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

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

#171

Post by echelon »

Anyone interested in building an open source, add-free, Creative Commons-licensed (perhaps not the posts as these belong to users, but the posts in aggregate) copy of Reddit?

My ideal "Reddit" more closely follows the freedoms of Wikipedia / FOSS. Reddit currently allows 3rd party clients to have access, but I envision more - an analytics API, ML tools to train your own consumption / discovery agent about what you like, filter out noise (including comments!), etc.

Reddit functioned with a skeleton crew for awhile. A small team could subsist on donations and build something for the public good.

Something community owned and operated could be of tremendous value, and we wouldn't worry so much over its uncertain future.

Federation could even be built in...

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

#172

Post by rnet85 »

_seemethere wrote: post #161

Why doesn't reddit try to roll out an enterprise product? I'm sure a lot of companies would be willing to pay to have an interface like reddit internally. Most current solutions for this problem aren't very good and I feel like reddit could be a good alternative. (not the redesign though, loading times on that would make it basically unusable)

Doesn't stackexchange enterprise already fill that niche?

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

#173

Post by stelonix »

slg wrote: post #81
narrator wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the focus on the toxic user base is an artifact of the idea of one-dimensionally categorizing people based on their political ideology. That is such a hot button right now that it completely overshadows all other contributions to society in most forums. Reddit, by allowing some bad behavior and anonymity diffuses that ever present political aspect of modern life.

The kind of toxic people we are talking about on Reddit are not toxic for their politics. Racism, bigotry, and misogyny are not political topics. It isn't like tax policy or any other topic that can be debated. There is one clear side that is wrong.

So, your comment is a pretty good example why I find Reddit such a toxic place. It's filled with absolute truths, and if you disagree you're a bot, a shill. You make a rational, logical, thoughtful comment but if you disagree with the "hivemind" someone else will just dismiss you with some dumb one-liner, eg. "How much does the FSB pay you?". Nowadays for example it's Russo/Sinophobia. I'm not talking about Trump supporters either, I'm talking about accounts which seem to be from every direction of the political spectrum repeat jargons and falsehoods without previously being given some critical thought into.

While we only hear about Russia's and China's cyber ops on western news outlets, whenever I look into Reddit it feels quite the opposite. It feels like the perfect place to foment war, jingoism and xenophobia. Just look at /r/worldnews.

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

#174

Post by CM30 »

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…

Yeah. And this is why Reddit's slow change to a more Facebook type setup is so risky for them right now. What the administration seems to want and what the users want are odds here, and the former seems to be on the verge of driving away the latter because of it.

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

#175

Post by danso »

So this doesn't account for mobile native app usage, right? My impression is that mobile accounts for the vast majority of Facebook users. In the 2018 Q1 earnings report, FB saiid that 91% of its ad revenue came from mobile:

https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

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

#176

Post by vatueil »

fein wrote: post #123
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…

And for the majority of the large subs for a specific interest, they are astroturfed to hell and back. Much of the content you see on /r/all is likely corporate shilling with sock puppets controlling the promotion of the item and the comments within. There should be Moore's/ Poe's law for the correlation of the size and influence of a site to the amount of corporate influence on said site. As the natural user base gr…

> And for the majority of the large subs for a specific interest, they are astroturfed to hell and back. Much of the content you see on /r/all is likely corporate shilling with sock puppets controlling the promotion of the item and the comments within.

And even more common than actual shilling is unsubstantiated accusations of shilling.

You could be right, I grant you, but anecdotally more cases of the latter stick out in my experience.

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

#177

Post by TheForumTroll »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #78
cwperkins wrote: post #27

Reddit is quickly becoming a tool for the majority on the site to suppress minority on the site's opinions. Until a viable solution is created to promote diversity of thought it will always suffer from this problem. Reddit is just as bad of an echo chamber as facebook. Please everyone who read stuff posted on reddit, engage in critical thinking after each article you read.

Quickly? More like always. That’s precisely what upvote/downvote buttons are designed to do. It’s their job. Don’t like downvotes? Try a different subreddit. There is always a more welcoming and engaging subreddit just around the corner. Personally I use Reddit for amusing and funny subreddits and so the political bullshit is never my problem. And you can have the same today for the low, low cost of not giving a shit…

You just proved his point of Tyranny of the majority.

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

#178

Post by icedchai »

rc-1140 wrote: post #133

Reddit has always been a strange place to me, even as it has grown to be a cornerstone of socialization on the internet. I didn't grow up with it, I'm still not a huge fan of the layout even after the redesign, the way comments work still annoys me, and there are still plenty of stereotypical Reddit users that I do not want to associate or be associated with. However, I can no longer deny that it serves no purpose or…

Reddit serves as a replacement for Usenet... Now that the general internet population is too technology inept for Usenet.

Still, I miss Usenet.

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

#179

Post by bpicolo »

cm2012 wrote: post #59

Keep in mind: 1) Most Facebook users use the app, not the website, which Alexa doesn't track (Which is also why Facebook doesn't fear commonly used ad blockers). 2) Alexa uses a number of metrics to rank sites, including pages visited. Reddit users load many more individual pages than FB users. In reality, Reddit is nowhere near close to the traffic and engagement leviathan that is Facebook.

It's quite possible that Reddit has many more mobile users than desktop users, but I can't say whether the official app is the most-used of the bunch

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

#180

Post by rnet85 »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #146
fein wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for the majority of the large subs for a specific interest, they are astroturfed to hell and back. Much of the content you see on /r/all is likely corporate shilling with sock puppets controlling the promotion of the item and the comments within. There should be Moore's/ Poe's law for the correlation of the size and influence of a site to the amount of corporate influence on said site. As the natural user base gr…

>There should be Moore's/ Poe's law for the correlation of the size and influence of a site to the amount of corporate influence on said site. For parody subreddits, I think there's a rule that at 80k subs, it starts to become the very thing it was parodying in the first place

Isn't that how /r/the_donald started?
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