The Reddits
ycombinator.com
ycombinator.com
I think it was a really nice service. Right now all similar ones I know of are unpleasant to use and get in your way.
It was really minimal and useful to find new things. One particular area where link sharing makes a lot of sense, yet existing services are not very nice, is academic papers.
They said they don't do that and will never do that unfortunately.
A couple weeks later they auctioned off tickets to the factory tours as a "special event". I felt incredibly sour from that. I felt like a little more of humanity had eroded.
Are you friends with these people? Why do they owe you anything
It sounds like a horrible deal.
Looking forward to see how true this is. The communities I used to frequent, have maybe 20% of the activity they used to, before the API fiasco, even though they're "back online". I also stopped using reddit on the phone after my chosen reddit client was closed down (which I'm grateful for, thanks reddit).
My reddit activity probably dropped way below half compared to before, as the communities I used to be in are now shells of their former glory.
I posted a little bit and then one day had a big red banner on the top telling me that my account was suspended for violating the TOS (my posts were on a puppetry subreddit about puppets and were very "normal" posts... how I could have violated the TOS was beyond me). I immediately appealed and the suspension was lifted (without any explanation as to what caused my account to be suspended in the first place). But even though my account is able to post and do everything a non-suspended account can, there's still that red banner at the top every time I access the website telling me my account was suspended and to check my inbox messages for instructions on how to appeal.
That user experience kind of killed any desire of mine to ever use Reddit again.
The recent very active moves to clean the site up and prep for this IPO have had a detrimental community effect in the sense of disgruntlement, but I would wager have been excellent in making the site more palatable as a business.
Virtually none of the reddit-alternatives that all spun up in the wake of this mop job have taken off. So assuming our gut feeling is right that reddit engagement is down, then overall engagement on all reddits is down and users have entirely moved to other social media styles entirely.
There's the other angle on this, that engagement is down, but it was calculated to get rid of mostly users who cost reddit things, or are of an undesirable user population (troublesome, illegal, etc.) And what's left is mostly a user class that maximizes the monetary value that can be harvested.
There are huge and obvious areas where reddit can better monetize the site if they wished, and I would guess that it's going to happen. Reddit has a very long history of doing a bunch of different experiments with the site, and an influx of investment to properly analyze and then monetize the more successful ones is my guess as to what's going to happen. The recent drive to vacuum up and sell data to LLM companies is serendipitous icing right now.
There's also the huge opening that's happening right now with Twitter, where with a few chess moves, Reddit could very easily turn into or pick up the population of exTwitter users who find the current ownership trends so toxic they don't want to be associated with it any longer, but don't have a platform with a built in non-friends public sphere to turn to -- which is why Facebook hasn't been able to really tap into that market gap.
I have deleted my account at least half a dozen times and just tried to use it as a source of useful information, but I inevitably fall into the pit of getting another account because I can't control myself objecting to the nasty stuff on there. I know this is partly my self control problem, but social media in general is just awful. I can get rid of FB easily, there is literally no benefit for me being on there, but Reddit legit has useful content about all of my hobbies and how to do X.
It is unkillable but for some pretty rotten reasons. It's a social media platform mixed in with really useful content. Come for the search result, stay for the drama is what happens to me.
My own activity dropped like a rock after the API changes killed Apollo, the mobile client I used (and before that reddit had already acqui-killed a previous one Alien Blue). I simply check it out of habit, and mostly for news, don't have much of the joy I had when I had started accessing it back in 2009.
Probably it's just the natural cycle of profit-driven social media getting swallowed by Eternal Septembers after the initial batches of users posting interesting content and making the platform cool leave the place when the platform inevitably becomes user-hostile.
When the email dropped that I was one of the early users offered entrance into the IPO, I pretty much ignored it.
communities even remotely related to companies (e.g. r/googlepixel) are run by either fervently crazy zealot fans, or which is more likely, filtered by interns in those companies marketing dept in what seem to be reddit best revenue stream.
Lotta zombies hang on long after their relevance fades for the future. "X is unkillable" is a good way to reveal a limited imagination for future changes. You go from talking about disruption to talking about how things are now disruption-proof!
Is that really true? I have been on reddit since day 0 and have noticed 0 change, absolutely nothing. Some communities went through a "we're now on lemmy" phase. But even that went nowhere. Reddit is still plagued by mods and all the other things, but the userbase is as powerful as ever
But here's the thing: prevailing HN sentiments notwithstanding, your average Redditor leans left and is fairly anti-big-tech, so Reddit could have leveraged this angle. They could've said it's a pro-user move to stop OpenAI and the likes from unfairly profiting off your work. And most users would have applauded.
But Reddit didn't say that. They took a PR hit and decided to wait it out. The cynical explanation was that they were actually just trying to get some of that LLM money for themselves. And not long ago, they announced a big deal with Google to give access to user data for training purposes: https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...
Frankly, I was on the fence about the API access thing until the motivation became clear.
I think it’s interesting to see a flagging platform with a user base that will consistently post and upvote “fuck spez” celebrated here as a success, but I suppose the only thing that matters at this level of discussion is the almighty dollar.
My circle & I have stopped reddit on phone almost completely.
So many active posters have left reddit, that it is a shell of what it previously was. Some of my favorite subreddits have become inactive and shallower, to the point that admins are actively boosting up alternate subreddits
From what I can gather, the large majority of the remaining active users in the site are people who use reddit as alternative to 9Gag & Porn sites - prolly hyperbole, but that is what the new r/all felt like
Same here, very grateful for Reddit’s API changes. It made me realize how little value Reddit actually provided vs time spent. I refuse to use their dumpster fire of an app so I quit altogether and deleted my very old account + comments. Good riddance after all, for each “niche” subreddit I was on, I have found very active forums and communities to replace these subreddits. And they’re independent forums that are very old (in internet terms) with lots of passionate people sharing very valuable information.
