Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Evolving beyond 100B recommendations a day at Reddit

reddit.com

105 pointsjovsa110 comments

I didn't realize that Reddit even recommends you content. And I can't tell the difference between before and after these recommendations are coming in. The blog post feels like one that Youtube made about their recommender system and how it improved but, their recommender system doesn't work.

Reddit has been sort of this weird place where they face the issues that Digg and Twitter have and want to slowly transition itself into some Facebook competitor but due to the communities that exist on the platform its a really hard sell. The new UI is harder to use and visually distracting. It feels like they just want you to use the App so you have to look at their advertisements.

Reddit's recommendations are total garbage. But YouTube is actually even worse.

For instance, Eddie Van Halen recently died. So I clicked on a few links from Twitter to check out some concert highlights from his life and career.

Now my entire YouTube recommendations feed is nothing but Van Halen and 1980s rock music.

The Go-Go's recently got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I clicked on a few links from Twitter to see some highlights.

Now my entire YouTube recommendations feed is nothing but the Go-Go's and 1980s pop music.

And not only that, but because I don't use Google search anymore, the only signal that Google can get from me is my YouTube watching, so my Google Now (swipe-left sidebar on Android phones) is nothing but Van Halen and the Go-Go's.

It's the dumbest freaking recommendation engine on planet Earth. It's ridiculous how bad it is.

"Am I prepared to get more of this recommended until the end of time?"

I ask myself this question every time I watch a youtube video. A lot of them I watch with private browsing to avoid it. Though lately it feels like I'm getting stuff recommended despite the private browsing measure.

> Though lately it feels like I'm getting stuff recommended despite the private browsing measure

Absolutely, some of the recommendations seems to be recommended based on IP. I don't watch anime but I have friends that do, sometimes after they visit my place, I start getting ads for manga and anime for a few days, until they figure out I'm not actually interested in it.

I also browse stuff via Firefox Focus on my phone, and get related content recommended on my desktop just minutes after watching something for the first time on the phone.

Hmmm, that makes me wonder whether it would be better to have a second account to watch those videos with. Then the video view would be tied to an account rather than anonymous through the IP address.

Basically in firefox do a "open in container tab" instead of "open link in private window".

YouTube has been recommending me pregnancy videos for over a year now. My youngest child was born in 2006.

My ads have slowly been progressing from medicine to planning your own funeral before you die, in order to save the hassle from your near and dear.

Sometimes I wonder if The Algorithm know something that we don't.

That's hilariously dark.

Honestly, though, that is the ad targeting that people are scared of (I know I am), but I am absolutely unconvinced that's what it is. Whenever I need a fresh perspective on tracking, I turn off all of my anti-tracking things and adblockers and search for toilets. Everything you see after that is related to toilets like you're some kind of collector and hoarder of toilets.

Youtube's algorithm has a major recency bias. Whatever topics and channels you last watched will be constantly recommended forever until you forcefully change.

The recommendation engine is indeed garbage, but the default related video algorithms are excellent. I wonder if there's some plugin that clears all cookie information on every YT page refresh. That would give a good vanilla YT experience.

> But YouTube is actually even worse.

Youtube's recommendation engine is to get you click on it and watch a certain percentage.

It's not designed to show you things that you "like." It's way more sophisticated than that.

That's a strange definition of "sophisticated" you got there.

I remember when I started using YouTube, their recommendations were excellent. I could get completely lost in each next recommendation and they were nearly allr elated to the content I just watched (and was thus clearly in the mood for).

Nowadays it's hot garbage. I just checked. There's 7 videos in there it's been pushing on me for the better part of the year but I have no interest in. 4 videos I've already watched (and it KNOWS this because it shows the full red bar at the bottom), 3 videos I bailed out of because they were not interesting. How many that are related to the video I just watched? Zero.

The original algorithm was clearly and forcefully replaced by something that was advantageous to YouTube's metric but I'd wager detrimental to the majority of their users. Everything feels dumbed down now and it's clear video's are playing to this new kind of algorithm in attempts to cling to their audience.

> It feels like they just want you to use the App so you have to look at their advertisements.

I browse using iOS Safari in privacy mode. Over the past few months Reddit has been doing everything they can to discourage that, including blocking me from reading threads by throwing up a non-dismissible modal with the bogus statement “We cannot verify this content yadda”, preventing sub-comment expansion, and screwing with the URL made available to the iOS share via messages.

