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Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

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Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#821

Post by hinkley »

anitil wrote: post #655
babypuncher wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a great video by Folding Ideas which talks about the issues with secondary services ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI - this is in the context of video platforms) One big 'bootstrapping' problem is that the first to adopt a new platform are the people who are _too toxic_ for the original.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world...”

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#822

Post by rsynnott »

saagarjha wrote: post #354
epistasis wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The degradation seems to directly correlate with the modern-feel of the page. I'm not sure if that's intentional. It seems that modern front end fashion is a huge step backwards from earlier fashions in web development.

It's completely possible to have a "modern" page that is also nice to use; it's just that with Reddit modernness and horribleness have been conflated together and it seems like they go together.

Do you have any examples of this? Every 'modern' webapp I can think of has been an exercise in making it slower and more confusing than its old-fashioned predecessor. Especially slower. They're _so_ slow.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#823

Post by superkuh »

jedberg wrote: post #60
marknadal wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Max, would you be willing to evaluate Reddit alternatives? One is https://notabug.io/ after the Aaron Swarz quote, has seen hypergrowth since it started a few months ago using our P2P tech.

You do realize that reddit owns Notabug, Inc, yeah?

There's also a namespace collision on Freenode IRC. The #notabug channel is definitely not for notabug.io it's for the free code hosting group https://notabug.org

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#824

Post by hinkley »

nisuni wrote: post #193
ppod wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought that the day they crossed the line was when they arbitrarily changed which subreddits were default, removing some (such as /r/atheism) with no real reason. At the very early days of reddit, discussing atheism positively was still kind of unusual in the news. Then, over time, it became a very popular position and advocacy case especially among developers, and new users found the stridency and repet…

/r/atheism was absolutely obnoxious, to the point that the obnoxiousness of some of the users is still a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-this-moment-i-am-euphoric > a community that is still one of the most hated As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

There’s an episode of Silicon Valley that talks about how hard it is these days to be a Christian and work in the valley.

For workplaces, I think that ship has sailed. But it probably won’t help you with awkward thanksgiving or high school reunion conversations yet. All the kids I know hang out with the atheists but I can’t tell if that says something about these kids or kids in general.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#825

Post by gdx »

diffuse_l wrote: post #758
minimaxir wrote: post #16

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…

I only use the webapp, and the "Use the app messages" was very annoying, until I found that you can actually turn these messages off using some obscure setting (which, of course, I can't find right now...)

It's easy to turn that dialog off 'permanently' (as long as you don't clear the cookies) on any Android browser: When the dialog appears, click on the hamburger menu at the top right of the reddit page, then turn off the "Ask To Open In App" option. The option disappears when it's off, so it's not possible to turn it on manually (not that anyone would want to). I've set it off months ago in my main browser and it's still off.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#826

Post by hinkley »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #265
nisuni wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/atheism was absolutely obnoxious, to the point that the obnoxiousness of some of the users is still a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-this-moment-i-am-euphoric > a community that is still one of the most hated As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

> As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians. I can't speak for Europe, but as of 2015, at least, about three-quarters of Americans identified as Christian. There are still large swaths of this country where being relatively outspoken about your atheism is, if not out-and-out dangerous, likely to have a negative im…

I spent some time noodling with Buddhism. One of the interesting things there is that outside of certain places in Southeast Asia that means you are an atheist.

This gets interesting when talking to theists because, if you don’t point it out, many people will hear “he has a religion, he’s one of us”. Many assume Buddha is a deity.

If you do push the point, you learn that some people’s brains short out when you tell them there is a religion with hundreds of millions of followers that doesn’t have a God. The Venn diagram in their brain of Us and Them can’t process this fact.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#827

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

baggachipz wrote: post #803
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself a right-leaning libertarian, and I am totally on-board with everything you said, save one. The more I ruminate on it, the more I think abortion is the single issue that encapsulates the political dichotomy of left vs. right in the US. Where you fall on the line, from "no abortions, ever" to "abortion up to a week after birth, no questions asked" readily defines how "right" or "left" you are, accordi…

> Where you fall on the line, from "no abortions, ever" to "abortion up to a week after birth, no questions asked" This is the false dichotomy so often pushed by right-wing ideologues. Literally nobody on any side of the abortion debate advocates for "abortions up to a week after birth" or anywhere close to that. This sort of boolean thinking is the root of our (especially current) toxic political climate.

It seems like that might be difficult for you to believe, considering the bias inherent in your own statement, but I've never seen anyone on the "right" side of this debate not at least make exception for "health of the mother" or rape. So, to my eyes, both sides of my statement were equally specious. I was simply trying to frame the opposite ends of the spectrum as far away as I could, for purposes of the point I was trying to make.

I think your reaction to this is the very problem you're trying to describe, but, to each their own.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#828

Post by superkuh »

minimaxir wrote: post #813
r721 wrote: post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ~1 million pageviews (according to SimilarWeb: https://www.similarweb.com/website/notabug.io ) is notabug.io+snew.notabug.io (see subdomains section: snew.notabug.io 97.85% notabug.io 2.15%). So notabug itself is 2% of 1 million ~ 20k pageviews.

That makes more sense, thanks for that clarification! However, snew.notabug.io is a mirror of the corresponding Reddit posts w/o censorship, which makes it not an alternative! Shenanigans identified!

As one of the most active users of notabug.io: you're not wrong. There's no hypergrowth.

But the tech has real promise and that's the story here. Of course 'alternatives' get the scoundrels first so criticizing it on that merit is a bit generic.

There's value in federated systems with a p2p overlay even if they're not attracting the money driven crowds. You can't post sci-hub links openly on reddit. You can't even discuss how to handle DRM and bypass it.

Centralized systems are always going to go through the same lifecycle after they reach a critical mass requiring real money. It's not pretty. If anyone can self-host from home or even contribute hosting by visiting with a webrtc enabled browser it benefits a lot of groups pushed out for perfectly cromulent reasons.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#829

Post by hinkley »

kevstev wrote: post #818
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians. I can't speak for Europe, but as of 2015, at least, about three-quarters of Americans identified as Christian. There are still large swaths of this country where being relatively outspoken about your atheism is, if not out-and-out dangerous, likely to have a negative im…

When I was in high school in the late 90s, it certainly wasn't a popular opinion to be an atheist, the few times I brought up that religious organizations were questionable, or seemed to do a lot of backtracking through history, it did not go over well. I kept my atheistic beliefs to myself. This wasn't bible belt territory either, we are talking about a suburb of NYC. I read Nietzsche on my own in high school, and j…

Al Gore got up and apologized for a funding policy theory he had. He thought if we brought the Internet to rural areas that the brain drain would stop. (I argue that with Seattle and the Valley getting so crowded we might be on the cusp of something like what he thought would happen, but with smaller regional cities).

What happened instead was that marginalized people all over the US found out they weren’t crazy or bad. There were people who thought just like them three hours away. So they picked up and moved to the city faster than ever.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#830

Post by MrMember »

Spivak wrote: post #722
jmanderley wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, out of the reach of adblockers or tracking blockers.

Sure, but on mobile people don't run ad blockers very often and if they do it's system wide like AdGuard.

It's a lot easier to run browser based ad blockers now than it used to be. Mobile Safari now allows them and installing an adblock extension in Firefox for Android is as easy as on desktop.
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