Turns out I didn’t really need Reddit at all but it took their shortsighted hara-kiri for me to realize.
Oh well, thanks Greeddit!
Once they pulled the API I was out. Not terrible since the site's quality has been in steady decline for years. Eventually you realize you are doing the equivalent of having economics discussions in the youtube comments of a taylor swift video.
But it seems that lowest common denominator user is who reddit really wants, so good luck to them.
Same is happening again now, entitled moderaters who complain about CEO pay.
If anything is destroying Reddit, it's the mods IMO.
They rather consciously decided that jettisoning some hard-core techies, privacy people and other "weirdos" is an acceptable price to pay for more mass appeal and more profitability. Remember, you as a user are not the client of Reddit Inc, you're the product. You or I may not like that direction, but we're not great products anyway. I block ads for Pete's sake, I am literally worthless to them.
At least old.reddit.com still works. For now.
Yeah it's all dogshit content, but this is the product now. All the niche communities that made reddit good were dying a slow death well before any of the API stuff.
That old product is dead, the current reddit will live forever as long as they can get costs under control.
In the last year, Reddit has pushed localized home pages across the world, and my own example is the default home page for Canada. It's now exclusively sports and right-wing nuttery.
There were good communities, but they were molded by their good moderators, and these moderators are gone.
they have been bugging you with the app for years
I started reading this cynically curious if Aaron would even be mentioned, but well said.
I found reddit back in 2005 and remember the post announcing that Aaron had joined the team and giving a bit of his background. Reddit was a lot different back then since there were no subreddits.
[0]https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-brilli...
That is true. But a bit later Reddit was joined with a company Aaron Swartz had founded, so he became a cofounder of this new arrangement of Reddit.
His is a story of a self-selected marter. This is an unpopular opinion: he broke the law and refused to plead, then jumped on RT and dissed the prosecution for years. There was no chance they were going to back down.
Why does this hurt me?
Well, Lawrence Lessig and Richard Stallman and the rest of them radicalised me at a young age too. I was their boy. Watching that documentary was like looking into a time-warping mirror!
Maybe every hairy nerd my age feels the same way, I don't know.
— Install AppStore++ for TrollStore: https://github.com/CokePokes/AppStorePlus-TrollStore
— Install Apollo from the App Store
— Open AppStore++, tap Apollo, tap downgrade, choose 1.15.11
— Go to your home screen and wait for the older Apollo to finish downloading
— Install this tweak: https://github.com/JeffreyCA/Apollo-ImprovedCustomApi
Open Apollo and it will prompt for your API keys — Stebe Jovs voice “Boom.”
> If Reddit could grow to the size it had with management that was harmless at best, what could it do if Steve came back? We now know the answer to that question. Or at least a lower bound on the answer. Steve is not out of ideas yet.
Does anybody know what "ideas" he's talking about? When I think back to recent developments at Reddit, all that comes to mind is the 3rd-party app fiasco and the "collectible avatars" and "Moons"/"community points" nobody but crypto speculators wanted anything to do with (and are now dead). Oh, and the death of celebrity AMAs after they fired Victoria.
It just doesn't make sense as a business. You don't need a million devs to run a forum site, you need them to add more and more bloat to convince investors you're growing.
All they have done is pushed ads harder. That is all they really have to offer.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
“I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” Huffman said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”
Edit: here is the story. I changed "he" to "Huffman" since I took the quote out of context of the full story. It's way down almost at the end. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...
Reddit has nothing to offer investors but Paul needs a return so he's trying to make sure someone else ends up holding the bags.
The "idea" is "make PG even more money", and that's a great idea if you're PG.
There are countless things I assumed would have been fixed years and years ago that never have been. For example the trash search engine where you are better off using google with site:reddit.com. I do wonder if it's incompetence or intentional.
Would love to see something in a vein similar to what BlueSky is attempting with twitter clone for reddit. Have a lot of ideas in this area lately.
That's because you're a power user.
Reddit owners figured out that even though the service gained popularity as a middle ground between 4chan and Facebook, they can make most money if they kick out weirdos and cater to general audience, so they're consistently making changes to make it appealing to average Joe. You can clearly notice how they're slowly but surely removing controversial content and promoting userbase growth over everything else.
My prediction is that Reddit will keep growing, but it's simply going to be "Facebook, but for people 15 years younger".
> remember the 2010's when devs actually added new features for users to apps on a regular basis
I am completely off the update treadmill.
I kind of like that their privacy efforts have been trimming back unnecessary features, at least from 3P hosts.
Still boggles my mind at times.
One day, they'll need to squeeze a few extra percentage of revenue to meet their quarterly target and decide that dropping old.reddit.com will move enough people to their revenue optimized new page to get there.
Or there will be a breaking change in the API and they'll decide they don't want to bother supporting the old one anymore.
In any case, the days of old.reddit.com are counted. I already stopped using Reddit on my phone after they shut down third party app. Just waiting on old reddit to disappear to finally say goodbye to this website
The history is often overlooked: when digg imploded/shot itself in the foot, Reddit was in the right place at the right time and got lucky. Somewhere for the exodus to go to. Reddit itself was failing fast and on its last legs at the time held afloat by its core users and that's it. They didn't know what they were going to do and rather than being visionaries in any way really they got lucky hosting everyone with a slew of very standard web 2.0 features. And as with any social site, it's the userbase/community that pulls it thru darkness to the where it is now.
