Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round
reuters.com
reuters.com
Some examples of some great subs:
- HomeImprorvement is great for repair advice
- Keto was helpful in my weight loss journey
- Posture for, well, fixing my posture
I've also bought and sold various digital and physical goods through HardwareSwap, GameSale, SteamGameSwap, and others. One of Reddit's strengths is being able to tie a username to a post history across many interests, which has given me enough confidence signals in buying and selling things on there. I'm sure fraud happens, but I have personally not (yet) been affected by it when transacting on the platform.
But the main, core "Reddit experience" as algorithmically produced by r/Popular is a complete dumpster fire. It's the noise of the entire internet, jam packed into a webpage. So many low quality posts and comments that encapsulate all the negatives about "internet culture". There's no room for thoughtful discussion and discourse on the majority of the site, just shitposting and low rung commentary.
Because of that, having a productive/net positive Reddit experience comes with a high barrier to entry in knowing which communities to pay attention to and which time sinks to avoid.
You don't need to know sub names to get some use of it. I append "reddit" to probably 1/3 of my search engine queries. Especially useful when looking for product recommendations.
Reddit USED to be amazing for finding recommendations for products/services but these days it’s just another bot-filled and paid-content dumping ground like the Google search results.
https://www.reddit.com/user/amily95/comments/fkm1rn/how_to_c...
Or you see the same link and comment/post text posted by many different users.
But this is just low-effort marketing. There's a lot of content that is relevant but also marketing. Burger/chicken restaurant twitter account screenshots getting posted to a default sub, for example.
one other obvious one I've seen is when batches of similar posts for recommendations in category "X" have each received a reply, usually days/weeks after the original submission, all from different users, posted around the same time, recommending the same product
This is the trick I use too; but I found the result still isn't great enough for a few reasons.
1. People seem have a tendency to recommend products/brands that are niche or "in minority". Like some obscure ones that scratch particular itch for that user (and often expensive and hard to find). This is totally fine on its own, but you want to have the big picture (i.e. learn about the most popular ones) first when researching a new product.
2. The number of the answers is often so low (and most would have 1 digit upvotes) that it's very hard to judge when there is conflicting info.
3. People often just list the brand/name, without much more information.
4. you can't even sure if these answers are genuine (instead of marketing/soft advertisement).
Still, probably much better than anything else that can be easily found in general search.
Reminds me how I once asked what's a good EU online shop for running gear on the running subreddit, and the top recommended post was about a premium priced boutique european manufacturer of clothes for "plus sized" runners...
- A headphone is released which is not flawless, but offers great value.
- The headphone is recommended on Reddit.
- Demand for the headphone goes up.
- The price of the headphone increases.
- The headphone is no longer a good value, but is still recommended.
- This continues until either a well-reputed user points out the poor value or a new headphone with great value is released.This is not a coincidence, I'm guessing Reddit is around 1/3 astroturfing to 2/3 legitimate discussion. I don't fault people for doing it, but I'm not going to pretend that Reddit is some pristine haven for genuine reviews.
HN is just as exploitable, but at least the ratio of informative content is higher, and the concerted marketing efforts are better disguised.
For small niche subreddits where you only get a few answers it seems less likely that those are advertisements (and user history is often telling)
And on bigger subs, it's much harder to manipulate the answer unless your product is already pretty decent and you're just fighting over some market spot. In other words, obviously bad products won't be able to advertise this way because of negative comments, but some covert brand building certainly can be done.
Negative comments can be downvoted and it's not a secret that you can buy reddit accounts and that there are lots of bots. A comment only needs what, 5 downvotes before it's automatically minimized by the default view? You're not seeing those comments unless you're digging, the same way you would on Amazon or anywhere else.
On /r/personalfinance people say you must payoff a 2% mortgage before you can consider investing. Advice on there is hit or miss because of herd mentality
There’s also entire subs dedicated to illegal activity like sharing pirated content or sourcing scheduled substances, or discussing conspiracy theories or discussing violence, and Apple is ok with this while shutting down other apps like parlor which arguably didn’t do anything different
Going on various social media platforms to decide on a purchase has already been an established pattern for more then 10 years. That's more then enough time for even the biggest corporations to act on.
Do keep in mind that the influencing agency doesn't actually have to write comments. Machine Learning is super good in determining if a given comment is about [topic], and wherever its a [positive] or [negative] comment.
I'm sure people already know that there are a lot of agencies around which sell you votes on relevant platforms, so any given company can - for peanuts(!) - just upvote positive 'real' comments and downvote the same for the competitors products etc.
There is very little you can 'trust' on the internet, as its just too profitable to spread propaganda through it. there have been several people that publicly admitted that their whole job was to derail critical conversations on various platforms. So even if you put in time and produce a quality comment... there are people who get paid just to write comments to make it look like misinformation.
The accuracy of Google's search results have gotten worse as time goes on. Once upon a time I could search for a specific system error code and get only results that contained that code. Now however, I am lucky if the search term I am looking for is on the same page, even after I add or try all the Search Modifiers.
Yes, the internet has gotten worse. Far more noise then signal. But if I search for: "Error: 98yuasdvfnbi89yt7" I expect to find that within the results. Even if there are 0 results, that is valid feedback too.
"Error: 98yuasdvfnbi89yt7"
Error "98yuasdvfnbi89yt7"
In both cases, that search will currently return one page, this one.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Error+%2298yuasdvfnbi89yt7%2...
