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Comment by 22289d | Hacker News Reader

I can see that Reddit really hurt you. On behalf of the community, I'm sorry.

> It just means they need a different type of marketing.

That's correct. And Step #1 is to have a product which will make it past the collective bullshit detector. Step #2 is to provide real and actual value. To have a legitimately good product.

So much of marketing is built on deception. If you try to deceive Redditors, you're going to get told to fk urself.

People who can't complete step 1 or 2 and want to employ deception-based marketing often tell a tail like yours. It's our fault for not just taking what you tell us at face value and handing over our money.

However all of the people appending 'Reddit' to their search queries instead of reading the deception-based marketing pages that fill up Google results, may understand where I'm coming from.

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You have way too much faith in reddit and it’s given you a huge blind spot.

It’s trivial for companies to get past Reddit’s “bullshit detector”. Just sound like a scrappy small business that cares deeply about users and not money.

There is a trail of overfunded kickstarters with nothing to show years later that demonstrates how gullible redditors are.

Your overconfidence in a bunch of armchair experts is exactly why they are so gullible. Being susceptible to marketing is one thing. Thinking you’re not is so much worse.

> I can see that Reddit really hurt you. On behalf of the community, I'm sorry.

You don’t speak for the community of which I’m a part. They also didn’t hurt me, they hurt the people they doxxed and I watched it happen years ago. That’s why there are strict doxxing bans now.

Redditors as a collective are as dumb as the average population (everyone gets equal votes), which doesn’t make for a good SNR.

> However all of the people appending 'Reddit' to their search queries instead of reading the deception-based marketing pages that fill up Google results, may understand where I'm coming from.

I do this too, but what you’re failing to grasp is that you don’t realize you’re also reading deception-based marketing pages. Corporations wised up to social media a decade ago and have armies of social media experts that know exactly how to target various online communities.

I've been a reddit user for a number of years, and while there are indeed some good subreddits, by and large my experience lines up with kortilla's.

> I can see that Reddit really hurt you. On behalf of the community, I'm sorry.

Dude doesn't seem hurt, they're just spitting facts.

That was an extremely biased and jaded characterization that focuses only on a narrow set of negatives.

Have those things happened on Reddit? Ya. Was that in any way an accurate summary of what Reddit is? No. And it's absurd to claim that it is.

"But look at this example and this one"

I could make a huge list of the times Reddit has been bad, too. That doesn't change a single thing about what I just said.

I think the problem is that we're talking about "reddit" like it's one group of people who have the same characteristic responses to things across time. But the whole point of reddit is for there to be disparate communities who may or may not communicate with each other and may or may not share or hold diametrically opposing views on any topic that can be written in words.

When submitting to reddit, you elplicitely cannot submit just to "reddit", you have to choose a subreddit. These subreddit can be as varied in response as humans can, even when apparently sharing the same topic/goal. Subreddits turn toxic sometimes, sometimes they're made that way intentionally. Some are hard fought places of positive intent with strong moderation and some are 'wild west'. Sometimes places get toxic enough that someone else creates a similarly named subreddit with an identical goal but attempts to cultivate and moderate a positive environment. If you didn't know about this you'd see 2 identical subreddits, when you post you'll get 2 very different receptions.

"Reddit"s response is entirely dependent upon subreddit. We cannot argue about how "reddit" reacts, and it's impractical to talk about individual redditors, the communities within, the subreddits, are the unit about which we can have meaningful conversation. There's no point in arguing about whether reddit has hurt someone or not or whether their reception was beneficial or degrading the community without knowing _which_ Community. There are places that will hurt everyone, there are places that will reject every product, there are places that won't. They are different places

> These subreddit can be as varied in response as humans can

I've never been anywhere on Reddit that doesn't have the specific characteristic that I'm referring to. If people think you are wrong, they tell you. If they think you're lying or spinning bullshit, they say so. If they think your method is suboptimal, they let you know the way they think is best.

This also applies to people on HN. We're engaged in it right now.

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