Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

alexa.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 609 posts

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#111

Post by slivym »

Shank wrote: post #94

The biggest value gain from Reddit, to me, is the ability to centralize effectively around different hobbies and activities. In the past, if you wanted to find an online community for a movie or a game, you had to find a forum for that community. Finding forums that are well managed and capture a good segment of the community is hard -- and Reddit just becomes a default place to look now. Let's say a new TV show star…

I think the flip side to this is that the communities are becoming so large now that they aren't really a community. I sometimes go on the /r/UK and the level of discussion gets lower and lower as the community dissolves. Rather than getting to know people everyone is just shouting into the void - unaware of who anyone else is.

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#113

Post by tmpz22 »

minimaxir wrote: post #7

Looking at Reddit data on BigQuery, the number of sitewide submissions has been growing steadily, despite the continual drama: https://i.imgur.com/V8AptYU.png Query to reproduce: #standardSQL SELECT TIMESTAMP_TRUNC(TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(created_utc), MONTH) as mon, COUNT(*) as num_submissions FROM `fh-bigquery.reddit_posts.*` WHERE (_TABLE_SUFFIX BETWEEN '2016_01' AND '2018_02' OR _TABLE_SUFFIX = 'full_corpus_201512') GR…

I wonder if an increasing bot population is playing into this. If you believe the premise that "power users" are responsible for most content, and then notice content submissions are rising with user registrations, then that might suggest that either the paradigm has shifted or the content is fake.

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#114

Post by exelius »

xarball wrote: post #103
tyrust wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native-born American with all of my family in the US, I use Reddit for the same category of things too :)

As a dead animal carcass whos insides are torn out and spewed out along the side of the road, I wish I could use reddit for similar, yet somewhat more distant categories too ^.^

That’s a strange fursona...

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#115

Post by TheForumTroll »

pacala wrote: post #102
exelius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you use Reddit the way I do when posting anonymously: I post on throwaway accounts and delete the accounts every few weeks. The account names aren’t saved in the posts, and the posts aren’t linked in any visible way. I’m sure Reddit has code in the back end to track people, but afaik thanks to Reddit’s general lack of ads, there just aren’t a ton of DMPs, so there aren’t a lot of data points to correlate with…

IP, browser signature, topic browsing patterns, linguistic mannerisms. Not too hard.

I think GP meant anonymous to other users - not Reddit itself.

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#116

Post by nielsbot »

emn13 wrote: post #51
iamunr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same could be same for Reddit, and their app ecosystem.

I can't say I'm enthused by reddit-on-mobile. I stick to the desktop version. No idea if I'm alone in that...

Apollo on iOS is good IMO

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#117

Post by falcon620 »

exelius wrote: post #110
falcon620 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the impression they are spending a whole lot on community management. In a way, that's a big part of what I see as their largest problem - they are relying on the zeal of the subreddit moderators to work for free. (They should have a model which allows moderators for large subreddits to get paid. And for the subscribers to vote for moderators.) This is why the large subreddits are so incredibly polarized…

I would go so far as to say that while the moderators of most major subs may have started as volunteers, they are almost certainly on someone’s payroll now as “social influencers”. This includes the political subreddits (actually especially the political subreddits). It’s legitimate user posts and discussions filtered by whoever has the coin to rent access to those moderators.

There's also been a few accusations of r/tesla moderators being on payroll (can be read at r/realtesla).

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#118

Post by volkl48 »

cuddlypsycho wrote: post #30
exelius wrote: post #15

Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you. It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects. I’m still skeptical of Reddi…

> Reddit works because it’s anonymous Are you sure there? Anonymity doesn't really exist anymore on the internet for the average person. Reddit has the illusion of anonymity which gives its users a false sense of privacy so they can act the way they truly are (parallels to Westworld if you watch the show). It would be incredibly easy for Reddit to de-anonymize its user base, the same way Facebook was trying to do wit…

You can make a new user account on Reddit in 30 seconds and don't even need an email (last I checked).

Pretty easy to maintain a significant degree of anonymity by just deleting your account and making a new one.

With that said, most users are more concerned about being anonymous to their peers in conversation than they are to Reddit's administration itself, IMO.

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#119

Post by killjoywashere »

slivym wrote: post #111
Shank wrote: post #94

The biggest value gain from Reddit, to me, is the ability to centralize effectively around different hobbies and activities. In the past, if you wanted to find an online community for a movie or a game, you had to find a forum for that community. Finding forums that are well managed and capture a good segment of the community is hard -- and Reddit just becomes a default place to look now. Let's say a new TV show star…

I think the flip side to this is that the communities are becoming so large now that they aren't really a community. I sometimes go on the /r/UK and the level of discussion gets lower and lower as the community dissolves. Rather than getting to know people everyone is just shouting into the void - unaware of who anyone else is.

I think this is more associated with the fact that all communities (real communities) are small. Try a more focused interest group. /r/pathology, for example, is only a few thousand folks, mainly people working at the graduate or post-doctoral level.

Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US

#120

Post by AlexandrB »

pacala wrote: post #102
exelius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you use Reddit the way I do when posting anonymously: I post on throwaway accounts and delete the accounts every few weeks. The account names aren’t saved in the posts, and the posts aren’t linked in any visible way. I’m sure Reddit has code in the back end to track people, but afaik thanks to Reddit’s general lack of ads, there just aren’t a ton of DMPs, so there aren’t a lot of data points to correlate with…

IP, browser signature, topic browsing patterns, linguistic mannerisms. Not too hard.

Not too hard for reddit, hard enough for the average user. This means that for the purposes of having a conversation with someone else, you're basically anonymous. It's the same level of anonymity that web forums had back in the day before all user-created content started ending up on Facebook and it's progeny.
Post reply on HN