1) It was never the hot social media site, and still to this day it's a dark horse with even some of my peers not "getting it." We're finally seeing it get the user base and mass market usage of other social media platforms. But it's been an extraordinarily long process. So it was never a hot place to work that attracted product managers / MBAs / status seekers that would come in and META the site. And I think even the investors and/or owners didn't know what to do with it, and were kinda content to just ignore it and let it do it's thing.
2) General incompetence. Search broken for decades. Videos broken for decades. Limited features for decades. Inability to make a native app that's usable. Not to say that I mind the UI of old.reddit.com. But that the Reddit team moved so slow to do anything. The only time the acted with expedience was when controversies occurred. Yeah, they're finally rolling out new stuff, but it's only been in the past 2-3 years that dev on the platform has picked up.
But the thing is, this is the REASON Reddit has become as important as it is. A "competent" startup would of enshitified reddit and it would of died 15 years ago. Just like Digg. Instead we got almost a decade where the site looked like the frontpage of hackernews. And in that time, users kept creating high quality text content. And that content brought other users. And it slowly snowballed to the point where reddit is now the place to get genuine human text content on any topic. This is not something that could of occurred in the sort of time frame most startups or VCs operate in. And now they're trying to play a game that doesn't exist anymore (social media in the 2010s), and destroying the site with bad UI, hostility to the primary content creators, changes to the algorithm to prioritize engagement vs. nurturing quality content. It's sad, but I'm happy Reddit existed for as long as it did.
Curiously, eyeballing the search engine wiki page [0] for when the engines I know about started it looks like there was a window in the mid 90s (Yandex, Google, MSN Search -> Bing) and another one might have opened in 2010s (DDG, Bing #2, Yandex English).
People found these companies continuously, but there is a temporal component to when these companies take off.
> ... we wanted to fund Steve and Alexis, so if their idea was bad, they'd have to work on something else
> There needed to be something like del.icio.us/popular, but designed for sharing links instead of being a byproduct of saving them. So I called Steve and Alexis and said that we liked them, just not their idea, so we'd fund them if they'd work on something else.
So PG is saying the seminal idea behind Reddit wasn't even conceived by the original founders? If so, it's not clear to me the post's concluding sentence ('Steve is not out of ideas yet') offers much solace.
But I disagree that the idea responsible for Reddit's success is link-sharing. I think Reddit's success has a lot more to do with the ease of creating a dedicated discussion forum for any given topic simply by navigating to `reddit.com/r/[topic]`. Wikipedia already uses this approach for article creation, but there wasn't anything like that for discussion forums (in the US at least[1])
[1] Baidu Tieba preceded Reddit by 2 years, and Reddit is commonly referred to in China as the 'American Tieba' (e.g.: https://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2024-03-21/doc-inapaxhk7062...)
That combination was killer, but also no longer unique.
And rather than addressing that problem, with this IPO they've heaped on another one.
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite , this and other tools make it easy to manage.
Reddit has hamfistedly broken whatever value it once had as a platform for long form discussion, with the interesting and valuable fringe, hobbyist, and obscure niche forums having been banned or moderated into inane milquetoast. Now, its value seems primarily as a customer support resource for companies outside the US, or as a platform for attracting clicks on other platforms.
Reddit's going the way of MySpace. Unless you like burning money, this IPO is one to skip. All the things that made Reddit great, once, are gone now. There are no compelling reasons to use it; it's slow, intrusive, disrespectful to user privacy, performatively moralizing and preachy, caters to the worst sort of moderation and curation power dynamics, and serves no relevant purpose in the ecosystem of the modern internet. The best and only value of Reddit comes from older archives of scraped content now used as training data for AI.
It's so sad. They really had a good thing going. I like to believe that it could have been a sustainable marvel of the internet of the likes of Wikipedia, if they had just stuck to reddit gold and non-intrusive ads for the revenue. How much can it cost to keep the servers going? The source code for the old reddit seems pretty stable and not like it requires tons of maintenance or the attention of many devs.
Generalized social media is looking more and more like a mistake. There were previously forums, and they were centered around a topic. Then Reddit and Facebook came around and killed those by making it easy to create and find those communities. Now they're coming back. I want a local equivalent to Reddit, without the rest of Reddit. Beyond that, I don't need more social media that has no link to my IRL activities.
Also, the comparison to MySpace isn't fair. Tom was far cooler than spez ever will be.
<lereddit>We did it, HN! This is exactly what I'm looking for. Take my updoot, kind stranger!</lereddit>
"You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed."
https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1bfto4a/youre_being_t...
(Notice the "old" in the domain, because the new layout and all the apps are designed not for maximum utility, but for ad revenue).
There is so much more unoriginal content on reddit now. So little that is interesting or inspiring. It takes true effort to find content that is the combination of Interesting AND Original. /r/all is to Instagram what BoredPanda was/is to reddit: stale, shitty content maintained by bots and influencers.
Weird comparison—user-submitted-link-aggregator-forum-combo was well-trod ground by 2005. Fark was founded in ‘99 and wasn’t the first. Slashdot, kinda, though with more gatekeeping. Kuro5hin. Tons of them. This framing makes it seem like a new idea, like there were lists of links but nobody had thought to attach forums to them yet, but they very much had.