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Error%3A+98yuasdvfnbi89yt...
This distils down basically every quality of reddit you need to know.
The issue with Reddit is that they lock all threads over a year old which makes them a poor mechanism to keep updated answers to questions.
Given the engineering effort to write the "new" site in such a user-hostile way, the refusal to backpedal on it in the face of overwhelming public negativity, and similar malfeasance on the mobile version, I have a hard time believing that they will keep the "old" version around for much longer.
So reddit is added as a keyword.
How soon before the user generated content is fully under centralized control so they can go back to force-feeding in search?
I would gladly trade having to manually filter through the crap for anonymity online. I think there's absolutely a niche for platforms serving (only?) verified people, but I don't think that should be the default in the way that saying it's a right for digital citizens to know implies.
You could subscribe to /r/Serendipity which posts a few posts from random subs a day.
It's a great way to keep an overview on an array of topics. I set them up for a large array of interests of mine, e.g. business (slavelabor, juststart and others), cool PC setups (battestations and unixp0rn), DIY, development, passive income, indoor gardening, cooking, ebikes, streaming tv (Plex, PlexACD, TiviMate).....
If you ever want to see the best ideas in a niche, just sort by > top > this year or all time, and you'll get great ideas and inspiration.
I just laugh when people say Reddit is rubbish, they just don't know how to curate and look properly for the gold on there.
You can also browse multireddits set up by others:
A better way is to look through a list of public multireddits:
https://old.reddit.com/r/multihub/
Start with a topic that interests you and work from there.
Basically all the TV shows have fun post-episode discussions and going through Game of Thrones, Black Sails or The Expanse wouldn't have been the same without Reddit for me. It becomes the group of buddies I can vent or be in awe with, when they don't share my TV show preferences at home.
Formula1 is a must for an F1 fan. Wow, I've learnt so much and the community is now part of watching F1. Pre-race chats, post-race, pre-qualification, post-qualification, haha... The behind the scenes racing drama...
MechanicalKeyboards can look over the top and elitist at first sight, until you realize they have self-distance and generally pretty relaxed (and it's very inspiring, dangerously so for my pocket...)
Good subs exist like you said. But even with f1, the same opinions start get upvoted, and that ends up just being noise for me. There's a definitely a sweet spot in terms of size and moderation.
the targeted subs is where its at on reddit. So my recommendation is edit your subscriptions and remove all but what you specifically came for.
can't help but wonder what the goal of the redesign was...
I recently searched for discussion on a topic and ended up at the "new" web design while not logged in and was blown away by how user hostile it is. Ads disguised as content, promoted posts, gating comments through multiple hoops, unnecessary thread reloads... basically enough dark patterns to make Pinterest blush.
Reddit just doesn't tailor itself to one particular type of discussion like HN does. But rather the dominant topics of discussion such as /r/funny frequently dominate the front page due to popularity.
Reddit is really what you make of it and if you only subscribe to topics that interest you, it becomes a vastly different experience than what a default account would be subjected to.
It also just depends on your subject of interest and what tone of voice, humor, etc your are appreciative of.
I don't think so, HN has a pretty specific audience. Just like reddit opinions that don't follow groupthink are often downvoted.
If the single board were about relationship advice, some identity politics subject, video games, or some pornographic theme, the quality would drop similarly.
Reddit's r/programming is, for instance, not all too bad but r/linux is a disaster, for it is quite close to identity politics.
If HN grew significantly and wanted to enable more diverse conversation, it would essentially turn into a Reddit.
My point is that HN is lucky that it is small and focuses on a particular topic of discussion and therefore it is quality over quantity. Reddit is a beast and allows discussion around really anything that pleases people. But it is a victim of its size and really reflects problems with other social media platforms such as FB and Instagram where rigorous moderation is next to impossible at that scale at the moment.
Think of /r/Wallstreetbets as an example, a subreddit that went from around 2.5 Million subscribers to 8.8 Million subscribers in a week. How do you appropriately scale moderation to content like that.
You could basically compare HN to a single subreddit.
The more niche a community is the higher the bar to entry the less internet riff raff you get. The more one's past comments stick around the less inclined people are to type bullshit. Reddit is slightly better on average than 4Chan. HN is better at the extremes and on average than Reddit. But they're all crap compared to some niche forum you've never heard of where the guys who maintain diesel electric locomotives (or some other niche) hang out.
One of the most well-moderated communities out there with clear and stringently enforced rules that cares about one topic only and allows no soap boxing, low quality comments or toxicity.
Just don't cite "Hard Core History" or "Guns, Germs and Steel" as your source.
Most answers are insightful and well written and contain actual arguments (including when we simply don't know something).
Even those which are disputed contentwise are still respectful and allow real discussions to occur.
I can't imagine the effort it takes to stem the flood of memes, bullshit, toxicity and one liners. Kudos to the mods
There's also a few different sub archetypes that have formed. For instance /r/nfl is a low effort upvote farm due to its size, but the moderators do a fantastic job of policing submissions. So if you use it as a news aggregator, it's great. Just don't read any of the discussion.
Large subreddits with thousands of weekly posts have the opposite problem, where low effort posts will dominate the top if unmoderated. [1] https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algo...
One example, /r/formula1 is the huge engaged community that every sport wishes it had. Live race threads are as close to watching the race with a bunch of friends in the room as it gets.
