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Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

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Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#111

Post by pixl97 »

lvass wrote: post #57

Reddit was great for the brief period of time after internet search engines like Google nosedived in quality thanks to blogspam, and before companies realized people were relying on Reddit for reading honest opinions. Whenever there's some economic interest involved in a Reddit thread (like product recommendations), companies are now flooding it with disguised ads, which is low quality content like all ads.

This is the curse of all public forums. I would add that the ability for bots and spammers to flood forums is getting easier and ads are many times less noticeable so the barrier to entry has lowered and we get even more crap with time.

About the only places that don't get completely ate up with it are so dark and foul your risking other facets of your mental health by visiting them.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#112

Post by joshstrange »

SoftTalker wrote: post #103
joshstrange wrote: post #56

Sounds like another instance of the Eternal September [0]. Reddit has grown and larger communities are harder to moderate. Of course, each subreddit is its own world. There are some that are well moderated (size factors in here for sure) that are quite enjoyable to participate in. As for UI I think we all agree, it's horrible. That's what old.reddit.com is for, it's still a sane UI overall. On Mobile I use Apollo (iO…

Yeah I think it's the ultimate end of all social media, excepting forums that are aggressively moderated to stay on topic. I'm on a few email lists that are moderated this way. Any tangents into politics and memes are killed immediately, even neutral off-topic stuff is discouraged. Usenet is dead. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter are dying. Something will take their place, become popular, and it will eventually die for the…

Moderation is key (IMHO) and it's not easy. I've moderated small subreddits and tried to be an "unbiased moderator" but I've come to the conclusion this is the worst of all worlds. Trying to please everyone ends in pleasing no one. The community-killers (people who can singlehandedly, or in a small group, ruin a community) will be very vocal/loud when you start to curb their actions, you have to tune them out. I look back at a community that withered away and the #1 reason was the moderators attempted to be completely neutral and only enforce clear rule violations. That just meant that the same people walked right up to and over that line over and over and in an attempt to stay "neutral" we didn't ban them like we should have. Tons of people who weren't vocal or were just lurkers evaporated away because of the actions of a handful of toxic community-killers.

HN is able to avoid this with heavy moderation and the participants agreeing to root out bad behavior (with downvotes and/or flags). Free speech online is something I used to consider a "right" we all should have. I have swung to the almost opposite end of the spectrum. On the internet, at least, it leads to toxic ghost towns and more often than not the moderators who attempt to allow "free speech" will overcorrect for their biases and reprimand people they agree with and let the ones they don't slide (in an attempt to not appear biased).

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#113

Post by dougmwne »

I have observed a few things.

-Obvious bot activity has increased, probably coordinated by troll farms warming up accounts then pushing public opinion.

-The Overton Window has slammed shut. Speech on both the right and the left has been massively curtailed. It has been decided from high up that the US population needs a cooling off period which makes all conversations quite bloodless.

-The real organic user base of people willing to invest in participation has dried up. Many niche subreddits that previously had lively and interesting communities and subcultures are now ghost towns. For example I follow some VR and travel subreddits where the participation has absolutely cratered.

My guess is that the above have scared off the high value users that drive novelty and engagement and that the whole platform is a shell just waiting to crack.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#114

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #49
kelseyfrog wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UX redesign is also clearly part of a mobile-first strategy. The mobile site funnels users into the mobile app, and the desktop site clearly echos the mobile design principles. Mobile users fundamentally engage with the platform in different ways. For one, they form a different demographic segment than older users, and secondly the mobile app frames and filters content in uniquely mobile ways. High-signal content…

More importantly, it's very difficult to block ads on a mobile app. Reddit's problem is that the vast majority of their "power users" use adblockers and therefore provide zero revenue. Mobile also makes it much easier to doom scroll for hours a day, key to facebook's success. As far as I can tell reddit's website provides minimal income and is just an ad for their app.

Go to any popular subreddit and click the "gilded" tab at the top. At the top of this page it tells you how many months of server time "gold"s purchased in the subreddit paid for, you will be shocked.

I've seen subreddits with less than 50000 subscribers who had enough purchases to cover 3 years of server cost. /r/aww alone paid for 772 years of server time according to their calculations.

