderator backlash seemed manufactured to provide
| management a reason to purge moderators and more accounts.
| Now they have plausible deniability when people claim Reddit
| is the dead internet, full of AI bots. Because now their user
| count isn't heavily tilted towards fake profiles (which would
| need to be disclosed in an IPo)
|
| Just my conspiracy theory of the day
| Lammy wrote:
| Relevant: "Containment Control for a Social Network with
| State-Dependent Connectivity" (2014), Air Force Research
| Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
|
| ...a.k.a Reddit's "Most-Addicted City" of 2013: https://web
| .archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| Reddit IPO'd today and the purpose of this piece is to add
| whatever hype can be added to that IPO so that PG and other
| early investors can maximize their return, and then likely,
| slowly and carefully unload their positions into the public and
| other investors who will be the bag holders when the price
| inevitably declines over time.
|
| The "idea" is "make PG even more money", and that's a _great_
| idea if you 're PG.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Didn't they already unload when they sold to Conde Nast? Or
| did PG partake in the re-acquisition?
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Reddit IPO 'd today and the purpose of this piece is to
| add whatever hype can be added to that IPO_
|
| To PG's credit, he has an uncanny ability to pluck out
| _relentlessly resourceful_ founders (self-fulfilling prophecy
| and all that, notwithstanding) who have greater chances of
| outsized success. And he 's been more right about startups
| than almost anyone else. When he praises those founders, it
| often comes off as an exaggeration, but I am convinced he is
| being thoroughly honest. "As someone who went
| through YC and met PG while he was still actively running it,
| I can tell you that at least in our batch he was 100% spot on
| about who was going to do well. He had a tendency to spend
| his free time with the same individuals who ended up doing
| phenomenally well. It would be easy to be dismissive about
| this and say something about doubling down on his best
| investments, etc. But during our batch many of those
| companies had not yet become the clear cut winners that they
| are today, and instead only turned into them a year or so
| down the road."
|
| -u/aerosimle, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25381893
| WheatMillington wrote:
| >He had a tendency to spend his free time with the same
| individuals who ended up doing phenomenally well.
|
| There's a causal relationship here, but it's not obvious
| what direction it points.
| woah wrote:
| If this guy is not only able pick successful people to
| spend time with, but to _make people successful_ by the
| very act of spending time with them, he must be some kind
| of god.
|
| TBH the obvious conclusion of the causal relationship
| seems more likely than what you are implying.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Money begets money is more of the lesson I think.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Wow, that was fast. Just recently I got the "hey you have a
| shitton of karma - do you want to be in the IPO"
| notification. Before I even dug in, it's public...
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I'd be fascinated to know if he uses old.reddit in private
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| Unfortunately, yes. A throw away quote at the bottom of one of
| the many articles during the API protest that was ignored by
| most:
|
| "I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they
| choose," Huffman said, adding that's "another conversation, but
| I think that's the next frontier of Reddit."
|
| Edit: here is the story. I changed "he" to "Huffman" since I
| took the quote out of context of the full story. It's way down
| almost at the end. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-
| news/reddit-protest-blacko...
| reagan83 wrote:
| Paulg taking a victory lap in really odd fashion: telling a
| couple of kids what he wanted them to build, saying he predicted
| ordering fast food on your cellphones was a bad idea and still
| can't be done today (DoorDash?). This whole write-up seems off.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Agreed. It feels forced. "Hey Paul, we're doing an IPO soon,
| can you write something about how cool we are?"
| rjbwork wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. PG just writing a fluff piece to try to
| get them a lil IPO pop.
| rchaud wrote:
| https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
| edanm wrote:
| I admire pg. But I kind of doubt anything he writes will make
| any difference for the Reddit IPO.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Yeah, it's definitely marketing.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Yeah, I don't understand what he even means.
|
| >a way to order fast food on your cellphone.
|
| >[...]So it was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19
| years later.
|
| How does this not exist?? If there was a further problem with
| their idea why did he describe it in the way of something that
| not only exists but is super popular? Has he grown completely
| out of touch or what's going on?
| emnudge wrote:
| I'm pretty sure he knows what Doordash is. I assume the thing
| that doesn't exist is ordering via a phone line, not an
| internet-based interface.
|
| i.e. texting or calling a number in a specific way based on
| some standard tons of fast food places provide to make fast
| food orders without human interaction.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| I've seen text to order food where you pay at pickup. There
| seem to be some systems out there.
|
| https://www.usfoods.com/our-services/business-trends/text-
| to...
| Tenoke wrote:
| It still seems pretty disingenuous to say it doesn't exist
| even today just because we do the same thing with better
| tech today - very likely what their hypothetical company
| would've ended up doing, same as Netflix or Twitter
| embracing the technology for their use cases and moving
| away from DVDs and SMS.
| HaZeust wrote:
| I really think he's trying to pussyfoot around his
| poorly-aged claim by changing the goalpost. Even in 2005,
| with Domino's order tracker, it was still a purposely-
| contrarian stance on what technology would allow us to do
| with food ordering in the near future. If this is
| considered a hill to die on, that's embarrassing.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| I took it to mean "an app like this _created by Steve and
| Alexis_ still doesn 't exist."
|
| It gave me pause though, as it's a weird way to phrase it.
| rhplus wrote:
| What they were probably pitching 19 years ago would have been
| ordering via SMS on basic phones, most likely via USSD codes.
| That's why he mentioned contracts with cell networks, as
| they'd need to secure numbers and codes.
|
| That model absolutely has taken off, just not in places where
| everyone has smartphones. USSD services - driven by basic
| text menus - powers everything from microtransactions to
| ordering food to accessing government services in many parts
| of Africa to this day:
|
| https://africastalking.com/ussd
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Isn't ordering food on your phone huge everywhere?
| rozap wrote:
| ITT: pg invented reddit, gives himself a pat on the back, has
| not used reddit in the last decade to see how much it has
| degraded
| barbazoo wrote:
| My thought exactly, this had to be written by someone who
| hasn't used reddit recently.
| mrb wrote:
| Re: ordering food by cellphone: paulg probably means doordash
| but via texts or calls navigating a tree of choices, as opposed
| to in an app/browser. Hence his vocabulary choice of
| "cellphone" not "smartphone".
|
| You could even charge customers food orders indirectly via
| premium SMS texts. Without having to sign up for an account.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Also this:
|
| > Steve is not out of ideas yet.
|
| Could this refer to the hugely innovative Reddit live chat
| (/s), or the idea to alienate many of it's most dedicated users
| by killing their favorite clients?
| lc9er wrote:
| The only good idea he had was to fellate pg's ego and write
| Reddit in lisp, which is all of talked about in those days.
| Seems to have a need to be proven that he was a right clever
| boy.
| rchaud wrote:
| PG essays from the 2000s felt insightful and honest. The
| latter-day stuff is veering dangerously close to A16z.com
| fluff.
| bilekas wrote:
| A really good idea, that had an honest to the user direction
| originally, it seems the natural progression towards making
| financial sense for people who got involved unfortunately has
| pushed some of the communities away from it a bit.
|
| It would be good to go back to a real user driven approach
| instead of "user driven, when values and priorities are in-line".
|
| I've had many memorable years there, but after leaving I haven't
| felt I am missing anything special anymore. It's a lot of
| recycled content, bot heavy, power drunk mods.. I'll cross my
| fingers for an improvement but not so confident.
| LispSporks22 wrote:
| > it's almost unkillable.
|
| Kills my iPhone XS Max daily though.
|
| The navigation is completely broken as well. Some things don't
| close, back button might or might not work, never seems to
| remember where I was before, frequently rescrolling stuff.
|
| This is all after ad blocking.
|
| Without it, endless spam of embedded ads distracting me, wasting
| my time. Janky loading, page hangs on clicks.
|
| I'm not sure wtf their engineering team is doing but the site's
| basically broken. Maybe it's the normal state of things. Before I
| was using some third party app that was working great until
| Reddit killed api access.
|
| My usage of it has dropped as well. It's just unpleasant to use
| now.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I was a frequent and enthusiastic contributor to dozens of
| niche subreddits about various techy topics, chiefly because it
| was a great way to kill time while using the restroom, shopping
| with the wife, all manner of things that are notable in that I
| don't have a computer. After using Apollo for so long, the
| reddit app is downright torture and I refuse to use it. I still
| occasionally reddit on a computer since the mobile experience
| is abysmal both in app and browser, but I'd be shocked if I
| manage 5% of my previous rate of activity.
|
| On the one hand, thanks reddit, I got a ton of free time back.
| On the other hand, that time was previously spent generating
| value for your website, so not sure that was a good move for
| you.
|
| Edit: Also, and this is strictly second-hand info from the
| Apollo dev who obviously is far from an unbiased source, but I
| have to admit alongside the thing just being objectively worse
| to use, my views of the reddit corporate structure also soured
| significantly. I think what they did with the API changes was a
| boneheaded move to be sure, but the _way they went about it_
| was so uniquely shitty to the people who had built small
| businesses around theirs that it truly boggled the mind. The
| dev for Apollo posted quite a bit around the "negotiations" if
| one wants to be generous and call them that in the lead up to
| the API changes, and the CEO just blatantly lied about him
| numerous times, in obvious ways, trying to paint him as this
| entitled kid in such a way that as a millennial, I have to
| admit I am THOROUGHLY sick of. Reddit as a company simply
| jacked the price, with barely any notice, refused to negotiate
| on a single point throughout and made numerous bad-faith claims
| about the developers who were (understandably) caught off
| guard.