Same goes for most interests: the biggest community about it is probably on Reddit, and most likely the majority of the content on its sub is pretty high quality.
I do agree it can be a chore to find these communities. Especially when their name is only tangentially related to their thing (small example, the subreddit of the 90's show "Friends" is /r/howyoudoin). Reddit definitely needs to have some way to "tag" subreddits, and search on those tags.
Finally, indeed the default Reddit experience is a sort of clickbait dopamine machine of /r/pics, /r/funny, /r/me_irl etc. One the one hand this sucks, on the other hand, it keeps the casual low effort lurker out of your high quality subreddits.
Some bizarre subreddits I read once in a while are:
- r/CatsStandingUp: the rule #1 states "Cat. and only Cat.", and the community interpreted it as only being able to write "Cat."... So, every post and every comment says "Cat.".
- r/IMGXXXX: random videos with default names given by cameras (e.g.: DSCXXXX, IMGXXXX)
You mean /r/YouCantDoItCallAPro
The advice and professional subs Reddit devolve into content of "I barely know anything about this field but I can google it as needed" quality. The broader the field and the lower the barrier to "sounding like you know what you're talking about" (home improvement, personal finance, legal advice come to mind) the more this is true. There are some really small niches where this isn't yet true but they are few and far between.
Whatever subject you are intimately familiar with go look on that sub and you will see a lot of low quality crap, worthless tropes held up as gospel, lack of nuance and opinions generally below even what novices in the field put out being held in high regard. Now realize that every subject is like this. (related: Murray, Gell, Mann amnesia effect)
For all of it's faults, at least 4Chan hit you with a "everything here is bullshit and you're a fool to believe otherwise" (or something along those lines) on their home page
>Keto was helpful in my weight loss journey
>Posture for, well, fixing my posture
If /r/Keto fixed your diet and /r/Posture fixed your posture it wasn't advice you needed. You could have learned the same things reading a couple low quality wikihow articles. What you needed was psychological, a perception that the group believed those things, a way to legitimize the advice or some other veneer of legitimacy. I don't want to speculate what's going on in your head but Reddit advice is fundamentally mass market low quality drivel. Now, the world is full of small problems and the average guy doesn't need an NFL dietician to help him lose weight or a boiler engineer to design his guest bathroom plumbing, the service industry practically runs on $20 Walmart no-slip shoes, etc. etc. so mass market low quality solutions do work for a lot of people and lots of use cases (hence why they're mass market). But my point is that it's folly to put Reddit advice on a pedestal like it's good for the same reason you shouldn't look for quality philosophical debate in the youtube comments of amateur political analysts.
IDK, yes dopamine gets triggered but much less than with the typical suspects out there. I find many of reddit subs quite helpful tbh, you check them out, comment, upvote, submit and leave again.
It's just bothering that one company could monopolize the entire forum space. They did a good job but yeah, one company to rule them all isn't good.
I think it's because it reminds me of Usenet. It's writing text posts, and typically not getting much of a reaction, and possibly some sort of direct message: a limited ability to track what I've put out there, how it went over, who responded. There's a sort of vague resistance to certain nasty brigading and abusing tactics that would otherwise really control the place, and there's a huge proliferation of little private interests right down to stuff that's by definition not controlled: if a little teeny sub is just dead it's almost definitely authentic, and not of interest to players who'd want to manipulate discourse.
Everything that's bigger and more effective at really bringing all the little meaningless folks into the discourse, is prey for propaganda use. It's the stuff like old Usenet, where there are places that are NOT IMPORTANT, which is capable of being authentic and to some extent 'real'. I guess it's a sliding scale between that and Twitter and Facebook.
/r/popular is more like the random junk bins at Aldi. Most of it is trash, but somehow you're always tempted to have a look at it.
Just jumped onto the front page and found most of the posts to be politically charged, including posts from ostensibly apolitical subs like /r/science. Of course there's a market there, but they're certainly not going to grow when they're immediately alienating such a wide potential user base.
Reddit generally works for these small subs, but even those will eventually become cancerous. I don't know if it's something reddit can fix, outside of adult hobby-oriented subs, nearly every community went from something of quality to worthless after a few years.
Marketing cameras and boner pills pales in comparison to what can be done if you're trying to get your enemy's citizens to literally murder each other in the streets and get your geopolitical rival to fall over dead. The power of essentially mass marketing through brigading, seeding propaganda, and controlling the discourse is enormous.
That's what you're seeing: this new form of warfare, and the aftereffects of it as ordinary Redditors react to what's being put out there.
Selling products just isn't as important.
Mvea has some pretty strong political opinions. A good chunk of the "republican=bad"-finding studies on /r/science are posted by him, as are a good chunk of the "cannabis/psychadelics=good"-finding studies. Checking out his user page today, 6 of his last 10 posts are related to Trump, conservatives, or psychoactive drugs.
If you point this out, you get banned. If you link to /u/mvea's page, you get banned. If you comment anything that's not another peer reviewed journal, including any kind of anecdote or hypothetical, your comment is deleted and you're given a "warning". I do think the rules were originally put in place with good intentions, but like many subreddits with strict rules, draconian mods end up taking it a bit too seriously and it entirely drives away the laymen.
If you hold a minority view and want it to be acknowledged then moving on to a platform where your view is the majoritarian opinion is the only option, Reddit facilitates it with its Subreddits.
