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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

#191

Post by exelius »

CM30 wrote: post #174
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.

It’s going to blow back on them.

The user experience is significantly worse. The entire goal is to reduce information density to cram in more ads.

Guess they didn’t get the memo that this transformation is exactly what drove users away from Facebook.

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

#192

Post by manfredo »

Matachines wrote: post #136

What surprises be about reddit is that they get advertisers and ads while having one of the largest porn communities. No one talks about this, and people are quick to say "Tumblr/4chan is just porn!", but not only is there a myriad of porn subreddits, many of them have OC content (people posting themselves), who thanks to reddit's new profile followers feature have a fanbase. One only needs to look at /r/sexsells (NS…

If my understanding is correct, subreddits that host NSFW material (or at least, a substantial amount of it) get tagged and age gated. I imagine it's pretty easy to let advertisers opt out of those areas.

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

#193

Post by fein »

rnet85 wrote: post #180
TremendousJudge wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Not really no.

It was more of an offshoot of the gamer gate crowd. There were a few different pro Trump subs; TD just so happened to be the one that took off.

It is a pretty honest sub though; It's supposed to be a non stop Trump rally - clearly subversive content and discourse will be banned and removed.

Source: was there when the original mod drama was kicking off at around 30k subs. Can't remember the guys username but he got booted once the sub took off (around 100k subs) and its almost certainly run by mods on the campaign dole currently.

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

#194

Post by city41 »

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…

> and relatively ad-free

The redesign that's currently in beta seems to mostly be driven by the desire to embed more ads. Instead of just one ad at the top of the page, there's new several spread throughout the feed, very similar to Twitter's promoted tweets.

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

#195

Post by bradlys »

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 it's okay to some extent but I find that forums definitely are a much better resource and controversial threads or posts in forums don't get buried or hidden by a downvote. Some of the most humorous threads you'll read would have had a -inf rating and thus never seen on reddit.

To me, reddit seems a great way for a community to reinforce groupthink.

Instances I can think of are forums for motorcycles, cars, photography, and certain tech forums. The ability to nest down by topic rather than having one giant page for say all of BMW cars is what I like about forums. /r/BMW is basically worthless to me as it's just picture sharing. I also dislike reddit because it's hard to remember a name constantly. It's easier when there's a little profile picture next to the name. You go, "oh yeah, that guy. He's helpful." You remember those posters more often.

Never been a big fan of reddit as it feels pretty shallow in comparison to forums and getting to actually know fellow members decently feels rare.

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

#196

Post by acdha »

TheForumTroll wrote: post #169
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #90

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…

I find it quite amusing that you two see "reddit downvote conservative posts" and "/r/politics having a clearly left lean". I stopped using Reddit because of two things: Everything is extremely US-centric and everything is clearly right leaning. I guess it depends on your point of view. At least as a European I can't recognize the left-lean at all.

The use of “left” by American conservatives doesn’t have a meaning beyond “political opponent”. The absence of an organized movement means people just assume that everything they dislike is “left”.

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

#197

Post by icebraining »

silentsea90 wrote: post #154
xarball wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ^.^

This made me lol at work. Don't know why this is getting downvoted

Your first phrase answers the second. Humor is only upvoted in HN if it provokes a wry smile.

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

#198

Post by aldoushuxley001 »

jerf wrote: post #100
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.

I laid out some ideas what appears to be 79 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16570017 In a nutshell, one of key aspects of the reddit system is that an upvote arrow affects everybody equally, so the majorities affect whether something is negative or positively rated. When you take that into account for where and whether you show a post, the net effect is that at scale you pretty much guarantee that the…

That would be done much more effectively using a graph database, as it would simplify the calculations immensely. But I think the reason people aren't doing this is certainly the computation required.

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

#199

Post by exelius »

falcon620 wrote: post #117
exelius wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I know someone who is a mod for a couple major subs and he absolutely does paid placements (he has his own bot network for everything, but being a mod his shill posts don’t get deleted).

Mods don’t necessarily use their mod power itself for profit, but knowing how the sub works and what users like is very powerful. So is ignoring obvious upvote botnets because they belong to you or another mod.

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

#200

Post by barkingcat »

bradlys wrote: post #195
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 it's okay to some extent but I find that forums definitely are a much better resource and controversial threads or posts in forums don't get buried or hidden by a downvote. Some of the most humorous threads you'll read would have had a -inf rating and thus never seen on reddit. To me, reddit seems a great way for a community to reinforce groupthink. Instances I can think of are forums for motorcycles, cars, p…

But there is a giant subreddit for all BMW cars...
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