The latter is just stupid: instead of the URL for the thread, they substitute the Reddit homepage. Instead of being able to track which of the links I send are interesting to the recipients, they get no useful info whatsoever, and discourage me from attracting eyeballs to their product. It’s stupid, squared.

All they are really accomplishing is hardening my resolve to not give an inch. Eventually another popular headline & dopamine feed will come along and they’ll lose my eyeballs.

I use old.reddit.com

Which, IIRC, doesn’t support clicking a preview to display the full (usually) image. That’s fine for the subs posting headlines, but sucks for memes.

YouTube primarily recommends me videos that I've already seen

I once looked at the little notification tray on the new Reddit UI and saw a recommendation for a post. It piqued my interest, so I clicked it. It took me to the subreddit, not the specific post. I tried clicking different parts of the notification, same result every time. I tried scrolling down on the subreddit (in the new UI, ugh) and did not the find the post after thirty posts or so. I tried to copy the title from the notification, so I could paste it into Google, but user text selection was disabled by the CSS. I used “Inspect Element” to get a copy of the text, and put it into Google, which finally took me to the post.

All that engineering work to produce 100B recommendations, and it’s not even been put to good use.

I have a bookmarklet to enable select. There is no valid use case for disabling this.

Visualizing SEP, and just dragging around text in general, is the only use case I can think of.

https://www.visualizingsep.com/#/entries/vico/ <- It's very annoying to drag around the topics.

Oops, something went wrong!

"This component maintains a 99.9% uptime and constructs a feed with p99 in the low hundred milliseconds. Which means that this design should hold as we scale to handle trillions of recommendations per day."

Is that why Reddit is the only major website that regularly can't keep up with demand? They are wasting all their resources on sending millions of spam emails filled with these 'recommendations'?

My own experience says that you should not attempt to make a serious change without being able to evaluate whether or not your attempt has worked. That could be as simple as fixing a bug - you need a test that would have caught the bug and it (and all your other tests) needs to pass once your fix is in. That could be as complex as something like this, improving your recommendation system. To evaluate something like this you'd likely need a few key metrics, latency and throughput, sure, but also recommendation quality. Maybe click through rate? Growth in recommended subs? Time that users spend on reddit with and without recommendation? Things like that.

If you can't evaluate your change then you will be stumped by a very simple question. Did you succeed? Are you done? If you fix a bug by thinking "I know what the problem is", then change a few lines of code and say "Done" how do you know you actually fixed it? How do you know you didn't make things much worse? Same thing here. So, you changed the recommendation system - did you make it better or worse?

I was quite interested to see how they were evaluating the system and whether or not it was an improvement. Their section on evaluation says "Scaling this component of the system is something we think about a lot and are actively working on." That seems really, really, backwards to me. You are thinking about evaluating it after you've changed the system? Huh?

Experimental design is boring and ML is cool. Hence why you see things like this.

> Gazette: Feature Stores and Model Prediction Engine

When did developers stop naming things properly and go straight to weird codenames? What is wrong with 'recommendation service'?

I do not think I would necessarily have more of a practical idea what to expect out of a "recommendation service" than "Gazette". Sure, it's related to recommendations in some way, but that might as well be next to useless technically. A 10 minute introduction on the various services and one could get their head around them even with silly names. Are you bothered your webserver is called nginx or by curl or grep or git or cat etc. etc.?

curl, grep and cat all have specific names that make sense.

curl: cURL (library)

grep: g/re/p "globally search for a regular expression and print matching lines"

cat: as in, concatenate

Gazette is just meaningless.

Actually, a “gazette” is a periodical newspaper.[0] It’s a more obscure word, but it isn’t meaningless. And I can kindof see the usage as coming from “recommendation email spam is a periodical”, but it’s a stretch IMHO.

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gazette

One advantage: googling by weird names is much easier.

You're going to hate the cryptocurrency space :)

It is only one part of the recommendation service.

Anyway, the reason you don’t “name things properly” is because it’s one of those truly hard problems (in a class beyond EXPTIME in input program functionality).

By bypassing it you no longer have to worry about the connotations and you can do things like split the tool without having to worry if the name will stay the same or if which piece will retain the name.

I would strongly recommend it.

IT has always been full of non-descriptive names. Unix was a pun, Linux is named after its creator, Macintosh after an apple and programming languages are probably the worst offender with their single-letter names.

> What is wrong with 'recommendation service'?