Reddit could go on indefinitely as is with no advertising.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#115

Post by Rochus »

barrysteve wrote: post #94
Rochus wrote: post #36

From my point of view, the quality of discussions is generally getting worse, including here (you could, for example, make a statistic of how many comments start with "I" and do not refer to the referenced article at all). It likely also depends which subreddit you're in; e.g. r/ProgrammingLanguages has generally good contributions and discussions, r/programming not so. Concerning the UX: I'm using https://old.reddit…

The topic raised by a new speaker doesn't always grab everyone's attention though. It happens in group conversations too. I'm amazed HN can still find some periphirally related topic to talk about and save an otherwise dead thread. The statistic of 'missed topics' would be really interesting if you could parse what people were really wanting to talk about.

Very often people seem to just pick up the title and to tell the world how they relate to some key words without even having a look at the article. Since a couple of weeks I regularly check the HN RSS feed to see what was posted; I would consider myself part of the original target audience of HN but find more interesting stuff in the RSS feed than on the front page; from that I conclude that the audience has changed.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#116

Post by spoils19 »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #114
colinmhayes wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, it's very difficult to block ads on a mobile app. Reddit's problem is that the vast majority of their "power users" use adblockers and therefore provide zero revenue. Mobile also makes it much easier to doom scroll for hours a day, key to facebook's success. As far as I can tell reddit's website provides minimal income and is just an ad for their app.

Go to any popular subreddit and click the "gilded" tab at the top. At the top of this page it tells you how many months of server time "gold"s purchased in the subreddit paid for, you will be shocked. I've seen subreddits with less than 50000 subscribers who had enough purchases to cover 3 years of server cost. /r/aww alone paid for 772 years of server time according to their calculations. Reddit could go on indefini…

I'd be careful with that - it's widely known that Reddit admins use "fake" gold to artificially bring content that they want to the frontpage.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#118

Post by pixl97 »

happythebob wrote: post #46
orangepurple wrote: post #14

Dead Internet Theory (DIT) TLDR: Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products. https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...

I spend enough time on Reddit that I think the bots excuse is overblown. I think there's just that many stupid people now who are too busy to think or read at a meaningful level. Social media by default encourages reaction (upvotes and quick comments) as opposed to reflection. Conservatives have been doing a much better job of reaching younger people imo the past ten years, too

Eh, feedback loops exist here for sure.

Countless studies have shown the initial trajectory of a post dictates its upvote/downvote ratio over time. Bots commonly will ensure the first few comments dominate most of the threads views.

Conservatives are reaching younger people the same way candy companies reach kids. By feeding them a diet of sugar shit that's going to have massive long term negative consequences. "Nothing is your fault, hate all immigrants" is a great way to reach someone that can't get a job and wants to blame someone else. It's not going to get them a job, it's not going to fix their situation. Oh boy, but it does generate engagement.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#119

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

spoils19 wrote: post #116
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to any popular subreddit and click the "gilded" tab at the top. At the top of this page it tells you how many months of server time "gold"s purchased in the subreddit paid for, you will be shocked. I've seen subreddits with less than 50000 subscribers who had enough purchases to cover 3 years of server cost. /r/aww alone paid for 772 years of server time according to their calculations. Reddit could go on indefini…

I'd be careful with that - it's widely known that Reddit admins use "fake" gold to artificially bring content that they want to the frontpage.

Good to keep in mind for the large subreddits and to put a grain on salt on those approximations, but even the subreddits hated by the admins show years-worth of purchases, it's also not likely to be prevalent in those like /r/aww where it's exclusively pictures of pets.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#120

Post by SoftTalker »

joshstrange wrote: post #112
SoftTalker wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think it's the ultimate end of all social media, excepting forums that are aggressively moderated to stay on topic. I'm on a few email lists that are moderated this way. Any tangents into politics and memes are killed immediately, even neutral off-topic stuff is discouraged. Usenet is dead. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter are dying. Something will take their place, become popular, and it will eventually die for the…

Moderation is key (IMHO) and it's not easy. I've moderated small subreddits and tried to be an "unbiased moderator" but I've come to the conclusion this is the worst of all worlds. Trying to please everyone ends in pleasing no one. The community-killers (people who can singlehandedly, or in a small group, ruin a community) will be very vocal/loud when you start to curb their actions, you have to tune them out. I look…

I know exactly what you're talking about with community-killers. They don't really violate any explicit rules but they poison every thread with endless argumentation and always having to have the last word. I'm on a forum where such people are given two-week bans to start, and eventually perma-bans if they persist. It works pretty well but they will often return with a new account and start over.

Moderation is endless work if your community is attracting new users to any degree.

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