|
| Like if you just want to close the API, fine, close it. But
| then that would paint reddit as the obvious bad guy, so instead
| they went round the back way with this "api price change" that
| was so ludicrously expensive that no app could possibly cover
| it, and then reddit gets to PR speak the thing as "well we
| tried to work with developers" in a blatantly bullshit way
| without technically lying. It's gross and tiresome and frankly,
| insults the intelligence of every reddit user.
|
| I can't say for certain if this wasn't the case that I'd still
| be using it more, as the app and mobile experiences are truly
| shit even without that. But this certainly has cooled my fervor
| to try to find ways to use it.
| danieldk wrote:
| _On the other hand, that time was previously spent generating
| value for your website, so not sure that was a good move for
| you._
|
| This is what I'd like to believe, but I fear it does not
| really make a difference. Reddit's audience has grown far
| beyond its initial tech roots and the quality outside a small
| subset of subreddits is... let's just call it devoid of
| content. It's barely a blip on the radar if the early adopter
| drop out, because they are by now a tiny subset of the
| population.
|
| And I guess that's fine. Platforms have their lifecycle. And
| when a social media network is for-profit, the early adopters
| are often only important for the initial bootstrapping.
| Luckily there are nice places like LWN, HN, Lobste.rs and
| other more niche communities.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > It's barely a blip on the radar if the early adopter drop
| out, because they are by now a tiny subset of the
| population.
|
| The thing is, when people append 'reddit' to their search
| query, who writes the posts that get linked? When someone
| is looking for a home wifi router and types 'mesh wifi6
| reddit' in google and a post comes up from
| /r/homenetworking, it is almost certainly a response to a
| question from someone about setting up a wireless network,
| or it is a guide or a review by someone who just posted to
| get their knowledge out there. Who writes those? Not the
| people who upvote videos of dudes getting into a fight in
| Burger King.
| epolanski wrote:
| Moderation and how horrible is the Reddit app is the thing
| that turned me off most.
|
| The fact that Reddit keeps growing despite it's flaws and
| terrible management, let alone moderation, says a lot about
| the combination of a simple but effective product and
| critical mass.
| heisgone wrote:
| My biggest fear is if they kill old.reddit.com . I can't use
| anything of the newer interface without pulling my hairs.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Yes, the day they kill old.reddit.com will be the day my
| Reddit usage drops to near-zero.
| liotier wrote:
| I'll miss AskHistorians. But thanks to Reddit having
| already weaned me from mobile usage, I'm psychologically
| ready to detach from yet another community.
| rd wrote:
| Same, I know one of the current devs browses HN and
| commented a couple of months ago that there was still a
| contingent of devs on the team who want to keep
| old.reddit.com alive - not sure how long for though!
| smegger001 wrote:
| glad to hear there is push-back preventing complete
| inshittifcation of reddit.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I can't use anything of the newer interface without pulling
| my hairs.
|
| Good luck with the "current" new design. The one that
| superseded old.reddit.com and got pretty decent is now on
| new.reddit.com, and the steaming pile of bull dung that is
| the current reddit.com if you're unlucky enough to get it
| forced upon you. And of course notifications on
| new.reddit.com will link to the bull dung version.
| antod wrote:
| Yeah the new new UI makes the old new UI seem awesome in
| comparison. I didn't actually mind the old new UI too much.
| pants2 wrote:
| It's remarkable that a San Francisco tech company with 2,000+
| employees can't seem to produce an app that's half as good as
| Apollo, an app developed by one guy in Canada.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Different incentives. Apollo was made by someone who loved
| making software and wanting to build something nice for
| people. Reddit is made by a corporation interested only in
| extracting as much wealth from the platform as possible, with
| as little regard for users as they can get away with.
| jorvi wrote:
| For a while, until he made sure every holiday stuffed the
| app with a repeating pop-up (think 5+ times over the
| holiday) that asked users to subscribe. Even users that
| already paid for the "Pro" version.
|
| I forgot what he did when Apollo closed down but it was
| another big moneygrab.
|
| The app itself always stayed pretty great, but the steady
| ramp up in monetization got increasingly annoying over the
| years.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| I remember the reports in r/apollo but I never
| experienced those issues myself. I don't know the guy
| personally so I can't make a judgement on if he was lying
| about that being a bug or not, but whatever the case it
| certainly wasn't something every user experienced.
| callalex wrote:
| Interesting, I used Apollo literally every day from
| launch to shutdown and did not have the same experience
| as you at all.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| It's bizarre to me that they didn't acquire Apollo. It would
| have generated so much goodwill.
| randomdata wrote:
| They already acquired Alien Blue, the (once) most popular
| and beloved mobile Reddit client. How much more goodwill
| does the company need?
| mhh__ wrote:
| My analysts are suggesting approximately 3.2 Goodwills
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Well the core purpose of the official app is to slurp up as
| much user data as possible and deliver targeted ads.
| cornholio wrote:
| These are all good arguments in favor of Paul's assertion
| that "Reddit is unkillable".
|
| I mean, people still use it despite a complete cluster-bombed
| design, intense push towards monetization at the cost of user
| experience, atrocious management and clear dictatorial
| tendencies from the top muffin, etc. It seems not even Reddit
| itself can kill Reddit despite their best tries.
|
| It's in the nature of their moat: millions of tightly focused
| small forums, each easy to duplicate on their own, but
| together making the Reddit account a gateway to an enormous
| chunk of the user-generated internet. You open a Reddit, and
| not, say, a Telegram channel, because that's where the users
| are, ready to form a coherent community around your topic.
|
| What might finally do Reddit in, or at least open vast
| markets for copycats, is its intense need to fit inside the
| narrow Overton window of American politics, in order to be
| palatable as a publicly traded company. This has already led
| to extremely heavy handed bans of major reddits and things
| can only get worse. If it reaches the breaking point, you
| will see a mass migration of not only the ideology driven
| communities, but also the neutral ones like fandoms,
| hobbyists etc., because they will move to where the users
| are.
| beryilma wrote:
| > It's in the nature of their moat
|
| On a tangent, what is the deal with the word moat and why
| is everybody using it all of a sudden? What does it mean?
| crq-yml wrote:
| "Competitive moat." It's a term Warren Buffett has used
| often to describe businesses that have an advantage that
| blocks competitors, like a moat around the wall of a
| castle. Control over intellectual property rights is an
| example of such a moat.
| mikestew wrote:
| "All of a sudden"? I've heard that term used for probably
| twenty years now, if not more, originating (IIRC) with
| Warren Buffet. What does the moat of a castle do? Keeps
| the baddies out. What does the "moat" of a business do?
| Keeps the competitors out. To take a recent example, what
| would Nvidia's moat be? A strong argument could be made
| that it's CUDA. For the sake of argument, let's say
| anyone could throw a bunch of silicon on a PCB and make a
| GPU equivalent to Nvidia's. Doesn't matter, because your
| cheapo GPU won't run the CUDA software that makes
| Nvidia's dominance possible.
|
| To offer one more example out of my butt, take Apple. The
| Apple brand makes up at least some of their moat. You
| could build an exact clone of an iPhone that even runs
| latest iOS (assume for the sake of argument that there's
| a way to get the OS on your hardware). Doesn't matter,
| unless you're ready to infringe on trademarks by putting
| an Apple logo on there, few will buy it because they want
| Apple, not a functional work-alike.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The thing is, this now matches Twitter/X: unpleasant in
| usability, increasingly unpleasant in content, lots of the good
| posters have left; BUT such a significant chunk of "normal"
| companies and users are doing social media through it that it
| survives nonetheless. And those frogs are pretty boil-
| resistant.
|
| If there's a new game launched, where is the forum likely to
| be? Reddit. What search term do people add to try to bypass
| genAI content farms? Reddit.
| cgriswald wrote:
| > What search term do people add to try to bypass genAI
| content farms? Reddit.
|
| I suspect that if reddit loses its more bespoke content,
| adding 'reddit' to searches will be far less useful. However,
| even if not, I think those days are numbered as AI becomes
| more useful and more integrated into search; and as it
| replaces traditional search.
| rybosworld wrote:
| Reddit has severely damaged their reputation recently, and usage
| has dropped.
|
| I'm pretty sure the article is just an attempt at revising
| history in front of the IPO.
| jahlove wrote:
| according to their S-1, usage did not drop.
|
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Did growth rate take a pause?
| pleasantpeasant wrote:
| Not sure but there seems to be a lot more bots on reddit.
| Entire threads with hundreds of comments from bots are all
| around reddit.
| jonchurch_ wrote:
| I can't dispute this, but since you shared an anectdote I
| will also. I haven't seen this in any of the communities
| I visit personally. Do you mean bot accounts which are
| passing themselves off as real people and karma farming?
| Or bots that self identify as such to fill a legit need?
|
| not out to defend reddit here, it also feels to be going
| donwhill to me, but this is not something I've personally
| experienced on the site yet
| cdelsolar wrote:
| "everything i don't like is a bot"
| the_doctah wrote:
| How else do you explain people who still post on
| /r/politics or /r/whitepeopletwitter?
| covercash wrote:
| I wouldn't put it past them to ramp up the bot activity as
| real users bailed so their S-1 would look somewhat okay...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| That's the go to jail kind of securities fraud.
| seanw444 wrote:
| And there are people who go to jail for fraud. Let's not
| forget about the whole CEO editing comments fiasco.
