671–680 of 877 posts
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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.
I agree that this process sucks. Do you think it's possible to do 1 and 2 without 3? How could a business that remains focused on benefiting free users compete/profit?
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The prevailing "business person" thought is that app users are more loyal (high value) while web users are temporary users that Google will eventually steal away from you when they decide they want to be in your market and want to stop putting you at the top of search result pages. See Yelp's decline as Google started putting their own local results above Yelp and the resulting lawsuits. As a result, most Silicon Val…
It's not the PMs being rogue evil; they (and the engineers) are serving their employers faithfully. Another reason is that a local app can spy on you more (track your location, for example) to collect data to sell, harass you with notification spam, and display non-blockable ads.
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StackOverlow is a small website that can run in a garage on a couple of servers, and that's with a lot of margin. I wouldn't be surprised as well if reddit was two orders of magnitude more than that, but that's still a fairly moderate site to operate. It is numerous orders of magnitudes away from the like of google, youtube or facebook.
> StackOverlow is a small website that can run in a garage on a couple of servers, and that's with a lot of margin. Maybe things have changed, but in 2016 they were running three or four dozen servers in each of two data centers: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...
You can see that most of the servers are deployed in pairs, the minimum to have any redundancy, so they are nowhere near capacity.
Another blog post stated that the servers rarely go above a few percents of usage, they are very powerful, often close to the highest specs available.
I will stand by my statement. It should be largely possible for reddit to serve 2 orders of magnitude more traffic than stack overflow with 1 order of magnitude its hardware. We're talking a couple of racks times ten.
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Yes we all know the logged in experience is terrific. However, the anonymous experience is (was) also terrific for very different reasons. Reddit is next to unusable on mobile safari in incognito mode. Sometimes I don’t want to be tracked. I want to read whatever I want to at the moment, without having that be associated to my name in a database somewhere, and without having related ads follow me around. It’s an inte…
Uh, you know you can make multiple accounts and don't need to even associate an email, right? You can browse just as anonymously logged in as out.
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I agree that this process sucks. Do you think it's possible to do 1 and 2 without 3? How could a business that remains focused on benefiting free users compete/profit?
Why does it have to profit?
It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years. (Edit - as pointed out in replies to this post, this is an unfair characterization fueled by my recent frustrations with the direction the site is going. I don't think it is unreasonable to point out that reddit is failing the expectations of their users, but I don't doubt for a minute that the individuals working…
I find this sort of slightly gloating incredulity at just how "obvious" the things a company ought to be working on are to be surprising. You have almost none of the information required to make informed judgements about whether or not Reddit's product team is incompetent (maybe they're doing way better than they should be under the circumstances?), or whether they're focusing on the right things. There are definitel…
I’m sure their product team is doing “fine” insofar as they’re setting a roadmap, delivering on a fairly predictable schedule, and doing traditional things like analytics, user research, usability testing, and so on. I would wager some really smart people actually.
The issue as I see it though is that “product” will only get you so far if there are platform/community issues. Reddit has an opportunity to leverage their massive reach and throngs of volunteer moderators to build a strong voice for the internet. But I keep seeing the fringe game the system, large communities crushed under the weight of brigading and exploitation, and the stereotypes of edgy, immature users blot out any chance at real discourse.
In my opinion you can’t UX/UI/user story your way out of that bag, and the execs at reddit have repeatedly and conspicuously refused to take on the responsibility of cultivating their platform for success. Instead, I think they’ve throw “product people” at it.
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Why does it have to profit?
I don't know if you meant to be sarcastic or funny here. However, business have to earn profit in the long run, otherwise who'd pay for all the employees, infrastructure costs etc.?
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What would you suggest?
Offensive? Anyway got dowvoted a lot so maybe "edgelords" its the best word for it! Even I should start using it against people I dissagree with.
It’s not the end of the world, but it’s hardly desirable.
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> 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.…
I see reddit as having three levels of censorship. User (downvotes), moderator, and administrator. The users can give a sort of "wisdom of the crowd" analysis that lets them evaluate subjective/borderline decisions better than moderators. Moderators deal with more clear rule violations like spam. Admins take a minimalistic hands off approach only getting involved when communities are bringing bad press to the site, b…
Really? It seems to me that the problems come from not banning things, still: see all the complaints about racism and other "undesirable content" on the site.
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> 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.…
> I think you have to separate the admins, who are reddit employees, and the subreddit moderators, who are mostly not. Admins created automod which delegated shadowbanning to moderators. Who's to blame for that? The mods or the admins? It's an age-old question whether kings or peasants are to blame for humanity's imperfections. Some mods probably would have scripted something themselves, yet admins helped them and ot…
They did not. Automod was created by a user as just another script that interacted with reddit's api (albeit, a powerful and useful one). Deimorz eventually joined reddit and became an admin, and Automod was eventually integrated into the site code (primarily for performance reasons), but that was completely user-created, and in fact a great example of how reddit's community governed the site for a long time in absence of much direction from reddit Inc.