Reading Reddit is like reading an article in a newspaper on a subject you are well versed in ... Then you read about something you know nothing about - while having the ability to upvote/downvote, and happily vote, even if you are not really qualified, and have now forgotten that the facts are probably backwards or wrong.
Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US
321–330 of 609 posts
Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
While it is true that sometimes valid, yet unpopular, opinions get downvoted and buried, most of the times the things getting downvoted and buried are simply comments or opinions that are worthless. They are either trolls, racist, or derogatory comments that I WANT to have hidden from my view. I think the upvote/downvote system is what makes reddit so popular, since it acts to filter out the useless comments that oft…
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Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US
#323The 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…
I wouldn't assume it's not happening on HN too. Think of the value of a prominent HN user's, or several users', positive comments about a product - in our industry, that's probably worth a lot more than the same on any subreddit (or on any blog or on Facebook). If advertisers have reached out to users on those platforms, why wouldn't they reach out to users here? If I were unscrupulous and had a product that HN users buy or influence, I'd definitely try it.
Being humans, we'd rather close our eyes to it unless we are compelled to face it - such things complicate every discussion and disrupt our happy community. And now you know why propaganda and advertising persist on Facebook and Reddit, and in society.
Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US
#324Keep 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.
An absolute ton of Reddit users browse the site via apps too. Something to keep in mind. I still agree that Facebook is larger though.
I don't know the usage stats, but I think the app/website ratio is nowhere near the one of facebook.
Some probable reasons for this (unbacked) claim:
1) Long sessions are more suitable on a laptop/desktop than on a smartphone (the average session time is ~15mn).
2) There is still a nerdy userbase (mostly early users) who prefer to use the website with all the features.
3) The app is relatively recent (April 2016 vs 2012 for Facebook).
4) The official app is not really good IMO (e.g. scrolling is laggy and the UI could be better).
Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 there's no debate to be had on affirmative action, and everyone who supports it is racist and wrong? Plenty of people I know consider it racist. The reality is, how people and groups define terms like racism, bigotry, and misogyny is often very politicized.
>So there's no debate to be had on affirmative action, and everyone who supports it is racist and wrong?
ofc there is. But you can't deny that the people who often pop up in reddit discussions about race issues have no interest in actually debating, they just want to spread their hateful worldviews.
It has gotten better lately imo. /r/uncensorednews got banned a couple of months ago for example and that was a >100,000 subscriber sub run by an actual neo-nazi (/u/RamblinRambo3). It featured neo-nazi imagery such as the black sun and whatnot in its banner. Those people had no intentions of ever having a civic debate about affirmative action.
When people talk about racism on reddit, it's rarely about people who have informed opinions about affirmative action, but rather about people throwing around "WE WUZ KANGZ" comments and triple parentheses.
Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US
#326The 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…
I think it depends on the specific Reddit community and how it's moderated. I moderate a community with 80k+ subscribers, and I put a lot of effort into keeping it on topic and interesting. (And we have community flair so users can add something very similar to a profile photo.
Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> everything being centralised means one party now has control over multiple communities Which is precisely why I started working on a federated alternative that uses ActivityPub to let users essentially build cross-server homepages of their own.
Sounds interesting. Make sure to mention it on here as a Show HN post when it's done!
Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Subreddits and forums are fundamentally different. Forums are linear and your are expected to have read all the post to post in one thread. There is also the old members who nag you into not creating a new thread but use the search tool to comment on an old one. There is forum local stars that control the discourse far more than on subreddits, and the photo + footer customization make them more prone starification an…
Reddittors' frequent insistence on no reposts and original content seems to contradict your assertions I have a bunch of old folders full of funny images that I would love to post but I'm quite sure I will get accused of karma whoring, even though I just want to share funny pictures that are more funny than the current crop of memes
Which is ironic since Reddiquette encourages re- and cross-posting.
Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US
#329Reddit 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…
I think that the industry has not yet solved the question of how to keep a social network interesting when it becomes mass-market.
The problem is that the kind of content and discussion which appeals to everyone also appeals to noone. The biggest common denominator is small.
Networks like Reddit and Facebook are born in a niche and this niche audience is what keeps the quality of content high.
Once the niche gets bigger and bigger, the quality of the content goes down. And the network suffocates.
Re: Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Well kind of...if you're in the Bay Area, you need to be able to compete for engineers with the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook etc. No perks == no employees. Why should I go work at your crappy startup when I could live the life of luxury at one of the FANGS.