| the_doctah wrote:
| CEO editing comments has what to do with fraud?
| pas wrote:
| the usual M.O. is to spend a lot on growth campaigns, and
| then they can claim that there's growth! how did the user
| acquisition cost change over time?
| rybosworld wrote:
| If you think _any_ major social media site is not
| willfully ignoring some percentage of the bots, I 've got
| a bridge to sell you.
|
| And it's much easier to hide this problem on a site where
| the users are anonymous.
|
| Reddit wouldn't be the first company to juice the numbers
| before an IPO. They've also admitted to taking advantage
| of fake accounts in the past:
| https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| I have a generic email address and its constantly being
| added to various new websites, apps, projects, etc. Its
| bizarre how blatant this is.
|
| Its very cleary an IPO strategy is to hire "marketing
| companies" that are really botnet controllers to create
| users for your site to make it more attractive to
| investors. Then leadership gets to play dumb when these
| "marketing companies" are filling their user roster.
| rybosworld wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Maintaining plausible deniability is all that's necessary
| to avoid the legal issues. Add very minimal bot detection
| just to claim you aren't doing nothing about the problem.
|
| I've stopped using reddit for a lot of reasons. But a big
| one was that more and more of the content being posted
| was from fake users. I had an account for ~11/12 years
| and this was always an issue. But it seemed to really
| ramp up in 2023. I also started receiving direct messages
| from bots in 2023. That had never happened before.
|
| This is an anecdotal experience. But there are quite a
| few users saying the same thing lately: there's a bot
| problem like there wasn't before.
| relativ575 wrote:
| > If you think any major social media site is not
| willfully ignoring some percentage of the bots, I've got
| a bridge to sell you.
|
| Sell me. How do they usually do that? Any concrete
| example?
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| you can simply buy upvotes, stars, views, retweet's,
| reviews etc some will even guarantee delivery. If you buy
| 1000 and all of those bots get banned they will deploy
| 1000 new ones to deliver the order.
|
| You prefer them to create real looking accounts or they
| start stealing them.
|
| If it gets harder only affects the price.
| the_doctah wrote:
| If a site has an API, it has bots. They call that common
| sense.
| Maxion wrote:
| You don't need to ADD bots, you can just not ban as
| many...
| the_doctah wrote:
| that's hilarious you think that every major platform
| doesn't have the same amount of bot activity.
| thefaux wrote:
| It could also be that they have had modest growth from
| normies offsetting the losses from earlier users. This
| could explain why it appears to be in steep decline for
| many of the people here but may look almost ok from the
| outside.
|
| Or it could just be bots.
| TravisHeeter wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| After the API thing, I stopped using for a few months,
| converting to Lemmy instead.
|
| Then I got booted from Lemmy for not being communist
| enough, I started looking at Reddit again maybe once a day.
|
| At first, I was so happy to see a lot of activity on my
| small subreddits that never had much activity before.
|
| But after a few weeks I realized it's just bots basically
| rephrasing popular posts from the past. And bots rephrasing
| responses to those posts.
|
| Where is the next Reddit? I miss it.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Indeed, like it or not, the people who complained are the
| power users, a very vocal minority who still use old.reddit.
| Normal people don't give a shit about any of the controversy.
| hbn wrote:
| They lost all their users that provided value for reddit as
| a platform. Reddit will surely continue to flourish as a
| way to show ads to children and astroturf Google search
| results for product reviews. But I've noticed a ginormous
| drop in posting quality since they neutered their API. Even
| small subreddits that were fairly active are now filled
| with spam and engagement farming, moderators aren't
| interested in cleaning anything up because their app to do
| so is trash, users don't want to post because the subreddit
| is shit up with garbage. It's gotten bad.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Any examples of such subreddits? For the ones I visit,
| like askhistorians, programming, etc, it's been business
| as usual.
| oglop wrote:
| I stopped using it when I noticed it had those strange banners
| about language in every single subreddit. It was weird to go talk
| about a programming question and see that.
|
| ChatGPT gives me most what I got on Reddit without the weirdos
| and constant speech policing. Which is to say, half baked
| information and random wastes of time digging into some
| historical or scientific thing.
|
| Reddit 10 years ago was fun and weird, Reddit now is a safe space
| meant for a wide audience and so it's lost most the edge and fun
| to me. Or maybe I got old.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| see also:
|
| Reddit Data API Update: Changes to Pushshift Access -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776848 16 comments
|
| Reddit's proposed API changes and the continued existence of
| RedReader - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35767700 109
| comments
|
| Reddit comments and submissions collected by Pushshift -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36038684 294 comments
|
| Since they disabled the ability to search effectively using
| pushshift, I haven't been back to Reddit myself.
| relaunched wrote:
| This article understates how big the content discovery problem
| was on the web, at those times. Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon,
| Reddit and a million others.
|
| Reddit is the Craigslist of content discovery, in so many ways.
| zachmu wrote:
| Except craigslist makes a ton of money
| bink wrote:
| Reddit had $900 million in revenue last year.
| okwhateverdude wrote:
| But how much profit? And how much of that revenue was spent
| on spez's comp?
| frankdenbow wrote:
| Appears to be about $341k
|
| ""A Securities and Exchange Commission filing said
| Huffman in 2023 got a salary of $341,346, which is
| relatively low for a CEO of a major public corporation.
| In February, this was raised to $550,000. He also got a
| $792,000 bonus last year based on Reddit's user numbers,
| revenue, and a type of profitability known as adjusted
| EBITDA that excludes certain expenses."
|
| "The bulk of his compensation package is now in
| restricted stock units and stock options. A lot of this
| compensation is based on Huffman staying at Reddit
| through late 2028, and some is triggered by completing
| Reddit's initial public offering, the SEC filing said.
|
| Half of the stock options vest at $25.29, a relatively
| easy bar to reach. The other half vest only if Reddit
| shares reach $45, $60, and $90 in public-market trading
| over 10 years, the SEC filing says -- that's a higher bar
| and aligns the CEO's interests with shareholders."
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| Kid named opex
| testacpwoek wrote:
| And yet Craig Newmark is a billionaire and the owners of
| Reddit aren't. $900 million in revenue means nothing if you
| jettison it into the stratosphere.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| It's not fundamental, it's a glorified forum host, not to say
| that isn't immensely useful in the current landscape. But it's
| also very much a result of timing that it is still here.
|
| The history is often overlooked: when digg imploded/shot itself
| in the foot, Reddit was in the right place at the right time and
| got lucky. Somewhere for the exodus to go to. Reddit itself was
| failing fast and on its last legs at the time held afloat by its
| core users and that's it. They didn't know what they were going
| to do and rather than being visionaries in any way really they
| got lucky hosting everyone with a slew of very standard web 2.0
| features. And as with any social site, it's the
| userbase/community that pulls it thru darkness to the where it is
| now.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| Besides general luck and timing, there are two other factors
| reddit had going for it.
|
| 1) It was never the hot social media site, and still to this
| day it's a dark horse with even some of my peers not "getting
| it." We're finally seeing it get the user base and mass market
| usage of other social media platforms. But it's been an
| extraordinarily long process. So it was never a hot place to
| work that attracted product managers / MBAs / status seekers
| that would come in and META the site. And I think even the
| investors and/or owners didn't know what to do with it, and
| were kinda content to just ignore it and let it do it's thing.
|
| 2) General incompetence. Search broken for decades. Videos
| broken for decades. Limited features for decades. Inability to
| make a native app that's usable. Not to say that I mind the UI
| of old.reddit.com. But that the Reddit team moved so slow to do
| anything. The only time the acted with expedience was when
| controversies occurred. Yeah, they're finally rolling out new
| stuff, but it's only been in the past 2-3 years that dev on the
| platform has picked up.
|
| But the thing is, this is the REASON Reddit has become as
| important as it is. A "competent" startup would of enshitified
| reddit and it would of died 15 years ago. Just like Digg.
| Instead we got almost a decade where the site looked like the
| frontpage of hackernews. And in that time, users kept creating
| high quality text content. And that content brought other
| users. And it slowly snowballed to the point where reddit is
| now the place to get genuine human text content on any topic.
| This is not something that could of occurred in the sort of
| time frame most startups or VCs operate in. And now they're
| trying to play a game that doesn't exist anymore (social media
| in the 2010s), and destroying the site with bad UI, hostility
| to the primary content creators, changes to the algorithm to
| prioritize engagement vs. nurturing quality content. It's sad,
| but I'm happy Reddit existed for as long as it did.
| jascination wrote:
| Absolutely true. Reddit's true success started when Digg failed
| (remember MrBabyMan??)
| unethical_ban wrote:
| " In those days the top forum for programmers was a site called
| Slashdot."
|
| /. still exists, and I still go a few times a week out of habit.
| The level of discourse varies widely, but at least I know I'm
| usually talking to a human and not an Asian bot farm.
| adr1an wrote:
| Reddit (the idea) is alive and spreading (federated) in Lemmy :)
| blastro wrote:
| when old.reddit.com dies, i'll be done :peace:
| pants2 wrote:
| Reminder that in 2014, Reddit planned on giving away 10% of its
| stock to dedicated power users and moderators[1], before Ellen
| Pao (briefly) and then Steve rejoined as CEO.
|
| 1. https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/reddit-fundraising/
| bastardoperator wrote:
| People are already raging that Reddit can't pay moderators, but
| that Spez takes more compensation than Tim Cook while his company
| reports losses. Reddit said it themselves, one similar website
| could take them out and that's exactly what I see happening once
| the landscape changes from community to profit which to your
| point is already happening given recent events.