Love Elon Musk? go to r/elonmusk
Hate Elon Musk? go to r/EnoughMuskSpam
Other social media have groups, forums and what not; Yet each subreddit is a platform by itself, tightly knit community, privileges & tools for moderation.
Mobile app has enabled those who are from other social media platforms, those who would have never used old.reddit.com to try it out, accelerated by recent string of high profile news involving reddit.
It would be interesting to watch how reddit balances its philosophy with advertiser's interests.
That's only partially true. Your views and opinions must still be vetted by the admins, or you and/or your subreddit will be banned.
r/fantasy - I read a lot of fantasy novels. This is probably my most visited sub on all of reddit. It's great. They get a lot of fantasy authors to participate and just generally have good discussions. That said, I feel they may be having some growing pains lately as I've found a whole lot of combative discussion lately on some of the more popular authors (like Brandon Sanderson), where someone says they love that author in one post, then almost within the same day a hate post comes up that tries to counter the positive post. It's.... annoying and I sure hope the mods can figure out a good method for stopping this shit as it's super obnoxious. (People, you're free to your opinions, you don't have to tell the world if your opinion is different than someone else's. It's not a zero sum game.)
There's a lot of really good subs out there, some more useful than others, some run by idiots, some have far more effort put into them than there should be.
Edit; formatting, spelling
/r/kidneystones
sad face noises
Sounds nefarious, but can't you say the same thing about say music?
To me, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and other social media today is less about connecting people and really about driving targeted and calculated impressions of X to audiences via a user's feed.
This is astro-turfed to feel organic and botted to death by everyone because of how much influence it has to dupe people. Almost unusable.
Even though reddit is extremely guilty of this too (just browse /r/popular not logged in for example), what I find awesome about reddit is its ability to connect people and really have group conversations on almost anything.
On a positive side, it's easily the best platform for mobilizing like-minded individuals and finding historic and well documented people's experiences about literally anything. Most my Google searches on random subjects look like this: "buying a house reddit", "best board games reddit", "high protein vegan foods reddit".
I see Reddit at its best in niche subreddits but it is far from a place to have conversations on almost anything. The site as a whole as well as most of the biggest subs have banned various topics or lines of discussion in a bid to align to progressive left political views.
Is there really this huge conspiracy by the left, or are most just tired of hate speech from the right when they want to look at funny memes?
> it is far from a place to have conversations on almost anything
Well, except for this alt-right stuff and things that are illegal, are so much else censored? I'd wager most people could find a discussion about any of their interests.
In contrast to the Hacker News guideline "assume good faith", the attitude on reddit is more like "assume anyone who disagrees is evil".
[Citation needed]. You don't do your point any favors by being hyperbolic. And as always, the "both sides are both equally bad"-rhetoric is just discussing in bad faith.
The toxic content is still there though, like a LeopardsAteMyFace post crowing about the death of Ron Wright, and as if to prove my point: "This thread has been locked due to extremely toxic and rude comments." Such as the current top comment "...I'm really past playing nice with even the memory of these fucks...... Rot in hell, Ron."
The discussion was too toxic even for the LeopardsAteMyFace mods, but they didn't delete it. It's still visible, and featured on r/popular. That sub (and the other we-hate-conservatives subs) are often filled with hate speech like that, and yet, unlike r/TheDonald, they haven't been quarantined.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/lflxdi/a...
Comment that you decided to quote contains no conservative hating just hate towards Ron, because of his behavior and others who behave in that way. Why would you even think that that was a conservative hating comment?
The hate in that comment wasn't directed only at Ron: "people like this", "these fucks". The comment doesn't specify who "these fucks" are, but the sub generally directs hate toward conservatives, so that's a reasonable assumption.
> because of his behavior and others who behave in that way
Others who behave in what way? The post I linked contains only a tweet from him criticizing the hypocrisy of allowing big stores to remain open while closing small businesses. Is that hate-worthy?
Surely not, so I assume you're referring to something else. Please be specific.
That is the whole sentence of which you quoted a part earlier. That sentence clearly specifies who "these fucks" are.
> The post I linked contains only a tweet from him criticizing the hypocrisy of allowing big stores to remain open while closing small businesses. Is that hate-worthy?
Is that hate-worthy? I don't think that pointing out hypocrisy is hate-worthy but I see no criticism of hypocrisy in that tweet. There is no hypocrisy, by default, in closing some businesses and not others.
I just noticed something. Ron did the same thing you did. You left out a part of the sentence that clearly show who "these fucks" are. Ron left out what these other small business are. He included restaurants but I don't see how anybody could claim that in this situation there is hypocrisy in closing restaurants and not closing general stores.
Was that on purpose on both your accounts I don't know but lying can be hate-worthy.
If that's the correct interpretation, we've found the underlying conservative hate you asked about: the belief that conservatives are evil and don't care about people dying.
And suggesting I'm lying because we have different interpretations is not discussing in good faith.
As to your second point, I'm sure he left out the list because it's far too long to include in a tweet, and getting into all the specifics is too long a discussion for HN comments.
Instead I'll close by asking this: how are gun stores (ordered to close in the lockdown by Governor Newsom) more likely to spread covid than other stores that remain open?
"These fucks", according to reddit poster, are people like Ron that call something out as safe and die from it and people that don't care about something until it affects them. The sentence clearly makes the distinction between two groups of people, those like Ron and then the other group. While Ron might have been in both groups the poster makes no attempt to affiliate Ron with the other group.
