Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is 5th most visited website in US and definitely one of the biggest in terms of raw text UGC. You can find anything you want there if you look long enough.
UCG?
User Generated Content
Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
221–230 of 877 posts
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#222I've given up most social media but have become obsessed with Reddit. No matter how much I use it, I'm constantly amazed that I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about. I'm not a fan of the redesign or their push to look at other social media platforms, but I understand the direction they have to go to build revenue.
You are describing reddit 8 years ago. Reddit today is a mess of political propaganda and fake content. Hardly anything knowledgable or interesting. Certainly the only "enthusiastic" people are the hordes of democratic party employees and trump supporters. Every else is just exhausted by it.
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#223It might soon be time for The Oatmeal to add a new panel to his famous "Digg vs. Reddit" cartoon: https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter_2012/reddit_digg I love Reddit and have no problem with this move in principle, though I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent." I'm not a big believer in crypto, but Reddit seems like one of th…
> I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent."
I worked at reddit for 4 years, but quit in 2016, largely because they were clearly beginning to switch from a small, fairly independent company (despite being owned by Advance/Conde) to one that was going to become completely dependent on venture capital and I knew what that would end up doing to the site.
A few months later, I decided to start a non-profit and start working on a site that would be able to address a lot of the issues that I think are hurting online communities: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of the announcement here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)
It's in private alpha and is still fairly small, but it gets several hundred posts/comments a day and is progressing steadily. If you (or anyone else) is interested in an invite, send me an email at the address listed in the blog post and I'll be happy to give you one.
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've noticed this as well. Really annoying. Or any website that immediately pops up a "sign up for our email list!" and blocks you from seeing the content. Isn't there a ton of data that most people don't even use many apps anymore? Or they install them once and then uninstall them or ignore them? I hope we can move towards a web that stays in the web browser. Apps are becoming really annoying, especially for interac…
>Isn't there a ton of data that most people don't even use many apps anymore? Or they install them once and then uninstall them or ignore them? That doesn't mean the app can't exfiltrate data (presumably data useful to advertisers) in the background.
The browser is a client that works for the user (well, Google, Apple, and Microsoft muddy the waters).
The mobile app is a program that works for the developer.
The end result of browsers becoming more adtech-hostile and user-friendly is that more companies turn to mobile apps.
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
2 things about Reddit's "use our app instead!" buttons: 1. They cycle through a couple of different messages, and the buttons get switched around 2. The wording is such that you read it twice and still aren't sure which button will just take you to the damn website I don't mind them promoting their app, but these dark patterns truely rile me
I do mind them promoting their app, it’s a horrible app and they’ve continually ruined their website. The only way I can stand to use reddit anymore is through Narwhal, at least until they kill their 3rd party apps API.
Yeah, I use their app on android and it's pretty bad. There's currently a bug that seems to get fixed and then reappear where if someone responds to your comment, you get an alert and when you click on the alert it takes you to the comment, but if the comment is too nested, it just takes you to the top of the thread. This makes responding to a comment in any thread with over 100 comments near impossible. Because of that, I'm using the web app currently and it's really annoying to be constantly pushed back toward a broken app.
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's good news. I hope it makes them rethink their relationship to their users. Well, otherwise, tildes is looking great.
Every time I see someone mention tildes as an alternative to reddit I check it out to see if I can create an account yet. For [edit] almost a year now the answer has been "no."
Tildes only started last May. Where were you checking for the several years before that?
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#227I've given up most social media but have become obsessed with Reddit. No matter how much I use it, I'm constantly amazed that I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about. I'm not a fan of the redesign or their push to look at other social media platforms, but I understand the direction they have to go to build revenue.
Reddit is basically Usenet 2.0, this time with moderation! The same rules apply. The bigger the community the lower the signal-to-noise ratio. Also, the more political or religious the community the more strident the users will be. The echo chamber effect is huge. The biggest difference is that Reddit mostly has spam under control, something the Usenet could never claim. Also, it's much less efficient under the hood,…
Sorry, this is not true. There were Usenet providers where you got practically zero spam and no false positives.
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've noticed this as well. Really annoying. Or any website that immediately pops up a "sign up for our email list!" and blocks you from seeing the content. Isn't there a ton of data that most people don't even use many apps anymore? Or they install them once and then uninstall them or ignore them? I hope we can move towards a web that stays in the web browser. Apps are becoming really annoying, especially for interac…
>Isn't there a ton of data that most people don't even use many apps anymore? Or they install them once and then uninstall them or ignore them? That doesn't mean the app can't exfiltrate data (presumably data useful to advertisers) in the background.
I thought modern OSes now pop up notification icons when this happens, so you can detect and punish apps that do that. Doesn't stop them from getting a snapshot of your system on first run, though.
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#229It amazes me that a fourteen year old company with a mature business model requires equity financing. I'll never really understand how tech companies work, I guess.
That's mostly because they DO NOT have a mature business model. Reddit struggles because their main source of revenue, ads, performs poorly on the generally tech savvy audience that makes up the core of their platform. They have been trying to figure out for literally the entire life of the company how to turn a top 10 visited website into actual consistent and repeatable revenue. You'd think it be pretty simple but look how much push back they've gotten on even relatively benign monetization strategies.
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#230I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem. The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push…
There are so many more issues with Reddit, I'm surprised they haven't been digg'd or myspace'd yet.
As soon as a viable alternative pops up that doesn't seem tailor made for racists, I'm there. So far every competitor I've seen pop up seems to think Reddit's biggest problem is their (rather weak) stance against hate speech and user harassment, and not all the actual problems being discussed here.