Telling dozens of competing recommendation services apart somehow.

RedditRecommendationService. Although, "Recommendation Service" is likely plenty clear if used in a discussion between two reddit engineers.

Now you've merely shifted the onus. What does "reddit" mean? It's also a meaningless name (ok it's trying to be a pun on "read it"). These are pretty much entirely equivalent in this context:

Gazette Feature Stores and Model Prediction Engine

Reddit Recommendation Service

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditEng/comments/neknjg/evolving_...

Just in case you are also asked to install the app as a content gate.

Or replaced reddit.com by teddit.net, in this case https://teddit.net/r/RedditEng/comments/neknjg/evolving_beyo...

I went to view the comments on that post and all 6 of them are shadowbanned

Reddit sends me intrusive notifications recommending useless, irrelevant subreddits.

Such a shame to see what has happened to Reddit

At some point I got opted-in so that they email me every time a post of mine hits a "milestone" (10 karma, 25 karma, 50 karma, 100 karma, ad nauseum). It was incredibly annoying and confusing when I got a constant stream of email for a single comment.

Most of the changes to reddit over the last year or two seem focused on driving short term engagement.

> Reddit has evolved to become a vast and diverse place

In spite of the best efforts of the administrators...

The only way to win is not to play

I used to browse /r/india . Then one day Reddit recommended I check out /r/chodi (a sub full of memes and random talk). So I said sure, visited it, commented a couple of times.

Next thing I know, I'm banned from /r/india. For participating in a sub that was recommended by Reddit itself!

And there's no appealing these bans.

Mods can ban everyone for almost any or even no reason. Unless some racist or otherwise illegal reason would be given, the Reddit admins keep their hands off bans.

But the recommendation level came from Reddit, not from the mods of /r/india.

I'm not a big fan of Reddit as a company but that's not really their fault – that's a moderation problem (from the mods of /r/india). You liked the sub enough to comment in it so clearly it was a good rec!

I would shift the blame back to Reddit here, because they exposed data to mods that are completely unrelated to the subreddit. Another problem is the non-existing appeal process.

you're suggesting comments should not be visible on your profile? but visible on the page they are commented on? not sure how this would make sense.

That wasn’t what I read, but it’s a lovely idea. Is that something we can have?

this would have the effect of making everyone's activity private to everyone except for scrapers (the actual bad people nobody wants to see their activity). Not sure how this would increase privacy at all. Activity on reddit outside of private subreddits is known to be public

There is no technological solution to most social problems, and you can hardly expect Reddit to mediate social problems like ban appeals at scale (I mean, you can, but it won't happen for $ reasons).

Most of the big subreddits are co-opted by toxic, power-mad moderators, or completely devoid of moderation entirely. A complete purge & reset wouldn't be a bad idea.

>I would shift the blame back to Reddit here, because they exposed data to mods that are completely unrelated to the subreddit.

GP mentioned that he "commented a couple of times", which means that his participation in the other subreddit is public knowledge.

"participation" can take multiple forms. As far as I remember, I actually challenged some of the more egregious posts I saw on /r/chodi, but didn't spend too much time there, as who has the time to educate the whole planet?

If that other sub is so bad, then Reddit should ban it outright; why recommend it to users only to get them banned in other subs?

>If that other sub is so bad, then Reddit should ban it outright

Because reddit is generally hands off when it comes to moderation. It generally doesn't replace moderators nor punishes moderators for their actions.

>why recommend it to users only to get them banned in other subs?

probably because the recommendation algorithm isn't smart enough to figure that out.

Using a VPN and alt accounts are practically a necessity. I have 3 main accounts: one only posts on niche hobby forums, one for "clean" subreddits (/r/news, pics and the like), and one for anything remotely controversial.

Similar here. I differentiate by how little I care about revealing my actual identity and location. Like for hobbies and stuff I really don’t care if people know my approximate location. But for some stuff… dudes are crazy. Would rather not get doxxed.

Maybe this is how Reddit is juicing the numbers; force users to create several alts, and voila! our DAU are up!!1!

Anyone can build a bot that automatically watches any submissions to any subreddit, and bans those users from their subreddit. Like it or hate it, reddit is very hands-off with how subreddits are moderated beyond maintaining overall site rules.

Most larger subreddits are managed pretty poorly.

Reddit has disclosed that even your upvotes on other posts and comments that they deem unsavory can be used to automatically ban you.