> I believe they just also care about the business owners going bankrupt, and have more doubts about the effectiveness of lockdowns. (Justified IMO, as the worst death rates to date are in New York and New Jersey, states with Democrat governors and harsh lockdowns, but that's another discussion.)
There are other ways to care about business not going bankrupt besides ignoring the pandemic. As far as your opinion goes on the effectiveness of lockdowns it is totally unjustified. Yes, New York and New Jersey have some of the worst death rates but lockdowns are not used to lower death rates of already infected but to lower the rate of infection which seems to be working since both NY and NJ are far from top on that account.
> If that's the correct interpretation, we've found the underlying conservative hate you asked about: the belief that conservatives are evil and don't care about people dying.
Even if your interpenetration was correct there still isn't any conservative hate there.
The reddit poster isn't hating on Ron because he believes that conservatives are evil, he is hating on him because of his actions. He isn't hating on people that don't care about something until it affects them because he believes conservative are evil but because those people don't care about something until it affects them.
I mean, the only reason why we are even having this disscusion is because the image contains a tweet from a republican representative. If that same tweet was made by a democrat representative, posted to leopardsatemyface and the same reddit commentator posted the same comment, word for word (lets say that the democrat is also called Ron), would you still say that that comment was hating on conservatives? Why or why not?
> And suggesting I'm lying because we have different interpretations is not discussing in good faith.
I wasn't suggesting that you are lying because we have different interpretations. At this point I really think that you are not lying but that your reading comprehension skills are lacking.
> As to your second point, I'm sure he left out the list because it's far too long to include in a tweet, and getting into all the specifics is too long a discussion for HN comments.
I doubt it. There isn't a need to list business in the first place and if one is to list business there isn't a reason to list all of them. He could have simply listed like for like business that differ in size. He couldn't do that so he simply said "small business and restaurants" so that we draw our own conclusions. My opinions is that either he is being deceptive or is incapable of logic.
> Instead I'll close by asking this: how are gun stores (ordered to close in the lockdown by Governor Newsom) more likely to spread covid than other stores that remain open?
Is this a serious question or a gotcha question? No, gun stores are no more likely to spread covid than other types of stores. Why do I think this is a gotcha question? Because, AFAIK, nobody claimed that gun store are more likely to spread covid nor are gun stores closed because somebody thinks that they are. You are constructing a strawman here.
Another interpretation. Clearly, the sentence is open to interpretation. My interpretation remains that in the second of two independent clauses it's quite possible for the phrase "these fucks" not to refer to the first at all.
> nor are gun stores closed because somebody thinks that they are [more likely to spread covid]
Then why are they closed? Political opportunism?
Using the excuse of a lockdown to advance unrelated political agendas is far worse than criticizing said lockdown.
> Yes, New York and New Jersey have some of the worst death rates
Yes, yes they do. And they've had lockdowns since the beginning of the epidemic, starting in NY just three days after the first in the nation and in NJ one day later.
And integrating over all that time under lockdown, they have the worst per capita death count.
And that is the most reliable statistic because it averages out most of the noise and short term trends in the daily rates, and avoids the differences in testing rate between states.
While there is some room for interpretation there is no way to interpret it as conservative hating. I'm guessing that by ignoring half of my post you've come to agree.
> Then why are they closed? Political opportunism?
I cant believe that you are being serious here. No really, I can't believe it. In case that you are being serious, they are closed to reduce the attack surface of the virus.
> Yes, yes they do. And they've had lockdowns since the beginning of the epidemic, starting in NY just three days after the first in the nation and in NJ one day later.
> And integrating over all that time under lockdown, they have the worst per capita death count.
> And that is the most reliable statistic because it averages out most of the noise and short term trends in the daily rates, and avoids the differences in testing rate between states.
I already explained why this is wrong. Again, instead of quoting and addressing the whole part you quote the smallest bit and then go on your rant ignoring everything else. Judging by these few posts that you've written here I'm guessing that you are either a troll or an idiot and I have no desire to waste my time on either.
This man spent the last few months of his life fighting against any medical, scientific response to COVID, claiming that it was a hoax.
Half a million Americans are dead - and they died in a truly horrible fashion.
What exactly do you expect the response to be?
Did he? I found nothing on either Google or Duck for "ron wright hoax".
I know some Republicans said that, but by no means every one.
Yes, fanboy/"power-tripping" mods of some interest-based subreddits can be pretty bad.
The word "conspiracy" has become a way (mostly for the media) to assign low/outgroup status to unfavorable theories. In the unlikely case where something is later proven to be true, one can always just say, "okay, but isn't it GOOD that everyone was silently cooperating?" And when it works, it's a tool to move the Overton window by painting the others as loonies.
I mean, the idea that a company worth $6B has a political strategy is hardly outlandish. You can have five people working in an office and they'll eventually start to conspire against each other, power games are human nature.
"Hate speech" and "alt-right" are similar terms that are not clearly defined, but conveniently serve the dominant discourse.
reddit's tolerance for "anyone but the bad guys" was brilliantly summarized by SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
(I agree with the sibling thread that /r/popular looks really fun today! It was a very different place throughout 2020.)
I was actually shocked how long they allowed the constant threats of violence and racist abuse to percolate on the_donald, and which still exists on r/conservative.
It might be that you believe that threats of violence are protected speech, however, being a US conservative. Let me assure you that they are not, not even in the US.