[edit] oh man, yeah, another post mentions 4chan and pals. The framing of this as if we had peanut butter and bread but nobody had noticed we might be able to make a peanut butter sandwich gets stranger the more I think about it.
However with growth, it's just full of idiots, you go to any subreddit for something that you are interested in and it's just a toxic mess. I've jumped into subreddits for a particular brand/person before that I hadn't heard about recently or that I enjoyed some output from them, only to find that the people on such subreddits spend there entire time ripping such thing apart 24/7, why even subscribe to that subreddit, if you hate that thing?
There are subreddits for a lot of things that I enjoy, but as I have gotten older, it's become an issue that most of the users are kids and therefore don't know what the hell they are talking about, I wouldn't have such conversations with such people in real life, but the issue with Reddit is I have no idea who these people are.
Reddit certainly has the potential to be one of the most interesting places on the internet to me, connecting you to all sorts of interesting things and ideas, but it's more and more just becoming a toxic cesspool.
But anytime a small community would grow in popularity and hit somewhere threshold, it would be overrun by the greater reddit population The subreddit would quickly lose what made the community special and core users would migrate or just stop.
And volunteer moderation is bothe best idea ever and the worst. When it works it's awesome, but it feels as if it's only a matter of time.
So when the API changes hit last year, I saw it as Reddit handing me my hat. The old reddit was no more. I couldn't use it how I wanted to use it, at least not without paying. And given that my reddit usage was more habit than value, I made the decision to accept how things are.
I miss it. This PG post felt more like a eulogy than a promise, despite the closing. But I think I'm better without Reddit. At this point it seems to primarily be a content farm for AI agents, both producing and consuming. So maybe the dark-forest Internet is starting to arrive.
Reddit is the same as it always has been, but once a social media network reaches a certain scale, you can't really deal with the problems in the same way, or any way.
ex: Social network has 1000 active users. 1% (10) are disruptive: spammers, flamers, trolls, maybe just plain morons. That's fairly easy to handle, even if you only have 1 or 2 people with moderation powers.
Alternate scenario: Social network has 10,000,000 active users. 1% are disruptive. That's 100,000 people you need to regularly moderate. Which means instead of having a few "benevolent dictators" who can handle all of the content moderation, you need a team of moderators. Who probably have their own disagreements and agendas (like, I don't know, maybe a moderator of the largest picture/meme subreddit using their power to funnel traffic to a site they control while blocking competitors to slurp up ad revenue[0]). So now you need super-mods for the mod team.
It's like building out a business. You can have a high-performing 20-person team where everyone is a strong, valuable contributor. But the likelihood of your 10,000 person corporation, or even your 250 person department, having every single person be a valuable contributor is 0%. The percentages don't change as you grow, but the absolute number does.
The % of HN readers who want to make dumb reddit-style jokes here may be low, but if HN were 100x more popular, it would be as bad as Reddit. It's just the way things go.
[0] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/reddit-quickmeme-banned-miltz...
I remember people on Reddit (10 years ago) used to be knowledgeable and when new information appeared, that would matter. There's just so much ignorance now.
My only regret is that I didn't remove all of my comments before deleting my account.
I'll never forgive them.
don't beat yourself up about this, because they are the kind of scumbags that spend time and money on detecting these deleted/removed comments and then backfilling them.
> I'll never forgive them.
we got too attached and they exploited it. they are abusive assholes, but we need to let it go, heal, find/create new and better online/offline communities (and platforms).
Mastodon is quite nice!
I’m talking about this: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/reddit-will-let-users-buy-it...
It was an option offered. Nobody's hand was forced.
> So it was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19 years later.
Weird take. Doordash/Uber eats/deliveroo are huge companies and it's absolutely the same idea they had, they just had it too early
It was certainly a surprise that he thought it was a good idea to edit a user's comment as a form of trolling when he's the ceo.
I'm pretty sure the article is just an attempt at revising history in front of the IPO.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...
In fact, the biggest innovation of Reddit vs Digg and Slashdot before it, isn't mentioned here at all; you could create and moderate your own communities on Reddit. I guess that is hard to square with Reddit seizing control of so many communities in recent years.
This also completely ignores the fake traffic and posts that the Reddit founders admitted to in the early days and certainly seems to be going on still today. Most subreddits seem to be a shadow of there former selves and feel like ghost towns. The front page and /r/all clearly have the books cooked on what appears there. Brand friendly posts jump up with barely any votes. One or two posts from popular subreddits almost seem to be chosen daily to appear there.
I remember years ago reddit was a lot more like HN. The comment section (even for the main subs) was much more intellectual and critical.
People appeared to actually read posted articles. It was a thing where people would read the comment section before the article because everyone knew headlines were generally clickbait, and you could rely on some internet stranger to have analyzed the article and demonstrate the headline wasn't all as it seemed.
But now it seems that no one reads the articles at all or care for any sort of discourse with people with different opinions. Comments are filled with just jabs and pitchforks. No different than comment sections on news sites. Yet Redditors still seem to have the arrogance that it had developed over the years that their communities are better than those sites. And well, they used to be, but now they're just as bad.
Much of reddit is, as they say, a cesspool. I have filtered over 200 subs from /r/all on my browser due to being nothing but spam, or being hatefully divisive on race or identity, or being a political echo chamber. If it burned down, little would be lost, and it would simply be replaced by another spam content farm.
Example spam submission:
https://old.reddit.com/r/FuckImOld/comments/1bk3ovp/what_els...
Example user submitting spam:
https://old.reddit.com/user/NaturallyFlashy
Notice account age compared with post history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4
Reddit is on the same path, but it's more of a slow burn.
