531–540 of 877 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're more effective on a non-technical user-base where a larger fraction of users are unaware or less aware of those techniques.
HN is also a fraction of the size of Reddit, so there is less value in attempting to do so.
Reddit is still great if you take the time to curate subreddits that pertain to your interests and you use a 3rd party app (Apollo is really fantastic.) I mostly spend my time moderating r/CrohnsDisease and making sure the people who post there get at least one thoughtful reply. I browse r/all most days but rarely do I post content or comments outside of my main subs because there’s just so much toxicity on the platf…
I know someone worked for reddit for a while last year (they don't anymore because they hated every second of it) and from what I understand the engineering teams there are a nightmare of groups that don't talk to each other, constantly write the same code in completely different ways, have no common style and just shoehorn in whatever they want. Everything breaks pretty much all the time. All of that is aside from t…
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I'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…
The worst dark patten in my view is 1) growing an online community around a set of values 2) growing so big you eclipse all competitors 3) suddenly changing your values to appeal to advertisers. Reddit is in good company here, notably with YouTube and Twitter.
Ever since the site redesign in May, popularity has been falling (source: Alexa Top Websites): https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com I hope that affected the amount of money they raised. As a reddit fan, the site redesign has not been pleasant. The mobile experience, too.
I know someone worked for reddit for a while last year (they don't anymore because they hated every second of it) and from what I understand the engineering teams there are a nightmare of groups that don't talk to each other, constantly write the same code in completely different ways, have no common style and just shoehorn in whatever they want. Everything breaks pretty much all the time. All of that is aside from t…
>the platform itself hosts tons of alt-right, incel, racist, sexist, and violent content. This is despite being pretty ban-happy in general about topics they don't like. So now they've got the worst of a censorship-heavy platform and the worst of a censorship-free platform.
I think you have to separate the admins, who are reddit employees, and the subreddit moderators, who are mostly not.
The admins are ultimately accountable to the CEO, who is accountable to the board and, by extension, the investors. The admins want to maximise traffic, because that maximises their ability to monetise the users. A certain degree of controversial content is actually good for that as long as it remains below the threshold where you start losing advertisers (see 4chan).
Meanwhile, the moderators are usually volunteers, but there are a few very active "powermods" (or groups thereof) who have control over one or more large default subs. This has allowed them to carve out their own personal fiefdoms. Some of them are abusing this power to enforce their own idea of how things should work, or to push their ideology and narratives. Some others (like the infamous GallowBoob) have even found ways to monetise their influence by getting paid to promote content for 3rd parties without disclosing that fact. This often goes hand in hand with abusing their moderator privileges in order to increase visibility of their own posts (e.g. by removing highly upvoted posts from users, so their own posts can take the top spot in that sub).
This is a real problem, but reddit are mostly unwilling to intervene unless there is a large degree of external pressure, like we saw with the "creepshot" subs that got banned in 2013 after the media picked up on their existence and the one user behind a lot of them.
All these moderators do spend considerable time and effort on reddit.
And now reddit is going public, do the moderators get paid going forward? why would someone want to volunteer for a profit making company?
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They've totally broken "quarantined" subreddits as well. I used to occasionally visit /r/watchpeopledie as a reminder of my own mortality and some of the horrors of the world, but apparently NSFW wasn't enough for people visiting "watchpeopledie" to realize they might see something bad. So they "quarantined" it, which actually means totally breaking it, in my browser at least. RIP. Discussion by others here [0] "I'm…
Yeah the horde of edgelords in WPD totally isn't one of the reasons the sub got quarantined. Gore will always be considered shock content, but the comments in WPD are almost always downright repulsive.
Must be .com bubble 2.0 if VCs will throw that much money at a company who can't monetize that many users after this many years. Not my money, so I don't care, but I do really have to wonder what their plan is. The way I see it, Google, Apple, and Facebook won't buy them because they're not competitors and they already have more users. And 99% of Reddit users probably use 1 or more of those 3 already anyway. An IPO s…
For the second time, of course: https://techcrunch.com/2006/10/31/breaking-news-conde-nastwi...
Reddit has an interesting corporate history of being a startup --> acquisition --> subsidiary --> spinout --> "startup" --> ??