Most bans are done by moderators, and moderators don't have access to upvote information.

I can only imagine someone condescendingly explaining that this was a test of your ethical character. By participating in it or other subreddits, like /r/BigChungus, you exposed yourself as an agent of hate. And then someone who might as well have had their image traced for a picture on the also-banned /r/smuggies would say "The only winning move is not to play."

Between that sort of nonsense and the redesign, they've Digg-ed themselves a hole and as soon as a viable competitor appears, it might just collapse as catastrophically.

I don't think so. I don't like reddit, but none of this is actually meaningful. Their active user rate has gone up exponentially since the redesign. People getting banned globally is standard on other social media networks, and the vast majority of redditors aren't banned from any subreddits (with actual global site bans being incredibly rare, too).

There's no reason that reddit would collapse if they maintain the status quo, because the status quo (while worse) is still better than 90% of other sites on the internet. The average quality of user has gone down, but that's inevitable online.

> I check out /r/chodi (a sub full of memes and random talk)

That sub seems to be regularly featured on r/AgainstHateSubReddits

Misogyny

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/na9y...

Racism

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/ly6n...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/jh3j...

Islamophobia :

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/ndor...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/mu1a...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/m71k...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/nap7...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/mvha...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/nbh1...

Transphobia

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/mm0l...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/mfot...

I'm not saying those linked comments are not authentic, but r/AgainstHateSubreddits does post hateful content on subreddits they want to get banned.

Sounds like a spontaneously organized social feedback community. Interesting.

Does it matter? No matter who originally posted the content, if it’s allowed by the mods and upvoted by the subreddit’s users, that should reflect on /r/chodi.

An against hate subreddit that doubles as a hate factory against other threads? How modern..

You can't fight hate with hate; you can bet your top dollar that those who try end up being worse than the ones they fight against...

What's the appropriate feeling about hate/hate subreddits? Mild annoyance?

Is there any evidence for that assertion?

I used to be an active mod on a somewhat active subreddit, not going to say which one. I can say that it was rather suspicious to get pinged to an AHS thread made about a post that was less than 7 minutes old. There's a report button under every post, so the idea that this person couldn't have just used that instead of posting a big dramatic post makes me highly suspicious of AHS.

There's no feedback loop on reports. They disappear into the ether, possibly never to be acted upon. It shouldn't be surprising users have zero faith they'll accomplish anything on their own.

Sure, but I think it's fair to wait longer than 10 minutes before doing a big post maligning a subreddit for "letting hate slide". The post being 7 minutes old before it was posted on AHS is not an exaggeration.

AHS could have the best intentions but karma addicted folks jumping on such a post to get a blitz of upvotes is always going to happen.

I'm amazed that the reddit mobile app pushes notifications about upvote thresholds by default - it is incredibly trashy.

I was pretty surprised because I just looked back at the AHS thread and there are hundreds of upvotes in there. It must've been euphoric

You're going to need to provide a citation for such a big claim.

While I cannot provide a citation, The posts linked by the user seem to show most of them were by a single person whose profile became active just for posting on that sub.

Anecdotally, I used to mod a sub which suddenly became active due to a meme. I got messages from mods of different subs offering to help or asking me to make them mods. When I refused. the sub started getting reported for comments made by new users(Auto mod was not much helpful back then), The sub died out along with the interest on meme. If someone were to say there is a mod cartel on reddit, I wouldn’t doubt it one bit.

Purportedly, a former AHS footsoldier talks about some of what goes on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG8xWJaJO-c

I've heard about AHS false flag operations many times, but i've never seen incontrovertible evidence of it. It feels like something that competent and technically savvy mods should be able to document. I'm not sure how many mods are even one of competent and technically savvy, let alone both.

You think that's bad, consider some of the ex-member affiliated subreddits for high demand religions. One in particular is monitored closely by official (employed by said religion) and unofficial member representatives and if any joint/xpost occurs it is immediate ban. The official side has been demurred as a "news clipping service" in the past.

Same thing, different day, just a new platform to continue these kinds of failing sociological controls.

Quora too is very aggressive with recommendations... and ads.

    Reddit has 52 million daily active users

You are sending 100B recommendations to 52 million daily users, that's 2000 recommendations per user per day. How many new subreddits do you think your users need to be made aware of in a given 24 hour period??

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

I doubt active users account for all of the recommendations. Consider inactive users who are on Reddit‘s mailing list. Those emails probably include recommendations as well.