Having said that, and being perhaps too negative, do we know how alive Reddit actually is? Because once you factor the power users that left, the bots reposting top comments on reposted stories, the auto-generated content and the shills it is possible that Reddit has already started its decline but hasn't noticed yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#AACS_encryption_key_contr...
The sub appeared to be working normally, I posted about the Amazon Redshift Serverless PDF, and then Reddit began behaving oddly.
After some investigation, and some guesswork, I concluded my account had been silently shadow-banned, and the sub banned (and then shortly after, deleted).
(Shadow-banning means when you log in as yourself, you see all your posts, and you see them in the threads where they were made. If you view Reddit when logged out, you then see all your posts have been deleted.)
Two years of posts and the sub disappeared, instantly, abruptly, without warning, reason, appeal process or notification, and Reddit is trying to lead me into thinking my account is still active. Make of that what you will.
Having had that experience, I concluded Reddit is not a safe place to invest time in.
I guess they want to hide it from users so their admins aren't flooded with users complaining or something? Or so spam bots keep running in circles? But it's ripe for abuse and false positives. Most users wouldn't know what "shadow banned" even means or that it exists.
I wonder if that was his play, but, again, it should have been equity. I don't care who you are, the odds of you having an impact versus someone else to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year are miniscule. Good for you if you get to join the club, I guess. But if we have learned anything the last few decades (Musk, Welch, Fiorina, Schwartz, Lay, Ebbers) is that the louder they are the more likely they believe their own legend and screw up. We don't like Jobs around here, but he's maybe the last CEO that was probably worth the hundreds of millions/billions. My perspective (due to my job) is probably different than a lot of peoples, I see leadership failures all day every day.
Reddit is the Craigslist of content discovery, in so many ways.
It would be good to go back to a real user driven approach instead of "user driven, when values and priorities are in-line".
I've had many memorable years there, but after leaving I haven't felt I am missing anything special anymore. It's a lot of recycled content, bot heavy, power drunk mods.. I'll cross my fingers for an improvement but not so confident.
It was at that point that I realised all the protests that were happening weren’t going to go nowhere, and indeed that is what happened. Reddit has lost its way ever in a major way in the pursuit of profit.
I definitely would’ve been a different person today if I hadn’t found reddit, sad to see it is a shallower former-shell of what it was
Kills my iPhone XS Max daily though.
The navigation is completely broken as well. Some things don’t close, back button might or might not work, never seems to remember where I was before, frequently rescrolling stuff.
This is all after ad blocking.
Without it, endless spam of embedded ads distracting me, wasting my time. Janky loading, page hangs on clicks.
I’m not sure wtf their engineering team is doing but the site’s basically broken. Maybe it’s the normal state of things. Before I was using some third party app that was working great until Reddit killed api access.
My usage of it has dropped as well. It’s just unpleasant to use now.
If there's a new game launched, where is the forum likely to be? Reddit. What search term do people add to try to bypass genAI content farms? Reddit.
On the one hand, thanks reddit, I got a ton of free time back. On the other hand, that time was previously spent generating value for your website, so not sure that was a good move for you.
Edit: Also, and this is strictly second-hand info from the Apollo dev who obviously is far from an unbiased source, but I have to admit alongside the thing just being objectively worse to use, my views of the reddit corporate structure also soured significantly. I think what they did with the API changes was a boneheaded move to be sure, but the way they went about it was so uniquely shitty to the people who had built small businesses around theirs that it truly boggled the mind. The dev for Apollo posted quite a bit around the "negotiations" if one wants to be generous and call them that in the lead up to the API changes, and the CEO just blatantly lied about him numerous times, in obvious ways, trying to paint him as this entitled kid in such a way that as a millennial, I have to admit I am THOROUGHLY sick of. Reddit as a company simply jacked the price, with barely any notice, refused to negotiate on a single point throughout and made numerous bad-faith claims about the developers who were (understandably) caught off guard.
Like if you just want to close the API, fine, close it. But then that would paint reddit as the obvious bad guy, so instead they went round the back way with this "api price change" that was so ludicrously expensive that no app could possibly cover it, and then reddit gets to PR speak the thing as "well we tried to work with developers" in a blatantly bullshit way without technically lying. It's gross and tiresome and frankly, insults the intelligence of every reddit user.
I can't say for certain if this wasn't the case that I'd still be using it more, as the app and mobile experiences are truly shit even without that. But this certainly has cooled my fervor to try to find ways to use it.
This really does not match my experience of the site. Citations are vanishingly rare and myths get repeated endlessly.
But now? Almost every comment here talks about how much they hate it. I honestly agree with the hate, and again that’s really sad to me.
I truly think it’s the moderators that destroyed it. Reddit didn’t do a good job of defining their roles, and they power tripped their way into community destroying behavior.
Half the people I know who used to run and attend meetups for my city’s subreddit are now banned from even participating in it, always from some stupid petty fight the moderators had with them[1]. It makes me wonder what types of people are still posting there?
[1] there was a big push a while ago to replace the community mods with people who do “social media” professionally. The old mods that live in my city and people know got semi-threatened with doxxing (hey nice job you have there do they know your Reddit account?) and removed themselves to be replaced by “professionals”. Such pathetic internet drama.
Anyway: we all collectively pour one out for the Reddit that once was. It can go to internet heaven with fark, slashdot, digg, stumbleupon, delicious, etc.
And it doesn't help that all major subs are modded by the same narrow group of people. How reddit the company has no problems with that is beyond me. Apparently that's exactly what they want.