I am a redditor for 7 years and that was true early on. Today it is not. You can connect and have group conversations only if you subscribe to a certain dominant political and cultural narrative, walk on egg shells, and toe a line. If you don't, you are swiftly downvoted and banned. There is no escape from this even in generic, non-political subs.
Niche small subs are often ok, but Reddit is not unique to have those.
You mean dominant across all of reddit or dominant in that specific sub? There are plenty of subs that have a political and cultural bent quite different from the overall reddit one.
Anything remotely political creates too much work for mods, who in turn ban first and ask questions later. Eggshells are sometimes not enough.
Maybe that tells you something about your political opinions and the nature of the folks you share them with. This sort of thing doesn't just randomly happen. If you're getting clobbered for an offhand remark, it's not about you, it's because there were 10,000 bots and trolls there before you automatedly saying the same stuff to make it seem like 'everybody is saying it'.
Then you turn up, and bam: they don't even think you're real, because you're saying the stuff a thousand bots were saying. Hard luck: I don't think there's a good answer for you, the ground is sort of salted at this point.
I've been on reddit for 13 years (today!) and I have never once purchased anything I've seen advertised there - because I never see anything advertised there.
I don't run ad blockers or anything.
How do they justify a $6 billion valuation?
Hey, I guess its like a forest - a tree falls down and small seedlings take up the space. Ah, the endless cycle of human struggle.
Got me thinking: isn’t one of the core premises of investing that you’re purchasing ownership of cash flow? Is the ideal company one that it’s never profitable because it so perfectly allocated its money to never return a dime, but always to reinvest in itself? There’s a time and a place for re investment, but returning profit to investors is marginalized these days.
Apple probably doesn’t have a money problem, the culture does. Startups don’t sell growth except secondarily, they sell profit.
Are they selling an ad free experience yet?
I'm sure they'll shut down the APIs allowing third party clients (like Apollo) soon, like Twitter did.
I have been nervously awaiting this day as well, but I just realized something in the context of HN.
Say reddit kicked off Apollo and all the apps... What an opportunity to make a reddit API clone & then site! Apollo alone has many loving users, some of whom would go with Christian to a new backend. Maybe all the apps would agree on one to migrate to? I wonder if this is already part of reddit's calculus when considering kicking the 3rd parties.
I'm sad for what Reddit will become in the next two years.
i.reddit.com is the mobile equivalent, but is also terrible.
try http://reddit.premii.com/ there also https://hn.premii.com/ .
I've switched over to https://teddit.net both on desktop and mobile.
For example, /r/India is hijacked by the moderators with political affiliation to Congress and AAP and they ban users immediately with any opinion which doesn't fit their narrative. I have messaged the reddit admin team to change the mods and stop calling them official subreddit of India but they obviously don't care.
Too much politics may cause Reddit downfall.
its impossible to elect moderators in a democratic fashion so we are stuck with the political bias of the people who created the subreddit first and it leads to all sorts of censorship and is a big source of misinformation.
for instance we see a single user /u/maxwellhill responsible for most of the headlines posted on r/worldnews. Many redditors and people in general can't be bothered to practice critical thinking and will gladly skim over headlines which are also optimized to get upvotes.
In addition, the over supply of awards, the availability of farmed reddit accounts for sale are all used to manipulate and trigger herd mentality.
For example the wallstreetbets and GME short squeeze that they are still waiting to happen. It's insanely easy to create these pseudo realities and brainwash people simply by gaming something as trivial as scores in a database because people simply trust numbers, doubly more so if they are awarded on reddit.
I argue that without Reddit, crypto, bitcoins, meme stocks wouldn't see its insane market prices.
My post was removed for being "low effort".
even city based subreddits. /r/boston's biggest right wing troll /u/mitchfromboston is known to be an alt account of one of the moderators.
Also, once you're logged into Reddit, the friction of exploring a new subreddit is essentially zero. Compare this with needing to sign up and email verify etc every time you want to join some random phpBB forum.
My design skills (rather lack of it) is to blame. Apologies and huge thanks for the feedback. I will improve it this week.
With each passing day, the Internet looks more and more dire.
A decentralized alternative Lemmy[1] is already quite feature complete and in many ways even better than reddit itself. It's just a bit of a ghost town and many of the instances are aimed towards and/or controlled by political/social rejects.
"just"? Reddit is the community, not code. Users aren't going to run off to Lemmy or any other site. It just isn't going to happen.
The alternative site (and it has to be one site, nor multiple, topic-specific sites) has to either already be massively active when the triggering event occurs.
It's a garbage website.
For those doubting this, remember that Reddit was bootstrapped by Spez and Alexis (by their own admission) posting stories through many sockpuppet accounts to make the early community seem larger and faster-growing than it really was.
EDIT: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
I received for the first time yesterday, 100 credits for free from Reddit. I had to spend it within 24hrs or lose it, so I guilded the most interesting comment I read that hour.
A lot of this could just be reddit staff astroterfing, but to the extent that it isn't, it (giving actual money, even small amounts, to flair reddit posts) just validates the stereotype that reddit as a platform selects for users with lower than average intelligence.
If you compare it to all the current social medias, reddit seems to be fairest of them all. the admins are working quite hard to make sure things are balanced with moderators etc, but it's always a delicate balance.
It's obviously the target of astroturfers, but honestly it's a sign that reddit is actually quite a more organic network compared to others, if it's such a target.