| csa wrote:
| > one similar website could take them out
|
| I'm guessing disaggregation will hollow them out by taking away
| many of the high-engagement subreddits, and _only then_ will
| one website be able to come in to start the reintegration
| cycle.
|
| I'm guessing something similar to Discord, but discoverable via
| search, will be the Reddit killer.
|
| De-centralized, self-moderated, payment options available, the
| company optimizes the tool rather than the content, etc.
|
| A system like that removes most of the headaches that the
| current Reddit ecosystem causes.
| ctrw wrote:
| Mods are raging that they are getting paid. Users don't care
| because mods are power tripping assholes who make spez look
| classy by comparison.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Two executives combined my over $300 million or better than a
| third of the total operating revenue and they "can't" pay
| moderators.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| People moderate on Reddit because they enjoy doing so. The mods
| may complain about not getting paid, but they'll continue
| moderating anyways. If they don't, then other people will
| actively volunteer to take their place.
| dmoy wrote:
| You couldn't pay me to mod a big sub (again, I did it for a
| couple years). The mod queue of a large sub is soul-crushing
| (at least where large is >10M, idk about smaller ones). Humans
| can be real *******s. And the admins don't appear to care about
| it at all.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It's not true that mods don't get paid, exactly. They don't get
| paid by Reddit, but being a Reddit mod gives you plenty of
| opportunity to get paid. You're allowed to run ads all over the
| sub. I know people making over $100K/yr from moderating a sub.
| concordDance wrote:
| > Reddit has a certain personality -- curious, skeptical, ready
| to be amused -- and that personality is Steve's.
|
| This really does not match my experience of the site. Citations
| are vanishingly rare and myths get repeated endlessly.
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| Obligatory link to an article covering how Reddit got started -
| Tons of fake accounts
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
| shombaboor wrote:
| reddit's success shows how much luck and timing is involved. It
| was basically a digg clone until digg imploded on their own and
| everyone flocked to reddit. Kevin rose should be listed as a
| cofounder.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Digg was just a poor man's fark!
| shombaboor wrote:
| fark pioneered foobies and i really have to think reddit nsfw
| has some of the biggest communities
| rndmwlk wrote:
| >If Reddit could grow to the size it had with management that was
| harmless at best, what could it do if Steve came back?
|
| Harmless at best wasn't enough, so let's bring in actively
| harmful!
|
| I'm being hyperbolic but Reddit doesn't really seem to have grown
| in any meaningful way for a long time; frankly, it has regressed
| in many ways since Steve has regained the reins.
|
| Steve is operating with more info than I am, so maybe all his
| decisions are sound from a business perspective, but as a user
| I've only seen Reddit become less useful, less novel, less
| active, and less enjoyable. As a result I use it less, and I know
| others use it less as well. There is no real moat to Reddit
| outside of it's user base, if they continue to push too hard I
| don't see how they survive.
| shmatt wrote:
| I really dont understand the hate. Reddit to me is a mini
| Facebook, with some added anonimity
|
| * Mods dont get paid - Facebook Groups has niche groups much
| bigger than niche subreddits. I subscribe to both FB and Reddit
| for the car models I own, the FB groups are 10x bigger with 20x
| posts. Those mods dont get paid either, and Facebook as a much
| bigger spam/fake account problem to work tirelessly to defend
| your group against
|
| * No API / 3rd Party access - well, just try asking Meta for a
| free API to build an adless wrapper around the Facebook wall,
| good luck
|
| But spez is the bad guy here and zuck is a saint. Or they're both
| bad guys but if you think that, then spez is on the right
| trajectory to easily have a $20b company in 5 years
|
| People seem to be confusing - high potential for profits with
| building an adless platform that also has succesfully passed the
| network effect
| sebastos wrote:
| What you're missing is that up until relatively recently, folks
| were still holding out hope that Reddit could remain a place
| that was enjoyable to interact with regularly. It's only the
| last 5 years that it has completely degraded into an obnoxious
| hellscape that you occasionally have to pinch your nose and
| deal with to extract some information that is unfortunately
| buried there. Facebook, on the other hand, degraded into a
| hellscape a long, long time ago. The facebook wounds have
| healed, whereas the reddit wounds are fresh. Plus, people liked
| using Reddit a lot more than they ever liked Facebook at their
| respective peaks. You're seeing people coping with a deeper and
| more recent loss.
| abxytg wrote:
| rest in peace Aaron Swartz
| thepasswordis wrote:
| This thread is so sad. Reddit was a big important part of the
| internet for like 15 years. People used to do massive Reddit
| meetups all the time back around 2010, and some of them were
| really fun. I still have some very close, family like friends
| that I met at those meetups.
|
| But now? Almost every comment here talks about how much they hate
| it. I honestly agree with the hate, and again that's really sad
| to me.
|
| I truly think it's the moderators that destroyed it. Reddit
| didn't do a good job of defining their roles, and they power
| tripped their way into community destroying behavior.
|
| Half the people I know who used to run and attend meetups for my
| city's subreddit are now banned from even participating in it,
| always from some stupid petty fight the moderators had with
| them[1]. It makes me wonder what types of people are still
| posting there?
|
| [1] there was a big push a while ago to replace the community
| mods with people who do "social media" professionally. The old
| mods that live in my city and people know got semi-threatened
| with doxxing (hey nice job you have there do they know your
| Reddit account?) and removed themselves to be replaced by
| "professionals". Such pathetic internet drama.
|
| Anyway: we all collectively pour one out for the Reddit that once
| was. It can go to internet heaven with fark, slashdot, digg,
| stumbleupon, delicious, etc.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| I agree about the mods being a major driving force behind
| reddit's accelerating enshittification. It went very fast from
| a platform for exchanging interests and ideas to personal
| fiefdoms of sub moderators and their private political beliefs.
|
| And it doesn't help that all major subs are modded by the same
| narrow group of people. How reddit the company has no problems
| with that is beyond me. Apparently that's exactly what they
| want.
| WatchDog wrote:
| It's funny seeing pg talk about Steve being anti authority,
| when the authorities of reddit are such a negative part of
| it.
|
| It's quite alarming how reddit has made no effort to
| encourage a higher quality of moderators.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Did anybody else get offered the "directed shares"? Seems so
| freaking scammy to ask your users to provide you with your exit
| liquidity.
|
| I'm talking about this: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/reddit-
| will-let-users-buy-it...
| hollerith wrote:
| If they didn't make the offer, they'd be criticized for
| offering any of the "pie" to users who helped them succeed.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Anyone who opted in could have doubled their money this
| morning. Is it still a scam with this knowledge?
|
| It was an option offered. Nobody's hand was forced.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| I've steered clear of anything like that since the Deliveroo
| IPO. I bought into the offer of "special early access" shares
| as a regular user of the platform... ...then watched their
| value spectacularly plummet over the next few years while the
| founders rode off into the sunset with my cash...
| dom96 wrote:
| Reddit banned my account without warning because I created a
| Reddit API mirror. I even followed their API docs by including my
| Reddit username in the user agent used by my HTTP client, I
| thought I was giving them the ability to reach out if the mirror
| was causing them pain but nah, they just banned me.
|
| It was at that point that I realised all the protests that were
| happening weren't going to go nowhere, and indeed that is what
| happened. Reddit has lost its way ever in a major way in the
| pursuit of profit.
| keiferski wrote:
| It's very weird that for as many problems as Reddit has, there
| doesn't seem to be any serious VC-funded competition. Why is
| that? Every other social site has a half dozen well-capitalized
| competitors. Is it because Twitter/X and TikTok occupy all of the
| social media attention? Or because a forum is filled with mostly
| young people simply isn't a scalable business?
| munificent wrote:
| Network effects dominate all other forces when it comes to
| communities.
| keiferski wrote:
| Sure but there have been numerous exodus moments from Reddit
| over the last +-5 years. Even today, my feeling is that no
| one really likes posting on Reddit itself, it's just kind
| of...there. There aren't any alternatives.
|
| It's a very different situation from say, TikTok vs.
| Facebook, in which I think TikTok is simply a superior
| product.
| dpflan wrote:
| Why is now the time for a reddit IPO? Is it because of the idea
| that "data is oil", and reddit can sell enterprise subscriptions
| to access to its data? Someone who has reviewed the S-1, how are
| they making money? And what's the point of the IPO, deploy more
| capital to accomplish what?
| bluescrn wrote:
| If they get it done quickly, it might happen before the
| election (and then the fallout from the election) turns the
| site into an utter shitshow?
| lupire wrote:
| The time to IPO is before the value collapses. Trust the
| experts.
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| Cute revisionist puff piece about Steve Huffman, moderator of
| r/Jailbait
| nosrepa wrote:
| I'm not defending Steve, but at that time anyone could be added
| to the moderator list without their consent.
| WatchDog wrote:
| Reddit also made a special unique trophy for the top
| moderator of r/jailbait
| cdme wrote:
| Reddit going public meant reclaiming value they provided for
| "free" for users. The platform will only get worse for users as
| they try and claw their way to profitability.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Honestly I wish this would happen sooner rather than later.
| There's too many people on there being exposed to profanity,
| xenophobia, bigotry. I will applaud them for any decision that
| will drive more normal people away from their platform.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| What's wrong with profanity?
| mikewarot wrote:
| I remember Reddit. It used to be a great place to meet others
| with the same niche interests. It's a shame they self immolated.
|
| My only regret is that I didn't remove all of my comments before
| deleting my account.
|
| I'll never forgive them.
| pas wrote:
| > My only regret is that I didn't remove all of my comments
| before deleting my account.
|
| don't beat yourself up about this, because they are the kind of
| scumbags that spend time and money on detecting these
| deleted/removed comments and then backfilling them.
|
| > I'll never forgive them.
|
| we got too attached and they exploited it. they are abusive
| assholes, but we need to let it go, heal, find/create new and
| better online/offline communities (and platforms).
|
| Mastodon is quite nice!
