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Reddit Claims 52M Daily Users, Revealing a Key Figure for Social-Media Platforms

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Re: Reddit Claims 52M Daily Users, Revealing a Key Figure for Social-Media Platforms

#191
post #63
post #28

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I know that Reddit admins read HN so please please do not kill off old.reddit.com. The redesign is absolute garbage. Normally I don’t express such strong sentiment on HN but I’ve been a Reddit user for 10 years and I genuinely like the communities, but not enough to suffer through the new website.

I'm not sure how many of the current admins read HN. I just know some of us old guys hang around here. And FWIW I agree with you. I've been a 15 year reddit user (and employee!) but if old.reddit goes away, I suspect my usage will go way down. The good news is that the current execs know this, because I have told them. But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business, and I'm afraid those of us…

As a devoted i.reddit.com user, it's by far my favorite way to enjoy the site, but it's getting harder to use every year as the main site adds more features and gates that don't work in the i. site. The most annoying part of the new site is the embedded video player and there's no way around it right now.

Re: Reddit Claims 52M Daily Users, Revealing a Key Figure for Social-Media Platforms

#192
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business, and I'm afraid those of us who like the old interface aren't large in number. Do people actually prefer the new interface [on its merits], or do they just use it because it's the default?

The new interface is good for the pornography subreddits.

I have a strong feeling that at some point Reddit is going to have internal struggles with this ala Tumblr. Their consistent amendments to what you can or can post, as well as culture policing in various subreddits is bound to create additional controversies.

Re: Reddit Claims 52M Daily Users, Revealing a Key Figure for Social-Media Platforms

#193

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I'm very thankful the user culture and the moderation policy here is geared towards productive discussion on focused topics. It's not a one size fits all social media site, its meant for tech and startup discussion. Plus, people don't seem to reward stupid puns, pithy comments, twitter style "hot takes", begging for upvotes, etc.. I would hope this keeps HN somewhat inoculated from becoming another Reddit.

You're giving HN too much credit. Reddit may be scraping the bottom of the barrel intellectually but humans pretty much all have decent skills at fitting in. Reddit users are perfectly capable of coming here and not cracking puns if that's what it takes to make the virtue points counter in the top right get bigger. There's obscene amounts of in-group signaling here too. It just takes different forms. Forms other user…

Show me a better platform then

Re: Reddit Claims 52M Daily Users, Revealing a Key Figure for Social-Media Platforms

#194
post #65

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It certainly is a propaganda tool. I don't have concrete proof just yet, but I suspect subs like /r/blackpeopletwitter are being heavily manipulated. Comments deleted en mass and rabid vote manipulation are a regular occurrence.

Not to mention censorship. I used to participate in a large community for a popular moba, and posted proof of the gaming company having lied to users to generate views/access. After 8h the post had thousands of upvotes and comments demanding explanations from the company. As soon as it gained traction, the mods deleted the post and banned me from the subreddit. They refused to give an explanation for doing so. That c…

There are so many stories like that that I'm convinced that this is Reddit's actual business model: game the site in the interests of people who are paying them, but make it look like it's organic.

Re: Reddit Claims 52M Daily Users, Revealing a Key Figure for Social-Media Platforms

#195

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Source? If you made old.reddit.com the default layout, how many users do you think would go through the same trouble to use the new.reddit.com layout?

No they wouldn’t seek out the new interface. They just bounce. When they first launched the new interface some new users got the new one and some new users got the old one. The bounce rate for the new one was lower and the signup rate was higher.

I think this thread should be an important lesson for HN devs:

You are not normal. Even the fact that you are likely consuming this website on a computer with its own keyboard, is not as common as it might seem if you surround yourself with other software developers. What you want, and what the majority wants are not the same thing.

Re: Reddit Claims 52M Daily Users, Revealing a Key Figure for Social-Media Platforms

#196

reddit may have been a good site a decade or so ago, but in its current state it's mostly a propaganda machine to manipulate clueless rubes. One look at the front page makes this glaringly obvious. The only remotely productive way to use reddit is by being selective with what subs you check out. Avoid the larger subreddits at all cost.

The only useful thing to me is to append "Reddit" to some Google searches for certain niches. occasionally it brings up a post describing exactly what I'm looking for. It's always an old post though unless I'm searching for the latest in the US Democratic party's talking points, then I can just go to Reddit.

Re: Reddit Claims 52M Daily Users, Revealing a Key Figure for Social-Media Platforms

#197

Good for Reddit, but I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with the entire site and how it's managed. The astroturfing isn't even subtle and the same few dozens of accounts dominate the front page day in and day out. The content on the frontpage, r/popular, r/all is starting to congeal into screenshots of tweets. The mods of the biggest subreddits don't seem to care if the content that gets posted actually lives up…

It certainly is a propaganda tool. I don't have concrete proof just yet, but I suspect subs like /r/blackpeopletwitter are being heavily manipulated. Comments deleted en mass and rabid vote manipulation are a regular occurrence.

r/news used to have a r/The_Donald mod, and as a result, r/news would remove news articles that could make conservatives look bad even if they fit within r/news' posting guidelines.

Around the time of Cesar Sayoc's, the "MAGABomber"[1], mail bomb campaign, even Wikipedia articles like "Terrorism in the United States"[2] were banned in comments, and posts that contained it would have the AutoModerator shadowban the comment instantly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAGA_Bomber

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States

Re: Reddit Claims 52M Daily Users, Revealing a Key Figure for Social-Media Platforms

#198
post #175
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how many of the current admins read HN. I just know some of us old guys hang around here. And FWIW I agree with you. I've been a 15 year reddit user (and employee!) but if old.reddit goes away, I suspect my usage will go way down. The good news is that the current execs know this, because I have told them. But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business, and I'm afraid those of us…

old interface was just way more information dense. That's my main complaint with new UI. Even with "compact" mode on the new UI, it's not as dense as the old one.

The difference in information density really isn't that large. Here's a comparison of the current top posts (and not even using the compact view): https://imgur.com/a/WsI3pBj

Re: Reddit Claims 52M Daily Users, Revealing a Key Figure for Social-Media Platforms

#199

On a side note, really hope reddit's engineering team doesn't kill off their 'old.reddit.com' domain though. That's probably the only thing keeping me from dumping reddit altogether (aside from their API-powered custom reddit apps made by indie devs for Android).

If they kill old.reddit.com there will be a mass migration to HN.

DIGG-->reddit-->HN

Re: Reddit Claims 52M Daily Users, Revealing a Key Figure for Social-Media Platforms

#200

Why is Reddit’s UI still getting worse? I have to click a link like 4 times on mobile for it to register, and I get errors for about 20% of links. Sometimes links take me the comments and not the content for some reason, particularly with images and videos.

They make the mobile site shitty to use on purpose, so that you download their app and let them harvest even more information about you.
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