Meanwhile, everybody knows facebook/instagram are less organic and too much oriented towards ads; reddit has much more authenticity, or at least that's how users feel.
I totally agree with your criticism, but it's not really the fault or the website, it's just impossible to prevent astroturfing, it's more of a law problem.
I’d love a return to the old. Even if its just the social web version of reruns.
[1] https://twitter.com/kevinrose/status/1347747289511563265?s=2...
Bring back Usenet, IRC, and Listserv and get rid of everything else. Only half-joking. And yes, I'm aware those things still technically exist.
You don't get that valuable being a popular platform for link-sharing and comments. You get that valuable by wielding an appreciable amount of power over a large group of people, which Reddit unquestionably does, and then making that power known to other powerful people who have available capital. If you can't continue real growth, gather power instead, and the growth will be artificially infused into your organization instead (like YouTube).
The things Reddit's home office decides to promote to the top of the front page versus what gets insta-buried starts to make a difference in how people think. That's the true malignancy of social media: it warps minds with fictitious, intentionally curated peer pressure.
Addiction-first UX design plus frequent "thinking past the sale" on important issues (Reddit posts usually treat only one side of an issue as though it's the obvious foregone conclusion and work from there), and add a few artificially promoted user comments below, and now you have a company that is able to leverage something akin to peer pressure toward its own private ends. "Not only are you supposed to like X and Y in polite society, but all of your friends already think that. Don't you?" Facebook has been doing that for years with the fake "your friends liked the pages of Walmart and Pepsi" messages.
There needs to be an easier way to talk about how some companies wield entire generations full of hormonal young people and that they can, will, and DO use them to create social upheaval at will.
Edit: typos
I don't remember it being like this in the beginning. Not sure if it was because I wasn't hooked on it yet, or because they changed their algorithms. Also, since Trump in 2015, it went even more downhill pretty fast. I am pretty sure they intentionally made it such that you get angry at "the other side" - it was so easy to do that with Trump.
No matter how much upvote, engagement data you give their algos as to your personal preferences,, your front page will always suck. Case in point, when several high profile Twitter accounts were hacked and used to solicit bitcoins from users, none of the threads were immediately visible on their front pages.
And I discovered this borked content recommendation is worser on some platforms than others. E.g reddit front page on a browser sucks 100x compared to their official app. And 50x compared to a 3rd party app. Most of this is eerily intentional. To push you towards using their clients.
I recently had a "digital purge", and my last reddit account was one of the many things to go.
Anyway good for them at reddit do push good numbers. I bet the covid fueled traffic also helped a lot.
Instead all these networks choose pretend that accounts aren't sold and pretend that everything is organic
I guess #ad would ruin the illusion
Say you sell bespoke bike parts or audiophile-quality headphones, there are subreddits for that. Or say /r/pcmasterrace is an opportunity for Asus, Corsair, etc.
I assume many companies are already active on Reddit, but there’s an opportunity for Reddit to better the experience for some fee
Effective advertising relies on good market segmentation and intent, and Reddit happens to do both in a non-intrusive way.
This is the same pit Tumblr fell into.
So then it's either reddit or some very niche forums, but forums are hard to use.
The right subs for ones level are really really helpful.
6 billion means approximately 1 dollar from every person on the planet. I struggle to see how Reddit is able to provide that much value.
I'm with you though. I am continually dumbfounded by the sky-high valuations for these kinds of companies. Many on HN act like it's all normal and cool, and when you cast any doubt on their valuations or suggest there may be a bubble you are treated like an out-of-the-loop normie who doesn't "get" the internet. Time will tell, I suppose.
The predominant consumption pattern is similar to the other major social networks - scrolling through an infinite feed of dopamine inducing content. This indicates that its earning potential could be closer to that of Facebook and Instagram with the right ads in place.
This also brings the point that Reddit would be an amazing purchase for Facebook if it could pass regulatory scrutiny. And if not - that they should at least collaborate on their ads
... he said, horrified
Hero to zero like digg. Just way too much diverse communities under one roof that don’t really fit with their corporate need to be PC
And since it's almost always either far-right stuff (t_d, chimpire, incels, greatawakening, pizzagate), morally obscene stuff (jailbait, watchpeopledie, gore, deepfakes), discriminatory stuff (fph, gendercritical) or legal hot topics (sonygop, gunsforsale, creepshots, darknetmarkets) that get banned, the reactions from general society to the bans are usually positive. Not many are willing to defend pedophilia, Nazi stuff or LGBT-haters.
Only a matter of time until they get hit with a big freak wave one, or they severely mishandle one
Anyway, they managed to get rid of the two largest threats to their business model (jailbait w/ all the issues that come with hosting borderline pedophilia content, and the entire t_d clusterfuck with the threat of an unhinged President looming) without any major issues other than a couple conservative talkshow people whining.
As long as Reddit flows with the "zeitgeist", there isn't much that can threaten them.
That didn't shut them down. I shudder to think of what drama would be big enough to pull it off.
That said on the bunch of times I've tested reddit paid ads its always has one of the worst ROI's. A good organic campaign is far better if you have the ability to engage people in a genuine way.
Edit: There seems to a project that does this exactly: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
A lot of people leave Reddit because of the heavy handed moderation and groupthink.
