As a long, long time user of Reddit, it has been quite saddening to see its descent into the shallow, ultra-toxic husk of a corporate entity that it is today. I'm not surprised by its popularity; it's a headline-surfers paradise, one in which you get feel good points for displays of virtue or shitposting easily digested content in an era of unparalleled narcissism and shortened attention spans. All is not lost though…
also 10 year club, defaults are full of stupid memes and what is popular right now but there are tons of great smaller subreddits that i read daily.
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…
subreddit flairs help with personifying, and you can tag people. Eventually you remember usernames of frequent commenters.
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 offic…
The problem is not the salaries or the perks that drives the unprofitability, it's simply the investment model. If you're backed by venture capital, you're goal is to get to an exit 500x larger than the investment ($2M round; VCs don't invest unless they think they may make $1B+). That requires people to focus on growth and world-eating more than any respectable-in-the-moment profitability numbers.
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…
Unfortunately, those two things are also Reddit's problems. For starters, everything being centralised means one party now has control over multiple communities, which allows for censorship that wasn't there in the days of separate forums. And tying identities together... well that's probably why there's so much drama online now. Because everyone presents themselves differently to different groups in the real world,…
One of the major issues not often discussed is the "powermods", or the small subset of users who are the moderators of a huge number of subreddits. They can and often do enforce their biases on multiple unrelated communities. Reddit's moderators selection process ensures that they cannot be replaced even if a majority of the community don't support them without creating a brand new subreddit.
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.
> Most Facebook users use the app, not the website
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…
What does "toxic user" mean in this context? How do they differ from a "non-toxic" user?
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…
For all the yapping everyone does about decentralizing everything, you're arguing that centralizing every community on the internet is a good thing.
As a long, long time user of Reddit, it has been quite saddening to see its descent into the shallow, ultra-toxic husk of a corporate entity that it is today. I'm not surprised by its popularity; it's a headline-surfers paradise, one in which you get feel good points for displays of virtue or shitposting easily digested content in an era of unparalleled narcissism and shortened attention spans. All is not lost though…
I am also a long time reddit user, 10 or so years at this point. It's not obvious to me that reddit is particularly different than it was in the past. There's just more of it now.
As another long time (10 year) reddit user: agreed.
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.
Few Reddit users actually crave that, hence the success of Reddit. Neo-Nazis for one example, do crave that, because otherwise they’re shut down. If you want unfettered freedom, try Voat, it’s downright pestilential, but it’s free.
Disagree. I think many people want ad-free, untracked experiences. Censorship is a value that different communities have different opinions on, but for some reason often drowns the debate on alternative communities.