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Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

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Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#71

Post by cannonedhamster »

samdoidge wrote: post #36
dspillett wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that's why HN is only good for a very specific and narrow subtopic of the whole reddit universe. Which is a good thing IMO. Not everything needs to be the next (or just another) digg/reddit/whatever. HN deliberately has a more specific focus than that of reddit, it is a feature not a flaw (if you watn everything to be reddit, then perhaps you would consider it a flawed feature). > You can't even have decent pol…

> Complaining that you can't have the political discussion that you want on a forum where politics is officially off-topic, is like complaining that you can't have the bacon cheese burger (with real pig and cow involved) that you want in the vegan restaurant you've decided to take lunch in. Except this is disingenuous. There are political discussions found here, but one side is generally downvoted.

Just because the discussions exist doesn't mean they should. Everyone feels their particular ideology is the one targeted. It's why Fox News can claim to be an underdog despite being the number 1 news station in the US. It's why liberals were shocked when the President won by following a strategy of electoral votes versus popular vote. Everyone is in their own bubble and it's the reason why politics are bad conversation. No one wants to have a conversation and come to an understanding they mostly just want to yell at one another about how the other side is wrong and stupid.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#72

Post by seiko988 »

neals wrote: post #2

As with everything internet: good doesn't last. Now that Reddit has started its demise, where do we flok to next?

A quick glance at the voat entry will convince you that whatever comes next must withstand a banking blockade, DDOS, bitcoin dust attack, DNS denial and possibly no one will host your domain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voat

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#73

Post by samdoidge »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #71
samdoidge wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Complaining that you can't have the political discussion that you want on a forum where politics is officially off-topic, is like complaining that you can't have the bacon cheese burger (with real pig and cow involved) that you want in the vegan restaurant you've decided to take lunch in. Except this is disingenuous. There are political discussions found here, but one side is generally downvoted.

Just because the discussions exist doesn't mean they should. Everyone feels their particular ideology is the one targeted. It's why Fox News can claim to be an underdog despite being the number 1 news station in the US. It's why liberals were shocked when the President won by following a strategy of electoral votes versus popular vote. Everyone is in their own bubble and it's the reason why politics are bad conversat…

No, not everyone is in their own bubble. Some are able to be objective, and profit from being so.

There is room for reasoned debate but many are incapable of it, especially on an internet forum.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#74

Post by xorcist »

toxican wrote: post #69
zerm778 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cause buying upvotes would not work at scale and you take the risk to get busted for doing that.

Busted how though? It's not like McDonalds, for example, would use a Mc-branded account to post random things to reddit with clearly visible McDonald cups or whatever. They'd use some throwaway account or buy an established account and buy upvotes to target that account's post. Reddit has no way to punish them for that. Maybe the reddit users find out and get pissed, but the site has no attention span and they'll for…

Also, everybody does it. Every major brand already has many thousands of followers with questionable names in clearly irrelevant locations, and this on a platform where such shenanigans are visible to everyone.

There's no reason to believe upvotes, which are less visible to other users, are bought at lesser scale.

When everybody does it, it's hard to single out any one actor as bad.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#75

Post by xorcist »

walrus01 wrote: post #32
foldr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying this on HN: a site that's vastly more regulated than reddit ever has been or is likely to be. I'm old enough to remember reddit before the days of subreddits. It wasn't a magnet for extreme content back then. That happened as a result of subreddits.

One example of an effective barrier that has kept shit to a minimum is metafilter, where you need to pay a one time token 5 dollars to make an account. It's been around for about twenty years now.

The one that do survive to a mature age are less likely to be unicorns however.

Maybe that's where the real problem is.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#76

Post by whamlastxmas »

mwyah wrote: post #60
TeMPOraL wrote: post #34

Well, as the disease of advertising progresses, Reddit too will shed all that made it interesting. It so happens that first to go are the people almost universally considered undesirable, but it won't stop at that.

I dislike advertising as much as the next guy but really, what alternatives do websites like reddit have?

Usenet model but with a modern UX

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#77

Post by arkh »

foldr wrote: post #42
arkh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the problem with having extreme or dumb ideologies? Without extreme views you can't have progress: in a lot of countries, being for homosexual rights or abortion is extreme.

Try imagining that you're hosting reddit yourself. Pretty easy to see what the problem is from that point of view. Do you want to be hosting and enabling child porn, hate speech, terrorism, etc. etc.?

I'd like people to remember that some people's terrorists are other people's freedom fighters. Same thing with hate speech. And the age of consent is not the same everywhere: maybe (I hope not) people against child porn will be labeled bigots somewhere one day.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#78

Post by repolfx »

mwyah wrote: post #60
TeMPOraL wrote: post #34

Well, as the disease of advertising progresses, Reddit too will shed all that made it interesting. It so happens that first to go are the people almost universally considered undesirable, but it won't stop at that.

I dislike advertising as much as the next guy but really, what alternatives do websites like reddit have?

Well, charging for it. Yes, they'd lose a big chunk of the userbase who value it a little bit but not really. But is it worth, say, $1/year to most users? Probably! And Reddit has 330 million users. Even if your conversion rate at that price is only 10% you should be able to run it for $33 million / year - it deals primarily with text, the software is relatively stable, it doesn't advertise. I suspect Reddit could be run very cheaply.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#79

Post by PaulKeeble »

Traster wrote: post #27
maeln wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad works differently than normal post. Even if your post make it to the front page, it will only be displayed once. Also, it mean the user either need to be looking at r/all or popular, or be subscribed to the subreddit. Ad are display several time per page and will be display whatever subreddit the user is currently on.

There's a good reason why podcast hosts read the ad copy. Even if an advert is obviously an advert - if it comes from a trusted source it's still more effective. The adverts which are astro-turfed as real posts are more effective simply because they seem to be endorsed by the community you're a part of.

It also isn't legal throughout most of the western world so it is a pretty risky thing to be doing. Saying that no one has cracked down on the youtube channels that repeatedly do it nor websites that have been utilising it for 15 years so I guess it is pretty hard to start prosecuting now, it won't be Reddit that shows the necessity of applying that law.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#80

Post by foldr »

arkh wrote: post #77
foldr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try imagining that you're hosting reddit yourself. Pretty easy to see what the problem is from that point of view. Do you want to be hosting and enabling child porn, hate speech, terrorism, etc. etc.?

I'd like people to remember that some people's terrorists are other people's freedom fighters. Same thing with hate speech. And the age of consent is not the same everywhere: maybe (I hope not) people against child porn will be labeled bigots somewhere one day.

Well, if you're happy to host all that, why not just set up your own reddit? The software is open source.

I think you might find that dealing with the legal consequences isn't a lot of fun. And I wonder if you'd really be so blasé about enabling that kind of content once you were actually looking at it on a daily basis.

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