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| Self immolation implies making a personal sacrifice in the name
| of a cause. In this case, they betrayed a set of their users
| with the goal of greatly increasing their wealth, and that
| outcome is now happening.
| p337 wrote:
| I did a data request, and then encrypted every single one of my
| comments, and made a web app to decrypt it lol. I randomly get
| messages from people still decrypting the most random stuff and
| either mocking me or complimenting the idea. Highly recommend
| this route vs deleting because a rando can still read your
| content, but it's not as useful to Reddit itself.
| hsjsbeebue wrote:
| Not sure if it was you but I have seen such encrypted
| comments before.
| the_doctah wrote:
| If randos are decrypting your reddit comments then you didn't
| use very strong encryption.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Paul is wrong on Reddit, and I think his article written on
| 3/21/2024 shows how badly the perception of value is around
| Reddit with the community.
|
| Because, he is not a user of Reddit, or, has completely missed
| the zeitgeist of the community
|
| Users are outraged with Reddit
|
| The UI is continually getting worse, and is iterating on worse
|
| The Epstein/Maxwell relationship is insane, and previous
| political coverups evidences corruption at the highest levels of
| Reddit meant to ensure that only certain things frontpage.
|
| The Admin Mafia is a very real thing
|
| The pay levels of Reddit execs is nausea inducing
|
| Reddit is likely a great example of value destruction.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| And yet the site is growing by millions of users every year.
| They must be doing something right. Isn't HN discounting a
| company that is going to become very profitable (like Facebook)
| because of some internet drama?
| annexrichmond wrote:
| A bit of a rant, but I find it hard to believe pg goes on reddit
| much if this is how he feels.
|
| I remember years ago reddit was a lot more like HN. The comment
| section (even for the main subs) was much more intellectual and
| critical.
|
| People appeared to actually read posted articles. It was a thing
| where people would read the comment section before the article
| because everyone knew headlines were generally clickbait, and you
| could rely on some internet stranger to have analyzed the article
| and demonstrate the headline wasn't all as it seemed.
|
| But now it seems that no one reads the articles at all or care
| for any sort of discourse with people with different opinions.
| Comments are filled with just jabs and pitchforks. No different
| than comment sections on news sites. Yet Redditors still seem to
| have the arrogance that it had developed over the years that
| their communities are better than those sites. And well, they
| used to be, but now they're just as bad.
| slingnow wrote:
| And it's very clear to me that HN is next to suffer this fate
| diggan wrote:
| Luckily, we have the golden rule that will surely prevent
| this fate:
|
| > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into
| Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
|
| Bottom of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Not next, it already does... but hacker news is also very
| hard to kill.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| HN has got worse in some places - I think size is the enemy
| of any community - but HN has comfortably sat behind the
| curve because it doesn't try to leave its niche. It is mostly
| outside forces that have changed HN (I.e growth of the
| general Internet population and big tech), whereas Reddit,
| etc try to change themselves (by changing their format and
| gamifying engagement)
| Phiwise_ wrote:
| Fun fact: Half of all HN posts/ comments were made in the
| last five years. I'm brand-new to here instead of reddit (no
| subs grrr), but look old as the hills from this perspective.
| dang wrote:
| People have been saying that since before Hacker News was
| called Hacker News.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852
|
| Whatever the poison is, to quote Voltaire, "it must be very
| slow".
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21755721
| huimang wrote:
| Let's not kid ourselves. HN already has the problem of
| commentors not reading the article, we're just not allowed to
| discuss it as per the rules.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I use RES to tag users that fit certain profiles of spamming
| divisive content or are just karma farming. In the past few
| months of lurking reddit an hour a day (sadly) I have
| accumulated more than 200 accounts that I took the time to
| identify, and many get banned. My count is only that low
| because I filter subs when I find they're total trash.
|
| Much of reddit is, as they say, a cesspool. I have filtered
| over 200 subs from /r/all on my browser due to being nothing
| but spam, or being hatefully divisive on race or identity, or
| being a political echo chamber. If it burned down, little would
| be lost, and it would simply be replaced by another spam
| content farm.
|
| Example spam submission:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/FuckImOld/comments/1bk3ovp/what_els...
|
| Example user submitting spam:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/user/NaturallyFlashy
|
| Notice account age compared with post history.
| hsjsbeebue wrote:
| Non mainstream Reddit is still great. city specific subs for
| example and some programming subs.
| preommr wrote:
| > But Reddit was special, and when Steve came back in 2015, I
| knew the world was in for a surprise.
|
| It was certainly a surprise that he thought it was a good idea to
| edit a user's comment as a form of trolling when he's the ceo.
| Havoc wrote:
| Strange article. Is this an attempt to drum up enthusiasm pre
| ipo?
| swyx wrote:
| it is pg's tradition to blog memories about YC founders when
| they IPO. calm down
| Havoc wrote:
| Tradition? Which other IPOs has he done this for?
| fragmede wrote:
| the Airbnbs would be the previous one
|
| https://paulgraham.com/airbnbs.html
| replwoacause wrote:
| I had the exact same thought and I'm guessing most others did
| too.
| saos wrote:
| Anyone shorting the stock?
| theGnuMe wrote:
| IPOs traditionally trade below their IPO list price after a pop
| for about a year. However, if reddit can generate continued
| media buzz then it might do well?
| mattnewton wrote:
| the venn diagram of retail meme stock traders and redditors is
| almost a circle. I don't think anyone has the chaos-theory-
| modeling tea-leaf-reading ability to understand the timing
| around shorting this stock right after IPO.
| kn100 wrote:
| nuked my 8 year old account and all posts and comments I had
| there after their API bull. Lemmy isn't as enjoyable as the
| communities are far smaller and less engaged, but overall I've
| spent a lot less time scrolling for no reason so overall it's a
| win.
|
| same thing with Twitter and Mastodon, except I feel Mastodon was
| far more successful a transition for me.
| lupire wrote:
| This article is an ad for the IPO, posted by an investor.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It will be interesting to see the different takes from power
| users that opted in and out of the IPO at $34. I imagine that
| bitter power users who balked[1] at the offer will be further
| embittered if they lose out on a significant windfall. Stock is
| currently at $52 and dropping [2], and if I understand correctly,
| there was no post IPO lockup period. If so, I bet there was some
| champagne being popped at 1030 AM by those who opted in.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772319
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RDDT
| SwellJoe wrote:
| I always liked the reddits (Steve and Alexis), but I'm not overly
| fond of what reddit has become.
|
| And, I fear the beatings will continue until morale improves. I
| just don't think the incentives are aligned with building a good
| community, anymore, so there's nothing pushing reddit toward
| becoming good again and many things pushing toward exploitation
| of the near two decades of conversation found there.
| hgs3 wrote:
| Is there an equivalent of Reddit run by a non-profit?
| notatoad wrote:
| the fediverse alternative is lemmy. the most popular and
| easiest way to get started is the instance at
| https://lemmy.world/ which is donation funded and doesn't
| appear to be doing any for-profit activities, but i don't think
| an actual registered non-profit.
| apercu wrote:
| What I don't understand is the compensation. It is multiples and
| multiples of anything any similar company pays, albeit
| complicated by the fact that most similar companies are public
| and while CEO pay might _only_ be limited to a few million
| annually, there's usually millions in stock grants.
|
| I wonder if that was his play, but, again, it should have been
| equity. I don't care who you are, the odds of you having an
| impact versus someone else to the tune of hundreds of millions of
| dollars a year are miniscule. Good for you if you get to join the
| club, I guess. But if we have learned anything the last few
| decades (Musk, Welch, Fiorina, Schwartz, Lay, Ebbers) is that the
| louder they are the more likely they believe their own legend and
| screw up. We don't like Jobs around here, but he's maybe the last
| CEO that was probably worth the hundreds of millions/billions. My
| perspective (due to my job) is probably different than a lot of
| peoples, I see leadership failures all day every day.
| jokoon wrote:
| I hope he has fresh ideas for moderation when reddit goes public
|
| I can't wait for reddit to go public, it's going to generate a
| lot of drama
|
| we are in the decade of internet moderation, I don't understand
| why the world doesn't care enough about this problem
| superdisk wrote:
| A few years ago I sent a message to spez on Reddit asking if he'd
| ever open source the original Lisp version of Reddit. He actually
| responded and said he couldn't find it, but then a while later it
| was indeed released. I like to think maybe I contributed to the
| butterfly effect of that happening.
|
| https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0
| ahansen wrote:
| That's really cool! Thanks for link. I guess I just never
| assumed that would be open sourced!
