Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#41

Post by artmageddon » Thu, Aug 06, 2015, 2:43 PM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #10

rndn wrote: post #3

Reddit is pretty much a case study of upbringing without effective punishment. In real life kids behave because they have skin in the game—if they misbehave, they are not allowed ice cream. On the contrary, if you are banned from reddit, you can simply reset your browser and create a new account. I doubt you can fix reddit with a smarter design, because that won’t change the troublemakers. To fix reddit, you would po…

Upbrining without punishment definitely is definitely possible and practiced semi widely (google around). Punishment is a pretty bad way to address misbehaviour.

> Punishment is a pretty bad way to address misbehaviour.

As someone who's anticipating having kids in a few years, I'm genuinely curious as to what a better approach is.

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#42

Post by xienze » Thu, Aug 06, 2015, 2:45 PM UTC

seiji wrote: post #21

rndn wrote: post #3

Reddit is pretty much a case study of upbringing without effective punishment. In real life kids behave because they have skin in the game—if they misbehave, they are not allowed ice cream. On the contrary, if you are banned from reddit, you can simply reset your browser and create a new account. I doubt you can fix reddit with a smarter design, because that won’t change the troublemakers. To fix reddit, you would po…

Reddit has this strange power inversion dynamic where the users think they are entitled to run the site. It's a complete illusion they have for themselves to feel more special. Reddit is a billion dollar company and unless you are in corporate management, you have no say. You can have opinions and attempt to have influence, but you have no flat out rights unless you are a decision maker at the corporation. Reddit is…

> Reddit has this strange power inversion dynamic where the users think they are entitled to run the site.

To be fair, Reddit isn't what it is without the users. So there is some legitimate amount of power that the users have.

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#43

Post by tempVariable » Thu, Aug 06, 2015, 2:46 PM UTC

puranjay wrote: post #33

boldpanda wrote: post #19

As a Reddit user and advertiser, I was disappointed when they doubled their ad CPM's in June without notice to advertisers (as mentioned in the article). I can understand incrementally increasing the price with demand, but doubling the cost of CPM's without notice is a big fuck you to advertisers. Now they're more expensive than Facebook and with less targeting capability and you can't change or edit your ads once th…

Question: What has been your experience with Reddit ads? I've heard that they are barely profitable for anyone save a few niche industries.

I'm not not parent, but - I've purchased a few time-blocks for a different campaigns over last few years and it brought in significant traffic, a bit more conversions, but despite being able to target a subreddit, it is still hard to get your money's worth if you are promoting a brick and mortar store. Unless that store offers tangible goods sold online as well. Location constrained and in-person transaction type of services saw less of a bump in revenue. That is probably true for online advertising overall. My 2 cents

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#44

Post by belenos46 » Thu, Aug 06, 2015, 2:48 PM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #10

rndn wrote: post #3

Reddit is pretty much a case study of upbringing without effective punishment. In real life kids behave because they have skin in the game—if they misbehave, they are not allowed ice cream. On the contrary, if you are banned from reddit, you can simply reset your browser and create a new account. I doubt you can fix reddit with a smarter design, because that won’t change the troublemakers. To fix reddit, you would po…

Upbrining without punishment definitely is definitely possible and practiced semi widely (google around). Punishment is a pretty bad way to address misbehaviour.

Yeah, says everyone except every reputable psychologist ever, and any parent who hasn't raised an out of control little monster of a child.

Negative reinforcement works better than any other form of reinforcement, except when paired with positive reinforcement for desired behaviors, just like innumerable studies and common goddamned sense tell you.

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#45

Post by crusso » Thu, Aug 06, 2015, 2:48 PM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #10

rndn wrote: post #3

Reddit is pretty much a case study of upbringing without effective punishment. In real life kids behave because they have skin in the game—if they misbehave, they are not allowed ice cream. On the contrary, if you are banned from reddit, you can simply reset your browser and create a new account. I doubt you can fix reddit with a smarter design, because that won’t change the troublemakers. To fix reddit, you would po…

Upbrining without punishment definitely is definitely possible and practiced semi widely (google around). Punishment is a pretty bad way to address misbehaviour.