There are still fewer than 10 billion people on the planet. I realize people can have multiple accounts, but realistically let's limit it to something like 1 billion actual users. Why does everybody need 100 recommendations a day?

It's a slight tangent, but it seems somewhat relevant - they're not only making so many recommendations, but the recommendations seem to be universally hated (judging by the comments here). It's like they're bragging about how epic their fuckup is.

it seems likely from the "Quest" section that they're using "recommendations" in the broader sense to describe the inputs to feed rankings and other parts of the product besides subreddit recommendations. i'm imagining that a single load of the personalized homepage might require hundreds of predictions.

Reddit explains how they work super hard on a feature I go out of my way to disable and ignore.

I have been actively using Reddit for 5+ years and I recently left Twitter after 10+ years.

In my opinion Reddit can be a fine social network if you are selective about the subs you read. It has a degree of granularity that Twitter simply doesn't offer, and most subs are heavily moderated.

The last few years my Twitter timeline was insufferable, and it didn't have a trivial solution -their algorithms work very hard at creating noise and upsetting people, to a disturbing point-, while Reddit allows me to improve my experience in a couple of minutes.

doesn’t scroll for me

Reddit is literally the last organisation on Earth I would take engineering advice from.

I appreciate they are operating at a very large scale and that has its own challenges, but it is by far and away the worst engineered product I use. I really do mean from soup to nuts, Reddit is just garbage software. The modern front end is obviously and plainly terrible. The backend is slow and suffers very frequent downtime, often for hours at a time. I could go on for hours about the terrible engineering of Reddit.

I'll add to this: of every website I use which recommends me things based on other things, Reddit does it the absolute worst. It's so bad that they have literally never recommended me a subreddit which was actually relevant to my interests.

My favourite instance was when they assumed I liked "programming", based on having (accidentally, once) visited the /r/f5networks subreddit, so they suggested the Europa Universalis 4 modding subreddit.

Lately, they've given up and are just recommending me "gaming" related subreddits, by which I mean literally any random subreddit that it thinks is related to "gaming", including subreddits for people who main a specific fighter in Super Smash Brothers or subreddits for random indie iOS TCG games.

The only "recommendations" that seem remotely reasonable are basically trending posts, and that's just because them trending indicates a broad appeal for that specific post.

Meanwhile, their mobile app is wildly unreliable; if I'm having any sort of network issues while I start it, it will fail to load any of my feeds, and then just refuse to try to load them until I kill the app again. Refreshing my feed will typically result in a new feed with new posts, about half of which have no text in them and just a giant blank space where the title and description should be.

Reddit is a colossal nightmare, engineering-wise, and I wouldn't listen to a word they said about implementing technology.

Reddit’s recommendations can be sharply contrasted with YouTube’s, which I frequently find useful and novel.

Or when they ask things like "Is r/sysadmin for humor?"

I guess if you're some sort of alien AI you'd think that's a relevant question... but otherwise what possible use would there be to ask it and take up valuable screen real estate (which could be used for ads or relevant content) asking it?

There is always https://i.reddit.com, the only reason why I still use it once a month maybe. Props to them for keeping that endpoint alive.

But I agree. I used to have the same respect for Reddit as I do for HN (I even donated to it when this buying stars thing wasn't around) but clearly the site is not even a shadow of it's former self. The last straw for me was when they started showing "Only available in mobile app" bullshit.

Now to me they are in the same league as FB, i.e. their engineers may be doing some cool stuff but I can't help feel sorry for people who work there.

Yeah, the i/compact interface is deliciously good. I frequently use it as a reference for good mobile design

The front-end is a disaster, especially on mobile.

It provides a paradigmatic example for people who believe SPAs are an invention from Satan himself. I actually love React and could have an SPA built that is a 100x better - but that is neither here nor there. The problem is that some features are half-assed or simply not implemented. The comment tree is a disaster, and pretty much in every interaction I discover new problems and bugs.

Cheery on the cake is that lately I am clicking on certain posts and getting a message along the lines of "We cannot verify whether this content is suitable for work and therefore cannot place ads against it. Please download the app to view it."

What. The actual. Fuck.

I understand why from a company perspective an app is more interesting to you than a mobile site, but you haven't managed to persuade me in all these years why I need an app for what amounts to viewing content, saving my subreddit selection, and posting an occasional comment. If your strategy is to simply kick us out of the mobile site, then fine - I will stop using your site. I guarantee it.