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Reddit is kinda trash these days, more rubbish is added to it
| when all that matters is the core functionality.
|
| However with growth, it's just full of idiots, you go to any
| subreddit for something that you are interested in and it's just
| a toxic mess. I've jumped into subreddits for a particular
| brand/person before that I hadn't heard about recently or that I
| enjoyed some output from them, only to find that the people on
| such subreddits spend there entire time ripping such thing apart
| 24/7, why even subscribe to that subreddit, if you hate that
| thing?
|
| There are subreddits for a lot of things that I enjoy, but as I
| have gotten older, it's become an issue that most of the users
| are kids and therefore don't know what the hell they are talking
| about, I wouldn't have such conversations with such people in
| real life, but the issue with Reddit is I have no idea who these
| people are.
|
| Reddit certainly has the potential to be one of the most
| interesting places on the internet to me, connecting you to all
| sorts of interesting things and ideas, but it's more and more
| just becoming a toxic cesspool.
| stevarino wrote:
| Yeah. I joined Reddit pretty early and loved it for the longest
| time. It was my main social media place.
|
| But anytime a small community would grow in popularity and hit
| somewhere threshold, it would be overrun by the greater reddit
| population The subreddit would quickly lose what made the
| community special and core users would migrate or just stop.
|
| And volunteer moderation is bothe best idea ever and the worst.
| When it works it's awesome, but it feels as if it's only a
| matter of time.
|
| So when the API changes hit last year, I saw it as Reddit
| handing me my hat. The old reddit was no more. I couldn't use
| it how I wanted to use it, at least not without paying. And
| given that my reddit usage was more habit than value, I made
| the decision to accept how things are.
|
| I miss it. This PG post felt more like a eulogy than a promise,
| despite the closing. But I think I'm better without Reddit. At
| this point it seems to primarily be a content farm for AI
| agents, both producing and consuming. So maybe the dark-forest
| Internet is starting to arrive.
| iamricks wrote:
| I agree, Reddit communities after a certain point become
| awful.
|
| I think you can still find great communities but they feel
| like ticking time-bombs.
|
| Only a matter of time before they became too big and issues
| from large communities begin to spill in.
| tempsy wrote:
| I think what happens with Reddit is that it's basically a
| collection of niche message boards for very niche interests,
| and over time the people who stay active in a given subreddit
| are people who take some topic extremely seriously and it
| essentially devolves into extremism/cult-like vibes with the
| mods at the helm.
| theragra wrote:
| I don't see all this. Take tea, cycling subs. I don't see any
| cultism there. Sub where I am mod, eupersonalfinance seems to
| be very polite and useful.
| tempsy wrote:
| Well you're a mod so already you are biased here.
|
| It's not every sub, but any diet related subs are a good
| example...keto/vegan/carnivore/the one for bryan johnson
| ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 wrote:
| The user quality on Reddit really has taken a nosedive over the
| years. I recall looking at some thread recently related to
| online services for consoles. The overwhelming sentiment in the
| thread was something like "I already pay for internet why
| should I pay for XBox Live". Maybe the thread was just
| especially full of children.
|
| I remember people on Reddit (10 years ago) used to be
| knowledgeable and when new information appeared, that would
| matter. There's just so much ignorance now.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| I gotta say, if thats the stupidest reddit comment you can
| think kff, you must not spend much time there. Try literally
| any political subreddit to find people being so absurdly left
| wing that they end up advocating for despotism.
| Liquix wrote:
| in all fairness to the people of reddit, this is a top-down
| propaganda assault, not a grassroots uprising. reddit is
| 100% used as a controlled-narrative dissemination tool by
| nation state actors all over the world.
|
| monkey brain see upvotes, monkey brain assume group
| consensus correct, monkey brain follow [0]. repeatedly
| banning or blackholing anything that goes against your
| desired narrative leads to a smaller and smaller percentage
| of users willing to speak out against the consensus, so
| these opinions become even more marginalized, repeat until
| desired level of radicalization is achieved.
|
| it even happens on HN - heavily downvoted comments are
| presumed to be barely worth reading because multiple people
| went out of their way to downvote. you could control the
| public opinion of a small country with <$50k worth of black
| market upvotes per year. that kind of power doesn't and
| hasn't gone unnoticed
|
| [0] see 1951 Asch conformity study
| thisgoesnowhere wrote:
| Im not conspiracy minded but if you go to the /r/Canada
| subreddit it is so ridiculously pro Pierre Poilievre that
| I think something is up.
|
| Not a single one of the 3 parties in Canada have a
| likeable head, it's shocking to see the people on there
| go nuts for this random goon.
| ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 wrote:
| I didn't say that was the stupidest comment I could think
| of. It was just something that stood out to me recently.
| Tech literacy among Reddit users used to be pretty decent.
| Now it's pretty much the opposite.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > Reddit is kinda trash these days... it's just full of idiots
|
| Reddit is the same as it always has been, but once a social
| media network reaches a certain scale, you can't really deal
| with the problems in the same way, or any way.
|
| ex: Social network has 1000 active users. 1% (10) are
| disruptive: spammers, flamers, trolls, maybe just plain morons.
| That's fairly easy to handle, even if you only have 1 or 2
| people with moderation powers.
|
| Alternate scenario: Social network has 10,000,000 active users.
| 1% are disruptive. That's 100,000 people you need to regularly
| moderate. Which means instead of having a few "benevolent
| dictators" who can handle all of the content moderation, you
| need a team of moderators. Who probably have their own
| disagreements and agendas (like, I don't know, maybe a
| moderator of the largest picture/meme subreddit using their
| power to funnel traffic to a site they control while blocking
| competitors to slurp up ad revenue[0]). So now you need super-
| mods for the mod team.
|
| It's like building out a business. You can have a high-
| performing 20-person team where everyone is a strong, valuable
| contributor. But the likelihood of your 10,000 person
| corporation, or even your 250 person department, having every
| single person be a valuable contributor is 0%. The percentages
| don't change as you grow, but the absolute number does.
|
| The % of HN readers who want to make dumb reddit-style jokes
| here may be low, but if HN were 100x more popular, it would be
| as bad as Reddit. It's just the way things go.
|
| [0] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/reddit-quickmeme-banned-
| miltz...
| spacecadet wrote:
| Market manipulation in broad daylight. lol.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Reddit is a lemon. "Some invitees say they're worried about the
| company's financial situation. Reddit recorded a net loss of
| $90.8 million last year, an improvement from 2022, when its
| deficit came it at $158.6 million. The company said in its
| prospectus that it's racked up a cumulative loss of $716.6
| million."
|
| Reddit's CEO and COO made $193M and $93M in 2023 but their CFO
| "only" made $6.6M
|
| So if you eliminate the CEO and COO, they have a profitable
| business. Given those two have tried to kill the community over
| and again, why keep them?
| epolanski wrote:
| CEO and COO compensation is mostly stock, so you can't do math
| like this.
| scoofy wrote:
| This is a bittersweet period for me. I'm a long time redditor,
| large subreddit creator, and even very large subreddit former
| mod. I've even met both Alexis and Steve because of reddit.
|
| At the same time, it's glaringly obvious that while the site was
| build for analytical, idealist, content contributor folks like me
| (i.e., the type of people who have contributed to wikipedia at
| least a few times), the site is being converted to focus on
| content consumption in order to reach a broader audience.
|
| I don't want to be mad. I still use old.reddit and tend to stick
| to the smaller subs I know and love (e.g. /r/RainbowEverything,
| /r/flashlight, /r/knolling, /r/ShittyDaystrom), but whenever I
| click on /r/all, I die a little bit inside, because it feels like
| I'm staring a reflection of the worst instincts of humanity (both
| the awful and the cliche), rather than the best of humanity I saw
| on the first days of /r/all when it was a way to add more blogs
| to my google reader feed.
|
| We all built a cool website together, and it was fun. I'll keep
| using it, but I probably wont ever actively moderate again,
| simply because it's obvious that they have a different vision.
| I've always found reddit to be the best of all the social media
| networks, simply because it actually requires people to engage
| instead of using it as a megaphone. I may even invest in it
| somewhere down the road if the financials make more sense.
| ametrau wrote:
| The best take here. It pays to scroll on HN.
|
| > whenever I click on /r/all, I die a little bit inside,
| because it feels like I'm staring a reflection of the worst
| instincts of humanity (both the awful and the cliche),
|
| It really is awful. Maybe worst of all are the "snark"
| subreddits for celebrity gossip and catty bullying.
|
| But as you also point out, that is, like it or not, broad, and
| broad is where the money is.
| scoofy wrote:
| For some reason I am as bothered by the "feel good" posts as
| the nasty ones. I really can't put my finger on why, but that
| type of content really just rubs me the wrong way too.
|
| For example, the top post on /r/all right now is:
|
| >TIL that singer Dionne Warwick, upset with misogyny in rap
| lyrics, once set up a meeting with Snoop Dogg and Suge Knight
| at her home, where she demanded that they call her a "bitch"
| to her face. Snoop Dogg later said "I believe we got out-
| gangstered that day."
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1bk944c/til_.
| ..
|
| I mean... what? It obviously didn't influence him
| substantially, as he still used "bitch" in his songs. I just
| don't get the point of something like this. It doesn't make
| me feel good, it just makes me confused at why this is a
| popular post.
| rdelpret wrote:
| I'm waiting for the discord IPO personally.
| jdprgm wrote:
| While I still use Reddit often I kind of hope this marks the
| decline and something new emerges. Pretty much anything and
| everything their army of devs have built over the past 5+ years
| has been anti user. I can't even remember the last time a
| positive new feature was added. (This also kind of feels broadly
| true for the majority of the consumer apps in recent years --
| remember the 2010's when devs actually added new features for
| users to apps on a regular basis?)
|
| There are countless things I assumed would have been fixed years
| and years ago that never have been. For example the trash search
| engine where you are better off using google with
| site:reddit.com. I do wonder if it's incompetence or intentional.
|
| Would love to see something in a vein similar to what BlueSky is
| attempting with twitter clone for reddit. Have a lot of ideas in
| this area lately.
