The free speech part of Voat is great. I don't think it's so much overrun as that the only people there are the ones with radical opinions. I wouldn't use Voat for other reasons, but that's just me.
I will never understand this romanticising of free speech on private platforms. Why would a service that cares about its members _ever_ implement free speech policies? That's just asking for assholes. If anything, popular services should have _more_ filtering and removal of asshole users.
Too many mods can be just as destructive as too few. Look at what happened to SomethingAwful.
If you are going to re-design a site like reddit, your best bet is to keep the old version in place, but allow people to also view all of the same content in the "new" design. For example, release the new design on new.reddit.com and let viewers migrate over to it at their own pace. Once you have a lot of people using the new reddit instead of the old design, you can migrate the old reddit to old.reddit.com and put t…
I hope they keep the old design and prioritize on fixing the implementation from a resource-usage perspective.
Reddit pages use a ton of RAM and CPU compared to sites like HN. Some of that is understandable considering the features they strive to support, but some of it is honestly just something that can be better engineered.
They already did -- the official reddit mobile app, and default mobile skin of the site, are already close to what's being described, and mobile use of reddit is pretty heavy. If it were going to cause a mass exodus, it would've already.
Who actually uses the official reddit mobile app? RIF is king on android, baconreader is decent. Alien Blue reigns on iOS.
Alien Blue is gone, I think. Reddit acquired and replaced with their app. Which currently has 5 stars and 700+ reviews, fwiw.
Reddit does make money though - Gold sales alone started paying for the servers after the admins added a meter to the side of the homepage that showed a daily "goal" to pay for server time. At the time, it was posited as an opportunity for the community to fund their own party. Of course, the monetization train just kept rolling from there - starting with AMAs, now (according to some) with sponsored content embedded…
Server time doesn't pay employees.
Good point! I'll admit my bias, I pretty much lost faith in the site's administration after they bungled the monetization of AMAs so poorly. It was exactly as predicted: AMA was the most obviously monetizable community, and was completely ruined in the process. The administrator who ran them quit over it and the quality has never recovered. I don't even bother reading most celebrity AMAs anymore because they're either a transparent advertisement or/and clearly written by someone with no understanding of reddit.
The management just seems to "miss the point" so often. The best AMAs in the early years were by a vacuum cleaner repair technician, not a movie star.
> Still, he says making money is “not our top priority,” estimating the company spends only about 20 percent of its resources on its advertising business. Huffman declined to share revenue totals. The company is also not profitable. I can't imagine giving $200M to a group of people who publicly say they're not focused on ensuring I get it back. Is this a VC investment or a charity? Also, have they not achieved profit…
A huge amount of reddit users (I think 70%+) use ad blockers.
Not true. Source: I was the ads PM not too long ago.
I think if there's a mass exodus from Reddit and the choice is Voat or something not Voat, the majority will choose not-Voat. If Voat hadn't absorbed much of the subreddits rejected for extreme and hate speech, then it would have a chance at growing with a more natural makeup. As it is now, any community that moved there would have to accept that there's a much higher percentage of extremist views there than present…
Agreed. If there's any migration it will likely be towards more actively moderated forums - if you just want to talk about slow cooker recipes you're probably not hoping that it comes with a side of genocide advocacy. Reddit has been an interesting exercise in shaping online communities, and the zeitgeist has changed in response. Where extremist views were originally approached on the basis of maximum tolerance, the…
I'm a little confused why I'm getting upvoted and you're getting downvoted, when we're essentially saying the same thing. All you've done extra is explain what Reddit already did, and opine on what you think it means for future trends, yet it somehow it tickles people very differently. Odd.
>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath. >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new users come to Reddit the…
> I fear this major re-design will be a mistake.
The awful mobile app/site justifies this opinion. If there weren't alternative mobile apps then I would already have left reddit.
Here's hoping we can go with something more distributed and standards based this time so we don't have to keep jumping from ship to ship like this.