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Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

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Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#121

Post by josephcsible »

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.

To be clear, it costs real money for regular people to give Reddit gold, but Reddit admins can do it for free. So it's a very strong signal from everyone but them, but just as meaningless as an upvote from them.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#122

Post by lamontcg »

noir_lord wrote: post #73
KallDrexx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To offer an opposite argument, I hated reddit before the redesign and always take "old." out of links. Every reddit looked like a geocities offering to me, they were inconsistent in coloring and contrast and all the bullshit I don't care about. Non-old reddit gave me a more consistent and less distracting way for me to quickly browse subreddits and posts I'm interested in and getting out.

with old.reddit.com when logged in you can opt out for subreddits been able to override the CSS then you get the vanilla and clean defaults everywhere. I use it as my "whoops, forgot to login" reminder.

you can also nuke the subreddit style for individual subreddits when you are logged out.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#123

Post by lamontcg »

pixl97 wrote: post #99
rockbruno wrote: post #6

There was a thread the other day about how every community is bound to lose its identity once it gets big enough, and it likely can be applied to this. Once Reddit caught the attention of the advertising world to the point where people with high karma were being asked to sell their accounts, the entire platform devolved into people reposting each other's content to farm karma. In the last couple of months people have…

The bots these days really put you in the point where you wonder what percent of people you talk to are real. I've seen a few popular comments bots give themselves away accidently by posting the same comment under a thread under different user names. Go and look at the accounts, and they are all the same comments, but generally in different threads. Because they seem to have been human comments at some point in the p…

Those are comment repaste bots.

They look for highly voted comments which typically have more upvotes than the comment they are responding to, but they're stuck under an ultimate grandparent comment which isn't the highest voted comment, and then the bot posts that comment in the comment chain under the top comment trying to farm karma.

They're now truncating the comment so it isn't a perfect match, which often results in "am i having a stroke?" comments under it as they mangle it.

I guess you do that and even if 99 accounts get banned the 1 account that gets a pile of karma can be sold off to social media companies / troll farms to push whatever their agenda is.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#124

Post by physicsguy »

The thing I hate most of it is that every community turns into a caricature of what it is like in real life.

The UK ones are all bizarre in-jokes about stereotypes that are not at all realistic of people in the real world. It’s like people feel they have to say weird things so they fit in.

“Does anyone else love tea? Ho ho ho, I really don’t like the television programme Miranda that hasn’t even been on for 9 or 10 years. Oh god, when people try and talk to me on the tube I just die?!”

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#125

Post by barrysteve »

Rochus wrote: post #115
barrysteve wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right. A lot of articles are paywalled, extermely padded advertising vehicles which people come to the comments to avoid. The audience might be reacting accordingly.

The better and more readable articles linked on HN could demonstrate this phenomena, if the audience shows better comments underneath them. I haven't looked for the correlation before.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#126

Post by colinmhayes »

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…

> Reddit could go on indefinitely as is with no advertising.

I don't think the goal of tech companies is to just "go on indefinitely." Their investors need them to make billions of dollars.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#127

Post by dvngnt_ »

KallDrexx wrote: post #69
0xRusty wrote: post #17

In terms of the UI/UX use old.reddit.com - I honestly don't understand how anyone uses the new default version. Comments are hidden, there are ads and other threads content on the page. It's literally impossible to use. It's such a disaster I can't understand how it ever passed testing. The community itself when you get away from the big main subreddits isn't too bad. The best experience is had when you unsub from al…

To offer an opposite argument, I hated reddit before the redesign and always take "old." out of links. Every reddit looked like a geocities offering to me, they were inconsistent in coloring and contrast and all the bullshit I don't care about. Non-old reddit gave me a more consistent and less distracting way for me to quickly browse subreddits and posts I'm interested in and getting out.

not with RES

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#128

Post by usrn »

TameAntelope wrote: post #13

You call it degradation, Reddit calls it "explosive growth". The UX redesign was hugely successful in attracting new users, users who could then be monetized. The "useless answers" are wildly popular responses because people generally prefer to meme, not solve problems. Your complaint essentially boils down to, "Why do people not behave how I want them to?" and that, my friend, is a question as old as time itself. Fr…

I think they legitimately thought it was an improvement. The guy responsible for it actually started a thread here to show off. The comments were pretty rough.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#129

Post by nvarsj »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #71

All really good forums, in my experience, have attentive and firm moderators. (HN for example.) A few years ago, I moderated a developer forum (not on Reddit) and by posting clear rules and enforcing them consistently without being a jerk about it, the forum was indeed evolved into a useful place for conversations. But it took constant attention; and I think most Reddit moderators don't have the inclination to do tha…

This... so much this. The few, good subreddits are _really_ good and it's due almost solely to a great moderation team (/r/anime is one example). I've seen a lot of small communities die off because they grew and the moderation did not happen.

In my opinion, moderators of an online forum are like the leadership team of a company. With bad leadership all the good people leave, and only the bottom feeders remain.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#130

Post by denimnerd42 »

butterfi wrote: post #74
TameAntelope wrote: post #13

You call it degradation, Reddit calls it "explosive growth". The UX redesign was hugely successful in attracting new users, users who could then be monetized. The "useless answers" are wildly popular responses because people generally prefer to meme, not solve problems. Your complaint essentially boils down to, "Why do people not behave how I want them to?" and that, my friend, is a question as old as time itself. Fr…

It also depends on what sub-reddit you're in. Some are really good, some are BS echo-chambers. It can't all be BS considering how many people are using Google Site search to get "better" answers from sub-reddits as opposed to generic google search results.

real people are better than seo spam but these days not by much
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