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| Lemmy is to reddit as blue sky is to Twitter and both run on
| Activity pub, IIRC.
| wlonkly wrote:
| Mastodon instead of Bluesky and you've got it, I think.
| (Bluesky has its own protocol.)
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > Pretty much anything and everything their army of devs have
| built over the past 5+ years has been anti user.
|
| That's because you're a power user.
|
| Reddit owners figured out that even though the service gained
| popularity as a middle ground between 4chan and Facebook, they
| can make most money if they kick out weirdos and cater to
| general audience, so they're consistently making changes to
| make it appealing to average Joe. You can clearly notice how
| they're slowly but surely removing controversial content and
| promoting userbase growth over everything else.
|
| My prediction is that Reddit will keep growing, but it's simply
| going to be "Facebook, but for people 15 years younger".
| specialist wrote:
| What are some example "general audience" features added these
| last 5 years?
| Threadbare wrote:
| Well, if censorship counts as a feature.. There are plenty
| of examples to choose from
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| > They told me about the startup idea we'd later fund them to
| drop: a way to order fast food on your cellphone.
|
| > So it was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19 years
| later.
|
| Weird take. Doordash/Uber eats/deliveroo are huge companies and
| it's absolutely the same idea they had, they just had it too
| early
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Speaking of reddit, this is one of the most interesting comments
| on the site, by cofounder and ex-CEO Yishan:
|
| > _What 's the best "long con" you ever pulled?_
|
| >> Here's one.
|
| >> In 2006, reddit was sold to Conde Nast. It was soon obvious to
| many that the sale had been premature, the site was unmanaged and
| under-resourced under the old-media giant who simply didn't
| understand it and could never realize its full potential, so the
| founders and their allies in Y-Combinator (where reddit had been
| born) hatched an audacious plan to re-extract reddit from the
| clutches of the 100-year-old media conglomerate.
|
| >> Together with Sam Altman, they recruited a young up-and-coming
| technology manager with social media credentials. Alexis, who was
| on the interview panel for the new reddit CEO, would reject all
| other candidates except this one. The manager was to insist as a
| condition of taking the job that Conde Nast would have to give up
| significant ownership of the company, first to employees by
| justifying the need for equity to be able to hire top talent,
| bringing in Silicon Valley insiders to help run the company.
| After continuing to grow the company, he would then further
| dilute Conde Nast's ownership by raising money from a syndicate
| of Silicon Valley investors led by Sam Altman, now the President
| of Y-Combinator itself, who in the process would take a seat on
| the board.
|
| >> Once this was done, he and his team would manufacture a series
| of otherwise-improbable leadership crises, forcing the new board
| to scramble to find a new CEO, allowing Altman to use his
| position on the board to advocate for the re-introduction of the
| old founders, installing them on the board and as CEO, thus
| returning the company to their control and relegating Conde Nast
| to a position as minority shareholder.
|
| >> JUST KIDDING. There's no way that could happen.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...
|
| The best part is all the responses by Steve Huffman, Sam Altman,
| and Ellen Pao, all related to the Reddit leadership at one time
| or another.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Amazing that reddit hits $54 from a ipo of 34$ and all I see on
| HN is negativity ... about how it doesn't make money ... about
| how it has a bad user experience ... about how it doesn't credit
| the mods ... about how it hurt the third party developers.
|
| Yada yada yada. Look if anything you should learn from this, its
| this. User experience doesn't have to be terrific. API after a
| good growth trajectory is less advantageous. There are no
| competitions for moderators because moderators are a dime a
| dozen. And you don't have to make money if you're growing or are
| a game changer (wallstreetbets).
|
| You just have to be here for the long run. The run when digg
| failed. The run when twitter went all the way into the hole. The
| run when facebook becomes friendster. The run when instagram
| becomes exhausting. The run when threads starts losing interest.
| The run when google stops giving good results so you keep going
| to reddit. The run when Microsoft office has bad help articles
| and so you must ask reddit. The run when stack exchange becomes a
| cesspool of tired experts but they find Reddit more enjoyable.
| The run when all of the memes words like AmA and OP and poopstick
| are not just geek words but real life issues that pervade every
| platform... like HN.
|
| The long run.
| neoromantique wrote:
| I started using VPN full-time and Reddit bans any datacentre ip
| address, does wonders to fight muscle memory built over decades
| to avoid this god forsaken site.
| justinator wrote:
| Now I miss del.icio.us.
| aragonite wrote:
| > Their idea was bad though. And since we thought then that we
| were funding ideas rather than founders, we rejected them
|
| > ... we wanted to fund Steve and Alexis, so if their idea was
| bad, they'd have to work on something else
|
| > There needed to be something like del.icio.us/popular, but
| designed for sharing links instead of being a byproduct of saving
| them. So I called Steve and Alexis and said that we liked them,
| just not their idea, so we'd fund them if they'd work on
| something else.
|
| So PG is saying the seminal idea behind Reddit wasn't even
| conceived by the original founders? If so, it's not clear to me
| the post's concluding sentence ('Steve is not out of ideas yet')
| offers much solace.
|
| But I disagree that the idea responsible for Reddit's success is
| link-sharing. I think Reddit's success has a lot more to do with
| the ease of creating a dedicated discussion forum for any given
| topic simply by navigating to `reddit.com/r/[topic]`. Wikipedia
| already uses this approach for article creation, but there wasn't
| anything like that for discussion forums (in the US at least[1])
|
| [1] Baidu Tieba preceded Reddit by 2 years, and Reddit is
| commonly referred to in China as the 'American Tieba' (e.g.:
| https://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2024-03-21/doc-inapaxhk7062...)
| kromem wrote:
| I've always felt their success was being the first large
| network using both threaded comments and up and down voting for
| visibility.
|
| That combination was killer, but also no longer unique.
| adw wrote:
| Slashdot was way way earlier. Also massively overcomplex
| (metamoderation) and full of trolls and much narrower.
|
| Reddit was basically Slashdot 4chan, in a meaningful sense.
| Max-Ganz-II wrote:
| My account on Reddit, and so as I am the founder also the sub
| r/AmazonRedshift, on 2023-09-30 looked to have been banned by an
| automated system.
|
| The sub appeared to be working normally, I posted about the
| Amazon Redshift Serverless PDF, and then Reddit began behaving
| oddly.
|
| After some investigation, and some guesswork, I concluded my
| account had been silently shadow-banned, and the sub banned (and
| then shortly after, deleted).
|
| (Shadow-banning means when you log in as yourself, you see all
| your posts, and you see them in the threads where they were made.
| If you view Reddit when logged out, you then see all your posts
| have been deleted.)
|
| Two years of posts and the sub disappeared, instantly, abruptly,
| without warning, reason, appeal process or notification, and
| Reddit is trying to lead me into thinking my account is still
| active. Make of that what you will.
|
| Having had that experience, I concluded Reddit is not a safe
| place to invest time in.
| dmix wrote:
| The lack of transparency with this stuff is really annoying.
|
| I guess they want to hide it from users so their admins aren't
| flooded with users complaining or something? Or so spam bots
| keep running in circles? But it's ripe for abuse and false
| positives. Most users wouldn't know what "shadow banned" even
| means or that it exists.
| peeters wrote:
| Yeah the point of shadow banning is so that trolls/bots
| continue to scream into the void, rather than creating a new
| account. I'm guessing it's only so long before human trolls
| notice, and I'm guessing that bots could just have automated
| ways of checking ("was my last post visible to an
| unauthenticated user?")
| the_doctah wrote:
| Very easy to verify. Make a post, go to the permalink, log
| out, and see if your post is still visible.
| greenthrow wrote:
| This is so detatched from reality it borders on lying. People
| went to Reddit over Slashdot not because news there was "faster"
| (it never, ever was) but because Reddit had and has porn.
| Slashdot never did.
|
| In fact, the biggest innovation of Reddit vs Digg and Slashdot
| before it, isn't mentioned here at all; you could create and
| moderate your own communities on Reddit. I guess that is hard to
| square with Reddit seizing control of so many communities in
| recent years.
|
| This also completely ignores the fake traffic and posts that the
| Reddit founders admitted to in the early days and certainly seems
| to be going on still today. Most subreddits seem to be a shadow
| of there former selves and feel like ghost towns. The front page
| and /r/all clearly have the books cooked on what appears there.
| Brand friendly posts jump up with barely any votes. One or two
| posts from popular subreddits almost seem to be chosen daily to
| appear there.
| capital_guy wrote:
| Reddit has declined in quality significantly since the API
| changes. All my favorite subreddits lost their moderators, which
| were always the heart of the site.
|
| Couple that with their constantly pushing their own (objectively
| inferior) client and killing the best ways to browse the site,
| I've really dropped off on how much I use reddit.
| woah wrote:
| From what I can tell, Reddit took a huge legacy forum product and
| pivoted into a modern social media app, using all the
| algorithmically addictive tricks in the modern social media app
| playbook.
|
| Their numbers look really good with consistent growth in MAU and
| revenue year over year:
| https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/
|
| And IIRC they are larger than such properties as Pinterest and
| Linkedin. I use the app daily, and it is full of activity on a
| huge number of subreddits.