My first thought was that your comment was a little out there, but then I realized that I'm not that big on punishment with my own kids. I just let life punish them and stand by to assist them if they're in over their heads as well as to advise them on how to avoid future pitfalls.

Punishment that I would inflict would be fairly orthogonal to the real hazards that they'll face in life, so I haven't seen much point in it. I guess I'm more of a hippie than I thought. ;)

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#46

Post by morley » Thu, Aug 06, 2015, 2:49 PM UTC

Grue3 wrote: post #12

A well-managed site wouldn't grow on the Internet. Look at Tumblr, Reddit, 4chan, they became some of the biggest communities on the internet precisely because they were "everything goes", whereas Something Awful or Metafilter fell into obscurity (and SA became big in the first place when it was less restrictive). The less you "manage", the more likely your site will end up in Alexa top 100.

You named three sites. The top 10 is Google, Facebook, Amazon, Youtube, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Ebay, Craigslist, Twitter, and Reddit. I would call three of those (Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Reddit) "unmanaged," although that's a stretch. That's hardly "more likely" than the 7 "managed" sites.

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#47

Post by zeteo » Thu, Aug 06, 2015, 2:51 PM UTC

The article is terribly condescending towards Reddit's founders and moderators. They have created and grown it to be in the top 10 of US websites. The site is still growing very strongly. Yet they're presented as an immature bunch who have no idea what they're doing and need "adult" supervision, e.g.

> Those cats can't run anything

> in retrospect, one flaw with [Condé Nast]’s hands-off approach was an assumption that Reddit’s founders would know when and how to ask for help. [...] Looking back [...] more hand-holding would have been a good idea.

Articles like this are a barely veiled attempt to put pressure on Condé Nast and the other owners - Reddit needs to be instilled with a corporate, PR-oriented mentality ASAP. Its spirit of "open discourse and peer-to-peer learning" is incomprehensible to corporate America. On the other hand, the impressive user base seems ripe for more aggressive monetization. So the old deal has become inconvenient:

> During the courtship of Reddit [...] the company promised that if the deal went through, it would leave the founders alone to run the site with minimal interference

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#48

Post by ihuman » Thu, Aug 06, 2015, 2:52 PM UTC

silverlake wrote: post #20

Who ran Reddit between 2009, when Alexis and Steve left, to whenever Yishan became CEO?

According to Wikipedia's Reddit timeline[1], they didn't have a CEO until Yishan became the CEO. I'm assuming they had some sort of leader before Yishan, however.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit#Full_timeli...

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#49

Post by herge » Thu, Aug 06, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

nadams wrote: post #13

mahouse wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it me or this is stupid? I mean, this is the digital world, you can make as many copies as you want, so if you give them a licence to whatever they want with it, what are your options after submitting something?

You could stamp everyone of your posts with a CC-NC license. Since the content is yours - I don't think they can magically wave the CC-NC license on the basis that you uploaded it to their site.

If you use their service, you first have to agree to their terms. You can put any magical gobledy-gook in your text, but your 'active' (if only by clicking on a button) acceptance of their terms will hold up better in court. Same as for this text right here and the good folks at ycombinator.

Now for your own content hosted on your own site that you control, it's a whole other story.

Re: Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

#50

Post by seiji » Thu, Aug 06, 2015, 2:59 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #42

seiji wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has this strange power inversion dynamic where the users think they are entitled to run the site. It's a complete illusion they have for themselves to feel more special. Reddit is a billion dollar company and unless you are in corporate management, you have no say. You can have opinions and attempt to have influence, but you have no flat out rights unless you are a decision maker at the corporation. Reddit is…

> Reddit has this strange power inversion dynamic where the users think they are entitled to run the site. To be fair, Reddit isn't what it is without the users. So there is some legitimate amount of power that the users have.

HN is a user driven site and the users have zero power.