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Video is Coming to Reddit

redditblog.com

21–30 of 119 posts

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#21
post #2

What is the end game for Reddit? Control of the videos so they can sell ads, right? Does the benefit redditors? No. Based on the testing so far the mobile player is not ready for prime time nor is the backend video infrastructure. Videos lag horribly and spin sometimes forever .. as if the connection was broken.

None of the videos loaded for me on Chrome with Ublock and privacybadger.

Worked with just Chrome and uBlock.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#22

I think it's obvious why they're doing this - accessibility. In moving r/all to r/popular, image hosting, removing default subs, and now this, they're trying to cater to more people. Four years ago I joined reddit, tried it out for about 2 hours, and quit. I couldn't get past the (admittedly small) learning curve (especially acronyms: ITT, OP, TIL, etc). Two years ago I joined it for real after putting in an hour to…

How does an embedded YouTube video (the status quo) make the Reddit experience less accessible for new users? Chances are, reddit's implementation will be significantly worse than embedded YouTube videos. If anything will create confusion for new users, it's having both YouTube embeds and Reddit videos on the same page. Nobody who is new to Reddit is unfamiliar with the YouTube player, but is definitely unfamiliar wi…

I think you're over thinking how it will confuse people even more.

Surfers/readers won't really notice unless it is just that awful.

Serious online personalities will still use YouTube and link in.

Casual uploaders or Reddit-only sorts won't have to click away and deal with some other system and its rules as well as Reddit's.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#24
post #16
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Tell me which video site has a rich and persistent community? Some youtube channels are less terrible than others, but none of them feel like community to me.

YouTube channels definitely have communities, but that doesn't mean that the community interacts purely through the YouTube comment section -- mainly because Google has managed to make said comment system worse and worse over time.

Often the community itself communicates over Reddit or some similar platform that is much better for communication, but the community itself was created around a particular video site (and channels on said video site). If YouTube had a better way of having discussions, it would likely be much a much better service.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#25
post #8

I've only encountered it a few times but it seems everyone dislikes it. The player is pretty bad. Then again, Reddit jumped the shark some time ago.

Like most new ventures, iterating is key to improving the product.

There's a difference between iterating based on community feedback, and "iterating" based on artificial requirements not defined by the community.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#26
post #18

A couple months ago I found that Reddit submissions using Reddit's native image hosting, a year after its implementation, surpassed those of its main competitor, Imgur (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595212 ) I'm not entirely sure the same will happen with video. Not only are the videos typically posted on Reddit's largest video subreddits are from the YouTube community (and intended for the Yo…

Do you have data about how reddit images score vs imgur images? Right now /r/all first page has 14 imgur.com and 4 i.reddit.com

In terms of arithmetic mean, Imgur submissions do have a higher score (about 20%), but there are a lot of confounding variables in play.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#27
post #2

What is the end game for Reddit? Control of the videos so they can sell ads, right? Does the benefit redditors? No. Based on the testing so far the mobile player is not ready for prime time nor is the backend video infrastructure. Videos lag horribly and spin sometimes forever .. as if the connection was broken.

Video playback experience sucks right now for their mobile apps. I think they can aim for a much better viewing and uploading experience.

Video playback has actually worked quite well for me on the official reddit app, along with Alien Blue. What have you seen?

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#28
post #2

What is the end game for Reddit? Control of the videos so they can sell ads, right? Does the benefit redditors? No. Based on the testing so far the mobile player is not ready for prime time nor is the backend video infrastructure. Videos lag horribly and spin sometimes forever .. as if the connection was broken.

Sure as hell benefits Reddit. Ads are their business and main priority, users come second.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#29
post #11

A couple months ago I found that Reddit submissions using Reddit's native image hosting, a year after its implementation, surpassed those of its main competitor, Imgur (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595212 ) I'm not entirely sure the same will happen with video. Not only are the videos typically posted on Reddit's largest video subreddits are from the YouTube community (and intended for the Yo…

Image hosting is easy, if you don't care about losing money. As long as you provide direct links to images, you're better than everybody else. Video hosting? You need a good player (nothing will ever top YouTube's) and a good CDN. That's a tough nut to crack. Especially for a company with no money.

The proliferation of HTML5 video support in browsers has made the player massively less of a concern than it used to be. I recently led a move of my employer's video hosting (many TBs worth of video) from a third-party platform to an in-house solution and it was quite a lot simpler than one might expect.

Video is super expensive in terms of bandwidth, but the technical pipeline for ingesting, transcoding, delivering, and presenting it is extremely simple now.

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