361–370 of 609 posts
Maybe this has to do with Facebook's plugin/commenting system that tracks across the web(?). Possibly social networks cross-supporting eachother, that is... twitter (5,421,978) linking to Facebook and vice versa.
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>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. Is there any actual evidence of this as a widespread phenomenon? The /r/hailcorporate people are among the most annoying on Reddit.
I bet the people who run astroturfing campaigns on Reddit have plenty of data on how effective it is. Wither that data is publicly available...
OTOH, if you know or suspect that astroturfing has a very low ROI, you have lots of motivation to not publish anything, but instead tell the clients: "our ROI is spectacular, but unfortunately we can't show any data or stats because you know, we have to do it in secret, so just trust us and pay us $TONS_OF_MONEY, and it'll all be awesome!"
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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…
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…
You get the same dumb questions over and over plus the “hey guys just joined the club, what are some must-have mods” one picture posts, who never return.
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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…
It’s not a perfect system, but it’s loss better than the next best option.
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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…
What is your basis for saying “most” of the time. This is very different from my experience and I find it difficult to measure as groupthink prevents discussion, so what do you measure.
I’ve watched many subs for hobbies I follow get boringer and boringer as mods try to enforce various rules and start moderating what’s appropriate or not. As a result, discussion kind of stopped. So I’m glad your experience is that mostly racists get banned, but I’ve seen discussions on /r/badhistory devolve into weird gender/race discussions that don’t really have a productive outcome.
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Don't assume forums are somehow freer of group-think because they are less accessible. Once they get established, the existing user base tends to push out anyone that doesn't agree with their views. Some subreddits are awesome, and some are way less awesome. And much of the best, most informative and technical information out there lives on subreddits. Many people pine for the days when only the most savvy users knew…
IMO, groupthink is worse here than on Reddit, or at least the subs I visit. Divergent thinking is often celebrated. Here it's more about convergence to the most defensibly informed perspective. I may be wrong, and these differences are subtle in any event. Regardless, any discussion of groupthink on HN should include some critical self-reflection. Please downvote me!
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
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This is an interesting observation. In a podcast [0], Mark Zuckerberg states that his vision behind Facebook has always been to connect people. To make them part of a group as he stresses that every individual has a need for that at some point in life. He stresses that he wants to make this possible even for those with rare conditions that would require a group spread throughout the world. So enable them as they woul…
> their neighborhood would simply not have the correct prerequisites to form that group (i.e members). Or: wouldn't have the right kind of lunatics in the numbers needed to form a sufficiently reverberant echo chamber.
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>You do need an email to sign up No you don't. You can leave the email box blank and sign up with no problems.
Not anymore.
Just to be sure I just tried it via iOS Safari and signed up for a new account by entering a username and a password. Left the email field blank. Works like a charm.