|
| It seems like the only people who don't like Reddit are middle
| aged men on programming forums who nevertheless use
| old.reddit.com every day. They've basically created the TikTok of
| text content.
| Thorentis wrote:
| Wait so Reddit wasn't even their idea? Paul just handed them an
| idea and a bunch of money to go with it?
| pmarreck wrote:
| I'm banned across all of my Reddit accounts because I
| accidentally posted to a single subreddit that I had forgotten I
| had been banned months before on a different account (which was
| unjustified, but there's no arguing with a mod having a bad day
| who misinterpreted you and will not accept your apologies... I
| stopped trying to resolve it and just moved on. Big mistake.)
|
| They called this "circumventing a ban", take it very seriously
| (as they should, I guess, but COME ON!) and it triggers a ban
| across every identifiable account that is connected to you, which
| they achieve via AI heuristics and fingerprinting. And this is
| VERY effective.
|
| If you create a new account because you can't reach anyone about
| this (because you won't) just to get back to anyone who sent you
| messages or comments or whatever, they will call this
| "circumventing a ban AGAIN" and that will be strike 2 and when
| you THEN try to get help they will say "it says here that you
| have multiple circumvention attempts" (to an initially
| unjustified ban)... etc...
|
| Do you see where this is going? Once Reddit (in the form of a mod
| having a bad day) has decided you are a "bad actor" (whether true
| or not), it's completely a slippery slope to a sitewide ban.
|
| If anyone could help me unlock my Reddit accounts, I'd appreciate
| it (you can use my rep here perhaps) because it's honestly been a
| horrible development- example- most of my health issues had
| support forums there that are now read-only for me.
|
| The really unfortunate thing is that I spent much of my time
| trying to help other people on it, and not being able to do that
| has felt bad. For some evidence of this, see my HN comments
| (although this is not really a support forum, per se).
|
| I've been on Reddit since it was new (my original and oldest
| account dates to its earliest days:
| https://old.reddit.com/user/lectrick) and I'd appreciate any
| help!
| 8ig8 wrote:
| I came to Reddit via Alien Blue and stayed via Apollo. Now I
| check a few subs periodically in a browser, but my usage has
| drastically dropped without Apollo.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| I used RIF. When that shut down I started checking in on my
| various accounts much less often. Multiple of my 500k+ user
| subreddits have been banned for being unmoderated since then.
| Ah well.
| Fatnino wrote:
| You can make RIF work again using vanced. You create your own
| api key and swap it in to the apk and then it works again.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Same, I quit using Reddit when they killed Apollo. Their app is
| terrible.
| Lammy wrote:
| Have you updated past iOS 17.0? If not:
|
| -- Install AppStore++ for TrollStore:
| https://github.com/CokePokes/AppStorePlus-TrollStore
|
| -- Install Apollo from the App Store
|
| -- Open AppStore++, tap Apollo, tap downgrade, choose 1.15.11
|
| -- Go to your home screen and wait for the older Apollo to
| finish downloading
|
| -- Install this tweak: https://github.com/JeffreyCA/Apollo-
| ImprovedCustomApi
|
| Open Apollo and it will prompt for your API keys -- _Stebe Jovs
| voice_ "Boom."
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| I find Reddit to be wayyy too political for one side (that's
| usually how clustering works) but without another guiding
| interest -like Tech here- it consumes and spreads to everything.
|
| The admin are kinder to banning the opposing Red team people who
| congregate there. I don't mind this, but it selects for annoying
| people.
|
| This is further confusing when the site has many European users
| who are not even aware of the US political game.
|
| (look at the frontpage any day, it's all Blue tribe with maybe
| 3-4 neutral animal posts. Why can't it be 20 neutral things with
| 3-4 political posts?)
| goalonetwo wrote:
| From all the social medias, Reddit is the biggest echo chamber.
|
| The voting system that glorifies posts that are voted by the
| community and hides posts that don't go with majority's opinion
| creates that one-sided effect.
|
| I don't spend a lot of time on Reddit but whenever I do, I
| always see the most left-leaning naive takes being upvoted
| massively.
| morbicer wrote:
| Sorry, as European I don't understand how anyone can be team
| Red nowadays. I have respect for conservative viewpoint but
| Republican party got overtaken by very dangerous and at the
| same time stupid people. Democratic party might be corrupt and
| maybe focusing on wrong things but they are not trying to
| destroy democracy and outlaw human beings.
|
| Since Reddit demographics is mostly young and educated, no
| wonder it's leaning Blue.
|
| (The amount of tankie delusion on Reddit baffles me as well
| though)
| the_doctah wrote:
| >but they are not trying to destroy democracy and outlaw
| human beings.
|
| 1. Trying to destroy democracy how?
|
| 2. Trying to outlaw human beings how?
|
| Be specific. Because you are parroting mainstream media
| nonsense, but you are likely just ignorant as a European.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| Evil pays well in the short term. Reddit has been squeezing users
| and making their app unusable for quite some time. Lack of
| competent alternative and the difficulty of "porting" the data
| already there is all that's keeping it up. Still, they'll
| probably just try to buy any competition.
|
| Note: they don't even let you escape the reddit app browser for
| external links anymore - no copying url (or any page
| content/links), no "open in external browser". Absolute pure evil
| UX.
| wilgertvelinga wrote:
| If you enjoy visual representations, try https://scrolldit.com/
| replwoacause wrote:
| Is this just a promo puff piece for the IPO?
| exreddit wrote:
| Figured I'd share this since its comp info you don't normally
| see. A lot of people made a lot of money today. I got 150,000
| options for Reddit very early after it was spun out. With today's
| price, that's $7.5M, but I didn't get all 4 years of vesting, the
| pay was below-average, and my money was tied up. During the same
| decade, the faangs were up 12x on average, but the pay was
| better, and my money would have been liquid. Reddit might not
| hold up for 6 months, either.
| indus wrote:
| IPO HN: Reddit (YC S05)
| testacpwoek wrote:
| The people who cultivate Reddit communities are not the owners of
| Reddit, or the paid engineers of Reddit. Reddit isn't good
| because of Steve, or any of its leaders, the good and bad parts
| alike are 100% because of its users and unpaid moderators. Reddit
| is a tool, and the users have used the tool to create a massive
| site that contains a gigantic variety of subcultures, including
| ones that hate each other.
|
| Any "innovations" Reddit has made in the past decade have been
| making the UI worse and borderline unusable in poor attempts to
| monetize the site. It offers video hosting that it does poorly,
| an "improved UI" that it does poorly, chat that it does poorly,
| some nebulous web3 things that it also did poorly, and now is
| going to pretend that using Reddit as a training set won't result
| in a very unskilled, and exceedingly confident of its own
| correctness, chatbot. Spez has no vision for Reddit, and clearly
| neither does Paul. The way to make Reddit great is to empower the
| communities and moderators, and instead Reddit has done the
| opposite, because - let's be real here - Steve Huffman doesn't
| want to create a cool website or a useful tool, he wants to IPO
| and become a billionaire and ride off into the sunset.
| Implicated wrote:
| As someone who has been aggressively cataloging "data" (posts,
| comments, subreddits, etc.) from Reddit and, importantly in this
| context, keeping those records relatively up-to-date, it's
| absolutely astonishing how much spam there is.
|
| I hash every string with a SimHash and perform a Hamming distance
| query against those hashes for any hash that belongs to more than
| 3 accounts, i.e., any full string (> 42 characters) which was
| posted as a post title, post body, comment body, or account
| "description" by more than 3 accounts.
|
| Regularly, this exposes huge networks of both fresh accounts and
| what I have to assume are stolen, credentialed "aged" accounts
| being used to spam that just recycle the same or very similar
| (Hamming distance < 5 on strings > 42 characters) titles/bodies.
| We're talking thousands of accounts over months just posting the
| same content over and over to the same range of subreddits.
|
| I'm just some random Laravel enjoyer, and I've automated the
| 'banning' of these accounts (really, I flag the strings, and any
| account that posts them is then flagged).
|
| This doesn't even touch on the media... (I've basically done the
| same thing with hashing the media to detect duplicate or very,
| very similar content via pHash). Thousands and thousands of
| accounts are spamming the same images over and over and over.
|
| From my numbers, 59% of the content on Reddit is spam, and 51% of
| the accounts are spam, and that's not including the media-flagged
| spammers.
|
| They don't seem to care about the spam, or they're completely
| inept. With the resources at their disposal, there's such a huge
| portion of this that should be able to be moderated before it
| ever reaches the API/live.
| Group_B wrote:
| Is this catalog project open source by chance?
| Threadbare wrote:
| This is so interesting. How do you manage to catalog all the
| subreddits in existence? Is there a page which lists them all?
| I assume the process from there is retrieving by most recent
| vundercind wrote:
| > There needed to be something like del.icio.us/popular, but
| designed for sharing links instead of being a byproduct of saving
| them.
|
| Weird comparison--user-submitted-link-aggregator-forum-combo was
| well-trod ground by 2005. Fark was founded in '99 and wasn't the
| first. Slashdot, kinda, though with more gatekeeping. Kuro5hin.
| Tons of them. This framing makes it seem like a new idea, like
| there were lists of links but nobody had thought to attach forums
| to them yet, but they very much had.
|
| [edit] oh man, yeah, another post mentions 4chan and pals. The
| framing of this as if we had peanut butter and bread but nobody
| had noticed we might be able to make a peanut butter sandwich
| gets stranger the more I think about it.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-21 23:01 UTC)