The admin are kinder to banning the opposing Red team people who congregate there. I don’t mind this, but it selects for annoying people.
This is further confusing when the site has many European users who are not even aware of the US political game.
(look at the frontpage any day, it’s all Blue tribe with maybe 3-4 neutral animal posts. Why can’t it be 20 neutral things with 3-4 political posts?)
Since Reddit demographics is mostly young and educated, no wonder it's leaning Blue.
(The amount of tankie delusion on Reddit baffles me as well though)
The voting system that glorifies posts that are voted by the community and hides posts that don't go with majority's opinion creates that one-sided effect.
I don't spend a lot of time on Reddit but whenever I do, I always see the most left-leaning naive takes being upvoted massively.
If you excised the startup founder culture from HN (which you cant) you'd be left with a bunch of straight forward Dem party politics guys and a handful of libertarians.
> Steve is not out of ideas yet.
Could this refer to the hugely innovative Reddit live chat (/s), or the idea to alienate many of it's most dedicated users by killing their favorite clients?
>a way to order fast food on your cellphone.
>[...]So it was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19 years later.
How does this not exist?? If there was a further problem with their idea why did he describe it in the way of something that not only exists but is super popular? Has he grown completely out of touch or what's going on?
You could even charge customers food orders indirectly via premium SMS texts. Without having to sign up for an account.
Any "innovations" Reddit has made in the past decade have been making the UI worse and borderline unusable in poor attempts to monetize the site. It offers video hosting that it does poorly, an "improved UI" that it does poorly, chat that it does poorly, some nebulous web3 things that it also did poorly, and now is going to pretend that using Reddit as a training set won't result in a very unskilled, and exceedingly confident of its own correctness, chatbot. Spez has no vision for Reddit, and clearly neither does Paul. The way to make Reddit great is to empower the communities and moderators, and instead Reddit has done the opposite, because - let's be real here - Steve Huffman doesn't want to create a cool website or a useful tool, he wants to IPO and become a billionaire and ride off into the sunset.
Yada yada yada. Look if anything you should learn from this, its this. User experience doesn't have to be terrific. API after a good growth trajectory is less advantageous. There are no competitions for moderators because moderators are a dime a dozen. And you don’t have to make money if you’re growing or are a game changer (wallstreetbets).
You just have to be here for the long run. The run when digg failed. The run when twitter went all the way into the hole. The run when facebook becomes friendster. The run when instagram becomes exhausting. The run when threads starts losing interest. The run when google stops giving good results so you keep going to reddit. The run when Microsoft office has bad help articles and so you must ask reddit. The run when stack exchange becomes a cesspool of tired experts but they find Reddit more enjoyable. The run when all of the memes words like AmA and OP and poopstick are not just geek words but real life issues that pervade every platform… like HN.
The long run.
Now we have a website where all the content seems to be from bots, right before they sell.
I like reddit because it has every topic on it but it’s trash now. It’s not unkillable. Fundamentally it’s just a forum where users create their own subforums.
And, I fear the beatings will continue until morale improves. I just don't think the incentives are aligned with building a good community, anymore, so there's nothing pushing reddit toward becoming good again and many things pushing toward exploitation of the near two decades of conversation found there.
Let’s not ever forget that.
I wouldn’t visit Reddit’s blog and interpret talk about their successes there as indicating that the entire forum(s?) exist for marketing the parent.
And although, the HN forum itself definitely is great marketing, I mean to say that not all the content is marketing for YC.
I also wouldn’t draw that conclusion if someone who worked at Reddit submitted the blog post to a subreddit and it got upvoted there.
Unless it was boosted here, it’s only on the front page because of others voting it up. It’s more likely that it’s the PG effect!
With Alexis: in the early days of Reddit. First was to ask him some general questions, probably. (Don't fully recollect.)
Then he mentioned that they have just created this new feature called subreddits, and that any user can create a subreddit. I was into Ruby at that time, so I created one for Ruby. Didn't use it much, though, after that. I don't know if the current Ruby subreddit is the one I created or not.
With Steve: years later, I was consulting to a new fintech SaaS startup, in it's earliest stage, so was helping them with requirements, high level app design and database design, and forms (UI). I pinged Steve with a few questions about architecture and technology, since Reddit was already at scale, and he replied with some suggestions.
Couple that with their constantly pushing their own (objectively inferior) client and killing the best ways to browse the site, I've really dropped off on how much I use reddit.
LifeProTip: If the idea you pitch is obviously nonviable, be just so adorable.
They called this "circumventing a ban", take it very seriously (as they should, I guess, but COME ON!) and it triggers a ban across every identifiable account that is connected to you, which they achieve via AI heuristics and fingerprinting. And this is VERY effective.
If you create a new account because you can't reach anyone about this (because you won't) just to get back to anyone who sent you messages or comments or whatever, they will call this "circumventing a ban AGAIN" and that will be strike 2 and when you THEN try to get help they will say "it says here that you have multiple circumvention attempts" (to an initially unjustified ban)... etc...
Do you see where this is going? Once Reddit (in the form of a mod having a bad day) has decided you are a "bad actor" (whether true or not), it's completely a slippery slope to a sitewide ban.
If anyone could help me unlock my Reddit accounts, I'd appreciate it (you can use my rep here perhaps) because it's honestly been a horrible development- example- most of my health issues had support forums there that are now read-only for me.
The really unfortunate thing is that I spent much of my time trying to help other people on it, and not being able to do that has felt bad. For some evidence of this, see my HN comments (although this is not really a support forum, per se).