I love browsing those where I find excellent advices:
https://www.reddit.com/r/awardtravel/
https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/
https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/ (I think more human than HN for advices / feedbacks )
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/ ( found great non-mainstream books to read )1. The value of the _content_ goes up as the community gets bigger. r/BetterEveryLoop is great because of the content, not the silly comments.
2. The value of the _community_ goes up when the community is smaller. I'm into board games, and the various subreddits for specific games are useful and interesting. Same with some of the cooking subreddits. (This assumes the community is good intentioned)
Of course, that's a rule of thumb, and there are lots of exceptions in both directions. But in general, active and small communities tend to be the most truly useful parts of reddit.
I do not believe it is that controversial to suppose that most non-niche subreddits are being manipulated by one of more of the above.
I mean, it's Facebook. If you're arguing that something has bigger reach than Facebook, you need more than those arguments.
If that's something that moderators can do, by curating the content on their subreddit, then what can admins do?
Reddit is cancer.
Tell me Reddit is the Usenet+StackOverflow of everything and the rest, and I create an account RIGHT NOW!!!
What do you mean start?
It makes sense, need to monetize and appeal to the average internet user, but it bums me out there isn't a great replacement as of now.
Many small communities that I like, but one of my favorite search queries is "_________ reddit"
Need to understand timeshares? Want the best rice cooker? Usually reddit has a post with actual humans responding.
My Reddit feed now has more programming related articles than Hackernews.
For example, my local city sub is like NextDoor only without the nut jobs and constant "my Pitbull got loose in the park again" posts.
It's a sort of hybrid between Twitter, Reddit, and Slack aimed at open, frictionless discussion using real time messaging instead of comments.
It works on mobile and desktop web, and while still early and in active development, I definitely appreciate feedback!
Cross posted this thread: https://sqwok.im/p/TC2uSScaSpqllg
This has to be the number one complaint, been hearing it for literally years. Keep ignoring them, reddit. Someone like Discord will launch a web facing community app and eat your lunch soon!
Dig deeper, and it's mostly porn.
If you zoom into any random community, it's probably porn. If it's not porn, it's some curated and heavily modded bubble forum for like minded individuals to reinforce what they already believe.
It's unfortunate that Reddit ever added comments, or karma.
On these platforms, anything that challenges the echo chamber’s status quo gets flagged or downvoted into oblivion. It has nothing to do with rules or content guidelines, and everything to do with opinions and emotions.
The downvote button needs to be removed entirely, because high karma users don’t know any more than the rest of us (other than how to be addicted to a screen).
Covid-19 claims another victim
Perspective is skewed by the stock market doing crazy things lately. Reddit doesn't get the benefit of that.
I'd love to see the number of decade or near decade old tech and social media startups that are still relying on VC funding.
I need to maintain three or four different semi-fully anonymous accounts just to make the site bearable.
I remember reading only a handful of moderators control all of reddit's most popular subreddits, the ones frequently hitting the front page. These I'm sure are just sock accounts for marketing firms to use when they mass promote content. I wonder how much of the front page is even "real" content these days, not just an advertisement.
The smaller niche communities are what make Reddit great for me. I guess a rigged front page is the price we pay to have so many quality smaller subreddits.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-s...
That must heavily influence the quality and worth of any data Zuck would want to suck out of Reddit.
I think a majority of the userbase wouldn't mind leaving reddit for another reddit clone just so they can stick it to Zuckerberg.
I think there is a lot of potential here.
The guys got t-shirts saying they built something people want
It is a pretty straightforward business model. Reddit is far from the first company with that valuation to successfully capitalize on it.
Yes, but what's your point?
I can observe this in myself, how quickly my opinion on something is formed the moment I see the first comment or the headline. Its quite impossible or hard to convince myself that this is the right conclusion/opinion to be made.
I guess I should just accept I am just another monkey
In general the site has had an ever expansive censorship policy, banning anything they consider “hate speech” without recognizing that there are two sides to many of these conversations. For example, Reddit also removed subreddits like r/gendercritical, which means conversations that challenge and critically explore modern transactivist views can’t happen. Whatever your stance on the issue, this is a live and controversial topic where everyone must be allowed to state their views even if activists and Silicon Valley companies disagree. The departure from their founding free speech principles is very disappointing.
Reddit’s history of using dark patterns to push their app is also infuriating and anti-user. And the desktop website is also a mess that seems to be less functional than old.reddit.com and more geared towards “engagement”. It has reached the point that it is “bad for society” since millions of people can be manipulated by this site quite easily. Subreddits regularly see brigading on politically sensitive or popular topics, and it is easy to spot - a subreddit with a few votes on each typical story will suddenly see thousands of votes on a story experiencing brigading.
I really hope they see viable competition, but with network effects being what they are, it’ll be tough. Many of the alternatives (https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/km9468/...) have only seen minor traction.
I'd love it if there was something that helped filter this content automatically. Currently I keep manually blocking these subreddits, which was a lot of work at first (my block list is currently ~200) but it's helped a lot.
I'm trying to solve this for myself actually by starting with filtering low-quality comments on Reddit and HN. I made a Chrome extension that helps me label comments as I read and stores them in Google Sheets. Then I use those labeled comments to train a custom NLP model that can categorize comments (good or bad, hide the comment if it's bad). So far, I'm spending most of my time trying to build a good dataset for my tastes. It's not too bad so far (~80-90% accuracy).
Whatever makes the front page "trashy" (whatever you mean by that) would also make your hypothetical modified front page so.