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

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501–510 of 609 posts

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

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Voat has fulminating hate boners and tumbleweeds, and literally nothing else. I go there and I can tell you this is categorically false. No one's asking you about "the JQ" in the gardening or painting communities. There's a lot of VERY unpalatable content on voat because its free speech and censorship policies allow what nearly no one else will, but to claim that's literally all that's present there is just a case o…

Right, no one is asking anything in those communities, because they’re the tumbleweeds. Voat has fulminating hate boners and tumbleweeds, and literally nothing else. https://voat.co/v/gardening Jesus that’s dead. Meanwhile if you want to hear some skinhead rant, that’s plenty active. Accept what you want, but I’m not interested in the internet equivalent of a Klan rally or a skinhead bar. I’ll go to the reputable est…

Or hell, just look at Voat's /v/all page. I just took a look myself, and I saw page of posts that included two posts from a Pizzagate sub, a comic that refers to refugees as "rapefugees", and a self post which unironically used the phrase "anti-White". I only saw one post that looked like it was from a general-interest sub (/v/JustGrowIt); everything else -- even posts from humor subs -- was unabashedly political.

There's one saving grace, and that is that there's very little overall activity on the site. The day's top posts on /v/all have scores in the low hundreds -- the equivalent page on Reddit has scores in the hundreds of thousands.

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

#502
What’s interesting to me is that YouTube is more popular than Facebook.

I realize that Facebook gets used a lot on mobile phones and that overall it’s probably more popular. But it’s still incredible that YouTube.com is more popular than Facebook.com.

That’s just one of Google’s properties. Google is basically dominating the web.

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

#503
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the focus on the toxic user base is an artifact of the idea of one-dimensionally categorizing people based on their political ideology. That is such a hot button right now that it completely overshadows all other contributions to society in most forums. Reddit, by allowing some bad behavior and anonymity diffuses that ever present political aspect of modern life.

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.

This has so much bigotry.

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

#504
I don't know how it is for other countries outside the US, but in the Netherlands it doesn't add up at all. E.g. Russian social media site VK.com ranks #4 and another 5 Russian sites (in Cyrillic, which most Dutch people can't even read) decorate the top 20:

https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NL

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

#505
post #74

It blows my mind that Facebook is even top 5. Do people actually spend time on the site?

Dude, 50% of the american population uses Facebook every single day of their lives (according to FB's quarterly statements, which would be a serious crime to lie on).

I think he was making a distinction between the app and the site. AFAIK, most Facebook users utilize Facebook primarily through the mobile app. If you look at Google trends[0] for Facebook, you'll notice a linear decline since 2011. I believe this is due to the onset of the Facebook mobile app, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f...

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

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that was a Facebook scandal, while Reddit has movements like hail corporate trying to self-police dishonesty and manipulative behavior. It seems like anonymity should be more of a driving force, but seeing both good and bad social media sites with each model, I'm no longer sure anonymity either preserves or inhibits culture... it might just be orthogonal.

> Reddit has movements like hail corporate trying to self-police dishonesty and manipulative behavior. Self-policing can also be manipulated. You cannot rely on user-intent alone, you need some structural protection against these kinds of things. Although I don't know what the best kind is.

It's not clear to me why structural protection would be better than self-policing, given that both can fairly trivially be manipulated by a wallet the size of a corporation.

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

#508
post #440

I gave up on Reddit a while ago because it is such a massive time-sink. Kills productivity like no other. Atleast Twitter is short and digestible. Reddit can eat entire days. But now I want to come back and see if I can strike a balance. Can anyone recommend great focused subreddits to keep my frontpage junktainment-free?

Your frontpage is junkfree after you unfollowed all the defaults and blocked the ads. After that, it's literally empty.

Now follow subs on topics you are interested in. I do it that way and I only have to unfollow in very few cases due to a lack of moderation or an usergrowth that brings in the masses.

I also avoid threads that get discovered by an audience beyond the initial subreddit it was posted in. That's easy to notice as conversation immediately stops and mindless chain commenters make karma rain over each other.

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

#509
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 2…

Well, I would say that your #1 reason is quite untrue. I can't speak for everyone, but I rarely browse Reddit on a computer. The only reason to do so is because I want to write a long response. Normally I'm browsing from an app so I can lay on the couch and watch TV while I'm doing it.

#2 could be true, but it might not be.

Regarding the apps, I paid for BaconReader on Android over 6 years ago and still use it. It works fine for me. I have no desire to switch to the official app.

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

#510

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. 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…

Good shilling (or "guerilla marketing") is hardly detectable, whereas people that complain about it are trying to draw attention. That could explain why cases of one are more visible (regardless of the actual frequency of either). Good shilling is hardly detectable. Front the logo on a can of coke and leave it in frame (next to a ring maybe) while a couple kisses, post it with the title "happiest moment of my life".…

It's true social media such as reddit attracts marketing, but that doesn't mean everything that could be marketing is. The obvious problem with claims of invisible marketing is that they're impossible to disprove. Also, if shilling were nearly as prevalent as the original commenter asserted it couldn't be kept such a secret.

There may be real shilling on occasion, but the damage to constructive discourse from unverifiable shilling accusations seems greater than whatever the benefits of constant vigilance are supposed to be.

If marketing were really so seamless and even valuable, it would remind me of xkcd 810: https://m.xkcd.com/810/

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