I've been on Reddit since it was new (my original and oldest account dates to its earliest days: https://old.reddit.com/user/lectrick) and I'd appreciate any help!
It's not like their costs go up because you access via the API vs the website/the official app.
/. still exists, and I still go a few times a week out of habit. The level of discourse varies widely, but at least I know I'm usually talking to a human and not an Asian bot farm.
I can't wait for reddit to go public, it's going to generate a lot of drama
we are in the decade of internet moderation, I don't understand why the world doesn't care enough about this problem
Reddit's CEO and COO made $193M and $93M in 2023 but their CFO "only" made $6.6M
So if you eliminate the CEO and COO, they have a profitable business. Given those two have tried to kill the community over and again, why keep them?
ChatGPT gives me most what I got on Reddit without the weirdos and constant speech policing. Which is to say, half baked information and random wastes of time digging into some historical or scientific thing.
Reddit 10 years ago was fun and weird, Reddit now is a safe space meant for a wide audience and so it’s lost most the edge and fun to me. Or maybe I got old.
I am kind of surprised that the idea was Paul Graham's. I always assumed that it was Steve and Alex who came up with it. Considering HN was also started by PG, which has survived and grown with just a few changes every year, I think he has a unique talent for creating lasting online communities. It's not an easy task, btw.
And, most importantly, money
Because, he is not a user of Reddit, or, has completely missed the zeitgeist of the community
Users are outraged with Reddit
The UI is continually getting worse, and is iterating on worse
The Epstein/Maxwell relationship is insane, and previous political coverups evidences corruption at the highest levels of Reddit meant to ensure that only certain things frontpage.
The Admin Mafia is a very real thing
The pay levels of Reddit execs is nausea inducing
Reddit is likely a great example of value destruction.
I hash every string with a SimHash and perform a Hamming distance query against those hashes for any hash that belongs to more than 3 accounts, i.e., any full string (> 42 characters) which was posted as a post title, post body, comment body, or account "description" by more than 3 accounts.
Regularly, this exposes huge networks of both fresh accounts and what I have to assume are stolen, credentialed "aged" accounts being used to spam that just recycle the same or very similar (Hamming distance < 5 on strings > 42 characters) titles/bodies. We're talking thousands of accounts over months just posting the same content over and over to the same range of subreddits.
I'm just some random Laravel enjoyer, and I've automated the 'banning' of these accounts (really, I flag the strings, and any account that posts them is then flagged).
This doesn't even touch on the media... (I've basically done the same thing with hashing the media to detect duplicate or very, very similar content via pHash). Thousands and thousands of accounts are spamming the same images over and over and over.
From my numbers, 59% of the content on Reddit is spam, and 51% of the accounts are spam, and that's not including the media-flagged spammers.
They don't seem to care about the spam, or they're completely inept. With the resources at their disposal, there's such a huge portion of this that should be able to be moderated before it ever reaches the API/live.
They don't care, at least that is the conclusion I've reached after repeatedly reporting content farms. I think they drive engagement anyway so it's good for business at the end of day. I did not do a thorough study like you apparently did, but anecdotally from the popular subreddits, I've spent enough time on Reddit (unfortunately) to recognize rehashed content that's reposted periodically to 'mine' karma. At some point, Reddit will be just a bunch of spam bots talking to each other and upvoting each other's content while humans will be spectators, or their content will be buried. Either way, this will be great for Reddit as it's good for business (ad impressions). It will be bad for Google as they're training their AIs based off spam and they will notice..
I suspect that the objective of these bulk spamming operations isn't to promote stuff on the platform, but to mess with other apps. LLMs trained on Reddit content, search engines that rank Reddit posts highly, etc.
And have you accounted for reddit-isms, such as posting huge chains of "Cat" or "nice"?
I rarely read Reddit, but when I do I rarely see outright spam (I see plenty of noise).
They want to hide certain correlations around controversial posts from long held accounts who otherwise have a good post and comment karma. If one had access to timestamps too then one could essentially see some of the astroturfing and intentionally directed bot spam clearly. Too much data would allow one to see such corruption in very clear ways. And even analyze the rhetorical anti-communication hostility tactics.
Simultaneously this gives them an excuse to ban all accounts productive in communication (via some slight breaking of some rule) with the explanation that they are too swamped to make discerning decisions.
Once you adjust browser settings enough to read the content he publishes, you'll notice that he praises the recent developments at Reddit, so let's just say he's not a guy that follows best practices or understands good UX.
Harmless at best wasn't enough, so let's bring in actively harmful!
I'm being hyperbolic but Reddit doesn't really seem to have grown in any meaningful way for a long time; frankly, it has regressed in many ways since Steve has regained the reins.
Steve is operating with more info than I am, so maybe all his decisions are sound from a business perspective, but as a user I've only seen Reddit become less useful, less novel, less active, and less enjoyable. As a result I use it less, and I know others use it less as well. There is no real moat to Reddit outside of it's user base, if they continue to push too hard I don't see how they survive.
Note: they don't even let you escape the reddit app browser for external links anymore - no copying url (or any page content/links), no "open in external browser". Absolute pure evil UX.
> What's the best "long con" you ever pulled?
>> Here's one.
>> In 2006, reddit was sold to Conde Nast. It was soon obvious to many that the sale had been premature, the site was unmanaged and under-resourced under the old-media giant who simply didn't understand it and could never realize its full potential, so the founders and their allies in Y-Combinator (where reddit had been born) hatched an audacious plan to re-extract reddit from the clutches of the 100-year-old media conglomerate.