That's apparently their strategy, much like Facebook: impair the mobile web experience and push users to the app(s).

I’ve noticed sometimes it’s dismissals and sometimes not.

The front end seems to me like it was written by a bunch of new grads. Its such a miserable experience.

The other huge problem with reddit is that they aren't profitable, so far as I know. It would be one thing if the problem was just that their site was ugly, slow, frequently down, stuffed full of useless "features", and needlessly difficult to use BUT they were making tons of money. If that were the case, while you might not want to exactly recreate them, you could make the argument that they were at least doing something right. As is (so far as I know) they also don't even make money despite their immense traffic.

All of the value of reddit comes from the users adding, sorting, and moderating content. The people running the site actively make it worse and they aren't profiting by doing so.

They've had 5-10 second page load times for over a decade now. I just don't get it. Not fixing search I can understand (they want you to stay on the site longer and not just find what you want and dart), but a regular page load I just don't get.

I love how every comment so far is about how much people dislike reddit.

It’s a bit silly considering that this site is pretty much the same as any Reddit subreddit.

The structure, participants, and audience are a lot different here than 99% of subreddits. There are a few well-managed subs there, but once they reach anywhere remotely near the size of HN, they turn into either navel-gazing echo chambers, or incredibly heavy-handed moderated subs where most of the users who would contribute meaningful content get banned or shadowbanned.

HN doesn't try to be everything to everyone like Reddit tries, and the moderation methods employed here are a lot less heavy-handed and take a few offenses before someone gets a meaningful ban or silencing.

At a technical level, I'd more or less agree with you. But from a content and community perspective, I disagree that it's pretty much the same.

IMHO, the signal-to-noise here is amazing; not perfect, but _so_ much better. If I really want memes or jokes, I'll go back to reddit (and I occasionally do if I want some mindless downtime). I get a lot more insightful information and community interaction here than there.

Generally speaking, the smaller the subreddit the better the community. I really like the subreddit dedicated to my favorite baseball team. I like the /r/MLB subreddit too, but less so. The noise noise from everyone posting and trying to make the frontpage leads to an inevitable degradation in quality.

I remember a while back when /r/cfb was invited to join the front page and there was considerable pushback from members who were afraid the reddit-wide readership would ruin the quality of posts. Kind of an eternal september thing...

There is one feature I've identified on HN that I think Reddit could really benefit from. Disallowing downvotes on direct replies prevents users from training themselves to downvote in the least productive manner possible - the spiteful "How dare you disagree with me" downvote.

The karma loss limit of six per comment is also helpful - on reddit you may be hesitant to break with generally expressed opinions over how drastically it can drain your comment - here the two options are -6 or banned (if you're really spewing hate speech).

Also, a shout out to dang for remaining very good at not interfering except when it's really warranted and then shutting things down quick.

> any Reddit subreddit

I think you many 'any given Reddit subreddit', which is very true.

To others comments below: the signal to noise ratio here on HN is pretty good, and the average S/N on Reddit is pretty poor, but some subs over there are exceptional. For instance, https://old.reddit.com/r/askhistorians

HN is about as different as you can get from Reddit. For example, Reddit encourages herd behavior, minimal-effort glib interactions, and addictive content. HN discourages herd behavior, is quite difficult for most newcomers because the higher effort required, and even includes a built-in anti-procrastination feature.

You can tell yourself that, but it just isn’t true. It really depends entirely on the subreddit itself. There are plenty of Reddit subreddits with high quality content, discussion, etc.

You can have that thought - but it's incorrect.

Well it wasn't, but it's rapidly becoming more like Reddit, in a bad way. Most of Reddit's 50M active daily users are under the age of 18 as it's apparent by the front page, and the last few remaining older users are driven away day by day.

I've been using Reddit for 10 years now. I still mechanically go the comment section when I come across something interesting to find the link to the source. It's never there anymore. No intelligent discussions. No pointing out the obvious fakes and advertisements/astroturfing. People write long, idiotically fake posts just to get upvoted, to either farm karma or because they're children.

Unfortunately with HN getting slowly flooded as well, I don't know where else to turn for an online news aggregator/discussion platform that fits my demographic.

Why is it that when Reddit knows nothing about a user it presents itself as downtown Portland during rioting season?

An inside look at how Reddit does recommendations

Reply on news.ycombinator.com