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

alexa.com

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

#181
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.

plus a lot of Facebook users concerned about their privacy installed some third party script blockers. They are probably now below Alexa's radar

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

#182
post #139
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The advantage to Reddit is the ability for other communities to just pop up and potentially fill gaps. Usually once a sub hits a certain level of activity... I leave and look for another one ;)

Community fracture is a huge feature of reddit. Something becomes to big, it spins off in to a new community. I rarely go to /r/rpg or /r/programming, but I love /r/genesysrpg and /r/haskell.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I speak as someone whose largely the sites demographic (20-35, liberal leaning male), so I'm looking at this from a place where I don't feel threatened or marginalized, so bear with me. What's to stop other groups from starting more focused subreddits? I understand what you're saying /r/Politics has a clearly left lean to it, but /r/Conservative seems to be relatively healthy (from my occasional peek in). Even someth…

> What's to stop other groups from starting more focused subreddits? Nothing, and as you point out, many do. At the same time, default is a powerful thing. I'm a mod for /r/cscareerquestions, and while we're ostensibly non-political, the fact that we try to keep a minimum bar of 'professionalism' means having norms that are somewhat left-leaning. As an example of what I mean, "it's less important for women to have st…

That's entirely true. If you want to be in the more popular areas you gotta walk and talk a certain way.

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

#184
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…

Surely it should be possible to run something like Reddit at a profit? Run it with like 50 people. And not necessarily in SF. I think that's doable if you're happy with where the site is, product-wise. Just googled quickly and found a figure of 250 employees from last year.

Honestly, it should be possible to run MANY internet services at a profit if you keep your costs low and stop throwing money at every little irrelevant thing. Reddit, Medium, Twitter... all of them probably could have been profitable businesses if their founders ran them out of a normal office, with normal staff salaries (not in the hundreds of thousands of dollars), with less staff and with less money spent on office perks and what not.

Does every business need to be some huge deal with thousands of staff and huge offices and tons of perks and a staff cafe now?

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

#185
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

Its kind of astonishing to me how no one even seems to notice. Its not so popular now, but the /r/murica used to be a joke about overzealous patriotism, then it became something... else. pcmasterrace way back in the day did the same, now its just a pc enthusiast subreddit. I didn't pay as much attention to it, but the the_donald originally was tongue in cheek before it was overtaken by trump zealots and just strangeness...

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

#186
post #172

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?

Does Stackexchange enterprise let users create sites/subreddits?

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

#187
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…

> 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 o…

I know /r/bitcoin and /r/btc (for those who don't know, the two are on opposite ends of the Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash aka small block/large block debate) toss the word around so regularly as to redefine it as a synonym for "dissent".

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

#188
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…

It's essentially usenet for current times. Which I've always found interesting, as usenet would give reddit users back the freedoms they often crave: no ads, no censorship, no tracking, etc.

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

#189

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…

Restricting CSS and wikis to be standardized is fantastic - it means that mobile users and desktop users might actually get to see the same subreddit.

For my interests, I guess I can't see the value in a mobile user; maybe in some really one-off cases in my interests it would be prudent for a unified view? The most I've seen a Reddit board do is have fancier sidebar links. My thoughts when it comes to having differentiated Reddits are forum-like features such as shoutboxes, hyper-specific file uploads, or even flat-out disabling Karma on that board (dunno if that one is already possible).

Sure I can have a forum with all of these features, but not the ease of use or traffic that Reddit gets. Like I hope I got across in my previous post, still undecided and hesitant on Reddit as a whole, even to this day.

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

#190
post #25
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The continual drama bothers only a relatively minor group of power users. A lot of newcomers to Reddit are casual submitters who neither know nor care about it.

I think the continual drama mostly bothers non reddit users and reporters

I haven't seen very negative coverage about the redesign, which I assume is what the "continual drama" is about.
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