>> Together with Sam Altman, they recruited a young up-and-coming technology manager with social media credentials. Alexis, who was on the interview panel for the new reddit CEO, would reject all other candidates except this one. The manager was to insist as a condition of taking the job that Conde Nast would have to give up significant ownership of the company, first to employees by justifying the need for equity to be able to hire top talent, bringing in Silicon Valley insiders to help run the company. After continuing to grow the company, he would then further dilute Conde Nast's ownership by raising money from a syndicate of Silicon Valley investors led by Sam Altman, now the President of Y-Combinator itself, who in the process would take a seat on the board.
>> Once this was done, he and his team would manufacture a series of otherwise-improbable leadership crises, forcing the new board to scramble to find a new CEO, allowing Altman to use his position on the board to advocate for the re-introduction of the old founders, installing them on the board and as CEO, thus returning the company to their control and relegating Conde Nast to a position as minority shareholder.
>> JUST KIDDING. There's no way that could happen.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...
The best part is all the responses by Steve Huffman, Sam Altman, and Ellen Pao, all related to the Reddit leadership at one time or another.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
same thing with Twitter and Mastodon, except I feel Mastodon was far more successful a transition for me.
At the same time, it's glaringly obvious that while the site was build for analytical, idealist, content contributor folks like me (i.e., the type of people who have contributed to wikipedia at least a few times), the site is being converted to focus on content consumption in order to reach a broader audience.
I don't want to be mad. I still use old.reddit and tend to stick to the smaller subs I know and love (e.g. /r/RainbowEverything, /r/flashlight, /r/knolling, /r/ShittyDaystrom), but whenever I click on /r/all, I die a little bit inside, because it feels like I'm staring a reflection of the worst instincts of humanity (both the awful and the cliché), rather than the best of humanity I saw on the first days of /r/all when it was a way to add more blogs to my google reader feed.
We all built a cool website together, and it was fun. I'll keep using it, but I probably wont ever actively moderate again, simply because it's obvious that they have a different vision. I've always found reddit to be the best of all the social media networks, simply because it actually requires people to engage instead of using it as a megaphone. I may even invest in it somewhere down the road if the financials make more sense.
> whenever I click on /r/all, I die a little bit inside, because it feels like I'm staring a reflection of the worst instincts of humanity (both the awful and the cliché),
It really is awful. Maybe worst of all are the “snark” subreddits for celebrity gossip and catty bullying.
But as you also point out, that is, like it or not, broad, and broad is where the money is.
Their numbers look really good with consistent growth in MAU and revenue year over year: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/
And IIRC they are larger than such properties as Pinterest and Linkedin. I use the app daily, and it is full of activity on a huge number of subreddits.
It seems like the only people who don't like Reddit are middle aged men on programming forums who nevertheless use old.reddit.com every day. They've basically created the TikTok of text content.
Reddit Data API Update: Changes to Pushshift Access - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776848 16 comments
Reddit's proposed API changes and the continued existence of RedReader - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35767700 109 comments
Reddit comments and submissions collected by Pushshift - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36038684 294 comments
Since they disabled the ability to search effectively using pushshift, I haven't been back to Reddit myself.
I’m guessing disaggregation will hollow them out by taking away many of the high-engagement subreddits, and only then will one website be able to come in to start the reintegration cycle.
I’m guessing something similar to Discord, but discoverable via search, will be the Reddit killer.
De-centralized, self-moderated, payment options available, the company optimizes the tool rather than the content, etc.
A system like that removes most of the headaches that the current Reddit ecosystem causes.
I didn't know this is true. That's mind blowing.
* Mods dont get paid - Facebook Groups has niche groups much bigger than niche subreddits. I subscribe to both FB and Reddit for the car models I own, the FB groups are 10x bigger with 20x posts. Those mods dont get paid either, and Facebook as a much bigger spam/fake account problem to work tirelessly to defend your group against
* No API / 3rd Party access - well, just try asking Meta for a free API to build an adless wrapper around the Facebook wall, good luck
But spez is the bad guy here and zuck is a saint. Or they're both bad guys but if you think that, then spez is on the right trajectory to easily have a $20b company in 5 years
People seem to be confusing - high potential for profits with building an adless platform that also has succesfully passed the network effect
> This was before smartphones. They'd have had to make deals with cell carriers and fast food chains just to get it launched. So it was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19 years later.
What does he mean here, since Uber Eats, Door Dash, Postmates, Grub Hub, and a bunch of similar startups all do some version of that.
So I dunno that I buy this adulation of Steve.
That was the final straw. I haven't been to the site for weeks for the first time in 12 years.
I remember the early days.. I deleted that early account b/c reddit was so addictive. And it arguably still is. I remember receiving a few replies from Aaron. He was a kid who was living in the future way ahead of his time.
I migrated here though when reddit diversified subreddits.. kinda like when Facebook opened up to the world reddit became less useful for conversation.
And I've gone through a few accounts/handles for the same reasons here as reddit.
Downvotes and even distributed slashdot moderation work to discourage conversation and ultimately engagement unless you garner a critical mass to break out of the algorithm. I imagine post engagement follows Zipf's law. This probably explains why people buy upvotes and followers etc...
No site is immune to this as far as I can tell. Niche subbreddits help but then those tend to be actively moderated. Very specific forums also tend to be better for specific things (like car forums).
Good advice is to never read the comments to the things you post and I guess that means replies as well :) .. It's a weird dynamic because what all humans really need is to be heard..
And yet magic internet points are not quite the correct filter. Maybe AI will save us.